 The deeper challenge to Western liberal democracy has emerged from the East Asian  region.[4]  In the 1990s, the debate revolved around the notion of “Asian values”, a term devised by several Asian officials and their supporters for the purpose of challenging Western-style civil and political freedoms. Asians, they claim, place special emphasis upon family and social harmony, with the implication that those in the chaotic and crumbling societies of the West should think twice about intervening in Asia for the sake of promoting human rights and democracy. As Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew put it, Asians have “little doubt that a society with communitarian values where the interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits them better than the individualism of  America”.[5]  Such claims attracted international attention primarily because East Asian leaders seemed to be presiding over what a U.N. human development report called ‘the most sustained and widespread development miracle of the twentieth century, perhaps all  history’.[6]  In 1997–98, however, the East Asian miracle seemed to have collapsed. And it looks like Asian values was one casualty of the crisis.