Deng Xiaoping, Asian Filipino Values

A theme which was present in both my colleague's and my presentations at the last Colloquium was the notion of creating a social justice framework that springs from our own culture (rather than imposing foreign--whether capitalist or socialist--models that might be incompatible with our culture).

Tonight I was reading about Deng Xiaoping on Wikipedia, and I came across these paragraphs:

Unlike Hua Guofeng, Deng believed that no policy should be rejected out of hand simply for not having been associated with Mao, and unlike more conservative leaders such as Chen Yun, Deng did not object to policies on the grounds that they were similar to ones which were found in capitalist nations.

Although Deng provided the theoretical background and the political support to allow economic reform to occur, few of the economic reforms that Deng introduced were originated by Deng himself. Typically a reform would be introduced by local leaders, often in violation of central government directives. If successful and promising, these reforms would be adopted by larger and larger areas and ultimately introduced nationally. Many other reforms were influenced by the experiences of the East Asian Tigers.

For all of Deng's faults, his pragmatic way of approaching reforms--not immediately accepting or rejecting them simply because they fit or didn't fit the ideology--interests me.

The Arendtian in me finds that very practical. (For Arendt the fundamental error of the totalitarian governments was their insistence on forcing reality to fit the closed logic of their ideologies.)

Hmmm. While "Asian values" as defined by Lee Kwan Yew are actually Confucian values (and not Filipino values), I'm interested in how a debate on "Filipino values" in national economics would go.