Will the Relative Western Failures in Handling COVID-19 Slow down the Diffusion of Western Cultural Values in East Asia?

As COVID-19 progresses, it has become a statistical fact that East Asia has fared noticeably better than many other world regions. While the likes of Vietnam, Taiwan, and Japan did not experience much of an outbreak at all, and China and South Korea, despite doubts about data and secondary outbreaks, largely kept new infections under control, the same cannot be said in many other world regions. Western Europe received the unglamorous title of the world region with the worst rate of infections for a time, before the US, Brazil, and now India and Russia well on the way to surpass the tolls of the epidemic in former hotspots like Italy and Spain.

Many professionals and amateurs have devoted efforts to understand the regional differences in the coronavirus' deadline. Many, justifiably, pointed to the difference in government actions taken to enforce social distancing. Those who locked down early, comprehensively, and decisively were spared the worst, so the narrative goes. Those were a notable portion of the political establishment and the general public actively opposed lockdown measures, as are the cases in the US and Brazil, are seeing infections continue to soar. Whether the citizenry can stand behind a government that is willing to sacrifice personal freedoms and economic activities to suppress the virus is seen as the primary difference between those that succeed and fail in handling COVID-19.

Yet, other commentators are not fully convinced that the top-down role of government policies is sufficient in explanatory power. After all, Asian states that handled the epidemic well are a varied group economically. Taiwan and Vietnam, two exemplary cases of suppressing COVID, are almost polar opposites politically. Japan and South Korea, two similar democratic environments, diverged massively in the ability to enforce mass testing on the general public. For even casual observers, how the government works, and what policies are put in place are so varied across East Asia, that their more uniform success in dealing with COVID cannot be explained by politics alone.

Many have instead pointed to cultural factors that these East Asian states share as more valid factors in explaining their collective success. Some of the cultural factors listed have certain scientific merit. A culture of bowing for greeting, rather than handshakes and kiss-on-the-cheek prevalent elsewhere, prevent person-to-person infections through physical contact. A culture of willingness to listen to authorities and self-sacrifice ensures that protests against painful government policies to fight COVID are rare and the policies are more strictly adhered to by the majority.

And perhaps the most cited cultural factor by East Asians is their willingness to wear masks during even the initial phase of the then-still-unknown outbreak. An already prevalent culture of wearing masks when sick in East Asia contrasted greatly with the dithering attitude toward their use in other parts of the world. While East Asians took to the mask en masse as the infections spread, Western governments first spoke of only wearing masks if sick, and then admitted the need for everyone to wear masks. The confusion is furthered by the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro who simply refuse to wear masks in public.

The belief among some East Asians that it is cultural factors that led to their coming out of COVID relatively unscathed may represent shifting thinking toward their perception of non-Asian and in particular, Western culture in the years and decades to come. For decades, East Asians (and non-Westerners in general) have thought Western culture as representing enlightenment, an embodiment of thoughts and values that allowed for both economic and social progress. To embrace elements of Western culture to a greater degree, it is thought, would improve the quality of life for the general public, more than native cultures can.

Western dysfunction in the face of COVID-19 has, for many, proven that Western culture is no better than their own when it comes to the most important task of keeping people alive during emergencies. As many in the West cited their personal freedoms and human rights, supposed universal values, for their refusal to socially distance or wear masks, such values, once held as sacred, have shown their limitations. Their non-Western audience would be rational to think that while Western values are important, thoughtless adoption of the values under all circumstances may be more harmful than good, especially when collectivism and self-sacrifice served East Asians well.

Of course, Western botching of its COVID response will not stop Westernization in other parts of the world. Pop culture is much more than politics and ideology. It may just be entertainment or economics, for which the West, and especially the US, continues to lead the world. But as East Asia proved itself more capable of dealing with an epidemic than the West, and with cultural factors thought of as the key difference, embracing Western cultural values may become more selective and deliberated among East Asians (and other non-Westerners) in the near future.