The persistence of the ‘bamboo ceiling’ in Australia and other Anglophone Western countries (US, UK, Canada) that restricts Asian worker’s upward mobility into leadership positions has been well documented (Hyun, 2005). Evidence from the US suggests there is bias in recognising ‘leadership potential’ in Asians because of stereotypes of being hard-working but shy and reserved (see Berdahl and Min, 2012). In his 2014 keynote speech to the Asian Studies Association of Australia Annual Conference, Dr Tim Soutphomassane, the then Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, observed that the model minority stereotype of Asian workers included “passivity, acquiescence and subservience”, which contributes to their invisibility (https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/speeches/asianisation-australia).
However, if Australian racialised stereotypes portray Asians as lacking leadership potential, why do we have contemporary terms to describe highly successful business leaders in Australia that have Asian origins, such as ‘mogul’ or ‘tycoon’? Such terms are used to describe not just middle management or even executive leaders, but the owners of large successful companies or a business ‘empire’, often with a tinge of awe and endearment. Why do we valorise Asian leadership terms while failing to promote or hire Asian leaders in Australia? How do we explain this ostensible discrepancy? Others suggest this is because of cultural differences in Western and Eastern ideas of leadership (see Aritz and Walker, 2014).
This paper suggests that this ostensible contradiction is, at least in part, rooted in Western ideas around Oriental despotism. In Western discourses, oriental despotism was portrayed as totalitarian autocracies that governed over exceptionally compliant and submissive oriental subjects, in stark contrast to the freedom-loving individuals of Western democracies. This trope contains two figures of the Orient. The first is the Oriental despot, who was demonised as a tyrannical dictator that governed by fear or capriciousness and demanded total obedience and often considered antithetical to democratic rule. The second figure was the oriental subject who was portrayed as unusually meek, submissive, compliant, and uncritical subjects who ‘kowtowed’ to authority because they could not govern themselves or because they were especially in need of the heavy hand of tyrannical government. I contend that these two figures of the Orient – tyrannical ruler and obsequiously subservient subjects – continue to haunt contemporary interpretations of Asians in the West. The figure of the slavishly subservient oriental subject negatively affects career advancement and leadership opportunities, while the continuing aura of the oriental despot enables Asian terms for rulers to be valorised in business and politics.
The first section outlines the discrepancy (what I call the ‘Asian leadership paradox’) between the popular use of Asian terms for leaders in Australia with the fact that Asians are less likely to be hired as or promoted to leadership positions in Australia. It mines national diversity reports on leadership in Australia alongside the Australian 2021 Census data to demonstrate that although Asian Australians are the highest educated group in Australia, they are less likely to be managers and are significantly underrepresented at executive levels. Using contemporary media articles and rich lists, I demonstrate that this contrasts with the fact that terms for Asian leaders, like ‘mogul’ and ‘tycoon’, are regularly used in business and politics to name highly successful leaders, sometimes referring to their portfolios as ‘empires’ (e.g. Murdoch’s ‘media empire’).
The next section draws on post-Orientalist genealogical approaches to recast this phenomenon (the Asian leadership paradox) in light of Western intellectual histories of Oriental despotism. Here, I am influenced by Foucault’s conception of genealogy as a ‘history of the present’, in order to “problematize the present by revealing the power relations upon which it depends” (Garland, 2014: 372). This genealogical approach is influenced by Edward Said’s (1978; 1994) post-Orientalist critique which interrogates Orientalism as a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the ‘Orient’ and … the ‘Occident’” (1978: 2). As a discourse, part of Orientalism functions as a politico-imaginative technique of domination that works through controlling the representation of the Orient. A post-Orientalist genealogy traces the history of the present to demonstrate how the history of Orientalism shapes contemporary power relations surrounding Asians in the West. In the context of this paper, I briefly trace ‘Oriental despotism’ through key Western philosophers to demonstrate how it produced the two figures of despotism that continue to cast their shadow on Asian Australian leadership today: the tyrannical Oriental ruler and the subservient Oriental subject.
The final section addresses how these ideas about Oriental despotism, particularly about power and freedom, were used in Australian media. Here, I argue that the two figures of despotism I identified in the previous section the autocratic Oriental despot and the subservient Oriental subject are expressed in Australian corporate and work cultures in two ways that explains the Asian leadership paradox. As a cultural figure in Western political discourse of absolute power, Oriental despots (emperors, kings, moguls, etc.) were ripe for appropriation by monopoly capitalists eager to establish business ‘empires’. Yet simultaneously Oriental despotism became synonymous with mass subservience, which was taken as evidence of a general, ingrained or cultural lack of wilfulness, agency, and critical thinking among Asians, which survives in contemporary portrayals of the Asian worker and learner today.
1. The Asian leadership paradox: Asians Leadership without Asians
Asians are significantly underrepresented in senior leadership roles in Australia. A 2014 report noted that although 9.3% of Australia’s labour force was born in Asia, only 4.9% made it to senior executive level, while only 1.9% of ASX200 company executives have Asian cultural backgrounds (Diversity Council of Australia, 2014). The Australian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC) 2018 report Leading for Change similarly found that only 1.6% of CEOs and 3.3% of senior executive management (other than CEOs) had an Asian background (AHRC, 2018), even though the 2021 Census revealed that 17.5% of the Australian population identified as having ‘Asian’ ancestry (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). This lack of representation in upper leadership is sometimes referred to as the ‘bamboo ceiling’, a metaphorical barrier that limits Asian upward mobility[i].
One argument used to dismiss the idea of the ‘bamboo ceiling’ is that these disproportions are only temporary as Asian Australians make their way through the system, rather than signs of systematic discrimination. However, there is no evidence that this discrepancy will decrease over time. The 2018 report mentioned above actually showed this discrepancy grew rather than diminished. In 2016, 5% of ASX200 CEOs were of non-European background, but by 2018 it had dropped to 4% (AHRC, 2018). Another study suggests that assimilation in Australia does not necessarily lead to upward mobility for Asian Australians. One study found that third-generation Asian Australians overall had lower occupational status levels than the first-generation Asian migrants mentioned above (De Alwis, Parr and Guo, 2022: 11). Also, even though Australia employed a skills-based immigration policy, in contrast to American family-based immigration policy, Asian immigrants to Australia report worse labour market outcomes than their American counterparts (Tran, Guo, Huang, 2020).
Earlier studies found that Asian first-generation immigrants in Australia often work in occupations for which they are excessively overqualified (De Alwis et al., 2020; De Alwis & Parr, 2018). More contemporary census data suggests this may still be true. Drawing on the 2021 Australian Census[ii], almost half of all working-age Asian Australians are university educated (47.72%), which is almost twice as likely as working-age Australians generally (26.29%). Even when broken down into degree levels, Asian Australians of working-age were both nearly twice as likely to have a bachelor’s degree alone (29.88% vs 17.36%) or a postgraduate degree (17.84% vs 8.93%) than Australians of working-age generally. One benefit emerging from this is that working-age Asian Australians were significantly more likely to be in one of the professions (19.33%) than working-age Australians as a whole (13.89%). However, despite such academic and professional achievements, Asian Australians of working-age were still no more likely (7%) to be a manager than the general working-age Australian population (7.92%), and were less likely to be a chief executive, general manager or legislator than working-age Australians in general (0.39% vs 0.68%).
Put another way, although working-age Asian Australians only make up 16.79% of the national population, they constitute 30.48% of all university-educated working-age Australians. However, while working-age Asian Australians constitute 23.38% of all professionals, they only constitute 14.84% of all managers, and only 9.63% of all chief executives, general managers and legislators. The situation is most stark for working-age Southeast Asian Australians who make up only 4.33% of the Australian working age population, but 5.83% of all university-educated working-age Australians, and are less likely (0.21% of working-age Southeast Asian Australians) to be ‘chief executives, general managers and legislators’ than working-age Australians generally (0.68%). Indeed, across all ancestry groupings, working age Southeast Asian Australians are the least likely to be a manager (only 5.5%).
Overall, these statistics suggests that while Asian Australians are somewhat able to capitalise on their university education to enter the professions (which demonstrates a degree of assimilation), they are still less likely to become managers and even less likely to become executives. Thus, even though Asian Australians graduate from university at higher rates and even though they are being hired into the professions, they are still significantly underrepresented in upper-management and executive leadership roles. This lack of upward mobility has been dubbed the ’bamboo ceiling’ (Hyun, 2005) and suggests that the racial discrimination is specifically located around Asians moving into executive leadership positions.
Some point to a lack of mentorship opportunities and access to professional networks (Diversity Council of Australia, 2014). But this explanation raises another question: why do Asian Australians receive fewer mentorship opportunities or have less access to professional networks? A better explanation for the bamboo ceiling is the perceived cultural differences of leadership. The Diversity Council of Australia 2014 report included a survey of Asian Australian business workers in entry and mid-level jobs, which found that 61% of those surveyed felt pressure to conform to Western leadership styles that are ‘Anglo’ such as valuing self-promotion and assertive communication styles, while undervaluing or misinterpreting more reserved, deferential behaviour that demonstrated respect for seniority (Diversity Council of Australia, 2014). If true, this explains why many companies can seem progressively inclusive at lower levels of an organisation but fail to promote Asians up the corporate ladder or tend not to hire Asians at senior executive levels.
The problem with this explanation is that it veers dangerously close to essentialist ideas of Asians. We can see these logics at play in an interview with someone working in an executive search firm who observed:
“When you look at who gets promoted and who doesn’t, that’s really around their traditional form of what a leader looks like and it’s not somebody from a culturally diverse background who doesn’t speak up […] leadership traits, that have been sort of the traditional male leadership traits. You don’t find them in other different cultures, especially Asian cultures” (cited in The University of Sydney Business School, 2018, p. 12).
This quote demonstrates the logic by which these anti-Asian exclusions are excused. While the interviewee begins with perceptions of leadership (i.e. what their clients or society at large think a leader should ‘look like’), by the end it shifts to making stereotypical claims about supposedly widespread cultural traits across the whole of Asia. In other words, it justifies discrimination against Asians as individuals by displacing the prejudice onto culturally embedded, essentialised ‘traits’ that fail to meet the requirements, even though these are based on stereotypical claims about Asian cultures.
This admission also demonstrates the conflation of racialised, essentialist stereotypes of Asians and Asian cultures with white gendered expectations of supposed leadership traits. The conflation of ‘traditional’ values and traits with white, Western, European history (which ignores the variations of tradition in the West and completely ignores any traditions in the East), privileges British and European heritage as masculine and aggressive, while Asian cultures are perceived as ‘lacking’ masculinity, weak and thus inferior.
This points to the fact that Asian Australian women experience two layers of stereotypes to combat in order to be perceived as ‘leadership material’. Asian women suffer a double stereotype of being interpreted as passive and lacking in leadership quality by virtue of their race/ethnicity and their gender. This seems to be borne out by the statistics of culturally diverse women in leadership positions in Australia. In 2015, only 2% of ASX directors were ‘culturally diverse women’, which includes all non-Anglo European women (Diversity Council Australia, 2017: 5).
However, this stereotype of the submissive Asian woman contradicts trends in women’s leadership in parts of Asia. For example, as of January 2024, when comparing world regions, the Pacific (22.5%) and Asian (21.4%) regions have the third and second lowest women’s representation in terms parliamentary seats across all Chambers (just above North Africa and the Middle East at 16.5%). By contrast, Australia and New Zealand had 44.7% of all Parliamentary seats occupied by women (see Inter-Parliamentary Union Parline). Yet despite such poor parliamentary representation, postcolonial Asian countries are global pioneers in appointing women as modern heads of state. The first woman to be elected head of government was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in 1960-65 (and again in 1970-77 and 1994-200), which was closely followed by Indira Gandhi in India becoming Prime Minister in 1966-77 (and later 1980-84). Since then, there have been several Asian women heads of state/government in the Philippines in 1986 and 2001, Pakistan in 1988, Bangladesh in 1991, Sri Lanka in 1994, and Indonesia in 2001, all of which were before Australia had its first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in 2010.
Some parts of Asia and the Pacific are also ahead of Australia when it comes to women in business leadership. According to the 2023 Grant Thornton report, all world regions finally achieved a minimum of 30% women in senior leadership positions in mid-sized companies. While the Asian-Pacific region (APAC) as a whole came second last (32%) (North America having the lowest percentage at 31%), there is a significant divergence within the region. Thus, when the ASEAN region is isolated, it actually ties with Africa as having the highest proportion of women (40%) in senior management roles (see Grant Thornton, 2023: 10). This divergence is most evident between the Philippines and Japan. Philippines has had the highest proportion of women in senior leadership in the 14 of the last 17 years, starting at 39% in 2004 and climbing to the mid-40s by 2024. One explanation suggested by a 2020 International Labor Organisation report is the cultural attitudes of Filipino companies where 84% of enterprises in the Philippines agreed that gender diversity initiatives enhanced business outcomes, which is in contrast to the Asia-Pacific average at 68% (International Labour Organisation, 2020: 5). By contrast, Japan has consistently had the lowest proportion by a significant margin, starting at 8% and climbing to 19% in 2024 (Grant Thornton, 2024: 13-14). When expanded to include both senior and middle management, according to the latest International Labour Organisation statistics, the picture shows a high representation of women in some Southeast Asian and Oceanic islands. The percentage of women in senior and middle management in Palau is 45%, 43% in Samoa, 41% in Philippines, Myanmar, Kiribati, Singapore, 39% in Mongolia and Fiji. All of these are higher than Australia, which has 38%, while the UK only has 35% of senior and middle management roles occupied by women (International Labour Organisation, accessed 25/03/2024). These statistics demonstrate that the submissive, meek Asian woman is an Orientalist stereotype (often highly sexualised) that obfuscates the reality of women political and business leaders across the Asia-Pacific.
Yet, ironically, many of our popular titles for leaders in Australia are actually of Asian origin. The most common examples in Australian media are terms like ‘tycoons’, ‘moguls’, and ‘gurus’. Other Asian terms for leaders like ‘honcho’, ‘sultan’ or ‘satrap’ tend to be used in humorous, jokingly irreverent or gently mocking ways, such as referring to a 17-year-old athlete as the “Sultan of Sprint” (see Payten, 2022). However, ‘mogul’ and ‘tycoon’ in particular tend to be used now sincerely to describe the highest levels of business and political leaders in Australia, which is what this paper will focus on. In modern English, ‘mogul’ is used to denote an important, influential and dominant person, particularly an autocrat. When describing business and industry leaders, the term ‘mogul’ is often accompanied by an industry modifier, such as ‘media mogul Rupert Murdoch’ (ABC, 2024) or ‘mining mogul Andrew Forrest’ (Hume, 2022). Australian media and public regularly use ‘tycoon’ in relation to successful business leadership, particularly in real estate (e.g. ‘property tycoon’, ‘real estate tycoon’), although it could be any business (e.g. ‘media tycoon’, ‘tobacco tycoon’, or even ‘lingerie tycoon’).
However, if the Australian media and public are comfortable using Asian terms for highly successful business owners and political leaders, this ostensibly contradicts the claim that Anglo, white Australians fail to see or appreciate ‘Asian leadership styles’. Indeed, judging from the use of these terms, Asian leadership might even be said to be somewhat aspirational. The deployment of these Asian terms attempts to associate business leaders with emperors and treats their business holdings as ‘empires’ (‘business empire’, ‘property empire’ or ‘media empire’). This produces a seeming paradox: if proponents of the ‘bamboo ceiling’ concept argue that one reason Asians are not promoted is because of cultural stereotypes about Asians as lacking leadership qualities, how do we square this with the fact that many popular Australian terms for honouring leaders come from Asia?
2. Oriental Despotism: Autocratic Rule and Asian Passivity
My hunch is that this ostensible contradiction between stereotypes of Asian workers as lacking leadership while Asian terms continue to be applied to the highest level of leaders in Australia stems in part from the history of Western conceptualisations of oriental despotism. Although there are different articulations across history and cultures (see Osborne, 2022), generally speaking ‘Oriental despotism’ named a supposedly Asian style of rulership based on absolute power over their subjects. While conceptualising this political concept, European thinkers produced a stereotypical image of the Asian masses as passive, irrational, superstitious and easily manipulated that survives today, even while Europeans envied the absolute power of Oriental emperors.
The idea of oriental despotism dates back to the Persian invasion of Greece in the fifth century BCE, but it was through Aristotle’s writings on politics in the following century that gave shape to the political concept we know today. From its inception, despotism was considered a specifically oriental style of government, distinct from similar kinds of tyranny in Greece. Although tyranny and despotism are synonymous now to describe autocratic dictatorships, Aristotle insisted there is a marked difference in the willingness of the population. Whereas Greek tyranny was created by usurping power from Greek freemen, Oriental despotism was the normal rule for Asian barbarians since they were slaves by nature. Asian despotism was thus based on a master-slave relationship, which conflated chattel slavery with Asian rule. According to this theory, Orientals willingly submitted to the despot because they were ‘natural’ slaves, which ironically made this form of government more stable than Greek tyranny, since the latter was gained by coercive force and thus constantly under threat of rebellion (see Richter, 1990; Harvey, 2001).
Aristotle’s theory of government established liberty vs obedience, active vs passive, and dependence vs independence as key themes of Oriental despotism, which continued to haunt the concept throughout Western history. With the ‘recovery’ of classic texts during the Renaissance, including Aristotle, these ideas of a naturally passive Asian resurfaced. Aristotelian ideas of despotism were used by Spanish conquistadors to justify enslaving Native Americans and extended into early modern European justifications for sovereignty, slavery and colonisation (Richter, 1990: 177).
The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, bordering on Latin Christendom, increased European trade and travel with the Near East and reinvigorated discussions of Oriental despotism in political discussions. By the early sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince wrote about the two forms of government represented by the Turkish Empire and the King of France. Whereas the Turks were governed by the whims of a single man under whom all the others are mere servants, the French monarchy was surrounded by a nobility whose power derives from their heritage, which keeps the French King in check (Machiavelli, 1961: p. 16). The seventeenth century French jeweller, traveller and merchant, Jean Chardin, who spent fifteen years in Iran, echoed these ideas when he observed that Asians “are quite incapable of conceiving of the administration of the sovereign power by several equal men” (cited in Young, 1978: p. 396). Chardin, among other European travellers influenced Montesquieu’s interpretation of oriental despotism in his 1748 Spirit of Laws, where he contrasted oriental despotism as an Asiatic dystopia against modern European monarchies. European monarchies supposedly shared power with intermediary groups while basing itself on the separation of powers, which in turn ensured the liberty of their subjects. By contrast Asian despotism exercised complete domination over their subjects, which meant that Asian subjects were not free individuals (see Young, 1978).
In the nineteenth century, Oriental despotism is increasingly portrayed as an outmoded form of government that was, at best, anachronistic, and at worst, in need of eradication. This idea of despotism as an anachronistic form of government is best encapsulated in Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s geographical conception of world history, in which he positioned the Orient and despotism as the first ‘stage’ of the evolution of world history with the teleological endpoint being the West (see Hegel, 1956). Once again, freedom is at stake. As Hegel argues in the introduction, “The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such—is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free. They only know that one is free [i.e. the despot]” (Hegel, 1956: 18). In Hegel’s geographical conception of history, the evolution of world history (from the Orient to the Greek empire, to the Roman empire and then the German empire) is the unfolding of self-awareness to man’s inherent freedom.
Hegel’s evolutionary framework is retained in the work of Marx, who argued that oriental despotism was the outcome of ‘Asiatic modes of production’. Marx saw Oriental despotism as a despicable form of politics that needed to be eradicated and maintained that this was the proverbial ‘silver lining’ of colonialism. Although Marx observed in 1853 that British colonial violence in India was “sickening”, he nevertheless warned:
we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rulers, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies (Marx, 2019: 640).
In this quote, ‘Oriental despotism’ stands in for a general passive consciousness, a lack of rational and critical thinking in the domains of politics and religion, which in turn makes Asian subjects vulnerable to despots and ‘superstition’. But unlike previous theories that alluded to some ‘natural’ Asian servility, Marx theorised that Asian obedience was the result of material modes of production that required autocratic rulership. Namely, because Asian civilizations were “too low” in development and ruled over vast territories, instead of governance through “voluntary association” as seen in the West, this material circumstance necessitated centralised authorities to create public works, specifically the irrigation systems necessary for Asian agriculture (Marx, 2019, p. 637).
This is obviously a sweeping account of the intellectual history of oriental despotism that glosses over many distinctions in conceptualisation between different authors. As the concept moved across time and space oriental despotism was reshaped as it entered into different intellectual milieus and geopolitical contexts (see Osborne, 2022). At different times, Oriental despotism was exemplified by the Persian empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottomans, and later the Chinese and Japanese empires. My point here is not to provide a full history of the Western concept of oriental despotism including all its diversity and contradictions, nor to deny that others within the Western tradition challenged these conceptions, but to highlight a continuing thread that produces two figures that haunt contemporary discussions of Asian leadership styles. Despite the diversity discussed above, this brief genealogy demonstrates that overall Western conceptualisations of Oriental despotism articulated two mutually dependent figures: the passive Asian subject and the Asian autocrat. In what follows I attempt to trace these two figures into the contemporary phenomenon of fantasising about Asian autocratic leadership while also claiming that Asians lack leadership abilities.
3. Contemporary Conceptual Legacies of ‘Oriental Despotism’
Above, I highlighted a particular strand of thinking surrounding Oriental despotism to show how contemporary ideas about both Asian passivity and Oriental autocrats have deeper roots in Western intellectual history. I am not suggesting that the concept of oriental despotism itself is being used consciously in contemporary Australia. Indeed, I doubt many Australians have even heard the term. But it remains as a culturally embedded, intellectual framework that shapes how Anglo Australians represent and view Asians as well as leadership in everyday work life and public culture.
3.1 Moguls and Tycoons: Contemporary Oriental Despots
On the one hand, oriental despotism cast Asian rulership as absolute power over their subjects. The modern use of ‘tycoon’ and ‘mogul’ drew on these historical connotations to become ideals for modern business and political leaders in industrial capitalism seeking to create monopolies over trade and power. These draw on an imperial imagination that figures their leadership akin to being an emperor. Their business holdings are often referred to as ‘empires’ and business dealings are often characterised in terms of warfare, domination and ‘hostile takeovers’ in wider ‘empire-building’ activities. As Koller (2009) argues, contemporary corporate discourse purposefully appropriated metaphors of historical power (religious ‘missions’ and political ‘empire-building’) to construct contemporary brand personalities. The imbrication of Asianness with executive leadership was further underscored by the incorporation of ‘Asian wisdom’, particularly Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, to Western leadership and management strategic thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century.
This imperial metaphor is also evident in the contemporary use of Asian terms for rulers, such as ‘tycoon’ and ‘mogul’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘mogul’ ultimately derives from the Persian muġul (and via Urdu to English) which was their word for ‘mongol’, as in the Mongol people or Mongol Empire. In English, the term ‘The Great Mogul’ or ‘Grand Mogul’ (‘Great Mughal’ is now preferred) is the common designation for the successive head of a Muslim dynasty founded by Zahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530) that ruled over an empire spanning modern-day South Asia from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In the 16th century, the title was often spelled as the great ‘Mogor’, although spelling variations included ‘Magoll’, ‘Mogol’, ‘Mogores’, and ‘Moghol’, before shifting to ‘mogoll’ and eventually settling as ‘mogul’ in the following century. By the mid-seventeenth century, the term was already appropriated into the English language to describe various leaders, sometimes affectionately and other times mockingly.
The term ‘mogul’ makes its way to Australia, in the early twentieth century, primarily in Labor discourse to criticise overzealous, greedy, heavy-handed business owners and political leaders. Labor newspapers often used the term when referring to conservative politicians. Within these Labor publications, the term was used pejoratively, in part to mock the self-importance of conservative and business leaders, but also to underscore the unfairness and injustice of their use power (see The Labor Vanguard, 1911, p. 6; The Worker, 1910, p. 3; Stevens, 1921: p. 2). By the mid-twentieth century, the term is increasingly used as a term of endearment and praise for successful business leaders of large companies, particularly chain stores, and eventually international business empires.
Another popular term in Australia is ‘tycoon’, which is used to nominate significant and successful business and political leaders. Although an archaic Japanese term of respect for military leaders (taikun), it came into the English language in the mid-nineteenth century when the Tokugawan Shogunate used the term as an appellation of the Japanese shogun in his diplomatic relations with foreign nations (OED). The American naval officer Commodore Matthew Perry, who headed the successful negotiations that ended the two-centuries-old Japanese isolationist trade policy, brought the term back to the US, where it first appeared in print in English in 1857.
By the 1860s, during the American Civil War, the term ‘tycoon’ was used affectionately to refer to political and military leaders. Secretaries to Abraham Lincoln, John George Nicolay and John Hay, used to refer to President Lincoln as “The Tycoon” in their 1863 correspondence, referring positively to his “tyrannous authority” over the Cabinet (Hay, cited in New York Times, 1915, p. BR401). In the same year, it was reported that the military staff referred to General Robert E. Lee, an American Confederate general during the American Civil War, as the ‘Old Tycoon’ (Chicago Tribune, 1863, p. 3). On the Union side of the War, Capt. Samuel H. Beckwith who served as Chief Cipher Operator to General Grant between 1862-65 wrote that the Chief of Staff, John A. Rawlins, often referred to Gen. Grant endearingly as “The old Tycoon”. Beckwith wrote that “he assumed that it conferred upon the General the name of some barbaric potentate who wielded despotic powers, and that was sufficient satisfaction for him” (Beckwith, 1914, p. 5.) The term ‘tycoon’ thus served to funnel older tropes of oriental despotism into modern-day leadership/rulership.
The term ‘tycoon’ was used often enough in modern America that when it arrived in Australian newspapers in the early twentieth century it was often used to describe American business magnates, particularly ‘oil tycoons’. While initially the term sometimes seems to imply a kind of brash and clever (if sometimes underhanded) kind of American business style, by the mid-twentieth century the term is used rather loosely to apply to all kinds of business tycoons in Australia as a term of honour and success.
The contemporary use of ‘mogul’ and ‘tycoon’ trade in the fantasy of an expansive, autocratic control represented within the concept of ‘oriental despotism’, that was despised as antidemocratic in politics, and yet widely accepted as part of cutthroat business practices in late capitalist society. These terms are steeped in Western histories of oriental despots as coercive dictators that ruled by fear, which are appropriated as inspirational models for capitalist leadership in the West. In this way, Asian leadership can serve as aspirational models for imperialistic metaphors of business empire building.
3.2 Contemporary Oriental Subjects: Passive Asian Workers and Students
On the other hand, the same intellectual history of Oriental despotism simultaneously produced a second image of Asians as obedient, subservient and passive as a result of their natural slavishness or their cultural heritage. Colonial Australian attitudes to Asians continued to position them as meek, passive, docile, servile workers. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, pastoralists began petitioning the new Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, to introduce indentured Indian workers to fill labour shortages from the decreasing use of convict labour. Indeed, an 1841 advertisement in Sydney Herald, invited the reader to ‘Picture then twenty or thirty of these quiet, peaceable, docile people, placed on an estate like “Lewinsbrook”’ (25 June 1841, advertisement). The advertisement evokes an idyllic country estate serviced by a compliant Indian labour force to investors seeking cheap labour. Yet while their docility was viewed as a desirable trait for employers, it was simultaneously viewed as a threat to a democratising society. In the ensuing political debate, Indian labourers were portrayed as “inferior and servile”, who would remain in the colony after their contract “as a ‘slave caste’”, becoming a permanent “alien and servile” class (Curthoys, 2014, pp 12-3).
When the idea of Chinese indentured labourers was introduced from the 1840s onwards the same rhetoric was transplanted from Indian indentured slaves and applied to Chinese ‘coolies’. This time, oriental passivity would be a danger to workers as well as society. For example, in 1854, Henry Parkes, portrayed coolies as a ‘coloured’, inferior race who would be responsible for “degrading labour itself” (cited in Curthoys, 2003, p. 17). As the reasoning goes, since Chinese coolies were willing to work longer hours for less pay, they would decrease the value of labour and working conditions by undercutting white workers. Historian Marilyn Lake summarised the situation thus: “Whereas ‘coolie labour’ was depicted as ‘servile’ and ‘slave-like’, colonial white men, by contrast, were asserting themselves as independent, manly and upstanding” (2014, p. 92).
The threat of the slavish Asian worker expanded in the late nineteenth century to explicitly encompass a broader danger to Australian living standards. From the 1870s to the Federation of Australia in 1901, Chinese workers in Melbourne’s furniture trade were seen as encroaching rivals to European cabinetmakers. As part of an ideological campaign, white cabinetmakers in Melbourne in the 1880s and 1890s wrote letters to the local newspaper, The Age, decrying Chinese furnituremakers as “rice eating slaves” who “lived more like swine than human beings, without comfort, decency or morality” (cited in Markus, 1974, p. 6). Lake (2014) argues that the imagined threat of coolie, Asian ‘slave-like’ labour and their supposed willingness to live in squalor and poverty, were used to justify the legal minimum wage as a defence against the degradation of the Australian working man. Indeed, this stereotype of coolies was so successful, that after the 1896 Factory and Shop Acts amendments, Chinese unionists and pro-labour reformers were forced to push back against “entrenched attitudes towards the Chinese as slave-like gangs of coolie labourers” (Kuo, 2017, p. 135).
So how did this come to shape Asian white-collar workers in Australia? After the White Australia Policy ended around 1968, Asians were allowed to enter Australia via the skilled migration program as skilled and/or educated workers or the humanitarian migration programs as refugees (Tiffen, 1983). By the 1970s and 1980s, the Asian worker as cheap, disposable labour resurfaced in line with previous histories of colonial ‘coolie’ labour and indentured servitude (Ohlsson, 2011), primarily through the figure of the sweatshop worker and outsourced manufacturing to Asia (particularly China). But alongside this was a new class of ‘elite Asians’, skilled migrants whose children often became academic high achievers entering coveted private schools and aiming their sites on the professions.
As more Asian Australians entered the university system for upward mobility, there suddenly appeared a growing concern with the Asian student as intellectually lazy and lacking in independence among university educators. This image of the hard-working, but mentally subservient, Asian student portrayed Asians as capable of memorising or mimicking others but ultimately lacking in the intellectual independence and assertiveness necessary for critical thinking and originality. This stereotype expanded and furthered the passive, obsequious Asian subject from working-class to middle-class Asians. ‘Asian learners’ were portrayed by Australian universities as hopelessly passive, dependent, rote learners, who were either incapable of, or otherwise culturally hampered from, independent critical thinking. Australian lecturers’ comments from the 1980s lamented that Asian ‘overseas’ students (as they were called then) were too dependent on rote learning, were silent in the classroom and too deferential to the lecturers. The teachers interpreted this behaviour as promoting low-level cognition and a passive approach to education that is unwilling to express opinion or challenge existing knowledge (see Samuelowicz, 1987; Biggs, 1994).
Drawing on a literature review in education, Janette Ryan (2006) argues that education literature employs binaried, Orientalist stereotypes between ‘Western’ and so-called ‘Confucian’ academic values. Education literature portrays Western learners as ‘deep’ learners, independent, critical, and argumentative thinkers who focus on individual achievement and constructing new knowledge. By contrast, supposedly “Confucian” values lead ‘Chinese learners’ to become merely ‘surface’ or rote learners, who are overly dependent on the teacher to tell them what to think and focus on group achievement and respect for tradition (Ryan, 2006: p. 306). Ryan summarises this ostensible clash of values between “Western individualistic, adversarial conventions (of questioning and critiquing) and more holistic, harmonious and collectivist views of knowledge and learning” (Ryan, 2005: 150). These stereotypes of the Asian university learner coincide with the stereotype of the Asian white-collar workers lacking ‘leadership potential’ because of their supposed passivity and lack of independence. We can see here the continued echo of the Orientalist figure of the passive, meek Asian subject of Oriental despotism.
At the turn of the 21st century, the so-called ‘Asian century’, these stereotypes are being challenged. Nevertheless, it is telling that the assumption that Asian workers are submissive is so ingrained that Australian newspapers openly lament the loss of docility among Chinese workers. For example, Business Review Weekly in 2009 warned of an emerging “threat”; “the rising power of Chinese workers” (McColl, 2009: 50). Global businesses that exported manufacturing to China had to contend with the loss of “China’s once-docile union” as Chinese workers began to demand better work conditions and pay (McColl). In 2010, Prof. John Legge, Foundation Professor of History at Monash University, specialising in Southeast Asia, warned in The Age, that it was a mistake to assume that Chinese workers would be content to spend their lives manufacturing goods they could not afford themselves. Although “The Chinese regime is oppressive by Australian standards”, Legge insisted that “Chinese workers are not slaves”. If Australia did not prepare a better long-term economic strategy, Legge painted a reversed nightmare scenario where Australia might be advertised to “Chinese pundits” as “a country with a docile, low-wage workforce prepared to do work that Chinese workers disdain” (Legge, 2010, p. 8). By 2012, Sydney Morning Herald lamented “the era of endless supplies of docile workers in emerging economies may be tapering off”, mentioning China and East Asia specifically (Anon, 2012, p. 12).
4. Conclusion
The provocative sub-title of this paper, ‘Asian leadership without Asians in Australia’, is not meant to suggest that Asian Australians are never called ‘tycoon’ or ‘mogul’ in Australian media, nor that Asian Australians are never leaders in Australia. Nor do I suggest that this is the only explanation for the bamboo ceiling effect or for stereotypes of Asian passivity or for anti-Asian racism. Rather this paper polemically underscores the ostensible paradox between the regular deployment of Asian terms for rulers to imagine senior leadership in Australia while there is simultaneously a widespread bamboo ceiling in place that stems in part from imagining Asian Australians as lacking leadership qualities. It tentatively offers a genealogical approach involving the history of Oriental despotism as one explanatory framework that can resolve this seeming paradox.
One consequence of this brief genealogy is that I am rather sceptical of claims to an authentic, transhistorical, cross-cultural pan-Asian style of leadership that is introverted, deferential, passive, and silent. Such an idea is empirically nonsensical, ignoring the vast diversity of workplace behaviour that exists even in one Asian company, let alone city or country or, even worse, the entirety of Asia across all of history. The idea that an ‘Asian style of leadership’ is holding Asians back from promotions in Australia has little explanatory power for Asian Australians in part because the bamboo ceiling exists for both first-generation and fifth-generation Asian Australians. If this were merely about cultural differences, the bamboo ceiling should dissipate with cultural assimilation to Australia; but this has not happened. The assumption that Asian Australians in the workplace are ‘not speaking up’ seems to be an unquestioned truth to explain the bamboo ceiling (when, suspiciously, it seems to conveniently fit Orientalist stereotypes about passive Asians). Also, it ignores the possibility that Asians don’t speak up in Australian workplaces because of racism.
Instead, this paper attempts to trace how the stereotype of Asians as lacking leadership potential is fuelled by a much longer history of Western representations of oriental despotism that imagined Asians as passive, submissive, and wilfully consenting to our own subjugation. I am not suggesting that there were not conflicting stereotypes of Asians throughout history (including as violent savages and barbarians, as licentious figures of immorality, or as scheming villains, for example) that might be drawn on in contemporary instances of workplace discrimination that contributes to the phenomenon of the ‘bamboo ceiling’. I make the more limited claim that the submissive/slavish Asian subject resurfaces in various historico-cultural iterations from Ancient Greek oriental despotism into contemporary labour relations and leadership discourses surrounding Asian workers, often in self-serving counterpoint to Western/European/Australian polities and subjects. The framework of oriental despotism proposed here has the benefit of resolving the Asian leadership paradox, where Asians are simultaneously tyrannical and submissive, autocratic leaders and subservient slaves. When refigured through the history of oriental despotism, we can see that the meekly passive Asian subject is the inverse image of the power-hungry, overbearing oriental despot.
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[i] This under-representation of Asians reflects a broader lack of representation of non-Europeans in Australian leadership. The AHRC’s 2016 report Leading for Change: A Blueprint for Cultural Diversity in Leadership found that in the ASX200 companies over 75% of CEOs were of Anglo-Celtic heritage, and another 18% have European heritage. Only 5% of CEOs had non-European backgrounds and there were no Indigenous CEOs (AHRC, 2016). These figures starkly contrast with the demography of the Australian nation at the time, where 28% of Australians were born overseas and another 20% had at least one parent born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). The 2016 Leading for Change reports also found a lack of non-European representation in senior leadership across multiple sectors. In Federal Parliament, just under 4% of Members of Parliament and Senators were of non-European background. In Federal and state public service, less than 2% of Secretaries and Heads of Departments were of non-European background. In the Federal ministry, there were no Ministers or Assistant Ministers of non-European background while in universities no Vice-Chancellors had non-European backgrounds (AHRC, 2016; AHRC, 2018).
[ii] I used data from the Australian 2021 Census of Population and Housing to calculate the rates of university education and occupations for Asian Australians of working age in comparison to the general Australian population of working age. ‘Asian Australians’ was operationalised as participants who, in the Census, self-nominated an Asian ancestry (including Southeast, Northeast, Southern and Central Asian ancestries). The ‘15 years and over’ dataset was used to ensure comparisons only with Australians of ‘working age’. The percentage calculations in this passage are the authors.
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