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.