Singapore was benevolent socialism/dictatorship. Read “Third World to First”, given to me in Afghanistan, by Singaporean whose Harvard education was 100% paid for by the Singapore government.
Singapore had and has elements of proprietorship, rather than socialism.
Of course, this distinction depends on what is meant by “socialism.” The word has been quite elastic since it was invented. Marx defined it as government ownership of the means of production. Toward the end of the 20th Century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism came to mean extensive government regulation of the private sector combined with extensive redistribution of the wealth. Now, people like Bernie Sanders say the Nordic countries are socialist, when according to the people who have been trying to measure the degree to which an economy is centrally-planned versus market-oriented, the Nordic countries are as or more market-oriented than the U.S. (Sanders, by the way, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, not in a Nordic country.)
Turning to Singapore, it is reckoned to be the most free economy in the world (by this measure, 83.9; notice, even though the freest in the world, the score is well below 100).
https://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore
As to what I describe as “proprietary” elements, the founding and long-time dominant party of the country was and is highly-invested in the economy, and therefore highly interested in its success. For an island-country totally dependent on trade and international investment, this means keeping industry competitive and not regulated.
Add to the orientation of the country to success, the tendency of the government to censor dissent, including anything it deems injurious to the peace of the island-country, and it’s not exactly comparable to western democratic capitalist countries.