Learning Authoritarian Modernism: China’s “Singapore Model”

Abstract

This chapter examines China’s “Singapore model” as the key positive example in the Mainland’s attempt to become an effective authoritarian learner. Here the emphasis is less on new policies adopted (with a focus on Chinese interest in Singapore’s successful anti-corruption drive) than on ideological lessons learned. China did show interest in improving governance by adopting policies that they believed made the tiny Southeast Asian city-state “perfectly managed.” But given the very different political “DNA” of the two countries, policy diffusion was unsurprisingly limited. Rather, “learning” in the end was primarily ideological as Chinese observers sought reinforcement of their belief that authoritarianism could continue to be justified once substantial economic advancement had been achieved.

This chapter draws extensively on my previous work with Stephan Ortmann (Ortmann and Thompson 2014, 2016, 2018; Thompson and Ortmann 2018) with whom I have been working on this (rather implausible) project for a number of years. It is hard to believe that gigantic China seeks inspiration from a tiny “red dot” of a country in Southeast Asia. Yet, until recently at least, Singapore had become an influential model for the Chinese Communist Party’s quest to modernize while remaining authoritarian.