Refrigerated State

Review of Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited: Essays on Singapore Politics by Cherian George (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2020)
By Jini Kim Watson

It’s easy to caricature Singapore for its famously efficient but illiberal government. In late March and April of this year, when U.S. states were responding to the novel coronavirus crisis with a hodgepodge of restrictions and, unbelievably, President Trump was suggesting the public drink bleach as a COVID-19 prophylactic, I felt a twinge of envy for my cousins in Singapore when we WhatsApped each other: surely they were going to fare much better than I was in New York City. Sure enough, Singapore quickly rolled out harsh new laws to enforce social distancing and a mobile app for contact tracing. Brisk revisions to its 2003 Infectious Diseases Act meant that individuals who stood within one meter of another person were subject to $S10,000 (approx. US $7,000) fine or six months jail. Cherian George’s Air-Conditioned Nation, Revisited, a highly readable set of essays on the city-state’s unique “soft authoritarian” political culture, explains why the government can respond which such terrifying efficiency. George, a former journalist for The Straits Times and now a professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, is an expert on free speech and the media, censorship and, most recently, hate speech. While these interests inform his less-than-flattering depiction of the People’s Action Party (PAP), the only governing party independent Singapore has known, George is careful to characterize his motivation as a patriotic one. Comprising thirty-seven short opinion pieces—many from the 2000 edition of Air-Conditioned Nation, which themselves draw on pieces published in The Straits Times, and a number from his 2017 collection Singapore, Incomplete—the anthology provides a political physiognomy of the PAP and how it has indelibly shaped the postcolonial island nation it has dominated since the 1950s.

George has a knack for the political metaphor, and there is much pleasure in watching him unpack them in various essays. The titular metaphor comes from a quote by Singapore’s longtime prime minister and “founding father” Lee Kuan Yew, who declared the cooling technology to be the most influential invention of the previous millennium. George offers the term “air-conditioned nation” as an alternative to muddled labels such as “authoritarian democracy” or “benevolent dictatorship” that outsiders are wont to stick on the city-state. Instead, he writes, “think of Singapore as the Air-Conditioned Nation—a society with a unique blend of comfort and central control, where people have mastered their environment, but at the cost of individual autonomy, and at the risk of unsustainability.” In another technological metaphor, the PAP’s vision of politics is likened to the nation’s highly lucrative semiconductor plants. Ideally, it is a realm that should be “conducted in an antiseptic environment, generates high value-added productivity, and with all participants agreeing to keep it clean—or stay out.”

That the PAP still maintains an incredible supermajority of seats in parliament—elections just held in July gave the party 83 out of 93 seats, or 89%—is an astonishing feat of modern electoral politics. For non-Singaporeans, the interest of Air-Conditioned Nation, Revisited lies in its intimate view onto a political system that has crafted its own unique, sometimes quirky, brand of authoritarianism. Neither the openly repressive, anti-democratic rule of a Suharto or a Marcos, nor the one-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party, but also not a populist authoritarian regime such as that of Modi or Duterte (or, increasingly, Trump), the PAP has succeeded in melding a high-growth capitalist economy with a gleaming global city image while rejecting a Western liberal democratic model. This is less to do, as George explains, with the government’s vaunted “Asian Way” ideology of the 1990s, than with the fact that Singapore was “born in a world divided” by the Cold War competition between communism and capitalism: “We lie somewhere between these two poles.” The PAP has held uninterrupted power for seven decades through both its remarkable track record in bettering the material lives of Singaporeans, and via a more subtle—but no less effective—system of finely-tuned laws and regulations that control dissent and free speech, a strategy George terms “calibrated coercion.” The result is a closely monitored, climate-controlled political space in which entry is kept forbiddingly high for most would-be contenders, but the elections themselves are regular and clean.

The technological metaphor of George’s book is thus apt, succinctly capturing the PAP’s own view of politics. The PAP, which originally came to power in the 1950s as a leftist, anti-colonialist force, reinvented itself under Lee Kuan Yew, who pursued a robustly anti-communist and technocratic path of development. By narrowing politics to the science of good social and economic management, PAP leaders have had an influence far beyond their island nation. In historian Vijay Prashad’s 2007 book The Darker Nations, he observes that that the “tangible successes” of the East Asian Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong were not just models of capitalist postcolonial development, but actively contributed to the pushback against socialist and leftist political possibilities more generally. In particular, the stunning economic rise of Singapore was to have several lasting effects, of which the most far-reaching was to “uncouple the linkage between economic and political reform of the world order.” To follow its postcolonial path meant abandoning the larger critique of the global economic order that emerged in the wake of decolonization, such as the development of the Non-Aligned Movement and expressions of Afro-Asian and Third World solidarity. What Singapore’s technocratic success signaled globally was the end of the ideas of import substitution and anti-imperialist cooperation, for an acceptance of neoliberal rationality and international market competition.

George’s writings, each labeled with its original year of publication, take us inside the mechanics that make up a political system that has both acceded to, and triumphed over, the hierarchies of the global order. For anyone interested in exploding the exceptionalist myth of Singapore (now itself a Hollywood trope thanks to Crazy Rich Asians), these essays offer a series of fair-minded analyses of how the PAP has fared across a variety of criteria, ranging from material improvements (five stars) to democratic reforms (one star). Some are occasional pieces that begin with a localized controversy like the 1994 Catherine Lim affair (“Testing the OB Markers”), in which the celebrated author earned the ire of the Prime Minister’s Office for commenting on the political styles of Lee Kuan Yew and his successor, Goh Chok Tong. Others speak to George’s enduring concerns for press freedom and civil society. Together, they function as snapshots that capture the way the PAP has maneuvered itself over time with regard to a host of issues including an independent press, oppositional electoral challenges, national identity, immigration, and Singapore’s complex multi-racial society. One essay that now begs to be added is on Singapore’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, given the well-publicized outbreaks in migrant workers’ dormitories, in addition to a postmortem of the 2020 General Election results.

Because George’s essays are organized by theme rather than chronologically, readers must toggle back and forth between essays written 17 or 20 years apart. The effect is not to reveal an evolution in political culture (or authorial concerns); indeed, in some respects the PAP has only tightened its grip on certain democratic freedoms (see the 2020 essay “The dogma behind Pofma” and the 2017 essay “Winter is here”). Rather, the back-and-forth dialogue opens a window to the smaller contestations, strategies, and counter-strategies that make up the delicate dance between Singapore state and society. For example, two essays on media freedom from 2000 and 2017 (“Freedom from the press” and “Why the press fails to impress”) historicize and explain Singapore’s compliant media landscape. As George elucidates, the pro-PAP stance of the major media outlets is sustained “not just by coercion, but also by consent,” thanks to the1974 Newspaper and Printing Presses Act. This legislation ensures the government can determine a newspaper company’s board of directors, while the state, in turn, has helped the papers flourish commercially. Over decades, this symbiotic relationship has eroded the notion of a strong, independent press as a cornerstone of democracy. In Singapore, conversely, it is the government that is “the embodiment of democratic expression” and which must be “protected from the unelected press.”

Although George generally takes the city-state as the container of his analyses, the snapshots often yield larger political lessons through pithy regional and historical comparisons. Why, for example, is the PAP party culture not riven by factionalism as were Malaysia’s UMNO or China’s CCP, despite equally long tenures of single-party rule? (Answer: because Lee Kuan Yew gave the PAP a “Leninist structure, ensuring that its summit could never be conquered from the base.”) How does Singapore’s language politics—especially the use of English for education, business and state—compare to that in other former British colonies like India? And how does Singapore’s treatment of minorities compare to other Asian nations with mixed populations? The essays also offer a keen sense of both the progression and regression that George observes in his own country. He acknowledges that, if “measured by Michelin-starred restaurants, Broadway musicals and art exhibitions,” Singapore would appear to be increasing in openness and cosmopolitanism in recent years. And yet, in the same period, the government has clamped down on academics and artists who did no more than question the PAP-anointed narrative of history (for example, historian Thum Ping Tjin, filmmaker Tan Pin Pin, and graphic novelist Sonny Liew, the latter with whom George is collaborating on a book of censorship and cartoons). Indeed, the most chilling essay in the collection is also the most personal: it relates George’s own run in with the government when he is mysteriously denied tenure in the journalism department at Nanyang Technological University in 2009. Despite being told he has fulfilled all the requirements, he learns that he was turned down due to his being “a reputational risk” to the university.

Perhaps the strongest argument of Air-Conditioned Nation, Revisited is what the book itself hopes to perform: to clear a space for political debate and actively remedy the depoliticization of a society “mired in apathy” and material comfort. Several essays (“Voices of Conscience” and “Reviving the People Sector”) examine the dilemmas of an emerging Singapore civil society: the picture is of both undeterred community groups and societies and the ways the government over-regulates them, sometimes out of existence. In this telling, the PAP is berated more for its hypocrisy and unevenness than for its authoritarian instincts and George complains about the way “citizen participation is encouraged but it should not get ‘political’ or ‘partisan’.” On a more positive tack, George eloquently argues for the mutual benefits of a robust civil society, since “political parties will never address every important issue.” In the collection’s most hopeful—if perhaps counterintuitive—essay, “The PAP I can get behind,” George counsels the PAP on ways it can simultaneously retain its dominance and embrace democratic reforms, which would prevent it being forced out via a “revolutionary or electoral reversal of fortune.” That George is the one to offer such advice to the PAP is testament to the continued refrigerated state of Singapore politics—and the author’s resilient patriotism. As George has stated in the preface to his collection, “I want my country to be the best it can be, even if that means giving unwelcome criticism to leaders convinced everything is as it should be.”


Jini Kim Watson is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her publications include The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (2011); The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (co-edited with Gary Wilder, 2018), and Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization, forthcoming in Spring 2021. She is co-convener of NYU’s Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Colloquium, which has partnered with the Singapore Literature Festival for a number of lively events on literature, politics, and society.