A tale of two city-states: A comparison of the state-led vs civil society-led responses to COVID-19 in Singapore and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

The East Asian experience in tackling COVID-19 has been highly praised, but this high-level generalisation neglects variation in pandemic response measures adopted across countries as well as the socio-political factors that shaped them. This paper compares the early pandemic response in Singapore and Hong Kong, two Asian city-states of similar sizes, a shared history of SARS, and advanced medical systems. Although both were able to contain the virus, they did so using two very different approaches. Drawing upon data from a cross-national, probability sample Internet survey conducted in May 2020 as well as media and mobility data, we argue that the different approaches were the result of the relative strength of civil society vs. the state at the outset of the outbreak. In protest-ridden Hong Kong, low governmental trust bolstered civil society, which focused on self-mobilisation and community mutual-help. In Singapore, a state-led response model that marginalised civil society brought early success but failed to stem an outbreak among its segregated migrant population. Our findings show that an active civil society is pivotal to effective outbreak response and that trust in government may not have been as important as a factor in these contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative politics
• public administration
• global health policy
• pandemic preparedness
• East Asia

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The positive tone and negative tone scores are the percentages of all words in the article that were found to have a positive and negative emotional connotation respectively. The average tone is calculated by differing the positive tone score and negative score. Since most average scores are less than zero, the visualisation shows the negated average tone score, i.e. the higher value, the more negative emotional connotation in the document on average. Daily average scores for Hong Kong and Singapore are displayed as a time trend in Figure 5. Smoothed curves are computed by R’s ggplot2 package.

2 All regression models passed the Breusch Pagan Test for heteroscedasticity and robustness checks.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University Grants Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region under [Grant number 6354048], the University of Hong Kong University Research Committee [Grant number 104005938] and City University of Hong Kong [Grant number 7200666].