Review 19: Singapore's Authoritarian Capitalism Asian Values, Free Market Illusions and Political Dependency, by Christopher Lingle (1996)
Reviewed by:
Mark T. Berger,
Murdoch University,
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 56:3 pp. 853-854 (August 1997)
...The autobiographical pages are extremely interesting, and this reader would have preferred this section to have been much longer. Lingle's encounter with the PAP deserves elaboration, insofar as such an elaboration would shed light on the workings of PAP hegemony in Singapore. Nevertheless, as it stands, the autobiographical section certainly explains the vehemence of the subsequent chapters. Against the backdrop of his personal experience in Singapore, Lingle makes clear that he regards Asian values as nothing more than a smoke screen behind which the Singapore government and other authoritarian capitalist regimes operate draconian systems of political, social and economic control. Certainly, the idea of Asian values and Asian democracy has been successfully deployed in Singapore and beyond to justify and maintain authoritarian structures, but Lingle is so intent on challenging Asian values that he ignores the cultural resonance that this formulation has with many people in the region and makes no attempt to explain why it resonates. Regardless of the cynical and manipulative way in which elites in the region deploy Asian values, and their often heavy reliance on coercion, it is important not to overlook the substantive, albeit fluid, role that cultural formulations such as Asian values play in the history of particular types of paternalistic nationalism and authoritarian capitalism, such as that which has emerged in Singapore.
A related problem is the way in which Lingle's highly generalized use of the concept of authoritarian capitalism obscures important difference between various political formations in the Asia-Pacific (pp.39-40, 119-20). This difficulty is further exacerbated by his tendency to conflate authoritarian capitalism with authoritarian socialism and with Nazism (pp 89, 98, 101, 113, 147, 154). His critique of the PAP in Singapore is weakened by his insistence that authoritarian capitalism in Singapore is virtually interchangeable with regimes in China, Indonesia, and South Korea and Taiwan during military rule. Although, he is exceeding critical of the concept of Asian values, which rests on a homogenous conception of Asia and on a dubious East-West dichotomy, his own approach is also clearly grounded in homogenous conceptions of Asia on the one hand and the West on the other (pp. 53-54).
Such conceptions appear to underpin the way in which he assumes that distinctly North American (or Anglo-American) modes of economic and political organization (which he equates with the West) are superior to any and all alternatives. Many readers will be less than persuaded by his invocation of the standard mantras of neoclassical economics (pp. 134-35) and his argument that, in contrast to the idea of a Pacific Century, a "much better, and more inclusive, concept is that of a 'Global Century', where a rising tide of global free-trade lifts all ships" (p. 148). Lingle's book is a passionate report from the East-West battle zone by an unabashed advocate of Anglo-American liberalism. As a text by a well-known participant in the East-West debate, it deserves the attention of any reader interested in the vicissitudes of the new kulturkampf unfolding in the Asia-Pacific."
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