Ethnicity Is Not Nationality. And Singapore Helped Build China's Economy.
Two separate
arguments are getting muddled in the online commentary directed at Singapore
from certain Chinese netizens. They deserve to be addressed separately —
because they are separate. One is a question of political philosophy. The other
is a question of historical fact. Both cut against the critics.
Part One:
Your Ancestry Does Not Determine Your Loyalty
The premise
behind much of this commentary is that Singaporeans of Chinese descent owe some
form of political allegiance to the People's Republic of China. This is a
category error — a confusion of race with citizenship that Singapore has
rejected since its founding.
Nationality is
a legal and political fact. Ethnicity is not.
A Singaporean
whose grandparents migrated from Fujian is Singaporean. Full stop. By the same
logic, an American of Irish descent owes no political loyalty to Dublin. A
Brazilian of Japanese descent owes none to Tokyo. A British citizen of Indian
heritage owes none to New Delhi. Nobody makes these arguments, because they are
transparently absurd.
What makes the
argument directed at Singapore additionally strange is that Singapore is not a
Chinese city-state. It is a multi-racial, multi-religious, sovereign nation in
which Malay, Indian, Eurasian, and other communities are constitutive — not
incidental — parts of the national fabric. Singapore's political identity was
built explicitly against the idea that ethnicity should be the organising
principle of a state. That was one of Lee Kuan Yew's foundational commitments,
and it remains a cornerstone of Singapore's national identity today.
When
Singapore's leaders act in Singapore's national interest — including when that
interest diverges from Beijing's preferences — they are doing their jobs.
Expecting otherwise is not a claim about shared heritage. It is a demand for
subservience dressed up as cultural kinship.
Singapore is
not a "third China." It never was, and it was never intended to be.
Part Two:
Singapore Was a Significant Contributor to China's Economic Rise
Having
established what Singapore is not, it is worth establishing what Singapore
actually did — because the historical record is substantial, and it runs in the
opposite direction to the "Singapore owes China" narrative.
It should be
said upfront: Singapore was one of several external reference points for
China's reform era, not its singular driver. Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the
World Bank, and others all played roles. But Singapore's contribution was
specific, structured, and documented — and it deserves to be understood on its
own terms.
The 1978
Visit and Its Significance
When Deng
Xiaoping visited Singapore in November 1978, he was searching for viable paths
forward for a country emerging from decades of economic isolation. What he
encountered reinforced an emerging belief within China's reformist leadership:
that economic modernisation and political control need not be mutually
exclusive.
At the time, a
significant anxiety within the Chinese Communist Party held that opening the
economy would inevitably mean losing political authority — that market
capitalism and Western liberal democracy came as a package. Singapore offered a
counterexample. Here was a state that had built world-class infrastructure,
attracted multinational corporations, and delivered sustained prosperity, while
maintaining single-party governance and strong social order.
Around the same
period, Deng referenced Singapore's public housing model in discussions with
colleagues, and the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee launched China's
Reform and Opening-Up policy in December 1978. Singapore was one reference
point in a broader intellectual and political process that Deng was already
driving.
In 1992, on his
Southern Tour, Deng put his admiration on the record:
"Society
in Singapore is quite orderly. They managed things very strictly. We ought to
use their experience as a model, and we ought to manage things even better than
they do."
Industrial
Parks: Transferring the Model
Singapore's
contribution extended beyond ideas. It helped build administrative and
industrial infrastructure inside China through a series of formal bilateral
projects.
The China-Singapore
Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), inaugurated in 1994 under a
government-to-government agreement, was designed to transfer Singapore's
planning and governance expertise into Chinese practice — urban design,
transparent corporate administration, integrated infrastructure, and streamlined
processes for foreign investors. The early years were not smooth; diverging
expectations on land use and commercial direction led Singapore to reduce its
ownership stake in 2001. But SIP adapted and grew. Today it hosts over 150
Fortune Global 500 projects and consistently ranks among China's premier
high-tech zones.
Earlier, a
Singapore-led consortium had tested the model commercially in the
Wuxi-Singapore Industrial Park, providing a smaller-scale proof before the more
ambitious Suzhou project.
Subsequent
initiatives reflected China's changing priorities. The Sino-Singapore
Tianjin Eco-City (2008) addressed the environmental pressures of rapid
industrialisation. The China-Singapore (Chongqing) Connectivity Initiative
(2015) focused on logistics and modern services for China's interior, serving
as a node in the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor.
Training
Officials: The Mayors' Classes
From 1992,
Nanyang Technological University ran executive training programmes for Chinese
officials — programmes that became known as the "Mayors' Classes."
Graduates returned to serve as mayors, governors, and senior cadres, having
studied frameworks drawn from Singapore's experience in public administration,
anti-corruption mechanisms, and urban planning. The National University of
Singapore ran parallel programmes through the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public
Policy. NTU alone has trained over 10,000 Chinese officials through these
programmes.
The impact
varied by individual and province, and it would be an overreach to draw a
direct line from classroom to policy. But the scale of exposure was real, and
the choice of Singapore over Western institutions was deliberate — Singapore
offered a governance reference point without the embedded political assumptions
of European or American systems.
Singapore as
a Financial Hub
As China's
economy matured, Singapore became a major financial and investment hub
connecting China to global capital markets. It has been China's largest
single-country foreign investor for over a decade. It operates as one of the
world's significant offshore Renminbi clearing centres, supporting China's
currency internationalisation efforts. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, it
serves as an important platform for Chinese enterprises seeking legal,
financial, and risk-management infrastructure for expansion into Southeast Asia
and beyond.
Hong Kong has
historically played a larger role as China's financial gateway, and offshore
jurisdictions move substantial volumes of capital. Singapore's role is best
understood as complementary — important, specialised, and growing.
The Record
Speaks for Itself
Taken together,
this is not the profile of a country that owes China anything. It is the
profile of a small, highly capable state that provided a larger neighbour with
structured cooperation, governance expertise, capital, and comparative
validation at a critical moment in that neighbour's development.
Singapore's
insistence on acting in its own national interest is not ingratitude. It is,
and has always been, what made Singapore a credible partner worth learning from
in the first place.
Sources: The
Diplomat, New Mandala, NTU Nanyang Centre for Public Administration, National
Library Board Singapore, ISEAS Fulcrum.
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