For most of the twentieth century, development advice to poorer countries carried one assumption: modernising meant becoming more like the West, in markets, institutions and eventually politics. China’s four decades of growth under a different system have invalidated that assumption. Beijing now presents China as part of the Global South, the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In November 2024, shortly after Donald Trump won a second term, George Yeo, Singapore’s Foreign Minister from 2004 to 2011, spoke in Beijing with Media Unlocked, an interview series from China Daily. The interviewer put two questions to him. The first carried a framing common in commentary at the time: that Trump’s win marked the end of liberal democracy, and that the contest between China and the United States is one of authoritarianism against democracy. The second asked what role the Global South can play as the world becomes multipolar.
Yeo answers both by asking how a political system should be judged, and by whose standards. He names what he looks for when he judges one. He then turns to Africa, recounting an argument by Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former president, about why institutions designed elsewhere have struggled there. His final minute returns to a phrase closely associated with Deng Xiaoping, and to what it means for countries far from China.
Supporters of liberal democracy hold that competitive elections, independent courts and a free press protect ordinary citizens wherever they live. China’s government points to its record of growth and stability. The questions in the clip are the interviewer’s, and the framing is the outlet’s; the views are Yeo’s own.
Why it matters for Asia
Southeast Asia contains almost every political model in this debate. ASEAN’s members include electoral democracies, one-party states and an absolute monarchy, and they cooperate as one bloc. Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms of 1986 opened its economy while the Communist Party kept power, a path often compared with China’s.
For governments across the region, the question Yeo takes up is practical. Whether development requires Western institutions shapes how they read advice from Washington, Brussels and Beijing, how they weigh conditions attached to loans and aid, and how much they draw on China’s experience when they plan their own reforms.
Related on Meridian
- South China Sea: Can the Philippines Count on America? – George Yeo
- The West’s Five Stages of Grief over China’s Rise: George Yeo
- AI and the End of Western Dominance? An Asian Perspective
Further reading
- Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). The leader behind China’s reform era and the experiments it began with.
- Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016). How local experimentation drove China’s development.
- Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2015). The case for judging China’s political system on its own terms, and where that case runs out.
- Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty(Crown, 2012). The argument that inclusive political institutions decide which nations prosper.
- Kishore Mahbubani, Has the West Lost It? A Provocation. Mahbubani’s argument that the West must adjust to a world it no longer dominates.
Excerpt from Media Unlocked (China Daily), recorded in Beijing in November 2024. Used for commentary and analysis. Views expressed are the speaker’s own. The interviewer’s questions reflect the outlet’s framing. Watch the original
