Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
historytoday.com150 points by pepys 19 hours ago
150 points by pepys 19 hours ago
I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government
Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.
Did I misread your thesis? It seemed like your strongest argument is “survival must be earned” and your most immediate claim to this is that “Singapore avoids multiculturalism.”
And then you kind of go on to imply that because they avoid being multicultural they instead are detail oriented and technically competent.
A lack of multiculturalism seems…like a very very nonsensical claim to make about Singapore. Its one of the most celebrated intersectional cities merging the identities of three different major regions.
> Its one of the most celebrated intersectional cities merging the identities of three different major regions
The Chinese population share in Singapore is similar to the white population share in Nebraska (75%). And Singapore has maintained the same 75% Chinese supermajority since 1960, despite Malays having about double the total fertility rate of Chinese since the 1980s.
It is not "multiculturalism" in the way that word would be used in say, Canada.
They have quotas to prevent enclaves, they actively manage immigration to keep it about 3/4 Chinese, there are a lot of restrictions on speech and the ways you're allowed to organise.
The things Singapore does to manage their ethnic diversity 100% would not fly in the west.
It is not nonsensical in the slightest. The government does their best to maintain a monoculture while promoting the farce of multiculturalism, because a monoculture facilitates easier economic growth which is the overall aim of the government rather than cultural development. Multiculturalism is essentially pacification because obviously this is unpopular
So you're saying what?
1) The countries that are less multicultural than Singapore are more technical?
2) The countries that are more multicultural than Singapore are less technical?
3) The diversity of foods, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and economic backgrounds in Singapore celebrated here [0] is completely fake?
> Where every citizen is equal, regardless of race, language or religion
Citizen is a pretty key word there - things are pretty okay for most citizens, damn fine for the elite, and rosy for the well heeled ex-pats and foreign STEM workers.
There's an underside of non citizen day workers that stream back and forth, and a deeper layer of hell for indentured "lesser" Asians of the region that are looked down upon and struggle.
> I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
It's mainly its strategic location and it's always been the the busiest maritime route chokepoint since recorded history between east and west, specifically between India and China two of the most populous nations in the world.
It sit right at the tip of the Strait of Malacca, the busiest and the longest strait in the world. This one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".
Secondly is the people, and the third is the governance policy. Essentially, you must have be a bone-headed to screw up Singapore, like the one who can bankrupt a central bank.
My original top most comment on the great lie of Singapore was just an obscure fishing village during the early colonial time but it's has already downvoted to oblivion, you can check them out if you want.
> Essentially, you must have be a bone-headed to screw up Singapore
The place that is now Singapore had less than 1,000 people when Raffles got there. So what happened?
There’s lots of places with strategic locations or natural resources or such advantages. The U.S. has the largest contiguous stretch of fertile land connected to one of the largest navigable river systems in the world. But the north american indians did essentially nothing with it. It’s not easy to make a modern civilization out of even a favorable geographical situation.
The reason for your last point is that Singaporeans are taught in school that we were nothing but a fishing village until first colonialism (and Chinese immigrants) arrived and turned us into a major port, then the PAP (Lee Kuan Yew's party) turned us into a first world nation. It's really propaganda, and of course you wouldn't bother looking up information that you were taught to see as truth when you were a young child
Many post-colonial societies (Arabs, Indians, etc.) puff up their supposed past wealth and success, but that’s the real propaganda. Even when these countries were on important trade routes or whatever, the per-capita GDP of these places never went much above the subsistence level. High estimates of the per-capita GDP of the Roman Empire have it at around half of modern India. These societies were very poor in pre-colonial times.
That explain it, thanks.
My comments point at one time at double figure and then it went south to zero now, but it probably can be negative soon, c'est la vie.
I would say one of the biggest things is it’s basically the size of a city. But then again, China is basically doing the same thing with a massive country right now.
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then.
LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z.... (Read the whole thing. The first part is about culture, while the second part starting on p. 114 is about how he implemented western economic policies without trying to import western style social policies.) Singapore focused on neoliberalism within a social and cultural framework that accommodates the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that compose the country. It focused on anti-corruption and government efficiency, a major weak spot of nearly all developing countries. But it didn’t try to go straight from fishing village to liberal democracy. Like other countries that developed rapidly in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and now China) development of state capacity and civil institutions happened under soft-authoritarian, one-party rule.
To put it in one sentence: LKY was a bog standard neoliberal who didn’t suffer from the neoconservative delusion that American-style individual rights and populist democracy can be transplanted into any country hand-in-hand with neoliberal economic policies.
China wasn't as poor as India, especially not until 1990s.
It absolutely was: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-china-got-rich-and-india-didnt (“In 1987, median purchasing-power adjusted income in China was $1.88 per day, compared to $2.94 per day in India. Chinese median wages surpassed Indian ones in the early 2000s.”). Also: https://mgmresearch.com/china-vs-india-gdp-comparison/ (“During 1990, China GDP per capita was 0.9-times of India.”).
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.
edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
Singapore's location on the straight of malacca is one of the most valuable resources in the world. #2 in container throughput worldwide even though they barely manufacture anything.
as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience
I’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty.
A better comparison might be Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln’s view of free markets combined with an interventionist government. But we don’t really have a neat label for that. In the U.S., free markets get conceptually lashed together with individual rights and limited government.
Weaponised the court system to repress union backed opposition, despite having been engaged with the union movement in his early years (as I understand it)
It is a kind of workers paradise. If you're well behaved and don't shout you get a good education, health system and housing. 95% owner occupied is pretty damn good.
Huge dependence on south Malaysia migrant workers shuttling over the bridge every day, so it's "homes for us but not for thee" however he did cry when the greater Malaysian dream fell apart.
The arguments over his house and garden post death sum up the legacy well: he did not seek ulogising or mythologised shrine status, the apparatchiks can't resist the temptation.
I see parallels to Britain's Enoch Powell. Super smart, highly educated, disinterested in what others think, Not afraid to be contrarian and not particularly interested in performative democracy but also a bit one eyed on his hobby horse. If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was.
Trivialising Singapore-for-foreigners as "no long hair, gays, gum or spitting" misses the point. Singapore welcomes all kinds of people if they have money, contribute to society and are useful or rich. Modern Singapore has gays and lesbians and tattoos and long hair a-plenty. They're just in a "don't ask don't tell" demi-monde netherworld.
Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
> If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was
How do you compare Powell's "racism" and LKY's views on race and intelligence? By nearly all definitions of racism, Yew was a racist as well
By what definition was LKY “racist?” He presided over growing prosperity for a multi-ethnic country of Chinese, Malays, and Indians. I’d submit that, if LKY fits within your “definitions of racism,” that’s not a useful definition.
Interesting. I assumed he wasn't. Bad assumption. I don't think he gave a "rivers of blood" speech but that doesn't let him off the hook. Maybe the difference was LKY got to be in control and Powell just got to watch from the sideline.
+1, it is absolutely safe but just not that free, which is touted as a requirement for safety
I think the last part really is why LKYs legacy is eulogized so heavily especially with more left leaning counterparts. In the USA there is no legacy matter for politicians, and they often scupper with one foot in the door and the other halfway out.
None of the things that LKY did that made Singapore great are unique to a dictatorship but him being the spiritual head and huge focus on education is critical. Interesting the USA has a good appetite for spending lots of money on students, but the education outcomes are really bad compared to places with half the spending
Singapore, like other ex-Colonies in SEAsia prove that having been a colony is not an excuse for not doing well. HK, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea were heavily colonized yet after emerging as independent states were able to overcome difficulties, educate their people, take what they learned from their colonizers and have become leading economies of the world.
Governance is more important than one’s history when it come to success of a country.
Most these countries had decent literacy and industry/proto-industrial base before WW2 or before becoming independent states. Singapore itself was richer than Spain in 1960 and one of the richest cities in its region despite the slums. This is why it makes no sense for example to compare China or India, they were just in a fundamentally different spot.
Regardless many of the strategies these countries used are increasingly difficult for low income countries to do as these countries (China is the biggest example) themselves are protective of these industries, there's no push for globalizing and as factories got increasingly automated.
That's not to say that I believe governance isn't important but the one's history is important for governance itself.
This is a false dichotomy - the nature of the colony matters a LOT more than you allude to here. Singapore got a heck of a lot better deal as a colony than e.g. African colonies because we didn't get ruthlessly exploited and instead just used for our seaport primarily
Absolutely agree. There's a lot of "yes, but.." in this for me, but the simple economics are pretty clear: post colonial asian states like this do fantastically well.
Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.
But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.
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I think this is a bitter pill to swallow for many because a more liberal sense of multiculturalism in AU and UK allowed enclaves to emerge which have now become intensely divisive where a less open "multiculturalism but conform to our norms" might have avoided.
Singapore is an enclave that emerged because of multiculturalism in Malaya caused by mass immigration from China, actually.
It would be more appropriate to say it emerged (as a sovereign nation) because of anti-multiculturalism, to be perfectly clear. Otherwise, it would still be a part of Malaysia.
In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. This happened mostly in Indonesia Burma and Malaysia and not so much in the Philippine islands.
Malaysia in particular instituted pretty harsh laws to make Chinese suppress their Chinese identity and also curtailed their economic potential by implementing in practice expropriation and barring the Chinese from certain sectors of the economy.
So it emerged not because of multiculturalism but because they were being virtually locked out of the Malaysian economy.
> In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese.
I’m not super familiar with Chinese history, but this jumped out at me. How were other countries jealous of Chinese people during the decade of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Famine, death, destruction, etc. Am I misunderstanding something?
I was referring to the Chinese diaspora who had left China over decades and even centuries -they had become successful in SEAsia and were often responsible for commercial progress in those places. The sixties were times of conflict all over the world and in SEAsia the Chinese diaspora in those countries found themselves the targets of the frustration of “natives”. I say natives though the Chinese diaspora was born and raised in those countries but were easily identified as being “foreign” in those places.