Singapore is much better prepared for the post-Lee Kuan Yew era than
many of its critics admit.
In the
wake of the death of Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, many obituaries
lauding Lee’s role in transforming the city-state also have argued that
Singapore faces high hurdles to continuing Lee’s revolution. As Forbes’ Joel
Kotkin writes, Lee’s achievements during his three decades as prime minister
were extraordinary, but in Singapore today the “durability of his legacy is in
question.”
Like many
other commentators, Kotkin notes that Lee helped make Singapore one of the most
attractive places in the world for foreign investment, but that investment
started pouring in during the late 1960s, a time when China was closed to
foreign investment and many other Asian nations also were unwelcoming to
investors. “Once Asia had few places where advanced technology and services
could be developed; now it has many. China alone has 13 cities larger than
Singapore, many of them with breathtakingly modern infrastructure and far less
expensive workforces,” Kotkin writes. He also notes that Lee Kuan Yew’s embrace
of essentially technocratic government has left Singapore, in his view, a kind
of soulless place in which earning an income is people’s highest goal, creating
some kind of void. Indeed, Kotkin mentions a global Gallup survey which found
that Singaporeans are pessimistic about whether their future will be better
than Singapore’s past.
Other
commentators, such as the Washington
Post’s editorial board, have noted that decades of restrictions
on social and political freedoms in Singapore’s past will have to be abandoned
as countries around Singapore democratize; some Singaporeans worry that
Singapore’s restrictions have made the country too cautious and hindered
innovation.
But these
worries are overblown. For one, Singapore’s political environment has opened
significantly in the past decade; the country’s politics are no longer
comparable to the situation in the Lee Kuan Yew era. In the most recent
national elections, the opposition won a group-member constituency, and
garnered about forty percent of the popular vote, its highest total in four
decades. The growth of social media and the Internet in Singapore has fostered
much more vibrant political debate, and reduced the influence of state-owned
media outlets, which dominated discourse in the past. Even Lee Kuan Yew’s own
son, current Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, has accepted that the
country’s politics are changing and becoming more competitive. “It’s a different generation, a
different society, and politics will be different,” Lee Hsien Loong
told the Washington Post in an interview two years ago. “We
have to work in a more open way.”
Singaporeans’
pessimism also is not a high obstacle to growth and innovation. Many of the
countries in the Gallup poll whose citizens have similar levels of
pessimism—Germany, Finland—actually have done quite well economically, and
continue to prosper. In these countries, sustained economic success has created
high expectations—expectations that can be tough to fulfill. By contrast, some
of the countries where people are most optimistic about the future—the Central
African Republic, Sierra Leone—are places where the past was so desperate that
citizens may assume the future simply couldn’t be worse. In other words, pessimism
doesn’t really seem to have much to do with actual or future economic
conditions.
In
addition, the rule of law that Lee helped create in Singapore—the country regularly is ranked by Transparency International as
the least corrupt in Asia—continues to give it an advantage in attracting
investment. It offers this advantage even in an era in which China, India,
Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and even Myanmar have arisen as destinations for
foreign investors. Thailand and Malaysia, regional competitors to Singapore,
actually appear to be heading backward in terms of the rule of law, a major
reason why investors are, for instance, fleeing Thailand. (According to a recent report by Reuters,
Thailand’s manufacturing sector has shrunk for twenty-two consecutive months.)
China, meanwhile, has in recent years become increasingly unpredictable for
foreign investors. Nationalist sentiment, the increasing personalization of
power around President Xi Jinping, and a host of proposed new restrictions on
foreign investment have caused foreign investors to become more cautious about
pouring into the country. Vietnam and India, for all their advantages, remain
places where investment is hindered by regulation, opaque administration, and
non-tariff barriers.
What’s
more, Singapore is becoming more innovative as the country moves up the
value-added chain, the social and political environment loosens up, and some of
Singapore’s best talent stays home. Bloomberg’s annual index of the
world’s most innovative countries ranks Singapore in the top five in the world
in terms of manufacturing innovation, and as the eighth most innovative country
in the world overall. In the Bloomberg index,
Singapore places ahead of other rich economies including the United Kingdom,
France, and Canada, and only two spots behind the United States. The country
certainly faces challenges—income inequality, population density on such a
small island, immigration—but it is more prepared for the future than many of
the naysayers admit. By Joshua Kurlantzick
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