The nature of the rejection of Lake’s vision went beyond the standard nationalistic criticism of decrying Western interference and alleged attempts by the West to reassert control, to questioning the underlying validity of Lake’s proposition. The Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohammed, and the Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, asserted that the mainsprings of their ‘economic miracle’ (as the World Bank called it) were what they called ‘Asia values’ as opposed to those prevailing in the West, which they depicted as undermining social cohesion. They argued that it was precisely the values of thrift, hard work and dedication to education, family centeredness and respect for authority that enabled them to become more economically dynamic than the West. Furthermore, they argued that it was their recognition of the importance of the community as a whole, as opposed to the Western over-insistence on the rights of individuals, that stopped their societies from becoming suffused with the social ills of the West, where economic disparities and drug abuse, alongside the prevalence of single-parent families, were said to be growing.