A good piece in today's Asia Times on the Singaporean ruling party, PAP, and its inability to follow through on its promises to engender a more open and creative society in the city-state. The PAP's overwrought political fear of losing power leads it to crack down on the free expression a truly open and creative society requires:
The PAP has struggled to land upon a cogent policy response to Southeast Asia's diminished role in the global economy and China's concomitant economic rise, both of which have taken a heavy toll on Singapore's export-geared economy. The PAP strategically called snap elections during a cyclical business upswing, but Singapore-based economists say the competitiveness problems that deepened the country's recent recession remain largely unaddressed.
Moreover, the PAP's attempts to force creativity into Singaporean society after years of trying to restrain it has, at best, met with mixed results. The recent decision to open a mega-casino resort complex is just one example of an elderly leadership's grasping for quick economic fixes rather than undertaking long-overdue political reforms, opposition candidates contend.
As the PAP tries to forge a racier national profile, albeit in old-fashioned nanny-state style, it continues to ignore the necessity of free expression to invigorate the population and spawn the new class of technology-savvy entrepreneurs who would propel the economy up the value-added ladder.
When Singapore's new generation of entrepreneurs try to test their creative gears, however, the PAP-led government often cracks down on their activities.
That is what is happening right now, as the ruling party uses its contol of the judiciary to bring flimsy libel charges against opposition politicians and passes new laws through the dominated legislature to restrict political speech during election time.
All of this is a sign of political weakness, of course. The PAP does not have sufficient confidence in its own popular appeal and governing skill to allow for a free and fair election.
It also demonstrates how PAP rulers, especially Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, lack the Confucian virtues they say they embody.
Chief among those virtues is Integrity, which for a Confucian means living up to the social duties that one has and, through the routine and visible performance of those duties, leading others by example. Strict rules and punishments are not necessary if a ruler is truly a person of Integrity:
The Master said: "If you use government to show them the Way and punishment to keep them true, the people will grow evasive and lose all remorse. But if you use Integrity to show them the Way and Ritual to keep them true, they'll cultivate remorse and always see deeply into things. (1.3)
So, if Lee Hsien Loong was really a man of Integrity, he would not be pursuing punishment against his political oppenents. He would simply demonstrate through his own actions that he was fulfilling his duties in the daily performance of cultivating his closest social relationships (that what Ritual is).
But he is not a man of Confucian Integrity. He is a grasping Legalist, debasing himself with mean-spirited and crudely repressive political tactics.
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