The Singapore government recently required YouTube, Facebook, and X to block 14 pieces of online content targeting the Indian community. Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs said these posts attacked the Indian community and undermined Singapore’s multiracial social model, and that the relevant content may have originated on Chinese platforms. The police issued directives to the platforms under the Online Criminal Harms Act, requiring them to bar Singapore users from accessing the relevant content.
This incident has drawn attention not only because it involves racial issues, but also because it touches the core of Singapore’s mode of governance: in a modern city-state that places a high value on social harmony, multiracial coexistence, and national security, to what extent should state power intervene when faced with content on overseas platforms that stirs up identity antagonism?
For Hu Yilin, the issue is not whether those contents are worthy of criticism. He first acknowledges that Singapore is one of the places in the world that does the best job of multiracial coexistence. The fact that Chinese, Malays, Indians, and other communities can live together peacefully for a long time within the same modern nation is, of course, an achievement worthy of recognition. Those contents that denigrate the Indian community and stir up ethnic relations are, in his view, also “unreliable” and should be subject to public criticism.
But he does not support banning them.
Hu Yilin’s reason is not that he underestimates the risks of ethnic conflict, but that he insists on a more fundamental political principle: multiracial coexistence is a derivative conclusion of liberalism, not some ideology superior to liberalism. Freedom is the foundation; diversity is the end. A society should respect different ethnic groups, religions, languages, and ways of life because it first recognizes human freedom, dignity, and rights. Diversity is not the highest value that can, in turn, override freedom.
“Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of publication are the most precious things in modern civilization,” Hu Yilin says. If these freedoms are sacrificed in order to preserve multiracial coexistence, then the cart has been put before the horse.
He is especially wary of one line of reasoning: so long as some speech is thought to come from abroad, or to represent the stance of a certain country, it can be suppressed. In his view, so long as it is not through force, coercion, secret subversion, or real-world attack, but instead through speech, publications, and cultural products expressing views, then even if state power is involved behind the scenes, it should still be allowed to exist and be subjected to open criticism.
He cites the example of the period of American independence. France provided all-around support for American independence, including not only military and material aid but also support in public opinion and ideas. Should this kind of state-backed, large-scale support in public opinion be banned? Or take the United States, which long styled itself as the “beacon of the world” and exported democratic and liberal ideas worldwide through films, publishing, media, education, and cultural products: should that too be banned simply because it is an idea dissemination in which state power participates?
Hu Yilin believes the answer is obviously no. One cannot simply exclude certain externally exported viewpoints from freedom of speech because they do not conform to one’s own position. China’s export of certain viewpoints can certainly be criticized; one can point out their errors, biases, propagandistic nature, and political purpose. But if the response is banning, then the critics themselves will also slide into the position of authoritarian rulers.
That does not mean freedom of speech has no boundaries. Hu Yilin’s delineation of those boundaries is quite clear: incitement to violence, disclosure of privacy, and attacks directed at specific individuals or specific entities and organizations cannot be left free. That is because such speech has a clear target and may also cause specific harm to specific objects. When someone is doxxed, when an organization is incited to be besieged, when members of an ethnic group are directly called upon to be harmed, these are not abstract discussions, but components of real-world infringement.
But he believes that speech that speaks in general terms about the social situation as a whole cannot be handled lightly according to the same standard. The key question is: how is harm to be assessed? For example, what additional harm have Indians living in Singapore actually suffered because of these videos? If such harm can be counted, proved, and attributed, then it is reasonable for those affected to file a class action lawsuit, demanding that the relevant people stop disseminating the material and provide compensation. But if the harm cannot be clearly calculated and the target is not specific, then banning should not be lightly employed.
This distinction forms the core principle of his view of speech governance: one should address specific harms, not generalized dangers; one should provide legal remedies for clearly defined infringements, rather than directly removing speech that is unpleasant, infuriating, or politically wrong from the public sphere.
Hu Yilin believes that this is precisely the difficulty of modern free society. Liberalism does not only hold when speech is mild, harmless, and correct. It is precisely when faced with harsh, wrong, biased, or even hostile speech that the question becomes whether society is still willing to deal with it through rebuttal, lawsuits, compensation, and public debate, rather than directly using state power to suppress it; only then is its civilizational meaning revealed.
This is also the source of his complex attitude toward the Singapore incident: he highly affirms Singapore’s multiracial coexistence and also opposes denigration and incitement targeting the Indian community; but at the same time, he believes that the way to preserve such coexistence cannot be to ban things casually. Even under ancient despotic empires there were examples of multiethnic coexistence; many empires were able to manage complex ethnic, religious, and local differences. But those orders, when placed in the modern era, are not automatically worthy of praise. Singapore’s multiracial coexistence is precious not only because it has achieved ethnic harmony, but because it has done so within the framework of the rule of law, democracy, and freedom in a modern state.
Once this framework is weakened, multiracial coexistence may become, from an achievement of a free society, a state-management project. It may still be efficient, stable, and neat, but it will no longer have the same modern political significance.
“Freedom is the foundation; diversity is the end.” That is Hu Yilin’s basic judgment on this incident. A diverse society certainly needs to defend itself against hatred, prejudice, and external manipulation, but if, in order to defend against these risks, state power is granted overly broad authority to ban speech, then a society may weaken the most important foundation of diversity in the name of protecting diversity.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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