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Over its sixty-seven-year history, officially, the People’s Republic of China looked up to foreign countries as inspiration only twice. In the early 1950s the Soviet Union guided the Communist Party of China. Yet by 1969 the two countries nearly went to war over ideological and territorial disputes. Then, after a long hiatus, Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Singapore in 1978 ushered in a prolonged period of keen interest in the city-state’s recipe for economic success.
In Singapore, Deng found a dynamic and fast-growing polity run by ethnic Chinese, while Hong Kong was still a British colony. Partly for that reason, Hong Kong society could not be openly extolled by the Communist Party of China (CPC).
To be sure, much of Deng’s economic architecture had to do with export orientation and what Western economists call “financial repression,” which borrowed heavily from the Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese post-war playbook. Popularly detested for its war-time excesses, however, Japan could never be acknowledged in China as a legitimate source of inspiration beyond envy of its living standards. This is despite the fact that Japan had been dominated by one party—the Liberal Democratic Party—until the 1980s. Although culturally proximate, fast growing South Korea and Taiwan could not be officially endorsed by Deng because of the enduring legacies of the Korean War and CPC’s feud with the equally authoritarian Kuomintang political party.