Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

80 • EAST ASIA ECONOMIC CAUCUS
into Japan, and Japanese studies of the West became known as “Dutch
learning.” Until the 1850s, when Japanese began to have contact with
Westerners (such as Americans, British, Russians, and French), Japanese
scholars wanting to learn of the West struggled to read Dutch. See
also DEJIMA; FUKUZAWA, YUKICHI; SAKUMA, SHOZAN;
SAKOKU.
– E –
EAST ASIA ECONOMIC CAUCUS (EAEC). The East Asia Economic
Caucus was established as an internal organization within the
Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) on 10 December
1990. The EAEC emerged as a response to a call by Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia to establish an independent
East Asia Economic Grouping (EAEG). Under Mahathir’s proposal,
the EAEG would seek to develop policy cooperation in the interest
of promoting Asian regional trade and investment. He suggested that
the members of the EAEG be the ASEAN countries plus Japan,
South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Indochina. Mahathir
put forth this proposal because of his distrust of the APEC as an organization
lead by the developed nations and his opposition to the
U.S. and European Union-led Uruguay Round of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. He believed
that if ASEAN nations cooperated with Japan, China, and
newly industrializing economies (NIES), they would be able to deal
with Europe and the United States on an equal basis. Mahathir not
only proposed to challenge the economic dominance of the West but
to also promote the superiority of “Asian values” over Western values.
In his view, Asian economic development was a result of those
“Asian values” that emphasized order and stability, discipline, family
and social responsibility, industry, frugality, thriftiness, and
group centeredness. It was his belief that the values held in the West
were the causes of economic stagnation, increased crime, sliding educational
standards, and destruction of the family in Western countries.
In making this comparison of values, Prime Minister Mahathir
was criticizing the framework that held that “Western values are
equal to world universal values.”