Cherian George’s “Singapore, Incomplete” Book Launch
Dr. Cherian George, an outspoken critic of the Singapore government, does not subscribe to the idea of the People’s Action Party being ousted from its one-party dominance of the city-state.
Instead, the former Straits Times journalist believes that, despite an increasingly unhappy citizenry in recent years, the progress of the nation is more plausible with a reformed PAP.
“Even if the opposition (parties) remain weak, isn’t it possible that openness towards political competition, to alternate ways of thinks, will come from within the (PAP)? I think, given the state of affairs in Singapore now, there’s no running away from this,” Dr. George says during the launch of his book, Singapore, Incomplete, at the Grassroots Book Room on December 10.
The book, a collection of essays focusing on Singapore’s arrested democracy, serves as the academic’s personal intellectual challenge and “responsibility as a citizen” to explore this controversial topic.
Before his current post at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Dr. George had his continuing tenure at the Nanyang Technological University denied — a decision which observers suggest was politically motivated over his remarks about the government. With Singapore, Incomplete, he hopes specifically to get his message across to young, future leaders of the PAP.
“I’m doing something that does not come naturally to me, which is to reach out to people who think rather differently from me,” Dr. George reveals, identifying conservative PAP supporters and party members as the people he wishes to address to. “At the end of the day, if (the PAP) is going to be dictating the pace of change and the way Singapore is going to evolve in the short to medium term, shouldn’t we engage them? And so that’s how I approach this book.”
PAP suffers a 2011 “shock therapy”
As Dr. George observes, the PAP had learned its lesson from the 2011 election — an event marking a historic first when the opposition Worker’s Party won the control of Aljunied GRC from the incumbent PAP — by addressing longstanding problems it could have dealt with years ago. In fact, its once unrestrained immigration policy frustrated Singaporeans for two decades prior to 2011. Dr. George recalls his Straits Times colleagues uncovering dissensions from the ground in the early 1990s as people expressed unhappiness over bond-free university scholarships being freely given to non-citizens as well as employers’ preferences to hire expats over locals.
“(My journalist friends) never got to write about it because of the government’s control of mainstream media… So those grievances remain suppressed,” Dr. George says. He adds that the public grievances over government policies which would haunt the PAP in the 2011 election should not come as a surprise as “they have been simmering for years.”
Eventually, the PAP began to tackle seriously the key concerns of housing, healthcare and transport. It may be a little too late for a more reasonable public discourse of immigration, which, although the government started to control tightly, had devolved into a contentious and “toxic” debate.
“Wouldn’t it be better if, at the very early stage, the Singaporeans who are very unhappy about certain policies did have their say published (by the press),” Dr. George ponders. “It would be better if those early hints of unhappiness (were made known) 10, 20 years earlier and that would have forced the PAP to respond much earlier to this unhappiness, rather than (let) it to grow to a much more unmanageable degree.”
Nevertheless, having recovered sufficiently from its 2011 “shock therapy”, the PAP did well enough in the following years to gather 69.86% of the popular vote in the 2015 election, a better result perhaps bolstered by the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister, and the SG50 celebrations in that year.
Getting tougher on government critics
But what especially troubles Dr. George is the way the Singapore government calibrates its national posture in the aftermath of the 2011 election.
“(The PAP) did enough between 2011 to 2015 to convince voters that it was listening to people… and enough voters felt that the PAP has learned its lesson so we can now cut it some slack. It seems to be what happened in (the 2015 election),” Dr. George points out.
The government, however, had “largely decided there’s simply no pleasing bloggers” and other establishment critics and proceeded to deal with them harshly. This would lead to defamation lawsuits, a notorious tool wielded by the PAP to bring down foreign media and opposition politicians, being employed against “relatively unknown bloggers and treating them as serious opponents.”
In addition, the government acted to increasingly restrict academia and civil society activism as part of the “other side” of its post-2011 response.
“The first side was, yes, a positive response to grievances on the ground. (But) if you look at (the PAP’s) actions, it is quite clear that they decided after 2011, “Let’s assume (the critics) are not representative (of the mainstream). If we look after the interests of the majority, we can, in fact, be even harsher to our critics than we used to”,” Dr. George explains.
“2015 actually proved to them that this is a gamble that worked. There was indeed no need to pander to the critics as long as it got its basic policies right. Since (then), there is an even greater hardening of its posture towards critics.”
It does not help that 2017 saw a rather rocky year for the PAP in light of the Lee family feud, MRT breakdowns and the reserved presidential election. “You see the Singapore government losing a bit of its old aura of policy infallibility. It now looks like a government that is capable of making mistakes, alongside its other capabilities,” Dr. George opines.
Singapore’s democratic inertia
Yet, despite the rise of negative sentiments towards the PAP in recent years, critics have resigned to the fact that nothing will change since the election system is widely perceived to be “tilted in the PAP’s favour.”
“The typical conversation in Singapore now goes something like this: grumblings, complaining about the government’s mistakes, but usually, someone at the end of the conversation will say, “But you know what? Singaporeans are still gonna vote for PAP in the next election”,” Dr. George says.
Other factors contribute to the inertia of democracy in Singapore: weak opposition parties and swing voters who are risk-averse and “quite easily pacified by a government that performs well.”
Furthermore, the government had started developing its capability of “sentiment analysis”, which is the use of digital technology and big data to study public sentiments over government policies in real-time, Dr. George claims.
“My guess is that its capacity to do so is quite large. That would be, they will no longer be caught napping the way it did in 2011. That it will know, for example, (whether) the talk of raising the GST rates will be costly in an election. And it will be able to track when the unhappiness will peak and die down, in time for the next election.”
Such an Orwellian use of digital technology hardly impresses Dr. George who thinks it may run against the PAP’s philosophy of not overstating elections or placing a government in power through referendum.
“Yes, elections are necessary but you also need to, for example, protect the rule of law and minority rights from majoritarianism. We shouldn’t just decide to go ahead or not go ahead with something based on what the majority wants because what the majority wants may violate minority rights,” Dr. George states. “You also need to preserve spaces for expert decision-making. Not all decisions should be made according to public opinion.”
He further argues that sentiment analysis is “a refinement of top-down mode of government” and does little to improve decision-making at highest level of governance.
The government going forward
Change should most fundamentally begin at the heart of the ruling party, according to Dr. George. He is concerned that the PAP’s 2011 post-mortem is inadequate as well as the lack of talents — who have experiences in private corporate sectors — within the present Cabinet. Most ministers hail from the higher echelons of the military and civil service, and closed-shop professions like medicine and law.
“Try to look for someone with the kind of experience that one would assume will be extremely relevant for Singapore, which is, say, a minister with 20 years of experience in a globally exposed industry, who throughout his working life has had to confront the challenge of creating jobs, creating wealth and face intense competition from multiple players and in the context of constant change,” Dr. George says.
“This is the reality facing most businesses in Singapore. As a country, this is surely the reality faced by Singapore now and into the future. Intense competition where you do not get to control what people say about you, where you have to take it for granted that you are operating with open flows of information and constant change… If (the government) is interested in preserving PAP dominance, shouldn’t you want people with that kind of experience at the center of the government?”
Ultimately, Dr. George blames groupthink which might prevent the government from realising its full potential as it helps shield “top policymakers from ideas that are inconvenient (and) too uncomfortable.” An open democracy may hamper the government’s implementation of its policies but Dr. George thinks that the trade-off of slow and inefficient governance is that the PAP doesn’t end up making wrong decisions for moving ahead too fast.
He remains hopeful that Singapore’s democracy could blossom beyond its current state. While Singaporeans tend to discuss this subject in terms of the success of opposition parties, Dr. George believes there is another way to look at it.
“I think there are some avenues that we have not explored sufficiently. And one particular avenue is the possibility of an internal reform within the PAP,” he remarks.
Of course, more work needs to be done in that area. Pointing to the government’s reliance on sentiment analysis to manage the expectations of the populace, Dr. George says that “there is no alternative but to open up (the government’s) decision-making to internal competition as well as to external scrutiny.”
“…we are talking about more freedom of speech, more freedom of expression, more critics from the outside, as well as a more competitive and open approach to government, valuing dissenting voices from within, rather than treating establishment critics or critics from within the cabinet or civil service as necessarily enemies of the state,” Dr. George summarises.
