China must continue to learn from Singapore

The China miracle has lasted for 30 years with double digit growth since Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore in 1978. In the last few years China's growth rate has declined to a 'frightening 6.9%'. This is alarming, according to all the doomsayers and western anal-lysts. China must start to rethink what they had done right in the past and what they had done wrong and leading to this decline. This is why I am saying that China must continue to learn from Singapore. When it was learning from Singapore, it became a bigger Singapore miracle. When it stops to learn from Singapore it is starting to show signs of decline.

The first thing that China did then was to borrow some of the top brains from Singapore like Goh Keng Swee, to help them draft out an economic blue print. China today needs more top brains from Singapore to help them in the next phase of development that Singapore had gone through after the miracles of 1970s and 1980s. Though Singapore is short of talents in many fields, the top talents are in political leadership and govt policy making. In this area Singapore has a lot of talents. China can tap on these super super talents, and they are in luck with the recent retirement of some of the best talents in the govt, big names like Lim Hng Khiang, Yaacob Ibrahim of cleaning the Singapore River fame, and the one in a billion Lim Swee Say. Then there is Khaw Boon Wan who is likely to retire soon. China can invite these super super talents to help them out in their next phase of development, maybe another decade of double digit growth.

Among the policies that Singapore has embarked, China may want to learn from the easy one first, like importing more cheap foreign talents to have drive their economy. China committed one serious mistake in stopping at one when Singapore stops at two. So China's population decline is worse than Singapore's and would be short of talents. There are many talents in South Asia and Southeast Asia that Singapore depends on. China can follow this easy path to max their economic growth like Singapore did. No need much thinking, no need to reinvent the wheel. Just take the blue print from Singapore. And china would become a multi racial country, a really international country like Singapore and the USA with plenty of bananas to chew.

This importing of foreign talents is very good for China especially in industries and fields that China is weak in. Finance and banking talents and IT talents from India are a must if Chinese banks want to earn billions overnight. Singapore banks could not earn this kind of money until they brought in Indian banking and finance talents. Likewise, Singapore would not be able to launch all the IT products and become a smart city without the IT talents from India. India talents have another strong advantage, they can speak English which Singaporeans and Chinese can't. So they would make good PRs and CEOs of China's international companies.

The next area is academic. Singapore's universities are now tops in the world, better than Beijing, Tsinghua, Fudan, Jiaotong and other top Chinese universities. China can learn from Singapore to put their top universities as the equals of Cambridge and Harvard and be as highly ranked as NUS and NTU. It only needs a bit of tweeting to have more foreign academics and students and the results will show. Just bring in the foreign academics, provide them jobs and good pay, discard some of the local academics, and the ranking for Chinese universities would swell, to the very top. China has more money and paying/buying foreigners is not a problem.

Another great policy that is cut out for China is asset enhancement. China has recently built a lot of public housing for its people. Using the same asset enhancement formula, China can also double the assets of its people in double quick time, and the Chinese people will be rich over night and be very grateful to the Chinese govt. Every Chinese would also become millionaires, asset rich. One caveat, China's lease term is only 70 years and the properties will become zero value faster.

The growing affluence of Chinese citizens have led to many traffic problems with more cars on the roads. Singapore have solved all traffic problems with COEs, ERPs and all kinds of fees and electronic parking system. The traffic situation in Singapore is excellent compares to other big cities. And Singapore is also starting to encourage its citizens to ride bicycles. China can learn from these policies and encourage its newly rich citizens to go back to riding bicycles for a greener and clean environment, like 40 or 50 years ago. Riding bicycles is progress, owning cars is bad.

And another thing, China must not keep the pay of its political leaders so low. It affects their dignity especially when they met up with Singapore leaders that are being paid in the millions. China should seriously consider raising their leaders salary to millions so that they can have more dignity and not to be looked down by Singapore leaders.

This million dollar salary thing is not just about dignity. It is also to prevent corruption. If China were to pay their political leaders millions, then the corruption problem will go away. No more corruption in China, just like no corruption in Singapore. Xi will no longer have to spend time catching corrupt leaders. Wang Qishan would not have to fret about not catching the tigers. Everything will be fine.

There are really many many things that China can still learn from Singapore like how to manage MRT problems in big cities. China may not have such problems now, but it will when the train system gets old. So it is best to send a team to Singapore to learn how to tackle train breakdowns and delays before the problems surfaced. Singapore has plenty of experience in this area.

China also copied Singapore's CPF system but not full scale, make the Chinese workers contribute more to their CPF. They should as this is a cheap source of funds to help fund big govt projects or redirect into China's Sovereign Funds to invest overseas. It can also be assigned as China's national reserves, and if needed, the money can be used to buy insurance to benefit the people. No need to worry about paying back. This can be delayed by all sorts of schemes.

Just one more point, though there are many more that China can learn from Singapore, is the opening up of China's financial system and stock market. Just learn from Singapore and China would have a very vibrant stock market connected to the whole wide world, and can trade in everything, best in derivatives using computer tradings, super high tech and super efficient. Just a word of caution, China must make sure their main boards are filled with blue chips and not super penny stocks that are worth 1c or less. That would make China's stock market a joke.

I could go on, would continue some other time when China's economy starts to decline further. 6.9% is really bad.A 2/3% growth rate is just about right, the same as the USA and Singapore, mature economies. Then China can declare that it is first world, and the western anal-lysts would said China has arrived, and its economy is safe from a meltdown.