3

  The Singapore Solution

  Singapore

  The drift of the Hong Kong model to London in the 1980s helped turn it into a tycoon city. But toward the end of the millennium, a different metropolis burned even brighter in the market’s radical imagination. Margaret Thatcher wrote to a friend that she thought Britain should turn away from Europe to become “a kind of free-trade and non-interventionist ‘Singapore.’”1 A quarter century later, her acolytes did just that, leading the country out of the European Union after a successful vote for Brexit. “Let Singapore be our model,” one wrote.2 In parallel, China has also sought to “Learn from Singapore.” Since 1990, over twenty thousand Chinese officials have made the pilgrimage to the city-state.3 In 2012, Xi Jinping, then vice president, commissioned a ten-part television series on the lessons of Singapore for China.4

  Singapore is, by any measure, an unusual place. It is a city-state, a form whose heyday was in the Middle Ages. It is about the size of Greater London—or less than 0.1 percent of China’s landmass—yet it is fully independent, with a seat in the UN. What lessons could this tiny anomalous patch of political geography have for much larger, longer-standing powers? Citing the Singapore model only raises the question of which Singapore one means. Is it a welfare dictatorship? A laissez-faire wonderland? A node in the information economy? A triumph of state-led industrialization? A sustainable utopia of public housing and green space? A paranoid surveillance state? All of the above? The micronation of Singapore is a kaleidoscope—it looks different from every angle. Yet despite—or because of—this ambiguity, it remains the lodestar for projects of political economic reinvention from Kazakhstan to Brazil, from Beijing to Britain.

  Singapore and Hong Kong sit together on top of the neoliberal indexes of economic freedom and can look like twins from a distance—but they are not identical. Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore enjoyed self-rule since 1959 and full national sovereignty since 1965. Milton Friedman, for one, did not love these offspring of the British Empire equally. On his first trip to Singapore in 1963, he sneered at the government’s active role in guiding development. “When one looks at these models, plans, etc., it’s sort of like something between children playing house and an artist molding a figure,” he said. “It would be interesting to come back in about 20 years and see what happens.”5 Friedman was honest enough to eat his words when he returned in 1980 to a boomtown growing at a rate of 10 percent a year. But even then he bent the facts, arguing that the city-state had succeeded “despite extensive interventions of government.”6

  This got it backward. As one economist put it, it was the “long arm of state intervention” more than the “invisible hand of the free market” that explained Singapore’s success.7 While private interests shaped Hong Kong with the government in a supporting role, in Singapore, the state took center stage. The government built industrial estates and added hundreds of acres of new land to its coastline through massive land reclamation projects. Many of its biggest companies were owned by the state, and huge sovereign wealth funds invested Singaporean savings domestically and globally.8

  The Singapore Solution meant using the power of government to find your niche in the world market. Foreign Affairs Minister S. Rajaratnam laid out the strategy in 1972. By “plugging in” to multinational corporations, Singapore could leapfrog decades of development by bringing in more advanced technology from abroad. Singapore would no longer need a hinterland: “Our port makes the world our hinterland.”9 It would not need a domestic public sphere: “We can, via the satellite, see and hear on our television events in London, Tokyo or Djakarta a split second after they happen.” Air travel meant it was easier to get from Singapore to Hong Kong than to a Malaysian town a couple of hundred miles away. “Through the tentacles of technology,” he said, a small number of metropolises “form a chain of cities which today shape and direct, in varying degrees of importance, a world-wide system of economics.”10 Once, ideas of statehood had been premised on the idea of being able to feed and clothe your own citizens through the products of your own territory. Singapore turned the model on its head. It embraced global opportunity even at the price of global dependence. If you could tap into the world markets, then why would you need to have your own mines, your own farmland, and, especially, your own troublesome working class? Small was good. You could pivot more quickly when the winds of economic demand shifted.

  An aspect of the Singapore Solution that Rajaratnam left out was the treatment of noncitizens. The city-state dealt with foreign workers the same way you would any other resources: turn the tap on when you need them and off when you don’t. The prosperity of the national community depended on a bottomless reservoir of surplus labor. By the mid-1970s, there were up to two hundred thousand foreign workers in the city-state, about 10 percent of the population. By 2008, foreigners made up 22 percent of the population; by 2017, it was nearly 40 percent.11 “Nonresidents” enjoy none of the privileges or rights of citizens. When the market slumps, they bear the brunt of the layoffs.12 Being a Singaporean citizen means access to a range of services including a compulsory savings account that one could draw on for pension, health care, and to buy a home. Being a foreign worker means you are not just hire-and-fire but fire-and-deport.13

  The Singapore Solution also meant a thin commitment to democracy. Elections in Singapore were multiparty but hardly free. The same party has been in power for the country’s entire existence, and one man, Lee Kuan Yew, led the government from 1959 to 1991. Until recently, there was no freedom of protest, and opposition politicians were regularly sued into silence, imprisoned, or driven into exile.14 Newspapers have to regularly renew their publication licenses, and those that step outside the space of allowable discourse are simply put out of business.15 The most well-respected index of political freedom consistently ranks Singapore as only “partly free.”16 Central control is justified with the language of “pragmatism” but also by appeal to culturally specific “Confucian-communitarian” values in the majority-Chinese nation, which allegedly permit a degree of paternalistic rule in exchange for stability and order.17

  Fukuyama has been invoked already for his pronouncement that liberal democracy was the last model left at the “end of History.” But we might also direct attention to the piece he published right afterward, where he found “one potential competitor to Western liberal democracy” in what he called the “soft authoritarianism” of East and Southeast Asia.18 Singapore was a prime example. Peering through the kaleidoscope of the Singapore Solution helps us understand the range of futures people see for the reform, reversion, or acceleration of global capitalism in an age when the tiny “start-up state,” far from a mere geographic curiosity, has been an enduring object of emulation.

  1.

  The exceptional nature of Singapore begins with its location next to the Strait of Malacca, where the Indian Ocean meets the South China and Java Seas—an artery of long-distance trade for centuries linking the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia to East Asia.19 Before Christopher Columbus had sailed for the New World, the Chinese general Zheng He sailed ships four times as large as the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María past Singapore on an exploration and tribute mission that reached the coast of Africa.

  This long past notwithstanding, the official history of Singapore begins with a more recent date—1819—when the British East India Company officer Stamford Raffles arrived to sign a treaty with the Malay sultan to use the harbor for trade. Raffles’s statue still stands on the waterfront, arms crossed and head cocked upward in a pose of defiant ownership. Inscribed on its base is the official self-narration of how Raffles “with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis.”20 Raffles made Singapore a free port with no duties, drawing in Chinese merchants from around the South China Sea.21 The opening of the Suez Canal in 1859 increased traffic. As a coaling station for the Royal Navy, Singapore joined a string of ports from Hong Kong to Aden to Nova Scotia that let the maritime force safeguard its supremacy of the seas, what a colonial official called “strategic points on the earth’s surface.”22

  Military routes were also conduits of the drug and arms trade. Singapore’s economy, like Hong Kong’s, was built on opium, which accounted for between one-third and one-half of its revenue before 1900.23 In the twentieth century, Southeast Asia supplied new products including the sap of the gutta-percha tree, used to insulate the telegraph cables laid on the seabed between continents, rubber for tires, tin for cans, and oil for the navy, which switched from coal before the First World War.24 Another substance drawn from trees—rubber—was exported through the subsidiaries of early multinationals like Firestone and Goodyear. And after Royal Dutch Shell (which took its name from one of the original investors’ importing of shells from East Asia to London) began drilling for oil on the Dutch colonial island of Sumatra, it built storage facilities in Singapore.25

  Rubber, tin, and oil were essential ingredients for not only the consumer economy but also the war economy. Among the military planners who realized their dependency on the region’s products were the Japanese fascists of the 1930s, who resented the British, American, and Dutch imperial stranglehold on the region.26 Japan plunged into the Second World War, in no small part, to bring the region’s raw materials under its control. The same day that bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor, they dropped on Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila too.27 When Singapore fell in 1942, the Japanese designated it as the capital of a new province in their Asian empire.

  One of the goals of the international order designed by the United States after the war’s end was to move away from the focus on colonial empire. It exited its own Southeast Asian possession of the Philippines in 1946 and pushed for access to Britain’s colonies. After Singapore’s move to self-rule in 1959, its first leader, Lee Kuan Yew, said the micronation had to do two things to survive: make itself a “poisonous shrimp” inedible to its larger neighbors and stay close to the larger fish.28 The city-state built up its military, arming itself with fleets of tanks and armored vehicles.29 It also clung to the old imperial master; the British navy stayed on as a major employer even after full independence in 1965. Singapore aided the new hegemon—the United States—with its war in Vietnam six hundred miles to the north. The war brought “collateral benefits” to his country, Lee said later, allowing it a chance to begin to catch up to the far more industrialized Japan.30 The “Asian Miracles,” one scholar quipped darkly, were built on “Asian Massacres.”31

  When the British announced the departure of their navy, a Dutch advisor from the United Nations, Albert Winsemius, offered two pieces of advice. The first was to crush the communists, which Lee had already begun by imprisoning opposition and outlawing parties and independent trade unions. Winsemius went further. “I am not interested in what you do with them,” he summarized later. “You can throw them in jail, throw them out of the country, you can even kill them. As an economist it does not interest me, but I have to tell you, if you don’t eliminate them in Government, in unions, in the streets, forget about economic development.”32 The second advice was to let Raffles remain standing. They should not repeat the error of Indonesian freedom fighters who tore down a statue of the Dutch colonial officer who had massacred the Indigenous population in the conquest of the archipelago.33 The Raffles statue would be testimony “that you accept the heritage of the British” and would serve as a beacon to Western companies.34

  Singapore’s leaders followed both recommendations. In 1972, they followed another one and became the second country in Asia (after Japan) to adapt their port for containers—the same technology that killed the London docks. Nearly overnight, Singapore became the fourth-busiest port in the world.35 A visitor riding the newly installed cable car across the island in the 1970s would see cranes erecting tall white boxes of new buildings in the business district alongside the gantry cranes and forklifts of the new container port. Among the more impressive buildings was the fifty-nine-story OCBC Tower designed by the ubiquitous I. M. Pei, a brutalist slab looming over low-rise red tile roofs, moored fishing barges, and the statue of Raffles—now updated and enlarged in synthetic marble.

  At independence, one of Singapore’s models was the US island possession of Puerto Rico, a pioneer in export processing zones, which experienced a flurry of industrial activity after the Second World War by attracting investors to simple factories funded by tax breaks and filled largely with women sewing underwear and other garments.36 By the 1980s, Singapore had moved up the value chain from textiles to high tech. Winsemius helped court electronics companies like Philips to the island in the early years.37 By 1969, the world’s largest producer of semiconductors, Texas Instruments, had opened a plant; Apple followed in 1981.38

  Singapore also built up its financial sector by taking a page from the City of London. Winsemius recalled a financier holding a globe and pointing out the island’s location halfway between the markets closing in San Francisco and opening in London.39 Singapore became an offshore financial center, meaning banks could conduct their business and make loans in dollars after 1968. Controls on buying and selling foreign currencies were abolished altogether ten years later.40 For centuries, trade goods had passed through the Singapore Strait. Now they were joined by great volumes of money transacted at the stroke of a key.

  2.

  By the 1990s, Singapore’s economy had been growing for decades at a rate unparalleled in the world. From one-third of the GDP per capita of its former colonial master at the time of independence, it surpassed it for the first time in 1994. What was the secret of its success? Already in 1977, in his PBS series that inspired Free to Choose, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith mused that it was “very unfashionable in our time to explain economic development by race or ethnic origin” but he would still “attribute much in Singapore to the excellent ethnic admixture.”41 He was ahead of the curve. Cultural essentialism became the preferred way to explain Singapore in the 1990s. Singapore was a multiracial city-state, with relatively steady ratios of 75 percent Chinese, 14 percent Malay, and 8 percent Indian population, but leadership in business and government was dominated by the Chinese.42 They set the tone for what came to be called “Confucian capitalism.”43

  The trope of “Asian values” took traditional ideas of Orientalism and reversed them. The East was fundamentally different from the West—and that was a good thing. Long seen by Western scholars as a brake on Chinese capitalist development, Confucianism was redefined as its rocket fuel, promoting not only social peace but also diligence, loyalty to employers, and cooperation within the workplace.44 The most vocal proponent of this thesis was Lee Kuan Yew. He turned to talk of tradition first in the 1970s in response to signs of Western-style counterculture in the city-state. Restrictions on rock music, long hair for men, and homosexual activity were accompanied by an insistence that hedonism and individualism contradicted Confucian family values. The turn was formalized when he consulted a group of scholars (ironically nearly all from US universities) and released a white paper on “Shared Values” in 1988.45 According to Lee, Asian values focused not on the individual but on “the extended family, the clan, [which] has provided a kind of survival raft for the individual.”46 The nation was a collection of organically bound families rooted in tradition rather than the atomized individuals of the West.

  Lee was an unlikely mouthpiece for cultural essences. Born in Singapore, he was of Chinese descent but only learned Chinese as a third language; he was raised speaking English and educated at the London School of Economics and then at Cambridge as a barrister. As a young man he professed to be baffled by “the peculiar workings of the Chinese mind.”47 Yet by middle age he held forth on the “Sinic” culture of Korea, Japan, China, and Vietnam. Why? One could say Asian values did double duty for Lee. They acted as the secret ingredient or nonreplicable variable of the Singapore model that made it something more than the “country run like a corporation,” as it was often described.48 They also offered a ready-made justification for the suppression of civil freedoms in the city-state. Lee complained that democracy was a system they were “caught in” because of the British zeal to “export [it] all over the place, hoping somewhere it will take root.”49 Government would go more smoothly if he could make the decisions himself. Years later, he said, “I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.”50

  The Singapore Solution combined economic openness with political control, a means to put the genie of capitalist globalization not back in the bottle but into a sturdy harness. In the wake of the global disruptions of the 1960s and 1970s led by youth movements and guerrilla insurrections, elites worldwide were seeking a way to assert such control. Perhaps nowhere was this more true than in the People’s Republic of China, where a decade of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong after 1966 had encouraged the uprooting of all forms of authority, from the military down to the local mayor and middle-school principal.51

  The opening of the economy from the late 1970s brought incremental prosperity but also turned in unwelcome directions, feeding a wave of enthusiasm for political liberalism among intellectuals that culminated with the occupation of Tiananmen Square by a group of students demanding political freedoms to match the newly granted economic freedoms. The violent suppression of the movement in 1989 solved half the problem but left the question of what new language the leadership could use to explain their vision of the good society. It had to be different from both the liberty of the United States and the glasnost of the Soviet Union, which looked to the reigning Chinese Communist Party like two versions of suicide. Singapore offered itself as a model.

  “Growth must come before sharing,” said Lee in 1974.52 “Let some people get rich first” is how Deng Xiaoping phrased it a few years later. Both countries accepted medium-term inequality for long-term growth. Singapore seemed to have lessons about containing the potentially disruptive effects of this process. In 1992, Deng traveled to Singapore and praised its “good public order.” “We should learn from its experience,” he said, “and surpass it in this respect.”53 Hong Kong taught the idea of the segmentation of space (as adopted in Shenzhen) and the incentives of low taxes and privatization of land. Singapore was more about what Chinese intellectuals called “good governance.”54