The mantra of governance for nation states across the globe is "follow what Singapore does."
Authoritarian management and neoliberalism
Authoritarian management and neoliberalism
Copy its authoritarian technocratic mode of state management, and you will effectively discipline your population, generate growth, support capital flow, and effectively address emergent crises. This mode of authoritarian administrative crisis management forms the backbone of the Singapore model, seductive to the transnational capitalist class for its ability to produce a disciplined ready-made workforce for global capital, and sold as the recipe for tackling global challenges.
Technocratic authoritarianism safeguards the free market, managing the challenges brought about by the unfettered allegiance to the neoliberal ideology, from climate change to growing inequality. COVID-19, a crisis, is a test case for the Singapore model of crisis management, to be extrapolated to controlling other forms of crisis.
Singapore profits from its positioning as a model for the global knowledge economy, creating new business opportunities that attract both transnational capital and nation states seeking to attract transnational capital. Singapore's expertise-driven techniques of authoritarian management, packaged as administrative-policy pedagogy, work well to consolidate the power of transnational capital across Asia. These techniques of monitored and measured control are sold through its knowledge hubs to the global administrative-managerial teams that come to Singapore to be trained into these techniques of neoliberal authoritarian management.
The Singapore model in COVID response
It is no surprise then that the Singapore model of handling COVID-19 is projected as a model for pandemic response.
The Singapore model in COVID response
It is no surprise then that the Singapore model of handling COVID-19 is projected as a model for pandemic response.
The World Health Organization (WHO) cites Singapore as an exemplar of COVID-19 response. WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, tweeted a list of countries as models for pandemic response, mentioning the Singapore example three times in his twitter thread and citing the speech of the Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong.
A Times story titled "What We Can Learn From Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong About Handling Coronavirus" touts the Singapore model as an exemplar in pandemic response. Similarly, an article published in The Weekend Australian, titled "Singapore early intervention offers a blueprint for success against coronavirus" details Singapore's strategy of "flattening the curve."
A Times story titled "What We Can Learn From Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong About Handling Coronavirus" touts the Singapore model as an exemplar in pandemic response. Similarly, an article published in The Weekend Australian, titled "Singapore early intervention offers a blueprint for success against coronavirus" details Singapore's strategy of "flattening the curve."
The unfettered promotion of the "Singapore model" carefully erases, backgrounds, downplays, and makes desirable Singapore's techniques of authoritarian management. All these techniques work together to prop up and naturalize authoritarian crisis management as a necessary response.
For instance, the Times article clubs Singapore alongside Taiwan and Hong Kong, with the eye-grabbing image of a mask-wearing man in front of the Singapore rain vortex on the top of the story.
Quoting a Harvard study, the article notes:
For instance, the Times article clubs Singapore alongside Taiwan and Hong Kong, with the eye-grabbing image of a mask-wearing man in front of the Singapore rain vortex on the top of the story.
Quoting a Harvard study, the article notes:
"In order to uncover COVID-19 infections that may have otherwise evaded detection, Singapore’s health authorities decided early on to test all influenza-like and pneumonia cases. They have also spared no pains in hunting down every possible contact of those infected. The process, which operates 24/7, starts with patient interviews, and has also involved police, flight manifests and a locally developed a test for antibodies, which linger even after an infection clears."
Note in the narrative of "hunting down" of the contacts the role of the police, efficiently equipped with techniques of surveillance and control. The capacity of the police to hunt down contacts draws directly from the surveillance and control functions of the police in serving one-party political hegemony. Contact tracing is enabled by the technologies of everyday surveillance normalized in Singapore, and in turn, legitimizes these everyday technologies and techniques of surveillance.
The article highlights the strategy of placing front-page advertisements on national media, backgrounding the state-controlled nature of the media.
Singapore's authoritarianism then gets an indirect reference:
"But Singapore’s response may not be directly translatable elsewhere. Since independence in 1965, it has been ruled by a single party that maintains tight control and is rarely subject to public criticism. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, quarantine and isolation protocols are strictly enforced. A permanent resident who breached quarantine rules lost his status, while a couple was charged in court with providing false information about their travel history."
The references to the strict enforcement of the quarantine and isolation protocols turns them into diserable techniques of infection management, underplaying the overarching apparatus of authoritarian control within which the Infectious Disease Act is located. The article then goes on to quote Jeremy Lim, co-director of the Leadership Institute for Global Health Transformation at the National University of Singapore, “It’s a mix of carrots and sticks that have so far helped us...The U.S...should learn from Singapore’s response and then adapt what is useful.” The "mix of carrots and sticks" mentioned by Lim is the mantra of Singapore's authoritarian management, deployed toward controlling a wide array of threats, from activists, to dissenting academics, to social media posts, to the corona virus. The magical power of the "Singapore model" is kept intact, inviting policy makers to consider what aspects of the authoritarian techniques of governance would work in their own contexts and adapt them accordingly.
Now the carrots mentioned in the article, such as offering S$100 per day to self-employed people or preventing employers from detracting quarantine days from staffers' annual leave, are worth noting. The positioning of some form of income assurance from the state as carrots both depicts the absence of labour rights as well as the scope of authoritarian power held by the state, where the technocratic state holds the decision-making power. The article doesn't mention anything about the support available to the working poor and the precarious classes in the context of the quarantine.
An article in The Weekend Australian, quotes Wang Linfa, an Australian virologist with the National University of Singapore, “In Singapore, police can track the mobile phone GPS of all people who came into close contact with a positive case. If you have a really bad outbreak in one cluster they can tell if someone was there for 30 seconds or 30 minutes." The ability of the police to track mobile phone GPS form a critical component of the surveillance infrastructure of the authoritarian state. Note here the appeal that "Singapore’s one-party political system also allows it to impose measures that might not be possible in other countries."
The paradox of transparency
Paradoxically, the Singapore response is marketed in this global narrative as transparent, obfuscating the tremendous power held by the state in gathering and controlling information, without accountability to the public. The definition of transparency here refers to one-way efficient communication by the state of cases, infections, and state responses. This is the form of controlled transparency that enables the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) to retain its hegemonic control.
The rhetoric of transparency communicatively inverts the opaque processes through which the state controls and limits access to data, information, and decision-making processes. Singapore's authoritarian system operates through the control over information held by its elite.
Decision-making processes across institutions is shrouded in the cloud of ambuiguity, where "reading the tea leaves" is the culturally circulated narrative for the lack of transparency. Try figuring out why a dissenting academic did not make tenure, or why an activist can't find employment in Singapore's institutions, and you are in for a "wicked challenge." The absence of a right to information act keeps intact state control over data and decisions. Consider in this backdrop the rampant techniques of state disciplining targeting Singaporean activists that seek greater participation and democracy.
Control and democracy
In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak and state response, the boundaries report for the upcoming elections in Singapore was announced. Key elements of the electoral process, including when elections will be held and when they will be announced, the electoral boundaries etc. are controlled by the Elections Department, established as part of the executive branch under the Prime Minister of Singapore. Several opposition parties have criticized the timing of the release of the report, suggesting that the release of the report is a sign for imminent elections. In the second COVID-19 related public address, the Prime Minister directly referred to the WHO praise secured by the state.
Announcing the elections now, it might be argued, would be a strategy for the PAP to secure its legitimacy, parading its efficient and effective response to COVID-19 as an electoral armour. This strategy of securing legitimacy, it may be argued, is particularly critical at a time when the ruling PAP is transitioning into its next generation leadership (The party had announced in 2018 this leadership trransition process).
Now there are several key elements in the Singapore response to COVID that are similar to the Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korean responses, and to the response of the state of Kerala in South India, that are worth commending. One of these elements is an early response approach that acted quickly in response to the virus. Yet another element is the rapid availability of free testing. Travel restrictions were quickly imposed by both Singapore and Taiwan. These are universally-based strategies grounded in a strong public health infrastructure.
Health and democratic rights
Health, however, can't be separated from democratic rights of participation, freedom to access information, freedom to express voice, and the right to communicate the fundamental right to health and wellbeing.
Health is deeply intertwined with communicative equality and justice. To build communicative equality, we must ensure transparency and voice democracy.
Data and information belong to the public and should not be enclosed by political actors. People should have access to data, and more importantly, have a say over how data are gathered, what data are gathered, how data are stored, and how data are used.
Voice democracy means that people should have access to communicative infrastructures to make decisions, to translate these decisions into public policy, and to hold policy makers accountable.
While short-term pandemic response strategies that focus on disease containment might indeed render authoritarian techno-management strategies promising, the long-term health of humanity and ecosystems are ultimately embedded within the capacities of people and communities to participate and be heard, anchored in open and equal access to information.
There is nothing un-Asian about democracy.
Singapore has operated by selling the false dichotomy of the West and East, propping up its authoritarian model of governance as a form of Asian exceptionalism, as reflective of Asian values. Yet, we witness ample examples of democracies across Asia, challenging this hegemonic narrative of Asian values.
We see substantive Asian examples of effective COVID-19 response from Taiwan to Kerala, operating within democratic frameworks, thriving within pluralist models.
We don't have to give up our democratic commitments to effectively manage a pandemic. Singapore, in this sense, has much to learn from democratic models elsewhere across Asia embedded in Asian values, in how the democratic spirit can be sustained while effectively addressing crises.
Singapore often uses its contextual difference, packaged into the "Asian values" umbrella, to legitimize its techniques of surveillance and state control. The corollary of this logic is that the techniques of surveillance and risk management developed within the authoritarian context of Singapore don't really travel to the pluralist contexts of democracies elsewhere. Similarly, the "small state" argument deployed by Singapore elite to legitimize its authoritarianism ought to be turned on its head; what is invented to discipline the populace of a small state doesn't translate into the complex and plural democracies elsewhere. By this logic, what is invented and implemented in Singapore should stay in Singapore.
At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, we must not take-for-granted the value of democracy to human health and wellbeing.
Without democracy, health and wellbeing are threatened on the long term. Let's not forget that neoliberal governmentality thrives on crisis, leveraging a crisis to legitimize the most grotesque of state responses serving the interests of the capitalist class in the global free market. Techniques of surveillance and control legitimized in the face of a crisis, supported uncritically, are likely to be legitimized into everyday forms of governance, extended to managing other forms of what gets termed as a crisis by the state. For instance, the same techniques of surveillance and police geomapping might be legitimized as appropriate and necessary instruments for controlling protest and dissent, constructed as risk to neoliberal governance (some recent examples of this include the narrative strategy pursued by the Singapore state in supporting the cancellation of a course on dissent at the Yale-NUS college, and in the projection of Hong Kong protests as risks to be managed).
What we uncritically jump onto holding up now in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving up our fundamental expectations of freedom, is likely to form the infrastructure of greater authoritarian governmentality.
In developing pandemic responses to global health, we must look for examples that are anchored in the fundamental principles of universal health, human rights, and most importantly, democratic participation.
An article in The Weekend Australian, quotes Wang Linfa, an Australian virologist with the National University of Singapore, “In Singapore, police can track the mobile phone GPS of all people who came into close contact with a positive case. If you have a really bad outbreak in one cluster they can tell if someone was there for 30 seconds or 30 minutes." The ability of the police to track mobile phone GPS form a critical component of the surveillance infrastructure of the authoritarian state. Note here the appeal that "Singapore’s one-party political system also allows it to impose measures that might not be possible in other countries."
The paradox of transparency
Paradoxically, the Singapore response is marketed in this global narrative as transparent, obfuscating the tremendous power held by the state in gathering and controlling information, without accountability to the public. The definition of transparency here refers to one-way efficient communication by the state of cases, infections, and state responses. This is the form of controlled transparency that enables the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) to retain its hegemonic control.
The rhetoric of transparency communicatively inverts the opaque processes through which the state controls and limits access to data, information, and decision-making processes. Singapore's authoritarian system operates through the control over information held by its elite.
Decision-making processes across institutions is shrouded in the cloud of ambuiguity, where "reading the tea leaves" is the culturally circulated narrative for the lack of transparency. Try figuring out why a dissenting academic did not make tenure, or why an activist can't find employment in Singapore's institutions, and you are in for a "wicked challenge." The absence of a right to information act keeps intact state control over data and decisions. Consider in this backdrop the rampant techniques of state disciplining targeting Singaporean activists that seek greater participation and democracy.
Control and democracy
In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak and state response, the boundaries report for the upcoming elections in Singapore was announced. Key elements of the electoral process, including when elections will be held and when they will be announced, the electoral boundaries etc. are controlled by the Elections Department, established as part of the executive branch under the Prime Minister of Singapore. Several opposition parties have criticized the timing of the release of the report, suggesting that the release of the report is a sign for imminent elections. In the second COVID-19 related public address, the Prime Minister directly referred to the WHO praise secured by the state.
Announcing the elections now, it might be argued, would be a strategy for the PAP to secure its legitimacy, parading its efficient and effective response to COVID-19 as an electoral armour. This strategy of securing legitimacy, it may be argued, is particularly critical at a time when the ruling PAP is transitioning into its next generation leadership (The party had announced in 2018 this leadership trransition process).
Now there are several key elements in the Singapore response to COVID that are similar to the Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korean responses, and to the response of the state of Kerala in South India, that are worth commending. One of these elements is an early response approach that acted quickly in response to the virus. Yet another element is the rapid availability of free testing. Travel restrictions were quickly imposed by both Singapore and Taiwan. These are universally-based strategies grounded in a strong public health infrastructure.
Health and democratic rights
Health, however, can't be separated from democratic rights of participation, freedom to access information, freedom to express voice, and the right to communicate the fundamental right to health and wellbeing.
Health is deeply intertwined with communicative equality and justice. To build communicative equality, we must ensure transparency and voice democracy.
Data and information belong to the public and should not be enclosed by political actors. People should have access to data, and more importantly, have a say over how data are gathered, what data are gathered, how data are stored, and how data are used.
Voice democracy means that people should have access to communicative infrastructures to make decisions, to translate these decisions into public policy, and to hold policy makers accountable.
While short-term pandemic response strategies that focus on disease containment might indeed render authoritarian techno-management strategies promising, the long-term health of humanity and ecosystems are ultimately embedded within the capacities of people and communities to participate and be heard, anchored in open and equal access to information.
There is nothing un-Asian about democracy.
Singapore has operated by selling the false dichotomy of the West and East, propping up its authoritarian model of governance as a form of Asian exceptionalism, as reflective of Asian values. Yet, we witness ample examples of democracies across Asia, challenging this hegemonic narrative of Asian values.
We see substantive Asian examples of effective COVID-19 response from Taiwan to Kerala, operating within democratic frameworks, thriving within pluralist models.
We don't have to give up our democratic commitments to effectively manage a pandemic. Singapore, in this sense, has much to learn from democratic models elsewhere across Asia embedded in Asian values, in how the democratic spirit can be sustained while effectively addressing crises.
Singapore often uses its contextual difference, packaged into the "Asian values" umbrella, to legitimize its techniques of surveillance and state control. The corollary of this logic is that the techniques of surveillance and risk management developed within the authoritarian context of Singapore don't really travel to the pluralist contexts of democracies elsewhere. Similarly, the "small state" argument deployed by Singapore elite to legitimize its authoritarianism ought to be turned on its head; what is invented to discipline the populace of a small state doesn't translate into the complex and plural democracies elsewhere. By this logic, what is invented and implemented in Singapore should stay in Singapore.
At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, we must not take-for-granted the value of democracy to human health and wellbeing.
Without democracy, health and wellbeing are threatened on the long term. Let's not forget that neoliberal governmentality thrives on crisis, leveraging a crisis to legitimize the most grotesque of state responses serving the interests of the capitalist class in the global free market. Techniques of surveillance and control legitimized in the face of a crisis, supported uncritically, are likely to be legitimized into everyday forms of governance, extended to managing other forms of what gets termed as a crisis by the state. For instance, the same techniques of surveillance and police geomapping might be legitimized as appropriate and necessary instruments for controlling protest and dissent, constructed as risk to neoliberal governance (some recent examples of this include the narrative strategy pursued by the Singapore state in supporting the cancellation of a course on dissent at the Yale-NUS college, and in the projection of Hong Kong protests as risks to be managed).
What we uncritically jump onto holding up now in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving up our fundamental expectations of freedom, is likely to form the infrastructure of greater authoritarian governmentality.
In developing pandemic responses to global health, we must look for examples that are anchored in the fundamental principles of universal health, human rights, and most importantly, democratic participation.