Lee Kuan Yew, the 'modern father' of Singapore,
who is also the father of current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong,
launched his latest book "One Man's View of the World" recently. In
it he gave his views on major powers and regions of the world,
often with scathing remarks about Singapore's neighbors and past
Chinese leaders. What’s more, the book has been endorsed by former
US Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz. The
book is also full of interviews conducted by Lee's editorial team.
They were defensive of his past actions and policies, yet very
critical of others, not even sparing the daughter of former Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong who immigrated to the UK with her English
husband.
However, Lee's book is totally silent on the mechanism that
maintained his tenure and influence over Singapore, an issue that
is very much alive in the local blogs. That mechanism is the
People’s Action Party cadre system - something that political
commentators domiciled within Singapore are very hesitant to
discuss. This too is very much part of Lee Kuan Yew's pragmatic
approach to solving problems.
The People’s Action Party (PAP) was conceptualized out of
friendships between Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, and Toh Chin Chye
during their education in Britain. In 1954, with the help of trade
unions that represented the Chinese educated majority, the
left-leaning nationalist party PAP was formed. With the help of Lim
Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan, the party would appeal to the
Chinese educated working class and go on to create a broad base of
support. The PAP started out as a mass mobilization party based
upon a Leninist model. Much of this model is still intact within
the party today.
The PAP is well disciplined and cohesive, with extremely powerful
machinery on the ground. Leadership is very much ‘top down’ through
an institutionalized cadre system. This has been kept in part to
prevent any future hostile takeover attempts. A potential cadre
must be recommended by a member of parliament, and then the
candidate is interviewed a number of times by a committee appointed
by the Central Executive Committee (CEC), which will include 4 to 5
ministers and members of parliament. There may be up to 1,000
cadres in the party today, but the exact number is kept a secret. A
cadre has the right to attend the party conference and vote for the
leadership every two years.
Consequently, political power is centered in the Central Executive
Committee, headed by the secretary-general (the head of the party),
who is usually also the prime minister. There is a very strong
overlap between CEC members and cabinet ministers. Twelve members
are elected by the cadre and six are appointed. Any outgoing CEC
member must recommend a list of potential candidates to fill
his/her position for the CEC. The CEC looks after the Young PAP,
Women’s Wing, as well as selecting cadres and parliamentary
candidates.
Ordinary party members are screened before they can join the PAP.
Potential members must demonstrate some involvement in the
community before memberships are approved. Lee Kuan Yew did not
want a mass party with populist demands, and also wanted to avoid
the problems of ‘guanxi’ within the party. Party members are
basically unpaid volunteers, serving their MPs on branch
sub-committees, and helping to mobilize support during
elections.
By international political party standards the PAP is very small,
with maybe about 15,000 members and a small central administrative
apparatus. There is a small HQ executive committee that oversees
the daily administration of the party, i.e., “maintaining party
accounts, memberships, overseeing committees work, publications,
and branch coordination.”
Like with Lee, the major ideology of the PAP is pragmatism,
meritocracy, multiculturalism, and communitarianism. The PAP is
pro-economic intervention through fiscal policy and government
enterprise involvement, against a generally free market backdrop.
The party strongly rejects the concepts of Western liberal
democracy, citing a philosophy based upon ‘Asian values’ as the
guiding principles of social development. Perhaps one of the
greatest concerns of the PAP, reflected in the way it is structured
and leadership is institutionalized, is the issue of succession,
where it is believed that succession is the root of stability.
Formal and informal rules, norms, and procedures guide who can and
cannot stand for party and public office.
Singapore's cadre system is partly responsible for the country’s
success story, but at the same time it is an albatross around the
government's neck, arguably responsible for the 'groupthink'
culture many local blogs are critical of in
contemporary Singapore society
today.
Since 1963, the Singapore government
has turned the island from a sleepy backwater into one of the
world’s most vibrant economies. Although nobody can fault the
ruling party which has governed Singapore for more than 50 years of
abandoning its responsibilities, many wish that it would tackle
these responsibilities with some heart and connect emotionally with
the people.
Times are rapidly changing in the island republic. There is genuine
disenchantment with rising prices, the influx of foreign workers,
competition for jobs, crowded public places, rising home prices,
rising cost of education, and the widening income gap
in Singapore.
There is even some feeling among Singaporeans that, with the
migration of foreign professionals, they may one day become
second-class citizens within their own country. Migration is
expected to continue as the local Singapore population
is aging. Today it is not uncommon to see the old and infirm
waiting on restaurant tables, clearing rubbish in the streets, or
even scavenging in rubbish bins. Singapore’s GINI index has
declined from 0.433 in 2000 to 0.465 in 2010 and is similar to many
African and South American countries. Social ills like erosion of
trust, crime, obesity, teen pregnancy, mental health and drug
addiction, is more closely associated with income inequality rather
than low average per-capita income. Consequently the electoral
landscape is quickly beginning to change, where the PAP will not in
the future be returned to power uncontested on nomination day due
to the failure of opposition candidates to nominate for
election.
The scraping in of the PAP’s preferred candidate Tony Tan for
president in 2011 showed that there is a growing proportion of the
Singapore electorate that wants a change from the PAPs heavy-handed
style of government. However, one of the issues that may stem a
further decline in the PAP’s fortunes is that there is currently a
lack of any credible opposition in Singapore.
From another paradigm, Singapore could be seen as
the domination of one group over another. Most of the leadership
has been drawn from the Baba Chinese community, a group cultured in
Malay and “Colonial British.” Babas hold strong family values,
community cohesiveness, and tend to respect
authority. This is in contrast to the
southern mainland Chinese migrants to Singapore who fled oppression and tended to
oppose authority. Singapore has thus been
run more in the manner to which a British colonial administrator
would have aspired. Thus patriarchal leadership with neo-Victorian
values is not something the migrating Chinese accepted openly.
Singapore has seen many campaigns, incentives,
and deterrents to achieve the values of the Baba
class.
One of the major legacies of Lee Kuan Yew was the authoritarian
style of leadership and the fear it invoked into the Singaporean
psych. For decades Singaporeans were expected to fall in line with
what leaders expected without question, as they were told that this
was best for them. The bounds of what couldn’t be done were clearly
set, i.e., not to criticize leaders, not to discuss ‘sensitive’
issues, or not to give alternative opinions. If these boundary
crossings were noticed, harsh penalties would be applied to those
who crossed them. The strong control of Lee Kuan Yew was the
dominant driver of society, and the state itself also had the
responsibility of being the ‘agent of change’. This to some degree
squeezed out small private businesses as an alternative engine to
growth in the Singapore economy. This persona of authority and
control still exists today.
Singapore government ministers appear to be disconnected with the
people who elected them. They have become so concerned about
running Singapore from an elite bureaucracy, trusted to make the
best decisions for the country to protect and improve the
livelihoods of its citizens. However as they live in some of the
choicest real estate in Singapore and have rewarded themselves with
some of the highest salaries in the world, they have fallen out of
touch with the struggles and plight of the common people of
Singapore.
For Singapore to prosper in the long term, and for Singapore to
maintain the unique system of government that has evolved, with all
the good, and perhaps less of the bad and ugly, the PAP needs to
re-evaluate itself for the future and decide whether it is a broad
based political party, or just the extension of one man and an
elite group that has ruled over Singapore for the last 50
years.
Under the present structure of the PAP, it will be impossible for
the party to reform itself from the grassroots and allow new ideas
to reach the top. The ability of people to rise through the ranks
of the party via new ideas is heavily restricted. The Lim Chin
Siong legacy saw to that. The very way the PAP has sought both
meritocracy and stability has become its Achilles heel, paralyzing
the ability to adapt to a changing Singapore, where ironically the
country has been so successful in adapting to outside factors of
change while being so internally rigid. The
cadre system itself prevents change, as the selection process is a
closed system selecting only same-minded people to the leadership,
subjecting government to the risks of
groupthink.
Lee Kuan Yew had dominated Singaporean politics, economy, and
society since the 1950s. The
family has influenced affairs in Singapore for over 50 years, much
longer than any other political family in the
region. His eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong
became Prime Minister in 2004. Lee Hsien Loong’s wife Ho Ching was
CEO of Temasek Holdings. Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son Lee Hsien Yang
is the head of Singapore Telecom.
The Lees have achieved their positions on merit and are genuinely
an exceptionally talented family. The official reason given by
former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong for this is the small talent
pool in Singapore. Both the political and business sectors appear
incestuous in Singapore, but due to the ‘city-state’ nature of the
country, there appears to be little in the way of any solution.
When the opportunities rose under Goh Chok Tong’s Premiership in
the mid 1990s, no moves were made to check the power of the Lee
family. There is no doubt that the Lee’s legacy is embedded
in Singapore and
its influence will last decades. Just how and when this influence
begins to dissipate remains to be seen.
However, the cadre system within the PAP is an issue within
Singapore society that will never see the light of day as an item
of national discussion.
One thousand faceless men have allowed one man's
view of the world to persist.
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/one-view-over-a-thousand-singapores-cadre-system-4852/
