So, in 1992, the little Southeast Asian country put itself on the map by making it a crime to chew gum, with its manufacture, sale and import strictly forbidden. Those who tried to smuggle gum into the country risked a year in jail or a US$5500 fine. The gum ban became a symbol of the rigid, and often ridiculous, regime of social controls imposed by government to curb the bad habits of Singaporeans.

Like gum chewers, litterers and jaywalkers face stiff fines. Vandals are subject to the traditional punishment of caning -- a lesson that American teenager Michael Fay learned in 1994 when he spray-painted cars as a prank and received four strokes with a rattan cane, setting off an international fracas. The death penalty is mandatory for drug traffickers.

To control the baser instincts of its citizens and maintain public morality, Singapore banned Cosmopolitan magazine, blocked Internet access to pornographic sites and forbid movies, television programs and record albums with suggestive content.

In Singapore, the government argued, the common good came before "Western-style" individual rights. That philosophy helped make Singapore a famously orderly place, with clean streets and efficient public services that put other Asian cities to shame. But, recently, Singapore's leaders have begun to acknowledge that their paternalism has had another effect.

Singapore may be clean and green, but it is also rather dull.

Singaporeans, they lament, lack creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive -- qualities that are vital for the country's survival in the modern world economy.

"We have to start experimenting," the country's founding father and guiding force, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, said last year. "The easy things -- just getting a blank mind to take in knowledge and become trainable -- we have done. Now comes the difficult part: To get literate and numerate minds to be more innovative, to be more productive; that's not easy. It requires a mindset change, a different set of values."

So, after due deliberation, the government has decided to lighten up a bit. Last month, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong proudly announced that it was lifting the ban on bungee jumping. "If we want our people to make more decisions for themselves, and if we are to encourage a derring-do society, we must allow some risk-taking, and a little excitement," the Prime Minister told the Remaking Singapore Committee, set up to consider easing social controls.

The ban on bar-top dancing -- a favourite, till-now-illicit practice at local nightspots -- will also be lifted.

Homosexuals will be allowed to work as government employees. And, yes, chewing gum will be permitted -- but, this being Singapore, under strict conditions.

Under a free-trade deal with the United States, which has worked to overturn the gum ban, "sugarless gum prescribed by doctors and dentists as having therapeutic and medicinal benefits will be sold in pharmacies." Two types of Wrigley's gum, Orbit and Orbit White, will be made available for breath-freshening and teeth-whitening purposes. Those who buy the stuff will have to present their "particulars" at the counter.

Not quite Mr Lee's bold change of mindset, is it? No one expects Singapore to become the wild and crazy guy of Asia, but many Singaporeans want a sign that the government is at least willing to stop treating them like kindergarten tots. So far, the sign hasn't come.

Like the government of France that set up a special department to foster French rock 'n' roll music, Singapore's seems to think it can make Singapore a more creative, more innovative place in the same way it controlled littering: by government edict.

It will never work. To become livelier, Singapore must become freer. And that means more democracy.

Singapore is technically a democratic state, with a constitution, universal suffrage, and regular elections. In practice, Mr Lee's People's Action Party has held power without a break since independence in 1965. Freedom House, the respected monitor of political liberties, classifies the country as only "partly free." Though it credits the government with permitting Singaporeans "modest increases in personal autonomy," it says that "the government uses defamation laws, strict electoral rules, curbs on civil liberties, patronage and its influence over Singapore's media to undermine the opposition's prospects in elections."

More than the freedom to chew, Singaporeans need the freedom to choose.

Until they get it, Singapore will remain clean, green -- and boring.

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