Singapore Replies To 'Big Brother' By S.R. Nathan

The Washington Post

9 March 1996, Final Edition

Stephen Wrage, who condemned Singapore in "Big Brother's Home" [Outlook, Feb 11], claimed that when he applied to teach at the National University of Singapore, the authorities demanded that the Singapore ambassador in Washington -- myself -- interview him for political reliability. The university never asked me to interview Wrage, nor did I do so.

It is untrue that Wrage was only permitted to teach a class at the university after 10 weeks in the country. He gave his first tutorial on Aug. 5, 1994, four weeks after his arrival, during the first week of the semester.

Wrage said that his department chairman brought two agents from the Internal Security Department to a colleague's office, where they questioned his colleague and stripped his office of papers, records and computer files. This colleague was Dr. Christopher Lingle. The officers were not security agents but ordinary police officers from the local precinct, investigating the case that led to Lingle and the International Herald Tribune's being convicted of contempt of court. They went to interview Lingle in the presence of his department chairman, and Lingle himself handed over the documents.

The police never visited Wrage's home to demand that he empty water from a saucer under a potted plant. But public health inspectors do routinely visit homes to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes, which transmit dangerous diseas es like malaria and dengue.

Wrage reported that in elections ballots are serially numbered, implying that this is to trace how people vote. Numbering ballots was standard British practice, introduced by the British colonial government to prevent stuffing of ballot boxes. After counting, the ballot boxes are sealed in the presence of candidates and their agents and are stored in the vaults of the Supreme Court for six months until the ballots are publicly incinerated.

Wrage said that Singaporeans can have their leases terminated and their apartments seized on a pretext. The Housing and Development Board repossesses an apartment only when the lessee breaches lease terms clearly stipulated in the law, for example by subletting to illegal immigrants. Compensation is paid. In 1995, out of 600,000 public housing apartments, only 15 were re-acquired.

There are no monitors in public housing apartment blocks to report on young women who have illegitimate children. Having a child outside marriage is not grounds for the housing board to take back an apartment.

Contrary to Wrage's allegations, the Central Provident Fund (CPF) is a compulsory savings plan, not a tax. CPF savings are protected by law against all claims. The government did not touch a cent of Lingle's CPF, which he withdrew in full. Lingle's other savings in the Academic Staff Provident Fund were also protected, except for debts due to the government and the university. Lingle's debts to the university were paid under a court order obtained by the attorney general following garnishee proceedings.

Wrage said students must be certified politically reliable before they may attend a university. This requirement was introduced in 1964 to meet the then serious threat of communist infiltration and subversion. But it was suspended 18 years ago, in 1978, after the threat receded.

Wrage repeated the allegation by Lingle and the International Herald Tribune that the judiciary are "utterly compliant." The Tribune admitted that this allegation was unfounded and apologized to the Singapore judiciary. The 1995 World Competitiveness Report, by the World Economic Forum, placed Singapore ahead of Hong Kong, Sweden, Britain and the United States in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.

Wrage said that foreign student debaters had to sit in silence and watch the locals debate because someone had failed to apply for a permit from the Internal Security Department. The Internal Security Department had nothing to do with this. Foreigners who debate in public need the proper visa, which the organizers of the event did not apply for. It would have been issued immediately if they had. Although the foreign debaters did not speak at some exhibition debates, they did participate in the competition. The Philippines team won.

Wrage criticized the government's response to Catherine Lim, who had attacked the prime minister and his policies. He said she was "repeatedly humiliated on the front page of the Straits Times by Mr. Lee himself." Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew never responded to Lim's articles. It was Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong who rebutted her arguments and asked her to put her views to the ultimate test, by standing for elections and convincing the people that she was right and the prime minister was wrong.

How could this have humiliated Catherine Lim? Is this not how democracy is supposed to work?



The writer is Singapore's ambassador to the United States.

Big Brother's Home: The Country Is a Model, All Right -- of Dressed-Up Dictatorship By Stephen Wrage

The Straits Times, 14 February 1996

The Washington Post published two commentaries on Singapore on Sunday. The first, by Nathan Gardels, which we reproduced on this page yesterday, praised Singapore for its achievements and argued that America could learn a few things from it. In stark contrast, the second article, by Stephen Wrage, was a scathing attack on Singapore. We reproduce it below not because we agree with it - indeed we cannot disagree more with it - but so that our readers are aware of what is being said about the country by its critics.

The Washington Post

11 February 1996, Final Edition

When Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to look into new forms of governance, he travelled west to the new world and spent nine months studying America. With the same idea in mind, but supposing that these days to find the new world one travels East, I went to teach for a year in Singapore.

I especially wanted to look into what Singaporean officials tout as a new, unique blend of Confucianism and capitalism, an Asian style of governance that corrects what they call the West’s excessive emphasis on the rights of the individual.

Singapore’s Government, the argument goes, focuses on the needs of the community and so spares its country the ills of the West while it promotes prosperity and general happiness. This new form of governance they call “authoritarian democracy”.

Since that country is a good deal smaller than the United States (three million people in a little over twice the area of Washington), I got to see it very thoroughly over the course of a year. At the outset, the country didn’t seem strange. Singapore is a modern, Westernised, consumerist society. The cultural overlap between Singapore and Tyson’s corner must be at least 80 per cent.

Nor was the famous skyline hard to get used to: “Like Rosslyn on steroids,” a DC friend remarked. The longer I stayed, however, the more peculiar Singapore became.

There was a grim air about the university. On the chairman’s desk, propped up on a little easel and aimed to catch your eye as you sat in the visitor’s chair, was a small sign that read, “An ounce of loyalty is worth more than a pound of cleverness”.

Though I came from a military academy and was not likely to be a radical, the Singaporean authorities demanded that I be interviewed for political reliability by their ambassador in Washington. I was directed to furnish copies of everything I had published and was required to have a phone interview with the acting chair of the department before I finally was pronounced acceptable. Even so, I was in the country for almost 10 weeks before I was permitted to teach a class.

It took months to piece together what I was seeing in Singapore. Why did the chairman of my department bring two agents from the Internal Security Department to the office of one of my colleagues and watch while they questioned him for 90 minutes and stripped his office of papers, records and computer files?

Why did the newspapers brag of the Government’s ability “to take a firm hand with irresponsible journalists”? Why was I visited after 10 pm by two policemen who demanded that I empty the water out of the saucer underneath a potted plant on my balcony (a threat to public health, they explained) and which of my neighbours had called them to turn me in?

It took the entire year to appreciate fully the achievement of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the man who ruled Singapore as Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990 and is still its dominant political figure in his role as elder statesman. Slowly his astonishing array of social controls became clear and the character of ‘authoritarian democracy’ became obvious. I found that no organisation on the island has been left unpenetrated by his People’s Action Party. His control of that compact and technologically sophisticated country is more total than any other national leader has ever achieved. Mr Lee has created the most perfectly realised autocracy anywhere, the world’s state-of-the-art dictatorship.

The press, the police and the military as well as the electoral, legal, housing, education, trade union and employment systems are all entirely under his control, so dissent, even at the polls (where voting is compulsory and ballots are serially numbered) is quixotic. Total government control of a very successful economy permits the regime to scatter largesse, so compliance is richly rewarded.

Mr Lee has woven a web of rewards and punishments around every aspect of life in Singapore. Nine out of 10 Singaporeans live in housing on 99-year lease from the Government. Their leases can be terminated on a pretext. In other words, their apartment, which typically represents most of their savings, can be seized.

On the other hand, if they behave well they get to live cheaply in safe, subsidised, spartan housing in a society where other real estate has been bid to well above Washington levels. If they do not behave, the consequences are dire. If, for example, a young woman engages in what the Government sees as morally inappropriate behaviour, such as having a child outside of marriage, she may be reported by the monitors in every housing block and expelled.

Singaporeans’ pensions are held hostage: Between 30 and 40 per cent of most people’s income is taxed away into a “Central Provident Fund” and held by the Government. Those who behave get a sterling reward: Their compulsory contribution is matched one-for-one by the Government. On the other hand, they live in fear that their retirement will be expropriated. My colleague Christopher Lingle, the American academic referred to above who angered the authorities by publishing a piece in the International Herald Tribune mocking Singaporean propaganda, lost about $20,000, all his savings in Singapore, in this way.

The education system is similarly rigged to provide huge incentives for compliance and lifelong punishments for deviance. Students must be certified politically reliable by the high schools or junior colleges before they may attend a university. Males undergo two or more years of compulsory military training before college; some among them are recruited by the Internal Security Department and directed to report on their instructors and their classmates. Refusing such recruitment, I was told, is not an option.

In sum, civil society has been dismantled; the judiciary is utterly compliant and the legal profession has been reduced to a largely technical function. Complaints may be submitted to the official “Government Feedback Unit”.

Legal protections of such basic rights as habeas corpus have been abridged and trial by jury has been abolished. Paradoxically, Singaporeans were much freer under the British than they are today under Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Their civil liberties had much fuller legal protection when they were colonials.

When one district in the city had the temerity to elect to parliament a candidate from the tiny, feeble opposition party, the Government launched a barrage of allegations, investigations and legal proceedings against him that lasted eight years, imprisoned him and left him ruined. When the victim took his case to the Queen’s Privy Council in Britain, they found he had been “fined, imprisoned and publicly disgraced for offences of which he was not guilty.” One year later, Parliament abolished appeals to the Privy Council for disciplinary matters.

Mr Lee also warned the dissenters that “the Government will not be blackmailed by the people... To make sure the excesses (votes against his party) are not carried too far... it is necessary to put some safeguards in the way in which people use their votes to bargain, to coerce, to push, to jostle and get what they want without running the risk of losing the services of the Government.”

Nonetheless, Mr Lee’s party intervenes to keep that opposition party alive, alternately mocking, intimidating and infiltrating it, then appointing a handful of its candidates to the Parliament, in order to sustain the fiction that genuine politics are possible in Singapore.

The striving for control takes laughable turns. Last year high school debating teams were imported from several countries to demonstrate Singapore’s openness, but someone failed to apply in time for the permit that must be granted by the Internal Security Department for any formal gathering. No exception could be made: the foreign students had to sit silent and watch the locals debate each other.

At other times, the control grows ugly. The leading creative writer of Singapore, Catherine Lim, was attacked and repeatedly humiliated on the front page of The Straits Times by Mr Lee himself after she made a cautious plea to the People’s Action Party to soften its style or risk creating an “affective divide” between itself and the people.

Mr Lee used the occasion to establish a new limit on political expression, describing how he would confront those who questioned him. “I would isolate the leaders, the trouble-makers, get them exposed, cut them down to size, ridicule them, so that everybody understands that it’s not such a clever thing to do. Governing does not mean just being pleasant. If you want a pleasant result, just as with children, you cannot just be pleasant and nice.”

Such language was printed with approval in all the papers of Singapore. Editorialists professed to find his statements “reassuring”.

But Mr Lee went further in his intimidation of Ms Lim: “Have a one-on-one. I’ll meet you. You will not write an article - and that’s it. One-to-one on TV. You make your point and I’ll refute you... Or if you like, take a sharp knife, metaphorically, and I’ll take a sharp knife of similar size; let’s meet. Once this is understood, it’s amazing how reasonable the argument can become...”

In this, as in all arguments in Singapore, Mr Lee has the last word. Outside Singapore, however, it is still possible to point out that under his rule “authoritarian democracy” has come to mean totalitarian control. What he touts as Singapore’s political innovation is in fact merely a sophisticated refinement of this century’s political invention: the totalitarian state.

The writer teaches in the foreign policy programme at the Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. In the 1994-95 academic year, he was a visiting Fulbright fellow in the political science department at the National University of Singapore.

City of the Future: What America Can Learn From Post-Liberal Singapore By Nathan Gardels

The Washington Post

11 February 1996, Final Edition

Fashionable though it may be to vilify Singapore as just one more historically outmoded dictatorship, a case can be made that it ought to be extolled as a model for the future when the center of gravity of human civilization shifts to Asia. Probably no place on the planet is as prepared to enter the 21st century as this orderly high-tech, middle-class, multiculturally tolerant -- but post-liberal -- city-state.

By the middle of the next century, Singapore's far-sighted (and highly paid) governing class will be remembered as one of the first to recognize that the small size of a city-state, once thought to be a disadvantage, is the most efficient scale for any stable polity in a perpetually shifting global economy.

As Singapore's young and impressive minister of information and the arts, George Yeo, says, "The information revolution will not dissolve the world into an amorphous mass of weakened political entities, but transform it into more efficient units of power -- crossroads cities like the big city-states in Europe or in China before the age of empire."

Singapore's governing class will also be remembered as among the first to see that nurturing the "cultural infrastructure" is every bit as important to the survival of a community as its physical infrastructure: that cultural self-determination for their small swatch of destiny is a post-modern virtue, that, indeed, it is the right of a community not to surrender supinely to whatever the entertainers, newsroom editors, executives and marketing wizards of the great Western media empires think is best for them.

Thus Singapore's leaders have not only built an air-tropolis and container port that are among the most advanced in the world, they are also hard at work wiring their society into cyberspace as a matter of policy. (Singapore has its own home page on the Worldwide Web and a program to ensure that all high school graduates have the skills to navigate the Net). At the same time, however, they are making a point of standing up to an "anything goes" world of information flows.

Lee Kuan Yew, still the eminence behind power in Singapore, made the point passionately during a long conversation last fall at Istana, the former British governor's residence in Singapore: "Good governance, even today, requires a balance between competing claims by upholding fundamental truths: that there is right and wrong, good and evil . . . . If everyone gets pornography on a satellite dish the size of a saucer, then governments around the world will have to do something about it, or we will destroy our young and with them human civilization."

This explicit willingness to meddle in the media has rankled the West no end and tarnished Singapore's reputation. New York Times columnist William Safire has made a regular practice of trashing the tyranny he sees in Singapore. Microsoft's Bill Gates told me after a visit to Singapore that "they want to have their cake and eat it too" -- they want cyberspace and control -- but "no place is an island anymore."

But there is another perspective. Is it really so heretical to suggest in the wake of the O.J. media circus, Calvin Klein's proto-porn teen ads, hyperviolent films, gangsta rap and the descent of the mainstream press into tabloidism that the Singapore authorities are not behind the times, but ahead of them?

Is it so outrageous to believe that those societies that ac monitor what their children are exposed to and how it affects them, that have no qualms about drawing the line between what is appropriate and inappropriate, are going to hang together better in the social squalls ahead than those that don't?

Perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that the Western attitude that has all but cast away the notion of appropriate social authority might be outmoded. After all, the key problem of Western civilization now is not the absence of tolerance, it is how to cope with so much freedom. Anyone who watches Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake or Sally Jessy Raphael has to know in their gut that the issue of our time is no longer which limits to erase, but where to draw the boundaries. Smelling political opportunity, even Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are onto this issue.

It is this context that makes Singapore's leaders post-liberal rather than merely reactionary authoritarians. Their stance arises not so much out of fear of what liberalism might mean to their hold on power but from the demonstrated failures of the permissive society carried to extremes. In America they have seen what for most of the postwar era was touted as the future, and it doesn't work.

I asked Lee if he agreed with Zbigniew Brzezinski's worry that "America's own cultural self-corruption -- its permissive cornucopia -- may undercut American's capacity, not just to sustain its position in the world as a political leader, but even as a systemic model for others."

"That has already happened," Lee responded. "The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working. Those who want a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model." In other words, extremism in the name of liberty is a vice.

As always in our conversations, however, Lee was careful to praise America's innovative edge -- the genius of innovation and the ability to recover manufacturing productivity in the face of Japanese auto competition. But isn't that innovation and capacity for initiative linked to the very unfettered freedom he so condemns, I asked?

Not so, says the senior minister in a revealing insight that echoes those who have argued that America went wrong with the extremism of the "rights revolution" of the '60s and '70s. Lee similarly argues that when the lifestyle experiments of the cultural avant-garde are democratized, society subverts itself.

"The top 3 to 5 percent of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas," he says. "If you do this with the whole mass . . . you'll have a mess. In this vein, I say, let them have the Internet. How many Singaporeans will be exposed to all these ideas, including some crazy ones, which we hope they won't absorb? Five percent? Okay. That is intellectual stimulation that can provide an edge for society as a whole. But to have, day to day, images of violence and raw sex on the picture tube, the whole society exposed to it, it will ruin a whole community."

Neither Lee nor Yeo, however, has any illusions that censorship can be effective. Rather, as Yeo put it, "censorship is a symbolic act, an affirmation to young and old alike of the values held by a community."

But ought this kind of power be in the hands of the state?

"What is the power of the state in local Singapore, a city-state with less than three million people?" asks Yeo in response. It is not, after all, a Leviathan like the old Soviet empire or even the French state or the American federal state. "We are really what in America is a local community. What we do is not so different from the people of Omaha or some other community saying, "We don't want the Playboy channel to play here because it is offensive and contrary to what we believe in."

Fair enough, but in the name of a wholesome and trusting society the Singapore government never hesitates to drag the Economist, the International Herald Tribune (which is co-owned by The Washington Post) -- or even the local Business Times to court for libel or for publishing leaked information. Isn't there a chilling effect, I asked, that will prevent the press from playing its critical check-and-balance role on corruption, nepotism or the manipulation of government information?

"If this were the case in Singapore," Yeo answers not wholly convincingly, "we would be destroying ourselves . . . . We are a nation of arbitrageurs. We can't afford to be a nanosecond behind Tokyo, London or New York. For us to try to limit information to a banker, a trader or a journalist would sound the death knell for Singapore. It would be contrary to our entire economic strategy."

Whatever one's doubts, this balancing act of good governance that guards the integrity of the cultural infrastructure in an efficient city-state of manageable administrative scale has been highly successful.

Anyone arriving in Singapore from the poverty and chaos of Calcutta or even Bangkok will readily acknowledge that it is a social model that works. Though it can be seen as one huge, immaculate shopping mall that is comparatively boring on the evening entertainment front, it is undeniably a very decent place. Indeed, the indices of social decency in this island nation of just under 3 million people are a reverse mirror image of the indices of American social decay.

Drugs are nonexistent as a result of one of the toughest policies in the world. On your immigration card you cannot miss the bold warning in red ink that drug smuggling carries a mandatory penalty of death. The boulevards, landscaped with palms and orchids, are spotless. Graffiti, penalized by caning as we know from the Michael Fay case, is nonexistent. Famously, women can safely walk the street alone, late and in the dark.

The standard of living in Singapore is as high as in many European countries, and more egalitarian. Fifteen years ago, the average income of the top 20 percent was 14.4 times that of the bottom 20 percent; by 1994, it was only 10.5 times as great. In that same period, the average income of the top 20 percent fell 3 percent while the average income of the middle 60 percent rose more than 4 percent. Savings rates are as high as they get in any society.

Chinese (who dominate ethnically) and Malays, Hindus and Muslims live and work together side by side as harmoniously as anywhere else. English is the dominant language to reach the outside world. Mandarin the inside. English is the language of the important newspapers; Mandarin the language of the most popular television channel. There are also Hindi and Malay TV stations.

Any businessman will tell you that Singapore is one of the few places in Asia where you can trust the rule of law not to be wholly corrupted. In a region where the notoriously blurry line between connections (guanxi) and corruption pervades all commerce, Singapore stands out. Late last year Fortune magazine named Singapore the best place in the world to do business.

At a time when so many societies are decaying or growing out of control, Singapore is going to make it. It is a place where I would feel comfortable raising my children but, admittedly, would hesitate to live as an adult. That I, like so many others, sometimes arrive at just the opposite conclusion about the United States assures that the Singapore model will continue to resonate as a critique of permissive societies run amok well into the next century.

Nathan Gardels is editor of New Perspectives Quarterly and the Global Viewpoint service of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. His forthcoming book of essays and interviews is entitled "At Century's End: Great Minds Reflect on Our Times."