Singapore Inc: Lessons and warnings for a new millennium

Associated Press. December 1999.

By JASMINA KUZMANOVIC

Singapore Inc resembles Plato's Republic -- a select group of benevolent men leading those considered their inferiors - which did not catch on more than two millennia ago.

IN just over a generation, with no more than grit and a little geography, a handful of leaders metamorphosed this island city-state from a colonial backwater into a glittering glimpse of the future.

Everyone eats. Schools need no metal detectors. Traffic grids don't lock. Public toilets gleam. The economy is the world's most competitive. And if anything is wrong with this picture, few dare to say so.

Singapore, these days, feels like an H.G. Wells experiment gone horribly right. It brims with lessons for a new millennium, but also with warning signs.

Per capita income has soared above US$20,000 a year because of strict, effective management by corporate-like executives with police powers. But other governments in that bracket have wide-open democracies.

This is a troubling conundrum.

Singapore, which covers half the space of the city of Los Angeles, lies just off the tip of Malaysia and is close enough to Indonesia to hear the noise. It's an island whose population is 77 percent ethnic Chinese, lying in a region with a history of ethnic bloodshed. Leaders insist they must be tough to survive.

If the ruling party loosens up, its leaders say, crises howling about them in the outside world could spoil their miracle. If not, diplomats and economists warn, the howling might come from within.
 
 

Also, Singapore has transformed so completely that it is as much like Manhattan, Zurich and Beverly Hills as anything in Southeast Asia. Planners now want to recapture some of the old reality they have bulldozed away.

How these dilemmas play out should offer useful clues as governments elsewhere try to juggle new technology, global financial flows, and disappearing cultural heritage.

Lee Kuan Yew, the man behind it all who as senior minister still charts the course, seems in no hurry to relax. On a visit to Hong Kong, he agreed with a reporter who said his Peoples Action Party faced no challengers.

"That's right," Lee said. "That's because we're not foolish enough to give them key issues that will enable them to become a credible alternative."

Lee, at 77, is in quasi-retirement. His son and potential successor, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, echoes his philosophy that Singapore would collapse without forward thinking and a firm hand.

Many of Singapore's 3.5 million inhabitants disagree, arguing that paternalism and censorship have no place in a modern state.

Who else forbids the importation and sale of chewing gum?

"If you look only at the buildings, the infrastructure, they have done wonders," J.B. Jeyaretnam allowed, when I asked him for a balance sheet. "But they have robbed the people of their human dignity."

Jeyaretnam, a 77-year-old lawyer and head of the Workers Party, is one of three opposition members of an 83-seat

parliament.

A stockbroker, who pleaded for anonymity in fear of reprisal, was more blunt: "We are all slaves here." His complaints run from harsh fines for trivial infractions to what he called mind-control.

Such remarks infuriate Lee, who likes people to remember how life was in 1959 when Britain left, or in 1965, when a shaky tandem with Malaysia collapsed. Then a tough young left-leaning lawyer, he took charge.

Lee kept all the trappings of Westminster democracy. But he also kept the Internal Security Act, which Britain used to combat terrorists. It gave him the power to jail anyone without trial.

His vision was clear: Singapore would be an oasis, an eye in the Asian storm. He would face down communist activists, foreign intrigue, permissive Western drug cultures, poor housing, poverty, pollution.

By 1970, Lee's hand-picked team was building his model society. If the 300 people who mattered were to crash in a jumbo jet, he said back then, "Singapore will disintegrate."

Stability brought oil service companies and banks. Old-style factories made way for an electronics boom, always ahead of the Asian curve, followed by services and well-stocked shopping complexes.

Soon, money sloshed through at a fast pace. The government built yet more high-rise housing blocks, soaring office towers and expressways, some of them on 15,000 acres of land reclaimed from the sea.

Political opponents sometimes found themselves arrested, or bankrupted by court action and fines. Jeyaretnam, for instance, is still paying off a slander suit brought by the ruling party. More often, they were coopted or subtly sidelined by a party that could reward as well as punish.

The profit motive ruled on the theory that people should be able to benefit from working hard and making money.

When traffic grew too heavy, a quota was fixed on cars, and would-be drivers bid electronically for a 10-year permit. These now cost about US$30,000, on top of a 33 percent duty on cars and high road tax.

Gantries were erected to control traffic flow. Each time a car enters the busy central district, an electronic eye deducts a toll from a smart card mounted on its windshield.

Changi may be the world's best airport, with bowls of candy at immigration counters. Singapore port handles more tonnage than any other. Its oil refinery capacity is unmatched. The subway system is space age.

Cash reserves top US$75 billion, not counting gold. Cabinet ministers, who earn US$600,000 a year, are not corrupt. Officials solicit new ideas from the public, such as one to equip library books with electronic tracking chips to ensure returns.

Parks and roadsides are ablaze in tropical blooms and exotic trees. There are occasional brutal crimes, but one recent newspaper headline focused on a 15-year-old girl who stole a Cookie Monster from Toys R Us.

But then there is the price.

Even incoming foreign news is vetted. The government plans to wire every home for cable television and fast Internet access.

But satellite dishes are forbidden from homes. Authorities block entry to prurient Web sites.

A book called Singapore's Shame by James Gomez startled many, simply by appearing on shelves. Gomez, an academic, had 2000 copies printed. He says deep paranoia causes Singaporeans to hold their tongues.

"It is interesting to see that self-censorship operates without the direct intervention of the ruling party," he wrote.

Clearly, he had a point. At the huge Borders bookstore, the "local interest" section features mainly tax guides and business directories. Few writers probe failings of the society, a manager told me.

At a consultancy firm, an expatriate executive laughed about a local sport: guessing who the informer might be. The People's Action Party cadre is secret, he said, and top-level party people could be anywhere, listening to anyone.
 
 

He once gave a speech to a small private group on a Friday in California. Monday morning, when he was back in Singapore, a government official phoned with a friendly warning.

What Gomez called a climate of fear reaches deep into everyday life.

"No comment, no comment," an elderly Malay man shouted, waving his hands and scrambling out of his coffee-shop chair when I asked about government plans to seize the palace of Singapore's last sultan, evict his descendants who were still living there, and turn it into a museum depicting the Malay way of life.

The eviction went ahead this month after the descendants lost a court battle.

"What these people won't realize is that conservation is not just saving a building but also saving what the building represents," said Tunku Mohammed Damaishah, a seventh-generation descendant of the original sultan.

Kampong Glam, the area around the palace, is among the last few neighborhoods of colonial Singapore that have not been razed to make way for the future.

During the 1970s boom, wrecking balls smashed much of the old charm of a unique Asian port, the cornerstone of the British empire east of the Suez since Sir Stamford Raffles landed here in 1819.

Old Chinatown, once a meandering maze of color, is now only a few blocks of gentrified shophouses, each worth more than $1 million.

The Singapore River banks were cleared of traditional bumboats and outdoor food stalls to build upmarket pubs and restaurants. Dining is now called "al fresco" along what might be the San Antonio River Walk.

The Raffles Hotel was carefully restored, but its graceful lawns and gardens were stripped away. Its original floors and sometimeworn fittings were pounded to rubble.

Once Singapore Harbor was an exciting spectacle with junks and schooners among countless freighters. Now land reclamation and high rises hide the water.

Among Singaporeans and foreigners alike, views are mixed.

When the Bugis Street area was bulldozed to make room for huge shopping malls, a hotel and garish food courts, a food hawker known to all as Fatty was among those who had to find somewhere else to cook.

His father opened his stall in 1927; Fatty took over after the war. By 1970, Bugis Street was an all-night feast. Tourists, transvestites and trishaw drivers wolfed down food from a hundred open-air stalls. Fatty's was the best.

I found him, ill and retired at 77. His son, Skinny, ran a normal sort of restaurant in a mall opposite five floors of electronic ware. Chicken feet salad and "pig's organ soup" were off the menu.

"Uncle Lee Kuan Yew did everything for us," Fatty said. "Singapore is much better now."

But I spoke to scores of people old enough to remember the before and the after, and dissenters were far more numerous.

Most say they work too hard for too little. They miss the leisure time spent with friends and family.

Along with happy nouveaux riches, there are many whom psychologists describe as stressed-out automatons barely able to keep up.

Some were vehement about government involvement in every level of their lives.

"First they say two kids are enough," fumed a man named Low. "Then they want us to have four (children). What do they think we are, animals? Anyway, I can't afford even one. You can't complain, or they have a special hotel room for you."

Others resented a tendency toward eugenics. Promising youngsters go on a faster school stream from their early years. The SDU - officially the Social Development Unit but mocked by some as Single, Desperate and Ugly -- matches up educated couples.

Chin Sin Chong at 72, has no quarrel with the government, but he sees a worrying effect of the system. With computer talent so highly prized, young people control the society. The experience of elders is tossed aside.

He is among dozens of retired volunteers who teach older Singaporeans the basics of e-mail and the Internet.

"The old morality and respect are gone," he said. "No one has time to live a normal life. I am in closer touch with my son in America than my son here. Here, so much time goes to working, getting the children in the right schools..."

If after 35 years Singapore is a perfect test tube state, no one knows what the results will eventually show. But a lot of leaders with problems to solve are watching. Since 1950, 135 new countries joined the United Nations.

In essence, Singapore Inc. resembles Plato's Republic -- a select group of benevolent men leading those considered their inferiors - which did not catch on more than two millennia ago. Still, a new millennium is coming.