You might think that low-income countries pursue economic development programs because it’s nice to have a higher standard of living. But surprisingly, this is often not enough. The existing elite class enjoys high relative status and typically has access to world-class amenities anyway. Economic development, to them, means being supplanted by a nouveau riche merchant/industrial class like in a Victorian novel, foregoing the patronage and corruption networks that enriched them, upending the traditional mores of their society, shackling themselves to the dictates and vagaries of global markets, and having to invite foreigners, perhaps the same people from the colonial era that they’ve finally gotten rid of, to come in and upstage them with their superior technical know-how. Why upset the apple cart like that?
A common catalyst for reform is a national security wake-up call. The leadership class is forced to recognize the need to industrialize or else fare poorly in the next war and be swept away. This is famously the case of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea followed similar playbooks in the 20th century. Many European states got started down this development path at different times.
An extreme example of this type of adapt-or-die development story is that of Singapore, which moved into the ranks of the fully developed nations in just a generation and became famous as one of the Four Asian Tigers. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and long-serving Prime Minister, lays out the story of the country’s transformation in From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000, his memoir/hyper-pragmatic policymaking bodice ripper. For a book that’s nominally about boring policy particulars and dry diplomatic meetings, you’re hooked with the magnitude of what’s at stake right from the start.
Lee sets the stage. It’s 1965, and Singapore has just been expelled from Malaysia. The small island city-state was struggling with race riots at home and military threats from hostile neighboring states abroad, with no natural resources or hinterland to provide a foundation for the economy and no great power to turn to for protection. They would have to make the best of their situation.
Malaysia itself had been cobbled together two years previously out of several newly independent British colonies in the area. Disagreements between the Singaporean government and the Malaysian central government quickly created bad blood, and race relations between ethnic Malays and Chinese in Singapore broke down, culminating in race riots in 1964. The Malaysian parliament voted to expel Singapore from the federation to prevent further violence. Lee, at 42, now found himself at the helm of an independent Singapore.
Lee had studied law in England and then gotten his start practicing in Singapore before branching out into representing labor groups. Getting involved in politics, he and some associates formed the People’s Action Party (PAP) in 1954 as a left-leaning party. The radical and moderate factions struggled for power, with the radicals being expelled in 1961. The PAP would later explicitly pivot center-right. Lee was elected PM of the now self-governing Singapore in 1959. He supported the merger with Malaysia and retained his position as PM of Singapore within Malaysia, and then continued on as leader of the new independent state after the expulsion. This earlier history is covered in a separate volume.
The fledgling nation was in a security vacuum from the start. The British, who had previously maintained a naval presence in the region and kept key bases in Singapore, were beginning to pull out. They would be gone by 1971 and in the meantime did not want to get involved in Singapore’s problems. The Americans were too distracted by Vietnam and too distrusted in the broader Third World for Singapore to invite them to step in. China was also viewed with suspicion in Southeast Asia. Singapore was rightly concerned about attempts to pull them into the communist orbit, and in any case China was distracted by massive internal unrest at the time. No great power was stepping up to keep a lid on the region.
Meanwhile, affairs with Singapore’s immediate neighbors got off to a rocky start. Relations with Indonesia became confrontational in 1968 when Singapore hanged two Indonesian saboteurs over the protest of the Indonesian government. The commandos had killed three Singaporean civilians in an explosion in 1965 as part of an undeclared war between Malaysia and Indonesia. After the execution, the Indonesian military conducted threatening exercises close by and threatened invasion.
Malaysia also maintained an uneasy stance toward the new nation: “Many Malay leaders in [Kuala Lumpur] believed that Singapore should never have been allowed to leave Malaysia, but should have been clobbered into submission.” Lee feared that extremist Malay Ultras in Kuala Lumpur could spark a coup. The Malaysian government also occasionally threatened to cut off Singapore’s water supply.
To ward off these existential threats to its security, Singapore would need to smooth relations between ethnic groups at home, build out a modern economy from scratch, and use that economic strength to support a capable modern military, all while hopefully keeping diplomatic spats from boiling over into hot war.
The Military
In building a military, Lee first had to contend with the fact that the two infantry regiments on the island were under Malaysian command and largely composed of Malaysians. Their presence served as an intimidation tactic, and Lee feared they could mount a coup at Malaysia’s instigation. Despite being a thorn in Lee’s side, eventually one was deployed to serve in the conflict with Indonesia, and the other withdrew on its own in 1967.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee took on an impromptu role as Minister for the Interior and Defence and set about building an independent defense force. His team did their best to fly under the radar so as not to tip off factions in the Malaysian government that they were cutting off Malaysia’s ability to reverse the separation. Secretly assisted by Israeli officers disguised as “Mexicans” (other nations had rebuffed him), Goh implemented a rapid program of mass citizen mobilization to deter invasion, using a similar strategy as Switzerland and Israel.
This effort was as much about subtly changing citizens’ attitudes as it was about military training. “We had to reorientate people’s minds to accept the need for a people’s army and overcome their traditional dislike for soldiering.” The government set up cadet corps in schools and attempted to promote “military valour” in a hitherto mercantile populace.
The mobilization was also intertwined with delicate racial considerations:
We faced another security risk from the racial composition of our army and police. Independent Singapore could not continue the old British practice of having a city three-quarters Chinese policed and guarded by Malay policemen and soldiers. The British had recruited mostly Malays born in Malaya, who traditionally had come to Singapore to enlist. Malays liked soldiering whereas the Chinese shunned it, a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China. The question was whether the army and police would be as loyal to a government no longer British or Malay, but one the Malays perceived as Chinese. We had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect the population mix.
By the early 1970s, when the British were gone, Singapore was fielding a respectable defense force. In the years since, they’ve relied on economic growth to bankroll increasingly high-tech equipment and a capable officer corps.
The Economy
Just as Singapore’s security situation was a challenge, the economy was moving backwards when they became independent. British military spending on the island employed 70,000 people, directly and indirectly, and accounted for 20% of Singapore’s GDP. Meanwhile, Singapore’s role as a trade entrepôt was being undercut by Malaysia’s attempts to bypass the new nation. Indonesia had also blocked trade because of ongoing poor relations. Singapore would have to carve out a new niche and break into new markets for trade. The government made a go of converting military assets to civilian use and tried to court business investment with mixed results.
In 1968 Lee took a short sabbatical at Harvard. While there he met with many American business executives. Apparently against the advice of development economists, he and his team, including Dutch economic advisor Albert Winsemius, concluded that the path to prosperity lay with aggressively courting investment from American multinational corporations (MNCs). Lee repeatedly beat the drum that Singapore would succeed by being “cheaper and better than anyone else, or perish,” and he was not visiting Western decision-makers with a “begging bowl.” This strategy would assist with turning Singapore into a “First World oasis in a Third World region.”
The new strategy was not a passive one. Lee’s team set up an Economic Development Board to function as a one-stop shop for addressing investors’ on-site needs. He and other officials would constantly field meetings with American executives to pitch them on Singapore’s favorable business climate. The government also utilized an industrial policy patchwork of tax breaks, tariffs, and other incentives to attract foreign investment, dialing them down as Singapore became more established. In many cases the government directly founded new companies, taking care to avoid supporting inefficient, loss-making state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as often happened in other countries. By the time the first OPEC crisis hit in 1973, the economy was on firm footing. Singapore also began to establish itself as a global financial hub beginning in 1968. Finance would become an important part of its economy over time.
Lee’s team sought to bolster political and social stability by structuring government benefits in a way that gave “every citizen a stake in the country and its future.” Retirement benefits were handled through the Central Provident Fund (CPF), a mandatory savings program. Over time these accounts were liberalized to allow for participation in financial investments, including stocks. They were also used to allow people to buy out their government-built apartments, fostering a spirit of homeownership:
During the riots of the 1950s and early 1960s, people would join in the rioting, stone windshields, overturn cars, and burn them. When riots broke out in the mid-1960s, after they owned homes and property, they acted differently. I saw young men carrying their scooters parked on the roads to safety up the stairs of their HDB [Housing and Development Board] blocks. I was strengthened in my resolve to give every family solid assets which I was confident they would protect and defend, especially their home. I was not wrong.
We chose to redistribute wealth by asset enhancement, not by subsidies for consumption. Those who are not winners of top prizes in the free market will still get valuable consolation prizes for competing in the marathon of life.
Later, special CPF accounts functioned as Health Savings Account (HSA)-like vehicles for Singaporeans, who could use the funds to pay for their share of the subsidized cost of medical procedures. In this way, over time, large portions of the social safety net were self-funding at the individual level.
Race Issues
The third major issue right out of the gate was the balance between ethnic groups. Singapore was about three-quarters ethnically Chinese (speaking multiple dialects), with most of the remainder being Tamil-speaking Indians and Malay-speaking indigenous Malays. Spoken language and the language of educational instruction generated recurring controversies. Over decades the government adopted a flexible bilingual system that used English as a common working language and either Malay, Mandarin, or Tamil as “mother tongues,” depending on ethnicity. English functioned as a neutral language that wouldn’t bias the government in favor of one ethnic group, while also coming in handy as an international lingua franca. The mother tongues supported intergenerational transmission of traditional values.
This is one part of the book that felt relatively underdeveloped. In particular, the race riots in the ‘60s seem to have just petered out. It’s never outright stated whether this had to do with language policy (which received an entire chapter), improved stability in neighboring Malaysia (race riots there had precipitated the outbreak of Singapore’s 1969 race riots), or something else. Lee spends a few pages briefly summarizing a campaign to convert Malay shantytown ghettos into modern high-rises, road expansions to break up powder keg neighborhoods into smaller pockets, policies to promote racial commingling, and election reforms that promoted inclusion of minority candidates, but it was unclear what if anything was decisive in improving race relations. To my American mind this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that could be summarized in just a few pages.
And The Rest
These were three of the big-ticket issues that Lee had to deal with in getting Singapore off the ground, but there were others to tackle as well. He had to dial back the power of unions that had inherited overly aggressive practices from the British. He also had to prevent communist factions, which had once taken over the unions and presented an organized and dangerous opposition, and which still commanded a sizable minority of support among the populace, from reemerging (more on that later). Turning around the city’s cleanliness and sanitation situation was a big project in the early years. Lee also discusses issues of governance and political process: minimizing corruption, managing the press, etc.
Much of the rest of the book beyond these issues is a play-by-play of Lee’s many diplomatic meetings over the years with foreign officials. These read almost as a history of Asia during and just after the Cold War, as Lee provides background information on his meetings. The visits to and from China over the years are particularly interesting. Chinese officials learned from Singapore and arguably based their reform model on Singapore’s: perestroika (reform) to create wealth, before glasnost (openness), as Lee would put it, using the Russian terms. There are some “Oh, honey…” moments here as Chinese leaders get their feet wet dealing with market systems:
Towards the end of the two weeks, Jiang [Zemin] had looked Ng Pock Too in the eye and said, “You have not told me everything. You must have a secret. China has cheaper land, cheaper water, cheaper power, cheaper labour. Yet you get so many investments and we don’t. What is the secret formula?” Nonplussed, Ng explained the key importance of political confidence and economic productivity. He pulled out his copy of the Business Environment Risk Index (BERI) report, and pointed out Singapore’s rating as 1A on a scale of 1A down to 3C. China was not even included in the rating.
From Third World to First defies quick summarizing. While grand strategy was important, the reader is beaten over the head with how many small decisions and initiatives had to compound over the years to drive success. If you’re into this sort of thing, I recommend reading at least Part I, which focuses on economic and domestic issues.
As a memoir, Lee’s account can’t be taken as an unbiased review of Singapore’s history (“Since I'd achieved all of my goals as President in one term, there was no need for a second. The end.”). Was the economic situation really that dire? Did mainstream development economists really advise Lee to eschew investment from multinationals? Was outright war really on the table? Are race issues being swept under the rug? But it does give us a window into the governing philosophy that motivated the country’s development. So what can we make of Singapore’s success? Unsatisfyingly for those looking for easy answers, it doesn’t seem to boil down to any one thing.
State-ish Capitalism
Most obviously, Lee explicitly embraced capitalism at a time when various flavors of socialism, or even outright communism, were in vogue across much of the Third World. A market-based system was a necessary condition for successful development.
But it is a mistake to assume that this was as simple as flipping a deregulatory switch. As we’ve already seen, Lee had to actively and relentlessly court foreign investment like a CEO pitching financial investors on his company:
Thereafter, every time I visited America, [EDB representative in New York Chan Chin Bock] would arrange for me to meet 20 to 50 executives. The usual format was drinks before lunch or dinner, conversation at the main table with the important CEOs, then a 20-minute speech followed by questions and answers. Chin Bock explained that most American CEOs had no time to visit Singapore, but they wanted to see and assess the man in charge before they set up a factory there.
Other big slices of the economic policy package are not free market maximalist. The Singaporean government holds meaningful ownership of SOEs and has a Georgist-flavored heavy hand in the real estate sector (most of the land is owned by the government, much of the housing stock was built by the government, and homes people buy out and “own” are technically held as 99-year transferrable leases). The healthcare system is also far from unregulated. Singapore, being a city-state, had to directly deal with the burden of running a rapidly evolving large city. This included the delicate task of resettling people to make way for modern infrastructure and buildings and implementing meaningful environmental improvement.
One sometimes comes across the claim that Singapore is successful because the government operates on laissez-faire economic policies. This is also the impression one gets from reading Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works. Studwell views Singapore and Hong Kong as merely “port-offshore financial centers” and doesn’t see them as useful data points in the constellation of Asian development fables, particularly since they lack agricultural hinterlands. He faults the international financial bureaucracies for pointing to Singapore and Hong Kong’s laissez-faire policies as examples for more normal countries to follow. But the overall model we take away from Lee’s account is not laissez-faire, but rather a sort of state capitalist model, again almost like a much more successful version of post-Deng China. Maybe Studwell means free trade, but Singapore also used industrial policy in the early years.
Singapore’s policy suite just does not map well onto Western left vs. right categories. Some things code right, like anti-communism and a tough-on-crime mentality. Others code left, like SOEs and policies promoting racial commingling. The healthcare system combines cost sharing, HSA-like accounts, and deliberate competition between public and private providers, and a sliding scale of hospital cost vs. quality, with publicly owned hospitals and regulated, subsidized treatment prices. The state promotes Singaporean nationalism over ethnic chauvinism, but racial categories appear to be hard-coded into the law. Lee supported a social safety net to sand the rough edges of the free market, but did so through compulsory saving vehicles when possible. In the US this resembles Social Security privatization, a priority of the George W. Bush administration. Lee was mindful of avoiding a welfare mentality as seen in the West. He did not pull his punches when discussing this issue:
There will always be the irresponsible or the incapable, some 5 per cent of our population. They will run through any asset, whether a house or shares. We try hard to make them as independent as possible and not end up in welfare homes. More important, we try to rescue their children from repeating the feckless ways of their parents. We have arranged help but in such a way that only those who have no other choice will seek it. This is the opposite of attitudes in the West, where liberals actively encourage people to demand their entitlements with no sense of shame, causing an explosion of welfare costs.
Further complicating our efforts to pin down Singapore’s success is the fact that many of its successful policies superficially resemble ones adopted by the US with more mixed results. For example:
To put it lightly, the US implementation of these kinds of policies is considered at a minimum disappointing, which suggests that Singapore has a special sauce in terms of policy implementation.
Pragmatism
A sense of calm, patient pragmatism cuts through seemingly every sentence in this book. Lee never appears to let overweening pride, ego, or wishful thinking get in the way of good decision-making. Nor does he cling to ideological commitments. Like many leaders of newly independent colonies, Lee and the other PAP founders began as anti-colonialist socialists, and they were in an unsustainable alliance with a communist faction to boot. Lee himself had gotten his start representing labor groups. With Singapore independent, he had to pivot in several of these areas. He switched to capitalism, implored the British to maintain a military presence for as long as possible, linked up economically with the First World, and reined in aggressive unions. How are leaders in most newly independent countries supposed to pull off a 180 like that?
Lee occasionally remarks about the need to “make a living,” such as when discussing the necessity of keeping English language proficiency, as if Singapore were best modeled as a strait-laced household writ large. The members of such a household might seek to learn English (check), get a job in some high-tech industry at a big international company (foreign investment), save (CPF), and invest (sovereign wealth funds, SOEs), and wouldn’t entertain delusions about being the big man on the block. Large nations, meanwhile, are governed by the funhouse mirror rules of macroeconomics and constantly swept up in aspirations of regional or global power. “All Chinese know the saying: big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp. Singapore was a shrimp.” Tyler Cowen compares Singapore to a start-up, in which Lee “embodied many features of the founder-chief executive: setting the vision and ethos, assuming responsibility for other personnel, influencing the early product lines in manufacturing and serving as a chairman-of-the-board figure in his later years.”
Lee recalls an early incident when he might have damaged Singapore’s business reputation to score points indulging in postcolonial resentment:
I remember [Winsemius’s] first report to me in 1961 when he laid two preconditions for Singapore’s success: first, to eliminate the communists who made any economic progress impossible; second, not to remove the statue of Stamford Raffles...To keep Raffles’ statue was easy. My colleagues and I had no desire to rewrite the past and perpetuate ourselves by renaming streets or buildings or putting our faces on postage stamps or currency notes. Winsemius said we would need large-scale technical, managerial, entrepreneurial and marketing knowhow from America and Europe. Investors wanted to see what a new socialist government in Singapore was going to do to the statue of Raffles. Letting it remain would be a symbol of public acceptance of the British heritage and could have a positive effect. I had not looked at it that way, but was quite happy to leave this monument because he was the founder of modern Singapore. If Raffles had not come here in 1819 to establish a trading post, my great-grandfather would not have migrated to Singapore from Dapu county in Guangdong province, southeast China. The British created an emporium that offered him, and many thousands like him, the opportunity to make a better living than in their homeland which was going through turmoil and chaos as the Qing dynasty declined and disintegrated.
He also points to times when basic blocking and tackling made a big difference:
Visiting CEOs used to call on me before making investment decisions. I thought the best way to convince them was to ensure that the roads from the airport to their hotel and to my office were neat and spruce, lined with shrubs and trees. When they drove into the Istana domain, they would see right in the heart of the city a green oasis, 90 acres of immaculate rolling lawns and woodland, and nestling between them a nine-hole golf course. Without a word being said, they would know that Singaporeans were competent, disciplined and reliable, a people who would learn the skills they required soon enough.
Other examples abound. Public servants in Singapore are compensated competitively against the private sector. High headline compensation might be scandalous in other countries but incentivizes quality candidates to enter government. During the 1973 oil crisis, Lee made sure to signal to the oil companies that the government would not seize or block the oil held in Singapore refineries. This kind of repeated game thinking created a foundation for further expansion of the refining and petrochemical industry in Singapore. The country’s later success as a financial hub would have also depended on this sense of confidence. While adherence to the rule of law like this is considered standard in the developed world, it’s often difficult for developing country governments to keep the golden handcuffs on.
More dramatically, Lee recalls the incident, mentioned earlier, when Indonesian saboteurs had killed three civilians and were due for execution despite pleas for clemency from the Indonesian government:
The cabinet had met earlier to decide what advice to give the president. We had already released 43 Indonesians detained for offences committed during Confrontation. In response to Indonesian pleas we had also released two Indonesians convicted and sentenced to death for carrying a time bomb in Singapore. But these persons had been arrested before they could do harm, unlike the other case, where three civilians had been killed. We were small and weak. If we yielded, then the rule of law not only within Singapore but between our neighbours and Singapore would become meaningless as we would always be open to pressure. If we were afraid to enforce the law while British forces were still in Singapore, even though they had announced that they would be withdrawing by 1971, then our neighbours, whether Indonesia or Malaysia, could walk over us with impunity after 1971. So we decided not to abort the due process of law by acceding to the petition. The two men were hanged on 17 October.
Lee is admittedly recalling this episode decades later, but he frames this decision in terms of trade-offs and credibility rather than a hot-blooded desire for vengeance.
The government undertook a number of social engineering initiatives over the years, including an anti-spitting campaign, “an antilong hair campaign in 1971 as we did not want our young to adopt the hippie look,” initiatives to get people to support conscription and even to be polite and hardworking, a Social Development Unit to get educated singles to date (imagine going on a singles cruise sponsored by Bill de Blasio) after previously promoting a “Stop at Two” family planning campaign, resettling people into modern housing, teaching schoolchildren to care for newly installed trees, banning ads for cigarettes, and famously banning the sale of chewing gum (apparently this was a real problem where used gum was blocking machinery sensors and damaging cleaning equipment). Some of these come across as overly aggressive to me, but in small doses they resemble a number of similar initiatives in other developed countries. In Lee’s telling, these campaigns were necessary; people were stuck in Third World habits that needed to change:
We would have been a grosser, ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts to persuade our people to change their ways. We did not measure up as a cultivated, civilised society and were not ashamed to set about trying to become one in the shortest time possible.
Political Correctness
For readers of a certain bent, Lee tickles his audience with an apparent lack of consideration for political correctness. The book itself has a foreword by Henry Kissinger, after all.
When recalling his time at Harvard, Lee had some fish-out-of-water moments:
They were too politically correct. Harvard was determinedly liberal. No scholar was prepared to say or admit that there were any inherent differences between races or cultures or religions. They held that human beings were equal and a society only needed correct economic policies and institutions of government to succeed. They were so bright I found it difficult to believe that they sincerely held these views they felt compelled to espouse.
Later, in the ‘80s, he got himself into hot water weighing in on fertility and education levels:
On the night of 14 August 1983, I dropped a bombshell in my annual National Day Rally address. Live on both our television channels, with maximum viewership, I said it was stupid for our graduate men to choose less-educated and less-intelligent wives if they wanted their children to do as well as they had done. The press named it the “Great Marriage Debate”. As I had expected, the speech stirred a hornet’s nest. My wife Choo had warned me there were many more women with only O levels than women with university degrees. It caused a drop of 12 percentage points in votes for the PAP in the election the following year, more than I had anticipated.
This problem, where increasingly educated and high-earning women expecting to marry higher-achieving men have “priced themselves out” of the marriage market, occasionally comes up in US media. It is paired with the observation that men are lesser-achieving than in decades past. In Singapore’s case, Lee explicitly brought it up based on Idiocracy-esque dysgenic concerns that “our brightest women were not marrying and would not be represented in the next generation.” He even dropped the nature vs. nurture twin adoption studies bomb to back up his point. The absolute madman!
This lopsided marriage and procreation pattern could not be allowed to remain unmentioned and unchecked. I decided to shock the young men out of their stupid, old-fashioned and damaging prejudices. I quoted studies of identical twins done in Minnesota in the 1980s which showed that these twins were similar in so many respects. Although they had been brought up separately and in different countries, about 80 per cent of their vocabulary, IQ, habits, likes and dislikes in food and friends, and other character and personality traits were identical. In other words, nearly 80 per cent of a person’s makeup was from nature, and about 20 per cent the result of nurture.
Lee proposed a policy that would have explicitly incentivized highly educated women to have an additional child, but they did not adopt the policy in the end. My understanding is that low fertility remains a serious issue for Singapore.
Other examples of casual disregard for political correctness are littered throughout the book. Lee expresses his support for US involvement in Vietnam, defends the practice of caning, and rejects the view that “a criminal is a victim of society.” You may think I’m overreaching on the political correctness angle, but in the epilogue Lee cites it as a key ingredient in Singapore’s success:
I learnt to ignore criticism and advice from experts and quasiexperts, especially academics in the social and political sciences. They have pet theories on how a society should develop to approximate their ideal, especially how poverty should be reduced and welfare extended. I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.
Authoritarian Goldilocks?
Lee was, and the PAP still is, accused of authoritarian tendencies in Western media. This charge is not entirely groundless. In Singapore, elections are genuinely fair, but the architecture of political participation is limited, and the PAP has continuously been in power since independence. This is one aspect of Lee’s account that really needs to be paired with a more critical treatment for balance. The treatment of J.B. Jeyaretnam seems bad (Lee defends it). The anti-communist crackdowns involved detention without trial, which Lee again claims was necessary. Another PAP criticism is that the party gives priority for infrastructure improvements to constituencies that vote more strongly for the PAP, a practice which Lee compares to pork barrel spending in the West. Protest rights are also heavily restricted.
To his credit, Lee doesn’t beat around the bush discussing these issues. He is explicit in his belief, for example, that the press should not be fully free in the American and British sense. In Lee’s account of the matter, except for an outright ban on communist publications, press restrictions are based more on guardrails and nudges toward reasonableness than firm diktat. For example he describes a law introduced in 1977 which prohibited any person from owning more than 3% of a newspaper in order to prevent one wealthy person from having undue influence on the voters. A local minister was further empowered to grant special “management shares,” which went to four major local banks. These shareholders would naturally promote stability, growth, and political neutrality (once again we have a policy that feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of left and right). More forcefully, the government reduced circulation of foreign newspapers which refuse to print unedited responses to allegedly false claims in articles. The government also enforces less dramatic forms of censorship on things such as public performances. Did you know that Zoolander was also originally banned in Singapore?
Lee also discusses and defends various defamation cases that he brought against political opponents. My understanding here is that Singaporean defamation law is similar to English defamation law in being plaintiff-friendly, and additionally does not include a carve-out for public figures. Consequently, public figures can and do sue each other and media outlets for making allegedly false or unproven statements. In Lee’s telling, the Singaporean system allows the truth to put its pants on and eventually catch up with a lie. In another interpretation, the PAP is using defamation suits to bankrupt critics and the would-be opposition.
Lee defends this legal setup by taking a more expansive view of freedom. As he describes it in a 1994 interview with Foreign Affairs:
I stressed that freedom could only exist in an orderly state, not when there was continuous contention or anarchy. In Eastern societies the main objective was to have a well-ordered society so that everyone could enjoy his freedom to the maximum. Parts of contemporary American society were totally unacceptable to Asians because they represented a breakdown of civil society with guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy and vulgar public behaviour. America should not foist its system indiscriminately on other societies where it would not work.
Despite this harsh-sounding rhetoric, he also expected at the time of writing that things would likely loosen up in Singapore after his tenure.
Will the political system that my colleagues and I developed work more or less unchanged for another generation? I doubt it. Technology and globalisation are changing the way people work and live. Singaporeans will have new work styles and lifestyles. As an international hub of a knowledge-based economy in the information technology age, we will be ever more exposed to external influences.
…
In material terms, we have left behind our Third World problems of poverty. However, it will take another generation before our arts, culture and social standards can match the First World infrastructure we have installed.
It’s possible that this rigidity was necessary in the early decades to keep Singapore on the path to First World status, but I’m not taking those claims at face value. Some criticisms of the country come across to me as grasping dysphemisms (Singapore is “antiseptically clean,” etc.), but the reader is also tempted to let legitimate problems slide simply because the Singapore is so successful and Lee is so charming in his delivery. Ultimately, the controversy around soft authoritarianism, if anything, just deepens the mystery of the country’s success. If Singapore is softly authoritarian, it’s overwhelmingly the most successful example of such a state, and its high quality of governance has not fallen into disrepair even today. Meanwhile, the PAP enjoys continued popular support.
What Can we Say?
Nowadays it is conventional to search for “upstream,” structural, or endogenous explanations for a country’s development, or lack thereof. In Singapore’s case, the island nation certainly had a national security incentive to make lemonade out of lemons. It also fit the geographic mold of an ocean-accessible land with no resources that must turn to trade and value-add industry to make a living. Being favorably situated by the Straits of Malacca was helpful for getting started as a transshipment hub. Lee himself points to the population’s immigrant appetite for improvement and its Confucian values as important ingredients, suggesting that a cultural determinist explanation could be in play. But parsing Lee’s accounts, it also seems that chance just broke in its favor, that Singapore was simply #blessed with having consistently competent, pragmatic, and honest leadership right out of the gate when it might just as easily have had incompetent corrupt fools. Lee comes across as a sort of Napoleon of policy in these pages.
My experience of developments in Asia has led me to conclude that we need good people to have good government. However good the system of government, bad leaders will bring harm to their people. On the other hand, I have seen several societies well-governed in spite of poor systems of government, because good, strong leaders were in charge.
From Third World to First is fun on its own as a real-life pragmatism fantasy, even if it needs to be approached skeptically. It’s also useful for readers looking to branch out into How Asia Works-style case studies. As for Singapore, parts of the model look attractive, but implementation is key, and they can’t just be pulled off the shelf without the right leadership.