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新加坡式的威权制度比民主制度更好吗

(2023-05-14 21:00:33) 下一个

新加坡式的威权制度比民主制度更好吗

FARAH STOCKMAN 2023年4月24日
 
行善的专制制度会比民主制度带来更好的结果吗?自从去年夏天听到受过高等教育的肯尼亚人对我说,民主制度并没有带来他们迫切需要的经济发展以来,我一直在思考这个问题。他们高度称赞现代新加坡的国父李光耀如何在一代人的时间里,将他贫穷的城邦国家转变为地球上最富有的社会之一。
 
想一想,1960年新加坡和牙买加的人均GDP大致相同,都是约425美元(据世界银行的数据)。到2021年,新加坡的人均GDP已上升到72794美元,而牙买加的只有5181美元。难怪李光耀已经成了一名民间英雄。在南非黎巴嫩斯里兰卡,不难发现有人祈盼当地也能出个李光耀。
上个月,拜登总统主持了他的第二次民主峰会,并发表了关于民主与专制之间宏大的全球斗争的演讲。与美国有伙伴关系的新加坡未获与会邀请,在“自由之家”的国家评级中,新加坡被评为“部分自由”。但华盛顿关于民主必要性的谈话要点忽略了一个简单的事实:一些专制领导人因为他们取得了成效而受到钦佩。
 
虽然成熟的民主国家在经济上的整体表现优于专制国家,但少数把注意力集中在经济增长上——而不是他们自己的瑞士银行账户上——的专制领导人,在发展方面超越了新兴的民主国家,哥伦比亚大学法律与商业荣休教授罗纳德·吉尔森说道,他2011年与人合作发表了论文《经济上行善的独裁者:民主制发展中国家的教训》。奥古斯托·皮诺切特领导下的智利、朴正熙领导下的韩国,以及邓小平领导下的中国都是实现了全面经济转型的典范国家,而脆弱的民主国家在经济上则停滞不前。
 
这篇论文的另一作者是斯坦福大学法学院的柯蒂斯·米尔豪普特,文章详细阐述了为什么行善的威权主义者更容易将他们的国家融入全球经济。精英们往往抵制会触及他们自身利益的大变革,即使这些变革是对国家有利。专制领导人手中有更多的工具来获得精英的支持。专制领导人的一句话就能让创造就业机会的投资者放心,他们的企业将受到保护,这弥补了法律制度不健全的空缺。在行善的专制制度下,合法性通常不是来自选举,而是来自于展示人民的物质生活得以改善的能力。在民主国家,领导人往往忙于应对政治挑战,无暇制定宏伟的经济计划。他们经常在看到这些计划实现之前就因败选下台。为了赢得选举,政客们做出短期的承诺,比如减税的同时增加福利,从长远来看,这些承诺并不总在经济上是合理的。
 
但行善的专制制度也有致命的缺陷。行善的独裁者并不常见。而且也不能保证他们会一直行善,或者他们的继任者会有同样的能力。国家的经济成功转型后,专制制度的优势似乎也将消失。但到那时,高层权力几乎不受制约的制度已经根深蒂固了。
新加坡就是个例子。据1998年出版的《李光耀治国之钥》(Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas)一书记载,李光耀曾声称,人民并不渴望民主。他说,首先也最重要的是,“他们想有房子、有医疗条件、有工作、有学上。”通过将来自西方的亲商政策(可预测的法院、低税收、对腐败零容忍,以及奉行精英领导体制)与来自专制国家的社会主义倾向政策(政府大量参与经济规划、几乎不容忍异见)结合起来的办法,李光耀满足了这些需求。他建立了一个庞大的公屋系统,约80%的新加坡人现在居住其中。民众从政府手里购买可交易的公寓长期租约,用的钱基本上是政府强迫他们储蓄存下的。新加坡也有选举,但控制着大部分媒体和大量赚钱工作机会的执政党自从独立以来一直当政。
任何去过这个有近600万人口的城邦国家的人都会看到,这里感觉比美国更干净、更安全、更有秩序。新加坡机场同时也是个高端购物中心。公园里鲜花盛开,没有垃圾、扒手或露营的无家可归者,后者已成为美国城市里常见的景象。抢劫如此之罕见——监控又如此之普遍——以至于一些高端酒吧甚至夜里都不锁门。法拉利和兰博基尼到处可见,仿佛“家家有鸡吃”的口号变成了“每个停车位上都是跑车”。
 
但现在,在李光耀去世八年后,新加坡正处在一个十字路口。现在管理着这个国家的总理李显龙是李光耀的长子,他在很大程度上依靠的是父亲留下的政治遗产。新加坡预计将于9月举行总统选举,那主要是个仪式性的职位;议会选举将于2025年举行。总理的潜在继任者已挑好。但执政的人民行动党看起来前所未有地脆弱。
 
批评人士称,新加坡正变得越来越像一个富豪统治的国家,与李家保持着良好关系的唯唯诺诺者升官发财。在今天的新加坡,叉车操作员能因收受一美元的贿赂而面临牢狱之苦,而据美国司法部调查,新加坡企业集团吉宝的高管们行贿数百万美元却逃脱了惩罚,仅受到“严厉警告”。(新加坡官员称,他们没有足够的证据将此案交由法庭审理。)
 
问题在于,这个制度需要像李光耀那样的人担任最高领导人,他严厉但有魅力,正如《新加坡:一部近代史》(Singapore: A Modern History)一书的作者迈克尔·巴尔对我说的。“但如今,拥有那种政治技巧的人无法升到最高位置,因为他会被视为一种威胁,”他说。
 
也许新加坡出问题的最明显迹象是,李光耀的二儿子和一个孙子说,他们现在流亡海外,担心如果回国就会被抓起来。
 
“我伯父不想在合法性问题上有竞争,”李光耀的孙子李绳武在马萨诸塞州坎布里奇一边喝茶一边对我这样说。“威权主义制度存在下去靠的不是冒险。如果他们认为我有5%的可能成为他们的麻烦,他们要把这个概率变为零。”
讽刺的是,现年38岁的哈佛大学经济学助理教授李绳武并没有政治野心,他刚刚获得了他所在领域的一项最高荣誉。他说话温和,富有理性,他说自己喜欢在一个没有人会因为他与李光耀的关系而给予特殊待遇的地方做学术研究。在牛津大学和斯坦福大学读了十年书后,他已经习惯了某些自由。
 
2017年夏天,他回新加坡探望父母时在Facebook的一个私帖下发评论,批评政府用法庭噤声批评者。政府“非常爱打官司,而且有一个顺从的司法系统”,他写道。不久后,他得到消息,自己将因此被起诉。他急忙回到美国。即使特朗普政府对待移民的态度非常糟糕,他当时也对登上美国的土地感到欣慰,他告诉我,因为他知道美国有独立的法官。新加坡法院在他缺席的情况下判他犯有藐视法庭罪,判处1.5万新加坡元(约合7.6万元人民币)罚款,而且五年内不得竞选国会议员。
 
新加坡官员上个月宣布,警方正在对李绳武的父母展开调查,他们被指控操纵当时90岁的李光耀修改遗嘱,并事后在这件事上撒谎。这项指控源于对李光耀故居趋于激化的分歧,李光耀生前多次公开表示希望死后将他住过的房子拆掉
 
李光耀的二儿子李显扬表示,他一直在努力实现父亲的遗愿,不要围绕着故居搞个人崇拜。但他说,担任总理的哥哥想把这栋房子留作一处国家纪念馆,以巩固他本人的政治合法性。李显扬公开反对兄长而遭到了调查。最终,他和儿子一样逃离了国家。这似乎是从事文化研究的新加坡教授陈思贤所说的“越来越老练的欺凌政治”的一个例子。从本质上讲,这不是一场有关故居或遗嘱的斗争,而是关系到新加坡的未来。
 
“新加坡的机构,无论是司法、公务员、军队、高等院校,都逐渐受到扼杀独立思考和挑战的直接控制,”李显扬对我说。他表示,李光耀会征求不同意见,偶尔也会改变想法。“今天,新加坡政府里不再有人会挑战这个制度,会说,‘这是我的观点。我不认为你在做正确的事。’他们的工资太高了。”
(政府发言人何文欣否认李显扬和李绳武在流亡,称他们旅行持的是新加坡护照,有回国的自由。她还表示,李显龙总理回避了涉及故居的案子。)
 
李显扬和儿子李绳武在他们一生中的大部分时间里都曾躲避政治,但自从围绕故居的争吵进入公众视野后,两人都对政治反对派表示了同情,用他们的姓给反对派增加了至关重要的合法性。然而,他们帮助反对派的能力遭到了他们所受指控的削弱。这一事件暴露出新加坡的著名体制出现了裂纹。如果连李光耀的儿子和孙子都觉得他们要被迫逃离的话,那么普通人会发生什么呢?
 
政治学家并不确定新加坡高度成功的体制是否会在李光耀死后持续下去。在他临终前,就连这位伟人自己也说过,要为他的政党失去权力的那一天做准备。这就是行善的专制制度的问题所在:它们往往会终止。要么它们不再专制——就像韩国和智利发生的那样——要么它们不再行善。

A black-and-white photo of Primer Minister Lee Kuan Yew atop the shoulders of supporters in Singapore.

Do benevolent autocracies get better results than democracies? I’ve pondered this question since last summer, when I heard highly educated Kenyans tell me that democracy hadn’t brought the economic development they sorely need. They gushed about the way that Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, transformed his impoverished city-state into one of the wealthiest societies on earth in just one generation.

Consider that in 1960, Singapore and Jamaica had roughly the same gross domestic product per capita — about $425, according to World Bank data. By 2021, Singapore’s G.D.P. had risen to $72,794, while Jamaica’s was just $5,181. It’s no wonder that Lee Kuan Yew has become a folk hero. It’s not hard to find people from South AfricaLebanon and Sri Lanka praying for their own Lee Kuan Yew.

Last month, President Biden hosted his second democracy summit and gave a speech about the epic global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Singapore — a U.S. partner rated “partly free” by Freedom House — was not invited. But Washington’s talking points about the imperative of democracy ignore a simple fact: Some autocrats are admired because they get results.

While established democracies do better economically than autocracies overall, the handful of autocrats who have focused on economic growth — rather than their own Swiss bank accounts — have managed to outperform fledgling democracies, according to Ronald Gilson, professor emeritus of law and business at Columbia University, who co-wrote a 2011 paper, “Economically Benevolent Dictators: Lessons for Developing Democracies.” Chile under Augusto Pinochet, South Korea under Park Chung-hee and China under Deng Xiaoping stand out as countries that achieved wholesale economic transformation, while weak democracies stagnated.

The paper, which was co-written by Curtis Milhaupt of Stanford Law School, spells out why benevolent authoritarians have an easier time plugging their countries into the global economy. Elites tend to resist big changes that would cut into their own bottom lines, even if those changes are good for the country. Autocrats have more tools to get them on board. An autocrat’s word can convince job-creating investors that their businesses will be protected, filling the void of a shaky court system. In a benevolent autocracy, legitimacy often comes not from elections but from the ability to show material improvements in people’s lives. In a democracy, leaders are often too busy fending off political challenges to make grand economic plans. They are frequently voted out of office before they can see those plans through. To win elections, politicians make short-term promises — like cutting taxes while increasing benefits — that don’t always make economic sense in the long run.

But benevolent autocracies have fatal flaws, too. Benevolent dictators are hard to find. There’s no guarantee that they will stay benevolent or that their successors will be as competent. After a country successfully transitions its economy, the advantages of this system seem to fade. But by then, a system of nearly unchecked power at the top has become entrenched.

Singapore is a case in point. Lee Kuan Yew contended that people don’t pine for democracy. First and foremost, he said, “they want homes, medicine, jobs, schools,” according to the 1998 book “Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas.” He provided those things by pairing business-friendly policies from the West (predictable courts, low taxes, zero tolerance for corruption and an embrace of meritocracy) with socialist-leaning policies from autocracies (heavy government involvement in economic planning and little tolerance for dissent). He created a vast system of public housing, where about 80 percent of Singaporeans currently live. People buy and resell long-term leases to government-built apartments with money the government essentially forced them to save. Singapore holds elections, but the ruling party, which controls much of the media and a host of lucrative jobs, has remained in power since independence.

Anyone who has visited the city-state of nearly six million people has seen how much cleaner and safer and more orderly it feels than the United States. Its airport doubles as a high-end mall. Public gardens bloom free of the litter, pickpockets or homeless encampments that have become familiar sights in U.S. cities. Robberies are so rare — and surveillance so pervasive — that some high-end bars don’t even lock their doors at night. Ferraris and Lamborghinis are everywhere, as if the slogan “a chicken in every pot” has turned into “a sports car in every parking space.”

But now, eight years after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is at a crossroads. It’s being run by his eldest son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who leans heavily on his father’s legacy. Elections for the largely ceremonial post of president are expected in September and parliamentary elections are due by 2025. The prime minister’s potential successor has already been picked. But the ruling People’s Action Party has never looked so vulnerable.

The trouble is that the system requires someone like Lee Kuan Yew at the top — strict and charismatic, as Michael Barr, author of “Singapore: A Modern History,” told me. “But no one who has that political skill would ever rise to the top today because that person would be regarded as a threat,” he said.

Perhaps the clearest sign that something has gone wrong in Singapore is the fact that Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son and one of his grandsons say they are now living in exile, fearful that they would be arrested if they ever returned.

“My uncle doesn’t want competing claims to legitimacy,” Lee Kuan Yew’s grandson Shengwu Li told me over a cup of tea in Cambridge, Mass. “Authoritarian systems don’t survive by taking chances. If they think there’s a 5 percent chance I’ll be a problem for them, they want that to be zero.”

The irony is that Mr. Li, a 38-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard who was just awarded a top honor in his field, doesn’t have political ambitions. Soft-spoken and cerebral, he says he’s happy working on his theorems in a place where nobody gives him special treatment because he’s related to Lee Kuan Yew. After 10 years studying at Oxford and Stanford, he got used to certain freedoms.

In the summer of 2017, while he was visiting his parents in Singapore, he wrote comments in a private Facebook post that criticized the government for using the courts to silence its critics. The government is “very litigious and has a pliant court system,” he wrote. Soon after, he got a tip that he was about to be prosecuted for it. He hurried back to the United States. Even during the Trump administration, which was known for its harsh treatment of immigrants, he felt relieved to land on American soil because he knew there were independent judges, he told me. He was convicted in absentia in Singapore for scandalizing the judiciary and fined $15,000, which bars him from running for Parliament for five years.

Last month, officials in Singapore announced an ongoing police investigation of Shengwu Li’s parents, who are accused of manipulating the then-90-year-old Lee Kuan Yew into changing his will and lying about it afterward. The accusation stems from a simmering disagreement over the fate of the family home, which Lee Kuan Yew said publicly at times that he wanted demolished after his death.

Lee Hsien Yang, Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son, says he has been fighting to honor his father’s wish not to have a cult of personality built around the house. But he says his elder brother, the prime minister, wants to preserve the house as a national monument to bolster his own political legitimacy. Lee Hsien Yang spoke out publicly against his brother, only to get hit with an investigation. Eventually, he fled the country, like his son. It seems to be an example of what Kenneth Paul Tan, a Singaporean professor of cultural studies, calls the “politics of evermore sophisticated bullying.” At its core, the fight isn’t about a house or a will. It’s about the future of Singapore.

“The institutions in Singapore, whether it is the judiciary, the civil service, the army, the institutions of higher learning, have all gradually come under direct control in a way that stifles independent thinking and challenge,” Lee Hsien Yang told me. Lee Kuan Yew would solicit different views and occasionally change his mind, he said. “Today, the Singapore authorities no longer have people who would challenge the system to say, ‘Here’s my view. I don’t think you are doing the right thing.’ They are too well-paid.”

(Ho Moon Shin, a government spokesperson, denied that Lee Hsien Yang and Shengwu Li are in exile, saying they are traveling on Singaporean passports and are free to return home. She also said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recused himself from the cases involving the family house.)

Political scientists weren’t sure that Singapore’s highly successful system would outlast Lee Kuan Yew. By the end of his life, even the great man himself spoke of preparing for the day when his party would lose power. That’s the thing about benevolent autocracies: They tend to expire. They either cease to be autocracies — as happened in South Korea and Chile — or they cease to be benevolent.

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