Ideas@TheCentre
Why China will not become like Singapore
Recent conversations with Chinese political scientists brought home the great extent to which Beijing is obsessed with watching, analysing and replicating the success of Singapore. After all, despite a mediocre global ranking for political freedom, Singapore is confident, prosperous and orderly. Most appealing of all as far as Beijing is concerned, the approval ratings for Singapore’s leaders would make many democratic leaders envious. If there is a successful ‘Asian way’ of enlightened authoritarian leadership, then Singapore is by far its best example. Unfortunately, the vision is seductive but out of reach for Beijing. In reality, China is moving rapidly away from the Singapore example.
In addition to outstanding leadership, Singapore had two advantages that China does not enjoy: the advantage of size or rather the lack of it and pre-existing institutions that were protected and improved upon.
When it comes to effective policy implementation – size matters. Except that the smaller the better. Singapore is a country of roughly 4.5 million people. China has 1.3 billion people. There are 45 million officials in China and only 2 percent are central authorities. No matter how enlightened Beijing’s leaders are, they are reliant on around 44 million unsupervised, poorly trained, and often corrupt local officials to execute and implement policies.
China suffers from another limitation. Effective policy implementation would be much more effective if the Chinese Communist Party built better institutions. For example, Hong Kong and Singapore achieved their economic success within an authoritarian set-up. However, these city-states shared the commonality of limited government interference and predation in the economy as well as sound institutions such as enforceable property rights and ‘rule of law.’ Similarly, China needs a strong civil society where rule of law exists and is enforced. Courts need to be independent and officials need to be accountable. Private property needs to be protected; individual enterprise needs to be given a chance to succeed; basic human rights needs to be enforced; and the government needs to be restrained.
Singapore has the virtues of sound institutions although political freedom has some way to go. Unfortunately, China has neither.
Dr John Lee is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. A second edition of his book The Limits and Contradictions of Market Socialism has just been published by CIS.
