The Suzhou fig leaf

Several recent statements of Singapore's leaders over the flailing experiment to clone itself in China, the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), strikes me as some of the most provocatively fitting fig leaves that the PAP is trying to adorn over the naked truth of a misadventure.

None other than the architect of this excellent caper, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, has come out of the closet before a worldwide CNN audience, brandishing the veiled warning that Singapore investors may scale down the massive industrial park SIP in view of the irascible Suzhou municipal authorities rival project.

Lee railed that what the Singapore government "will do is complete one sector in the way we promised to do," and this sector would serve as an example of what the whole park could have been "if we had completed it."

Lee's thundering against local Suzhou "municipal shenanigans" may ring hollow because it exposes the Singapore government's tendency to be blindsided in it's overseas investment escapades. The PAP's pitiful and untrammeled destruction of its perceived enemies in Singapore and clamping on transparency of decision-making within our small island had given it a false sense of security, an inflated and self-illusory invincibility in itself that it can do anything, anytime, anyplace and to anyone that it wants. Which it can, but only in Singapore.

As noble the experiment was in attempting to clone itself (neo-authoritarian Singapore) in an alien environment (good old fashioned authoritarian PRC), the missing variable from the protocol from this groundbreaking experiment was that there was competition within that environment to the PAP which the PAP cannot crush or demolish.

The local Suzhou authorities were the perpetrators of those "municipal shenanigans" and they provided this competition. Perhaps SIP teaches the PAP a good lesson that when there's competition, you dance a different tune.

Maybe the PAP has become is much too pudgy and not too nimble in the face of real world competition - makes you wonder where is good old anti-government conspiracy to overthrown the Singapore state when you need one. This lack of being nimble and quick doesn't augur well with the PAP's current mantra to take on the world in the new global knowledge economy with IT and the Internet.

A better way of ensuring that white elephants like SIP do not occur in the future is perhaps to remedy the lack of credible parliamentary accountability and independent critical analysis over the executive branch's decision-making into such frolics of spending. Perhaps, no one really bothered or had the courage to ask why are we in SIP in the first place.

Flash back to those heady daze of the early 1990s with the PRC was white-hot magnet for investment. Just because everyone else is in PRC at that time, people chose to overlook the failures and lessons of other US and European projects who have invested far more and away than Singapore.

Actually, the Economist in a February 1998 article had unearthed some interesting information confirming the hubris of the PAP's SIP folly as the municipal sponsored Suzhou New District began fully three years before the SIP, as a way to move 130 or so industries out of Suzhou's city center. Therefore, Lee's cries of foul play of the local Suzhou New District was after the fact are questionable.

Perhaps a lot of the public hand-wringing and flagellation was for domestic consumption in spinning a tragic tale of the erstwhile good-intentioned scion of the Chinese diaspora returning to help an undeveloped Chinese city learn from Singapore about what works and works very well. But alas Singapore still got rather shabby treatment and ignored.

To complicate matters further, the same Economist article reported that Singapore chose not to join forces with the local Suzhou New District, deigning it to be too small for Singapore's plans. A couple of million dollars later, the ignominy of having been checkmated by a lowly local municipal authority, far and away from the epicenter of China's power - Beijing, really does show the depth of Singapore's competitive abilities in the marketplace.

At least, no one tried to steal Singapore's business secrets or made hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign election contributions, no Singapore just spends lots of our money in the country that wants it, build up some infrastructure and Singapore threatens to walk away.

Fortunately, for us, Singapore will never accidentally launch a cruise missile at a PRC embassy. Apparently the PAP leadership was so assured in its belief, and is still so, that SIP will succeed notwithstanding Lee's final face-saving gambit of threatening to pack up and leave behind a tantalizing symbol of Pax Singaporeana (sic) in the PRC, a promise of what SIP woul-d have been.

Will the epitaph on SIP's gravestone be "Singapore tried its best but for these inscrutable municipal Suzhou types. So Singapore wins by showing you what you will be missing"

Is it only me but do others think that if Singapore and Singaporeans wanted to have a high-tech industrial theme park, there was no need to spend hundreds of millions for it or for the sake of that matter, building it in the PRC?

Surely, some more land could have been reclaimed from Sentosa and it could have even boosted our local tourism industry? Even so, if Singapore Inc., was to pack and leave behind what should have been in scenic Suzhou, I really hope that they charge pretty hefty admission fees for rides and amusements.

There could be like the Tower of Terror where thrill seekers can free fall from a CEO's office into several million one dollar bills (they have to be US dollar bills) to break their fall?

BG Yeo's latest spin on SIP is even more slick in "Suzhou shows how 'different we are'" in Straits Times (June 20, 1999) as he rationalizes that SIP is actually a blessing in disguise as it shows that what has been achieved in Singapore cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. Perhaps, BG Yeo must surely have overlooked Lee's public complaint that the Suzhou municipal authorities had learnt how Singapore did it and "they can always duplicate it and offer it at a lower rate of land."

The PAP should have known better than to want to teach the Chinese how to be rent-seeking in their backyard but then again mighty Singapore was only dealing with some lowly municipal underling.

The ultimate irony, of course, is BG Yeo's solemn observation that Singaporeans should draw some comfort from SIP "since it eases the competitive pressure Singapore would face otherwise."

As far as I recall, the perennial favorite ways out of a recession whenever we do get into one is to blame our competitors for being too cheap, land and wages being the two fixed mortal enemies to Singapore's competitiveness.

These factors will always be there and as I recall regionalization of the economy into South East Asia, India and even the PRC was supposed to develop our competitive abilities. The results have been abominably pathetic.

That being said, I wonder what do Singapore's woes with the SIP show about Lee's sought-after PRC expertise and insight in the West.

One would think that Lee's ability to assay and divine the innards of the PRC, Taiwan and the rest of Asia should come into question when all of the might of the Singapore government under his aegis cannot even effectively deal with some inconsequential municipal authority who is allegedly free-riding and ripping off a prestige showcase of bilateral national ties, the SIP.

Or perhaps, I would have spoken too soon and history will correct me. I certainly hope so.

Could SIP have been avoided with a more transparent and accountable executive cabinet or those indispensable well-compensated superscale civil service?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

But there is definite culpability in the PAP's failure in provision of a more rigorous and transparent supervision of Singapore's investment into SIP.

The Singapore press regaled us for years that things were moving on track and that SIP was not a rathole of money and other rosy pictures of a thousand flowers blooming creating in more feeble investors' minds in snapping up residential investment property vehicles in PRC and we all know what became of that.

What is frightening is that the apparent collective amnesia of these civil servants, media and the cabinet are the very same protagonists who trumped that the PRC would be Singapore's next new frontier for Singapore's growth are now carpet-bombing Singaporeans about stories and exotic tales of the promise of the Internet, e-commerce and IT and how it would lead us to another promised land.

I really hope that for our sake, the promised land will not land on us. Now the latest sexy thing is Singapore becoming the IT center of the Asian universe notwithstanding the losing luster of dot com stocks on Wall Street. Are we too late to get on that fast boat to success?

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