by Ian Buruma
There is culture in Singapore with a more local color, but much of it has been destroyed, damaged or sanitized beyond recognition. Bugis Street, for example, used to be the center of an old Malay, or more precisely, Bugis cultural tradition: transvestism. This had its seamy side, to be sure, but it is a pity that the street had to be demolished, only to be re-created in a different location as a kind of tourist mall with food stalls, but without Bugis transvestites. They have not entirely disappeared, however. Some can still be seen lurking around the big hotels, making eyes at tourists. I asked one of them what life was like in Singapore. He slipped his arm into mine and sighed: “Sooo boooring!”
More serious is the linguistic poverty of Singapore. Seventy-six percent of the population is ethnically Chinese. The rest is either Indian or Malay. Most Chinese speak different southern Chinese dialects at home: Hokkien, Cantonese or Hakka. But this practice has been discouraged by the government since the late 1970s, when the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched. Dialects were considered vulgar, the language of market hawkers; Mandarin was the official language of China. And a standard Chinese language was meant to unify the Chinese. So Mandarin was imposed on the mass media, and in public life. Cantonese soap operas from Hong Kong had to be dubbed. People who had never spoken Mandarin in their lives suddenly had to learn. Yet English is now the main medium of instruction in schools and universities. Chinese higher education was abolished in 1980, when Nanyang University was merged with the English-language University of Singapore. As a result of these measures, few Singaporeans speak any language well. Television announcers and government spokesmen speak painfully correct English or Mandarin in the manner of elocution teachers. But most Singaporeans speak a mixture of English and Chinese slang, or Chinese and English slang, or Malay and English slang, or all of the above.
A Chinese woman named Leena Lim, who runs one of the few decent bookshops in Singapore, lamented the disappearance of Chinese schools. She said nobody buys Chinese books anymore. Chinese bookshops have to survive by selling Sidney Sheldon novels, American how-to-succeed-in-business manuals and Ping-Pong bats. She said that the only people talking about Asian values are PAP politicians: “After breaking down communities, languages and cultures, they now want to re-create Asian culture artificially.”
I’m told [repression] is like making love—it’s always easier the second time.
Lee Kuan Yew, October 1956
The story of Singapore is, in many ways, the story of Lee Kuan Yew himself. So much in the state was shaped in his image. One way of explaining Lee is to look at his enemies. He began his political career as a fighter against British colonialism. Yet he was very much a product of the British Empire. Born in 1923, Harry Lee Kuan Yew was educated in English. He took great care not to have a native accent. He refused to learn Mandarin (but spoke some Cantonese to his nanny). Harry went on to read law at Cambridge University, where he won two firsts, a feat of which he likes to boast, especially to British visitors. He returned to Malaya a believer in democracy and genteel socialism.
Those, indeed, were the principles on which he based his anticolonial politics. In 1955 he maintained that “If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication.” He fought the British as an “Anglified Chinaman” (Lee’s own words). But to mobilize the Chinese-speaking masses, the Anglified Chinaman had to speak to them in Chinese, so he began to learn Mandarin when he was about thirty years old.
His next enemy, after the British had gone, was the communists. In 1963 hundreds of dissidents, including members of parliament, were arrested and jailed for communist subversion. Most communists and leftists in Singapore were Chinese speakers: many of them graduates and students of Nanyang University. And now British antisubversion laws, British detention centers, and British methods of punishment were used against them. The oppressive apparatus left behind by the Raj—particularly the Internal Security Act—would henceforth be used to crush political opposition to Lee Kuan Yew’s PAP government.
The most famous political prisoner is an academic and a former socialist MP called Chia Thye Poh. In 1966 he organized a demonstration against the Vietnam War, which was enough to detain him, but a better pretext had to be found. A few years later, while still in jail, Chia was accused of being a communist. No evidence was ever produced. And he would have been released, if only he had agreed to confess publicly to his alleged communism. But since he never agreed to do so, he is still confined to a room on Sentosa Island, a resort where mostly Japanese tourists come to admire the wax tableau of British generals signing Singapore’s surrender to Japan in 1941. Chia is now allowed out during the day, but has to return to the island every night.
But even as the PAP struggled against communist subversion, Lee’s party became an almost Leninist institution that gained more and more control over every aspect of Singaporean life, political, social and economic. PAP cadres keep a careful watch on housing estates, student organizations, trade unions and clan associations. It is impossible to start any private organization without government approval. Almost all local companies are linked to the government. For many years students could not enter a university in Singapore without a political Suitability Certificate. A Social Development Unit was set up to stimulate marriages between educated Singaporeans. Singapore, in short, is the epitome of the nanny state. But it is a peculiarly nosy and strict nanny. In 1987 the prime minister said,
I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yet, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what’s right. Never mind what the people think.
The specter of communism was invoked again in 1987, when the dramatist Wong Souk Yee was detained without trial with a group of young lawyers and Catholic social workers. They were accused of organizing a conspiracy to overthrow the government and establish a Marxist state. In fact, no evidence ever emerged that they did more than speak up for the rights of Filipina maids and protest against the suffocating intrusiveness of PAP rule. But they were sufficiently frightened by their treatment in the Whitley Detention Center—interrogation without sleep, exposure to ice-cold temperatures, solitary confinement, threats and beatings—that they confessed their “crimes” on television. Three of them were represented by a lawyer named Francis T. Seow. His arrest brought a new enemy to the fore: the United States.
Seow’s account of his problems with the PAP government has a typically Singaporean flavor. His book, To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison, was published in the U.S. It cannot be bought in Singapore, even though it is not actually banned. It is merely “undesirable.” As with smoking marijuana in Britain or the U.S., one can get away with reading undesirable books in private, but booksellers would be unwise to stock them. Seow’s prose style, larded with quotations from Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Lee Kuan Yew, is flowery and self-regarding: his rise as a barrister was “meteoric,” his speeches “won thunderous ovation.” But the book is also a devastating account of the destruction of the rule of law.
Seow started off as a young star on the Singapore bench, educated in London and trusted by Lee Kuan Yew himself—hence the “meteoric rise.” In the 1960s he helped to expose communists in Chinese schools. He became a feared prosecutor, then Solicitor General, and then president of the Law Society. And then, around about 1986, things began to go wrong.
Seow, as well as other members of the bar, felt that the Law Society should not only be consulted on promotions in the judiciary, but also make its views known on legislation. In early 1986 the Council of the Law Society issued a critical report on a new bill, which would enable any government minister
to restrict the circulation of foreign publications at will. The tax authorities began to harass Seow. His bank loans were suddenly called in. His accountants, sensing trouble, wanted to be discharged from handling his affairs.
Lee Kuan Yew decided to curb the Law Society’s public activities by staging a televised Parliamentary Committee hearing. This was meant to discredit the critical lawyers. Instead, it made rebel heroes out of them. Francis Seow and two young woman lawyers, Teo So Lung and Tang Fong Har, stood up to the PM’s harangues. The PM flew into such a rage that technicians had to be brought in to tone down his skin color for the television broadcast. Eight months later, Teo and Tang were among the detainees, arrested for engaging in the Marxist plot. The PM declared that one of the ringleaders of the plot was a Catholic lay worker named Vincent Cheng. When the Singaporean Archibishop Yong asked him for proof of this allegation, Lee said he would not “allow subversives to get away by insisting that I [have] got to prove everything against them in a court of law …”
The plight of the political detainees became an international cause célèbre. Seow met American diplomats, representatives from law societies and human rights groups, and was asked to run as an opposition MP in Singapore. He was arrested while waiting to see one of his clients, Teo So Lung, in the detention center. The accusation: plotting with Americans to interfere in Singapore’s internal affairs. American diplomats allegedly had paid him to oppose the PAP government. The proof: his dinners at Singapore restaurants with E. Mason Hendrickson, first secretary of the U.S. embassy. To force a confession, Seow was subjected to the usual treatment: seventeen hours of continuous interrogation (his clients endured seventy-two hours) while standing half-naked under a freezing air conditioner, threats, abuse and so on.
Seow remained in detention for more than two months. Officers of the Internal Security Department did their best to write a statement of Seow’s guilt that would be ambiguous enough to enable Seow to sign it without losing too much face, while also satisfying the government. The allegations were so far-fetched, however, and so lacking in evidence, that Seow’s case became an embarrassment. Yet, this being Singapore, the forms of due process and parliamentary rule had to be upheld. A parliamentary debate was staged to pass a government motion supporting the use of the Internal Security Act to prevent imaginary foreign interest groups from subverting Singapore. The Straits Times wrote that the PM had no choice but to keep Seow in detention: “To release the man would be an admission that it had been wrong to arrest him, and such an admission would confuse all those who have believed in the government.”
Seow was released in the end, but was warned not to get involved in politics. He ignored the warning, won a nonconstituency parliamentary seat, and the government started proceedings against him for tax evasion. While visiting New York to see a doctor, he was convicted in absentia, and without the presence of his lawyer in court. The fine was high enough to block any further political aspirations in Singapore. He now lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Seow’s clients got off less easily. And the way they were treated is the perfect example of Singapore’s peculiar use of due process—not to protect individual rights, but to deny them. First, Teo So Lung and eight others were forced to confess publicly to their alleged Marxist plot. After being released, they complained in private that the confessions had been exacted under duress. When the stories came out in the foreign press, the Singapore government said no credence would be given to these allegations unless they were stated in public. The challenge was met, and the former detainees spoke at a press conference about being physically and mentally abused by ISD officers. Whereupon the government announced a formal inquiry into the allegations. But Teo and the others were quickly rearrested and sent into the custody of the very officers they had accused of mistreatment. After several days of interrogation by these same officers, the detainees signed a Statutory Declaration that their allegations had been “a political propaganda ploy to discredit the government.” It is an offense to claim that a Statutory Declaration was made falsely. So the government could now announce with great satisfaction that the formal inquiry into alleged abuses would be abandoned forthwith.
Lee Kuan Yew likes to invoke the Confucian tradition in his political speeches. The insistence on public confessions is indeed modern Singaporean Confucianism in action. The law, under authoritarian regimes in China, South Korea and even sometimes in Japan, is not used to protect individual rights, but as an instrument of government power. Confessions are exacted to frighten people into submission. This is what is meant by “society above self” and “consensus above contention”: consensus is what the government wants people to think. And the law is used to make sure that they do.
By and large, and especially in a tiny, rich state like Singapore, it works. People are frightened away from politics. They develop sensitive antennae for potential trouble. And if they are prosperous as well, they will do anything to stay out of harm’s way, for they have too much to lose. A British academic at the National University of Singapore told me how he was sent an article from a Western newspaper which was critical of the Singapore government. He tried to show it to a Singaporean colleague. The man had a fit of hysterical blindness. He was unable to read it. He ran off in terror.
Singaporeans become very good at judging “tone,” at knowing just what to say, when, and to whom. Some regard this heightened sensitivity as a sign of Oriental refinement, of superior culture. I went to see a highly successful Singaporean property developer called Ho Kwon Ping. He is chairman of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, tipped to be a pillar of the PAP. He is the embodiment of Singaporean success. But he, too, used to be a bit of a rebel, many years ago. He, too, was once detained for being a “Marxist.” And he, too, made a public confession. I saw him at his plush modern office. In impeccable English, he drawled: “You know, I only feel comfortable talking about Asian values with my fellow Asians. For, you see, I think Westerners are so prejudiced.”
My colleagues and I have been personal friends and political colleagues for fifteen, twenty years now, and we have been through fire together.… And you build a camaraderie that these little things [split or disagreement] cannot break …
Lee Kuan Yew, 1965
Some of the most embittered men in Singapore are Lee Kuan Yew’s former colleagues, men of his own generation who helped him to fight British colonialism and build a free and independent nation. The former president, Devan Nair, now living in exile in the U.S., was for many years one of Lee’s closest friends, and is now among his fiercest critics. He wrote the foreword to Francis Seow’s book, comparing Lee’s oppressive measures unfavorably to the treatment he received from the British as a young, communist, anticolonial rebel: “It surely cannot be termed progress in freedom and humanity to arrest and treat his own political prisoners so brutally, and with far less reason than the British had to detain me and my revolutionary comrades.”
The founding chairman of the PAP and former deputy prime minister, Dr. Toh Chin Chye, accused the government of “administration by intimidation.” He said, “People abroad say to me: ‘You Singaporeans seem to be nervous, always looking over your shoulders.’ And it’s true, Singaporeans are so bloody scared. Nobody wants to say anything. It’s always: ‘Don’t quote me.’ … They’re scared of losing a license or their jobs.… Here we’re all ball bearings produced by quality control.”
David Marshall, the chief minister in 1955, was never a close friend, and for much of his life has been a vocal critic. Marshall, a Baghdadi Jew born in Singapore, founded the left-wing Workers’ Party in 1957. He beat the PAP in an election in 1961. He could have been a contender. Instead, he accepted Lee’s offer to become ambassador to Paris. Marshall is an expansive figure, a bon vivant, a ladies’ man, with cream and white hair, bushy eyebrows and soulful eyes. Singaporean liberals say that if Marshall had become prime minister instead of Lee, Singapore would have been poorer but freer, and certainly more fun. I went to see him at his law firm i
n the center of town.
“Could I have achieved what Lee did? The answer is no. I don’t have the iron in my soul to have achieved it.” This was in answer to my question whether Singapore’s prosperity could have been achieved without Lee’s authoritarianism. Then the conversation turned to Asian values. He called it “phony baloney.” He did not see Asian values of being of any value. In Lee’s case, he said, “lust for domination came with power.”
And yet Marshall, the Oriental Jew, despised by British colonialists and Chinese chauvinists in equal measure, was curiously like Lee in his stress on culture as the basis of politics. There is no understanding of democracy in Asia, he said. There is just a brutal Asian approach. You kill your enemies. This, he feared, was the “movement of the future. With the ebbing of American influence, and the flowing of Chinese influence, we see an extension of nails in our coffin, and an expansion of our ruthlessness.”
David Marshall did not seem bitter, just tired, old. Before parting, I asked whether he felt closer to the West, even though he was born and bred in the East. His eyes opened wide, owl-like. “Of course,” he said. “The brotherhood of man, equality, what a wonderful concept! What a beautiful thing: a religion that makes brothers of all people.”
The world would be simpler if Marshall and many others of his persuasion were right: that politics is mainly a reflection of culture; that liberal democracy is a matter of Judeo-Christian values; that despotism, enlightened or not, is destined to thrive in Asia, because of Confucius, or Shintoism, or whatever. But the example of Singapore shows that the world is not that simple. Underneath the rhetoric of Asian values lies a fear of not being equal to the West, of not living up to those Cambridge law degrees.