I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the art of spinning is very much alive and well in Singapore. The statements of Singapore's leaders over the flailing experiment to clone itself in China, the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), strikes me as some of the most provocatively fitting fig leaves that the PAP is trying to adorn over the naked truth of a misadventure.
None other than the architect of this excellent caper, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, has come out of the closet over to a worldwide CNN audience, brandishing the veiled warning that Singapore investors may scale down the massive industrial park SIP in view of Suzhou's municipal authorities rival project. Lee railed that what the government "will do is complete one sector in the way we promised to do," and this sector would serve as an example of what the whole park could have been "if we had completed it."
Lee's thundering against the local Suzhou "municipal shenanigans" rings hollow because it exposes the Singapore government's tendency to be blindsided in it's overseas investment escapades. The PAP's pitiful destruction of perceived enemies and clamping on transparency within our small island had given it a false sense of security, an inflated and self-illusory invincibility in itself that it can do anything, anytime, anyplace and to anyone that it wants.
As noble the experiment was in attempting to clone itself (neo-authoritarian Singapore) in an alien environment (authoritarian PRC), the missing variable from the protocol from this groundbreaking experiment was that there was competition to the PAP within that environment. The local Suzhou authorities were the perpetrators of those "municipal shenanigans" provided this competition and perhaps SIP teaches the PAP a good lesson that when there's competition, you dance a different tune. Perhaps, the PAP has become is much too pudgy and not too nimble in the face of real competition, I wonder when will the next anti-government conspiracy to overthrown the Singapore state will be exposed. This lack of being nimble and quick doesn't augur well with the PAP's current efforts to take on the world in the new global knowledge economy with IT and the Internet.
A better way of ensuring that white elephants like SIP do not occur in the future is perhaps to remedy the lack of credible parliamentary accountability and independent critical analysis over the Executive branch's decision-making into such frolics of spending. Perhaps, no one really bothered or had the courage to ask why are we in SIP in the first place. Flash back to those heady daze of the early 1990s with the PRC was white-hot magnet for investment. Just because everyone else is in PRC at that time, people chose to overlook the failures and lessons of other US and European projects who have invested far more and away than Singapore.
Actually, the Economist in a February 1998 article had unearthed some interesting unknown information confirming the hubris of the PAP's SIP folly as the municipal sponsored Suzhou New District began fully three years BEFORE the SIP, as a way to move 130 or so industries out of Suzhou's city center. Therefore, Lee's cries of foul play AFTER the fact are questionable and perhaps a lot of the public hand-wringing and flagellation was for domestic consumption in spinning a tragic tale of the erstwhile good-intentioned scion of the Chinese diaspora returning to help an undeveloped Chinese city learn from what works and works very well, Singapore.
To complicate matters further, the Economist reported that Singapore chose NOT to join forces with the New District, deeming it to be too small for Singapore's plans. A couple of million dollars later, the ignominy of having been checkmated by a lowly local municipal authority, far and away from the epicenter of China's power - Beijing, really does show the depth of Singapore's competition in the marketplace. At least, no one tried to steal Singapore's business secrets or made hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign election contributions, no Singapore just spends lots of our money in the country that wants it, build up some infrastructure and Singapore threatens to walk away. Fortunately, for us, Singapore will never accidentally launch a cruise missile at a PRC embassy. Apparently the PAP leadership was so assured in its belief, and is still so, that SIP will succeed notwithstanding Lee's final face-saving gambit of threatening to pack up and leave behind a tantalizing symbol of Pax Singaporeana in the PRC, a promise of what SIP would have been.
Will the epitaph on SIP's gravestone be "Singapore tried its best but for these municipal Suzhou types, So Singapore wins by showing you what you will be missing" Is it only me but do others think that if Singapore and Singaporeans wanted to have a high-tech industrial theme park, there was no need to spend hundreds of millions for it or for the sake of that matter, building it in the PRC. Surely, some more land could have been claimed from Sentosa and it could have even boosted our local tourism industry? Even so, if Singapore Inc., was to pack and leave behind what should have been in scenic Suzhou, I really hope that they charge a pretty good admission fees for the rides and amusements. There could be like the Tower of Terror where thrill seekers can free fall a tower into several million one dollar bills to break their fall?
BG Yeo's latest spin on SIP is even more slick in "Suzhou shows how 'different we are'" in Straits Times June 20 1999 as he rationalizes that SIP is actually a blessing in disguise as it shows that what has been achieved in Singapore cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. Perhaps, BG Yeo must surely have overlooked Lee's public complaint that the Suzhou municipal authorities HAD learnt how Singapore did it and "they can always duplicate it and offer it at a lower rate of land." The PAP should have known better than to want to teach the Chinese how to be rent-seeking in their own country.
The ultimate irony, of course, is BG Lee's solemn observation that Singaporeans should draw some comfort from SIP "since it eases the competitive pressure Singapore would face otherwise." As far as I recall, the perennial favorite ways whenever we get into a recession is to blame our competitors for being too cheap, land and wages being the two fixed mortal enemies to Singapore's competitiveness. These factors will ALWAYS be there and as I recall regionalization of the economy into South East Asia, India and even the PRC was supposed to develop our competitive abilities. The results have been abominably pathetic.
That being said, I wonder what do Singapore's woes with the SIP show about Lee's sought-after China expertise in the West. One would think that his ability to assay and divine the innards of the PRC, Taiwan and the rest of Asia should come into question when all of the might of the Singapore government under his aegis cannot even effectively deal with some petty municipal authority who is allegedly ripping off a prestige showcase of bilateral national ties, the SIP? Or perhaps, I would have spoken too soon and history will correct me. I certainly hope so.
Could SIP have been avoided with a more transparent and accountable executive Cabinet? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But there is definite culpability in the PAP's failure in provision of a more rigorous and transparent supervision of Singapore's investment into SIP. The Singapore press regaled us for years that things were moving on track and that SIP was not a rathole of money and other rosy pictures of a thousand flowers blooming creating in more feeble investors' minds in snapping up residential investment property vehicles in PRC and we all know what became of that. The very same people who trumped that the PRC would be next new frontier for Singapore's growth are now carpet-bombing the population about stories of the Internet and IT and how it would lead us to another promised land. I really hope that for our sake, the promised land will not land on us (apologies to Cole Porter). Now the latest sexy thing is Singapore becoming the IT center of the Asian universe but more about that later.
John A. Tessensohn Osaka, Japan John Tessensohn