In the fall of 2007, Amsterdam traveled to Singapore for a speech at the International Bar Association, where he struck up a friendship with one of the country’s leading democratic activists, the Dr. Chee Soon Juan. The two found a remarkable overlap in their respective issues of fighting for rights and rule of law within capitalist authoritarian systems. Since then, we’ve published numerous pieces by Soon Juan (this is significant, as Singapore is a country where blogging can land you in jail), and opened up an interesting dialogue of similar political trends in both the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia. Soon Juan has forwarded us this column from the Guardian, which points out that every country should be wary of trading liberties for economic growth. We find the parallels to the Russia case to be numerous.

The new authoritarianism More and more of us are willing to trade freedom for wealth or security By John Kampfner Why is it that a growing number of highly educated and well-travelled people are willing to hand over several of their freedoms in return for prosperity or security? This question has been exercising me for months as I work on a book about what I call the “pact”. The model for this is Singapore, where repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities. If you do not, you enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as you wish, and – perhaps most important – to make money. Under Lee Kuan Yew, this city-state built on a swamp has flourished economically.