9.  S. Rajaratnam, “Singapore: Global City (1972),” in S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality, ed. Kwa Chong Guan (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2006), 233.

    10.  Rajaratnam, “Singapore,” 231.

    11.  Michael D. Barr, Singapore: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 161.

    12.  W. G. Huff, “What Is the Singapore Model of Economic Development?,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 19, no. 6 (December 1995): 753.

    13.  Alexis Mitchell and Deborah Cowen, “The Labour of Global City Building,” in Digital Lives in the Global City: Contesting Infrastructures, ed. Deborah Cowen et al. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2020), 213.

    14.  Gordon P. Means, “Soft Authoritarianism in Malaysia and Singapore,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (October 1996): 106–9. Since 2000, a small “Speaker’s Corner” has been established as a designated zone for gathering and demonstration in a central city park.

    15.  Beng Huat Chua, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 40.

    16.  For a recent overview see Chong Ja Ian, “Democracy, Singapore-Style? Biden’s Summit Spotlights Questions of How to Categorize Regimes,” Academia SG, December 20, 2021, https://www.academia.sg/explainer/democracy-singapore-style/.

    17.  On pragmatism see Kenneth Paul Tan, “The Ideology of Pragmatism: Neo-liberal Globalisation and Political Authoritarianism in Singapore,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42, no. 1 (February 2012); Chua, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore, 6–7; and Denny Roy, “Singapore, China, and the ‘Soft Authoritarian’ Challenge,” Asian Survey 34, no. 3 (1994): 234.

    18.  Francis Fukuyama, “Asia’s Soft-Authoritarian Alternative,” New Perspectives Quarterly (Spring 1992): 60.

    19.  Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, “The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor?,” in Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 83.

    20.  Not mentioned are the South Asian convict workers who built the roads and bridges throughout the island, as well as the Government House, a military battery, and a church. Anand A. Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 201.

    21.  Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge, 2006), 13.

    22.  Quoted in Paul H. Kratoska, “Singapore, Hong Kong and the End of Empire,” International Journal of Asian Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 2.

    23.  Jeevan Vasagar, Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia (New York: Pegasus, 2022), 32.

    24.  Barr, Singapore, 147.

    25.  Vasagar, Lion City, 36.

    26.  Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019), 197.

    27.  Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, 4.

    28.  Vasagar, Lion City, 225.

    29.  Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 14–15.

    30.  Ang Cheng Guan, Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought (New York: Routledge, 2013), 96.

    31.  Jim Glassman quoted in Chris Meulbroek and Majed Akhter, “The Prose of Passive Revolution: Mobile Experts, Economic Planning and the Developmental State in Singapore,” Environment & Planning A 51, no. 6 (2019): 6.

    32.  The quote is from a 1982 oral history quoted in UNDP, UNDP and the Making of Singapore’s Public Service: Lessons from Albert Winsemius (Singapore: UNDP Global Centre for Public Service Excellence, 2015), 11.

    33.  The officer was Jan Pieterszoon Coen. Debates over removing his statue in his hometown emerged again during confrontations with the national colonial past. Olivia Tasevski, “The Dutch Are Uncomfortable with Being History’s Villains, Not Victims,” Foreign Policy, August 10, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-indonesia-villains-victims/.

    34.  Barr, Singapore, 162; and UNDP, UNDP and the Making of Singapore’s Public Service: Lessons from Albert Winsemius, 11.

    35.  “Singapore’s Successful Drive to Become Brain Centre of Southeast Asia,” Financial Post, October 7, 1972, Newspapers.com.

    36.  UNDP, UNDP and the Making of Singapore’s Public Service: Lessons from Albert Winsemius, 8. On Puerto Rico see César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chap. 9.

    37.  Kees Tamboer, “Albert Winsemius: ‘Founding Father’ of Singapore,” IIAS Newsletter, no. 9 (Summer 1996): 29.

    38.  Vasagar, Lion City, 71.

    39.  Catherine Schenk, “The Origins of the Asia Dollar Market 1968–1986: Regulatory Competition and Complementarity in Singapore and Hong Kong,” Financial History Review 27, no. 1 (2020): 22.

    40.  Vasagar, Lion City, 76.

    41.  J. K. Galbraith, “Age of Uncertainty” (1977), ep. 10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv8b_ou-NQM.

    42.  Daniel P. S. Goh, “Super-Diversity and the Bio-Politics of Migrant Worker Exclusion in Singapore,” Identities 26, no. 3 (2019): 359.

    43.  Arif Dirlik, “Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism,” boundary 2 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 239.

    44.  Dirlik, “Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism,” 232–36; and Roy, “‘Soft Authoritarian’ Challenge,” 232.

    45.  Dirlik, “Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism,” 239. For the US reception see Jennifer M. Miller, “Neoconservatives and Neo-Confucians: East Asian Growth and the Celebration of Tradition,” Modern Intellectual History (2020), 1–27.

    46.  Fareed Zakaria, “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994): 115.

    47.  Wen-Qing Ngoei, Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 126.

    48.  Mario Rossi, “Singapore Run Like Corporation,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, October 5, 1980, Newspapers.com.

    49.  Quoted in Chua, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore, 50.

    50.  Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000, 304.

    51.  See Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999), 291–412.

    52.  Pang Eng Fong, “Growth, Inequality and Race in Singapore,” International Labour Review 111, no. 1 (1975): 16.

    53.  Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai (January 18–February 21, 1992),” http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/dengxiaoping/103331.htm.

    54.  They borrowed the term from the World Bank. He Li, “The Chinese Discourse on Good Governance: Content and Implications,” Journal of Contemporary China 29, no. 126 (2020): 831.

    55.  Elsa van Dongen, Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics After 1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 6; and Carolyn Cartier, “‘Zone Fever,’ the Arable Land Debate, and Real Estate Speculation: China’s Evolving Land Use Regime and Its Geographical Contradictions,” Journal of Contemporary China 10, no. 28 (2001).

    56.  Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (New York: Verso, 2011), 51.

    57.  Hui, End of the Revolution, 57. A Chinese intellectual, Wang Huning, traveled to the United States and published a book called America Against America in 1991. By 2022, he ranked fourth in the hierarchy of the CCP. Chang Che, “How a Book About America’s History Foretold China’s Future,” New Yorker, March 21, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-a-book-about-americas-history-foretold-chinas-future.

    58.  Lye Liang Fook, “Suzhou Industrial Park: Going Beyond a Commercial Project,” in Advancing Singapore-China Economic Relations, ed. Swee-Hock Saw and John Wong (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), 68; and Yang Kai and Stephan Ortmann, “The Origins of the ‘Singapore Fever’ in China 1978–92,” in China’s “Singapore Model” and Authoritarian Learning, ed. Stephan Ortmann and Mark R. Thompson (London: Routledge, 2020).

    59.  Kean Fan Lim and Niv Horesh, “The ‘Singapore Fever’ in China: Policy Mobility and Mutation,” China Quarterly 228 (2016): 995, 1006.

    60.  Connie Carter, “The Clonability of the Singapore Model of Law and Development: The Case of Suzhou, China,” in Law and Development in East and South-East Asia, ed. Christoph Antons (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 212.

    61.  See Mary G. Padua, Hybrid Modernity: The Public Park in Late 20th Century China (London: Taylor & Francis, 2020), chap. 5.

    62.  Tu Weiming, “Multiple Modernities: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Implications of the East Asian Modernity,” Globalistics and Globalization Studies (2014).

    63.  Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 258.

    64.  Margaret Tan, “Plugging into the Wired World: Perspectives from Singapore,” Information Communication & Society 1, no. 3 (1998). A shrewd observer wondered if they were not trying to get ahead of the technology to digitally ring-fence the island for reasons of censorship to protect “Asian values”—which turned out to be true. Warwick Neville, “Managing the Smart City-State: Singapore Approaches the 21st Century,” New Zealand Geographer 55, no. 1 (1999): 39.

    65.  This followed conversations in the field of Law and Development at the time. Carter, “The Clonability of the Singapore Model of Law and Development: The Case of Suzhou, China,” 208–20.

    66.  See Chris Gifford, The Making of Eurosceptic Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe, “Neoliberals Against Europe,” in Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Ruptures, ed. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 89–111; Quinn Slobodian, “Demos Veto and Demos Exit: The Neoliberals Who Embraced Direct Democracy and Secession,” Journal of Australian Political Economy, no. 86 (2020): 19–36; and Roberto Ventresca, “Neoliberal Thinkers and European Integration in the 1980s and the Early 1990s,” Contemporary European History 31, no. 1 (2022): 31–46.

    67.  Margaret Thatcher, “Speech in Korea,” September 3, 1992, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108302.

    68.  See, e.g., Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to the International Free Enterprise Dinner,” April 20, 1999, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108381.

    69.  Margaret Thatcher, “Speech Receiving Aims of Industry National Free Enterprise Award,” October 17, 1984, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105766.

    70.  Youyenn Teo, “Interrogating the Limits of Welfare Reforms in Singapore,” Development and Change 46, no. 1 (January 2015): 99. See Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Another legacy of the earlier period was race science and eugenics, openly embraced by Lee in attempts to increase births from highly educated women and decrease births from those less so. See Michael D. Barr, “Lee Kuan Yew: Race, Culture and Genes,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 29, no. 2 (1999).

    71.  Kwasi Kwarteng et al., Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 57.

    72.  “Making the Break,” Economist, December 8, 2012, Gale.

    73.  Tony Rennell, “Brexit Bloodletting,” Daily Mail, October 31, 2016, Gale OneFile; and Ben Chapman, “‘Singapore on Steroids,’” Independent, November 13, 2019, Gale In Context: Global Issues.

    74.  Daniel Hannan, “Free Trade: Have We Lost the Argument?,” Initiative for Free Trade, https://ifreetrade.org/?/article/free-trade-have-we-lost-the-argument.

    75.  Jeremy Hunt, “Why I’m Looking East for My Vision of Post-Brexit Prosperity,” Daily Mail, December 29, 2018, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6539165/Why-Im-looking-east-vision-post-Brexit-prosperity-writes-JEREMY-HUNT.html.

    76.  Paterson, “Don’t Listen to the Terrified Europeans. The Singapore Model Is Our Brexit Opportunity.”

    77.  Glen Owen, “Let’s Make Britain the Singapore of Europe!,” Mail on Sunday, January 17, 2021, https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-mail-on-sunday/20210117/281719797231656.

    78.  On this point see William Davies, “Leave, and Leave Again,” London Review of Books, February 7, 2019, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n03/william-davies/leave-and-leave-again.

    79.  This is Sajid Javid. Fraser Nelson, “Javid’s Home Truths,” Spectator, February 11, 2017, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/javid-s-home-truths; and Jamie Grierson, “Going Up: Sajid Javid, the Tory from ‘Britain’s Worst Street’, Is Back,” Guardian (UK Edition), June 27, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/27/going-up-sajid-javid-the-tory-from-britains-worst-street-is-back.

    80.  This is Jacob Rees-Mogg. Alan Livsey, “Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Lacklustre Record as a Fund Manager,” Financial Times, October 15, 2017, ProQuest; and James Meek, “The Two Jacobs,” London Review of Books, August 1, 2019, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n15/james-meek/the-two-jacobs.

    81.  Boris Johnson, “Boris Johnson’s First Speech as Prime Minister,” Gov.uk, July 24, 2019, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/boris-johnsons-first-speech-as-prime-minister-24-july-2019; and Arj Singh, “Liz Truss Plan for Singapore-Style Freeports ‘Will Create Tax Havens’ in Britain,” Huffpost (UK Edition), August 1, 2019, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/freeports-brexit-liz-truss-tax-havens-money-laundering_uk_5d431469e4b0ca604e2eb8f4.

    82.  Case in point was Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute who offered advice to both Thatcher and Johnson administrations on free ports. Eamonn Butler and Madsen Pirie, eds., Freeports (London: Adam Smith Institute, 1983); and Eamonn Butler, “Now’s the Time to Finally Get Freeports Right and Reinvigorate the British Economy,” Telegraph.co.uk, August 2, 2019, Westlaw.

    83.  “Post-Brexit Plans Unveiled for 10 Free Ports,” BBC News, August 2, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/49198825.

    84.  Martina Bet, “EU Could Tear Up Rishi Sunak’s Freeport Plan with Measure Agreed in Brexit Trade Deal,” Express Online, March 4, 2021, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1405449/eu-news-rishi-sunak-freeports-brexit-trade-deal-exports-spt. The first round of trade agreements with twenty-three countries post-Brexit actually made it less advantageous to produce in free ports than outside of them. Jim Pickard, “UK Freeports Blow as Exporters Face Tariffs to 23 Countries,” Financial Times, May 9, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/625d1913-9242-4d97-9d0b-9cd6925c4e0e.

    85.  Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Australian Institute of Directors,” October 2, 1981, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104711.

    86.  Gavin Shatkin, “Reinterpreting the Meaning of the ‘Singapore Model’: State Capitalism and Urban Planning,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 1 (January 2014): 124.

    87.  Tan, “The Ideology of Pragmatism: Neo-liberal Globalisation and Political Authoritarianism in Singapore,” 76.

    88.  Shatkin, “Reinterpreting the Meaning of the ‘Singapore Model’: State Capitalism and Urban Planning,” 135.

    89.  Seth S. King, “Modern Building Changes Face of Romantic Singapore,” New York Times, August 12, 1963, https://www.nytimes.com/1963/08/12/archives/modern-building-changes-face-of-romantic-singapore-tide-of.html.

    90.  “Apartments Rising Fast in Singapore,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1963, Newspapers.com.

    91.  Michael A. H. B. Walter, “The Territorial and the Social: Perspectives on the Lack of Community in High-Rise/High-Density Living in Singapore,” Ekistics 45, no. 270 (June 1978): 237.

    92.  Susan S. Fainstein, “State Domination in Singapore’s Public–Private Partnerships,” Journal of Urban Affairs 43, no. 2 (2021): 283.

    93.  See series of seven posts beginning with Dominic Cummings, “High Performance Startup Government & Systems Politics: Some Notes on Lee Kuan Yew’s Book,” Dominic Cummings Substack, August 2, 2021, https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/high-performance-startup-government?s=r.