Luckily for Lee there are more important issues in the world today, or Singapore’s recent decision to go whole-hog for a new lifestyle including gambling casinos would have been used to show just how foolish some of his earlier posturing really had been. The casinos, along with other major changes are part of Singapore’s strategy to maintain its role as the entrepot [that’s fancy French for “skimmer”] in Southeast Asia. They are dictated by the vast changes taking place in the world economy. With its higher living standards and costs, Singapore has no choice but to get out of manufacturing – even higher end electronics – and go for being a financial center and a tourist mecca. And, thence, the casinos.

The changeovers also include moving Singapore’s huge bundle of cash [the government’s surpluses and social welfare funds] into major investments abroad, rather than subsidizing local manufacturing. No need to comment on the fact the head of this operation – which has been almost as opaque as financial dealings in what before the East Asia Financial Crisis of 1997-98 were called “crony capitalism” – is none other than Lee’s daughter-in-law and the wife of the current Singapore Prime Minister.

What will be interesting to watch is how successful the fund is in plunking down, as it has recently, huge [for Singapore] investments in China. Singapore’s track record is disaster. When, again in its schoolmarmish fasdion, it tried to tell the quick-learning Shanghailanders how to industrialize, it came a cropper [Chinese ethnic identity or no]. It’s also interesting one of the worst recent [of endless] Chinese corruption scandals involved the monopoly corporation for distribution of aviation fuel in China was based in Singapore. Can one sup with the devil without getting his fingers burned?

But none of this seems to have curbed Singapore’s proclivity for telling the world why American advocacy of freedom, both in the realm of politics and in economics, is a tired, old concept eclipsed by newer formulae. One of the Singapore worthies of the local international relations organization, a kept outfit which more often than not, expounds on the latest dictums of the Lee family, is now touting [along with some of his American fellow thiMkers] “the China consensus”.

The argument runs: Beijing, by going the path of semi-liberal economics but clinging to the worst political manifestations of its Maoist past, is creating a strategy which will eviscerate “the Washington consensus”. The latter was seen during the past decade or so as a doctrine not only coming out from the Americans – particularly the Bush Administration – but the international lending agencies, as well. It held freedom was essential, not only for the existence of a stable and peaceful political order, but for the kind of developmental economics which had brought prosperity to the Western world. [The French, it might be argued, in their inimitable way opted out by pursuing a kind o corporatism which has ended by giving them their present economic, social, and political impasse.]

China, it is argued, is dramatically moving ahead, will in the coming decades, catch up and surpass the U.S., Japan, and Britain, by pursuing its own semi-state brand of developing – pragmatic to the nth degree. That includes not looking with any circumspection on regimes with which it does business [particularly as it becomes a growing importer of fossil fuels] from Sudan to Burma to Uzbekistan. Washington, on the other hand, is fettered by its insistence on its ideological commitment to the pursuit of freedom including personal human liberty. [That just got Washington thrown out of Uzbekistan where a primitive dictatorship had mowed down its own citizens, and threatens to give Beijing a tactical if not strategic victory in Nepal where following New Delhi’s lead, the U.S. sanctioned the King for abandoning representative government.]

Well, yeah, despite Francis Fukuyama’s dawdle in Hegelian nonsense, the race isn’t over. And it is not likely the fat lady will sing for a long time. But it might be well for those spokesmen for “the China consensus” to remember a few short years ago when in similar [often the same] circles we heard the Japanese were 10-feet tall and would soon take over the world.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.