George Yeo: Challenge for Asian govts to adapt to growing urban society

 

URBANISATION is the biggest challenge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faces today because it pulls apart the social glue that has held societies together, said Foreign Minister George Yeo yesterday.
 

This is partly why China's leaders are interested in Singapore's political system, as the People's Action Party (PAP) is the one dominant political party in Asia that has not fallen from power due to the forces of urbanisation.
 

In China, Confucianism has bound the sprawling country since ancient times, but it requires "a certain accepted set of hierarchical social relationships which are all dissolving now in the modern world".
 

The new realities of an urbanised state – "small families, the anonymity of city environments, everybody on mobile phones and the Internet, growing social mobility" – could be the CCP's Achilles' heel, said Mr Yeo in his closing address at the FutureChina Global Forum.
 

Calling the PAP "probably the most successful urban political party in Asia", he said urbanisation was the top issue for political parties across the continent.

The challenge is how Asian political parties can reinvent themselves in the face of a shrinking rural power base.
 

From Japan and South Korea to Thailand and Indonesia, "they are now all confronting urban populations which are not happy... It's almost as if the more you develop, the bigger the urban population, the more disaffected the (people) are with traditional government".
 

For China, governing in the past was "making sure the countryside was productive". During Mao's "peasant" revolution in 1949, China was only 20 per cent urbanised. It is now 40 per cent urbanised, and will soon be 90 per cent urbanised, Mr Yeo predicted.

But governance will struggle to keep pace with this profound social change; all the skills, instincts and techniques of the CCP are based on the control of the countryside and the peasantry, he said.
 

Chinese delegations are coming in droves to Singapore, marvelling at the Meet-the-People sessions which MPs conduct, wanting to know the PAP's "secret".

Mr Yeo did not say what, in his opinion, the secret was. But he emphasised that if China can find an "urban Confucianism" that will bind an urbanised China together, it will "once again be the biggest economy and the greatest country on earth".

 

A NODE, NOT A BRIDGE

 

"Singapore cannot be a bridge. A bridge suggests a certain exclusive channel of communication. We're in a networked world. There is an almost infinite number of bypasses. What Singapore can be is a node. We can enlarge this node and increase its connectivity to other nodes. But if we become self-satisfied or inward-looking, then we will shrink and then become less relevant to others. It's a little paradoxical, but the more we want to strengthen our links to China – and we should – the more we must strengthen our links to other parts of the world. The more connected we are to India, South-east Asia, Europe, Japan, to Africa, the more valuable are our links to China and to the Chinese people." Foreign Minister George Yeo
 

 

Courtesy of The Straits Times, 14 July 2010.