Singapore’s Tharman urges US, China to abandon ‘hubris’ of viewing own system as superior

Tharman says there are ‘no saints’ in US-China relations and calls on the superpowers to cooperate in areas of common ground, such as ensuring fair trade
US politics since 2016 had occasioned a ‘step change’ in how China is increasingly viewed as a threat and such ‘politics of pessimism and grievance’ must be redressed, Tharman adds

Singapore

Bhavan Jaipragas

Published: 10:18pm, 13 Jun 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

The United States and China should abandon the “hubris” of claiming superiority of their respective political systems and instead should focus on collaborating to advance their self-interests, top Singapore minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam has said.

Speaking at the Chatham House think tank in London on Tuesday, the senior minister echoed calls made by other regional leaders for the superpowers to cooperate in areas where they had common ground.

Tharman, who is Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, is among a handful of senior Singapore ministers whose views on US-China ties are parsed by international observers as a means to understand the prevalent middle-ground view about the superpowers in Southeast Asia.

Singapore’s Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam says China is deeply inserted in the liberal economic order and has a deep interest in its preservation. Photo: Handout

The 66-year-old last week announced he was stepping down from the long-dominant People’s Action Party (PAP) to run for the largely ceremonial position of president – a role he said he would use to “project Singapore’s interests and voice of reason in an increasingly turbulent world”.

Asked during a question-and-answer session on what advice he would give to the leaders of China and the US, said “there are no saints” in the relationship between the superpowers.

“Both of them need to make adjustments. Both of them need to avoid a sense of hubris with regard to the superiority of their own systems,” Tharman said.

“And both of them need to recognise that there’s actually a great deal in common in the way they go about trying to improve lives and grow incomes,” the minister said, noting that China, unlike the erstwhile Soviet Union, was “deeply inserted in the liberal economic order and has a deep interest in its preservation”.

“Those are huge grounds for seeing eye to eye and developing rules to make sure that trade is fair, investment is fair and intellectual property is protected. These are rules that can be developed,” Tharman said.

The absence of a strategy of interdependence would not necessarily mean that China “gradually withers away”, he said.

“It eventually rises anyway … but when it finally gets there it will know who made it extremely difficult for it to get there. That makes for a dangerous world,” he said.

There are “huge grounds” for the US and China work together to fuel their self-interests, says Singapore’s Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Photo: AP

The minister did not directly mention former US President Donald Trump in his remarks, but noted that there was a “step change” in the threat perception about China in the US in 2016 – when the nationalist ex-president was elected – even though there had been a gradual move of sentiment in that direction for some time.

“I don’t think that step change in the curve was occasioned by any new strategy on the part of China or any new development in China’s market share or China’s actions in any regard. It was domestic politics,” Tharman said. “Politics matters, and I think we are trundling down a road where we are in the politics of pessimism and grievance and it has to be redressed.”

Asked whether mainland China under President Xi Jinping had fuelled the West’s concerns about it through actions and rhetoric, including on Taiwan, Tharman suggested serious observers of Asia’s biggest economy had a more nuanced view.

14:45

An unwinnable conflict? The US-China trade war, 5 years on

First, these observers noted that “China doesn’t yet feel it is ready to be an equal with the US at the centre stage” but wanted to play a more major role in rule setting in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, in trade and other areas, Tharman said.

On Taiwan, Tharman said “no serious observer, including those who are very close observers and who are engaged in this believes that China wants war with Taiwan”.

“Neither does the US. And it’s extremely important to preserve prior understandings on Taiwan, and preserve the constructive ambiguity on Taiwan that has lasted for decades on the part of both the US and China,” he said.

Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland – by force if necessary – and has steadily ramped up military pressure on the self-ruled island.

The US, like most countries, does not officially recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, but opposes any attempt to change the status quo by force and is legally bound to help the island defend itself.

In a speech before he fielded questions during Tuesday’s dialogue session, Tharman – a former central bank chief – took aim at what he said was a rising trend in many countries of formulating industrial and foreign policy on protectionist terms that prioritised “relative superiority” rather than “absolute performance of policies”.

“If we go for a system that is protectionist, that imposes restrictions … where your actions domestically have negative spillovers on the rest of the world, you might be able to preserve relative superiority, at least for some period of time,” Tharman said. “But it is almost certainly at a cost of absolute performance everywhere.”