http://www.feer.com/essays/2008/september/pressure-builds-on-singapores-system
Pressure Builds on Singapore's System
by Hugo Restall
During
the National Day festivities last month, Singapore Prime Minister
Lee Hsien Loong’s gloomy prognosis for the economy — a “bumpy year”
ahead — was overshadowed by even more dire warnings that the city
state is about to start running low on its main resource,
people.
With
an aging society and one of the lowest fertility rates in the world
at 1.29, the government is pulling out all the stops, doubling the
budget of baby-making incentives to $1.13 billion.
Meanwhile,
in order to make Singapore a more tolerant and pluralistic place,
political videos will be allowed, as well as protests in a downtown
park.
It’s
all straight from the ruling People’s Action Party’s standard
playbook. Play up the anxiety of a small nation beset on all sides,
in need of a strong government to take positive action to avert
disaster.
Individual citizens who are failing to live up to the expectations
of society need to be brought back into line.
At
the same time, leaders are willing to give those citizens a few of
their rights back, as long as they are not used to undermine
harmony.
Since
Mr Lee took over the premiership in 2004, Singaporeans have been
watching for any sign he plans to reform substantially the
authoritarian state created by his father, Singapore’s founding
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
So
far there has been little indication that in his heart the prime
minister is a liberal democrat. But the system of control is coming
under increasing stress due to the changing structure of society. A
process of subtle change will continue to be driven by pressure
from below, rather than a change of heart at the top.
Last
month’s gestures far fall short of lifting what the opposition
calls the climate of fear—past experience, such as the detention of
former Solicitor General Francis Seow in 1988, suggests that
retribution for challenging the PAP can come in many forms, from
bureaucratic harassment to detention without trial under the
Internal Security Act.
The
government is making a virtue out of necessity by lifting the
10-year-old ban on making or showing political films, and allowing
political podcasts during election campaigns. Oppositionists were
successfully skirting the restrictions, so that they only served to
hamstring the PAP's own efforts to utilise online media.
The
opening of a protest area is a token gesture, which no doubt will
be raised to deflect international criticism the next time police
arrest dissident politician Chee Soon Juan for illegal assembly. In
that sense, the move suggested that Mr. Chee’s campaign of civil
disobedience is causing some heartburn within the
regime.
But
the real problem is not Mr. Chee — the stressors on Singapore’s
political machine lie elsewhere. The PAP’s legitimacy has always
rested on its performance, backed by trust in the party.
Given
its chaotic past and neighbours, Lee Kuan Yew argued, the tiny
country could not afford the risks associated with liberal
democracy.
In
the past that argument was largely taken at face value by the
Chinese working class, despite the experiences of other Asian
nations that contradicted it.
Today,
however, there is more apathy than agreement. No one seriously
questions the PAP’s track record of governance or probity of its
top leaders, yet trust is giving way to resentment at the party’s
arrogance.
The
main proof is in the erosion of the party’s share of the popular
vote in elections. In 2006, it hit 66.6%, down from 75% in 2001,
and 75.6% in 1980.
In
the past, opposition parties deliberately refrained from contesting
more than half of the seats, since they found that while some
Singaporeans wanted to cast a protest vote, they would not vote for
the opposition if there was any chance the PAP would be thrown out
of office.
But in 2006, the opposition contest 47 of 84 seats, suggesting that
the PAP’s hold on voters’ loyalty is not as fearsome as
before.
Why
is this? For one thing, Singaporeans are better versed in critical
thinking. During the 1980s and '90s, people may have grown wealthy,
but they remained politically unsophisticated. Development happened
so quickly that it took decades for education levels to catch
up.
According
to the government statistics, between 1990 and 2005 the percentage
of the population with a university degree grew to 17% from
4.5%.
That is matched by an even more dramatic shift in individual age
cohorts — in 2005, 32.1% of 30-34 year olds had a university
degree, as compared to just 6.6% of 50-54 year olds.
The
language spoken at home is now predominantly English, meaning that
Singaporeans are increasingly able to learn about and interact with
the outside world.
Moreover,
the PAP has pushed the economic structure of the country in a
direction that is no longer win-win for all classes.
A
certain amount of economic inequality is tolerable as long as there
is a sense that everyone’s lives are improving. But inequality and
real hardship are on the rise, as inflation running at 6.5% erases
the 3.3% wage gains that the poorest tenth of the population
enjoyed last year, even as the top tenth picked up an 11.1%
increase in income.
PAP
loyalists control a lucrative web of government-linked companies,
while ministers have also picked up big pay rises, since their
salaries are indexed to the private sector, making them some of the
world’s highest paid politicians.
Scholars predominate
As
for social mobility, the top scholarships, which are a ticket into
the elite, increasingly go to students from wealthy families that
live in private apartments, rather than public housing.
Despite
this trend, the PAP is unwilling to dismantle its policies of
holding wages low in order to attract multinational companies to
invest.
This
was a strategy born of necessity in the 1960s, when Singapore was
short of capital and struggling to catch up with Hong Kong’s model
of creating an export-oriented growth.
Today
it is economically obsolete, yet it suits the government
politically because the combination of state-owned companies and
politically quiescent multinationals prevents the emergence of an
independent commercial class that might push for political
change.
The
result is a top-down economy which is running up against the limits
of its capacity to drive growth.
Without
an entrepreneurial class and successful home-grown companies,
Singapore’s productivity growth has historically lagged behind that
of its laissez-faire twin, Hong Kong.
As
University of Chicago economist Alwyn Young showed in a 1992 paper,
Singapore had one of the lowest returns on physical capital in the
world.
Its growth has been fueled by forced savings programs shoveling
ever increasing amounts of capital into the furnace, rather than by
innovation or managerial efficiency.
Diffuse dissatisfaction? - Give away money
Mr.
Lee’s administration has found that the only way to defuse public
dissatisfaction is to do something the PAP consistently condemned
as the hallmark of Western democracies: Give away money.
The government used to damn welfare as a dirty word, yet transfer
spending is on the rise.
This
year, $2.1b in giveaways were planned. Then last month Mr. Lee
announced a 50% increase, totaling $179.8m, in utility rebates and
“growth dividends” — cash payments to households that started in
2006.
The
new prime minister has brought in other social spending programs
for the poor. For instance in the 2008 budget, the Ministry of
Manpower’s expenditure rose by 184%, almost entirely due to a new
scheme of workfare, the $306 million Income Security Policy
Programme.
The
pressure for more entitlements will only grow as retirees find that
their savings do not provide enough of a cushion. The compulsory
government-run Central Provident Fund sucked up a huge percentage
of income to finance the state’s development goals, but offered
dismally low returns.
As a
result, many of the generation that built the Singapore miracle now
finds itself eking out a retirement in public housing while the
government surpluses remain under the management of the
PAP.
Beside
the carrot, there is also a stick. Starting in 1985, the PAP began
to warn voters that if they supported the opposition, their
government-built apartment buildings would not get priority for
maintenance.
This
was gradually refined to the point that in 1997, then Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong explicitly campaigned on the promise that
individual precincts would get housing renovation spending
according to their votes. When the US State Department condemned
this as undemocratic, the interference of foreigners was used as
another rallying cry.
Indeed,
it seems that Singapore is increasingly cursed with the
shortcomings of a democracy without enjoying the
benefits.
During
the 2006 campaign, Prime Minister Lee inadvertently blurted out his
fears of what would happen if there were more opposition members of
parliament: “Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right
policy for Singapore, I’m going to spend all my time thinking
what’s the right way to fix them, to buy my supporters’
votes….”
Putting
aside the ominous sound of “fixing” opponents, the remark was
ironic because the PAP now expends so much effort to buy the
support of the populace with giveaways, all in order to avoid the
transparency and accountability that a vibrant opposition would
bring.
Some
younger Singaporeans with skills respond to this by voting with
their feet, moving abroad to find greater freedom and a higher
standard of living working with the kind of entrepreneurial
companies that Singapore has yet to create.
In
order to eventually win some of them back, the possibility of
recognising dual nationality is increasingly discussed, a move that
would represent a huge concession for a nation-building party that
demands self-reliance and sacrifice of its citizenry.
In
the place of the émigrés, foreign workers are flooding in to man
the factories, docks and construction sites, as the government
steadily opens the doors wider. Foreign workers already account for
more than one million of the total population of 4.6
million.
Among
the immigrants are talented individuals like the Chinese table
tennis players who provided the country with its first Olympic
medal last month. But they lack the loyalty to the country that the
PAP has put a premium on.
If
Singapore were a plural democracy, it would no doubt have developed
an independent civil society capable of binding together the
native-born and immigrants, providing mutual support.
But the PAP and Lee Kuan Yew are like the African baobab tree,
whose spreading canopy hogs the sun and prevents other trees from
growing up underneath.
Alienated, rootless society
Such
a society may be easier to control, but it is also alienated and
rootless, jealous of others’ gains—the oft-quoted national
characteristic, kiasu, literally means “fear of losing.” In a
developed economy that depends on attracting and retaining creative
individuals, this has become a significant handicap.
The
arrogance of the winners in society is becoming a major issue. The
elder Mr. Lee’s ego is legendary, but given his accomplishments it
is perhaps understandable.
When
his minions take on similar airs, however, it is a different story.
In one extreme example two years ago, a furor erupted after the
daughter of MP Wee Siew Kim used her blog to berate a man afraid of
losing his job as “one of many wretched, undermotivated,
overassuming leeches in our country” who should “get out of my
elite uncaring face.” To make matters worse, Mr. Wee tried to
defend her remarks.
Naturally
the PAP is aware of these trends and that its monopoly on power has
become an important issue in itself. Over the years it has tried to
come up with mechanisms for citizens to register their complaints
and blow off steam.
The
government no longer seeks to destroy all opposition, leaving alone
and even praising those tame MPs who focus on constituents’ issues
rather than the PAP’s system of social control. Yet ultimately
there is no solution to this problem, since the party is unwilling
to share power in any meaningful sense.
A
siege mentality has been the hallmark of Singaporean politics for
four decades, often with good justification given hostile
neighboring governments to the north and south.
Yet
it is increasingly hard today to see how that anxiety can be
justified and maintained. The generation now coming onto the
political scene grew up in at least moderate prosperity, and may
not be so easily bullied into voting for the PAP.
It
is eager to put down roots and create a civil society. So far the
PAP has finessed this aspiration without compromising its
control.
Prime
Minister Lee can afford to be sanguine for now, with the security
apparatus, corporatist economy and civil service all at his
command.
Yet
if this economic downturn worsens, he will be confronted with a
more difficult choice of whether to accede to demands for greater
pluralism.
As
academic Michael Haas once wrote, “Whenever the public exercises
the independence of thought that better education brings, ‘a danger
to be nipped in the bud’ or some similar cliché is articulated as
the basis for repression.”
It
bears remembering that the laws like the Internal Security Act that
have been used in past such exercises remain on the books. If
pushed too hard, Lee Hsien Loong still has the means to prove he is
his father’s son.
Mr. Restall is editor of the REVIEW.
Yes, a hungry man is an angry man.