Will China Follow the Singapore Model?

That seems to be the direction Beijing might try to take over the next ten years:

So far, all efforts have failed to contain corruption and promote economic efficiency while maintaining the privilege of Communist party members in the one-party state.

That’s the attraction of Singapore, which by deft management of what appears on the surface to be a multiparty democracy operating under the rule of law, but which in fact operates an economically vigorous and superficially graft-free one-party state.

For several years, Xi has led a team investigating the Singapore model and envisaging how it might be applied to China.

All I can say to that is, good luck.

It’s one thing to run a prosperous city-state of five million people as a sort of family business. But it’s quite another thing to try that in a country of 1.3 billion, with extreme disparities of wealth, ethnic tensions, fidgety neighbors, imperialistic ambitions, and irredentist itches in need of scratching.