China and the “Singapore Model”

Stephan Ortmann, Mark R. Thompson

ISSUE DATE:
January 2016

VOLUME: 27

ISSUE: 1

PAGE NUMBERS: 39-48

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Following the death of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015,
China remains obsessed with Singapore, the only country in the region to achieve
advanced economic industrialization without undergoing substantial political
liberalization. The key “lesson” that China is trying to learn is how to combine
authoritarian rule with “good governance” (“meritocratic” one-party rule). The
impact of the “Singapore model” on China shows that learning by nondemocratic
states is not necessarily a short-term “modular” phenomenon that is largely
reactive in character, but can be long-term and highly institutionalized. It has
become increasingly clear, however, that China sees what it wants to see in
Singapore, making the “lessons” learned more caricature than reality. And China’s
recent crackdown on dissenters, squeezing the already limited political space
allowed during the post–Tiananmen Square Massacre period, is actually moving
the country further away from rather than toward the Singapore model.
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SUBJECT

Authoritarianism, Economic development

REGION

East Asia, Southeast Asia

COUNTRY

China, Singapore

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