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Foreword Travelling around Asia, I frequently encounter enthusiastic expressions of Singapore as a ‘desired’ future. Discussions range from ‘how did Singapore alone manage to avoid the culture of corruption that is everywhere in Asia’, to ‘can we borrow your political leaders, particularly Lee Kuan Yew, for a few years to get us off the ground’, and this often only partly in jest, to finally and ultimately, ‘Singapore as model’. Indeed, none less than the late Deng Xiaoping, the instigator of market economy for communist People’s Republic of China, had suggested that its people ‘learn from Singapore’. The irony should not be lost here: the largest nation in Asia is to learn from one of the smallest. The reason for such enthusiasm is, of course, Singapore’s rapid rise in global capitalism. The People’s Action Party (PAP) government, which has governed without interruption for close to five decades by now, is extremely liberal towards the market economy; although one should recognize this as more a necessity for Singapore than a virtue of the government. Foreign investments are assured of labour peace and welcomed with favourable tax regimes, making Singapore a very profitable location for multinational corporations. The economy has been growing phenomenally since the early 1960s, with only a couple of brief recessions. Within a short two decades, Singapore began to cast off low-wage, labour intensive industries and move up the technological ladder to knowledgeintensive and capital-intensive industrialization, such as bio-medical and pharmaceutical industries. Decades of sustained double digit national economic growth has transformed Singapore into a capital exporting economy, as foreign investment continues to flow into the domestic market. At the everyday life level, economic success has translated into massive improvement in material Foreword viii life for ordinary citizens. ‘Success’ has become an element of national pride, national value and national identity. The suggestion of ‘Singapore as model’ for developing Asia is undoubtedly engendered by this capitalist success. This is obviously not a suggestion for the ‘cloning’ of Singapore; the different historical and political conditions of each location make the ‘reproduction’ of Singapore anywhere an absurd idea. Rather, ‘Singapore as model’ points to the idea that ‘if’ Singapore, an island without any natural resources, is able to make it, so should ‘we’. Singapore is thus a ‘model’ in that it provides a sense of ‘can do’ and an ‘imaginable future’ among its admirers in developing Asia. Logically, as a Singaporean, one may be excused for deriving some pride in this ‘iconic’ status of Singapore. Yet, most progressive Singaporeans would find it difficult to recommend without reservation, let alone wish, the Singapore ‘system’ on others. Reservations come from the nature of the one-party dominant political system that has appropriated the legitimising character of an electoral system and yoke it with many anti-democratic, if not outright authoritarian, features. The end result is a society that is all too self-conscious of the absence of freedom in many areas of social life. Life in Singapore is thus marked by crisscrossing contradictions that can best be explained from the inside. Wee Wan-ling is an insider. His text maps the ideological underpinnings of the trajectory of development of Singapore over the forty years since independence in 1965. At each stage of this trajectory, there is a tension between the need to embrace capitalist economic modernization modelled after the West and an ideological desire to avoid the aggressive liberal democracy of the West. The tension drives PAP ideologues, including Lee Kuan Yew, into constant search for things ‘Asian’ which will enable the rationalization of economic openness with political conservatism. As a literary scholar, Wan-ling brings into his analysis different resource materials that are often overlooked by conventional social scientists: The modernity of the urban environment is dissected through a critique of the absence of Western self-reflexivity via the remarks of the globe-trotting architect, Rem Koolhaas; in contrast, Singaporean critical self-reflexivity is seen in the dark representations of the same urban environment in local movies. The cultural consequences of the obsession with capitalist growth, at both national and individual levels, is analysed through the allegories of humanity/humanism of the late Singapore playwright, Kuo Pao Kun, especially in the staging of his play, Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral, by the Singaporean director, Ong Keng Sen, whose own definition of ‘Asian-ness’ escapes the discursive confines of that of the PAP government. Wan-ling’s very nuanced analysis of the complexity of Singapore’s development trajectory...

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