If Hong Kong produced “zone fever,” Singapore fed “culture fever” as intellectuals discussed the relative merits of Western versus Chinese traditions.55 The events of the 1990s buoyed the proponents of the latter. The Chinese watched American advice lead to the chaos of “shock therapy” privatization in the former Soviet Union.56 The West was plagued by economic inequality, ecological disaster, voter apathy, and the elite capture of the democratic process.57 NATO fought an air war in the Balkans in the name of human rights that included the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Given this dispiriting picture, why shouldn’t “Sinic” Asia go its own way?

  Four hundred Chinese delegations traveled to the city-state in 1992 alone as Singapore quickly became the dominant foreign model.58 Singapore’s approaches to management and planning were copied in experimental zones in China, from a Singapore-Sichuan Hi-Tech Innovation Park in Chengdu and a Knowledge City in Guangzhou to a Food Zone in Jilin and, most significant, an industrial park in the southern city of Suzhou.59 Planned to house six hundred thousand and employ three hundred thousand, the Suzhou Industrial Park was developed as what one scholar calls a “clone” of the Singapore industrial district of Jurong.60 While Western depictions of Singapore recycle photographs of its skyline and project the image of a compact and cramped metropolis, Singapore—like Hong Kong and London—is in fact one of the greenest cities in the world, with nearly half its area devoted to green space. The Chinese version of the Singapore approach emphasized a managed balance between people and nature. The Suzhou Industrial Park built greenbelts and protected natural spaces and lakes.61

  Implanted in China, mini-Singapores had their own sets of laws, regulations, and even welfare systems, consistent with the atmosphere of subnational experimentation that characterized the period of reform and opening up. Singapore offered a streamlined Asian capitalist modernity that mixed hospitality for multinational investors with a containment of any of the less desirable values that came along with them. It was a vision of slick real estate prospectuses, all lens flares, panes of glass, and hyperreal greenery against blue skies.

  Following the Singapore model of Confucian capitalism finessed China’s abandonment of socialism, making it appear to be the realization of something autochthonous rather than an import from beyond. It also added a cultural gloss to the strategy of fragmentation through special economic zones. Rather than merely miniatures of the Hong Kong Crown Colony or copycat export processing zones, these were presented as part of the localism of traditional Chinese villages, and an inheritance of a decentralized form of imperial rule. Confucian capitalism opened the possibility of what was called “multiple modernities,” the idea that the world might not all be moving in the same direction toward a common goal—and that this might be for the best.62

  In 1977, the international relations scholar Hedley Bull published a classic book called The Anarchical Society in which he called out the “tyranny of existing concepts.”63 The problem, he said, was that we had a narrow-minded idea of what states should look like. We had grown too comfortable with a small range of options for human political organization. We still thought in terms of a binary—either empires or nation-states—living in thrall to familiar categories even as the world eluded their confines. As one of only two city-states (along with Monaco) in the UN, Singapore broke with the tyranny of existing concepts. Imported into Deng’s China, it was spawning flexible forms of the zone, variations of capitalism “with Chinese characteristics.”

  3.

  In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, observed that the number of transistors that could fit on a microchip was doubling every two years. What became known as Moore’s law meant that hardware was shrinking every year even as the amount of data it could handle ballooned. Singapore was at the vanguard—the perfect nation for the age of the microchip. The first place to call itself a “smart city,” Singapore attempted to wire the country with broadband and put a computer in every home with the Intelligent Island initiative in the 1990s.64 Not only did the country produce the literal hardware at its semiconductor foundries, but its laws, when exported to places like coastal China, were referred to as “software.”65 Singapore chimed with the idea of cut and paste, the notion that a government’s operating system could be duplicated and realized elsewhere.

  The microstate of Singapore seemed to be moving in the opposite direction of other economic trends. As technology scaled down, economic territories were scaling up. The North American Free Trade Agreement created a trade bloc out of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The World Trade Organization made the global economy a new institutional reality. The Maastricht Treaty wove the European Union into an ever-closer common market for goods, services, and labor. Most observers saw these treaties as a victory for transnational capitalists and a boost for outsourcing production and increasing access to cheaper consumer goods. But a vocal minority on the Right saw them as Trojan horses of the Left, smuggling socialist and ecological policies into laws beyond the reach of nations.66 For the so-called Euroskeptics in the British Conservative Party, Singapore became a talisman, representing the belief that smaller was better, and an even more radically capitalist world was possible.

  The patron saint of the Euroskeptics was Margaret Thatcher, one of Singapore’s biggest boosters. She praised the city-state continually through her years in power, comparing it time and again to the moribund Europe to which Britain was bound. She swallowed Lee’s Asian values talk whole, referring to the Chinese as “natural capitalists” and “born traders.”67 To her, Singapore was a happy hybrid, having also profited from the values of the “Anglo-Saxon world.”68 “Tell me, what is the recipe for the colossal achievement you had?” she asked friends in Singapore. “But we learnt it all from you, all the lessons of free enterprise,” she heard in response, “It is just that you have forgotten them and we have taken them on!”69

  Singapore seemed to keep Victorian principles of self-help and toil alive. One Singaporean recounted that the message drilled in from a young age was that “the world doesn’t owe you a living.” Rather than socialized medicine, Singaporeans had compulsory personal savings accounts, which the Tories admired, from which they drew for health care, retirement, and real estate purchases. Legitimized by talk of Confucian filial duty, the government offloaded many responsibilities for care work onto families.70 One book written by Thatcherites, including future prime minister Liz Truss, praised Singaporeans for working on average two hours and twenty minutes longer per day than the British.71

  To Tory Euroskeptics, Singapore combined the old with the new—conservative social values with a willingness to contort into whatever new position the world economy demanded. As momentum built toward the 2016 Brexit referendum, the idea of Singapore-on-Thames became a buzzword to describe one vision of what Britain might look like outside the EU. The term was used both by critics and advocates. Along with opposition to socialized health care, it implied low taxes, deregulation, and the erosion of worker rights, a combination of the offshore tax haven and the sweatshop. It also alluded to the rapid rise of Singapore as an international finance center. The focus was often on how the City of London might have more opportunities after leaving the European Union. The Economist argued that London outside the EU could be “a sort of Singapore on steroids.”72 Some backers of Brexit embraced the term. One of the nation’s highest-paid advertising executives praised the prospect of a “Singapore on steroids, a regulation-light, tax-light UK economy, open for business in a way we haven’t seen before.”73

  For the globally minded wing of the Brexiteers, to invoke Singapore was to put stock in optimism. The metamorphosis of Singapore from what one called “a mosquito swamp into a gleaming city-state” was an inspirational tale about the combination of national sovereignty and a commitment to free trade.74 One Conservative politician compared Brexit to Singapore’s moment of independence, quoting Rajaratnam directly to say this was a chance that the UK, too, could plug into the “international economic grid.”75 Another wrote that, as with Singapore, the only variable was “boldness.”76 The chancellor promised a repetition of the Thatcherite moment of deregulation: a “Big Bang 2.0.”77

  In their emphasis on the virtues of exit, some of the Tory ideologues showed their debt to the fast-moving world of finance from which they came. In finance, you can indeed make money just by leaving. Exiting a position at the right moment was often the key to massive profits.78 One Brexiteer had spent three years himself working in Singapore, making in the range of £3 million a year as Deutsche Bank’s managing director. He boasted of reading a scene from Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead biannually his entire adult life.79 Another cut his teeth in Hong Kong and ran a hedge fund that operated out of Singapore and Dublin.80

  Yet, as the Tories soon discovered, the Singapore Solution was less like an instantaneous bet on a stock than a decades-long process of grinding material into a new shape. In Boris Johnson’s first speech as prime minister, he announced what the press dubbed “Singapore-style freeports” across the country.81 The idea was to cordon off sections of the British coastline and lift the usual regulations, labor laws, and taxes to create offshore areas more attractive to foreign investment. The free ports followed the template of the Thatcher-era enterprise zones. In fact, some of the very same think tankers were involved.82 “Freedoms transformed London’s Docklands in the 1980s,” declared Truss as international trade secretary, “and free ports will do the same for towns and cities across the UK.”83 Being out of the EU seemed like it would create new room for maneuver, but the government soon discovered that WTO law was just as restrictive.84

  The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin made a famous distinction between negative and positive freedom. The error of the market radicals in the Brexit camp was to think of Singapore purely in terms of negative freedom. All that was necessary was less rather than more. But the Singapore Solution was not a project of negative freedom in the sense of removing taxes and regulations. (The two countries’ corporate tax rate was within a few percentage points of each other by the time of Brexit.) It was an active project of positive freedom, producing security, health, and capacity. To Thatcher, the success of Singapore and other Asian tiger economies was “not the result of some grandiose state plan; they were the aggregate of hundreds of thousands of individuals and firms each trying, and superbly succeeding, to improve his lot.”85 Yet Singapore’s success was precisely the result of a grandiose state plan. In 1963, a master plan for “Ring City Singapore” was developed with UN advice, a loop of transportation infrastructure around the island with evenly spaced high-rise new towns.86 Later plans layered onto this one, adding industrial plants, recreation facilities, and expanded housing.87 Far from the Thatcherite fantasy of the “non-plan” in the enterprise zone, these were meticulously laid through central command and control.

  The Singapore Solution was not just about building an eye-catching skyline. It was also about cultivating popular legitimacy through the provision of housing and infrastructure that improve the lives of everyday people.88 Inspired by massive projects of wartime mobilization and postwar nationalization, Singapore had expropriated almost every scrap of territory in the first year of independence. The land was used to move the population from their shophouses and thatched-roof villages (known as kampong, the origin of the English word compound) into high-rise apartment blocks.89 By 1963, Singapore’s “Housing for the People” program was building a new unit every forty-five minutes.90 Newly issued currency featured serried ranks of modernist blocks, a testament to the care of the population.

  By 1977, 60 percent of Singaporeans lived in public housing.91 A quarter century later, it was 80 percent. Even as 90 percent owned their units as long-term leaseholds, the government remained the owner of the land, allowing it to take advantage of rising property prices, and intervene where necessary for its master plan.92 Real estate was not shaped only by the market. Housing complexes were actively integrated both racially and socioeconomically—with quota systems for different races (also designed to mitigate ethnic mobilizations against the Singaporean state) and a mixture of different-sized apartments, a far cry from the racial and class segregation of British cities driven by private interests.

  Britain after Brexit is suspended between two versions of Singapore. One is the free port—Raffles with his chin out—calling for the firm hand of leadership, low tariffs, and generous tax breaks. The other version of Singapore is that of the meticulous plan. This version has its fans too. The key strategist behind the Brexit campaign, Dominic Cummings, praises Singapore not for its small state but for its central control, meritocratic civil service, occasionally harsh law and order system, military preparedness, and application of research with state backing to find new niches for national economic growth.93 He calls Singapore a “high performance startup government.” He and others saw that the way to ameliorate regional inequality in Britain—which is what voters wanted—would require Singapore-like state investment in infrastructure and other forms of industrial policy: positive not negative liberty.94

  The argument over the meaning of Singapore is part of a larger argument over the future of capitalism. Will the race to the bottom based on low taxes, low wages, and light regulation continue or will it be replaced by a race to the top based on high wages and heavy investment? Either way, the vision is marred by blind spots. The first is the question of climate change. Looking at Singapore itself, it is clear that there is no exit from the earth. Not only is the city-state highly dependent on air-conditioning and imported water, but its projects of sucking up sand from poorer neighboring countries to build out artificial space for more real estate makes it a parable of the human denial of limits.95 Its location at one degree above the equator, highly exposed to changing currents and extreme weather, puts it in the crosshairs of coming climate disaster.

  Second is the question of people. Decades ago, the economist Paul Krugman delivered a devastating critique of the Singapore growth model when he argued that the economy was not necessarily any more efficient or productive than others. Like the briefly booming Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, it was just inputting resources at a faster pace. It was not building a better engine. It was just throwing in more fuel so the flames grew higher.96 That fuel was not just state funds or raw materials but also the injection of new people. In Singapore, these workers are drawn mostly from South Asia, China, Thailand, and Burma, with about half employed in construction, many of the rest as domestic workers, and a smaller number of professionals and executives.97 Excluded from public housing over the years, manual workers are housed in dormitories segregated from the rest of the city by fences and accessible only by slip roads, shuttled from work to home to the enclave of Little India for shopping and recreation. It was in Little India that worker discontent spilled over in 2013 after the death of an Indian construction worker, leading to the first large-scale riot in Singapore in half a century.98

  Labor is the sand in the machinery of globalization. As Britain was convulsed with immigration politics in the 2010s, Singapore was too. In 2011, the ruling party received its lowest election results ever over the steep rise in the number of noncitizens moving into the city. Similarly, what most of those who voted for Brexit wanted was reduced immigration.99 The first slogan for the Vote Leave campaign was “Go global,” but the slogan that won was “Take Back Control.”100 In the end, Britain cannot become like Singapore to solve its problems, because Singapore has similar problems. It is caught in the same demographic trap as the rest of the industrialized world. An aging population is keen on protecting its social entitlements even as it grows ever more critical of the influx of new workers necessary to keep the system going.

  As a hero in the pantheon of crack-up capitalism, Singapore seems to teach the lesson that anything is possible with enough discipline, determination, and subordination to the forces of globalization. But it is also a showcase of capitalism’s intractable contradictions: endless growth in defiance of limits, social security for some based on the growing number of excluded, and the difficulty of securing the consent of the governed as economic spoils are ever more unevenly divided. Among wealthy territories, its depth of inequality was second only to Hong Kong. The title of a bestselling book in Singapore was blunt in its assessment of the city-state: This Is What Inequality Looks Like.101

  Singapore, in the end, is not an island—it’s everywhere.

  PART II

  PHYLES

  4

  Libertarian Bantustan

  Late Apartheid–Era South Africa

  It has been said that a city is a mine turned upside down.1 Places like Hong Kong, Canary Wharf, and Singapore depend on faraway sites of exploration and extractions of minerals to be refined and processed: iron for steel cladding, sand for glass curtain walls, copper for pipes, sandstone and marble for glistening lobbies. Global cities draw on a vast tracery of shipping lanes and highways stretched across the earth, and pits, shafts, and pumps descending into it. The human labor that makes them run, meanwhile, relies on reserves of calories and regimes of coercion.