Your elaboration of Lim’s thesis is NOT off the mark. But I feel Tiananmen Square is PERFECTLY RELEVANT because it is the China divide which could tear China apart. I have seen on countless occasions how the weak there are so cruelly oppressed that the China model is a fiction of “truth” or “success”. Have you seen those in power bashing up old ladies selling food by the roadside for “illegal” hawking when obviously they have NO means of livelihood – their land taken away by those in power for “greater economic advantages” NOT relevant to the displaced? IT IS REPULSIVE TO WATCH.

It is almost slavery in some instances outside the main cities where cruelty prevails shut from media and public eyes of foreigners? Haven’t you read in MSM slave labour in brick kiln where obedience was exact by physical beatings worse than prison? Protesters of evil were reported to have been taken to “hidden jails” and raped into submission. Men and women toil in very harsh conditions for a pittance. China is a showcase of beautiful glamour big cities with all the envious show of modern infrastructure and convenience living, just go into the countryside to see the real China where corruption and oppression rule.

Ask yourself why the rich don’t built lakeside villas to enjoy their good lives and serenity in the pollution-free quiet vacational countryside living?. They have the corrupt means to acquire land there – maybe forcibly as well. My guess is that they will need to hire a private army of bodyguards because the poor might organise raid and hold them hostages for ransom or just killing in envy.

TIC. This is China. The real thing which might explode like a volcano without warning and the rest of the world wake up to find the the autocratic model of success in China was a BIG joke. Without the oppression of the Communist Party backed by its army, it would have collapsed long ago. Mao did not know his coffin was “defecated” to this extent.

Mainly it’s the Indians who love LKY I am a Chinese Malaysian and I certainly have no time for him.

I told you guys to watch out for that kundut Robox who is a anti Chinese racist disguised as an anti PAP protestor.

Re: “PLEASE READ AND THINK, BEFORE YOU SHOOT OFF SOME REHASHED, REGURGITATED ARGUMENTS, AND QUOTE IRRELEVANT FACTS AND HISTORY.”

It’s obvious that it is YOU who needs to follow your own advice.

This article is just another incarnation of ‘Asian’ values-based democracy. (Read: the ossified political values of feudal China based on the deeply flawed Chinese legal philosophy called “Legalism”). It’s a thinly-veiled Chinese chauvinism first inflicted on Singapore by your great Chinese supremacist Lee Kuan Yew.

Don’t just read THE lines; read between and beyond them as well.

Democracy is the reverse which is why little innovation of sustainable value comes from countries infested with dictatorship.

Innovation is strongest in US, EU, Japan, South Korea and Australia while IT software is from India.

Autocracy is focussed on attainment of power and the status quo in the maintenance of power domination while democracy is focussed on change adaptation and renewal of replacing irrelevance with relevance

It seems that all too often, these people grab whatever nuggets of information that they’ve read, weave it together, and then try in vain to dress it up as a so-called “rebuttal” / “argument”.

Perhaps it would be better to have an apathetic population than a population of fools who have deluded themselves into thinking they are engaged in constructive debate when all they are are the online equivalent of a bunch of mobsters with stick in hand waiting to bash anything or anyone which they misunderstand or can’t understand.

Louis Lim is not a fascist, neo serf, commie, or any other label that you might have googled, or wikipedia-ed. His article is not a pseudo-critique of democracy, because it is not a critique of democracy at all.

For the sake of Robox’s “coolie / indentured labourer” mind, the rough trajectory of his article is as such:

- The development of the political-economic climate in China is going to have a vast impact on the world.

- How? One example is how another behemoth (Russia) is watching China’s success closely to see whether it should adopt a Western-style democracy, or Chinese-styled more autocratic government

- Western-styled democracy unquestionably accomodates personal freedoms the most. But recent events have shown that the system is prone to hijack by ‘Special interest groups’ (he gives an example in the last paragraph: Powerful insurance companies opposing Obama’s healthcare reform, to the detriment of the ordinary folk)

- Democracy & Capitalism are in fact, polar opposites. (implied here is that people tend to think that one necessarily entails the other, and here he debunks that)

- Deng Xiaoping realised this (”that capitalism and autocracy are natural partners”) and proceeded to with economic reforms in China, because political reforms could be simultaneously delayed

- The next 2 paragraphs are essentially like christmas decorations. He just states that west can’t understand why the Chinese would give up their personal freedoms

- If i understand it right, in the last few paragraphs he summarizes the sorry state of democracy in the US: Split down the middle by bipartisan politics. The facts cease to matter, what matters are the emotions of one party vs. another. The press exploits this. Papers which side with the republicans demonize the democrats’ policies: (e.g. well-intentioned healthcare reform suddenly becomes a monster which will increase healthcare costs for all.)

- Amidst the fray, the voices of reason, the ones who speak objectively, are “like voices crying in the wilderness”. Torn and weakened by bipartisan politics, America has lost its moral standing in the world.

- People look towards China’s system as a model of order, and good sense. And that is fundamentally his warning to us all. He says “Capitalism without social justice cannot endure as Communism with social and economic justice can” NOT because he truly believes in communism, but because China’s model of communism with social and economic justice today seems like the well-reasoned, the RIGHT choice, the way to go. China’s moral standing in the world is increasing.

- Finally, “those of us who treasure freedom had better WAKE UP”, because unfettered capitalism is destroying democracy today! THAT is the crux of his message. He isn’t a communist, or purely “motivated by money” as some of you have suggested.
What on earth do you bring up Tiananmen Square for?!?!?

PLEASE READ AND THINK, BEFORE YOU SHOOT OFF SOME REHASHED, REGURGITATED ARGUMENTS, AND QUOTE IRRELEVANT FACTS AND HISTORY

By Vijay Kumar from Malaysiakini

In between the glamarous buildings and shoppings complexes of this city state, there is huge suffering that the world has never seen. Something that the Singapore government or media will try to hide from the rest of the world. And this is the lives of 80 percent of ‘true’ Singaporeans who live in the republic’s Housing Development Board (low cost) flats.

I, like many young youths, went looking for a better future in this Lion City of opportunity, After four years of working experience in Kuala Lumpur. It was my first experience outside Malaysia and I was very happy to be offered a job in Singapore with a basic salary of S$3,500.

Then, with huge hopes, I started looking for a master bedroom to rent being single. I finally got a master bedroom in Clementi for S$700 a month but only after being rejected by many other landlords for being Indian. The ensuing eight- month ordeal that I spent in this HDB flat really opened my mind to what Singapore is for those who can’t earn.

http://www.temasekreview.com/2009/07/07/the-hidden-ugly-side-of-singapore/

By Olinda Brazil from Malaysiakini

It is very amusing to see how Malaysians (probably of the minority races) have spasms of ecstasy when referring to Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) in Malaysian forums. From across the border in Malaysia, Singapore seems like Wonderland and LKY like a benevolent god.

As a Chinese Singaporean, born of Malaysian parents who took up citizenship here in Singapore, I can understand why they feel this way. The grouses are familiar: NEP, corruption and ineptitude in governance.

Let me provide an insight on how it is like to be a Singaporean. I must first stress that new immigrants or Permanent Residents (PRs) from Malaysia (like my parents) will not experience any disadvantages. It is the children of these people (like me) or new PRs’ children (who will be Singaporean) who will feel the disadvantages most sorely, and curse the fact they were born in Singapore.

http://www.temasekreview.com/2009/06/30/i-curse-the-day-i-was-born-a-singaporean/

Louis Lim Beng Tat YOUR OPINION SUCKS! Please don’t be ashamed of your true roots as a coolie/labourer and tell us what your real southern Chinese peasant name is.

And here’s why your opinion sucks.

2. Re: “Democracy, in the simplest term is the will of the democratic majority, as expressed in individual ballots.”

Where did you learn about democracy from? Ching Chong China? The Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy. Well, it shows.

“Democracy” broken down to its Greek root words is “demos” (ie. people) and “kratos’ (ie. will/power/force). In other words, democracy is about the will of the people – within reason, and there are provisions for that in all modern democracies – expressed through the institutions of state.

It is not, according to the “democracy” that you learnt from your Ching Chongland ‘the will of the democratic majority, as expressed in individual ballots’.

Can your crass coolie/indentured labourer mind grasp the difference?

The will of the majority is just code for the tyranny of the majority, and an excuse to further the tyrannies of Chinkapore, Ching Chong China, and a Russia that is clueless about democracy. As a Ching Chong who, as you mentioned, learnt ‘a lot about democracy’, don’t you know that Constitutions are part of modern democracies and Constitutions are there to protect the rights of ALL citizens, and not only the majority of the?

3. Re: “I mention this because no other than the big Russian nation is now studying seriously whether a Chinese style (which John Naisbitt described as a form of ‘vertical democracy’) of government is more efficacious than an often disruptive and counter-productive, bicameral, Westminster style one.”

And who in the world has any respect for Russia other than totalitarian regimes? US? Canada? Australia? New Zealand? UK? France? The EU?

And you say that the Westminster-style democracy is often ‘more efficacious’ and ‘disruptive’ and worse, ‘counterproductive’?

Well, maybe only to dictators in their unbridled zeal for steamrolling over unselfrespecting populations perhaps, with not a care to the feelings or the real circumstances of that population.

But I can tell you this with full confidence, NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD wants your fascism disguised as a neo-intellectual pseudo-critique of democracy.

Otherwise provide CONCRETE proof of the lack of efficacy and disruption, and of productiveness, or go back to Ching Chong China if you don’t want any democracy in Singapore.

4. Re: “The strangest irony is that real democracy and unfettered capitalism (or true laisse faire) are, as Marx would describe, natural opposites.”

If by ‘real democracy’ you mean the democracy as postulated in Greece 200 years ago, I agree with you. But you are also behind the times by those same 2000 years.

Not surprising for backward Ching Chongs.

Dear Ching Chong Louis Lim Beng Tat, fast forward 2000 years and there is something called Modern Democracy, a democracy that attempts to maximize participation by the largest number of citizens so as to produce the most well rounded laws, policy etc. Modern democracy is not about the exclusion that China’s and Chinkapore’s political cultures are all about; it’s about inclusiveness.

And when that happens in Chinkapore, you are actually copycatting from the more advanced modern denmocracies of the West. Again.

Not the other way around. And claiming Ching Chong as the source.

It’s your head that is twisted the other way around.

Send it for examination!