Posted on Sept. 5, 2008
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 utilize 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 neighbors, 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. 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.
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, $2.1 billion in giveaways were
planned. Then last month Mr. Lee announced a 50% increase, totaling
$179.8 million, 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 U.S. 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 recognizing 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. 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.
http://www.feer.com/essays/2008/september
