Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

Competitively authoritarian, so, democratic.

If Singapore isn't a democracy then the U.S is a dictature.

[dead]

> And since Singaporeans reportedly have high life satisfaction

They do not; in fact, they're the least happy country in SE Asia.

https://www.hcamag.com/asia/specialisation/employee-engageme...

>Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers")

What nonsense, colonizers do not live and settle there for thousand of years. Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there?

>Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.

Albuquerque was the first European colonial who conquered Malacca in the early 16th CE, later Dutch and then British. They all came because they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman, the most powerful maritime empire in the Mediterranean and Europe for many centuries.

The local authorities most probably very well deployed a typical scorched-earth strategy to prevent the Albuquerque to fully utilize Singapore infrastructure. The British did exactly this to most part of Singapore including totally damaging the very important causeway when the were defeated by Japanese in the mid 20th CE. Fun facts, the world busiest causeway still not return to the its original sophisticated design with elegant pass-thru water design until today, thus pollution side effect are still happening and not being solved [2].

[1] Scorched earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth

[2] Why Singaporeans Are Fleeing to Malaysia Every Weekend | AB Explained [video]:

https://youtu.be/vUWOhAs5rTs

In this kind of discussion, you cannot disentangle the fate Singapore from Malaysia. The comparison between the two is interesting.

When Singapore was squirted out from Malaysia in 1965, it had no natural resources, surrounded by hostile Muslim nations ( though not as bad as Israel, but still), and no one to depend on, except themselves.

The Malaysian Ringgit vs Singapore dollars was 1 to 1 back then in 1970s. And now it's 3.1 to 1. This alone is a testament how far Singapore has come.

One important factors separating Singapore and Malaysia is Malaysia's affirmative action (or quota system) that favors the majority, the Malay Muslims, which gives preference to Malay and Islam in all things including tertiary education, GLC opportunities. If you want to get listed in Malaysia stock market you need to have certain quota reserved for the Malays. It was supposed to ensure social justice and diversity, equality and inclusivity for everyone; why should Chinese monopolize all the opportunity to make money and leave Malays poor? This was so unfair.

This affirmative action was started in 1970, after the famous May 1969 racial riot incident. The argument was the riot happened because that the Malays were badly left behind by circumstances; they suffered so much injustice that they had to release it out on others, and the government must do everything to improve their socioeconomic status, lest the same thing happened again. It originally lasted only 30 years but in 2000, the government deemed that the Malays need more help still, and so it's still in effect today.

The affirmative action initiative by Malaysia government would have made any DEI adherents proud for it's thoroughness. Yet when you look at the results you must have wondered whether we did anything wrong. For if it was done right then why, by the affirmative action supporters own admission, the gap didn't close? And why Malaysia lagged so much behind Singapore? And how much minorities were driven away-- and many of them went to Singapore, to contribute to the economy there-- precisely because of affirmative action?