As to Singapore and Hong Kong you have to look at the European city model (polis, civitas, Medieval commune). It is about an agreement to voluntary participate in a large economically successful human organization within limited space. Elected, hereditary or self-made gouvernment were just choices about making this system work. The civil rights are part of the voluntary participation requirement ideas with money and penalties to ensure stability of the profitable enterprise always the dominant basic theme.
Both cities work perfectly fine based on the paramount economic function of the city concept and have well blended multiple inputs from various sources into their own concept that did develop apart from the Western World where from the roots an increasingly limited viewpoint has been extracted that does not allow for ideological alternatives.
I agree that it is not a or b. For me it is about security of rights, but others can see something similar as security of laws. We all want to be more than just sheep to a government with some capability to shape their decisions to benefit us and secure our important vitals like respected rights or law-obdience. These are seen as requirements for our ongoing success that is usually equated with success of the system we partake.
You can base such a system on select distribution of favours and well-being at the expense of other humans. This is the Western Eurasian and African slavery tradition, last enacted on a grand scale by the animal-lover Hitler. He did create a giant sheme to restructure the world on older ideological templates of our past fitted to the creation of a new present and future that eventually failed. But it provided enough economic benefits to still convince many people all over Europe to long for that reported time of great personal benefits by grand public projects. The idea is not dead and it works simply by a credit based economic bubble with massive armament for robbing your neighbour state's bank vaults for continuing liquidity.
The cold truth of the city and the states derived from these cities is that most things can be traded for economic benefits, but trading a few issues will backlash because within this set-up they are fences against human nature that otherwise destroys the communal system for personal gains. Democracy has and will always be a timocracy. Lobbyism is just one expression of that truth. As long as the established fences stand and there are pressures on the timocracy to earn via cooperation and not exploitation, people feel free and satisfied. Authoritarian systems have an easier route to exploitation and discontent due to perceived personal underachievement for they are quite capable to set up large scale very unfair external conditions. You get a revolution as soon as the system is rigged enough to deprieve very capable people of their chances - they fight back with all means necessary and if they need guns and bombs, so be it. Guess what, in no democracy exists a level playing field, but discontent is usually within tolerable levels and has a less destructive outlet for capable challengers. But they can fail due to corruption of leaders and representatives for effective status quo. Insert Chinese man-of-letters and scholar and you see the same pattern.
The authoritarian system is very quick and can quickly transform anything for good or bad. Democratic systems are best seen as institutionalized and quite lethargic with lots of friction if ever moving. The advantage of lethargy is that you don't screw up things yourself without having enough time to reliably predict and correct the course. Authoritarian forms have their benefits if rapid development, usually due to external influences, is required, but lack the safety net of the slower institutions. The longer you keep on such a dangerous fast track, the higher are the chances that it will fail due to leadership errors (human nature). More institutional systems can be dinosaurs (extinct) or crocodiles (same design since millions of years) and institutional designs don't require democracy, a seemingly open meritocracy like in ancient China can do the same service. Democracy as an institution tries to keep at bay special self-serving interest groups, but can fail on a large scale if you look at Greece.
