Singapore is the New Capital of Asia
Reopened borders reflect smart risk-taking that eludes other countries in region
What’s not to like about Singapore? It’s an appealing, capitalist entrepot. It’s a sample of Chinese culture in a tidy package with Malay and Indian mixed in—tied together with the English language. They used to make hippie backpackers get haircuts on arrival. They cane some criminals, including an American punk in the 1990s. (At U.S. request, his sentence was reduced from six to four strokes of the rattan cane, which is probably why he went on to commit more crime.) And they’re the first Asian country to let me visit in over two years.
Singapore still employs overzealous WuFlu restrictions by U.S. standards. Regulations require that masks be worn even outdoors except during “vigorous” exercise, a step that only our dumpier, poorly run cities inflict pointlessly on children. There are limits on the number of guests a household can welcome, which is a nuisance as the Lunar New Year celebrations begin, when extended families traditionally get together. One must check in with a phone on arrival at most public venues, although that is as easy as scanning a QR code.
Nonetheless, the Singaporean government has taken political risk and gone farther than any other Asian country to reopen its borders and get back to real life. This reflects an attitude that put Singapore above other financial, cultural, and political capitals in the region in recent years. As companies and talent quietly exit Hong Kong, no one is moving to Tokyo, Taipei, Jakarta, Bangkok, or Manila. Despite closed borders, governments there think they are past the highest cost of their shutdowns. They are wrong: taking two years and counting off from the world will have generation-long consequences.
Singaporeans are bashful when you mention this magnet effect. Perhaps they don’t want to rub their gain in the faces of China and other countries. Partly it goes well beyond the pandemic, with Singapore’s low taxes that peak at 22 percent for individuals and 17 percent for corporations, which are people too. Political stability adds to long-term allure. Of course, Singapore’s appeal isn’t universal: more than a few expats who are sick of not being able to travel elsewhere in the region and of ongoing local restrictions have packed it in or plan to do so.
Singapore’s politics rankle neoliberal globalists, and the Biden administration even declined to invite it to its “Summit for Democracy” woke jamboree last December. It has the rule of law, a parliamentary government with a minority party, and a liberal if boring media. But its ruling People’s Action Party has governed since independence, in part by playing hardball and in part by delivering for its people. As neoliberalism fails globally, it is worth asking whether Singapore is a better democracy on the whole than the Philippines, for example, with its elections, changes in power, and pervasive corruption and de facto oligopolies in politics and business. Singapore has never pulled a banana republic stunt like Japanistan’s outrageous detention of American attorney Greg Kelly, formerly of Nissan’s board. (See Senator Hagerty’s statement on that matter.)
Singapore’s long-term prospects are good. Southeast Asia, like the broader region, exhibited slower economic growth in recent years. As I’ve written elsewhere, the region needs more capitalist voices and capitalist policies and less hoopla about always-disappointing trade deals.
As the Year of the Tiger begins, no one talks about Asian tiger economies anymore. But the potential is there. Despite some obligatory nonsense about climate change, this is after all a region still dependent upon making things. Much of the oil consumed in the Pacific Rim passes Singapore through the Malacca Strait—more than 16 million barrels per day by the middle of the last decade. Mining, energy development, forestry, and shipping are big business in Indonesia. Joining finance and telecom, the tech industry is accreting in Singapore, aided by the need to move servers and software development out of China for security and legal reasons. That raises the risk of importing California culture, but hopefully the government will cane any executives who deliver annual reports or product launches wearing black t-shirts.
The most common question I received was whether America will defend Taiwan. No one ostensibly entertained actually helping us with this task, but no one professed affinity for the Chicoms either. I answered that we probably would if there was anything left to defend after China made a first move, and that Beijing would likely design that first move to make it hard for us to respond and unlikely for Japan to get involved. I added that the Chicoms probably think increasingly that we will not respond decisively to an attack, and that Beijing did not believe Joe Biden’s recent claim to the contrary or else its reaction would have been much windier. Finally, I have a hunch that CCP boss Xi Jinping judges the risk from failed invasion to his own rule and that of his party to be too high to undertake. I base that on the same amount of first-hand information about Xi’s thinking that I suspect is available to the U.S. and allied governments, which is to say, none.
No one asked me about Russia or Ukraine, which reinforced my view that our feckless elite’s brinkmanship there, absent any defined U.S. interests, is a counterproductive distraction from the struggle that matters. The idea that Xi will be encouraged or discouraged by what happens there is a fiction. Separately, people seem to think Australia will continue its tough-on-Beijing tack even when Labor likely takes power there this spring. This includes sticking with plans to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, whose more junior crew members presumably have not yet been born given the pace of military procurement.
Consistent with our woke times and the Democrats’ Get Whitey™ agenda, I think I will adopt a new policy of not meeting white guys on future Asia trips. I exaggerate of course: I had great meetings with American and Australian expats, and a Dutch economist. However, the contrast was clear between meetings with Asians, who often had realist views of the region and divorced ideology from their assessments, and neoliberal western expats and journalists, who were often pessimistic with views stained by ideology—what in these times might be called Western Disease. This illness includes smug disapproval of Donald Trump and a refusal to try to understand the political forces that gave rise to him, which are accelerating. No Asians were wearing MAGA hats, but they had mostly accepted the best of Donald Trump, and were not longing for the days before 2016.
I received one or two complaints that Trump had been less present in regional meetings, which was taken as a signal of disengagement. Absent the USA rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which will never happen, there is a desire that Washington engage in some sort of economic initiative. The retort to this is that most multilateral regional meetings are a waste of time and that TPP hasn’t caused any real changes, even though other factors are changing Asian power dynamics significantly. As in Washington, no one in Asia has heard any specifics of the Biden administration’s rumored “comprehensive” Indo-Pacific economic framework, which leads me to believe it will consist eventually of little more than bloviating about climate change and sustainability. What the region needs most is capitalism—beginning with more capitalist voices in media and politics—but any official U.S. contribution to that need will have to wait for a new administration.