Modern Singapore : Photo by Oxymanus
December 24, 2009
By Mark Jacobson from National Geographic
If you want to get a Singaporean to look up from a beloved dish of fish-head curry—or make a harried cabdriver slam on his brakes—say you are going to interview the country’s “minister mentor,” Lee Kuan Yew, and would like an opinion about what to ask him. “The MM?Wah lau! You’re going to see the MM? Real?” You might as well have told a resident of the Emerald City that you’re late for an appointment with the Wizard of Oz. After all, LKY, as he is known in acronym-mad Singapore, is more than the “father of the country.” He is its inventor, as surely as if he had scientifically formulated the place with precise portions of Plato’s Republic, Anglophile elitism, unwavering economic pragmatism, and old-fashioned strong-arm repression.
People like to call Singapore the Switzerland of Southeast Asia, and who can argue? Out of a malarial swamp, the tiny island at the southernmost tip of the Malay Peninsula gained independence from Britain in 1963 and, in one generation, transformed itself into a legendarily efficient place, where the per capita income for its 3.7 million citizens exceeds that of many European countries, the education and health systems rival anything in the West, government officials are largely corruption free, 90 percent of households own their own homes, taxes are relatively low and sidewalks are clean, and there are no visible homeless people or slums.
If all that, plus a typical unemployment rate of about 3 percent and a nice stash of money in the bank thanks to the government’s enforced savings plan, doesn’t sound sweet to you, just travel 600 miles south and try getting by in a Jakarta shantytown.
Achieving all this has required a delicate balancing act, an often paradoxical interplay between what some Singaporeans refer to as “the big stick and the big carrot.” What strikes you first is the carrot: giddy financial growth fueling never ending construction and consumerism. Against this is the stick, most often symbolized by the infamous ban on chewing gum and the caning of people for spray-painting cars. Disruptive things like racial and religious disharmony? They’re simply not allowed, and no one steals anyone else’s wallet.
Singapore, maybe more than anywhere else, crystallizes an elemental question: What price prosperity and security? Are they worth living in a place that many contend is a socially engineered, nose-to-the-grindstone, workaholic rat race, where the self-perpetuating ruling party enforces draconian laws (your airport entry card informs you, in red letters, that the penalty for drug trafficking is “DEATH”), squashes press freedom, and offers a debatable level of financial transparency? Some people joke that the government micromanages the details of life right down to how well Singapore Airlines flight attendants fill out their batik-patterned dresses.
They say Lee Kuan Yew has mellowed over the years, but when he walks into the interview wearing a zippered blue jacket, looking like a flint-eyed Asian Clint Eastwood circa Gran Torino, you know you’d better get on with it. While it is not exactly clear what a minister mentor does, good luck finding many Singaporeans who don’t believe that the Old Man is still top dog, the ultimate string puller behind the curtain. Told most of my questions have come from Singaporeans, the MM, now 86 but as sharp and unsentimental as a barbed tack, offers a bring-it-on smile: “At my age I’ve had many eggs thrown at me.”
Few living leaders—Fidel Castro in Cuba, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe come to mind—have dominated their homeland’s national narrative the way Lee Kuan Yew has. Born into a well-to-do Chinese family in 1923, deeply influenced by both British colonial society and the brutal Japanese occupation that killed as many as 50,000 people on the island in the mid-1940s, the erstwhile “Harry Lee,” Cambridge law degree in hand, first came to prominence as a leader of a left-leaning anticolonial movement in the 1950s. Firming up his personal power within the ascendant People’s Action Party, Lee became Singapore’s first prime minister, filling the post for 26 years. He was senior minister for another 15; his current minister mentor title was established when his son, Lee Hsien Loong, became prime minister in 2004.
Lee masterminded the celebrated “Singapore Model,” converting a country one-eighth the size of Delaware, with no natural resources and a fractured mix of ethnicities, into “Singapore, Inc.” He attracted foreign investment by building communications and transportation infrastructure, made English the official language, created a superefficient government by paying top administrators salaries equal to those in private companies, and cracked down on corruption until it disappeared. The model—a unique mix of economic empowerment and tightly controlled personal liberties—has inspired imitators in China, Russia, and eastern Europe.
To lead a society, the MM says in his precise Victorian English, “one must understand human nature. I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I’m not sure he can be. He can be trained, he can be disciplined.” In Singapore that has meant lots of rules—prohibiting littering, spitting on sidewalks, failing to flush public toilets—with fines and occasional outing in the newspaper for those who break them. It also meant educating his people—industrious by nature—and converting them from shopkeepers to high-tech workers in a few decades.
Over time, the MM says, Singaporeans have become “less hard-driving and hard-striving.” This is why it is a good thing, the MM says, that the nation has welcomed so many Chinese immigrants (25 percent of the population is now foreign-born). He is aware that many Singaporeans are unhappy with the influx of immigrants, especially those educated newcomers prepared to fight for higher paying jobs. But taking a typically Darwinian stance, the MM describes the country’s new subjects as “hungry,” with parents who “pushed the children very hard.” If native Singaporeans are falling behind because “the spurs are not stuck into the hide,” that is their problem.
If there is a single word that sums up the Singaporean existential condition, it is kiasu, a term that means “afraid to lose.” In a society that begins tracking its students into test-based groups at age ten (”special” and “express” are the top tiers; “normal” is the path for those headed for factory and service-sector work), kiasu seeps in early, eventually germinating in brilliant engineering students and phallic high-rises with a Bulgari store on the ground floor. Singaporeans are big on being number one in everything, but in a kiasu world, winning is never completely sweet, carrying with it the dread of ceasing to win. When the Singapore port, the busiest container hub in the world, slipped behind Shanghai in 2005 in total cargo tonnage handled, it was a national calamity.
One day, as part of a rehearsal for the National Day celebration, I was treated to a veritable lollapalooza of kiasu. Singapore armed forces playacted at subduing a cabal of “terrorists” who had shot a half dozen flower-bearing children in red leotards, leaving them “dead” on the stage. “We’re not North Korea, but we try,” said one observer, commenting on the rolling tanks, zooming Apache helicopters, and earsplitting 21-gun salutes. You hear it all the time: The only way for Singapore to survive being surrounded by massive neighbors is to remain constantly vigilant. The 2009 military budget is $11.4 billion, or 5 percent of GDP, among the world’s highest rates.
You never know where the threat might come from, or what form it will take. Last summer everyone was in a panic about swine flu. Mask-wearing health monitors were positioned around the city. On Saturday night, no matter how stylo milo your threads, there was no way of getting into a club on trendy Clarke Quay without a bouncer pressing a handheld thermometer to your forehead. It was part of the unending Singaporean state of siege. Many of the newer public housing apartments come with a bomb shelter, complete with a steel door. After a while, the perceived danger and excessive compliance with rules get internalized; one thing you don’t see in Singapore is very many police. “The cop is inside our heads,” one resident says.
Self-censorship is rampant in Singapore, where dealing with the powers that be is “a dance,” says Alvin Tan, the artistic director of the Necessary Stage, which has put on dozens of plays dealing with touchy issues such as the death penalty and sexuality. Tan spends a lot of time with the government censors. “You have to use the proper approach,” he says. “If they say ’south,’ you don’t say ‘north.’ You say ‘northeast.’ Go from there. It’s a negotiation.”
Those who do not learn their steps in the dance soon get the message. Consider the case of Siew Kum Hong, a 35-year-old Singaporean who thought he’d be furthering the cause of openness by serving as an unelected NMP, or nominated member of parliament. With only four opposition MPs elected in the history of the country, the ruling party thought NMPs might provide the appearance of “a more consensual style of government where alternative views are heard and constructive dissent accommodated.” This was how Siew Kum Hong told me he viewed his position, but he was passed over for another term.
“I thought I was doing a good job,” a surprised Kum Hong says. What it came down to, he surmises, were “those ‘no’ votes.” When he first voted no, on a resolution he felt discriminated against gays, his colleagues “went absolutely silent. It was the first time since I’d been in parliament that anyone had ever voted no.” When he voted no again, this time on a law lowering the number of people who could assemble to protest, the reaction was similarly cool. “So much for alternative views,” Kum Hong says.
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Singapore’s Expat Surge Fuels Economic Fears
By Patrick Barta and Tom Wright from Wall Street Journal, 13 January 2010
For years, this rich city-state has marketed itself as one of the world’s most open economies.
But as Singapore recovers from recession, its residents are questioning a key part of the country’s economic model: its long-standing openness to foreigners.
Singapore has thrown open its doors to bankers and expatriates in recent years, making it easy in many cases to establish residency and hastening the country’s emergence as an Asian version of Dubai. It also welcomed low-skilled laborers from Bangladesh and other developing countries to help man construction sites and factories.
The goal was to capture more Asian wealth and offset Singapore’s low birth rate with immigrants, spurring economic growth. But the push has also fueled discontent, turning immigration into a red-hot political issue in a country where dissent is still tightly controlled by the government.
Between 2005 and 2009, Singapore’s population surged by roughly 150,000 people a year to 5 million—among the fastest rates ever there—with 75% or more of the increase coming from foreigners. In-migration continued in 2009 despite expectations it would collapse because of the global recession.
The influx helped boost Singapore’s economy in the short run by creating new demand for goods and services and helping manufacturers keep labor costs low. Developers built apartments and posh shopping centers for the new arrivals.
By some estimates, a third or more of Singapore’s 6.8% average annual growth from 2003 to 2008 came from the expansion of its labor force, primarily expatriates, allowing Singapore to post growth more commonly associated with poor developing nations.
At the same time, though, foreign workers have driven up real estate and other prices and made the city-state’s roads and subways more congested. Their arrival has kept local blue-collar wages lower than they would be otherwise, exacerbating Singapore’s gap between rich and poor.
Some economists say the most damaging effect of the immigration is that the influx appears to be putting a lid on productivity gains, as manufacturers rely on cheap imported labor instead of making their businesses more efficient. Labor productivity, or output per employee, fell 7.8% in 2008 and 0.8% in 207—a phenomenon that could eventually translate into lower standards of living.
Lee Ah Lee, a 58-year-old who makes 850 Singapore dollars a month (about US$600) clearing tables in a cafeteria, says the flood of immigrants has made it hard to make ends meet by pushing down blue-collar pay in Singapore, which has no legal minimum wage. Sitting nearby in a drab apartment block built by Singapore’s Housing Development Board, a state-owned body that constructs and sells subsidized housing, 79-year-old Lee Kwang Joo says low-skilled foreign workers are often housed in corporate dormitories, meaning they have no housing costs and can survive on lower pay.
On Temasek Review, a Web site dedicated to Singaporean affairs, one writer recently warned Singaporeans would be “replaced” as “3rd class citizens” by foreigners, while another said that immigration “will emerge as the single most important issue” in Singapore’s next general election, due by 2011.
Immigration “kept our economic growth high but, at a tremendous cost,” says Kenneth Jeyaretnam, the secretary-general of Singapore’s Reform Party, a small opposition party founded in 2008. Relying on foreign labor to help boost growth is unsustainable, adds Choy Keen Meng, an assistant professor of economics at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. He says a better model would involve the reining in immigration and accepting that Singapore is becoming a more mature economy like the U.S. or Europe, with a long-term growth rate of 3% to 5% a year.
Singapore, unlike many of its neighbors, has a reputation for reliable public services and minimal corruption. Its openness to foreign investment is one reason why gross domestic product is expected to rebound to 4.5% this year, according to the Asian Development Bank, from a contraction of 2.1% in 2009.
Still, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, speaking at a Singapore university in September, said there was a need to be “mindful of how quickly our society can absorb and integrate” new arrivals, and vowed to curb immigration.
The government is also studying immigration as part of a wide-ranging review of the city-state’s economic model launched in 2009. Results of the review, due this month,are expected to include steps to diversify Singapore’s economy and reduce its reliance on exports to the United States and Europe by boosting domestic consumption, among other things.
Yet people familiar with the government’s plans say it is unlikely to press for deep cuts in immigration, and will aim to find other ways to restore productivity growth. Singapore remains committed to a long-term goal of increasing the population to 6.5 million, though it would do so by prioritizing high-skilled residents as opposed to blue-collar workers.
Immigration “is not a weakness, it’s a strength,” said one person familiar with the long-term economic planning process. “People want to come here, why not make use of that strength?”
Serious cuts to immigration could also generate a backlash from other interests—notably the factory owners and real-estate developers who rely heavily on foreign arrivals. Many employers complain that local Singaporeans, accustomed to a higher standard of living than most other Southeast Asians, are unwilling to take on menial jobs, and are likely to resist further tightening of foreign labor supply. – Wall Street Journal
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Singaporeans Seek Asylum Elsewhere - Written by Ben Bland
Thursday, 07 January 2010
Given the Singapore government's oft-repeated mantra that it has taken the city-state "from third world to first," you would not expect to find refugees fleeing the island's shores and gleaming skyscrapers.
But despite the prosperity, the decent health and education systems and the lack of crime, a steady trickle of Singaporeans have felt the urge to abandon their homeland and seek asylum in nations such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada over the last few years.
(That of course doesn't count the thousands of Singaporeans who leave every year to settle elsewhere. By one estimate, the number who put the Lion City behind them is as high as 15 percent of annual births. In 2006, the Transport Minister, Raymond Lim, expressed concern that 53 percent of Singaporean teens would consider emigration. One website survey put Singapore's average outflow at 26.11 migrants per 1,000 citizens, the second highest in the world - next only to East Timor (51.07). )
Canada, the refuge of choice for noteworthy politically fed up Singaporeans such as pioneering writer Goh Poh Seng, who left the city-state in 1986, seems to have a more sympathetic ear for those fleeing the Lion City or, at least, a more deserving slate of applicants. Twelve of the 29 who fled the Island Republic for Canada between January 2005 and September 2009 were given political refugee status, a success rate of 44 percent. Four applied in Canada in the first nine months of 2009 and three of them accepted. It isn't known who they were or why they were seeking asylum.
Another 26 have been granted asylum in the United States, according to the US Department of Homeland Security. At least some are believed to have sought asylum because they were being persecuted for being gay.
But these are the lucky ones. With genuine refugees from strife-ridden nations such as Afghanistan, Burma and Sudan often denied asylum status by the stringent immigration authorities in the Western world, most asylum seekers from Singapore are turned back.
Of the 50 or so Singaporean refugee applications identified by Asia Sentinel in Australia, New Zealand and Canada over the last decade, the vast majority were rejected.
Ten have applied for refugee status in New Zealand since 1997, according to spokesman for the country's Department of Labour, and all were rejected. Another 15 applied for refugee status in Australia between 2004 and 2009. All were denied.
The fact that there are so few successful asylum applicants from Singaporeans is testament to how perceptions of Singapore's approach to human rights have improved over the last 20 years. In that period, the government has made some small but significant steps toward meeting globally-accepted democratic norms, abandoning the detention without trial of political opponents and trying to combat institutional and societal discrimination against women, ethnic minorities and gays.
Singapore's 21st- Century refuges are driven by a variety of motives including political oppression, racism, persecution and the desire to avoid military service. Some, no doubt, are economic migrants who hope for a better standard of living in New Zealand or Canada, far away from the rat race of the Lion City. A few are clearly mentally unstable, with others fleeing debt or using political repression as an excuse.
Looking into their cases provides a rare insight into the tiny minority of Singaporeans who have rejected the ruling People's Action Party's de facto social contract that promises economic development in exchange for the surrender of political freedoms.
Take the Singaporean of Tamil heritage who fled to New Zealand in August 2008 because, even after selling his apartment and all his possessions, he was unable to pay off debts to loan sharks and feared that the Singapore police would not protect him from violent reprisals. His sorry tale of loan-shark debt spiraling out of control is a common one in the humble public housing estates of Singapore, where many people are unable to get access to mainstream bank credit.
Not many in his position would resort to fleeing the country and with good reason. To fall within the remit of the UN's Refugee Convention, applicants must have a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of "a person's race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion."
Fear of persecution from criminal gangs on the basis of your inability to repay illicit loans is not a valid justification for asylum under international law. Unsurprisingly, in August last year, New Zealand's Refugee Status Appeals Authority rejected his final plea for asylum.
The New Zealand refugee appeals tribunal also rejected appeals from two Singaporean men in 2003 and 2001 who claimed that they were discriminated against during their military service.
One repeated the often-aired grievance that the Singapore army is biased toward those of ethnic Chinese origin, insisting that he had been passed over for promotions because he was of Indian extraction. He also claimed that there was mounting discrimination against Indians in Singapore, which had led to the suicide of his brother.
The other appellant said he was a conscientious objector and that he feared being jailed if he refused to complete his obligatory military service. Both appeals were rejected on the grounds that the unpleasant circumstances faced by both men did not amount to persecution.
Meanwhile, the Singapore government continues to stick to its long-standing policy of refusing to accept refugees. It is one of the few countries that have chosen not to sign up to the UN Refugee Convention and has a long history of turning away even those in desperate need, whether they be Vietnamese boat people or stateless Rohingya fleeing Burma.
As Balaji Sadasivan, minister of state for foreign affairs, put it earlier this year: "Given our limited land and natural resources, Singapore is not in a position to accept persons seeking political asylum or refugee status."
Recently-declassified British government papers reveal that founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was so unforgiving that he vetoed a 1979 proposal by Margaret Thatcher to buy a vacant Indonesian or Philippine island to house Vietnamese boat people.
His concern was that this would create a "rival entrepreneurial city".
Fortunately for some Singaporeans in dire straits, other countries take a more compassionate view. As recently as 1996, Australia, which is evidently no soft touch on immigration, granted asylum to a Singaporean woman of Indian background who married against her family's wishes and ended up getting divorced.
The immigration tribunal upheld her claim that she faced possible sexual harassment and physical abuse by men within her community and that the Singaporean authorities "may be unwilling to offer her protection" because of "the view that they take of her moral background".
Such dark days appear to be behind Singapore now. But the realities of political repression and the climate of fear stoked up by the government continue to drive some Singaporeans to flight.
Ben Bland is a freelance journalist in Jakarta. He was formerly based in Singapore. He blogs at http://www.asiancorrespondent.com/the-asia-file.
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