Public Lecture, "Are Singapore's Finest Years Coming to an End?", City University of Hong Kong

Contemporary Singapore is simultaneously a small post-colonial, multicuitural nation-state and a cosmopolitan global city. In spite of Singapore's historically unique qualities, governments around the world have been paying a lot of attention to its experience of successful development and governance. China's leaders, for example, have been interested not only in Singapore's innovative policies, but also in the adaptive durability of Singapore-style authoritarianism, which appears to have resisted political liberalisation trends descrbed in various accounts of modernisation theory. Instead, Singapore-style authoritarianism seems to be able to adapt to changing internal and external circumstances, tiding over, sometimes even thriving on, their attendant contradictions and tensions. Pragmatism, now enshrined as its governance principle (ironically, even its ideology), is usually offered as an explanation for this adaptive quality. But the once malleable system ha hardened, and there are obvious cracks in it. In this talk, Kenneth Paul Tan discusses the near-future of Singapore authoritarian pragmatism and asks whether its most successful years are coming to an end.