Bryan Cheang’s Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State is a timely and intellectually daring book that enters the long-standing debate over the East Asian economic miracle with clarity, rigor, and a revisionist sensibility. Rather than choosing sides between neoliberal praise of market freedom and statist acclaim for technocratic planning, Cheang proposes a more careful reading of the historical and institutional differences between Hong Kong and Singapore. His conclusion is arresting: Hong Kong’s relatively laissez-faire colonial legacy fostered a more productive, innovative, and entrepreneurial society than Singapore’s developmental state.
To understand why Hong Kong outperformed Singapore in key areas of long-term development, Cheang begins by reexamining the colonial origins of both city-states. In contrast to post-colonial narratives that treat imperialism as a purely extractive venture, Cheang emphasizes the institutional benefits left behind by British rule—particularly the enforcement of private property rights, legal impartiality, and economic openness. …
Nowhere is this inefficiency more apparent than in the realm of innovation. Singapore spends heavily on research and development, regularly outpacing Hong Kong in terms of R&D as a share of GDP. However, this investment has failed to produce proportional results. Cheang shows that in the 2013–2015 period, Singapore ranked outside the global top 100 in innovation efficiency and was the lowest-performing Asian country in the Creative Productivity Index.
By contrast, Hong Kong—despite lower R&D spending—recorded significantly better outcomes. It had six times as many R&D-oriented firms in 2013 and performed better on patents filed by local assignees. These figures suggest that Hong Kong’s innovation ecosystem is more organically entrepreneurial, whereas Singapore’s is overly engineered and bureaucratic. …
In Hong Kong, the state plays a more limited role in the economy. Cheang notes that while the city has faced challenges from property monopolies and political instability in recent years, its entrepreneurial culture remains robust. SMEs contribute more meaningfully to value-added, and the economic environment remains more contestable for new entrants. The philosophical difference is profound: in Singapore, economic life is orchestrated; in Hong Kong, it is allowed to emerge.
Ultimately, Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State is not just a comparison between two city-states—it is a philosophical argument about the limits of technocratic planning and the enduring power of freedom. Cheang does not deny that Singapore achieved remarkable success, but he warns that this success came at a cost: diminished creativity, limited innovation, and a citizenry conditioned to look to the state for initiative.
In contrast, Hong Kong’s model—rooted in British liberal institutions and empowered by a dynamic Chinese commercial class—produced a society more attuned to risk, innovation, and long-term efficiency. Even amid recent political challenges, this model holds important lessons for the future of economic development.
For policymakers, scholars, and defenders of liberal capitalism, this book is both a corrective and a beacon. Cheang reminds us that real prosperity comes, not from orchestration, but from freedom—freedom to trade, to create, to fail, and to try again.
Particularly, the freedom to fail and the ability to look at failure as one more step to success is one of the most important economic factors, as noted by @DarthCoin in other posts from yesterday and today. The free flow of ideas and actions is what serves economies the best not the motherWEFer’s wet dream of total control of every little detail in the world. Perhaps the motherWEFers should read the book Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State before they try to take us down the same road that Singapore decided to take! Again FTS!
