I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.
Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then.
LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z.... (Read the whole thing. The first part is about culture, while the second part starting on p. 114 is about how he implemented western economic policies without trying to import western style social policies.) Singapore focused on neoliberalism within a social and cultural framework that accommodates the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that compose the country. It focused on anti-corruption and government efficiency, a major weak spot of nearly all developing countries. But it didn’t try to go straight from fishing village to liberal democracy. Like other countries that developed rapidly in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and now China) development of state capacity and civil institutions happened under soft-authoritarian, one-party rule.
To put it in one sentence: LKY was a bog standard neoliberal who didn’t suffer from the neoconservative delusion that American-style individual rights and populist democracy can be transplanted into any country hand-in-hand with neoliberal economic policies.
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.
edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
I would say one of the biggest things is it’s basically the size of a city. But then again, China is basically doing the same thing with a massive country right now.
"I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy: Lee Kuan Yew"
"I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through instalments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents.”
It’s a pretty good policy: Singapore owns most land and therefore you lose the rent-seeking ability on land. So all homes are leasehold apartments and the government can develop places either by right or by using repurchase agreements with substitution. A unique setup that works given their constraints. In the worst case, you get to hold your apartment 99 years and then the government can take it all back to redevelop it. You don’t get nail houses like in China or California.
Ownership is closer to 90% now or something and the 30% of non resident foreigners will have much lower ownership obviously.
Weaponised the court system to repress union backed opposition, despite having been engaged with the union movement in his early years (as I understand it)
It is a kind of workers paradise. If you're well behaved and don't shout you get a good education, health system and housing. 95% owner occupied is pretty damn good.
Huge dependence on south Malaysia migrant workers shuttling over the bridge every day, so it's "homes for us but not for thee" however he did cry when the greater Malaysian dream fell apart.
The arguments over his house and garden post death sum up the legacy well: he did not seek ulogising or mythologised shrine status, the apparatchiks can't resist the temptation.
I see parallels to Britain's Enoch Powell. Super smart, highly educated, disinterested in what others think, Not afraid to be contrarian and not particularly interested in performative democracy but also a bit one eyed on his hobby horse. If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was.
Trivialising Singapore-for-foreigners as "no long hair, gays, gum or spitting" misses the point. Singapore welcomes all kinds of people if they have money, contribute to society and are useful or rich. Modern Singapore has gays and lesbians and tattoos and long hair a-plenty. They're just in a "don't ask don't tell" demi-monde netherworld.
Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
Interesting. I assumed he wasn't. Bad assumption. I don't think he gave a "rivers of blood" speech but that doesn't let him off the hook. Maybe the difference was LKY got to be in control and Powell just got to watch from the sideline.
I think the last part really is why LKYs legacy is eulogized so heavily especially with more left leaning counterparts. In the USA there is no legacy matter for politicians, and they often scupper with one foot in the door and the other halfway out.
None of the things that LKY did that made Singapore great are unique to a dictatorship but him being the spiritual head and huge focus on education is critical. Interesting the USA has a good appetite for spending lots of money on students, but the education outcomes are really bad compared to places with half the spending
Singapore, like other ex-Colonies in SEAsia prove that having been a colony is not an excuse for not doing well. HK, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea were heavily colonized yet after emerging as independent states were able to overcome difficulties, educate their people, take what they learned from their colonizers and have become leading economies of the world.
Governance is more important than one’s history when it come to success of a country.
Most these countries had decent literacy and industry/proto-industrial base before WW2 or before becoming independent states. Singapore itself was richer than Spain in 1960 and one of the richest cities in its region despite the slums. This is why it makes no sense for example to compare China or India, they were just in a fundamentally different spot.
Regardless many of the strategies these countries used are increasingly difficult for low income countries to do as these countries (China is the biggest example) themselves are protective of these industries, there's no push for globalizing and as factories got increasingly automated.
That's not to say that I believe governance isn't important but the one's history is important for governance itself.
Absolutely agree. There's a lot of "yes, but.." in this for me, but the simple economics are pretty clear: post colonial asian states like this do fantastically well.
Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.
But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.
The issue has never been previous status as colony but society and culture (East Asian countries and Sinpgapore are all part of the sinosphere culturally).
I don't think that's entirely true. Britain forced colonies to export only when beneficial to the domestic British market and forced them to import to benefit the domestic British market: India may have produced cotton, but under colonialism it had to import cotton goods from the UK.
Japan did not view Korea as a place to enrich for anyone's benefit but Japan. The same with their occupation of Taiwan.
> Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
Of all the things wrong with the USA, when picking just two, it seems strange for one of them to be graffiti. I have lived in the USA all my life, in some more and some less urban areas, and even from the people most afraid of cities I have never heard graffiti mentioned as a serious worry or complaint.
Eh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls.
I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.
I'm with you. Graffiti is property destruction. It shows lack of respect for property rights. Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
> Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
I think that this sounds good and is a sensible hypothesis, but it's far from clear to me that the corollary of prosperity for those without property is true in practice.
In some places, graffiti means "gang activity" as local gangs tag their turf. If you are from such place, then it kinda makes sense to be afraid of graffity.
But where I am from, there are two kinds of graffity:
- Cool elaborate pictures, usually in "legal zones" walls city dedicated to it. They take time to create, hence preference for legal place and are made by artists.
- Less cool stuff created by skinny "edgy" teenagers, who are jerks to the owners, but also completely harmless.
Completely harmless needs contextualising. In gross sense, no: damage to property is not harmless, it has consequences, costs. In personal safety terms sure tagging isn't mugging.
If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
My point was that there is nothing to fear of. And yes, I said there that they are jerks to owner. Which they are. But, it is not putting anyone in any kind of danger and there is no reason to be scared.
> If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
I honestly don't get what are you on about here. I never seen anyone interpret graffiti as some kind of political statement, unless it is swastika or some such. I genuinely doubt any teenager doing graffiti has any kind of idea about any of those names.
An immense amount of graffiti in Europe is overtly political. And in south America. I know from personal experience. Crete is a hotbed of radicalism and has a massive amount of antizionist graffiti. South America has anti junta statements and support for shining path.
My father landed in Singapore in the 1950s on the steamship SS Rajula, eighteen years old with 10 dollars to his name, to seek his fortune, stepping into a crime-ridden, filthy slum.
As he described it, people crammed into shophouses, kampongs (villages) and squatter settlements with no proper toilets (human faeces and urine were carted away by "night soil" men carrying them in open containers in the streets), no clean water, no drainage, no fire safety.
In 1959 barely 9% had public housing. The streets boiled over with riots, strikes and communist agitation, one bloody flashpoint after another.
Work was casual and wages were thin. The British still ruled but had lost all moral authority after the Japanese rolled over across the northern causeway with not much of a resistance from the brits (the idiots were stationed in the southern island of sentosa with their guns pointing south thinking the japanese will invade from the sea) and buggered them in the war.
Singapore was a poor, overcrowded, combustible place with no business surviving, let alone becoming a nation.
The hard truth the world forgets: Singapore is an improbable nation. By all logic, it had no right to exist. No natural resources. No hinterland. No oil, no land, no army, no water of its own. Thrown out of Malaysia in 1965, a tiny island of immigrants with three races, four languages and nothing in the bank. By every textbook measure, it should have failed.
It didn't, because of one man's sheer will.
My father now is 90 years old, worked his way up as a menial laborer, put himself through night school, became a successful businessman, and built a family. To my father and his generation, LKY will always be their hero.
From a shit-hole to the first world. In one generation.
Literally every country that was ever colonized by Japan hates them in ways that are impossible to convey to most westerners. Same dynamic with China too. This is why the people of Vietnam LOVE Americans despite our war with them (their war vs China is the "1000 years war")
Most of the people from the countries that Japan colonized openly want/beg for westerns colonialists to "come back".
American WASPs and Burmese people (among many others) both have a history of their grand/great grandfathers being brutally tortured circa WW2 by the average Japanese persons great grandfather.
As it turns out, a slur that's literally just removing a couple letters from your countries name isn't all that bad in the grand scheme of things. I'll stop using it when they stop calling me "Jingai" and "Gaijin" because I had the audacity to put my seat down on the Shinkansen without asking the entire train if I was going to lose face by doing it.
I love Lee Kuan Yew and his story. He's revered not just in the West but East as well. Obviously people can't see past his style but they'll never tell you it wasn't effective.
There is a lot to learn from his philosophy and there used to be countries that were on a similar track that also saw similar transformation from a backwater agrarian society deciding from marxism to market economy.
His legacy speaks for itself and I love how he can make Western journalists completely shut up, a true Cambridge law student, he could speak English effectively out of all non-Western leaders.
The only problem is that he lost the war on the hot scorching weather, something that really takes a way from enjoying the country. If Singapore had cooler weather, it would've been completely flooded with all the disillusioned Westerners from democratic countries.
His legacy as a statesman is unparalleled, but his legacy as a parent falls short, given how poorly his son did at maintaining the country his father built. His father surrounded himself with smart people and welcomed criticism, while his son surrounded himself with yes-men and prosecuted critics. And now Singapore is becoming increasingly unappealing to MNCs due to recent discriminatory visa policies, and the rising cost of living is making life harder and harder for young people, with the fertility rate now under 0.9 as people can't afford to start a family.
I disagree LHY inherited a major challenge, one with completely different variables such as a larger aging population along with all the typical balancing act to prevent it being a hollow shell for internationalists and easing burden on the middle class that keeps the whole order intact.
None of the problems you listed are unique to Singapore. Chinese buyers who often serve as effective money mules for capital out of China have inflated real estate prices globally and the enablers at home profited from the transaction, fully aware of the demographic impact it can have.
Singapore acted the best for its citizens in protecting them from outsider speculation compared to Canada for example.
Lee Kuan Yew is praised by Western academia because of 'benevolent authoritarianism' — in other words, the idea that a small elite should rule over the workers. In fact, his policies were authoritarian and dictatorial.
Despite Singapore's geographical advantages, Lee's achievement in transforming it into a great financial hub is certainly a testament to his capability. However, when you consider his track record 'Operation Clodstore;, the suppression of freedom through defamation laws, and Singapore's early streaming education system — it ultimately seems like he only nurtured people from his own faction, believing that parental background matters.
While criticizing Singapore like this, I suddenly looked up Singapore's statistics. To my surprise, its intergenerational social mobility ranks 20th in the world — higher than I thought. Moreover, I found data showing that South Korea's social mobility is even lower than Singapore's. That made me feel depressed. Of course, with a population of just 5 million, Singapore is easier to manage than larger countries. but stil it functions properly as a nation.
And since Singaporeans reportedly have high life satisfaction, it even makes me question whether authoritarianism is really that bad. But I still dislike authoritarianism based on my personal values.
Still, maybe this is just blind hatred — because I've never been at the center of any industry in my entire life; I've always been an outsider
I grew up in the former capital of a country that was colonized by the British and one thing that stood out to me while I was studying the history of my city was how much the colonial structure survived in terms of vested interest and avenues of power exercised, including corruption. I learned how the most of the agents of the crown that came to my town were largely Scottish and Irish in ethnicity, taking a post here just to earn enough money to go back and live a lavish lifestyle, hence heavily indulged in corruption, and that working culture still survives. The reason why it wasn't reformed was not only governance apathy but also the same vested interests greasing the hands that held power at any given time to protect their cash cow. And if that doesn't work using inflammatory accusation to rile up a popular protest by scaring the populace using their insecurities.
I am not a fan of "authoritarianism" but I do recognize that Singapore had a lot of the same issues and Lee Kuan Yew effectively used authoritarianism to drive it out. But one thing to keep in mind is that Singapore got very lucky in getting Lee Kuan Yew as their leader, someone who was very idealistic in his goals and had the pragmatism to execute it. Such a person is very rare and even rarer is for someone like that to rise to a position of power.
> Such a person is very rare and even rarer is for someone like that to rise to a position of power.
Even more dangerously, I think they're even rarer than people who can convincingly pretend to be one. So even if you go looking for such a person you're heading into the danger zone.
Lee Kuan Yew is heavily praised in Korea especially and the rest of Asia so I do not know how you came to generating your reply that he is a Western academic orientalist object comes from, that is certainly far from reality.
In Korea, Lee Kuan Yew is actually more often cited as a target of criticism. Of course, a small number of people praise him, but he is usually mentioned in the context of nostalgia for dictatorship (like Park Chung-hee in Korea), and more often than not, he is talked about as a kind of idealized image of dictatorship created by the West.
Rather, Korean academia and Korean media are generally more critical of Lee Kuan Yew compared to other countries, precisely because of the issue of dictatorship. The reason is simple: we experienced Park Chung-hee. Park Chung-hee receives overwhelming support in some parts of Korea. But fundamentally, academia does not glorify Park Chung-hee. This is because Korean political history emphasizes the flow of democracy. Korean conservatives tend to favor Park Chung-hee, while Korean progressives favor Kim Dae-jung. And since the debates between Kim Dae-jung and Lee Kuan Yew are often brought up, this leads to a more critical view of Lee Kuan Yew compared to other countries.
The link you cited has nothing to do with "life satisfaction", but rather "job satisfaction", which is a completely different measurement. Singapore has the highest life satisfaction of any Asian country other than Taiwan[1]. Being unhappy with your job obviously does not necessarily translate to being unhappy with your life.
I'm curious: why are people told not to use the em dash and the semicolon? I honestly don't know.
When I learned English writing, I was taught to use an em dash after words like 'by the way' or 'to add to that' — as a kind of aside.
For hyphens, I was taught to use them in compound words. And for semicolons, I learned to use them when moving on to the next sentence within the same clause.
Actually, this is formal writing — techniques I learned in graduate school. Is this 'AI writing'?
It's entirely because it's one of the more obvious tells of AI writing. Most keyboards don't have an easy way to enter an em-dash, so they haven't been part of casual conversation for... decades I guess. AI has no such restrictions, and is trained on formal writing, so it uses them commonly. Similar but less strongly for semicolons. Most people just don't know how to use them.
Regardless of whether you're using AI (please don't btw) or coming by your em-dashes honestly, people who fixate on trivial obvious cues will notice your em-dashes and assume you're using it.
Maybe it would be better to use an AI translator. Because GPT has AI memory features, right? So when it translates, it often doesn't include hyphens or em dashes. But if you use a Korean translator, it has a function to attach hyphens to the language (kind of like Google Translate).
In Korea, it's not that difficult to input an em dash because you can type it using 'ㄱ + chinese characterbutton' (both based on the Korean keyboard). But I guess it's hard for people outside Korea.
Actually, since Korean doesn't have em dashes or hyphens, you could simply not use them at all. However, in 'formal' writing, I was taught that you should use them. just like you should use 'could' instead of informal alternatives.
This is really tough. When I use Hacker News, I keep a machine translator and DeepL open next to it. When I translate that way, em dashes sometimes appear, and that's what I'm worried about.
I thought this was obvious, but it seems like writing in Korean and then using an AI translator would be much better. The problem is that on this site, I'm not really allowed to use an AI translator either, so I'm almost being forced to write everything manually. The goal is to get overseas freelance work.
I had no idea that typing an em dash is difficult overseas. For me, it's just two buttons I never imagined that would be an issue. Thank you.
> I had no idea that typing an em dash is difficult overseas.
It’s not. On Apple platforms, you can type two hyphens in a row and let the default text replacement convert it; or you can hold down the hyphen and pick from hyphen, en dash, or em dash; or you can press Option-Shift-Hyphen. I think it’s about as easy on other platforms as well.
Don’t listen to them. The em dash is not some obscure punctuation nobody but AI uses.
He's not a native English speaker so I suspect he is heavily using AI to generate his comments and seems oblivious to how em dash is viewed in the anglosphere post-chatgpt
I've been shadowbanned before because of AI translation, so I'm doing manual translation. However, I didn't know that em dashes were perceived that badly
>Stamford Raffles stands – according to the plaque attached to the plinth – on the ‘historic site’ where he first landed as an agent of the British East India Company on 28 January 1819 and, thereafter, ‘with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis’.
This is one of the greatest lies ever told, that Singapore was an obscure fishing village when the colonial powers came to "modernise" Singapore.
Read the history books, Singapore is bang in the middle of ancient super powers of India and China. It's has been and always has been for most of its history a successful entreport for several thousand years before the colonials first visited, and the later Chinese immigrants settled in Singapore.
The founder of Malacca, where the Strait of Malacca name originated from, was himself a prince from Singapore and at the time better known as Temasek.
The people who originally settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers. Their descendents discovered and migrated to wider Austronesia including Madagascar to the west, and New Zealand and Hawaii to the east several thousand years before the colonial powers "re-discover" these places. They also who speak their ancestors derivatives languages until now, that at one time US government tried to ban.
That’s a different kind of misleading narrative, the “$PLACE was rich in pre-modern times” narrative. Places decline. Heck, by the middle ages, Rome’s population had dropped to just 30,000.
I can assure you Ptolemy never been to India let alone Singapore.
But hey you just deleted your Ptolemy narrative, are you misleading a narrative?
Ironically although Ptolemy never been to Singapore it's apparently recorded in his book as Sabana [1]. Perhaps that the reason you deleted your Ptolemy entry.
It's also recorded in ancient Chinese record in the 3rd CE Chinese traveller's record describing an island at the same location called Pú Luó Zhōng a transcription of Singapore's early Malay name Pulau Ujong, literally meaning Tip End Island because it's located at the southern most tip of Malaysian Peninsular.
The famous Indian Emperor Chola also said to briefly conquer Singapore/Temasek in the 11th CE [1].
Singapore by any definition for the past two thousands years was not an obscure fishing village. It's always has been a bustling metropolitan with international entreport status. Anyone who said otherwise is lying through their teeth and pushing their own wicked narrative.
I edited because I realized Rome was a much easier example. But at least according to Wikipedia, chittagong was one of the major seaports of the ancient world and appeared on Ptolemy’s world map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chittagong. The map was based on Greek knowledge of Asia through trade. But Ptolemy also described the Malay peninsula.
As to your other point, again, you’re overlooking that places change over time. The Arabs built a huge civilization a thousand years ago. But by the 19th century, there wasn’t much left.
>As to your other point, again, you’re overlooking that places change over time
Not much change for Singapore, I know this because I learnt my history and geography properly, I hope you too.
Strait of Malacca has always been the busiest maritime trade route in the world continously since recorded history even until now, and at the heart of it is Singapore Strait where Singapore or Temasek is located.
Even until now most of the world's trade are performed via maritime route even with advent of aircraft, and guess what most of these trades when through Malacca and Singapore Straits. Maritime industry called these Straits the world's busiest trading choke-point. I'm not even exxagerating to say that Strait of Hormuz is nothing compared to this chokepoint, especially in the ancient time.
On top of that, more than quarter of the world's population since recorded history are living in China and India, and in between these two most populous nations are connected via maritime sea route through Straits of Malacca and Singapore.
In the old days, or most of our maritime trading history for thousand of years, we do not have engine for ships neither steam nor fuel, only for very short period recently starting from late 19th CE [1].
During most of our maritime history we use sails. People or sailors travelling between India and China, and returning back rely entirely on wind power that are based on alternate monsoon seasons. This where we got the famous saying of "time and tide wait for no man".
For one season (half a year) they used for travelling westward and another half season they travelling eastward. Either way, ancient sailors from Europe/India/China/Arab/Japan they need to stop over somewhere (read Malay Peninsular or Singapore/Temasek) while waiting for monsoon to change before returning back home. Since Singapore/Temasek at the end of this Peninsular, it's the most natural transit point for these ancient/modern sailors. Whenever you fly over Singapore take a look down to see these multitude of these ships. Although now in theory they don't need to stop for monsoon due to fuel, but realistically the ships still need for refuel/rest/transit/etc.
By the time the Europeans arrived Singapore had long since declined:
> However, by the time the Portuguese arrived in the early 16th century, Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.
How far back and how much context is required for a simple narrative to not constitute lying? And for a narrative about national origin, is it not also misleading to insinuate that successive settlements and polities constitute a singular, shared history?
And Europeans were not the first colonial powers to land on and assert control over the peninsula. In fact, the incumbent Muslim powers the Europeans encountered had colonized the peninsula only a couple of centuries beforehand. Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers") still live in Malaysia, and they're still as isolated and impoverished by the state as they were before Europeans arrived. Malaysia even has its own Plymouth Rock-like monument (on the coast somewhere near Malacca, IIRC), and it's not where Europeans first stepped ashore. And it seems a little odd to presume Singaporeans would identify with the political and social history of their Malay and aboriginal predecessors when Singapore, a majority Chinese community, was kicked out of Malaysia precisely because of racist and xenophobic sentiments of many Malays.
The racial politics of Malaysia and Singapore are at least as complicated as in the US if not more so. I count South Africa and Malaysia as the two countries where racial politics are not only as complicated, but open and explicit as in the US, and like the US the relationship between European colonizers and the "native" groups constitutes only a portion of that complexity. Many other countries have similarly diverse groups, but usually one group is unchallenged in its power and there's very little open discourse about the subject. But contemporary anti-colonial rhetoric whitewashes (figuratively and literally) all of this.
Not sure about Singapore but Malaysia's racism is not complicated. It is discrimination into law. It makes things rather clear. About discourse of course there is not discussion to have.
The most amusing part of Malaysia's discrimination is in the term "bhumiputra," which is Sanskrit for "son of the soil," but today it's used for Malay muslim.
All these lands were Dharmic originally, all the way to Japan, before the various cults arrived.
What nonsense, colonizers do not live and settle there for thousand of years. Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there?
>Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.
Albuquerque was the first European colonial who conquered Malacca in the early 16th CE, later Dutch and then British. They all came because they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman, the most powerful maritime empire in the Mediterranean and Europe for many centuries.
The local authorities most probably very well deployed a typical scorched-earth strategy to prevent the Albuquerque to fully utilize Singapore infrastructure. The British did exactly this to most part of Singapore including totally damaging the very important causeway when the were defeated by Japanese in the mid 20th CE. Fun facts, the world busiest causeway still not return to the its original sophisticated design with elegant pass-thru water design until today, thus pollution side effect are still happening and not being solved [2].
> Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there?
Depending on context, yes, especially considering that (AFAIU) there still exist identifiable (socially, not just genetically) ethnic groups on the Japanese archipelago who predate that colonization event, and who still experience forms of ostracization typical of such colonization. There'd be no cognitive dissonance for me because I refuse to internalize a definition of colonialism that tacitly presumes European exceptionalism and supremacy through a sort of reverse White Man's Burden logic of moral accountability and historical criticism.
For the same reason, I recognize that groups we (i.e. westernized, globalist, cosmopolitan, what-have-you types) typically call aboriginal in a homogenizing, undifferentiating manner were often colonizers themselves thousands of years ago, displacing other aboriginal groups that may or may not still exist today. There are multiple such groups in Southeast Asia. And the first such modern human aboriginal group may have colonized an area occupied by pre-modern, archaic humans. (Or possibly vice versa!)
Buying into the logic of modern anti-colonialism critical theory is not required to appreciate and criticize the harms European colonization inflicted and continues to inflict. But rejecting that logic might be a prerequisite to recognizing and appreciating the exact same dynamics and harms that played out and still play out today among non-European ethnic groups.
Here is a piece of history trivia. Not trying to have an argument.
> they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman
The Ottomans didn't exactly close the Silk Road, but they made it harder and more expensive to use it.
But the major reason for the maritime routes taking over the cargo traffic was that it's much more efficient to sail to Asia with your cargo than to walk it on camels.
So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.
> The people who originally settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers.
That comment upset me as a Melanesian. I'm sorry, but I need to challenge the above statement as it is factually incorrect. What you are claiming is widely spread in a politicized way in Malaysia and Indonesia, and in a similar but different context in Thailand and Phillipines. Firstly, I'm sure you know that the actual original first peoples (called as "orang asli negrito" or "sakai" (derogatory) by "Malay" settlers) are Melanesian/Negrito/Aboriginal tribes. Again, Malay settlers are not the the 'people who originally settled' as you claimed, they took the land from Melanesians. To be precise, the original people are MT Haplogroup P, MT Haplogroup M/sub-R, Y Haplogroup K/F. They have predominantly jet black skin and curly hair or straight hair in the case of some Aboriginal tribes in Australia. These are the genuine first peoples. They were in South and South East Asia, Papua and Australia first prior to the Toba eruption 70ka ago. Today, they have been mostly genocided by 'Malay' (sometimes used to cloud the term Austronesian term) settler populations. You can see this process happening even today in West Papua where 'Malay' soldiers and settlers brought over from Java, Indonesia are genociding Melanesian men in West Papua and taking over their land. The indigenous Melanesians are now a minority in their own land. There's brutal horific videos you can find online of Javanese settlers attacking and skinning a Melanesian man alive inside an oil drum. Truly barbaric stuff. It is a slow genocide but you don't hear much about it, probably because the mines of Freeport McMoran and Grassburg supply a huge chunk of the copper/gold that's key for EV and other modern technologies. That's as much time as I can spend on communicating this right now. I hope this information will help you and others correct your misunderstanding and stop spreading such disingenous claims intended to enable land grab by settlers. Thank you.
Naturally they inter-married, the first wave from out of Africa people (e.g Perak man) and the second wave from the Taiwan diaspora [1]. This as you probably know happened over many thousands of years.
The word one to ten in most Austronesian countries from Madagascar to Hawaii, spanning more than 17,000 km or 10,000 miles (about half of earth's perimeter of 40,000 km). These countries main languages including Malagasy, Malay, Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, Sulu, Palau (Micronesia), NZ Maori, Hawaii (Polynesia), etc are very similar. In particular, "Lima" meaning five/hand is the common and signature Malay/Austronesian world, even in Hawaii.
Based on your throw away name, most probably you're from Papua Island, you probably know that one of its original main languages, apart from the recent colonial based Tok Pisin, is the Malay Austronesian based Hiri Motu [2].
>Today, they have been mostly genocided by 'Malay' (sometimes used to cloud the term Austronesian term) settler populations.
What nonsense, as they said the proof is in the pudding. If genocide happened as you claimed most of these people are gone but they're everywhere. Please check Borneo Island for example, ruled by the Malay Brunei Kingdom for several centuries until the colonial Brooke the White Rajah came. This third largest Island in the world probably has the most diverse demographic population of indigenous peoples in the world [3].
Fun facts, as comparison the Champa Malay people were genocided by the Vietnamese warlords mainly by the Nguyen lords. They controlled majority of Vietnam for about two thousands years but now you hardly find this Champa Malay people, similar to what happened in muslim in Spain. The highly contested South Chinese Sea original name was Champa Sea [4].
>I hope this information will help you and others correct your misunderstanding and stop spreading such disingenous claims intended to enable land grab by settlers.
Since we are in the Singapore topic, by your own definition of land grab by settlers, the Chinese immigrants where the first PM LKY are from, that constitute majority of Singaporean were performing land grab by settlers because just 200 years ago majority were Malay?
Earlier you claimed 'originally settled by Malays' now you're saying Malays inter-married with the actual indigenous population. That's like saying European Americans inter-married with actual native population and therefore European Americans are now the first peoples in America. I'm unsure if it is worth discussing further with someone that would manipulate facts in this way.
I'll also ask you to google about Y-haplogroup and MT-haplogroup statistics to see how it shows the disappearance of male Melanesian contribution to the population in Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand. Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia had official policies even going on today where indigenous Melanesian women were targeted to be impregnated by settler 'Malay Muslim' men. For example:
I noticed you refused to address what is happening in West Papua.
Sadly, I think our conversation can't really continue effectively since you're starting to bring in unrelated topics like Spain and then you started talking about 'land grab by Chinese immigrants in Singapore' which is unrelated to the claims you originally made. Again, I sought to correct your statement claiming 'originally settled by Malays' which I notice you've now softened to 'Malays intermarried with the actual indigenous people'. I think that's the extent of the possible communication with you.
As the article points out, Lee Kuan Yew did not believe that democracy meant that his (or any other party in power) should also help opposition parties politically thrive. While such political philosophies can be abused by authoritarians (and Lee was an authoritarian) in a democracy, I do see the wisdom in it. For example, Nehru - India's first Prime Minister - invited even some opposition leaders into his Cabinet as his party got an absolute majority in the first election post-independence. That was a rare departure from the convention of a Parliamentary Democracy, where only members from the ruling party or coalition form the Cabinet. Nehru however wanted to promote democratic values in India and since his party didn't really have an opposition, he invited some into the Cabinet to ensure their voice would have prominence in the media and the public. But he later abandoned this practise because the political ideological differences made this untenable in practise.
I have no idea and probably not, but it is a bit more complex than that. There isn't any particular rule saying that the only functional democratic model is multi-party democracy. One could imagine a successful democratic model with one party allowing diverse internal factions, for example. It is really hard to get a read on China, but their success raises some interesting questions of how exactly their internal party decision making is set up.
That being said, I would assume that a one party state isn't very democratic. It'd be an unstable democracy.
From what I've read (and this may very well be outdated), Singapore is generally democratic, but the PAP does such a good job of running the country that people don't vote for other parties.
PAP has exploited Singapore's strict libel laws to bankrupt opposition parties by suing for defamation. It is not so difficult to retain power when the opposition has no money for campaigning.
Yeah we've heard that before from people who turned out to be filthy liars. Not saying it is impossible, the Singapore numbers are borderline plausible, but if the leading party gets more than 60% of the vote I'm going to assume shenanigans unless I've seen some pretty strong evidence beyond what a propaganda department would put out. People don't agree with each other all that much.
Opposition can literally just converge to the PAP positions over time. Or internal factionalism causes a schism and leads to 2 parties forming from one overwhelming ruling party. In political settings there are enormous incentives to set up roughly 50-50 coalitions.
It’s interesting. They’re “cheating” a bit at least. They have these things called Group Representation Constituencies: multiple people represent a single constituency but you vote once for the team. So they’re clearly using this to up-weight areas they guarantee and to release ethnic cohesion voting (each team must have minority members in it). Interesting tricks that don’t require ballot stuffing etc.
It seems that Singapore/PAP figured out that policy control could effectively keep power without the violence traditionally associated with authoritarianism. I wonder what other dark arts they employ.
been in China for decades, benevolent dictatorships allow long term planning, elections every 4 years favor short term decisions, populism and waste a huge percentage of time in after elections and pre-elections
China and Singapore showed democracy is not necessarily the most productive way to run a country
The election happening once in a while helps ensure if the long term planning is still aligned with the population, because, new people will be born and some others will ‘age out’, the original long term planning might no longer represent the voice of this new set of population.
Merit remains the foundation of its ruling style, the other, whatever suits the mood of the ruling power behind democratic labels and institutions that ultimately have violated its own constitution.
People throw out the word democracy like they know what it is.
"Over the following decades, Lee built a strong government that was backed by a competent and virtually corruption-free civil service..."
This part of the history, only mentioned in this one sentence, is the most interesting and relevant for other countries, and is really what sets Singapore apart from other countries in the region.
What does detaining someone over an unlawful (per the written law) protest have anything to do with corruption?
Corruption involves bribes, selective enforcement of the law, unethical favoritism when it comes to legal decisions, "favors", etc.
Your links just describe people participating in a protest that was against the law on the books, and then that law being enforced upon them. You can call that specific law unfair, undemocratic, authoritarian, etc., but what's the corruption angle here?
Singapore has been described as a "managed democracy". There are genuinely free elections, and there's an actual opposition, but the government/ruling party (they're largely inseparable at this point) exerts a heavy hand to ensure they keep their supermajority.
One of the big questions of Singaporean politics is what would happen if there ever was a "freak result" (in LKY's words) and the opposition won a majority, since thanks to the first past the post voting system further exacerbated by mandatory "group representative constituencies" the winner always wins big and coalitions or minority governments are not an option.
In comparison, another country considered to be a ‘flawed democracy’ also have governments exerting a heavy hand in redrawing the election map (even getting to Supreme Court) to ensure they keep their majority.
It's not really a proper democracy, the same party has ruled since the founding of the country.
There are severe restrictions on speech, assembly, press and important legal and political barriers for the opposition parties. It is very easy to land in front of a tribunal for defamation or similar for expressing dissent or accusing the government of corruption.
The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.
Lee Kuan Yew has been an astonishing nation builder and an extremely brilliant man with a huge sensibility for politics and understanding the world.
But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".
>The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.
I don’t think this is only by luck. Singapore made the decision to ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ so that they can build a career on it. This attracts more people to be a bureaucrat. The alternative is that only already rich people become politicians and bureaucrats or bureaucrats only getting their bag by joining lobbying firm after their time in government.
IMO, the hard part about implementing this ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ system is that it is often hard to determine the market rate as there are often no equivalent roles in the private market.
> But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".
tbf that applies to all democracies, including genuinely competitive multiparty democracies. Would PAP accept defeat and cede power if they handled a crisis so badly an effective opposition party emerged? That's unclear, as is how many of their appointees would support them in that goal, though it is considerably more likely than nations which do not attempt to hold representative elections. But we've also seen the answer to questions of how much success will someone have in explicitly overriding democratic norms and revelling in open corruption be plenty in the United States with all its storied separation of powers and tradition of political freedoms, and perhaps more surprisingly he gave up quietly to wait for the next election was the answer to what would happen when a narrow majority rejected a guy who'd spent years turning Hungary into his personal fiefdom....
The other quirk about the PAP's paternalism is how many of their authoritarian type policies have been primarily driven by a culture of trying to avoid upsetting people, hence years of doublethink on homosexuality and newspapers being told that publishing aerial before and after photographs of Singapore's coastline might be a touch too provocative towards their neighbours.
Trump is testing the limits of USA democracy every day, just from the top of my mind: top lieutenants worth 5%+ ownership in Thether holding company, Ivanka's husband with the Saudis, Ivanka herself in the ONU, shameless plugs of crypto tokens and cards in the podium after elections, pardons for criminals
In this kind of discussion, you cannot disentangle the fate Singapore from Malaysia. The comparison between the two is interesting.
When Singapore was squirted out from Malaysia in 1965, it had no natural resources, surrounded by hostile Muslim nations ( though not as bad as Israel, but still), and no one to depend on, except themselves.
The Malaysian Ringgit vs Singapore dollars was 1 to 1 back then in 1970s. And now it's 3.1 to 1. This alone is a testament how far Singapore has come.
One important factors separating Singapore and Malaysia is Malaysia's affirmative action (or quota system) that favors the majority, the Malay Muslims, which gives preference to Malay and Islam in all things including tertiary education, GLC opportunities. If you want to get listed in Malaysia stock market you need to have certain quota reserved for the Malays. It was supposed to ensure social justice and diversity, equality and inclusivity for everyone; why should Chinese monopolize all the opportunity to make money and leave Malays poor? This was so unfair.
This affirmative action was started in 1970, after the famous May 1969 racial riot incident. The argument was the riot happened because that the Malays were badly left behind by circumstances; they suffered so much injustice that they had to release it out on others, and the government must do everything to improve their socioeconomic status, lest the same thing happened again. It originally lasted only 30 years but in 2000, the government deemed that the Malays need more help still, and so it's still in effect today.
The affirmative action initiative by Malaysia government would have made any DEI adherents proud for it's thoroughness. Yet when you look at the results you must have wondered whether we did anything wrong. For if it was done right then why, by the affirmative action supporters own admission, the gap didn't close? And why Malaysia lagged so much behind Singapore? And how much minorities were driven away-- and many of them went to Singapore, to contribute to the economy there-- precisely because of affirmative action?
TBH if the government didn't implements these racial policies, I think Malaysia will be worst off - it will stuck in a civil war between the races like many other countries.
But I do think many of those policies are no longer needed - many of the Malays are more educated and smarter compared to 50 years ago. Right now those policies likely doing more harm than good - driving brain-drain and limiting economy growth, but any government try to remove those policies is just suicidal.
Firstly, the 'Islamic' character of Malaysia and Indonesia has never really factored into Singapore's geopolitical confrontation or collaboration within SEA. Secondly, the narrative that Israel is some kind of plucky outpost standing up to barbaric Islamic hordes at its gates is, at best, profoundly naive at this point. There isn't a meaningful correlation to be found here except through the lens of intellectual laziness and Islamophobia.
> The story of Singapore’s ascent from ‘Third World’ to ‘First’, following its forced separation from Malaysia in August 1965, happened under the watch of another visionary, Lee Kuan Yew.
Ah, yet another uncritical narration of the People Action Party's literal party line.
Singapore was the second richest city in Asia (behind Shanghai) before WW2. While the PAP obviously deserves credit for their economic management from the 1960s onward, their starting point was far from the opium-riddled fishing village backwater they like to paint it as.
Yes. All the fancy buildings in the historic city center (the cathedral, the national gallery buildings) were all pre war buildings. No small fishing village would have such grand buildings.
I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.
Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then.
LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z.... (Read the whole thing. The first part is about culture, while the second part starting on p. 114 is about how he implemented western economic policies without trying to import western style social policies.) Singapore focused on neoliberalism within a social and cultural framework that accommodates the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that compose the country. It focused on anti-corruption and government efficiency, a major weak spot of nearly all developing countries. But it didn’t try to go straight from fishing village to liberal democracy. Like other countries that developed rapidly in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and now China) development of state capacity and civil institutions happened under soft-authoritarian, one-party rule.
To put it in one sentence: LKY was a bog standard neoliberal who didn’t suffer from the neoconservative delusion that American-style individual rights and populist democracy can be transplanted into any country hand-in-hand with neoliberal economic policies.
as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.
edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
the prioritization on education has alot to do with it
I would say one of the biggest things is it’s basically the size of a city. But then again, China is basically doing the same thing with a massive country right now.
"I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy: Lee Kuan Yew"
"I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through instalments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents.”
https://sgmatters.sg/i-could-not-ask-their-sons-to-fight-and...
It’s a pretty good policy: Singapore owns most land and therefore you lose the rent-seeking ability on land. So all homes are leasehold apartments and the government can develop places either by right or by using repurchase agreements with substitution. A unique setup that works given their constraints. In the worst case, you get to hold your apartment 99 years and then the government can take it all back to redevelop it. You don’t get nail houses like in China or California.
Ownership is closer to 90% now or something and the 30% of non resident foreigners will have much lower ownership obviously.
Weaponised the court system to repress union backed opposition, despite having been engaged with the union movement in his early years (as I understand it)
It is a kind of workers paradise. If you're well behaved and don't shout you get a good education, health system and housing. 95% owner occupied is pretty damn good.
Huge dependence on south Malaysia migrant workers shuttling over the bridge every day, so it's "homes for us but not for thee" however he did cry when the greater Malaysian dream fell apart.
The arguments over his house and garden post death sum up the legacy well: he did not seek ulogising or mythologised shrine status, the apparatchiks can't resist the temptation.
I see parallels to Britain's Enoch Powell. Super smart, highly educated, disinterested in what others think, Not afraid to be contrarian and not particularly interested in performative democracy but also a bit one eyed on his hobby horse. If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was.
Trivialising Singapore-for-foreigners as "no long hair, gays, gum or spitting" misses the point. Singapore welcomes all kinds of people if they have money, contribute to society and are useful or rich. Modern Singapore has gays and lesbians and tattoos and long hair a-plenty. They're just in a "don't ask don't tell" demi-monde netherworld.
Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
> If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was
How do you compare Powell's "racism" and LKY's views on race and intelligence? By nearly all definitions of racism, Yew was a racist as well
Interesting. I assumed he wasn't. Bad assumption. I don't think he gave a "rivers of blood" speech but that doesn't let him off the hook. Maybe the difference was LKY got to be in control and Powell just got to watch from the sideline.
I think the last part really is why LKYs legacy is eulogized so heavily especially with more left leaning counterparts. In the USA there is no legacy matter for politicians, and they often scupper with one foot in the door and the other halfway out.
None of the things that LKY did that made Singapore great are unique to a dictatorship but him being the spiritual head and huge focus on education is critical. Interesting the USA has a good appetite for spending lots of money on students, but the education outcomes are really bad compared to places with half the spending
Singapore, like other ex-Colonies in SEAsia prove that having been a colony is not an excuse for not doing well. HK, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea were heavily colonized yet after emerging as independent states were able to overcome difficulties, educate their people, take what they learned from their colonizers and have become leading economies of the world.
Governance is more important than one’s history when it come to success of a country.
Most these countries had decent literacy and industry/proto-industrial base before WW2 or before becoming independent states. Singapore itself was richer than Spain in 1960 and one of the richest cities in its region despite the slums. This is why it makes no sense for example to compare China or India, they were just in a fundamentally different spot.
Regardless many of the strategies these countries used are increasingly difficult for low income countries to do as these countries (China is the biggest example) themselves are protective of these industries, there's no push for globalizing and as factories got increasingly automated.
That's not to say that I believe governance isn't important but the one's history is important for governance itself.
Absolutely agree. There's a lot of "yes, but.." in this for me, but the simple economics are pretty clear: post colonial asian states like this do fantastically well.
Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.
But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.
The issue has never been previous status as colony but society and culture (East Asian countries and Sinpgapore are all part of the sinosphere culturally).
I don't think that's entirely true. Britain forced colonies to export only when beneficial to the domestic British market and forced them to import to benefit the domestic British market: India may have produced cotton, but under colonialism it had to import cotton goods from the UK.
Japan did not view Korea as a place to enrich for anyone's benefit but Japan. The same with their occupation of Taiwan.
> Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.
Of all the things wrong with the USA, when picking just two, it seems strange for one of them to be graffiti. I have lived in the USA all my life, in some more and some less urban areas, and even from the people most afraid of cities I have never heard graffiti mentioned as a serious worry or complaint.
Eh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls.
I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.
I'm with you. Graffiti is property destruction. It shows lack of respect for property rights. Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
> Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
I think that this sounds good and is a sensible hypothesis, but it's far from clear to me that the corollary of prosperity for those without property is true in practice.
Why? Do the riches cities have the poorest poor or is it generally the richest cities have the both the richest poor and the most support for them.
Greece has always had a huge problem with graffiti. I did a semester abroad in Athens, new graffiti popped up all the time, but I never felt unsafe.
It's really an old problem, there were graffiti in Greece in 200AD !
In some places, graffiti means "gang activity" as local gangs tag their turf. If you are from such place, then it kinda makes sense to be afraid of graffity.
But where I am from, there are two kinds of graffity:
- Cool elaborate pictures, usually in "legal zones" walls city dedicated to it. They take time to create, hence preference for legal place and are made by artists.
- Less cool stuff created by skinny "edgy" teenagers, who are jerks to the owners, but also completely harmless.
Completely harmless needs contextualising. In gross sense, no: damage to property is not harmless, it has consequences, costs. In personal safety terms sure tagging isn't mugging.
If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
My point was that there is nothing to fear of. And yes, I said there that they are jerks to owner. Which they are. But, it is not putting anyone in any kind of danger and there is no reason to be scared.
> If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
I honestly don't get what are you on about here. I never seen anyone interpret graffiti as some kind of political statement, unless it is swastika or some such. I genuinely doubt any teenager doing graffiti has any kind of idea about any of those names.
An immense amount of graffiti in Europe is overtly political. And in south America. I know from personal experience. Crete is a hotbed of radicalism and has a massive amount of antizionist graffiti. South America has anti junta statements and support for shining path.
I don’t understand why people just tolerate graffiti. It’s ugly and makes buildings look worse. Aesthetics matter.
Nothing more irritating that having your apartment building get a fresh coat of paint, look great, and then someone writing scribble tags all over it.
Did you know anyone who owned a building that had been tagged?
You was never attacked by a wild graffiti jumping out of the wall to beat you up? weird /s
My father landed in Singapore in the 1950s on the steamship SS Rajula, eighteen years old with 10 dollars to his name, to seek his fortune, stepping into a crime-ridden, filthy slum.
As he described it, people crammed into shophouses, kampongs (villages) and squatter settlements with no proper toilets (human faeces and urine were carted away by "night soil" men carrying them in open containers in the streets), no clean water, no drainage, no fire safety.
In 1959 barely 9% had public housing. The streets boiled over with riots, strikes and communist agitation, one bloody flashpoint after another.
Work was casual and wages were thin. The British still ruled but had lost all moral authority after the Japanese rolled over across the northern causeway with not much of a resistance from the brits (the idiots were stationed in the southern island of sentosa with their guns pointing south thinking the japanese will invade from the sea) and buggered them in the war.
Singapore was a poor, overcrowded, combustible place with no business surviving, let alone becoming a nation. The hard truth the world forgets: Singapore is an improbable nation. By all logic, it had no right to exist. No natural resources. No hinterland. No oil, no land, no army, no water of its own. Thrown out of Malaysia in 1965, a tiny island of immigrants with three races, four languages and nothing in the bank. By every textbook measure, it should have failed.
It didn't, because of one man's sheer will.
My father now is 90 years old, worked his way up as a menial laborer, put himself through night school, became a successful businessman, and built a family. To my father and his generation, LKY will always be their hero.
From a shit-hole to the first world. In one generation.
> thinking the japs will invade from the sea
Be mindful of using terms that are widely recognized as racial slurs.
Some 50,000 of OP's father's compatriots were killed by the Japanese, the survivors can call the invaders what they wish.
OP isn't OP's father, and wasn't alive during WW2
If my edgy teenager says that, he'll be in the corner for a good long while.
But if you've been slaughtered and raped, you can call your oppressor whatever you want.
But it's not somebody who directly lived through it. Even the father's account was well after the war.
You are really going to criticize language, when describing a past event like this? This is the definition of woke shit that's ruining our society.
Literally every country that was ever colonized by Japan hates them in ways that are impossible to convey to most westerners. Same dynamic with China too. This is why the people of Vietnam LOVE Americans despite our war with them (their war vs China is the "1000 years war")
Most of the people from the countries that Japan colonized openly want/beg for westerns colonialists to "come back".
American WASPs and Burmese people (among many others) both have a history of their grand/great grandfathers being brutally tortured circa WW2 by the average Japanese persons great grandfather.
As it turns out, a slur that's literally just removing a couple letters from your countries name isn't all that bad in the grand scheme of things. I'll stop using it when they stop calling me "Jingai" and "Gaijin" because I had the audacity to put my seat down on the Shinkansen without asking the entire train if I was going to lose face by doing it.
Educate yourself on what the Japanese did to the people in the region.
The OP is using it in a figurative quote attributed to the British armed forces, not in their own voice.
I love Lee Kuan Yew and his story. He's revered not just in the West but East as well. Obviously people can't see past his style but they'll never tell you it wasn't effective.
There is a lot to learn from his philosophy and there used to be countries that were on a similar track that also saw similar transformation from a backwater agrarian society deciding from marxism to market economy.
His legacy speaks for itself and I love how he can make Western journalists completely shut up, a true Cambridge law student, he could speak English effectively out of all non-Western leaders.
The only problem is that he lost the war on the hot scorching weather, something that really takes a way from enjoying the country. If Singapore had cooler weather, it would've been completely flooded with all the disillusioned Westerners from democratic countries.
>His legacy speaks for itself
His legacy as a statesman is unparalleled, but his legacy as a parent falls short, given how poorly his son did at maintaining the country his father built. His father surrounded himself with smart people and welcomed criticism, while his son surrounded himself with yes-men and prosecuted critics. And now Singapore is becoming increasingly unappealing to MNCs due to recent discriminatory visa policies, and the rising cost of living is making life harder and harder for young people, with the fertility rate now under 0.9 as people can't afford to start a family.
I disagree LHY inherited a major challenge, one with completely different variables such as a larger aging population along with all the typical balancing act to prevent it being a hollow shell for internationalists and easing burden on the middle class that keeps the whole order intact.
None of the problems you listed are unique to Singapore. Chinese buyers who often serve as effective money mules for capital out of China have inflated real estate prices globally and the enablers at home profited from the transaction, fully aware of the demographic impact it can have.
Singapore acted the best for its citizens in protecting them from outsider speculation compared to Canada for example.
Lee Kuan Yew is praised by Western academia because of 'benevolent authoritarianism' — in other words, the idea that a small elite should rule over the workers. In fact, his policies were authoritarian and dictatorial.
Despite Singapore's geographical advantages, Lee's achievement in transforming it into a great financial hub is certainly a testament to his capability. However, when you consider his track record 'Operation Clodstore;, the suppression of freedom through defamation laws, and Singapore's early streaming education system — it ultimately seems like he only nurtured people from his own faction, believing that parental background matters.
While criticizing Singapore like this, I suddenly looked up Singapore's statistics. To my surprise, its intergenerational social mobility ranks 20th in the world — higher than I thought. Moreover, I found data showing that South Korea's social mobility is even lower than Singapore's. That made me feel depressed. Of course, with a population of just 5 million, Singapore is easier to manage than larger countries. but stil it functions properly as a nation.
And since Singaporeans reportedly have high life satisfaction, it even makes me question whether authoritarianism is really that bad. But I still dislike authoritarianism based on my personal values.
Still, maybe this is just blind hatred — because I've never been at the center of any industry in my entire life; I've always been an outsider
I grew up in the former capital of a country that was colonized by the British and one thing that stood out to me while I was studying the history of my city was how much the colonial structure survived in terms of vested interest and avenues of power exercised, including corruption. I learned how the most of the agents of the crown that came to my town were largely Scottish and Irish in ethnicity, taking a post here just to earn enough money to go back and live a lavish lifestyle, hence heavily indulged in corruption, and that working culture still survives. The reason why it wasn't reformed was not only governance apathy but also the same vested interests greasing the hands that held power at any given time to protect their cash cow. And if that doesn't work using inflammatory accusation to rile up a popular protest by scaring the populace using their insecurities.
I am not a fan of "authoritarianism" but I do recognize that Singapore had a lot of the same issues and Lee Kuan Yew effectively used authoritarianism to drive it out. But one thing to keep in mind is that Singapore got very lucky in getting Lee Kuan Yew as their leader, someone who was very idealistic in his goals and had the pragmatism to execute it. Such a person is very rare and even rarer is for someone like that to rise to a position of power.
> Such a person is very rare and even rarer is for someone like that to rise to a position of power.
Even more dangerously, I think they're even rarer than people who can convincingly pretend to be one. So even if you go looking for such a person you're heading into the danger zone.
Lee Kuan Yew is heavily praised in Korea especially and the rest of Asia so I do not know how you came to generating your reply that he is a Western academic orientalist object comes from, that is certainly far from reality.
In Korea, Lee Kuan Yew is actually more often cited as a target of criticism. Of course, a small number of people praise him, but he is usually mentioned in the context of nostalgia for dictatorship (like Park Chung-hee in Korea), and more often than not, he is talked about as a kind of idealized image of dictatorship created by the West.
[1] https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/0104_201503231558059503
Right and you are quoting left leaning media outlets as basis for your claims.
Even on the largest wiki in Korea, the negative descriptions are fundamentally longer. It is also taught negatively in textbooks [1] https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%A6%AC%EC%BD%B4%EC%9C%A0/%ED%8F%89%EA...
Rather, Korean academia and Korean media are generally more critical of Lee Kuan Yew compared to other countries, precisely because of the issue of dictatorship. The reason is simple: we experienced Park Chung-hee. Park Chung-hee receives overwhelming support in some parts of Korea. But fundamentally, academia does not glorify Park Chung-hee. This is because Korean political history emphasizes the flow of democracy. Korean conservatives tend to favor Park Chung-hee, while Korean progressives favor Kim Dae-jung. And since the debates between Kim Dae-jung and Lee Kuan Yew are often brought up, this leads to a more critical view of Lee Kuan Yew compared to other countries.
[1]https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/pc/view/view.do?ncd=5590151
[2]https://www.khan.co.kr/article/201503251135171
> And since Singaporeans reportedly have high life satisfaction
They do not; in fact, they're the least happy country in SE Asia.
https://www.hcamag.com/asia/specialisation/employee-engageme...
The link you cited has nothing to do with "life satisfaction", but rather "job satisfaction", which is a completely different measurement. Singapore has the highest life satisfaction of any Asian country other than Taiwan[1]. Being unhappy with your job obviously does not necessarily translate to being unhappy with your life.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
Please modify your AI writing prompt to avoid semicolons, and the EM dash.
I'm curious: why are people told not to use the em dash and the semicolon? I honestly don't know.
When I learned English writing, I was taught to use an em dash after words like 'by the way' or 'to add to that' — as a kind of aside. For hyphens, I was taught to use them in compound words. And for semicolons, I learned to use them when moving on to the next sentence within the same clause.
Actually, this is formal writing — techniques I learned in graduate school. Is this 'AI writing'?
It's hard because I'm not a native speaker.
It's entirely because it's one of the more obvious tells of AI writing. Most keyboards don't have an easy way to enter an em-dash, so they haven't been part of casual conversation for... decades I guess. AI has no such restrictions, and is trained on formal writing, so it uses them commonly. Similar but less strongly for semicolons. Most people just don't know how to use them.
Regardless of whether you're using AI (please don't btw) or coming by your em-dashes honestly, people who fixate on trivial obvious cues will notice your em-dashes and assume you're using it.
Maybe it would be better to use an AI translator. Because GPT has AI memory features, right? So when it translates, it often doesn't include hyphens or em dashes. But if you use a Korean translator, it has a function to attach hyphens to the language (kind of like Google Translate).
In Korea, it's not that difficult to input an em dash because you can type it using 'ㄱ + chinese characterbutton' (both based on the Korean keyboard). But I guess it's hard for people outside Korea.
Actually, since Korean doesn't have em dashes or hyphens, you could simply not use them at all. However, in 'formal' writing, I was taught that you should use them. just like you should use 'could' instead of informal alternatives.
This is really tough. When I use Hacker News, I keep a machine translator and DeepL open next to it. When I translate that way, em dashes sometimes appear, and that's what I'm worried about.
I thought this was obvious, but it seems like writing in Korean and then using an AI translator would be much better. The problem is that on this site, I'm not really allowed to use an AI translator either, so I'm almost being forced to write everything manually. The goal is to get overseas freelance work.
I had no idea that typing an em dash is difficult overseas. For me, it's just two buttons I never imagined that would be an issue. Thank you.
> I had no idea that typing an em dash is difficult overseas.
It’s not. On Apple platforms, you can type two hyphens in a row and let the default text replacement convert it; or you can hold down the hyphen and pick from hyphen, en dash, or em dash; or you can press Option-Shift-Hyphen. I think it’s about as easy on other platforms as well.
Don’t listen to them. The em dash is not some obscure punctuation nobody but AI uses.
He's not a native English speaker so I suspect he is heavily using AI to generate his comments and seems oblivious to how em dash is viewed in the anglosphere post-chatgpt
I've been shadowbanned before because of AI translation, so I'm doing manual translation. However, I didn't know that em dashes were perceived that badly
>Stamford Raffles stands – according to the plaque attached to the plinth – on the ‘historic site’ where he first landed as an agent of the British East India Company on 28 January 1819 and, thereafter, ‘with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis’.
This is one of the greatest lies ever told, that Singapore was an obscure fishing village when the colonial powers came to "modernise" Singapore.
Read the history books, Singapore is bang in the middle of ancient super powers of India and China. It's has been and always has been for most of its history a successful entreport for several thousand years before the colonials first visited, and the later Chinese immigrants settled in Singapore.
The founder of Malacca, where the Strait of Malacca name originated from, was himself a prince from Singapore and at the time better known as Temasek.
The people who originally settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers. Their descendents discovered and migrated to wider Austronesia including Madagascar to the west, and New Zealand and Hawaii to the east several thousand years before the colonial powers "re-discover" these places. They also who speak their ancestors derivatives languages until now, that at one time US government tried to ban.
That’s a different kind of misleading narrative, the “$PLACE was rich in pre-modern times” narrative. Places decline. Heck, by the middle ages, Rome’s population had dropped to just 30,000.
>Ptolemy’s maps of the world
I can assure you Ptolemy never been to India let alone Singapore.
But hey you just deleted your Ptolemy narrative, are you misleading a narrative?
Ironically although Ptolemy never been to Singapore it's apparently recorded in his book as Sabana [1]. Perhaps that the reason you deleted your Ptolemy entry.
It's also recorded in ancient Chinese record in the 3rd CE Chinese traveller's record describing an island at the same location called Pú Luó Zhōng a transcription of Singapore's early Malay name Pulau Ujong, literally meaning Tip End Island because it's located at the southern most tip of Malaysian Peninsular.
The famous Indian Emperor Chola also said to briefly conquer Singapore/Temasek in the 11th CE [1].
Singapore by any definition for the past two thousands years was not an obscure fishing village. It's always has been a bustling metropolitan with international entreport status. Anyone who said otherwise is lying through their teeth and pushing their own wicked narrative.
[1] Early history of Singapore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_Singapore
I edited because I realized Rome was a much easier example. But at least according to Wikipedia, chittagong was one of the major seaports of the ancient world and appeared on Ptolemy’s world map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chittagong. The map was based on Greek knowledge of Asia through trade. But Ptolemy also described the Malay peninsula.
As to your other point, again, you’re overlooking that places change over time. The Arabs built a huge civilization a thousand years ago. But by the 19th century, there wasn’t much left.
What was the population of what is now Singapore when Raffles landed there? Wikipedia says that under the Sultanate the population was under 1,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore
>As to your other point, again, you’re overlooking that places change over time
Not much change for Singapore, I know this because I learnt my history and geography properly, I hope you too.
Strait of Malacca has always been the busiest maritime trade route in the world continously since recorded history even until now, and at the heart of it is Singapore Strait where Singapore or Temasek is located.
Even until now most of the world's trade are performed via maritime route even with advent of aircraft, and guess what most of these trades when through Malacca and Singapore Straits. Maritime industry called these Straits the world's busiest trading choke-point. I'm not even exxagerating to say that Strait of Hormuz is nothing compared to this chokepoint, especially in the ancient time.
On top of that, more than quarter of the world's population since recorded history are living in China and India, and in between these two most populous nations are connected via maritime sea route through Straits of Malacca and Singapore.
In the old days, or most of our maritime trading history for thousand of years, we do not have engine for ships neither steam nor fuel, only for very short period recently starting from late 19th CE [1].
During most of our maritime history we use sails. People or sailors travelling between India and China, and returning back rely entirely on wind power that are based on alternate monsoon seasons. This where we got the famous saying of "time and tide wait for no man".
For one season (half a year) they used for travelling westward and another half season they travelling eastward. Either way, ancient sailors from Europe/India/China/Arab/Japan they need to stop over somewhere (read Malay Peninsular or Singapore/Temasek) while waiting for monsoon to change before returning back home. Since Singapore/Temasek at the end of this Peninsular, it's the most natural transit point for these ancient/modern sailors. Whenever you fly over Singapore take a look down to see these multitude of these ships. Although now in theory they don't need to stop for monsoon due to fuel, but realistically the ships still need for refuel/rest/transit/etc.
[1] From Sails to Steam Power:
https://www.marinmuseum.se/en/visit/exhibitions/from-sails-t...
By the time the Europeans arrived Singapore had long since declined:
> However, by the time the Portuguese arrived in the early 16th century, Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore
How far back and how much context is required for a simple narrative to not constitute lying? And for a narrative about national origin, is it not also misleading to insinuate that successive settlements and polities constitute a singular, shared history?
And Europeans were not the first colonial powers to land on and assert control over the peninsula. In fact, the incumbent Muslim powers the Europeans encountered had colonized the peninsula only a couple of centuries beforehand. Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers") still live in Malaysia, and they're still as isolated and impoverished by the state as they were before Europeans arrived. Malaysia even has its own Plymouth Rock-like monument (on the coast somewhere near Malacca, IIRC), and it's not where Europeans first stepped ashore. And it seems a little odd to presume Singaporeans would identify with the political and social history of their Malay and aboriginal predecessors when Singapore, a majority Chinese community, was kicked out of Malaysia precisely because of racist and xenophobic sentiments of many Malays.
The racial politics of Malaysia and Singapore are at least as complicated as in the US if not more so. I count South Africa and Malaysia as the two countries where racial politics are not only as complicated, but open and explicit as in the US, and like the US the relationship between European colonizers and the "native" groups constitutes only a portion of that complexity. Many other countries have similarly diverse groups, but usually one group is unchallenged in its power and there's very little open discourse about the subject. But contemporary anti-colonial rhetoric whitewashes (figuratively and literally) all of this.
Not sure about Singapore but Malaysia's racism is not complicated. It is discrimination into law. It makes things rather clear. About discourse of course there is not discussion to have.
a major factor is the lack of societal assimilation.
with separate schooling systems, many Malaysians grow up in ethnic silos, which fundamentally hinders national unity even beyond any legal framework
The most amusing part of Malaysia's discrimination is in the term "bhumiputra," which is Sanskrit for "son of the soil," but today it's used for Malay muslim.
All these lands were Dharmic originally, all the way to Japan, before the various cults arrived.
We are all migrants. No exception.
>Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers")
What nonsense, colonizers do not live and settle there for thousand of years. Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there?
>Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.
Albuquerque was the first European colonial who conquered Malacca in the early 16th CE, later Dutch and then British. They all came because they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman, the most powerful maritime empire in the Mediterranean and Europe for many centuries.
The local authorities most probably very well deployed a typical scorched-earth strategy to prevent the Albuquerque to fully utilize Singapore infrastructure. The British did exactly this to most part of Singapore including totally damaging the very important causeway when the were defeated by Japanese in the mid 20th CE. Fun facts, the world busiest causeway still not return to the its original sophisticated design with elegant pass-thru water design until today, thus pollution side effect are still happening and not being solved [2].
[1] Scorched earth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth
[2] Why Singaporeans Are Fleeing to Malaysia Every Weekend | AB Explained [video]:
https://youtu.be/vUWOhAs5rTs
> Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there?
Depending on context, yes, especially considering that (AFAIU) there still exist identifiable (socially, not just genetically) ethnic groups on the Japanese archipelago who predate that colonization event, and who still experience forms of ostracization typical of such colonization. There'd be no cognitive dissonance for me because I refuse to internalize a definition of colonialism that tacitly presumes European exceptionalism and supremacy through a sort of reverse White Man's Burden logic of moral accountability and historical criticism.
For the same reason, I recognize that groups we (i.e. westernized, globalist, cosmopolitan, what-have-you types) typically call aboriginal in a homogenizing, undifferentiating manner were often colonizers themselves thousands of years ago, displacing other aboriginal groups that may or may not still exist today. There are multiple such groups in Southeast Asia. And the first such modern human aboriginal group may have colonized an area occupied by pre-modern, archaic humans. (Or possibly vice versa!)
Buying into the logic of modern anti-colonialism critical theory is not required to appreciate and criticize the harms European colonization inflicted and continues to inflict. But rejecting that logic might be a prerequisite to recognizing and appreciating the exact same dynamics and harms that played out and still play out today among non-European ethnic groups.
Here is a piece of history trivia. Not trying to have an argument.
> they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman
The Ottomans didn't exactly close the Silk Road, but they made it harder and more expensive to use it.
But the major reason for the maritime routes taking over the cargo traffic was that it's much more efficient to sail to Asia with your cargo than to walk it on camels.
So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.
> The people who originally settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers.
That comment upset me as a Melanesian. I'm sorry, but I need to challenge the above statement as it is factually incorrect. What you are claiming is widely spread in a politicized way in Malaysia and Indonesia, and in a similar but different context in Thailand and Phillipines. Firstly, I'm sure you know that the actual original first peoples (called as "orang asli negrito" or "sakai" (derogatory) by "Malay" settlers) are Melanesian/Negrito/Aboriginal tribes. Again, Malay settlers are not the the 'people who originally settled' as you claimed, they took the land from Melanesians. To be precise, the original people are MT Haplogroup P, MT Haplogroup M/sub-R, Y Haplogroup K/F. They have predominantly jet black skin and curly hair or straight hair in the case of some Aboriginal tribes in Australia. These are the genuine first peoples. They were in South and South East Asia, Papua and Australia first prior to the Toba eruption 70ka ago. Today, they have been mostly genocided by 'Malay' (sometimes used to cloud the term Austronesian term) settler populations. You can see this process happening even today in West Papua where 'Malay' soldiers and settlers brought over from Java, Indonesia are genociding Melanesian men in West Papua and taking over their land. The indigenous Melanesians are now a minority in their own land. There's brutal horific videos you can find online of Javanese settlers attacking and skinning a Melanesian man alive inside an oil drum. Truly barbaric stuff. It is a slow genocide but you don't hear much about it, probably because the mines of Freeport McMoran and Grassburg supply a huge chunk of the copper/gold that's key for EV and other modern technologies. That's as much time as I can spend on communicating this right now. I hope this information will help you and others correct your misunderstanding and stop spreading such disingenous claims intended to enable land grab by settlers. Thank you.
Naturally they inter-married, the first wave from out of Africa people (e.g Perak man) and the second wave from the Taiwan diaspora [1]. This as you probably know happened over many thousands of years.
The word one to ten in most Austronesian countries from Madagascar to Hawaii, spanning more than 17,000 km or 10,000 miles (about half of earth's perimeter of 40,000 km). These countries main languages including Malagasy, Malay, Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, Sulu, Palau (Micronesia), NZ Maori, Hawaii (Polynesia), etc are very similar. In particular, "Lima" meaning five/hand is the common and signature Malay/Austronesian world, even in Hawaii.
Based on your throw away name, most probably you're from Papua Island, you probably know that one of its original main languages, apart from the recent colonial based Tok Pisin, is the Malay Austronesian based Hiri Motu [2].
>Today, they have been mostly genocided by 'Malay' (sometimes used to cloud the term Austronesian term) settler populations.
What nonsense, as they said the proof is in the pudding. If genocide happened as you claimed most of these people are gone but they're everywhere. Please check Borneo Island for example, ruled by the Malay Brunei Kingdom for several centuries until the colonial Brooke the White Rajah came. This third largest Island in the world probably has the most diverse demographic population of indigenous peoples in the world [3].
Fun facts, as comparison the Champa Malay people were genocided by the Vietnamese warlords mainly by the Nguyen lords. They controlled majority of Vietnam for about two thousands years but now you hardly find this Champa Malay people, similar to what happened in muslim in Spain. The highly contested South Chinese Sea original name was Champa Sea [4].
>I hope this information will help you and others correct your misunderstanding and stop spreading such disingenous claims intended to enable land grab by settlers.
Since we are in the Singapore topic, by your own definition of land grab by settlers, the Chinese immigrants where the first PM LKY are from, that constitute majority of Singaporean were performing land grab by settlers because just 200 years ago majority were Malay?
[1] Asia’s secret World Heritage site:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20160518-malaysias-11000-...
[2] Hiri Motu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiri_Motu
[3] Borneo:Demographics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borneo#Demographics
[4] The Cham: Descendants of Ancient Rulers of South China Sea Watch Maritime Dispute From Sidelines:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140616-so...
> Naturally they inter-married,
Earlier you claimed 'originally settled by Malays' now you're saying Malays inter-married with the actual indigenous population. That's like saying European Americans inter-married with actual native population and therefore European Americans are now the first peoples in America. I'm unsure if it is worth discussing further with someone that would manipulate facts in this way.
I'll also ask you to google about Y-haplogroup and MT-haplogroup statistics to see how it shows the disappearance of male Melanesian contribution to the population in Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand. Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia had official policies even going on today where indigenous Melanesian women were targeted to be impregnated by settler 'Malay Muslim' men. For example:
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2006/06/27/incentives... 'Kelantan will offer RM10,000 to each Muslim preacher who marries an orang asli woman and naturally converts her'
I noticed you refused to address what is happening in West Papua.
Sadly, I think our conversation can't really continue effectively since you're starting to bring in unrelated topics like Spain and then you started talking about 'land grab by Chinese immigrants in Singapore' which is unrelated to the claims you originally made. Again, I sought to correct your statement claiming 'originally settled by Malays' which I notice you've now softened to 'Malays intermarried with the actual indigenous people'. I think that's the extent of the possible communication with you.
European powers had taken over shipping in that region since the 17th century because their sailing ships were superior to anything the locals built.
Singapore is a strange outlier among successful democratic countries. There's always stories that are untold. For example,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Chin_Siong?wprov=sfla1
Operation Spectrum untracing the conspiracy' https://share.google/2mRpZk3RGaYUKCRXS
"He was one of the founders of the governing People's Action Party (PAP), which has governed the country continuously since independence"
Very democratic country.
As the article points out, Lee Kuan Yew did not believe that democracy meant that his (or any other party in power) should also help opposition parties politically thrive. While such political philosophies can be abused by authoritarians (and Lee was an authoritarian) in a democracy, I do see the wisdom in it. For example, Nehru - India's first Prime Minister - invited even some opposition leaders into his Cabinet as his party got an absolute majority in the first election post-independence. That was a rare departure from the convention of a Parliamentary Democracy, where only members from the ruling party or coalition form the Cabinet. Nehru however wanted to promote democratic values in India and since his party didn't really have an opposition, he invited some into the Cabinet to ensure their voice would have prominence in the media and the public. But he later abandoned this practise because the political ideological differences made this untenable in practise.
I have no idea and probably not, but it is a bit more complex than that. There isn't any particular rule saying that the only functional democratic model is multi-party democracy. One could imagine a successful democratic model with one party allowing diverse internal factions, for example. It is really hard to get a read on China, but their success raises some interesting questions of how exactly their internal party decision making is set up.
That being said, I would assume that a one party state isn't very democratic. It'd be an unstable democracy.
From what I've read (and this may very well be outdated), Singapore is generally democratic, but the PAP does such a good job of running the country that people don't vote for other parties.
PAP has exploited Singapore's strict libel laws to bankrupt opposition parties by suing for defamation. It is not so difficult to retain power when the opposition has no money for campaigning.
Yeah we've heard that before from people who turned out to be filthy liars. Not saying it is impossible, the Singapore numbers are borderline plausible, but if the leading party gets more than 60% of the vote I'm going to assume shenanigans unless I've seen some pretty strong evidence beyond what a propaganda department would put out. People don't agree with each other all that much.
Opposition can literally just converge to the PAP positions over time. Or internal factionalism causes a schism and leads to 2 parties forming from one overwhelming ruling party. In political settings there are enormous incentives to set up roughly 50-50 coalitions.
It’s interesting. They’re “cheating” a bit at least. They have these things called Group Representation Constituencies: multiple people represent a single constituency but you vote once for the team. So they’re clearly using this to up-weight areas they guarantee and to release ethnic cohesion voting (each team must have minority members in it). Interesting tricks that don’t require ballot stuffing etc.
It seems that Singapore/PAP figured out that policy control could effectively keep power without the violence traditionally associated with authoritarianism. I wonder what other dark arts they employ.
The Chinese Communist Party and United Russia might say the same thing.
been in China for decades, benevolent dictatorships allow long term planning, elections every 4 years favor short term decisions, populism and waste a huge percentage of time in after elections and pre-elections
China and Singapore showed democracy is not necessarily the most productive way to run a country
The election happening once in a while helps ensure if the long term planning is still aligned with the population, because, new people will be born and some others will ‘age out’, the original long term planning might no longer represent the voice of this new set of population.
A country shouldn't be a factory. It doesn't need to be "productive".
Did you know Philippines adopted American style democracy and were much more wealthier than Singapore and other Asian countries?
How do you think Philiippines compare now to Singapore as a result of its "democracy" ?
Competitively authoritarian, so, democratic.
If Singapore isn't a democracy then the U.S is a dictature.
Merit remains the foundation of its ruling style, the other, whatever suits the mood of the ruling power behind democratic labels and institutions that ultimately have violated its own constitution.
People throw out the word democracy like they know what it is.
"Over the following decades, Lee built a strong government that was backed by a competent and virtually corruption-free civil service..."
This part of the history, only mentioned in this one sentence, is the most interesting and relevant for other countries, and is really what sets Singapore apart from other countries in the region.
The idea that Singapore isn't corrupt is one of the biggest lies of all time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m7xrd2z0o
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/spanish-couple...
Ok, I will bite.
What does detaining someone over an unlawful (per the written law) protest have anything to do with corruption?
Corruption involves bribes, selective enforcement of the law, unethical favoritism when it comes to legal decisions, "favors", etc.
Your links just describe people participating in a protest that was against the law on the books, and then that law being enforced upon them. You can call that specific law unfair, undemocratic, authoritarian, etc., but what's the corruption angle here?
I don't think you know what the definition of corruption is. According to Merriam Webster the definition is:
> a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers) : depravity
> b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery); the corruption of government officials
> c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct the corruption of a text; the corruption of computer files
> d: decay, decomposition; the corruption of a carcass
As far as I can tell the law was passed by the legislature, the police enforced the law, they weren't bribed to not enforce it or to enforce it.
Seems like the whole system worked correctly, legally and without corruption of any kind.
It's not a democratic country. If it was then so is China and North Korea. They hold elections too
Singapore has been described as a "managed democracy". There are genuinely free elections, and there's an actual opposition, but the government/ruling party (they're largely inseparable at this point) exerts a heavy hand to ensure they keep their supermajority.
One of the big questions of Singaporean politics is what would happen if there ever was a "freak result" (in LKY's words) and the opposition won a majority, since thanks to the first past the post voting system further exacerbated by mandatory "group representative constituencies" the winner always wins big and coalitions or minority governments are not an option.
In comparison, another country considered to be a ‘flawed democracy’ also have governments exerting a heavy hand in redrawing the election map (even getting to Supreme Court) to ensure they keep their majority.
It's not really a proper democracy, the same party has ruled since the founding of the country.
There are severe restrictions on speech, assembly, press and important legal and political barriers for the opposition parties. It is very easy to land in front of a tribunal for defamation or similar for expressing dissent or accusing the government of corruption.
The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.
Lee Kuan Yew has been an astonishing nation builder and an extremely brilliant man with a huge sensibility for politics and understanding the world.
But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".
>The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Yew and most of his successors have been good bureaucrats and politicians. That makes the ruling party also somewhat popular.
I don’t think this is only by luck. Singapore made the decision to ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ so that they can build a career on it. This attracts more people to be a bureaucrat. The alternative is that only already rich people become politicians and bureaucrats or bureaucrats only getting their bag by joining lobbying firm after their time in government.
IMO, the hard part about implementing this ‘pay the bureaucrats well’ system is that it is often hard to determine the market rate as there are often no equivalent roles in the private market.
> But it's still a system that's waiting for the wrong people to be put in charge and test the limits of their "democracy".
tbf that applies to all democracies, including genuinely competitive multiparty democracies. Would PAP accept defeat and cede power if they handled a crisis so badly an effective opposition party emerged? That's unclear, as is how many of their appointees would support them in that goal, though it is considerably more likely than nations which do not attempt to hold representative elections. But we've also seen the answer to questions of how much success will someone have in explicitly overriding democratic norms and revelling in open corruption be plenty in the United States with all its storied separation of powers and tradition of political freedoms, and perhaps more surprisingly he gave up quietly to wait for the next election was the answer to what would happen when a narrow majority rejected a guy who'd spent years turning Hungary into his personal fiefdom....
The other quirk about the PAP's paternalism is how many of their authoritarian type policies have been primarily driven by a culture of trying to avoid upsetting people, hence years of doublethink on homosexuality and newspapers being told that publishing aerial before and after photographs of Singapore's coastline might be a touch too provocative towards their neighbours.
Trump is testing the limits of USA democracy every day, just from the top of my mind: top lieutenants worth 5%+ ownership in Thether holding company, Ivanka's husband with the Saudis, Ivanka herself in the ONU, shameless plugs of crypto tokens and cards in the podium after elections, pardons for criminals
democracy failed America
Winner-takes-all democracies all suffer of the same issue.
There's a reason why every single democracy to turn authoritarian in the last 60 years has been presidential or semi-presidential.
The only parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian since the 60s has been Sri Lanka, there's not a single other example.
I think you'll find America failed democracy.
In this kind of discussion, you cannot disentangle the fate Singapore from Malaysia. The comparison between the two is interesting.
When Singapore was squirted out from Malaysia in 1965, it had no natural resources, surrounded by hostile Muslim nations ( though not as bad as Israel, but still), and no one to depend on, except themselves.
The Malaysian Ringgit vs Singapore dollars was 1 to 1 back then in 1970s. And now it's 3.1 to 1. This alone is a testament how far Singapore has come.
One important factors separating Singapore and Malaysia is Malaysia's affirmative action (or quota system) that favors the majority, the Malay Muslims, which gives preference to Malay and Islam in all things including tertiary education, GLC opportunities. If you want to get listed in Malaysia stock market you need to have certain quota reserved for the Malays. It was supposed to ensure social justice and diversity, equality and inclusivity for everyone; why should Chinese monopolize all the opportunity to make money and leave Malays poor? This was so unfair.
This affirmative action was started in 1970, after the famous May 1969 racial riot incident. The argument was the riot happened because that the Malays were badly left behind by circumstances; they suffered so much injustice that they had to release it out on others, and the government must do everything to improve their socioeconomic status, lest the same thing happened again. It originally lasted only 30 years but in 2000, the government deemed that the Malays need more help still, and so it's still in effect today.
The affirmative action initiative by Malaysia government would have made any DEI adherents proud for it's thoroughness. Yet when you look at the results you must have wondered whether we did anything wrong. For if it was done right then why, by the affirmative action supporters own admission, the gap didn't close? And why Malaysia lagged so much behind Singapore? And how much minorities were driven away-- and many of them went to Singapore, to contribute to the economy there-- precisely because of affirmative action?
TBH if the government didn't implements these racial policies, I think Malaysia will be worst off - it will stuck in a civil war between the races like many other countries.
But I do think many of those policies are no longer needed - many of the Malays are more educated and smarter compared to 50 years ago. Right now those policies likely doing more harm than good - driving brain-drain and limiting economy growth, but any government try to remove those policies is just suicidal.
>surrounded by hostile Muslim nations ( though not as bad as Israel, but still)
What a bizarre non-sequitur.
How so?
For starters, Singapore wasn't founded by a group of ethno-national colonists who drove out the indigenous population...
Firstly, the 'Islamic' character of Malaysia and Indonesia has never really factored into Singapore's geopolitical confrontation or collaboration within SEA. Secondly, the narrative that Israel is some kind of plucky outpost standing up to barbaric Islamic hordes at its gates is, at best, profoundly naive at this point. There isn't a meaningful correlation to be found here except through the lens of intellectual laziness and Islamophobia.
> The story of Singapore’s ascent from ‘Third World’ to ‘First’, following its forced separation from Malaysia in August 1965, happened under the watch of another visionary, Lee Kuan Yew.
Ah, yet another uncritical narration of the People Action Party's literal party line.
Singapore was the second richest city in Asia (behind Shanghai) before WW2. While the PAP obviously deserves credit for their economic management from the 1960s onward, their starting point was far from the opium-riddled fishing village backwater they like to paint it as.
Yes. All the fancy buildings in the historic city center (the cathedral, the national gallery buildings) were all pre war buildings. No small fishing village would have such grand buildings.