The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore

Introduction

Introduction What does the Asian modern of a ‘globalising East Asia’ — a phrase now both clichéd and yet still resonant — look like? In the discourses that have emerged over the past two decades, East Asia has become increasingly viewed as industrial, capitalist and urban — and committed to frenetic development. All the three elements mentioned contribute to what is almost a mantra to be intoned by those who wish to represent East Asian cultural dimensions. In 1999, the Paris-based, mainland Chinese curator Hou Hanru co-curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist the touring arts-exhibition extravaganza that started in London’s Hayward Gallery called ‘Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change — East Asian Art, Architecture and Films Now’. They proclaimed that: A kind of mixture of liberal Capitalist [sic] market economy and Asian, post-totalitarian social control is being established as a new social order [in industrial-capitalist East Asia]. Culture, in such a context, is by nature hybrid, impure and contradictory. Accordingly, the new architectures and urban environment [sic] are being renovated and transformed into a sort of ‘Theme Park’ oriented cityscape. … [T]his [urban modernity] incarnates perfectly the image of the post-colonial and post-totalitarian modernization in the region: the impulsive and almost fanatical pursuit of economic and monetary power becomes the ultimate goal of development.1 This type of breathless prose, proclaiming the latest version of the new — now available in East Asia — with a vocabulary drawn from postcolonial theory of the 1980s and postmodern and globalisation cultural theory of the 1990s, along with a hint of Asian one-upsmanship, though, is not always well received, or is The Asian Modern 2 received ambivalently. The revival of aspects of postwar ‘modernisation’, a term that seemed superseded but is now updated to include the information industry and the warm reception of the globalised free market in former Third World regions, surprises cultural critic Fredric Jameson: ‘[Modernity] is in fact back in business all over the world, and virtually inescapable in political discussion from Latin America to China, not to mention the former Second World itself.’2 The ‘developmental’ city-state of Singapore3 in many respects has contributed towards the now-established image of an Asian modern urban formation in which, it has become almost predictable to say, East meets West, and in which centre and periphery, old and new, are conjoined. Looking at one representative critical response to Singapore allows us to ponder why the East Asian modern could be perceived as an inauthentic modernity, or perhaps as a distorted form of modernity. The year 1993 is a good place to start, for it was the year the World Bank released its report on the Little Tigers’ economic development, The East Asian Miracle.4 It was thus a year when Asian triumphalism seemed at least implicitly validated by that major international organisation. A Time article of that year on Singapore captures the image of success the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled the city-state since 1959, wants for the country. The writer, though, suggests that Singapore’s Asian modern is a trifle sterile, that it is an inauthentic capitalist society. It begins by quoting Francis Fukuyama: ‘the “soft authoritarianism” of countries like Singapore “is the one potential competitor to Western liberal democracy, and its strength and legitimacy is growing daily”’.5 Significant (if backhanded) praise from the 1990s high-profile champion of the teleology of progress and liberty based on European Enlightenment thought — an intellectual heritage, as we will see, which the first-generation PAP leaders adapted for their own use. Singapore’s ‘legitimacy’, it is suggested, come from its technicist, narrow and therefore distorted understanding of modernisation: ‘Singapore Inc.’ is ‘the world’s busiest container port, the third largest oil-refining center, the major exporter of computer disk drives’, and ‘has attracted some 3,000 foreign companies with generous tax breaks, ultramodern telecommunications, an efficient airport, and tame labor unions’ (36–37). Despite such achievements, full universal progress and a complete modernity have not arrived in the citystate .6 The photograph which straddles two pages of the article is apt, embodying as it does the writer’s physical description of Singapore as an inorganically evolved and thus incoherent urban space: ‘With low pollution, lush tropical greenery, a mix of modern skyscrapers and colonial-era buildings, the city resembles a clean and efficient theme park ...’ (36). The Padang — the city green with its playing fields — occupies the foreground of the photo and...