I was utterly shocked by your recent statement made at a university forum in which you said that if China and Singapore could blend authoritarianism and capitalism and become twinned on the world stage, the “Lee Kwan Yew model of governance will have achieved an international acceptance that the PAP could never have dreamt of”.

With all due respect to your stature, Catherine, it is way beyond my comprehensive ability to understand how authoritarianism can ever be blended with capitalism? The resulting monster “hybrid” will grow to be susceptible, in the long term, to blatant abuse of power and influence by its politicians, particularly of the Lee Kwan Yew model of governance where state-linked corporations control and monopolise the economy at the expense and benefits of the populace. How can capitalism be effectively beneficial to the country’s economy and the common people if the free market is interfered, meddled with and unfairly competed by state-linked corporations riding on political influence and power with their “spur firmly stuck to the hide”, a scenario we Singaporeans are now witnessing!

Human history has shown time and again that authoritarianism is doomed to fail, be it the historic imperial China, the communist China of the Mao era or the Marxist-Leninist Russia of the 1950’s through the 1970’s. They had all failed because human decisions could and will never be unbiased under the influence of political power and vested interests which are often preserved by authoritarian government in the name of social stability. North Korea is a classic authoritarian country the world is now watching its decline.

To cut the long story short, Catherine, the demands of the young and sophisticated (I humbly quote) Singaporeans are not political freedom per se. We demand a genuine political change, either within the PAP itself (which is extremely unlikely) or a change to a genuine democracy where the government is elected to address national issues, not to be feverishly pre-occupied in commercial businesses and investments without well defined national objectives, to be transparent and fully accountable.

Public assembly ? Placard-waving ? these are the means of the common people to make their hardship known to the government and the public when all other avenues of attention to their problems have been exhausted. What’s wrong with that? Here again, there would be no assembly for the sake of assembly. Voices must be heard and appropriate actions taken in the process of formulating government policies.

Finally, may I humbly point out that the decision making process of the inner party politburo in Beijing is definitely not a one-man, top-down machinery. Voices are heard through the yearly People’s Congress held in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. China has already started their brand of controlled capitalism many years back. They are working gradually towards a form of liberalized authoritarian system but not of the Lee Kwan Yew variety. The central politburo in Beijing has already decentralised their administrative power to all the provinces. Lee Kwan Yew had wrongly assumed that Beijing would apply central authority over commercial matters in Shanghai’s Shu Chow industrial estate, an expensive mistake indeed.

China’s state-owned enterprises have long been encouraged to go independent and compete on their own. Many of these organisations have already transformed themselves successfully. A handful of them have even ventured overseas on their own ( China’s central government does not give financial support to state-owned companies in overseas commercial ventures except for projects under G to G programmes).

So, what the Lee Kwan Yew model of governance has to offer China? I really like to think that Catherine, you did not really mean what you said, or did you!?