Hsiu-Chuang Deppmaniconic power of capitalist consumption while reinforcing the Confucian virtues of loyalty and
discipline (Iwabuchi 2002; Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Kuwahara 2014). From Tokyo Love Story
(1991) to Meteor Garden (2001), Winter Sonata (2002), and Boys Over Flowers (2009), these dra-
mas present a winning recipe for iterating a “visual tourism” that displays good-looking men
and women engaged in lavish spending on luxurious goods. Living in spacious and opulent
apartments in downtown Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei, TV characters wear designer clothes and use
the latest technological gadgets to seduce everyday viewers who see television watching as an
aspirational activity (Chua 2004).^11
Asian politicians, as critics point out, often promote Confucian ethical values to rationalize the
pursuit of wealth, because Confucianism emphasizes “a positive attitude toward the affairs of this
world” and “the virtue of ‘practicality’ (from the ‘unity of knowledge and action’ in Confucian
philosophy)” (Dirlik 1995: 247).^12 These attitudes, Arif Dirlik argues, save “East Asians from ‘the
spiritual angst’ that afflicted other spiritual traditions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism,
in the confrontation of the conflict between spiritual and material life” ( Dirlik 1995). Such
pragmatism is what the Chinese commonly call ru shi (“living in the world”), a philosophical
approach to politics that helps define a collective pan-Asian identity, making “Confucianism,”
Chua asserts, “the foundational culture of everyday life of East Asians” (Chua 2004).^13 Citizens
are encouraged to actively engage in socioeconomic production and, as many Asian children
learn in school, keenly cultivate five basic virtues that categorize social relations: filiality between
father and son, loyalty between ruler and subject, distinction between husband and wife, order
between the old and the young, and trust between friends.^14
The tenets of self-discipline and altruism continue to dominate contemporary Asian thought,
as a quick survey of how national leaders invoke Confucius to justify their public policies sug-
gests. Facing economic crises in 1998, Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew implored his
citizens not to forsake “Confucian values:” “You’re supposed to look after your family and your
extended family, and to be loyal and supportive of your friends. And you should do it from
your private purse and not from the public treasury” (Chua 2004). His speech highlights the
“relational” value of a social network. Negotiating between the demands for public and closed-
door diplomacy, South Korean President Park Geun-hye in a 2013 visit to China quoted from
Confucius to nuance her caution in managing the political tensions in the Korean Peninsula:
“I used to take a man at his words and trust that he would act accordingly. But now I listen
to a man’s words and note his actions.”^15 More recently, in a passionate speech at the Inter-
national Confucian Association in Beijing in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping exalted such
Confucian virtues as self-improvement and character cultivation to combat “widening wealth
gaps, endless greed for materialistic satisfaction and luxury, unrestrained extreme individualism,
ever-degrading ethics, and increasing tension between man and nature.”^16 The logic of Xi’s
argument rationalizes his intense crackdown on “Western values” and freedom of speech, as the
title of a New York Times article suggests: “China sharpens its censorship blade.”^17 With different
degrees of political openness, these leaders emphasize (or at least pay lip service to) the impor-
tance of control, discipline, and altruism, defining love not as a fulfillment of personal desire but
as a Confucian “family love,” naturalizing an “inherent intimacy between affection and ethical
training” (Raphals 2004: 219).
Sensitive to the renewed interest in Confucianism, popular TV producers have created
sensational plots and experimented with new aesthetics to address rising moral concerns
about human greed and materialistic seduction. To fan viewers’ imagination about the intri-
cate connections among power, money, and ethics is to stage dramatic encounters between
Confucian heroes and capitalist allure in the city, a battlefield that pitches the elites against
each other.