*** Thank you for your interests. This seminar was successfully held on 29 NOV 2020. For video recording, please click HERE ***
Abstract
For China's neo-authoritarian reformers, Singapore, despite being a tiny city-state, long exemplified that for which China should strive: resilient authoritarianism despite advanced development with good governance based on institutional reform and political stability due to enhanced legitimacy. Tens of thousands of officials visited Singapore and thousands of articles and books were written about its economy and political system as part of Chinese efforts to learn from Singapore. But Xi Jinping's derision of foreign templates including Singapore appears to consign authoritarian reformism in China to the path not taken by the mainland's new hard-line leadership. Although triggered by Xi's roll-back of reforms and China's economic and geo-strategic rise, Singapore's loss of "model" character was also path dependent. Chinese academics studying Singapore had long misunderstood the fundamental institutional differences between Singapore and China that went back to the city-state's colonial past and the Communist Party of China's Stalinist-Maoist revolution. Efforts to model economic and political reforms based on the Singaporean 'state-party' ran into the untouchable prerogatives of the Chinese party-state. Proposals to strengthen market forces (by transforming State-Owned Enterprises into Government-Linked Companies), impose limited legal constraints on the party (where the rule of law mattered despite its partial politicization) and introduce semi-competitive elections (accompanied by top-down forms of political participation) based on Singapore's experience were seen as threatening to the institutional foundations of the CCP. Moreover, despite a (partial) revival of Confucianism in China that imitated the Singaporean discourse of authoritarian 'Asian values', Singapore's neo-liberal "pragmatism" and multi-racialism contradicted Chinese efforts to portray the CPP as striving toward Marxist socialism and embodying the Han-Chinese nation.
Click HERE to download the e-Poster.
Mark R. Thompson is Head and Professor of Politics, Department of Asian and International Studies and Director, Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) at the City University of Hong Kong. He is president of the Hong Kong Political Science Association and past president of the Asian Political and International Studies Association. He previously taught in the UK (Glasgow University) and Germany (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Dresden University of Technology, the Munich Federal Army University, and the University of Muenster). He has held several visiting positions, including at Keio University, the University for Peace, De la Salle University, and Thammasat University. He was Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow for Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. He completed his PhD in political science at Yale University where he was a student of Juan Linz and James Scott. He has received several major external grants, most recently one funded by the Hong Kong General Research Fund on illiberal populism in the Philippines. The author or editor of 10 books and over 100 articles and chapters, his research focuses on democratisation, autocratisation, and leadership.
For attendees' attention
 |
The lecture is free and open to all. |
Enquiry
Division of Public Policy (PPOL)
Email: ppol@ust.hk
Professor Mark R. Thompson
Professor and Head, Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong
Organizer: Division of Public Policy