Criticism
Taiwan social-politics critic Lung Ying-Tai argues that Asian values are merely a doublespeak on suppressing universal values of freedom of speech and human rights.
Several Asian political figures have expressed criticism of the idea of Asian values, including former President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Lee Teng-hui, and former President of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Kim Dae Jung.
Also, in his article "Democracy as a Universal Value", Amartya Sen pointed out that no universal "Asian" value system could possibly exist, because the cultural diversity of Asia is far too great for there to be a single set of common values across the region.
Read more about this topic: Asian Values
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)