S. C. Y. Luk - Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew

This book addresses key questions about how Singapore is likely to develop going forward, what are the key challenges facing the state, and how is the government going to deal with these matters. The book shows how important Lee Kuan Yew and subsequent individual leaders have been in shaping Singapore, and goes on to consider the specific new challenges, including rapid population growth, migration and a changing population mix, the rise of China and possible shifts in the regional balance of power, and anxieties about the economy and an increasing global backlash against the neo-liberal free trade regime. It considers key areas of economic policy, social policy, and foreign policy, and explores the changing nature of governance. It also examines the Singapore governments effort to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Overall, the book provides a concise, comprehensive assessment of the current state of Singapore and its likely future direction.

Sabrina Ching Yuen Luk is an Assistant Professor in Public Policy and Global Affairs at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Peter W. Preston is an Emeritus Professor of Political Sociology, University of Birmingham

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For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Contemporary-Southeast-Asia-Series/book-series/RCSEA

First published 2021

by Routledge

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2021 Sabrina Ching Yuen Luk and Peter W. Preston

The right of Sabrina Ching Yuen Luk and Peter W. Preston to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-49732-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-01906-4 (ebk)

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The death of Lee Kuan Yew on March 23, 2015, was a significant marker in the historical development trajectory of modern Singapore. It is not necessary to buy into the familiar tales of his indispensability in order to acknowledge and appreciate his key role in the making of the contemporary state and nation. The long queues of Singaporean mourners attest to his role in the creation of the city-state. Lee and his colleagues were members of a generation that was familiar with the conflicts of global warfare and the end of foreign empire, and together they played key roles in turning their colonial legacies into modern Singapore. However, whereas Lee and his colleagues were concerned with state-making, nation-building, and the single-minded pursuit of economic growth, coupled to the general provision of social welfare, Lees successors have taken this legacy in a somewhat different direction. Whilst the second-generation leadership of Goh Chok Tong quietly built on the established record, the third-generation leadership of Lee Hsien Loong, which inherited the machinery and country that Lee and his allies made, has been in power during a period of neo-liberal hegemony. It was a different period, read differently as the idea of globalization came to prominence.

In these changing global circumstances, both ideas and patterns of international interactions have been important. Where Lee and his allies sought to understand their circumstances in terms informed by post-Second World War metropolitan ideals of social democracy, Lee HL and his colleagues have had to deal with ideas of globalization and the related construction of significant global networks, including money, goods, and people. A new set of circumstances. The Peoples Action Party (PAP) regime has responded by updating its nation-building efforts, and embracing advanced high-tech digital technologies in order to prosper within the globalized world. Contemporary Singapore is a global hub for logistics, manufacturing, and finance, according to standard agency data from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Its domestic population is prosperous, well-schooled, employed, housed, and able to access efficient welfare provisions. The agency data shows that the country is one of the richest on the planet. The state has led this development trajectory and has routinely involved itself in economic, social, and political spheres. Policy strategies in all these areas are routinely updated; the state is omnipresent in Singapore, and its demands reach into all sections of society.

In the post-Lee KY era, it is likely that the Singaporean political elite will continue with some variation of the policies that have shaped its long-established development trajectory: state-building, nation-building, and the resolute pursuit of material advance; growth and welfare. However, currently, the elite faces novel challenges: cast in the broadest terms, the eclipse of ideas of globalization and the rise of China, and non-traditional security threats such as cyber-attacks and public health crises.

The early twenty-first century has seen signs in Europe and the USA of a backlash against the neo-liberal free trade regime that has provided recent Singaporean leaders and policymakers with an orienting frame of reference. The 2008 financial crisis with its twin centres in Wall Street and the City of London, and its wide global impacts, severely dented confidence in the neo-liberal model of globalization: claims that the planet now comprised, or soon would, or ought to, a single integrated system. As the crisis unfolded in the USA, Britain, and more haphazardly in the European Union, states bailed out the market. With that said, the financial markets and mainstream politics quickly returned to a semblance of the status quo ante, and the states drew back from public gaze whilst the market reasserted its centrality. A period of state-funded quantitative easing fuelled a renewed prosperity. This was true until, in 2020, the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic once again demonstrated both the ability of a globalized world to rapidly transmit disease and, in the wake of the spread of the disease, the central and indispensable role of the state. Commentators began to speak about de-globalization. If we add the environment and global warming to these anxieties, then it is easy to see how the 30-odd year celebration of the liberal market came to a halt.