Singaporeans know this story.
How Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore in 1978, saw how a predominantly Chinese society could be rich even as it is governed strictly, and saw in Singapore, the future of China.
While China wanted to learn from Singapore, and in fact, hundreds of official trips to study the "Singapore System" were made by mid-level officials, the fact is that China and Chinese officials saw in Singapore what they wanted to see in Singapore (or saw Singapore's solutions through ideological lenses. This is very normal.) And so "transplanted" the policies and practices without fully understanding the fundamentals that made Singapore a success. For example, the lesson from Singapore's fight against corruption was distilled as "the importance of committed leadership", and ignored the significance (and importance) of the rule of law in Singapore, and how the law also applies to leaders and leadership.
Thus, there is a hypothesis that China has not fully understood the Singapore Model.
To be fair though, what they did understand or what they did transplant from Singapore to China did result in about 4 decades of progress and growth for the Chinese economy (with about 2 decades of an inflating housing bubble).
Deng and his successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao led China into successive years of growth.
