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Notes -
With Singaporean integration, everyone had to integrate. The Anglo-Singaporean culture represented by LKY, S. Rajaratnam, etc, was foreign to the Chinese as the Malays and Indians. Now, Anglo-Singaporeanism is primarily a creation of the Chinese elite, sure, but housing was part of a package of military service, language and education reform, so on, that deserves to be analyzed as a type of internal colonization. The plan was cooked up by an elite intentionally seeking to suppress racial conflict and that had used questionably-legal means to suppress opposition and other civil society. Politically infeasible in other countries? Today's Singapore couldn't even do it - in today's politics you can see other technocratic, hard-headed but unpopular policies like open immigration and explicitly pro-corporate liberalism are starting to bend and buckle under public pressure. Specific to housing, Singapore has always sold property as 99-year leaseholds with rights reverting back to the government. This is a ticking time bomb under the government as the first generation of housing blocks start nearing that date, and the buildings are wearing out earlier than then - the next decade or two is going to have a large wave of these repossessions. We'll see how the government deals with that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was extremely populist compared to past policy.
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