Singaporean leaders mounted a deliberate cultural counter-attack against the West

Evidence

In the early 1990s Asian triumphalism was articulated anew in what can only be described as the “Singaporean cultural offensive.” From Lee Kuan Yew on down, Singaporean leaders trumpeted the rise of Asia in relation to the West and contrasted the virtues of Asian, basically Confucian, culture responsible for this success—order, discipline, family responsibility, hard work, collectivism, abstemiousness—to the self-indulgence, sloth, individualism, crime, inferior education, disrespect for authority, and “mental ossification” responsible for the decline of the West. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 293

Categorization

• DEFINE: This concretely defines the ‘Singaporean cultural offensive’ — a named campaign of anti-Western cultural rhetoric led by Lee Kuan Yew.
• SEED: A contrarian ‘Asian values’ essay contrasting the 1990s Singaporean cultural offensive with today’s China-first rhetoric would be a rich through-line.