Singapore Doesn’t Have All the Answers

When Singapore caned Michael Fay on a charge of spray-paint vandalism, many Americans thought the punishment fit the crime. The episode became the occasion for philosophical comparisons between a supposed Asian model of society and a supposed Western one, with Singapore’s philosopher-king, Lee Kwan Yew, figuratively taking the entire Western tradition to the woodshed.

But had Fay actually committed the crime of which he was accused? There was and is good reason to believe that he had not. Inconveniently for its admirers, Singapore-style authoritarianism is far more assiduous in inflicting punishment than it is in determining guilt.

The same game was played last week for infinitely higher stakes when Singapore executed Flor Contemplacion, a Filipino maid who may well not have committed the murders of which she was accused. President Clinton had appealed in vain for clemency for Fay. President Fidel V. Ramos of the Philippines appealed in vain for clemency for Contemplacion. The outrage in the Philippines has forced Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong to cancel a visit there.

The death of Flor Contemplacion ought to prompt Asian as well as American second thoughts about Singapore’s attempt to wrap the abuses of hyper-personalized, strong-man rule in the robes of Confucian tradition. Interviewed last year by Foreign Affairs Journal, Lee said: “The fundamental difference between Western concepts of society and government and East Asian concepts . . . is that Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. He is not pristine and separate. The family is part of the extended family, and then friends and the wider society.”

“Family values” are as unassailable in the West as in the East. What troubles the close observer on either side of the Pacific is what they stand for in practice. Other East Asian and even Confucian societies--Taiwan stands as the most striking example--have achieved impressive economic growth and impressive domestic tranquillity without resorting to the extremes of authoritarian rule that Lee justifies by invoking the sacredness of the family.

Significantly, Lee’s version of social order has been embraced nowhere with greater enthusiasm than in communist China. In 1991 Deng Xiaoping invited Singapore to build and manage a “Singapore II” at Suzhou, near Shanghai, as the first in a series of Singapore clones around China. What attracted Deng was what Singapore has referred to as the “software” of its social control. What ought to give pause, however, to all who respect Confucianism is that Chinese communism has been its aggressive and deliberate repudiation.

Singapore has impressive achievements to its credit. And much of Lee Kwan Yew’s diagnosis of Western social ailments rings true. But the time has come to quote a venerable Western proverb: “Physician, heal thyself.”