1996, Washington Post
WHEN ALEXIS de Tocqueville wanted to look into new forms of
governance, he traveled 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 their 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 (3
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,
Westernized, consumerist society. The cultural overlap between
Singapore and Tyson's Corner must be at least 80 percent.
Nor was the famous skyline hard to get used to: "Like Rosslyn on
steroids," a D.C. 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 p.m. 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
neighbors had called them to turn me in?
It took the entire year to appreciate fully the achievement of Lee
Kuan Yew, the man who ruled Singapore as prime min ister 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 organization 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. Lee has created
the most perfectly realized 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.
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, subsidized, 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
behavior, such as having a child outside of marriage, she may be
reported by the monitors in every housing block and expelled.
Singaporeans' pensions are also held hostage: Between 30 and 40
percent 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 their 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 Division 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 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 offenses of which he was not
guilty." One year later Parliament abolished appeals to the Privy
Council for disciplinary matters.
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, 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
Division 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 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.
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 Lee went further in his intimidation of 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, 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.
Stephen Wrage teaches in the foreign policy program 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.
comments? it is rather old though
