China and the “Singapore Model

Bibliographic Data

ID6287574
AuthorsStephan Ortmann (0000-0002-6567-6103), Mark R Thompson (0000-0002-7004-3669)
Year2016
Volume27
Issue1
Pages39-48
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of democracy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1045-5736 • E-ISSN: 1086-3214
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jod.2016.0004
OpenAlexW2292251394
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited11

Following the death of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015, China remains obsessed with Singapore, the only country in the region to achieve advanced economic industrialization without undergoing substantial political liberalization. The key “lesson” that China is trying to learn is how to combine authoritarian rule with “good governance” (“meritocratic” one-party rule). The impact of the “Singapore model” on China shows that learning by nondemocratic states is not necessarily a short-term “modular” phenomenon that is largely reactive in character, but can be long-term and highly institutionalized. It has become increasingly clear, however, that China sees what it wants to see in Singapore, making the “lessons” learned more caricature than reality. And China’s recent crackdown on dissenters, squeezing the already limited political space allowed during the post–Tiananmen Square Massacre period, is actually moving the country further away from rather than toward the Singapore model

Authoritarianism · Beijing · China · Corporate governance · Democracy · Development economics · Economics · Industrialisation · Management · Meritocracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Asian Studies and History · Law · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub