Skip to main content Accesibility Help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Article

Mis-modelling Singapore: China's Challenges in Learning from the City-state

  • Mark R. Thompson (a1) and Stephan Ortmann (a2)
Abstract

Singapore exemplifies what China strives for: resilient authoritarianism despite advanced development with good governance and political stability. But lessons Chinese observers draw from the Southeast Asian city-state have been selective, leading to misconceptions. We focus on three key areas in which Chinese observers claim inspiration from the “Singapore model.” The first, Singapore's “Asian values” discourse which is seen to provide an ideological defense of non-democratic rule, overestimates the impact of top-down conservative culturalism while underestimating the difficulty of propagating Confucianism in officially still communist China. Second, while elections in Singapore are seen to bolster the ruling People Action Party's legitimacy in Singapore, they have been implemented to such a limited extent in China that any legitimation gain is unlikely. Finally, the chief lesson derived from Singapore's fight against corruption, the importance of a committed leadership, ignores the importance of the rule of law in Singapore, a legacy of colonialism very different from China's post-totalitarian trajectory.

作为中国所学效的对象，新加坡除了发展先进、治理良好和政治稳定，亦拥有具弹性的威权主义。但中国的观察员却只选择性的从东南亚城市国家中借鉴，而引致了误解。我们现针对三个中国观察员声称由新加坡模式所启发的重点领域。第一，新加坡论述的『亚洲价值观』只被看作为一个提供非民主统治意识形态的思想防线，高估了由上而下保守文化主义的影响，同时亦低估了一个在传播孔儒思想上困难但仍然正式实施共产主义的中国。第二，新加坡的选举仍被看作是支持执政人民行动党在新加坡的认受性，这些选举已经在中国有限度的实施，以使任何从中合法化获得利益都。最后，来自于新加坡主要的学习得到的教训为打击腐败，就是拥有一个坚定领导的重要性。新加坡法治的重要性是一个不容忽视的殖民主义遗产，这是与中国的后极权主义轨道截然不同的。

Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © SOAS University of London 2018 
Corresponding author
E-mail: mark.thompson@cityu.edu.hk (corresponding author).
References
Hide All
“Wukan: After the uprising – Part 2.” Al Jazeera, 23 July 2013, https://youtu.be/t8tFsFUkpoo. Accessed 4 July 2016.
Babones, Salvatore. “China's predictable slowdown.” Foreign Affairs 18 (2015).
Bell, Daniel A. 2010. China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Berger, Mark T. 2004. The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization. London: Routledge.
Bloomberg News. 2015. “China's love of Lee's ‘Singapore model’ ran deep for decades.” Bloomberg, 23 May, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-23/china-s-love-of-lee-s-singapore-model-ran-deep-for-decades. Accessed 15 June 2016.
Buckley, Chris. 2015. “Practice in foreign economic relations and trade.” Sinosphere: Dispatches from China, 30 January, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/china-warns-against-western-values-in-imported-textbooks/. Accessed 4 October 2016.
Cai, Dingjian. 2005. “Xiang Xinjiapo xue shenme?” (What can you learn from Singapore?). Zhongguo qingnian bao (China Youth Daily), Special Monthly Edition 11, 6.
Cai, Dingjian. 2017. “Singapore: what we have overlooked and misinterpreted.” In Yang, Chen Ning, Yu, Ying-Shih and Gungwu, Wang (eds.), Lee Kuan Yew through the Eyes of Chinese Scholars. Singapore: World Scientific, 3–26.
Chen, Edward K.Y. 1979. Hypergrowth in Asian Economies: Comparative Study of Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Cho, Eunsun. 2015. “Mapping Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign.” World Policy Blog, 22 July, http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2015/07/22/mapping-xi-jinping%E2%80%99s-anti-corruption-campaign. Accessed 17 May 2016.
Chong, Terence. 2005. “Civil society in Singapore: popular discourses and concepts.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 20(2), 273–301.
Cook, Sarah. 2015. The Politburo's Predicament: Confronting the Limitations of Chinese Communist Party Repression. New York: Freedom House.
Creemers, Rogier. 2015. “Evaluating Chinese media policy.” In Rawnsley, Gary D. and Rawnsley, Ming-yeh T. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media. London and New York: Routledge, 47–64.
Davies, Michael C. 2015. “Beijing's broken promises.” Journal of Democracy 26(2), 101–10.
Economist. 1994. “Singapore: West bashing,” Economist, 27 August, 46–47.
Elegant, Simon. 2007. “China's Nelson Mandela,” Time, 19 November, http://world.time.com/2007/11/19/chinas_nelson_mandela/. Accessed 16 June 2016.
Fan, Ruiping. 2012. The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China. Dordrecht: Springer.
Fewsmith, Joseph. 2010. “‘Inner-party democracy’: development and limitations.” China Leadership Monitor 31, http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/CLM31JF.pdf. Accessed 10 November 2016.
Fu, Hualing. 2015. “Wielding the sword: President Xi's new anti-corruption campaign.” In Rose-Ackerman, Susan and Lagunes, Paul Felipe (eds.), Greed, Corruption, and the Modern State: Essays in Political Economy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 134–160.
George, Cherian. 2007. “Consolidating authoritarian rule: calibrated coercion in Singapore.” The Pacific Review 20(2), 127–145.
Ginsburg, Norton S. 1955. “The great city in Southeast Asia.” American Journal of Sociology 60(5), 455–462.
He, Baogang. 2016. “What exactly is ‘the Chinese ideal?’: A discussion of Daniel A. Bell's ‘The China Model: Political meritocracy and the limits of democracy’.” Perspectives on Politics 14(1), 147–49.
Hill, Michael. 2000. “’Asian values’ as reverse Orientalism: Singapore.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 41(2), 177–190.
Ho, Benjamin. 2015. “Learning from Lee: lessons in governance for the middle kingdom from the little red dot.” East Asia 32(3), 1–24.
Jacobs, Andrew. 2011. “Confucius statue vanishes near Tiananmen Square.” New York Times, 22 April. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/world/asia/23confucius.html. Accessed 20 August 2013.
Jiang, Qing. 2013. A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China's Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Order. Bell, Daniel and Fan, Ruping (eds.), Ryden, Edmund (trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jiang, Xun. 2011. “Zhongguo Dangjiu Wudu Xinjiapo Moshi” (China misinterprets the Singapore model). Yazhou zhoukan 25(20), http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/inews.cfm?Path=3470526402&File=20110512/yz041415a.htm. Accessed 2 November 2012.
Johnson, Chalmers. 1995. Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State. New York: W.W. Norton.
Koh, Gillian. 2015. “The IPS GE2015 surveys.” presented at the IPS Post-Election Conference 2015, 4 November, http://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/ips/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/POPS-8_GE2015_061115_web-Final.pdf. Accessed 2 November 2016.
Lam, Willy. 2015. Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping: Renaissance, Reform, or Retrogression? New York and London: Routledge.
Larson, Christina. 2015. “China hails, then bans a documentary.” Bloomberg, 12 March, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-12/china-hails-then-bans-antipollution-film-under-the-dome. Accessed 21 June 2015.
Lau, Mimi. 2016. “Popular elected Chinese village chief arrested on bribery charges.” South China Morning Post, 22 July, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1993186/popular-elected-chinese-village-chief-arrested-bribery. Accessed 1 November 2016.
Lee, Kuan Yew. 2000. From Third World to First: The Singapore Story – 1965–2000. New York: HarperCollins.
Lee, Jack Tsen-Ta. 2012. “Shall the twain never meet? Competing narratives and discourses of the rule of law in Singapore.” Singapore Journal of Legal Studies 2012(1), 298–330.
Lim, Yan Liang. 2015. “Record 28,000 gather at Hong Lim Park for annual Pink Dot rally,” The Straits Times, 13 June, http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/record-28000-gather-at-hong-lim-park-for-annual-pink-dot-rally. Accessed 7 June 2016.
Lu, Zhifang. 2009. “Xinjiapo fan-fubai jingyan dui Zhongguo lianzheng jianshe de qishi” (Singapore's anti-corruption experience and its inspiration for China's clean government). Dangdai shijie 10, 57–58.
Luo, Xuefei. 2014. “Lun Xinjiapo de ‘xuanju minben quanwei zhui’ zhengzhi” (On the politics of Singapore's “electoral authoritarianism”). Wuhan keji daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 16(2), 176–180.
Mauzy, Diane K., and Milne, R.S.. 2002. Singapore Politics under People's Action Party. London and New York: Routledge.
O'Brien, Kevin J., and Han, Rongbin. 2009. “Path to democracy? Assessing village elections in China.” Journal of Contemporary China 18(60), 359–378.
Ortmann, Stephan. 2011. “Singapore: Authoritarian but Newly Competitive.” Journal of Democracy 22(4), 153–164.
Ortmann, Stephan, and Thompson, Mark R.. 2014. “China's obsession with Singapore: learning authoritarian modernity.” Pacific Review 27(3), 433–455.
Ortmann, Stephan, and Thompson, Mark R.. 2016. “China and the ‘Singapore model’.” Journal of Democracy 27(1), 39–48.
Ortmann, Stephan. 2015a. “The Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong's protracted democratization process.” Asian Affairs 46(1), 32–50.
Ortmann, Stephan. 2015b. “Politics, not elections, will change Singapore.” East Asia Forum 2 September, http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2015/09/02/politics-not-elections-will-change-singapore/. Accessed 9 May 2016.
Ortmann, Stephan. 2016. “Singapore 2011–2015: a tale of two elections.” Asia Maior 26, 197–212.
Oster, Shai. 2014. “President Xi's anti-corruption campaign biggest since Mao.” Bloomberg, 4 March, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/china-s-xi-broadens-graft-crackdown-to-boost-influence. Accessed 27 June 2016.
Page, Jeremy. 2015. “Why China is turning back to Confucius,” The Wall Street Journal, 20 March, https://http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-china-is-turning-back-to-confucius-1442754000. Accessed 26 March 2016.
Pang, Qin. 2013. “State–Society Relations and Confucian Revivalism in Contemporary China.” PhD diss., City University of Hong Kong.
Peh, Shing Huei. 2009. “‘S'pore fever’ rages on in China.” The Straits Times, 24 June. http://wanderingchina.blogspot.com/2009/06/spore-fever-rages-on-in-china.html. Accessed 8 August 2015.
Pei, Minxin. 2016. “China's rule of fear.” Project Syndicate, 8 February, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-fear-bureaucratic-paralysis-by-minxin-pei-2016-02. Accessed 4 February 2017.
Perkins, Dwight H. 2015. “Understanding the slowing growth rate of the People's Republic of China.” Asian Development Review 32(1), 1–30.
Phillips, Tom. 2016a. “Women's rights crackdown exposes deepening crisis in Chinese society,” The Guardian, 5 February, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/feb/05/china-womens-rights-crackdown-exposes-deepening-crisis-in-chinese-society. Accessed 21 June 2016.
Phillips, Tom. 2016b. “He Xiaobo: latest victim of China's crackdown on labour activists,” The Guardian, 2 February, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/02/he-xiaobo-the-latest-victim-of-chinas-crackdown-on-labour-activists. Accessed 21 June 2016.
Quah, Jon S.T. 2001. “Combating corruption in Singapore: what can be learned?” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 9(1), 29–35.
Quah, Jon S.T. 2015. “Hunting the corrupt ‘tigers’ and ‘flies’ in China: an evaluation of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign (November 2012 to March 2015).” Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies 2015(1), http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mscas/vol2015/iss1/1. Accessed 15 June 2016.
Rahim, Lily Zubaidah. 2015. “Reclaiming Singapore's ‘growth with equity’ social compact.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 16(2), 160–176.
Ramcharan, Robin. 2002. Forging a Singaporean Statehood, 1965–1995: The Contribution of Japan. The Hague: Kluwer Law.
Rajah, Jothie. 2012. Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reuters. 2015. “China's top court rejects judicial independence as ‘erroneous thought’,” The Guardian, 26 February, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/chinas-top-court-rejects-judicial-independence-as-erroneous-thought. Accessed 16 June 2016.
Shambaugh, David. 2016. “Contemplating China's future.” The Washington Quarterly 39(3), 121–130.
Shared Values. Singapore: Singapore National Printers, 1991.
Tan, Ah Leak. 1999. “The experience of Singapore in combating corruption.” In Stapenhurst, Rick and Kpundeh, Sahr J. (eds.), Curbing Corruption: Toward a Model for Curbing National Integrity. Washington DC: EDI Development Studies, 59–66.
Tan, Qingshan. 2010. “Why village election has not much improved village governance.” Journal of Chinese Political Science 15, 153–167.
Thompson, Mark R. 2001. “Whatever happened to ‘Asian values’?” Journal of Democracy 12(4), 154–165.
Thompson, Mark R. 2015. “Democracy with Asian characteristics.” Journal of Asian Studies 74(4), 875–887.
Thum, Pingtjin. 2014. “The old normal is the new normal: lessons from Singapore's history of dissent.” In Low, Donald (ed.), Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus. Singapore: NUS Press.
Transparency International. 2015. Corruption Perception Index 2015, http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015. Accessed 15 June 2016.
Tsang, Steve. 2014. “China after Deng Xiaoping: the search for a non-Democratic development model.” In Hsiao, Hsin-Huang Michael (ed.), Democracy or Alternative Political Systems in Asia: after the Strongmen. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 78–96.
Tu, Weiming, 2000. “Implications of the rise of ‘Confucian’ East Asia.” Daedalus 129(1), 195–218.
Uslaner, Eric M. 2008. Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wang, Junhua. 2011. “Xinjiapo gongtong jiazhiguan de jianshe ji qishi” (The development of shared values in Singapore and its lessons). Shanghai shi shehui zhuyi xueyuan xuebao 2, 58–62.
Wang, Xiaoqing. 2016. “Xinjiapo de gongtong jiazhiguan jiaoyu jiqi qishi” (Singapore's common values education and its implications). Guangxi qingnian ganbu xueyuan xuebao 26(3), 33–37.
Wang, Guohui. 2014. Tamed ‘Village Democracy’: Elections, Governance and Clientelism in a Contemporary Chinese Village. Heidelberg: Springer.
Wei, Xiangqian. 2009. “Cong Xinjiapo jingyan tan Zhongguo lianzheng jianshe” (From the Singapore experience to the construction of a corruption-free government in China). Daqing shehui kexue 154(3), 146–48.
Welsh, Bridget. 2016. “Clientelism and control: PAP's fight for safety in GE2015.” The Round Table 105(2), 119–128.
Wong, Edward, and Ansfield, Jonathan. 2012. “Singapore link in Xi Jinping's reform agenda?,” The Straits Times, 25 October.
Worthington, Ross. 2001. “Between Hermes and Themis: an empirical study of the contemporary judiciary in Singapore.” Journal of Law and Society 28(4), 490–519.
Xue, Jinhua. 2015. “Xinjiapo gongtong jiazhiguan jianshe dui woguo hexin jiazhi peiyu de qishi” (Lessons from Singapore's development of shared values for China's cultivation of core values). Zhongguo jingangshan ganbu xueyuan xuebao 8(6), 35–40.
Yao, Shuntian. 2002. “Privilege and corruption: the problem of China's socialist market economy.” American Journal of Economic and Sociology 61(1), 279–299.
Jin, Zhang. 2010. “Xinjiapo de lianzheng jianshe ji qi jiejian yiyi” (The construction of Singapore's non-corrupt government and its implication). Neimenggu dianda xuekan 6, 38–39.
Zhang, Kevin Honglin (ed.). 2006. China as the World Factory. London and New York: Routledge.
Zheng, Yongnian. 2010. The Chinese Communist Party as Organizational Emperor: Culture, Reproduction and Transformation. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

The China Quarterly
  • ISSN: 0305-7410
  • EISSN: 1468-2648
  • URL: /core/journals/china-quarterly
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×

Keywords

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between <date>. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed

Cancel
Confirm
×