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I always thought that a fascinating and enlightening public debate would have been one between Kim Dae-jung, the former Korean president, and Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, on the merits of democracy in Asia.
Kim led the movement to overthrow Korea's military dictatorship and was a firm believer in the principles of liberal democracy and their application in Asia. Lee, on the other hand, favored a style of pseudo-democracy based on what he described as "Asian values," which in fact are largely autocratic neo-Confucian ones, for his ethnic Chinese-dominated city-state.
Lee began pitching the idea of Asian values in the late 1970s to justify his authoritarian government as Singapore's growing prosperity and rising middle class led to increasing political opposition to Singapore's one-party government under the People's Action Party (PAP), which then held all the seats in parliament. But Kim had little truck with the idea of Asian values when he saw liberal democracy flourishing in his own country, which after all had been strongly influenced by neo-Confucianism since at least the 14th century.
I thought of all this as I read in The Korea Times of Sept. 27 the response of the Singapore Embassy to my column, "A Whiff of Singapore," of Sept. 12. Like the Singapore government, I too am a believer in "robust debate" and thus cannot allow to pass without commenting its assertion that my column represented "a misguided view of Singapore."
"Misguided" as judged by whom? Such a characterization implies that I do not know what I'm talking about. As Tan Xuan Rong, the political first secretary at the Singapore Embassy in Seoul, discovered when he viewed my LinkedIn account before penning the letter, I was the Financial Times correspondent in Singapore for eight years and can claim some knowledge of the country, although its government may disagree with my interpretation.
The letter states that Singapore has "no issue with robust debate and criticisms of government policies," although its officials religiously and consistently counter any criticisms when they appear in the media. They call this their "right to reply." Nothing in the letter was new. The points of defense have been aired many times before, but the claims are rarely rebutted. So here is my reply.
"Burton labeled Singapore an ‘ostensibly democratic country.' Different forms of democracy are practiced in the world shaped by each nation's history and social background. Since independence, Singapore has held regular, free and fair general elections with high voter participation."
Singapore takes a "have its cake and eat it too" approach in defending its political system. It says its form of democracy is based on Asian values, while suggesting its election procedures reflect those of a liberal democracy. In reality, the political system lacks a system of checks and balances. Power is concentrated in the executive branch while parliament rubber stamps legislation and plays no significant independent role.
The electoral system is heavily tilted against the opposition with very restrictive campaign laws, gerrymandering and the dominance of multi-candidate parliamentary districts (supposedly created to promote ethnic diversity in parliament) that favor the government. Opposition figures receive little coverage (unless it's negative) in the state-controlled media, except during the short election period, which normally lasts nine days. Of course, Singapore has "high voter participation" because voting is compulsory.
The results of this system are clear. Although 25-30 percent have regularly voted against the government since the 1980s, only 5 percent of the seats held by full-voting members of parliament have normally gone to the opposition. In the last election in 2011, a record 40 percent voted against the government but only 7 percent of the full-voting seats fell to the opposition.
"Governance in Singapore is based on the rule of law and its effectiveness is demonstrated by our ability to consistently deliver a high quality of life to its people."
The PAP has justified its rule by saying that its effective governance is reflected in the city-state's prosperity. It is true that Singapore is one of Asia's richest economies, but Singapore already had the second highest GNP per capita in East Asia in 1959 (after Japan) when the PAP assumed power from the country's British colonial rulers. Income inequality is close to the same level as in 1959, although it narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s before widening again. Singapore's Gini coefficient score (which measures inequality) was a dismal 48.1 in 2008, according to the World Bank (Korea's score was better at 31.3).
In response, Singapore will then trot out international rankings that place it near the top in terms of international competitiveness, absence of government corruption and human capital development among other measures.
But this is what I find troubling about such arguments. Efficiency is used to justify the curtailment of civil liberties such as press freedom (which I will discuss in my next column in response to the embassy letter). Similar arguments were made by fascists or communists in the 1930s to criticize the messiness of democracies when capitalism was in crisis. Indeed, the PAP party symbol was borrowed from the pre-war British Union of Fascists (a fact once confirmed to me by Lee himself).
So we should keep all this in mind when Singapore's pioneering model of authoritarian state capitalism is being studied and copied by China, the Gulf states, Russia and even Rwanda. Is it a harbinger of our future?
John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at john.burton@insightcomms.com.
