2021–22
Lecture and video installation with digital prints on paper, conference table, office chairs, desk, stool, book trolley, books, thermos flasks, cups, saucers and acrylic name plate holders
Since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has dispatched thousands of officials to Singapore to study its economic and social policies. The city-state was crucial in reshaping the political imagination of an entire generation of Chinese leadership in a time when “the economy” had replaced class struggle as the primary subject of governance following the launch of China’s economic reforms. In The Economy Enters the People, this history of encounters between the two countries is re-examined against the present-day crisis of late capitalism, within which both China and Singapore have emerged as key points of reference for study.
The work examines how the revolutionaries-turned-technocrats within the Communist Party drew upon Singapore’s experiences in governance, especially when it came to resolving the intractable problem of corruption that resulted from the intersection of the socialist party-state apparatus and the market economy. With corruption having returned as a subject of political discourse following the 2008 global financial crisis and China’s economic rise, the so-called Singapore model has only become more pertinent for understanding contemporary desires for a capitalism that “works” by being free of corruption. Yet, has class politics been so utterly foreclosed that the people today can, at best, replace governments and disgrace corporations but never abolish capitalism itself? Without pretending to have the answer, The Economy Enters the People makes clear that this question is too important to be left to the technocrats.
