ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the character of the Singaporean middle class is crucial to the nature of the island's political development, but that the Singapore case conforms to neither the western liberal nor the Asian traditional model. Throughout the 1980s, there existed in the political discourse of Singapore a widespread, though not always clearly articulated, intimation that Singapore's economic development implied a shift towards a more liberal and open democratic style of rule. Events between 1990 and the summer of 1991 seemed to bode well for the liberal realization of a Singapore-style perestroika. If the expectations of a rising middle class demanded pruning back the ‘banyan tree’, the People's Action Party (PAP) government would compensate for this loss strengthening social controls. The new post-election orthodoxy, powerfully articulated by Lee Kuan Yew, asserted that the middle classes were not after all forcing political change in a liberal democratic direction.
