Melissa Chen is a Singaporean journalist and activist. She is a contributing editor to The Spectator and co-founder of Ideas Beyond Borders.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Melissa Chen discuss the unique cultural and political landscape of Singapore and its “competitive authoritarian” system of government; how the U.S. went wrong in its policy of engagement with China; and what the Trump presidency portends for relations between the two countries.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You're a scientist by background, and you grew up in Singapore. How did you get drawn into politics?
Melissa Chen: Singapore is a very unique country, mostly because of its exceptional success story, which by now everybody seems to know about, because it's a little red dot on the equator that somehow surpassed so many other nations in GDP per capita—even Norway, which I think is remarkable for a country that doesn't have any natural resources.
The Singapore miracle by now is quite well studied and it's a really interesting model for a lot of other countries around the world, especially in the Global South. I came to America about 2005. So this was post 9/11. I spent all of my primary and secondary education in Singapore and realized I really needed to get out, because it's such a punishingly conformist culture. I left to go to university and studied what I knew would bring me immediately closer to getting a green card, which was STEM. And that's how I ended up in Boston. I went to Boston University and studied computational biology. The Human Genome Project was just done, I think, in 2005. And at that time, I knew there would be very high demand for that particular degree, which didn't really exist yet. And sure enough, right after graduation, it was in high demand. I got a job almost immediately as a computational biologist.
Mounk: You alluded to the fact that you found Singapore to be sort of punishingly conformist. What did that look like in your childhood?
Chen: It takes certain forms. For one, Singapore is quite known to be repressive on speech. The law, which also kind of shapes the culture, is that any speech that disrupts social harmony (and that is a very vague term) is something that you could technically be charged for. And so you always have this albatross hanging over your neck. You know that this law could be used against you. But I think the more insidious thing is that it actually leads to self-censorship. So if you're kind of a naturally contrarian person, you question everything. I went to religious schools. Singapore is quite a conservative country in that sense, politically conservative. And the religion kind of added another layer in terms of what I was comfortable saying or questioning. Because Singapore is a multi-religious society. So to maintain that kind of peace between the religions—because, traditionally, that area in Southeast Asia and also Singapore in the 1960s had to deal with quite terrible race issues and there were riots in the 1960s that became quite violent—you can't even protest without a permit, for example. You've never seen a protest on the streets in Singapore because it's just simply illegal. In that sense, the culture of censorship became internalized and people kind of just don't end up talking about controversial things. I personally felt what self-censorship does to the mind and how it changes your social experience.
Mounk: I want to get more into the contemporary politics of Singapore, but for those of my listeners who have a kind of broad sense of Singapore, but who don't actually know its origin story, how did the state come to be? How is it that this very, very small territory got split off from Malaysia? And what is the role of Lee Kuan Yew in setting it on its current trajectory?
Chen: I don't know if you're seeing this in your news feed, but Lee Kuan Yew is becoming very popular on Twitter and among certain factions of American society. You're starting to see him and his ideas and the way he governs quite openly feted online, especially by neo-reactionary tech bros from Silicon Valley who view American democracy as toxic. Partly, they have seen the results of what San Francisco has become as it descended into chaos, and DEI policies in their companies that they have to abide by, and so they see Singapore as a direct rebuttal to that model; jokingly, it is called “Singapore Incorporated,” because it is run like a business yet it is not exactly, if you care about democracy, either very liberal or very democratic. I think Freedom House would consider it a competitively authoritarian country. The other term they might use is illiberal democracy.
There are elections, obviously, but essentially since 1965, there has been only one party in power. And the founding of Singapore is really interesting because it was explicitly founded as an entrepreneur trading hub by the British, in particular, to plant a flag and to rival the Dutch mercantile system that was prevalent in that region of the world. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was the East India Company guy that founded Singapore. He took Singapore, to use Peter Thiel's terms, from zero to one. So he kind of did the heavy lifting. This was 1819. And so Singapore was kind of founded on free market, free trade principles and thrived under Raffles. You had groups coming in from everywhere, even Baghdad Jews came to Singapore. I recently actually was in Singapore only to learn that I met a Jewish family that had been there since the 1800s. I was confused—they're actually more Singaporean than me because my great-grandparents left China later than they came to Singapore.
Kind of like America, everyone is an immigrant. There were maybe some natives, but we're talking about 200 to 300 villages that were relying on subsistence farming. So there's not really an indigenous culture, not much at least, until the British came and attracted a lot of immigrants who took advantage of the policies there. And slowly the city expanded, it built up. And of course the British, after winning World War II, decided the imperial experiment had gotten way too expensive for Britain and they were reeling from having to rebuild their home country. And when they decided to pull out, that's when Singapore had to reluctantly join Malaysia, because the ruling party at the time thought it was just too small: you had barely two million immigrants on a small rocky island with no defenses. And so it joined Malaysia, and Malaysia was a majority-Muslim country and had a policy called bumiputra which favored the indigenous Muslim Malays in many areas of public life, including admissions to universities, corporations and government.
I think Singapore may be one of the only countries in the world that was reluctantly independent. It didn't really want its independence. Lee Kuan Yew was famously crying on public TV when Malaysia expelled it, essentially over what is identity politics. Singapore wanted a merit-based society. Malaysia didn't want that for Singapore. And so the only way was to secede and become independent.
Mounk: When it's expelled from Malaysia, at that point, it sort of faces two giant challenges, right? The first is that even though it is this trading outpost founded by the British, it is still a very, very poor place in which most people are very poor. And so there's a question of how to build an independent political bureaucracy, functioning political system, and how to turn it into a genuine economic center; because it is effectively a city-state, that is the only way that it can thrive.
The other big challenge—which, as you point out, was not at all a trivial challenge in the first years of Singaporean independence, when you had race riots and similar things—is that it had this population which is drawn from very different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Roughly speaking, for people who may not know Singapore as well, the largest ethnic group is of Chinese origin. There's a significant ethnic group that is of sort of Malay origin. And then there is a third population group that is, I believe, somewhat smaller in size, but still significant, that is South Asian Indian.
So how do Lee Kuan Yew and the other founders of Singapore go about solving these two twin problems? How do they turn Singapore into the kind of global center that it is today economically? And how do they think about managing these tensions?
Chen: One of the things that Lee Kuan Yew wrote about in his autobiography was a Dutch economist called Albert Winsemius. He was advising Singapore at the time, and he said there were two things that you needed to do, Mr. Lee, in order to bring foreign direct investment to Singapore. You have no natural resources. Your country produces nothing. You're just an entrepreneur trading hub. So you need foreign investment. All you really have is human capital. First, you need to eliminate the communists (this is the 1960s and the Cold War was in motion at the time), and the second piece of advice, which I think is actually really important and may not get enough play today, was, whatever you do, do not tear down the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles standing right at the edge of the harbor.
And that advice today seems controversial, in a world where “decolonize everything” seems to be a dominant narrative, especially in college campuses, not to tear down the statue of your former colonial master or governor is shocking. And the reason that he said that was because it was a signal to investors that you were as the new leader of Singapore going to build upon the British legacy; you weren't going to year zero. And if you compare Singapore to another British Commonwealth country that achieved independence roughly at the same time, Jamaica, you will see this divergence in their GDP growth per capita: Jamaica kind of flatlined, Singapore shot up. And many of the other countries that had problems, or had people that came to power riding on this wave of anti-colonial resentment, also ended up discarding institutions that could have helped the country develop. Part of what makes Singapore so successful is English software, and that includes the parliamentary system, the British education system, and English common law. So Lee Kuan Yew was very good at attracting foreign direct investment. He went all over. He traveled to Germany, to France. He asked these countries to bring their companies and set up their Asian multinational headquarters there in Singapore because that's what we can offer you—rule of law, order, and a cheap labor force.
Mounk: So part of what made Singapore work in that context is a very successful fight against corruption. And we'll come to speak more about some of the points on which I think you're rightly critical of Singapore today. But it is also impressive what Singapore got right. And I get this impression every time that I speak, even today, to a Singaporean government official: They are atop a system that is not truly democratic, but they are some of the most impressive government officials that I've met from any country, both in terms of intellectual range and their evident talent. It is quite a steep meritocracy, and they do appear genuinely public spirited. And the first condition of that is that you don't have extensive corruption in Singapore; you have, by and large, people being selected for high office on the basis of their educational pedigree or their achievements within the bureaucracy.
So what did Singapore get right, and why is it so hard to emulate that anywhere else?
Chen: You're definitely right about the quality of people that end up in the civil service in Singapore, and that is achieved through that very competitive streamlining of people, and recognizing and identifying talent. If you achieve certain results at your A-levels, which is the British examination system, you get to sit for these psychometric tests administered by the Public Service College. And they will actually, based on these tests, decide whether you can be earmarked for government scholarships that prime you for a job in government. And often these are very well-respected jobs, very prestigious, with very good pay. So the civil service in Singapore is pegged to private sector pay. The prime minister of Singapore is the highest paid prime minister of any country in the world. And that is one way that you retain talent, instead of having everybody go work for Goldman Sachs or one of those big Silicon Valley firms.
And Lee Kuan Yew himself was incorruptible in a way. Famously, in the 1960s, the CIA had tried to bribe him, bribe his government. And not only did Lee Kuan Yew not take it, he actually forced the Americans to publicly apologize. And this was all declassified. Then he wrote about it in his autobiography. So he could have taken what would have been quite a substantial amount of money for Singapore or for himself in order to keep quiet about it. But he wanted to reveal what the Americans were trying to do, which was to influence Singapore internal affairs. And he rejected the money, and then he said “OK, well, you can pay us some money but it will go into the development coffers.” He set the tone for integrity. He actually lived by example and he was actually quite famously very much against any kind of cult of personality, to the point that it created a scandal probably that lasts even today with regard to what to do with his home.
Mounk: Perhaps you can briefly explain this to the audience. So Lee Kuan Yew obviously passed away a number of years ago, and the main branch of the family that continues to be active in Singaporean politics wants to tear this house down, because that's what he wanted. It really is kind of the inverse of what you might expect.
Chen: Yes. Exactly, because most dictators want that mausoleum, they want to be honored. If you go to the Forbidden City, Mao's pictures are everywhere. Lee Kuan Yew did not want his name to be attached to anything in Singapore. He didn't want the airport named after him. So it's Changi Airport. It's not Lee Kuan Yew International Airport. The only thing that actually bears his name is the School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, which I think is actually very fitting. So he rejected cult of personality and even growing up in Singapore, as a millennial, I'll say that I barely studied Lee Kuan Yew and his ideas—versus Xi Jinping, who, two or three years into his tenure as premier of China, ends up starting an entire course called Xi Jinping Thought. If anybody deserved to have a Thought, it was Lee Kuan Yew, and he rejected it.
Mounk: Explain to me a little bit about what feels stifling about Singapore. I was able to spend a little bit of time in the country last year and it has many wonderful qualities. It is in many ways a very impressive place and it's hard not to acknowledge that. But even the experience of being there feels incredibly sanitized and it does feel like there's a kind of lack of vitality. And part of that is perhaps to do with what you call a conformist culture.
And part of that, of course, is to do with the political system itself. There have been democratic elections in the country in which an opposition party is allowed to present itself at the polls and the votes are, so far as I understand, fairly counted, and yet there's no genuine political competition. And that is not just because the incumbent party is reasonably popular, but also because of real constraints on the way you can speak and campaign in Singapore.
So how is it that this party has been able to keep control of the political system for so long? And in what ways do you think that's holding Singapore back?
Chen: Well, it's shown results. Singaporeans do, by and large, want the PAP to be in power. To the extent that the opposition gets any percent of the seats in parliament, of which there are 93 to vie for, it is merely to register discontent in terms of the directionality of that session. It's not really competitive in the sense of a vibrant democracy where you have many different groups vying for power.
Mounk: No, but let me be a devil's advocate for a moment, right? Like, let me play one of those impressive Singaporean government officials or civil servants who would say, “Well, look, it's not our fault that we're very successful. It's not our fault that we're very popular. We have this incredible set of results to point to. Why are you saying that we're not a democracy based on that? Just the fact that there hasn't been a change of government doesn't prove that there's something wrong with the system.”
Where are the actual limits on what the opposition can do, such that Freedom House comes to the evaluation it does?
Chen: It's evolved over time, but early on there was something called Operation Coldstore, which was used to detain certain political dissidents without trial. That said, in the U.S. we have Guantanamo. We have similar instruments as well where we are able to detain people without trial.
Mounk: To be fair, we've never detained an opposition leader in Guantanamo.
Chen: No. But we can also use lawfare now against the opposition. In Singapore's case, that’s the example that is often used, where either the opposition party members are sued, because of very high standards for libel, and they are either bankrupted or, at one point, actually detained.
We don't have situations like that anymore. But in 2019, a bill was introduced called POFMA, which stands for the Prevention of Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. This was probably, in terms of the advanced economies, the first law that was actually passed to deal with false speech online. And it is used for targeting anyone that says anything online that the government wants to challenge and can challenge based on whether or not this is fake news, sensitive, or considered manipulation. It's quite broad, and it has been used. So it doesn't jail anybody but what happens is if you make a post on social media and the government challenges that, they can either demand a retraction, an apology, a correction, or fine you. And so in this way, they're able to signal what is allowed and what is not allowed online. And if you're, say, a blogger who's quite critical of the Singapore government, all of a sudden your whole calculus on how you think about approaching an article changes, knowing that this law is in use and actually has been used quite often since 2019.
If you grew up in Singapore, the best thing you could do is just not be political. Most of us do not study political science at all or philosophy in high school. Maybe if you get to university level, you choose to study that. It is just not a very political society. People like to actually stay out of it. Maybe privately at the coffee shops they might discuss local politics, but by and large, it's not something that's all-consuming. But of course, now that things have evolved the way they are in the West, where people are so hyper-polarized, the very thing I once thought was a liability is actually now a welcome development. Because now we are way too political. And sometimes it's really nice to be able to live in a society where people are not fighting or politicizing everything. So in some ways, I see the Singapore model not as a bad thing now, especially if you're somebody that wants to just push the frontiers of science. It can actually be a totally different experience living in a place where politics is not discussed. I had no conception of what left or right was growing up in Singapore because Singaporean politics has always been known to be pragmatic—that is the one word that's used very often. It is not about ideology, it is about results and what works.
Mounk: So Singapore has so far resisted either drifting into a full-out dictatorship, but nor has it sort of ascended to the realm of a genuine democracy. It stays in this sort of odd in-between world of what, as you point out, some political scientists would call a form of competitive authoritarianism.
Now, of course, more consequentially, another country that was often seen through this frame was China. People looked at China in the 1990s, in the 2000s, even in the early 2010s, and they might have said this country was incredibly poor, poorer even than Singapore had been. It is vast. But it is developing economically very quickly. People in large numbers are learning English. When I first visited China, you saw people selling DVDs of Western movies on the street and stuff like that, and so some people said that there was an interest in Western culture and so, if we give it time, China will democratize; China will follow this kind of path of modernization. My understanding is that, based on your own experience in Singapore, you were skeptical of that from the start.
Why do you think we got it wrong about China, and what is your assessment of the country's political trajectory today?
Chen: I don't actually blame the U.S. for getting it wrong—it seems obvious now, but that's in retrospect. At the time, the reigning theory was that, as Milton Friedman had proposed, you can't really stuff the freedom genie back in the bottle because once people got economic freedoms and markets liberalized, and they became more prosperous, they would demand for more political freedoms. And from my vantage point in Singapore, something about that axiom seemed wrong because I did not notice that my fellow countrymen demanding more political freedoms despite, in my own lifetime, seeing Singapore grow exponentially in GDP per capita, real wages increase, the wealth of the average Singaporean really change in such a noticeable way. The vacations that they could take overseas now, the spending power they had to go to Paris—it was a visceral phenomenon around me.
But from the U.S.'s point of view, the reasons for initially engaging with China seem quite valid, I think. We wanted to contain or deal with the Soviet Union at the time and separating the two powers was a good idea, and so let's engage with China. And I think that was quite sound from that vantage point. Deng Xiaoping was quite crucial in selling this idea to the United States. In particular, he had this philosophy of hiding your strength and biding your time. What China was obsessed with avoiding was the downfall of the Soviet Union. They saw what happened when the Soviets had their perestroika and glasnost policies and it led to the collapse. And they sought to avoid that fate. So when Deng liberalized the markets and started attracting a lot of foreign investment into China, I think that there was a chance that as the middle class started to get more and more wealthy and the Chinese started to travel, maybe there was something there about the possibility of people demanding more. But in 2001, when China joined the WTO and when certain liberties were then taken, in violation of certain treaties, and the West did not retaliate or hold China to them, you started to see that instead of markets being this force that magnified liberty, that markets might be the leverage that allows China to hold the rest of the world to its ideology. And I think that's when that started happening more and more. That's when the mistake was made by the United States, to basically ignore that the big market power that China had was being exploited to entice companies to basically do its bidding. So I think that's where the mistake was.
The most obvious case was by far when you had the manager of the Houston Rockets tweeting a very basic level of support for Hong Kong. It was a very innocuous tweet. Just a few words, “Stand for freedom. Fight for Hong Kong.” The NBA apologized on his behalf, he had to apologize, contracts were canceled, and everybody in the NBA started to fall in line. That should have been the wake up call to how this actually operates.
You've created an environment where free companies domiciled in another country, American companies headquartered in the United States of America, have to fall in line with Chinese dictates. And that should be a wake-up call that this can happen. And that doesn't even take into consideration, in the era of big tech, things like TikTok and all the other apps that now China is involved in and that we are using.
Mounk: Let's say that we do become really concerned about what that means not just for developments within China, but, as you're pointing out, the freedom of speech of somebody who happens to be a senior figure in the NBA, or the ability of companies to operate in the way they otherwise might. What action does that imply?
Chen: Education is a big start. For a long time, people were kind of blind to it. And so the knowledge that this is out there now helps a lot. But the U.S. government has been ratcheting up the trade war, and companies have also started to pull back on their own. De-globalization is happening on its own. Companies have started to recognize, especially since COVID, that maybe we did not properly price the risk of doing business in China. There were risks that we didn't price in. Hollywood, for example, has accepted investments from firms like Tencent, only to realize that when the movie comes out, China kicks up a big fuss about why this flag was on somebody's jacket. There was a movie made by Disney about the Dalai Lama that had to be taken off the Disney service. There is an awareness that maybe this was a Faustian bargain all along. But with businesses, it's hard to convince them to do the right thing. That's not what businesses are supposed to do (ironically, though, we've managed to somehow convince them that ESG is a good idea).
But for businesses, the bottom line is always the best argument. And so instead of just saying, “look, you didn't think about American values here (maybe, if enough people or shareholders are outraged about it on Twitter, you can force a change), it is much easier to do that by pointing to the business’s bottom line—in an era where you have these rising geopolitical tensions, the regulatory landscape changes quite often and sometimes arbitrarily. The national intelligence law in China sometimes can be used to detain personnel in your Chinese office, as the Mintz Group and Bain learned recently. They can seize computers and things like that. Your executives could be detained simply because Huawei's executive was detained in Canada. It's a tit-for-tat policy.
So that's the kind of risk we're talking about, and it's better to appeal to American businesses in terms of pure numbers. Let's not appeal to morality.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Melissa discuss what the Trump administration’s policies are likely to be towards China, and the best-case scenario for engagement between the two countries. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
