Singapore balanced collectivist shared values against individual merit

Evidence

President Wee suggested four such values: “placing society above self, upholding the family as the basic building block of society, resolving major issues through consensus instead of contention, and stressing racial and religious tolerance and harmony.” His speech led to extensive discussion of Singaporean values and two years later a White Paper setting forth the government’s position. The White Paper endorsed all four of the president’s suggested values but added a fifth on support of the individual, largely because of the need to emphasize the priority of individual merit in Singaporean society as against Confucian values of hierarchy and family, which could lead to nepotism. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 893

Categorization

• SHARE: An exact list of Singapore’s official Shared Values plus the telling amendment — the sort of concrete state-document detail a specific person interested in Singapore or ‘Asian values’ politics would enjoy.