(2015) People have been talking about the former leader of Singapore as though he was a great leader who provided an example for the authoritarian approach to development. There are several reasons, regardless of the truth about how Singapore developed, that we should not treat him either with such respect, or more importantly, as such an exception to the normal course of affairs.
People assert that LKY managed to develop Singapore without corruption. They cannot credibly make this claim without the required freedom of speech and opposition party presence required to expose wide-scale corruption on a semi-regular basis; they do not have a test that can show this was true.
People assert that LKY’s model contrasts with that of the development of the Western powers. That is incorrect: the cleaning up of ordinary corruption in an environment of political repression of minorities was a common theme throughout the development of the Western powers through the Industrial Revolution. Further, Singapore was not invaded, laid waste, and colonized during his time, which was a common cause of the poverty in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Furthermore, Singapore had the choice under LKY to adopt a policy of free-trade without coercion by outside powers. Mainland China, which began industrial development in the 1800s, did not have such freedom. Furthermore, many of the countries in the Asia sphere, such as South Korea and Taiwan, were able to leverage the same post-WWII environment of relative free-trade in order to develop. Japan, a resource-poor country devastated by the war, also managed to rebuild in this environment. As a relative tax haven, Singapore also prospers using the same techniques as other tax havens; the high average income is not really anomalous in that context.
His territory was small, and he did not have to build, defend, or manage an empire. In that regard, the kings of other eras stand above him in accomplishment (and also in opportunity in most cases). Hence, we cannot say that his approach and technique would scale to a country the size of the current PRC, i.e. that it wouldn’t be horrendously corrupt, polluted, and fractious. Nor is the fact that he can develop a city under autocracy abnormal; the hard part is maintaining the peace and prosperity, which have not become materially better during the entire of his reign (though of course we would not attribute that failure to him).
We should recognize LKY for what he probably was, subject to the inevitable revelations from archives and oral history: an ordinary example of roughly competent government in an environment where his failings in development and lack of regard for the future beyond his rule could be momentarily offset by well-known wealth-preserving and mercantilist policies, without interruption by rudeness like firebombing and wild pillaging. In other words, just another autocrat.