China and Singapore economically come from two very different histories. The People's Republic of China arose from a brutal civil war alongside a united front against the imperial Japanese invaders. The ruling party in the one-party state is the Communist Party of China. Their economy, as they describe it, is "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", as Deng Xiaoping called it. Singapore on the other hand declared independence from Malaysia after equal rights reforms threatened the special privileges Malaysians had in their country. Like China, they needed national involvement to realize their economy. As Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew describes, "We have to create, in one year, an additional eight to ten thousand jobs by building new industries. We have calculated it." This of course, needs to be done through state control, and like China, the People's Action Party considered themselves socialists. Today, though, Singapore is looked at as an example of capitalism, while China is looked at as an example of communism. So what gives?
Before we answer that, we have to look beyond economics and look at politics, to look at the political systems employed by Singapore and China, and see how similar they really are. Gordon Paul Means, a sociologist, calls it "soft authoritarianism" that was inevitable due to British colonial constraints. Dan Slater, a political scientist, writes that Singapore, like its cousin in Malaysia, is distinguished by its "extraordinary strength of the state apparatus", differentiating their "similar brand of authoritarianism." Although it maintains the guise of a democratic regime, the playing field is highly unequal. China, on the other hand, is much more well known for its brutal and totalitarian one party system. Unlike Singapore, China does not need to even look legitimate democratically. Larry Diamond describes it as "one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world" while Mixin Pei describes how the CCP has focused on achieving "authoritarian resilience" through "repression, economic statism and political cooperation." Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer to China as "among the most notable revolutionary regimes" due to how durable it is. In this way, both China and Singapore are highly authoritarian regimes with a basis of strong one party control.
But we're talking about economics, why do we need to focus on their regime types? Because the right lens to view these two regimes may be that of state capitalism.
Traditional market conservatives argued the importance of the free market in capitalism, with Burke and Hayek focusing on the notion of a free market and natural hierarchy. Yet, in an authoritarian regime, capitalism is inherently restricted. If the private hierarchy is to be all encompassing and dominant, it would undermine the public hierarchy, the state hierarchy. Something has to give, thus it is the free market.
State capitalism, on the other hand, is the hierarchical capitalist market where the state controls a psuedo-free market. In China, from Deng to Xi Jinping, the private sector was opened up to market forces which would play a "decisive role." Deng's economic reform ensured that China could gain the benefits of a capitalist market economy without losing state control. In Singapore, the government owns 90% of land through the equivalent of the U.S's "eminent domain" where the government can forcefully buy back land. But the free market lives as well! In Russia, the authoritarian government under Putin subdued oligarchs, but remains capitalist.
We can contrast this state capitalism in authoritarian regimes to that of the liberal capitalism in modern democracies. In the former, it is the state with ultimate power to control the private sectors. As conservatives rebel against regulation in the U.S.A, capitalists are forced to know their place or suffer for it in China or Russia. It is the state that exerts influence onto the hierarchy. In the latter, it is capital that imposes its will onto the state, through lobbying, corruption, advertising and other such sources. The government, at least to a significant extent, refrains from co-opting the free market. And because of the state's democratic nature, capital can always try to push public agenda back onto its side, which isn't possible in an authoritarian state like China or Singapore. Joshua Kurlantzick, the pioneer of the theory of state capitalism, describes how "when the state becomes fully democratic, it is very difficult to maintain state capitalism", saying you couldn't have both "political freedom" and "state capitalism" at the same time.
Still, it isn't completely the same, because the private hierarchy, as biased as it is towards the top, can at least sometimes invoke worries of competition. Yet in the public one, competing with government is impossible. But the same corruption remains all the same as the extraction of surplus is prioritized towards those at the top in government as opposed to those in the top of the market.
For both Singapore and China, both were originally "designed" as socialist states. When making their transformations, they pivoted from a sort of true socialism to state capitalism, but retained socialist language nonetheless. It was "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", for instance. They wanted to harness the efficiencies of markets in how effectively they can distill and reflect needs without the vulnerabilities of bureaucracy, while keeping the appearance of their ideology, and retaining their brutal authoritarian state control. Rebelling from the path of the Soviet Union, they chose not to embrace their market system, but to reject it.
Socialism is a system where the means of production are "publicly owned", when the workers own the very means of production. Labor is not a commodity, but a right. This is as opposed to capitalism, where the means of production are privately owned and commodities. Yet this state capitalism, sold as the hybrid system that reforms socialism into something sustainable and workable, is a fundamental betrayal of it. The means of production are not privately owned, because the state is privately owned, fundamentally acting as a huge corporation that takes the surplus value for itself and rewards its members through privileges.
We can see this privatization of the means of production in both China and Singapore. On China, as David Harvey writes, "the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices" described by Marx like "the forceful expulsion of peasant populations" and "conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive property rights" were "most spectacularly represented by China." Branko Milanovic writes that "the entire globe now operates according to the same economic principle" of "production organized for profit using legally free wage labor and mostly privately owned capital", including China. And with regards to Singapore, Devex News calls Singapore's market "a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain", fundamentally evaluating it in the same capitalist framework, merely re-categorizing how the surplus is used. And the Realities of Socialism project discusses how although some have characterized its policies as "socialist-style", Singapore primarily uses "market forces", and even avoiding taxing "economically successful individuals", with "the focus" being "on self-reliance rather than the dependence of government."
In chasing the efficiencies of capitalism, China and Singapore fundamentally betrayed socialism. In effect, they achieved the worst of both worlds: a lack of protection of individual rights due to totalitarian oppression and one-party control, and the cruelty of the private sector at the expense of the worker and consumer. In effect, a pragmatic irony is realized, with the Cold War ending not just with the fall of the Soviet Union, but the betrayal of its ideology by its contemporary allies. Capitalism now runs the world.