by Ian Buruma
Singapore is a model of modern rationalism, a rich urban enclave in Southeast Asia, whose shopping malls and department stores contain all the name brands of West and East, a city of plush golf courses, smooth highways, superb restaurants, and perfectly efficient leisure resorts, where the old exotic customs of Malays, Chinese, and Indians can be enjoyed in the safety and comfort of a perfectly clean environment. Here, then, in this controlled material paradise, capitalist enterprise and authoritarian politics have found their perfect match. If all physical needs can be catered to—and Singapore comes as close to that blissful state as anywhere in the world—what need is there for dissent or individual eccentricity? You would have to be mad to rebel. And that is precisely how those few brave or foolhardy men and women who persist in opposition are treated, as dangerous madmen who should be put away for the comfort and safety of all the digits.
This is pretty much what Deng had in mind when he cleared the rubble of Maoism. If there ever was a blueprint for post-Maoist China, it would have looked like Singapore. This new Asian model, which also owes something to South Korea when it was being run by military regimes, and to Pinochet’s Chile, is a challenge to those who still take it as a given that capitalism inevitably leads to liberal democracy, or, in other words, that a free market in goods automatically results in a free market in ideas. In the case of Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan, this turned out to be true, but there was nothing inevitable or automatic about it. Military regimes collapsed when the middle classes rebelled, or at least stopped supporting them. So far, there is little sign that a similar democratic transformation will happen soon in China or Singapore.
In fact, the authoritarian capitalist regime in post-Maoist China has been astonishingly successful in co-opting the middle class to its political ends. There is, of course, nothing inevitable about this either. Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong have shown that there is no inherent cultural reason for the Chinese to prefer authoritarian to democratic government. Koreans, too, come from the same Confucian tradition, indeed from a particularly authoritarian version of it, and they have fought successfully for a more liberal political system.
Taiwan is actually an interesting case, since it is indisputably Chinese, and its politics once had many theme-park elements too. When the Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and later by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, ruled Taiwan as the last bastion against communism, it still pretended to rule the whole of China. Up to the 1980s, ancient representatives from mainland Chinese provinces were still rolled into the national assembly, snoozing in their wheelchairs. And such institutions as the Palace Museum, housing the Qing imperial collection, were meant to show that the Nationalists still represented Chinese civilization. The Taiwanese democracy movement, however, led by local Taiwanese, had no interest in ruling China, not even a miniature China. Taiwanese dissidents and activists simply wanted to establish a democracy in Taiwan. As soon as they succeeded, Continental pretensions and phony symbols—though not, thank God, the superb Palace Museum—quickly disappeared.
Japanese politics may not be flawlessly democratic, but Japan has had a relatively liberal system longer than any other East Asian country. Nonetheless, even postwar, democratic Japan developed a de facto one-party system, which is not as oppressive as Singapore’s but has made a similar pact with the middle class. Since the early 1960s, the Japanese have been promised a lifetime of secure employment and a doubling of their income every year. Acquiescence to the political status quo was demanded in return. Not everyone benefited to the same extent, but enough did for the system to work. Governed by bureaucratic mandarins, more or less corrupt Liberal Democratic Party politicians, and the representatives of big business, Japan is a paternalistic state that conforms in many respects to the Confucian tradition: obedience in return for order, security, and a full bowl of rice.
Intellectuals, so often the source of political dissent, have traditionally enjoyed the status in Confucian societies of loyal advisers to the rulers. In theory, if the rulers strayed from the correct path, it was the duty of learned men to point out the error of their ways. In practice, you had to be a brave man to do so. Some always were that brave, and often paid a heavy price. The tradition of the intellectual as a freethinker, independent of the state, is relatively new in East Asia, and Chinese free spirits still pay a heavy price. This is why Deng and his successors were able to harness most intellectuals to the cause of economic reform, just as it was easy for the Japanese government in the 1930s to bring Japanese intellectuals to Manchukuo to work on socioeconomic issues, supposedly to liberate Asians from the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. The Chinese government has also been quite successful in promoting the idea that to be critical of the system is to be unpatriotic, especially when that system offers so many social and material benefits to the educated urban elite.
Many young, entrepreneurial Chinese, perhaps faute de mieux, have even convinced themselves that greater prosperity and a freer market can be a substitute for cultural and intellectual freedom. A property developer in Beijing once explained to me that “commercialization” was the best way to build a free, modern society. She was the perfect example of the post-Maoist yuppie: partly educated in Britain, with work experience on Wall Street, dressed in the latest European fashion, driven by ambition and nationalist pride. She liked to quote Andy Warhol’s views on the dissolving borders between commerce and art. Her latest project was an architectural theme park at the Great Wall, where eleven hot Asian architects were commissioned to build modernist villas, to be rented for vast amounts of money to rich individuals or companies, such as Prada or Louis Vuitton, who would hold “events” there to promote their products.
Status, stability, patriotism, and wealth, then, have proved to be sufficient reasons for the growing middle class to accept a paternalistic, authoritarian form of capitalism without much protest. The fact that any form of organized protest in China immediately leads to heavy punishment is, of course, another reason for political obedience. The big cities of China are really monuments to this kind of modern society—technocratic, affluent, but politically, as well as intellectually, sterile. It hardly needs to be pointed out that foreign businessmen are happy with this state of affairs. Dealing with corrupt officials may be tiresome, but that can be left to middlemen. And blessed is the absence of awkward trade unions, opposition parties, political dissent, and other messy manifestations of more open societies.
Will the Singaporean system last in China? Or will it crack because of what Marxists call internal contradictions? The widespread demonstrations of 1989 against official corruption and for more civil liberties were a warning that stability can never be taken for granted. But capitalist authoritarianism has already lasted longer in China than I had expected, and the end is not really in sight. Without middle-class rebellion, it is hard to see how it will come. There are reasons, nonetheless, why the system may be much more fragile than it looks. Singapore is small enough to create a stuffy middle-class city-state. China now has a growing urban elite. But most Chinese live in the much less prosperous hinterlands. Farmers and workers, often laid off in large numbers from bankrupt state enterprises, are not the beneficiaries of East Asian technocracy. Their daughters flock to the southern cities to work as virtual slaves in Chinese or foreign-owned factories, or as prostitutes in the blossoming sex industry. Their sons roam the country as itinerant construction workers, without rights or protection. Since they are unable to organize themselves, their voices are muted, and their sporadic explosions of angry protest can be contained.
But technocracy will always be hostage to economic fortunes. In the case of a severe depression, several things might happen. The sporadic protests may lead to a nationwide uprising. A discontented middle class might join in, even though fear of mob rule makes this an unlikely prospect. On the other hand, the urban elite may lead an organized rebellion against the corrupt one-party system. Or perhaps something closer to what happened in 1930s Japan
might be the pattern, especially if the frightened rulers try to deflect domestic unrest into aggressive chauvinism directed at Taiwan, Japan, or the West. Variations of fascism are a possibility.
The establishment of a liberal democracy after the Communist Party finally loses its power cannot be ruled out. But more violent, less liberal solutions remain more likely. None of them will be pleasant, and all of them will be dangerous. Then again, things might simply remain the same, and China, as a continent-size Singapore, will be the shining model of authoritarian capitalism, saluted by all illiberal regimes, corporate executives, and other PR men for an emasculated, infantilized good life: the whole world as a gigantic theme park, where constant fun and games will make free thought redundant.
1 Now grown to about ten million.
2 The Great Leap Forward, a book on the Pearl River Delta, by Rem Koolhaas and his Harvard Design School Project on the City (Taschen, 2001), p. 32.
SOURCES
Earlier versions of the essays in this book appeared as follows:
Chapter 1: The New York Review of Books, April 8, 1999
Chapter 2: The New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007
Chapter 3: The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007
Chapter 4: The New York Review of Books, January 17, 2008
Chapter 5: The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004
Chapter 6: The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990
Chapter 7: The New York Review of Books, February 19, 1998
Chapter 8: The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009
Chapter 9: The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010
Chapter 10: The New York Review of Books, October 14, 2010
Chapter 11: The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2002
Chapter 12: The New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007
Chapter 13: The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2011
Chapter 14: The New York Review of Books, January 12, 2012
Chapter 15: The New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010
Chapter 16: The New York Review of Books, November 19, 1987
Chapter 17: The New York Review of Books, January 13, 1994
Chapter 18: The New York Review of Books, February 16, 1995
Chapter 19: The New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013
Chapter 20: The New York Review of Books, March 15, 2007
Chapter 21: The New York Review of Books December 19, 2002
Chapter 22: The New York Review of Books, December 4, 2008
Chapter 23: The New York Review of Books, July 13, 1995
Chapter 24: The New York Review of Books, April 6, 2005
Chapter 25: The New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013
Chapter 26: The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999
Chapter 27: The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2005
Chapter 28: The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003
