Neoliberal recontextualizations and legitimations in a post-Confucian state

While neoliberal ethos has seen a consistent spread and reterritorialization beyond its Anglo-American roots, the specific inflections of neoliberalism and its discourse have had to be recontextualized to fit with context-specific values and structures of government/governance. Adopting a critical discourse-analytic approach, this paper looks at the case of Singapore to probe the discursive moves and tropes deployed to communicate and legitimate a neoliberal-oriented, authoritarian governance in a wealthy society marked by a high level of inequality. It shows how Singapore's ‘Asian’ sociopolitical context and its post-Confucian heritage are amenable to a strategic discursive melding of a more conventional self-interested, neoliberal individualism with a more locally-situated traditionalist collective/communitarian ethos, with the latter functioning as a discursive-moralizing trope to encourage acquiescence to a market-fundamentalist agenda for ‘the greater/common good’.