Amid Contending Narratives, A Read on U.S. and PRC Messaging in Singapore

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Singapore’s position at a major crossroads of commerce and communication in Southeast Asia has been a key reason for its wealth and prosperity since the nineteenth century. Location, however, has also historically placed the city-state in the crosshairs of major power competition. That Singapore now sits on the front lines of intensifying competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) should, therefore, come as little surprise. This situation means that Singapore is increasingly buffeted by contending narratives that the two major powers use to promote their political positions. With a population traditionally primed for pragmatism rather than a clear, explicit set of civic values and conditioned to avoid overt discussions of politics, navigating U.S.-PRC competition may test not just Singapore’s foreign policy but also its domestic cohesiveness.^[1]

U.S. and PRC narratives tug at different strands of Singaporean identity. On one hand, Washington’s calls to support a rules-based international order often speak to small and vulnerable actors that depend on institutional processes. Singapore has gained significantly from being able to use international laws and procedures to its advantage. On the other, Beijing has appealed to a cross-border ethnic and cultural Chinese nationalism, as well as an emphasis on “Asian-ness” that tends to cast things “Western” as foreign and suspect. These claims have found traction among some of Singapore’s ethnic Chinese majority, as well as those who buy into the Singaporean state’s own earlier juxtaposition of “Western” foreignness against “Asian values” to resist political and social liberalization.

With the United States and the PRC appealing to different aspects of Singaporean interests and identity means that the rivalry between Washington and Beijing creates particularly tricky conditions for the country. Amid this new competition, Singapore’s political leadership cannot simply label one side a threat, largely cut off ties, and detain or expel alleged sympathizers, as it did during the Cold War. Consequently, Singapore’s publicly stated position is to seek continued engagement with both the United States and the PRC while proclaiming a desire to avoid choosing sides. By hiding or deferring a clearer policy decision, Singapore’s current leadership effectively relies on the hope that U.S.-PRC relations do not significantly worsen and major power friction does not intensify. However, this lack of decisiveness opens Singapore to the pressures of contending U.S. and PRC efforts to seek advantages over each other.

A Country at the Crossroads

Singapore has long profited from being a major conduit in global value and supply chains. Its ability to connect capital and markets from Europe and North America to Asia is a key element behind its success since its establishment as a colonial port by the English East India Company in the early nineteenth century. Premodern Singapore was likewise an emporium linking the Yuan, Majapahit, and Siamese empires with ports in South Asia and beyond during the fourteenth century (see figures 1 and 2). Singapore leveraged its middleman position in the decades following the PRC’s reform and opening in the late 1970s. Singapore prospered as it absorbed technologies, services, and capital from North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia to produce goods for export to the PRC or assemble imports from the PRC and reexport capital to the PRC and Southeast Asia.

Given Singapore’s integration in the global economy, it is no surprise that intensifying major power competition and rising protectionism places increasing pressure on the island nation. Today, the PRC is Singapore’s largest partner in merchandise trade and its top destination for outbound investment (see figure 3). North America, Europe, and Japan are its largest trading partners in services and its largest sources of direct investment by stocks and flows (see figures 4 and 5). Such gains accrue to Singapore and contribute to its rising levels of aggregate wealth precisely because of its ability to function as a global comprador. However, a turn toward “internal circulation” by the PRC, coupled with on-, near-, and friend-shoring by the United States and its allies as part of de-risking efforts, lessens both countries’ dependence on the services of intermediaries like Singapore. Until Singapore develops an alternative growth model, these conditions create incentives for the island nation to try to resist deglobalization and bind itself more closely to the economies of the PRC, North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia.

The location that served Singapore so well across the centuries is now complicating its strategic circumstances. In times of growing global trade and communication, Singapore’s position at the southern entrance to the Malacca Strait and near the northern entry to the Sunda Strait make it a vital hub linking the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. However, rising geopolitical tensions increasingly highlight Singapore’s role as a strategic choke point. Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have consequently come to see the island as critical to facilitating the transit of military assets, telecommunications, and strategic goods like oil, gas, and minerals as they prepare responses to the PRC. Such U.S. perspectives arise from the decades of close security, military, political, and economic cooperation with Singapore stretching back to the Cold War and the fact that Singapore’s military remains reliant on U.S. and NATO-specification equipment. Beijing may conversely come to view Singapore as a conduit for adversarial behavior that must be neutralized or bypassed, given its perspective that the United States and its allies seek to encircle, contain, and suppress the PRC.

Singapore’s strong desire for continued global economic integration means that extricating itself from the increasingly pronounced rivalry between the PRC and the United States and its allies will prove challenging. This is a reality that Singapore’s political leaders have come to realize, even if they have yet to explicitly propose a path forward for the country except to seek broad consistency with international laws and “not choose sides.” These conditions open the island state and its society to contestation by Beijing and Washington as they seek advantages over each other, likely by applying some combination of carrots and sticks. This will almost certainly include a contest for hearts and minds that involves not just appealing to people in Singapore but also undermining the other’s position. If Singapore fails to develop a strong, clear, and affirmative civic narrative of its own, the major power rivalry could place greater strain on the seams that hold the country’s social fabric together.

The PRC’s Narrative: The Inevitability of Greatness and a Destabilizing “West”

PRC and PRC-friendly narratives are common in Singapore. They are present on cable television, official PRC channels such as CCTV and CGTN, and pro-Beijing channels operating out of Hong Kong (such as Phoenix and TVB) and Taiwan (CTiTV, TVBS, and EBC/ETTV). These channels account for virtually all nonlocal news programming in Chinese languages available in Singapore. Investigative news reports indicate that Singapore’s state-affiliated Mandarin-language broadsheet, Lianhe Zaobao (聯合早報), not only publishes many PRC-leaning articles but also includes opinion pieces by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Propaganda Department (宣傳部) officials without disclosing this affiliation.^[2] Other unclearly attributed opinion contributors to Lianhe Zaobao include people with official posts and regular columns for PRC state media outlets. In another example, the local state-affiliated Mandarin broadcast outlet, Channel 8, produced an explainer repeating PRC and Russian positions that justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a response to U.S. provocation. The explainer was later removed without explanation.

A U.S. State Department study pointed out that Singapore’s state-affiliated English-language media, the Straits Times, published opinion pieces by an unidentifiable persona that regularly contributes to PRC state media and advances PRC narratives overseas. The anonymity afforded by the Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao to PRC-aligned opinion pieces contrasts with the identification these outlets usually require of submissions. Singapore’s current administration recently indicated a desire to distinguish the positions of contributors from those of local state-affiliated media, but full results remain to be seen. In addition, there are a large number of social media accounts, including those of key opinion leaders, that amplify PRC-aligned messaging in Singapore. This messaging is then circulated further via private messaging services (see figure 6). Some of the social media and private messaging appears to come from Malaysian, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and PRC sources.

A consistent theme in PRC-related messages in Singapore is the claim that the United States and its allies pose dangers to the country and that associating too closely with them presents risks. According to this narrative, the United States and the alliance system it underwrites represent a “Cold War mentality” that threatens to disrupt and destabilize the world and Asia, especially the South China Sea and Taiwan. This narrative calls actions like Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea provocative and says that they violate the PRC’s sovereignty based on Beijing’s underdefined nine-, and recently reiterated ten-, dashed-line claims that a 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling found to be very weak. According to pro-PRC narratives, Taiwan’s resistance to coming under PRC control, as well as continued Filipino and Vietnamese insistence on claims to the South China Sea, are due to U.S. manipulation of these “pawns” that have no agency of their own. From these perspectives, U.S. behavior leads essentially to the destruction experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A range of other conspiratorial allegations about supposed nefarious U.S. roles are present in PRC state-affiliated media reporting seen in Singapore and then are amplified on social media and elsewhere. These include the continued circulation of claims—without evidence—that the protests in Hong Kong starting during the 2014 Umbrella Movement and leading up to the 2019/2020 protests against a proposed extradition law were the result of a Central Intelligence Agency and National Endowment for Democracy plot to undermine the PRC. This view blames the United States and other shadowy “foreign forces” for violence and destruction of property in Hong Kong, as well as the city’s economic decline. Similar channels carried persistent accusations that COVID-19 was part of a U.S. biological weapons program that spread to the PRC, as well as assertions that Russian aggression in Ukraine was justified to remove U.S.-backed biological weapons laboratories. There were likewise assertions—again, without corroboration—that food and energy price inflation in 2022 resulted from the United States and NATO using Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia.

Another narrative found in Singapore emphasizes the inevitability of the PRC’s dominance contrasted against U.S. weakness, decline, and abandonment. Here, the view is that the PRC’s march toward economic, political, and even military supremacy is unstoppable, as is its eventual control of a failing Taiwan. According to this narrative, no actor can derail this outcome and attempts by a declining United States to limit the PRC’s rise are futile and will end in abandonment. Opposition to the PRC will only bring punishment given regional economic dependence on the country. Examples of disruptions to the import or export of key goods or commodities to Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others reinforce impressions of the costs of crossing Beijing, even if the overall macroeconomic effects of such coercion were actually minimal. News about the PRC’s maturing economy, aging population, and high local debt only managed to dampen such narratives in Singapore slightly, possibly due to the confidence in the overall size of the PRC economy and the fact that the PRC is Southeast Asia’s top trading partner in goods.

Because of Singapore’s majority ethnic Chinese (Han) population, the PRC’s appeals to loyalty, or at least affinity, along ethnic and cultural lines are attractive to some segments of society. Since coming to power, Chinese President Xi Jinping has shown a renewed interest in diaspora nationalism and mobilization, as seen in everything from key policy statements to the more comprehensively subsuming of overseas Chinese affairs under the CCP’s United Front Work Department. Ethnic- and cultural-based mobilization revolves around the idea that people who identify as Chinese should actively support PRC positions, whether these are claims over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, or opposition to the United States. Accompanying such assertions is the view that resisting an amorphous “Western” threat represented by the United States means standing up for a constructed idea of Asia and the developing world, pitted against a history of colonialism, injustice, and even rapaciousness.

A final theme in PRC-promoted narratives in Singapore are assertions that foster PRC-friendly interpretations of key texts, events, and processes, even if they depart from realities on the ground. For example, messaging of official PRC sources and on PRC-aligned platforms call the arbitral tribunal process the Philippines initiated in 2012 over disputes in the South China Sea illegal, unacceptable, and a violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Manila initiated the arbitral tribunal through Annex VII of UNCLOS as a default procedure under Article 287(3) of the same law to determine the nature of the features and the claims they could generate rather than to determine the limits of the Philippine’s sovereignty. Another PRC-related claim is that most states have accepted its “One China Principle” that Taiwan is part of the PRC when, in reality, different countries have their own “one China” policies, most of which differ substantively or subtly from Beijing’s position. There is also the claim that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 recognized Taiwan as part of the PRC, but the document only deals with the representation of the China seat at the United Nations and does not mention Taiwan.

The United States’ Narrative: Rules, Stability, and Democracy Amid Noise

Narratives from the United States in Singapore tend to air on a wide range of international news platforms and are often repeated by local reporting as well as on social media, including both official and unofficial positions. Concerted efforts by the U.S. government or other actors to share official U.S. positions are rarer on private messaging channels, especially in comparison to those by the PRC. Exposure to U.S. positions in Singapore tends to be relatively widespread given that the positions are often stated and reported primarily in English, which is widely spoken as Singapore’s working language. Important official statements from the United States tend to find their way into other languages through translation in news reporting. Unlike the PRC case, the transmission of U.S. narratives can be filtered through the lenses of the many media sources available in Singapore; for example, points of emphasis in the New York Times and Washington Post may differ from those in Fox News, the BBC, and the Economist.

A common refrain from the United States in recent years is support for the rules-based international order. In general, the rules-based order refers to the international institutions, laws, and norms that emerged under U.S. support at the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War, which include the United Nations system and Bretton Woods institutions. Special emphasis is given to respect for sovereignty, adherence to treaties, compliance with international laws like UNCLOS, and support for an open international economic system. Alongside U.S. claims of support for the rules-based order are open and frequent criticism in various media sources of U.S. behavior that can contradict and even undermine Washington’s stated official positions. These inconsistencies include the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2022 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the withholding of World Trade Organization appellate appointments, continued refusal to ratify UNCLOS, increasingly prominent industrial policy, and erratic policies during the Donald Trump administration.

U.S. narratives also focus on the stability it brings to the world and Asia, especially as a “resident great power” with long-standing ties and interests in the region. Successive U.S. administrations have argued that the United States’ engagement in Asia based around its commitments to institution-building, trade liberalization, its alliance system, and forward military presence provided conditions for the region’s economic growth. According to this perspective, the U.S. role in Asia limited the spillover of conflict and helped facilitate relative predictability in regional politics even as the United States became the market of last resort and remains the largest foreign investor in the region. Even Singapore’s government and officials will on occasion point to the relatively benign and beneficial effects of a robust and active, but restrained, U.S. presence in Asia and the world. That said, counternarratives pointing to destructive U.S. behavior in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and support for dictatorships across Asia and the world are also present through the media available in Singapore.

A renewed area of prominence in the repertoire of U.S. perspectives seen in Singapore is that the world is facing a struggle between democracies led by the United States and autocracies represented by the PRC, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others. Statements to this effect clearly seek to rally U.S. allies—mostly mature democracies—to Washington’s side. However, partners like Singapore tend to treat such claims with more caution, given differences in their regime type. The language is reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s “if you are not with us, you are against us” foreign policy approach that included the invasion of Iraq based on what has been proven to be misleading interpretations, if not outright fabrications, of evidence. Recent Joe Biden administration statements appear to have moderated the division of autocracies and democracies to make the U.S. narrative more palatable to less and nondemocratic polities that the United States wishes to win over. Singapore’s leadership and establishment remains less comfortable with the idea of democracy versus autocracy, although society seems more split given that the population entertains a range of political outlooks, discussed further in the following section.

Accompanying U.S. messaging in Singapore are the mixed signals and uncertainty emanating from the U.S. Congress and the broader U.S. political system, a situation exacerbated by the country’s domestic polarization. The U.S. Senate’s persistent refusal to ratify UNCLOS, periodic government shutdowns, disagreements between the executive and legislative branches, and general aversion to market access are subject to much media discussion in Singapore. There is also the fact that the United States does not provide substitute markets or compensation for countries like Singapore when their corporations must comply with U.S. extraterritorial restrictions on the export of key technologies to the PRC or face the risk of costly restrictions imposed by Washington. Questions also remain over the continuity of U.S. policies and U.S. self-restraint given the increasingly large vacillations in policy across recent administrations, as well as xenophobic and isolationist sentiments among many segments of the U.S. population. These developments fuel concerns about the U.S. commitment to existing global rules, as well as its continued presence in Asia, despite new initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific Framework for Economic Prosperity and high-level visits to the region.

The Effects of PRC and U.S. Narratives on Singapore

Contending PRC and U.S. narratives appeal to different sensibilities and segments of Singapore’s population. To the extent that these claims find meaningful traction within the city-state, they confound any attempt to make easy decisions about navigating the increasingly competitive and fraught relationship between Washington and Beijing. Considerations about stability, predictability, and opportunities to inform policies offered by the United States are pitted against desires for prosperity and cultural and ethnic affirmation with the PRC, as well as fears of punishment or social and political change resulting from distance from the PRC. That Singapore does not have a strong, positive articulation of its own set of civic values and standards to frame its political discourse creates space for disparate appeals to divide its population. Such countervailing pressures create strong incentives for caution and even inaction, even if greater initiative and a clearer set of policies may better serve Singapore in the long run.

Arguments about having a rules-based order to facilitate major power restraint and economic openness, as well as having multiple major powers in Asia to support stability, are most attractive to those who focus on security and macroeconomic concerns. Only in the context of major power restraint and in an international system built on legal equality can smaller actors like Singapore maximize their autonomy to fully grasp opportunities in bilateral and multilateral settings. The presence of a rules-based framework has allowed Singapore to transcend its physical limitations and power asymmetries in interstate interactions to achieve its wealth. These arguments tend to resonate with those grappling with Singapore’s international economic and political position out of professional demands or personal interest. Such considerations perhaps reflect the relatively greater comfort and trust that Singapore’s elites place in the United States, consistently captured in the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute’s annual State of Southeast Asia Survey.

Perhaps less comfortable for many in Singapore’s establishment is the emphasis on democracy that has punctuated recent U.S. narratives, as well as the seeming disarray found in U.S. domestic politics. The idea of having more limits on domestic authority and popular participation in policymaking challenges the more patriarchal approach to governance and rule that those in Singapore’s political class are accustomed with. The seeming chaotic nature of U.S.-style domestic politics is disconcerting to an establishment—as well as a population—conditioned to accept order and control. Nonetheless, the Singaporean establishment feels confident enough to regularly charge the United States with being overly liberal and an active participant in interference in the domestic affairs of foreign states, including Singapore. Of course, such perspectives ignore the pluralism of U.S. politics, which includes prominent and powerful socially and economically conservative voices.

Ideas about instability and potential punishment speak to a sense of risk aversion pervasive in Singapore. Singaporeans often describe themselves as kiasu, kiasi, kia chenghu (驚輸, 驚死, 驚政府; kiann-su, kiann-sí, kiann-tsíng-hú in Minnan; and jingshu, jingsi, jing zhengfu in Mandarin), which the local lingua franca, Singlish, borrows from the Hokkien language also common in Singapore. These traits—fear of loss, fear of death, and fear of government—have been the subject of graphic novels, newspaper articles, and academic studies about Singapore. Consequently, there is a certain receptivity in Singapore toward PRC claims about its inevitable rise, the potential for costly punishment for crossing Beijing, and the disruptiveness and capriciousness of the United States. These themes speak to deep-seated anxieties about security and continued prosperity, reinforced over decades by Singapore state-led narratives about persistent vulnerability, fragility, and weakness given its small geographic size.

Appeals to Chinese culture and ethnicity, alongside claims of opposing an idea of the decadent, unjust, and dangerous “West,” play into existing concerns about identity in Singapore. Ethnic Chinese people in Singapore who worry about cultural or linguistic loss tend to understand the “West” as threatening their sense of identity, while the PRC—which they see as synonymous with all things “Chinese”—is seen as a source of authenticity. They sympathize with long-standing, even pre-PRC, Chinese nationalist perspectives now incorporated into PRC discourse, like the “century of humiliation,” bullying by the “West,” and the need for “Asia” to stand up to the “West,” even if some of the same individuals are almost completely Anglophone.^[3] There tends to be little distinguishing between Chinese ethnicity and culture on one side and the contemporary PRC state ruled by the CCP on the other. People with such priors may find it easier to accept PRC and CCP initiatives and policies as expressions and extensions of their own identity, giving them reason to amplify PRC claims.

Singaporeans who believe that the “West” presents some sort of liberal threat to their sense of what political and social order should be gravitate toward claims that the “West” is insidious and best kept at an arm’s length, if not actively repulsed. The Singaporean state’s earlier embrace of supposed “Asian values” in the 1990s as a bulwark against political and social liberalization encourages a reflexive pushback against “Westernization.” More recent assertions that the “West” is a source of foreign interference and division likewise prepares the ground in Singapore for PRC narratives promoting suspicion of the United States and the “West” it supposedly leads. Senior Singaporean establishment figures publicly concede that the frequency with which Singaporean officials deploy suspicion toward the “West” can create fertile soil for U.S.-skeptic PRC narratives. These positions also ignore the strong conservative currents and traditions in Europe, North America, and Oceania while also overlooking liberal leanings in South and Northeast Asia.

Groups and individuals in Singapore who have less need to stay attuned to the intricacies of foreign policy and commerce can be more open to narratives that play more directly on their cultural desires and fears. Such dynamics may be a reason why public opinion polls, such as those produced by the Pew Research Center, find more Singaporeans sympathetic to the PRC than to the United States, and perhaps increasingly so. The Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index likewise reported growing affinity toward the PRC in its survey of the general Singaporean population, with Singaporeans perceiving nearly equivalent levels of influence between Washington and Beijing in several areas. This sort of bifurcation in sentiment, which may cross the usual ethnic distinctions, could become a hinderance to Singapore’s ability to concurrently manage its ties with Washington and Beijing as it seeks to navigate major power rivalry. To the extent that such differences are persistent, it could result in a surprisingly high degree of skepticism toward the Singaporean government’s policies, such as its decision to sanction Moscow at the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Navigating Competing Narratives

The various rival PRC and U.S. narratives buffeting Singapore in the wake of intensifying competition between Washington and Beijing differ in approach and content, making them resonate with dissimilar elements of the population. PRC narratives tend to make visceral, emotive appeals to identity and fears of loss, and they can be intentionally confusing or misleading. U.S. positions tend to make more subtle, intellectual arguments based on interest, longer-term considerations, and positive experience, complemented organically by a diverse range of perspectives, discussions, and debates. Such characteristics may mean that the two narratives appeal to disparate parts of the population and exacerbate existing tensions within Singaporean society. This phenomenon may help explain why available polling data indicates that those familiar with foreign policy and economic issues tend to be more at ease with the United States, even as the broader public may feel more affinity with the PRC.

Without a more clearly defined set of civic and political values against which citizens can hold themselves, each other, and authority to account, Singapore’s population could become more susceptible to the forces created by competing U.S. and PRC positions. Singapore’s notions of multiculturalism based on consequentialist pragmatism, rule-following, subservience to authority, and principles such as the self-containment but legal equality of each major ethnic group can be elastic and open to redefinition. Such plasticity historically made rule and governance easier for those in power in Singapore so long as they had the ability to manage and regulate information. Where sources of information are more varied and less controllable, the absence of more coherent understandings of a shared national identity allows actors with sufficient capability to shape sensibilities by exploiting existing beliefs in society. More severe U.S.-PRC competition could, therefore, potentially fuel divisiveness within Singaporean society.

Singapore sits at the nexus of different economic and strategic interests. That position has historically been a great advantage to Singapore since it confers an ability to seek out and profit from opportunities to develop new connections while deepening existing ones. Enjoying such benefits goes beyond fortuitousness and hard work; it is also dependent on the condition that the major powers in Asia desire greater engagement and cooperation. When such circumstances evaporate, Singapore may find itself at risk of being either on the sharp edge of major power friction or superseded when other areas of the world become more prominent. As the world undergoes a new round of fragmentation and major power rivalry that includes the advancing of divergent visions of global order, Singapore is discovering that its interests are increasingly being pulled in different directions. Facing this challenge may prove to be a significant task for Singapore’s leaders and citizens if they wish to maintain domestic cohesiveness and more effectively navigate the uncertainties presented by U.S.-PRC competition.