It is perhaps a measure of the importance of a book that a major journal in the field still requests a review nearly three years after its publication. Indeed, Beng Huat Chua, the éminence grise of a Singapore-focused sociology, has written a book that both reprises some of the major themes of his decades of influential research on the Southeast Asian city-state but also packages it in a provocative way that has captured attention beyond Singapore and Southeast Asian studies. For indeed, Singapore is not only a but arguably currently the only case globally of a sustained ‘disavowal’ of liberalism in a highly modern society (although with the rise of illiberal populism in Donald Trump's America and elsewhere it may soon have company).
As Chua shows, Singapore has adopted a model of governance which runs counter to the conventional view equating good governance with liberal democracy. Singapore's hybrid regime combines both authoritarian and democratic institutions while it embraces neoliberal economic rationality and statist direction with limits on civil and political liberties. Singapore is consistently ranked among the top five least corrupt countries, but it rates lowly for ‘voice and accountability’.
Chua's core argument is that it is the People's Action Party's (PAP) largely effective socioeconomic policies — which have been shaped by its social democratic roots and its ‘communitarianism’ that place collective and societal interests ‘above those of individuals’ (p. 6) — rather than heavy-handed coercion or Singapore society's cultural inclinations that largely explain the ruling party's ‘success’ in maintaining itself in power for over a half century. In particular, while the legal system is manipulated to repress dissent (albeit in a ‘soft’ authoritarian manner), the country's pioneering public housing programme helps co-opt the majority of the population while highly profitable state-linked and -owned enterprises contribute to the country's prosperity and provide employment for many citizens in a way a more market-driven economy could not.
As other reviewers have indicated, Chua's claim about how the PAP's social democratic past continues to influence its present policies is perhaps his most controversial argument. The fascination with the post-war British Labour Party is very much a thing of the past and has been downplayed by contemporary PAP leaders. While the PAP has distributed public goods, this has not been rooted in notions of egalitarianism but is in fact strikingly similar to Bismarckian-style efforts to co-opt working class opposition that the ruling conservative elite has often tried to dress up in a form of idealised Confucianism (aka ‘Asian values’). Garry Rodan has made the point that by current international standards the PAP's record of redistribution is ‘modest, even meagre’. While the PAP state emphasises its communitarianism, inequality has widened, with developed countries (excluding the United States of course) doing more to contain it through taxation and redistribution. The limited benefits of Singapore's nanny state, in turn, serve to justify constraints on individual liberties.
As Chua documents in his useful historical account in the book's second chapter which gives full weight to the Cold War context, there have long been prominent liberal oppositionists in Singapore, but they have sometimes been jailed, bankrupted through libel suits, and/or forced to flee into exile. While oppositionists receive attention in this book, a kind of illiberal teleology runs through it in which the PAP has maintained control through periodic crackdowns with reference to challenging ‘local contingencies’, as Chua shows. I would recommend reading Cherian George's Singapore incomplete, also published in 2017, which emphasises the country's ‘arrested’ liberal development, alongside Chua's book. It is of course unfair to point to the recent 2020 Singapore elections as a sign of the substantial erosion of PAP support when Chua's book itself was written in the shadow of the 2015 election, in which the ruling party's voter support had surged (although arguably due to special circumstances — the country's 50th anniversary celebrations mixed with national mourning of the death of the country's patriarch, Lee Kuan Yew, just months before).
Two other aspects of PAP rule are also underplayed. The first is the notable decline in the PAP's governance performance, a major theme in recent volumes edited by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh and Donald Low (Hard choices: Challenging the Singapore consensus) as well as Lily Zubaidah Rahim and Michael Barr (The limits of authoritarian governance in Singapore's developmental state). In particular, Singapore's state-centric governance and an increasingly out-of-touch PAP leadership has struggled to handle issues of immigration and rising income/inequalities. Another is growing repression after the 2015 election. This is a reminder that at the end of the day PAP power rests on coercion, however strong its governance performance (once) was, suggesting liberalism has not so much been disavowed as disallowed.
An intriguing comparative point about Singapore's illiberalism is the absence of a strong communalist counterweight to the PAP such as reformist Islam in Malaysia or Indonesia, the Catholic Church in the Philippines or Buddhist monks who opposed military rule in Myanmar. Of course here one could point to Chua's illuminating chapter about the PAP's racial policies designed to ensure that such identities are not mobilised against the PAP. But it is striking that the crackdown on the ‘Marxist conspiracy’ in mid-1987 was in fact largely aimed at a group of Catholic activists, who, while not posing a major challenge to the state, did call into question the PAP's dominance of the public sphere by providing a seemingly safe political space through church networks.
This important book has already started a lively debate about the nature and trajectory of Singapore's illiberal politics well beyond the normal confines of area studies. For this we can be grateful to Chua — even those who do not share his highly differentiated but ultimately sympathetic take on the PAP's governance of the city-state.
