This article uses the career and writings of political philosopher Wu Teh-yao (1916-1994) to argue that Singapore in the 1970s–1980s embodied crucial aspects of conservatism as a modern, transnational ideological project in post-Second World War Asia. Wu opposed radicalism and was sceptical towards liberal democracy and Westernisation, all while promoting culture and tradition to legitimise a less-than-democratic political and social order. His worldview was shaped by a peripatetic life that spanned Asia and the United States and found expression in his propaganda work for the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, presidency of Tunghai University, and, above all, contributions to nation building in Singapore. Indeed, during this period, no intellectual lent as much discursive and administrative support, in English and Chinese, to legitimising authoritarianism and social conservatism in the city-state. Both intellectual biography and social history of ideology, the article explains how Singapore represented the realisation of what we typically call ‘Asian Values’ and was embedded within a wider conservative ideoscape. It questions the conventional temporality and genealogy of Asian Values, arguing that they did not simply flow downwards from upon high, but were also produced and circulated by figures who operated between the state and public.

This article builds on work by social and cultural historians of the Cold War such as Heonik Kwon and Masuda Hajimu by showing how three groups of Chinese actors helped create the locally specific reality of Chinese anticommunism in the Philippines during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that, in a climate thick with Sinophobia and fears of communism, but largely devoid of actual Chinese Reds, anticommunism for the Chinese was only secondarily about rooting out subversives, ideological authenticity, and supporting Chiang Kai-shek's counterattack against mainland China. As a social phenomenon, it was primarily a diverse and flexible repertoire of practices, from crime to civic associationism, that Chinese elites and their challengers employed to bolster their reputations as anticommunists, enrich themselves, and pursue vendettas against their ‘communist’ enemies. By focusing on these practices of what I call ideological accommodation, the article intervenes in scholarship on the Chinese diaspora after the Second World War by showing that anticommunism was essential to how the overseas Chinese adapted to being resident ‘aliens’ in post-colonial Philippine society.