True to form, when then WSJ asked several 20th-century luminaries to pick the most influential invention of the millennium, Lee named the air-conditioner. “The humble air-conditioner has changed the lives of people in the tropical regions. Before air-con, mental concentration and with it the quality of work deteriorated as the day got hotter and more humid. Historically, advanced civilizations have flourished in the cooler climates. Now, lifestyles have become comparable to those in temperate zones and civilization in the tropical zones need no longer lag behind.”
It is intriguing to speculate if he would have been as effective and successful a politician in the 1950s and 1960s if he had not managed to exercise some control over his immediate surroundings. Perhaps the Singapore story would have indeed turned out differently if Lee had no air-con.
So, think of Singapore instead as the Air-Conditioned Nation — a society with a unique blend of comfort and central control, where people have mastered their environment, but at the cost of individual autonomy, and at the risk of unsustainability.
An air-conditioned nation is designed, first and foremost, for the comfort of its inhabitants. Lee and the PAP have always believed that what people want most from their government is an environment in which they can pursue prosaic material comforts, rather than live up to high-minded political principles for their own sake. Democracy is a means to an end, and the end is a high level of material security for Singaporeans. “What they want is a good government which produces results. They want the government to concentrate on the basics, like better pay and lower costs of living, better neighborhood schools for their children and better jobs. They want a safe, stable society, one good for their children to grow up in.”
What constitutes a desirable standard of living undergoes change, and the government has been highly responsive to these shifts. Once, basic public housing was enough to win votes; now, the government must cater to a growing appetite for the so-called finer things in life, such as leisure and entertainment.
Air-conditioning is a selfish technology: one of its paradoxes is that its net effect is an increase in heat. As a prodigious consumer of energy — it accounts for one-third of Singapore’s electricity use — it contributes significantly to global warming.
It is highly infrastructure-intensive, and demands fine planning and constant management. To use a well-worn example, Singapore’s continued success as a port is based not only on its suitable waters and strategic location, but also the use of hyper-efficient information technology and business-friendly policies that make it worthwhile for shipping and logistics companies to go out of their way, and even pay higher fees, to operate through Singapore.
The link between control and comfort is crystalized in the PAP’s notion of trusteeship. It does not view its role as being to respond to people’s expressed preferences at any one time. “As a custodian of the people’s welfare, it exercises independent judgment on what is in the long-term interests of the people and acts on that basis. It is willing to make unpopular decisions for the common good. With a comfortable majority and a strong mandate, we have been able to take a long-term view in addressing our economic problems.”
Only those how have forgotten the pangs of hunger will think of consoling the hungry by telling them that they should be free before they can eat. Our experience is that economic growth is the necessary foundation of any system that claims to advance human dignity, and that order and stability are essential for development. Good government was necessary for the realization of all rights. And the first duty of all governments is to ensure that it has the power to govern effectively. And they must govern fairly. Given the ideal of universal values and the reality of diversity, zealous moralizing should be avoided. Every country must find its own way. Human rights questions do not lend themselves to neat general formulas.
Tommy Koh acknowledged Singapore’s debt to the West for “our independent judiciary; our transparent legal process; our excellent civil service, based upon merit and free of corruption; science and technology; a management culture based upon merit, team work and the delegation of power; the liberation of women from their inferior status; the belief in affording all citizens equal opportunity; and a political system which makes the government accountable to the people through regular elections.” But democracy in the West was stable because it was built gradually, and in tandem with economic development, the Singapore thinkers pointed out. What the West was trying to do in Asia, through its human rights diplomacy, was to put the democratic cart before the economic horse. The Soviet Union’s experience had shown the risk of this: with perestroika lagging behind glasnost, people lacked the cushion of economic comfort required to endure the instability wrought by political openness. China’s strategy — market reform first, political reform later — was less dramatic in the short term but would produce more lasting benefits, the Singapore School argued.
Similarly, Asian countries had their own cultural and historical leanings that would shape their political evolution. Some of these were strengths that helped Asian societies grow their economies and cope with change, and Asians were right to want to preserve them. These included a strong sense of family self-reliance, a deep commitment to education, and a firm sense of public morality. The Singapore thinkers added that some features of Western-style democracy such as unrestrained press, overly influential lobby groups, and a culture of belittling holders of high public office — were hardly suitable for export to Asia, since they were under attack even in the West.
In resisting Western pressure, the PAP was also exhibiting — and exploiting — Singaporeans’ deep suspicion and sensitivity towards and the slightest hint of post-colonial condescension. The West was not wrong to want to share its message of liberty and freedom. But what some Western critics failed to take into account was the shared, shameful memory of white imperialism, military intervention and economic exploitation that festers just beneath the surface of most Asian societies. The indignities of colonial rule left Asians with the psychological legacy of having to struggle with what Mahbubani described as “the sub-conscious assumption that perhaps they were second-rate human beings, never good enough to be number one.” The West’s continued economic and cultural dominance makes many ordinary Singaporeans, like many Asians, extra-sensitive to being talked down to by Americans or Europeans.
The incident was thus beginning to generate a potentially useful domestic debate. This discussion evaporated instantly when the US started its hectoring. At that point, philosophical musings on human rights gave way to patriotic fervor.
Diplomats learnt from the fiasco. The American envoys who replaced those who rant the embassy during the Fray affair seemed to understand better the merits of quiet diplomacy. Their British counterparts, more experienced in dealing with former colonies, kept their appeals under wraps when two servicemen were arrested in Singapore in 1997 for allegedly robbing a taxi driver, which could have earned them jail and at least 12 strokes of the cane. Their discretion was rewarded, for Singapore duly handed the men over for prosecution in Britain, saying only that this was in the public interest.
***At its most intelligent — at UN meetings and in international intellectual journals — the Singapore School held balanced views, readily admitting weaknesses in Asian systems that needed to be corrected by emulating the best of the West. Unfortunately, when it came down to the level of domestic politics, these nuances frequently gave way to the crude formula of East-is-good-West-is-bad. The Asian Way became an irresistible intellectual crutch to reach when faced with things unfamiliar, complex and challenging.
It became all too easy to brand domestic critics as Western-influenced or apologists for the West. Using such labels provided the luxury of not having to deal with difficult issues.
Similarly, policy-makers looking through the filters of the Asian values debate tend to be unsympathetic to appeals for state welfare from down-and-out Singaporeans — since Asians are supposed to believe in self-reliance — rather than viewing them as the inevitable victims of capitalist industrialization and urbanization. The belief that Singapore’s Asianness offers a cultural immunity to social problems may be comforting, but not necessarily accurate or conducive to timely policy responses.
Fortunately, the PAP’s pragmatic tendencies do surface eventually. It may argue, dogmatically, over political theories. It does not argue with results. Thus, in 1995, Goh Chok Tong stated that Singapore would “hurry to catch up” if, in ten years’ time, its society was found to be lagging behind Asian countries that had undergone Western-inspired democratic reforms, like Taiwan and South Korea. In 2000, as the US was passing the milestone of its longest-ever boom, LKY spoke at an event in San Francisco and urged Asia to look across the Pacific and learn. Singapore officials abandoned all talk of the decadent West, and hungrily digested lessons in education, creativity, entrepreneurship and deregulation.
Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckledusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you… try.
Indeed, so dominant was his knuckleduster reputation that it is easy to overlook a key skill that Lee applied in his use of force. He was a master at calibrating his coercive interventions. Instead of blasting his way through every obstacle, he often exercised tactical self-restraint, picking more delicate and precise instruments to bring opponents under his control.
Lee’s calibrated coercion contributed to the PAP’s longevity. Many authoritarian regimes have been toppled after overdoing the use of force. Excessive violence tends to backfire. Instead of solidifying obedience, it generates moral outrage that can spawn rebellion.
He shared with Li Peng, former premier of China, his misgivings about the Tiananmen crackdown, pointing out that the Chinese had staged a “grand show” for the TV cameras. He contrasted it with the tactics he’d used to break up sit-ins by leftist students. “I cordoned off the whole area around the schools, shut off the water and electricity, and just waited. I told their parents that health conditions were deteriorating, dysentery was going to spread. And they broke it up without any difficulty.”
Again, Lee wasn’t content with the outcome. While prepared to win at any cost, he preferred to win without a public fight. To ensure that the confrontations of 1971 wouldn’t recur, parliament passed the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act in 1974. This spelled the death of independent newspapers. The new press law gave the government the power to name newspaper companies’ directors. The government thus got a say in appointing editors and setting the editorial direction of every newspaper, ensuring that none would act in a way that precipitated an open war. Through such moves, a system of self-censorship replaced the adversarial relationship that had triggered the use of repressive laws.
Wary of declaring war on the Catholic Church, the government widened the net to haul in various other critics. It claimed it had uncovered a “Marxist conspiracy” to overthrow the government by force. Again, the ISA crackdown was followed by legislative innovations. The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act of 1990 empowered the government to place gag orders on religious preachers deemed to be “carrying out activities to promote a political cause.” Henceforth, instead of locking up preachers, the government could impose a more calibrated restraining order.
In the meantime, the government amended the Legal Profession Act. The Society would be allowed to comment on Bills only when invited to do so by the government. The government could also nominate three members to the Society’s council. In addition, the government formed the Singapore Academy of Law as an alternative and more conservative voice of the legal profession.
The net effect of the government’s calibration of its coercion has been remarkable. The government’s dominance has increased, even as it use of overt force has diminished. The government has successfully transitioned to behind-the-scenes controls. In many sectors, it has been able to stack the leadership of key institutions with loyalists and pragmatists with no appetite for heroics. The old repressive laws are still on the books, of course, underwriting the government’s dealings, sort of like how a country’s currency is backed by gold reserves you don’t need to see in normal times.
Chee’s lawbreaking events were usually handled on the ground not by riot police or paid goons (like in Hong Kong), but by soft-spoken police officers, usually in plain clothes and with no visible weapons, not even megaphones. The government would settle scores later, in the courts rather than on the streets. Thus, Chee was never rewarded with dramatic news photos or video of dignified protesters being brutalized by the state — the kind of images the Malaysian government, for example, regularly gifts to its opponents.
Politicians on either side of the spectrum don’t like talking about calibrated coercion. The government denies that any form of coercion has anything todo with its success. Its opponents argue that there’s nothing calibrated about its use of force. Nevertheless, the PAP’s calibrated coercion may be one of its more underrated capacities. As far as superhero comparisons go, the party of Lee is less Iron Man, more Doctor Strange.
The 5 gold stars on China’s national flag represent communism (the big star, naturally) and the social classes of the people (the four small ones).
In contrast, the 5 white stars on Singapore’s flag represent the nation’s core principles — one of which is democracy. Every school day, children stand before the flag and promise, hand on heart, “to build a democratic society.” I was basically being accused of trying to fulfil our national pledge.
Regulators have gone to the extent of labelling local plays dealing with socio-political issues as “Mature Content,” a tag normally reserved for sex and violence. The irony of the government’s demophobia goes deeper. The PAP has been a major beneficiary of democracy. LKY didn’t have to go to war to come to power like Washington or Mao ddi. Thanks to democracy, no PAP leader had to lose his life to win the right to rule.
Many popular elected regimes later became so unpopular that they could stay in power by abandoning any pretense of democracy. Zimbabwe’s Mugabe and the Philippines’ Marcos come to mind.
Even American diplomats in a confidential 2004 briefing note published by Wikileaks did not attribute PAP dominance mainly to dirty tricks: “The biggest challenge to the development of the opposition in Singapore is the PAP’s highly successful track record. It has consistently delivered peace, stability, and rapid economic growth for 4 decades while avoiding corruption and mainly avoiding cronyism.”
Star students tend not to knock the education system that allowed them to shine. So why does a straight-A political party keep badmouthing democracy?
Clearly, not everyone can be trusted to act for the common good, or even to make intelligent choices in their own self-interest. But the democratic principle of one person one vote has never been based on the fiction of uniform ability. When the American founding fathers declared as a self-evident truth that everyone is “created” equal, they meant just that: people enter the world equally endowed with certain basic rights. It is a moral statement, distinguishing democracy from systems that treat some groups as rulers by birthright while others as destined to be ruled. No democrat claims adults are equally capable of making wise decisions in the public interest — this is just one of many myths that democracy’s opponents construct to make this form of government seem as absurd a sport as racewalking. Nor do democrats claim that the system always hands power to the most able or honest leaders. (Donald Trump. Enough said.)
What makes democracy the best political system ever devised is not that voters unfailingly choose good government but that it gives people a peaceful way to kick out bad ones. This is nothing short of miraculous considering that, through much of human history, most people lived and died under yokes of oppression they were powerless to break.
After all, under their powdered wigs, most founding fathers of Western democracies were more elitist and less trusting of the masses than any PAP scholar-technocrat. Therefore, while every democratic system requires the government to be elected by the people and to act for them, each also carves out domains to be insulated from the vagaries of public opinion. In these protected spaces, decision-making is guided by core values, expert judgment and long-term concerns, not popular pressure. Courts, for example, are required to be guided by the law, not TV talking heads, opinion polls or lynch mobs. Similarly, liberal democracies did not put man on the moon or decipher DNA by giving all citizens equal say in the enterprise. There are times when the ablest people need to be given the space to do the job with minimum interference by the rest of us.
Exactly where to draw the line between public participation and managerial autonomy is something we have to work out domain by domain, paying attention to other countries’ best practices and worst mistakes. When countries overdo popular participation, the result may be governmental inefficiency or, paradoxically, the rise of demagogues who hijack mass movements for their own ends. On the other hand, inadequate public accountability and voice routinely leads to corruption and abuse of power.
The polling process itself is as clean as one can reasonably expect. But elections are not just about what happens on polling day. Democratic choice is a process requiring certain conditions to be met on both the demand and supply sides. On the demand side, voters must be able to learn about and discuss their choices fully — which requires much more freedom of media and public assembly than we currently enjoy. On the supply side, contenders for power must not be unfairly disadvantaged long before the polls — an independent election commission is a must, particularly to prevent gerrymandering. Nor should they be obstructed from fulfilling their mandates if they win — which is the effect of denying opposition MPS any say in their constituencies’ government grassroots machinery.
And so the PM became SM. Many older Singaporeans and foreign investors welcomed the assurances of stability. The new government promised a mix of continuity and change, and was not dismayed of characterizations of November 28 as a non-event. They saw it as a tribute to the gradual transfer of power they had planned.
In the 1992 by-election campaign, he told voters that if he lost, his successor at the helm of the PAP government might not continue with “my views, my policies, my philosophy, my values” — suggesting that not all his colleagues agreed with him.
“If he were not my son, he would be the PM. I’ll tell you honestly. I stopped him because he can run faster any any of the others. But I told him it would do him no good. Just stay out of this race.” The revelation that LHL at some point had had to be “stopped” from making a bid for the premiership raised more questions than it answered.
To boost his moral authority in arguing for higher salaries for public servants, he excluded himself from the formula, and announced that he would not accept any raise for five years. He did not allow his ministers to follow his example, saying that this would make the government appear defensive.
Such interventions hinted at Goh’s deep sense of his role as first among equals. He accepted matter-of-factly that he was not the most formidable or respected personality in his cabinet, but did not use that as an excuse to shirk his responsibility as PM. His press secretary put it this way: “The PM has not found the need to assert himself personally on every issue. He encourages collective leadership in his cabinet. He takes full advantage of the SM’s experience and judgment. His other cabinet colleagues also contribute to the final decision on every major issue. But the buck stops with him, not with the SM or any other minister.”
Relative to the average Singaporean, Goh, like the rest of his cabinet, was a member of the super-achieving elite. He had become managing director of the NOL at the age of 32 and was drafting and presenting government budgets by his late 30s. His government experience was not in the softer social ministries, but in the most hardline and top-down of economic and security, portfolios: finance, trade and industry, defence. By 1979, the Far Eastern Economic Review was calling him the “young managing director of Singapore Inc.”
Relative to the impossibly articulate and frighteningly intelligent Lees, however, Goh was an everyman. At some unconscious level, many Singaporeans could identify with his situation. The Lees were to Goh waht Singapore-As-Number-One was to the average Singaporean — a lofty standard that made them feel lucky to be on the same side, but also somewhat inadequate. Many Singaporeans see themselves as ordinary folk who have been catapulted into the middle of a highly developed, sophisticated and fast-paced city. Most of their anxieties, such as over the rising cost of living, the incessant educational treadmill and the unforgiving rat race, are related to this sense of being unable to keep up with an overly demanding society. Perhaps, in Goh Chok Tong, Singaporeans saw a leader who at least understood all this. People sensed that when he said he wanted to make Singapore a more forgiving, second-chance society, he meant it, for surely he knew how it felt to be held up to impossibly high perfectionist standards.
Any successor will find the shoes he has left too big. I do not intend to wear his shoes. I shall wear my own, and choose my own stride. I intend to be myself, and set my own style.
The first duty of all governments is to ensure that it has the power to govern effectively.
The government and the national press are fond of highlighting possible future scenarios, as a way to educate citizens about possible pitfalls ahead. Unfortunately, the ideological purpose behind such exercises tends to limit the publicly discussed scenarios to a narrow range. We are told that the main risk factors threatening Singapore’s peace and prosperity are, first, our own unreliability as citizens (we may succumb to the temptations of welfarism, communalism, individualism or emigration) and, second, our location in an unpredictable region (from which could seep Islamic fundamentalism or thousands of refugee-laden boats).
As plausible as these risks are, they tend to deflect attention from problems that may arise as a result not of anyone’s failure, but of Singapore’s success. Karl Marx got this much right: history moves through contradictions; every society’s greatest strengths eventually turn out to be its most fatal weaknesses. In Singapore, intelligent planning should not ignore the possibility that the rapid economic development and tight political control that characterized the 1990s will be increasingly at odds with each other in the coming decade. This scenario may require a new kind of politics.
You have to decide whether you think he knows more or I know more.
Lee’s moral authority and political skill were derived from this 40 years’ hardball political experience, his success as a premier, and his status as the architect of most of Singapore’s post colonial norms and institutions. This was a card that nobody in the world could trump, so it was natural that he readily played it whenever he felt it would help the government’s hand — as in the debates over ministerial pay, the elected presidency and foreign talent.
However, unless the next PM surrounds himself with sycophants — which is unlikely, since LHL has both the wisdom and the self-confidence to want the ablest people on his team — it is possible that cabinet will include strong-willed personalities who do not see themselves as a mere chorus to the top man’s tune. Regardless of how deeply they believe in preserving PAP dominance, honest differences of opinion are bound to surface. The leadership will have to find new ways to manage these internal differences. LKY would no doubt offer private advice as long as he is able to, but it would untenable for him to be seen to intervene, as that would utterly undermine his son’s credibility. It would be equally counterproductive for LHL to try to be as forceful as his father was, since his most valued colleagues, seeing themselves as his peers rather than his juniors, would probably not respond well. The PM would therefore have to continue with the style of collective leadership exercised by Goh Chok Tong.
It cannot be a single point because there will be diversity and different views, and you have to accommodate them. Actually, you need the diversity in order to make progress. But at the same time, if it’s just a flat plain with a little hillock which you can just barely discern, then where does the center of direction come from? If you are an optimist, you say, well, out of the creative chaos will emerge progress. Maybe. But I’m not sure that works for us.
I think one would be that the more people you involve in working with the solution, the better the solution that we’re likely to come up with. We’re dealing with people, we’re dealing with human beings. They have their worries, they’ve their concerns. And they have different points of view and these have to be accommodated, worked together and you have to set a direction so that it finally doesn’t add up just to zero. That’s the first lesson. The second one to complement that is that you have to develop some quite clear ideas of what you want. Because at the same time you’re developing your consensus and soliciting views, unless you can eventually crystallize them into something definite, something quite simple and clear, you’re not going to be able to make progress.
The patriarch isn’t to blame if Singapore doesn’t want to grow up.
Whatever the title, for the next 20 years, the simple political reality was that LKY was still around. At The Strait Times, word came from way above my pay grade that we were not to say he stepped down. He stepped aside.
If Lee didn’t join this club, it wasn’t because he lacked self-belief or the stomach for undemocratic methods. Perhaps his autocratic tendency was tempered by his hyper-rational, unsentimental view of life. He knew time changes everything, and that people grow old, get weak, and die.
After 3 decades, the state had become like a corporate computer system patched together by a brilliant IT guy who refuses to adopt off-the-shelf solutions used by other firms, and insists on installing his own custom-built software upgrades year after year. He is conscientious enough to train apprentices and write a voluminous troubleshooting guide. But only he knows how to get optimum performance out of his system. Eventually, the company will find out the hard way that it should have adopted more resilient open-source solutions that wouldn’t depend on their champion IT guy bing on call 24/7.
The globally respected OS that Lee rejected while he was in office was the democratic template of checks and balances to avoid over-concentrated power. Robust institutions insure against the mortality and fallibility of human leaders. Lee placed his bets instead on a conveyor belt of able men unfettered by onerous constraints.
The elected presidency was Lee’s insurance policy against a so-called freak election that could bring the wrong party into power. The insurgents might only last a single parliamentary term, but they could cause permanent damage in that time, Lee feared. They could raid the country’s financial reserves and replace key public sector appointment holders with incompetent cronies. Lee decided that the office of the president had to be given the power to veto such plans.
But LKY was determined to do what he had always done: use his political clout to create a structural fix that, he thought, would put an end to unproductive debates and let the government get on with the job.
The PAP had prided itself on its willingness to make unpopular decisions in the country’s long-term interest, but now when ministers resisted the popular will, their motivations would be questioned — of course they don’t care about the people, they only care about their high-paying jobs. The market-pegged formula also made people contemptuously unforgiving of inevitable mistakes — this is what million-dollar salaries get us? Another serious unintended but predictable consequence was to make the civil service resistant to change, by disincentivizing risk-taking among officers earning salaries many know they can’t command elsewhere.
He does not deserve all the blame. As he phased himself out of day-to-day government, it was up to his younger colleagues to stress-test his legacy clinically and redesign the system accordingly. If they were too in awe of his status as supreme architect of PAP software, that was their fault, not his.
After LKY’s final, emotional exit in Feb 2015, the depth of his influence became even more apparent. LKYism became a kind of quasi-theology, with members of the governing elite falling over one another to cite his words and acts, and thus show that they were the legitimate interpreters and inheritors of Singapore’s ultimate oracle. Being “against Mr. Lee’s values” emerged as a damming label to stick on opponents within the establishment.
This itself was an implicit acknowledgment that the new-style president did not fall within its chain of command. Cabinet could not subject Ong to internal party discipline or OB markers, in the way that it managed its backbenchers or the media, for example.
Whatever his thinking, it is clear that the directly elected character of the president adds a new and unfamiliar dimension to Singapore’s political matrix. Singapore upholds the formal separation of powers — among the legislature, the executive and the judiciary — to prevent abuse by any one arm of the state. In practice, however, politics has been characterized by an extraordinarily powerful executive, in the form on an inner cabinet. Parliament is dominated by a ruling party with a leadership made up of cabinet ministers. Significant political decisions are not subject to judicial review and are instead at ministers’ discretion. Non-state institutions that serve as watchdogs in other countries, such as the press and the academe, are relegated to subordinate positions. All these factors add up to a highly dominant executive.
In fact, however, the government’s reluctance to be swept along by the tide of public emotion was not new. In 1970 and again in 1981, it had refused to declare public holidays when Presidents Yusof Ishak and Benjamin Sheares, respectively, died in office.
When the idea of a more powerful presidency was first mooted in the 1980s, it was widely assumed to be an office designed by LKY for himself.
Symbolism matters in all kinds of human relations, whether it’s wearing a wedding ring or preserving a heritage building. It’s how we declare who we are and what’s important to us. The identity of our new president amounts to a big, bold statement.
I can think of few political events that reveal so starkly the tendencies that prevent Singapore from maturing as a polity: the government’s distrust of the people, its insistence on getting its way, and its lack of finesse in dealing with contentious issues.
The government wanted certainty. But this could only come at a very high cost. The point of election isn’t simply to give power to winners. If power were the only thing at stake, contenders could do it the efficient GoT way and murder their opponents. No, elections are about conferring legitimacy. That legitimacy is a product of people’s democratic choice: their freedom to stand for election and their freedom to vote. But genuine choice makes elections unpredictable.
To put it another way, you can have either legitimacy or certainty; you can’t have both. Trying to guarantee an election outcome — as the government did when it restricted the 2017 election to Malay candidates — diminished the perceived legitimacy of the process. That was too high a price to pay.
Basic knowledge of human psychology should tell us that if we want people to feel good, we need to respect their dignity. If your colleague needs money for an operation, there’s a big difference between discretely giving him the cash versus broadcasting your charity via your workplace’s group email. The former tells him you sincerely want to help; the latter says you’re showing off at his expense.
Everybody likes a gift, but nobody wants to appear needy. Tokens need to be presented with grace.
Elite dynamics matter in every country’s politics, even in the age of so-called people power. When the people rise up, what happens next depends on the response of elites — party bosses, local governors, military generals, business moguls and union bosses, ayatollahs and bishops. Elites control the networks and resources that revolutionaries and reformists need for the long haul. The masses may fill the streets, but it’s elites who, behind closed doors, urge a president or PM to stay or go, depending on which scenario serves their own interests best.
A certain amount of elite solidarity is essential for political stability and getting things done for the country. Too much of it, though, can result in rigidity; the political system can become an instrument of elites’ narrow interests, insensitive to the needs of ordinary citizens.
Clearly, the vast majority of individuals we may think of as establishment rebels are not revolutionaries. Their words may rock the boat, but they are not calling for a mutiny to throw their captain overboard. Indeed, when we look at the pattern of establishment dissent since the 1990s, it’s striking that betrayal is largely in the eyes of the beholder — namely, of the PAP leadership. When the government gets upset with its own elites, it’s not because those individuals are plotting the leaders’ downfall or planning to defect to the opposition, but because the government is hypersensitive to criticism and paranoid about the mere appearance of division.
Singapore’s elite cohesion is an accomplishment that hasn’t been given much attention, considering how exceptional it is. To give the PAP due credit, one big reason is the party’s success in aligning itself with Singapore’s national interests. As a result, many elites are loyal to the system because they sincerely see it as the only way to keep their country going. Another major factor is Singapore’s size. It is too small to require decentralization of authority and resources to provincial or state-level governments, which could become political bases for would-be challengers. Instead, everything can be run from an all-powerful centre.
In addition, LKY erected a formidable array of structural barriers to keep the system in check. Learning from his battle with Lim Chin Siong and the radical left, Lee rewrote the party constitution, installing a phalanx of cadres that made an essentially self-selected central committee impervious to challengers from within the party. Lee amended the republic’s Constitution such that an MP will lose his seat if he’s no longer a member of the political party for which he stood in the election. If the leaders think one of their own is plotting something, they can pre-emptively expel him from the party, thus triggering his eviction from parliament.
Most countries have multiple power centres where potential competitors can emerge. In weak democracies, the military is the most important of such bases. In Singapore, the armed forces are a key training ground for future politicians, but no officer could ever elevate himself against cabinet’s wishes. SAF chiefs are rotated every couple of years and retired in their prime; they never stay long enough to cultivate an autonomous power base. When scholar-officers leave the SAF at age 50 or younger, the government doesn’t require them to fend for themselves and thus get into mischief. They are transplanted into ministries and government-linked companies, keeping them safely within the family.
Somewhere along the line though, the PAP has come to view the establishment in more partisan terms. Refusing to profess loyalty to the leadership is equated with disloyalty to Singapore. This attitude is likely to set a vicious cycle in motion. As the government gets less and less accustomed to vigorous debate, its tolerance for alternative views will progressively diminish. Then, like a child who is so used to getting his way that he throws a tantrum when his devoted parents bring home chocolate ice cream instead of chocolate chip, the government will overreact to even mildly deviant ideas from its own side. Should the government show itself emotionally unprepared for naysayers even within its establishment, that would be an unintended but predictable consequence of decades of elite cohesion.
As for the third occupant of the PM’s Office, the writing was on the wall even before Goh moved in. When LHL took over in 2004, the only surprise was that Goh lasted as long as he did.
In 1990, when Goh’s team took over, less than 1 in 10 resident adults had a degree or diploma; 6 in 10 didn’t have secondary qualifications. Today, almost half have degrees or diplomas; only one-quarter didn’t complete secondary school. Even if they don’t possess top qualifications themselves, many Singaporeans have had work experience in globally exposed sectors and have some sense of what strong organizations, managers and leaders look like.
In Singapore, though, citizens are even more excluded from the process. This is due to the lack of democracy within the ruling party. LKY gave the PAP a Leninist structure, ensuring that its summit could never be conquered from the base. The central executive committee, via cadres it selects, basically elects itself. It would be futile for any leadership contender to appeal to the party grassroots, let alone the wider public. Popularity among the masses does not decide succession. It may even work against candidates, since the government’s elite technocrats would probably be suspicious of any charismatic colleague cultivating too independent a connection with the citizenry.
According to the official line, the PM leaves the final choice to the next generation’s office holders. But these caveats belie the reality that current leaders vet the finalists. Anyone whom party seniors deem unfit to succeed them would have been weeded out long before the final rounds.
One consequence of this carefully controlled, top-down process is that an incoming PM must work hard to prove he is his own man. Everyone knows he doesn’t owe his position to the grassroots, but to a handful of his peers and an even tighter circle of elders.
Leaving aside formal ministerial appointments, everybody knows that when public sector system break down, the Mr Fix-it on the PM’s speed dial is a man from his first cabinet, Khaw Boon Wan. And when there are political fires to put out — or pre-empt — it’s been another senior steward, K. Shanmugam, whom the government still counts on. Whatever others think of the job they’ve done, it’s clear from the responsibilities they’ve shouldered that Khaw and Shanmugam are the PAP’s MVPs.
When LKY faded from the scene, it looked as if the PAP would never again have someone with the legal mind, shrewd instincts or street-fighter temperament to replicate his bold interventions — until now.
Shanmugam’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 for example, is Singapore’s most sweeping media legislation since LKY’s 1986 press law amendments.
Any election result provides more than just a mandate to the victorious party. It also generates political capital for various individuals and groups within the party. The capital from GE2015’s 10-point swing towards the PAP was there for Tharman’s and other reformers’ taking. They deserved it. Inexplicably, his stock within the government fell soon after. Perhaps this was an indicator of his main weaknesses: like many wise leaders, he was not a wily enough politician.
The retribution meted out to opposition politicians is probably the ugliest aspect of Singapore politics, and the main reason that some political scientists classify the republic as a non-democracy. The authorities’ actions are not those of a violent police state that uses threats against life and limb, but a legal-bureaucratic machinery that pins opponents under the weight of criminal prosecutions and civil suits.
However, many countries have operated far more fearsome regimes than the PAP, and yet have seen opposition movements rise up and even take over power. The people’s fear of government repression cannot, on its own, explain the PAP’s electoral dominance. The government’s actions against the opposition can be thought of as attempts to still the waters around the ship of state, but what keeps it afloat and on course is a tide of public support. That support is based on social and economic policies that have benefitted most Singaporeans, and give them a vested interest in continued PAP government.
Nurture a capitalist ideology so that Singaporeans compete for resources through the market instead of through politics, and so they believe that winners and losers are determined on merit, and not by the political structure.
You’re fighting to prevent the opposition from gaining ground and saying, “I may not be good enough to form the government but please get me in so that I can check this government.” The attraction of that position is a problem.
Paradoxically, the stronger the PAP government gets, the more the opposition’s call seems to make sense. In the 1990s, the opposition-for-opposition’s-sake argument was the single most important dynamic shaping the election strategies of both PAP and opposition.
It realized that swing voters liked the idea of having more opposition in parliament, but were also receptive to the ruling party’s dire warnings that a freak result might boot the PAP out of office — an outcome that these voters did not want. The opposition found a way to assure voters that they had nothing to fear. Its candidates contested less than half the seats.
One way to raise the hurdle was to turn single-seat constituencies into group representation constituencies (GRCs). In 1988, there were 42 single-seat wards and 13 three-member GRCs. By 1997, only 9 wards were single-seat.
Homeowners had to take seriously the government’s threat to place HDB precincts in opposition wards lower on its upgrading schedule.
The government was unapologetic. In a letter replying to the Roundtable’s analysis, it wrote: “Upgrading depends on growth and surpluses. Surpluses require good and sound government pursuing long-term policies that can generate growth and wealth for all. Good government can endure only only if people vote for it. So voters who help to elect a good government are making a valuable contribution to Singapore. Those who vote against good government, and yet hope to benefit from it, are free-riding on those who vote for good government. We must give people and incentive to support good government with their votes, instead of free-riding on others. This is both necessary and right.”
From the CEC’s perspective, Chiam’s leadership style grew increasingly intolerable, and the others were forced to bypass him to get anything done. In the year preceding his resignation, Chiam felt the party he founded slipping slowly out of his control.
He again misjudged public opinion when the appeared to give ammunition to foreign critics of Singapore during emotional international tiffs. Experienced politicians in most countries know better than to risk offending their publics’ nationalist sentiments.
Of course, most Singaporeans are not known to get worked up over issues such as free speech. But some sections of the population do bristle when they perceive opposition leaders being treated harshly.
The PAP would claim that such tests help to hold politicians to the high standards required for those entering national politics. Certainly, the PAP applies far more stringent background checks on its candidate than the opposition does on its own. However, in some aspects, a new and inexperienced PAP candidate has an easier ride. He is cushioned by the ruling party’s institutional support, and faces a press predisposed to treating him with kid gloves. While an opposition member’s every move is dissected and held against him in the interest of keeping politics honest, the PAP candidate is spared any probing by the media, on the grounds that a loss of privacy and face would deter good men from stepping forward to serve.
A second dampener on the WP’s aspirations is the absence of a First World electorate, as Ho Kwon Ping noted in a pre-election commentary. Political reform anywhere depends not only on politicians and parties, but also on active citizens in civil society. The problem is that Singapore society has been systematically depoliticized over the decades and is now mired in apathy. While there has been a noticeable revival of civil society over the past decade, activists of all kinds are stilled used to forging ahead — only to find nobody following behind them.
The 2011 election campaign may have energized ordinarily docile Singaporeans to share views on Facebook, attend rallies, and jostle for WP umbrellas, but the sobering truth for the opposition is that the vast majority will return to their private lives immediately after Polling Day, and continue to outsource public affairs to politicians.
The big issues that have dominated the elections — such as public housing prices, traffic congestion and the cost of living — will, ironically, the the easiest for the PAP to solve. These are problems that are open to technocratic solutions, and the PAP leaders and their civil servants are masters of navigating complex policy terrains when they have the political will to do so.
Instead, the real challenge post-GE is to win back the people’s trust. Only then can policymakers make what the PM called in first post-election remarks the “difficult decisions and trade-offs which governing Singapore involves.” Worryingly for the PAP, the cynicism that greeted even LHL’s apologies and assurances during the campaign shows that the ruling party’s political capital is significantly depleted, and perhaps at an all-time low.
Opposition politicians wanted to teach the government a lesson in 2011. Now, they’ll have to face the daunting possibility that the government actually learns it.
From a PAP perspective, voters may look irrational when they pick parties and candidates that are plainly inferior. Too many voters are focusing on what, in its view, are the wrong questions. They are asking, “Do we have enough opposition?” Or, “Should we send a signal to the government that we’re not happy?” The ruling party believes people should only ask, “Who is fit to govern?” But one of the hard truths about democratic elections is that it’s not just the answers that are in the hands of the voters — it’s also the questions.
As long as the PAP’s parliamentary dominance is so out of whack with its popular vote, we’ll continue to see the electorate practise a kind of affirmative action in favor of the opposition. Voters will grant opposition candidates a generous benefit of the doubt while punishing PAP candidates for the slightest slip. The PAP may think this extremely unfair, but it’s an understandable response to a distorted political marketplace.
The majority does not want the PAP to monopolize power. Singaporeans know that the PAP has a tendency to take their support for granted. They feel minsters are too impressed by their own technocratic brilliance and too insulated from the real world by their fat salaries, making them brush aside the people’s genuine grievances. The public has come to believe that the threat of opposition gains is ultimately the most effective way to get the best out of a PAP government.
A public that took 32 years to grow the number of elected opposition MPs from 1 to 7 can hardly be described as cavalier risk-takers.
Since it is uncomfortable to move about in the tropics, the city should integrate various activities within compact, high-density developments. Instead of importing temperate town-planning doctrines wholesale, designs should replicate the structure of of the tropical rainforest, within which temperatures are several degrees lower than in open fields.
The problem with such radical alternative paradigms is that their widespread application would mean tearing down and rebuilding most of the city. It is simply too late; the only option is gradual adaptation and incremental improvement, rather than wholesale reconstruction.
LKY’s wish for a future invention, he said in 1999, was a personal air-conditioning device.
The sobering truth is that the majority of Singaporeans, like the majority in any country, slip easily into the habit of protecting their private interests, and insulating their consciences from society’s demands, with the conditioned reflexes with which one avoid eye contact with a beggar on the pavement. But, again like any country, Singapore also possesses that minority of people who believe that society is a gift to be kept alive, by talking about it and working for it. They want to believe in something larger than themselves.
This is at odds with Singapore’s self-image as a communitarian Asian society, an image conjured up largely to justify the protection of family values and paternalistic government. In truth, the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business.
Yet, few ingredients are more important for democratic progress than an active civil society — that space where individuals exercise voluntary initiative for public ends. Civil society includes voluntary welfare organizations, advocacy groups, professional societies, alumni associations, cultural groups and the like. In a world dominated by the state at one end and the market at the other, civil society — the “people sector”, as opposed to the public and private sectors — is where citizens gain practice in the essential democratic art of cooperation, negotiation and compromise.
They also observe that the administration is often reluctant to consult them in decision-making despite their expertise in their particular field. The government seems to believe in many helping hands, but not necessarily many helping heads.
Most people are caught up with the responsibilities of work and family and simply do not want the hassle of taking up causes with no tangible payback. In an Air-Conditioned Nation, it is certainly more tempting to just sit back and enjoy the comforts of life. But others have this overriding impulse to get involved in things larger than themselves. They cannot help it. They are not oblivious to the controls, but are willing to sacrifice their own comfort for what they believe. Thus, people rarely start with theories and then work out how to act. Instead, they pick theories of politics to match the opinions and actions that they are already inclined towards. The choice really lies within themselves.
I don’t even recall the name of the opposition challenger and had nothing against the ruling party incumbent. But I had been appalled by LKY’s character assassination of President Nair a few years earlier. I felt I had no way to register my abhorrence for the government’s actions other than through my ballot.
Occurring in my early adulthood, such spectacular demonstrations of raw power left a permanent scar on my political consciousness, ingraining what one of the founding fathers of social theory, Max Weber, said about the modern state — that it is ultimately defined by its coercive capacity. I could see how important it was to check that power.
First, I want leaders who believe they know best — but are equally certain that they don’t know it all. Politicians shouldn’t run for office if they aren’t convinced they can do the job better than anyone else. I don’t subscribe to the populist tendency to reward relatability over ability. I have enough friends to share a prata with; I don’t need government leaders to fill that role. I don’t need them to rap or share selfies any more than I expect my doctor or banker to do so; they don’t need to entertain me.
Leaders who are truly competent, though, would be always mindful of their fallibility. Wise leaders acknowledge they might be wrong on any given decision, even if they were best placed to make it. They would willingly subject themselves to external scrutiny and independent checks.
They would also understand that most choices are not between good and bad, but trade-offs between competing values and goals. Yes, they may have to make a tough choice today, but that doesn’t make other choices illegitimate. In a fast-changing world, they would follow the example of technology companies and treat most of their policy positions as being in constant beta mode: they would recognize that solutions they reject as suboptimal or impractical this year may be just what’s needed next year.
It would scuttle its mental model of Singapore as a single sampan in which everyone must row in the same direction once the caption decides a course, and replace it with a flotilla of vessels from which some are encouraged to dally to explore hidden coves, or speed off to see what’s over the horizon, and then to share publicly what they’ve found, in case they discover opportunities and threats that the captain can’t spot.
I suspect that if it acted more idealistically, the PAP would attract many more young Singaporeans who crave something to believe in.
The PAP prides itself on being responsive to people’s needs. But in the 2000s, it underperformed. Policymakers focused on achieving macroeconomic targets and enhancing Singapore’s global competitiveness, but lost sight of how households were coping on the ground. We had F1 racecars zipping past City Hall at 240kph but MRT trains couldn’t get people to work on time. The new casinos were bussing in tourists more efficiently than our overcrowded hospitals were able to admit patients. Singaporeans were getting the impression that our country was becoming an attractive playground for the region’s middle class and super rich, at the expense of locals’ standard of living.
They believe an uncertain world requires the PAP to preserve its dominance as long as possible. They consider the complaints of liberals to be rather childish, as if only those who have represented the country against foreign adversaries count as real men.
This team would face a Catch-22. They cannot reform the PAP until they reach the top. But they cannot reach the top unless they shelve their reformist ambitions. It’s only with the blessings of godfathers within the current leadership that they will get anywhere.
Since Pofma’s correction and removal directives are obviously less severe than the bans and jail terms provided for under preexisting legislation, ministers argued that the new law’s critics were overreacting. The public should appreciate its more considerate, “calibrated” approach, they implied. One reason why it’s hard to be grateful for these gentler powers is that they augment rather than replace the more extreme weapons, which are all still intact.
A second extraordinary feature of this law is that nobody other than government ministers can trigger correction and removal orders. This distinguishes it from France’s 2018 election misinformation law, under which any candidate, whether from the opposition or the ruling party, can apply to a judge for an emergency injunction to remove online content containing damaging falsehoods. One does not have to believe in French-style liberte — one just needs to possess a commonsense grasp of human history — to know that people who already hold power are prone to lie and mislead as much as opponents who seek that power. Indeed, the lies of rulers are generally more harmful to society than the lies of the ruled. So it’s reasonable to expect any law against falsehoods to apply to all sides.
The government has so far used only correction orders, saying that this merely amounts to claiming its “right of reply.” But a “right” that’s the exclusive privilege of around 20 of the country’s most powerful men and women isn’t a particularly high-minded principle; it’s an oxymoron.
They could only give verbal assurances that they would not abuse the law, if any future government did, voters could have the final say at the ballot box. In other words, we should just trust leaders to keep their non-binding promises, and try to sack them. If your business partner or building contractor presented you with such an agreement, you wouldn’t sign it.
The government and its supporters had ramped up their digital capacities over the past decade, and ministers could now rely on not only their own official websites and social media vehicles, but also paid influencers and supporting fire of unknown provenance, such as internet brigades, bots and assorted trolls.
The ruling party’s prime position has been so normalized that it’s become a habit to treat party, government and republic as virtually synonymous. Pofma turns this unthinking conflation of terms into formal law by elevating the interests of government bodies to the “public interest.”
Second, Pofma is symptomatic of the PAP’s shift from pragmatism to dogmatism. Government leaders still claim to be non-ideological, embracing whatever works for Singapore. But for more than decade, they’ve appeared convinced that they’ve found the formula for success. When Singapore reached First World status, leaders understandably grew more anxious about what it could lose by changing course, than excited about what it could gain.
The state’s self-image as “exceptional” is, therefore, not without basis. What’s dubious is the idea that Singapore can only preserve its exceptional strength by fiercely protecting every feature of the Singapore model — regardless of whether particular features are indispensable for future success, inconsequential, or actually in the way. Such an attitude turns Singapore’s exceptional status into a self-serving government ideology of exceptionalism that encourages the powerful to insulate themselves from sustained, penetrating democratic accountability.
The arrival of Web 2.0 in the late 2000s prompted another review. I was invited a couple of times to talk to senior civil servants about how the public sector could adapt to this new talk-back culture. I suggested to them that the days of winning arguments by pulling rank are over. Respect has to be earned, not demanded by virtue of status. And the only way to develop the requisite skills for this new environment is to practise, out there in the wild.
Try dealing with SPH and Mediacorp editors and journalists like a private sector newsmaker would. By all means, use your influence. But stop using either implicit or direct threats when telling editors how you’d like a piece of news covered. No more warnings if they get something “wrong,” and no orders to run your replies.
Press laws inherited from the British require all newspapers to be licensed; licences can be revoked at any time, effectively killing a publication. Journalists must also beware of the Internal Security Act, under which they can be detained without trial. They can be fined or jailed if they are judged to be in contempt of court or contempt of parliament. The OSA deters reporters from being on the receiving end of leaks, while libel laws compel them to take extreme care with any information that could hurt officials’ reputations.
The law in question is the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act. Enacted in 1974, after the Herald was closed down, it empowers the government to determine the composition of newspaper company’s board of directors. Through the chairman and directors, the government can also ensure that the senior editors who serve as the main gatekeepers of the press are trustworthy. With this mechanism in place, the government needs neither to post its officials directly into top newsroom positions, nor to nationalize the press.
As members of the establishment, newspaper editors are expected to have an instinctive grasp of Singapore’s national interests and how to protect them. They interact regularly with cabinet ministers to keep these instincts honed. Most of the time, they get it right; but not always — which is why the press is the single establishment institution that is regularly chastised by government leaders for not being supportive enough of national goals.
LKY has understood perfectly that the media business is, first and foremost, a business: that a press allowed to make money out of a system will support that system; and that publishers value their bottom line more highly than they do in their editorial freedom.
Thus, in the US, the Constitution protects the press from the government, which, despite having been elected democratically, is assumed by American political culture to harbor undemocratic tendencies. In the Singapore model, the formula is reversed. The elected government is the embodiment of democratic expression. Government, which expressed the will of the people, must be protected from the unelected press, which is prone to being swayed by private commercial interests, narrow ideological missions, or, at the very least, the hubris of journalists’ inflated egos. In liberal democracies, it is all about freedom of the press from government; in Singapore, it is about the government’s freedom from the press.
Also at work is the very Singaporean bias in favor of pragmatic ideas of immediate functional value, and an impatience with political ideals such as democracy and human rights. Since opposition politicians deal mainly in the latter, they are easily dismissed as saying new or of substance.
Editors defend their pro-PAP bias by pointing out that even newspapers in the West take sides during elections. Readers’ complaints that SPH, as a monopoly, has a moral obligation to be fair in its election coverage have not succeeded in changing editors’ minds.
When consensus fails, the government can, if it wishes, instantly switch to the two levels of coercive control described above. It can remove editors overnight, and replace them with individuals possessing the proper understanding of their “duty,” detain offending writers without trial, and close down the entire newspaper — all with complete legality. The government has much latitude, in a system that upholds its freedom from the press.
He had learnt from his battle with the Chinese-language media that the truly bothersome owners were headstrong publishers like Nanyang Siang Pau’s Lee Eu Seng, who put his ideals ahead of profit and even personal safety — he ended up detained for five years under the Internal Security Act.
It’s no coincidence that many of the world’s most fiercely independent newspapers are or were family-owned: The NYT and Washington Post in the US, The Hindu and The Indian Express in India, for example. When faceless conglomerates take over newspapers, they often install tamer editors.
When queried about Singapore’s limited press freedom, the government’s stock answer is that we can’t afford to take risks with the extremely sensitive topics of race, language and religion. But the government’s pressure tactics are used more often to police out-of-bounds markers that have nothing to do with such sensitive topics. They are about making the executive branch’s job easier, by guiding public opinion on matters that are politically controversial. This is in line with the PAP’s belief — first articulated by LKY in 1971 — that press freedom must be “subordinated” to the “primacy of purpose of an elected government.”
There are a few reasons why Singaporeans haven’t turned their backs on the media in larger numbers. The simplest explanation is that there is much more to life than politics. On most non-political fronts, Singaporeans can count on the national media for relevant and reliable accounts of what’s going on. Furthermore, the government has a huge impact on people’s lives from cradle (baby bonuses) to beyond the grave (exhumations for cemetery clearances). Regardless of their political orientation, people in Singapore need to keep up with what the government is thinking and doing in multiple arenas. If you’re looking for timely and accurate information about any of this, you need news organizations that are close to the government.
Textbook advice on crisis communication says you must never create an information vacuum, because this will be filled by irresponsible rumor and speculation. The mainstream media’s live coverage on TV and online did just that.
Laws which cannot be enforced are not relevant or intelligent laws which are arbitrarily enforced are repressive laws which assume that people will never be mature and responsible will create societies which are selfish, childish and petty.
To keep track of our opportunities and threats, we need a system for fact-finding and sense-making on a scale that surpasses our DIY capabilities.
This can’t be done by unpaid commentators and citizen reporters with day jobs. No matter how sharp and independent their minds, they cannot escape the tyranny of time. If each writer can’t spare a day to analyze a new Bill or annual report, or a week to study the impact of a welfare programme or economic trend, or a month to investigate a social problem nobody wants to talk about, and if you don’t have the manpower budget to multiply such capacity by 50 or 100, then your blog is not going to serve Singapore’s news and information needs.
The internet is a force multiplier but it can’t create power and influence out of thin air. If individuals, civic groups and political parties are frail in the real world, the internet can’t turn them into effective players. If people are unwilling to pay for quality journalism, you won’t get it either offline or online.
Taking the long view, though, what is remarkable is that there was any public discussion at all. In a pre-internet era, the two younger Lee siblings’ complaints would not have gotten the kind of traction they did. They might have even decided that speaking up would be futile and chosen to stay silent. Thanks to the Internet, the days of silencing dissent are over.
But it’s one thing to change the political culture; it’s another thing entirely to overhaul the political structure. Public opinion matters, but usually not as much as people like to assume. It has a transformative effect only when it is properly organized, turning swirling sentiment into practical action. So-called “people power” revolutions and effective social movements have always operated through deep-rooted civil society networks like churches as well as elites that defect from the establishment. Online petitions and Facebook likes have no effect unless influential people and organizations harness them and strategize for change. That’s unlikely in a Singapore still dominated by the PAP.
If there are no legal obstacles in the way of such an enterprise, why doesn’t one exist? Mainly because, so far, it’s been hard to find a Singaporean with both deep pockets and the steady nerves to do something that would be perceived as anti-establishment. In purely financial terms, Singaporekini would be a bad investment. Domestic political and public affairs news is the most important gap that’s waiting to be filled, but there’s no sign that Singaporeans would be prepared to pay for it.
Around the world, we’re seeing authoritarian leaders pouring resources into social media to soften their image, sell their messages and attack opponents. Between cute animations of Xi Jinping, Modi’s Twitter army and Putin’s disinformation machine, there’s now no doubt that the internet can be used to concentrate, not just disrupt, power.
It’s natural to want to associate home with permanence and continuity. So it’s not surprising that the origin story we celebrate through the pageantry of National Day, for example, is more linear and streamlined than how we actually got here. Of course, the national narrative includes the Japanese Occupation and other collective trials and tribulations. But while the story makes plenty room for trauma, it leaves none for ambiguity. For example, it doesn’t know how to deal with — and therefore ignores — the fact that most members of what became known as the Pioneer Generation had been so buffeted by epic geopolitical and ideological contests that they had fluid and tentative identities. When my parents got off the boat, there were around a quarter of million Chinese who had lived in Singapore for more than 10 years but were still called “aliens.” Only in 1957 were these long-term residents offered citizenship. Is it any wonder that many people in that generation weren’t sure which vision of Singapore, if any, to believe in.
The government’s impulse to smooth out these kinks in the national fabric comes from an understandable desire to build a common identity so we can achieve great things together. One model for nation builders is a sense of manifest destiny, like that which Americans and Israelis have cultivated to impressive effect. Unfortunately, both the American and Israeli cases show that when you’re convinced there’s a divinely preordained plan for your nation, you’re likely to inflict harm on people you think are standing in your way — such as those who happened to be living there before you. Similarly, nations that imagine their identity in terms of a paramount race, language or religion find it hard to respond humanely to a world of diversity.
LKY declared that “the conglomeration of numbers, of likeness — as a result of affinities of race or language or culture — shall never work to the detriment of those, who by the accident of history, find themselves in minority groups.” The new republic, according to its founding fathers, would forge unity not from a common identity or shared past, but a joint commitment to future coexistence.
Template government speeches refer to Singapore’s cultural landscape as ridden with “fault lines,” a geological term that treats our multiracial, multireligious character as a permanent risk factor, ready to erupt in violent disorder if we are not vigilant. In contrast, countries that are comparatively homogeneous are considered blessed: thanks to their shared culture, those nations are said to have enough trust and social capital to sustain levels of political freedom and social welfare that wouldn’t work for Singapore.
The overriding ideological message is not we’re diverse, let’s celebrate; it’s we’re diverse, so beware.
We are still waiting for a PM who rises to the challenge of presenting an inspiring vision of multicultural Singapore; one that crystallizes how our diversity has added value to our national identity, beyond the trivial example of spicing up our buffets. We’ve had to turn mainly to local artists to help us find positive meaning in our cultural mix, but they’ve received barely enough support — and even faced resistance — from petty regulators who equate nation building with pleasing politicians.
Such decisions were based on the realization that nation-building needed time — perhaps even generations — and that, in the meantime, Singapore was vulnerable to the kind of ethnic pulls evident in the 1960s. The problem with this strong regulatory emphasis, however, is that it has allowed Singaporeans to enjoy the fruit of inter-ethnic peace without having to work particularly hard for it. To use a fashionable economic term, most Singaporeans are free-riders when it comes to race relations. Children recite the Pledge every school day. But, in truth, no deep commitment to multiracialism is required, either in thought or action. Singaporeans leave such work to the government, which is empowered to deal with problems under a host of laws and regulations. This, sadly, does not say much for the whole Singaporean enterprise.
At the start of this essay, I referred to how difficult I find it to write about race. One particular problem with expressing any sort of positive vision is that it runs headlong into a realpolitik that many Singaporeans in establishment circles wear like so much macho amor. It has become fashionable to dismiss any talk of multi-cultural appreciation as soft, unrealistic idealism, out of touch with the hard realities of living in a radically divided island in a complicated geopolitical sea.
In some respects, Singaporeans are not westernized enough. We have not imbibed enough of the strong individual can-do mentality and the public-spiritedness that can be found in the US, for example. Our sense of loyalty and sacrifice is limited largely to family and clan, rather than to the strangers that make up the public. And unlike most developed Western societies, we treat physical and mental disabilities as shameful, and hide them away.
One of the country’s best-known products, Tiger beer, promotes itself with a series of commercial featuring all-Caucasian casts. Singapore Airlines’ commercials feature Singapore Girls fawning over an all-white cabin of passengers. Meanwhile, presenters on national radio and TV regard it as a mark of sophistication that they can say French names properly, but show no similar care over the pronunciation of Asian names. But since they mispronounce them the way an American would mispronounce them — the correct mispronunciation, so to speak — their bosses do not seem to mind.
Tang’s entry into parliament may or may not have precipitated these events. But as the PM put it: “I have to deal with the problem in the future. So why not deal with it now?” The government, in trying to achieve the best for Singapore, has always believed in assuming the worst. It is not surprising that it decided that, if it were to err it, it would be on the side of caution. Most Singaporeans have benefited from the government’s approach to managing language, culture and race relations. Some have had to bear the cost. Under the New Guard leadership, few paid as heavy a price, as did Tang Liang Hong.
One quality that Singapore does not have an excess of is idealism. As a country, we tend to keep not just our feet firmly on the ground but also our gaze. We’re reluctant to lift our eyes to see the better society we could be. We are realists to a fault, limiting our reach to what is already within our grasp and always finding reasons not to aim for loftier goals.
They have chosen to ignore the golden rule at the core of all world religions, that we should treat others how we wish to be treated. This is a basic principle of morality and justice: before we demand that our own values be imposed on the entire society, we should put ourselves in the shoes of everyone who would be affected. We should consider whether we’d want people of other or no religion to impose their own values on us, preventing us from doing whatever they choose to take offence to.
Singapore is an immigrant nation where very few adult citizens don’t have at least on grandparent born elsewhere. So xenophobia should be as unnatural to Singapore as a snowstorm at the Padang.
By the 1990s, most Singaporeans were ready for a healthier work-life balance for themselves and a less stressful school system for their kids. But they suddenly had to compete with new immigrants prepared to put in longer hours at work and at school. Furthermore, many employers felt no obligation to hire Singaporeans ahead of foreigners. Indeed, in some sectors, expat managers seemed biased in favor of hiring acquaintances from their overseas networks.
But most new immigrants came from more cut-throat social milieus — where, even the top 1% in ability and effort still need something extra to make it in the rat race. Furthermore, while they liked Singapore as a well-run city, many of them — especially the new arrivals from China and India — didn’t understand or appreciate Singaporean values.
The PM was 100% right. Unfortunately, as the main cause of public unhappiness with immigration, the government had lost its perceived moral authority to lecture Singaporeans about it. His intervention seemed only to make matters worse. More and more commentators turned this into an opportunity to teach the government a lesson.
When such concerns were expressed, the government refused to reword its legislation more precisely, fearing that this would open loopholes. It instead protested that its intentions were pure. The approach was in keeping with its “Asian way”: government, it believed, needed the freedom to rule effectively; the way to prevent abuse was not to tie its hands, but to choose honorable rulers. Singaporeans were therefore asked to put their trust not in the letter of the law bu tin the spirit of its drafters; not in contracts, but in conscience.
The problem was of course that one man’s constructive criticism was another’s “denigration and contempt.” And, if even a polished, professional communicator like Catherine Lim misfired in her attempt, what chance did most Singaporeans have? The affair remained a prominent reference point, making Singaporeans conclude that, for all the government’s explanation and clarifications, engaging in political debate was an extremely risky and unpredictable business, and that it was wisest to stay out.
Not everyone would see a passive public as necessarily a bad thing. There are benefits to limiting political engagement to a minority of highly committed citizens, with the majority involving itself only in elections and other major events. This elitist theory exists as a strand within Western democratic thoughts, with proponents arguing that modern governance is so complex that over-politicization of issues and over-participation by the masses is a liability: it would add an irrational element to governance that could undermine democracy. Sustainable democracy instead requires a fairly passive mass, such that most matters are debated and settled within the political elite, at least when things are running smoothly.
The opposite condition, however, seems a more likely risk: a weak, undeveloped political culture that is unable to meet the challenges of democratic citizenship, including the challenge of finding leaders. Singapore’s political sterility is probably the main reason for the PAP’s chronic inability to attract enough able Singaporeans for parliament and government. In most countries, politicians arise naturally from the ground up, usually involving themselves first in student politics and then in various political organizations. Such involvement enables individuals to strengthen leadership qualities, to grow accustomed to public life, and develop an interest in public affairs. The PAP has stifled these opportunities for lower-level political growth. It is little wonder that the successful Singaporeans who would make able leaders are reluctant politicians, and that the government has had to throw more and more money at the problem of political recruitment.
If the rules are here to stay, they should at least be clarified.
At public forums about Singapore politics, you’ll occasionally see someone from the audience to go to the mic and utter that four-letter F-word. Fear.
The person pleads: Singapore has come so far, but when will we be able to leave our fear behind?
Some of it is irrational. There are some Singaporeans who think we live in a totalitarian police state. They decide it’s too dangerous to participate in politics, even if it’s just to sign a petition or share their views in public. They say they won’t get involved because they are afraid of the consequences. Fortunately, there are also Singaporeans who have a stronger urge to participate. People in civil society, for example, know only too well that the walls exist, having bumped into them. But their instinct is to try to locate doors that can be nudged open.
Specifically, if you communicate anything that directly or indirectly suggests that a minister is corrupt, that he is guilty of wrongdoing, or that he got his position because of his connections, you have be prepared to prove it. If you can’t, you should expect to be sued for defamation. If you claim that judges are biased in favor or the government or that they cannot be trusted to dispense justice fairly, you can count on being prosecuted for scandalizing the judiciary. Express anything that upsets a religious or racial group, or accuse the government of being prejudiced against a community, and you risk being charged with sedition.
Bureaucratic harassment, through tax audits for example, is another common tactic of authoritarian government around the world.
For locals and expats who are not very interested in politics — in other words, the majority — lifestyle choices continued to expand, especially for those with money. Measure progress by Michelin-starred restaurants, Broadway musicals and art exhibitions, and Singapore seems to keep collecting the accoutrements of a cosmopolitan world city.
The more difficult question for the PAP was whether it needed to address why it had made these mistakes in the first place. Some critics thought so, arguing that policymakers needed to be more exposed to open competition and on-going scrutiny to that they would detect and respond to bad news from the ground before grievances surfaced at the ballot box.
Politicians in most other countries reach the top only after long years of callus-forming battles against strong opposition, adversarial media and outspoken constituents. In contrast, candidates for high political office in Singapore are plucked from the more protected environs of the civil service and military. Most would have been psychologically unprepared for the online vitriol. The experience may have persuaded the leadership to write off Singaporeans who want more political space as unreasonable and impossible to please.
As for the 2015 election, the results might have given the PAP the confidence to loosen up. It had the opposite effect. It was seen as vindication of the government’s post-2011 clampdown. PAP hardliners felt they’d won the bet that most voters aren’t bothered by strictures on civil society, journalism or other democratic institutions, as long as you look after their practical needs.
LHL is certainly not as ruthless as LKY, but neither does the son relish political debate the way his father did. He seems happiest tinkering with policy details.
What’s more, so many leaders have upped the ante in autocratic behavior — Najib in Malaysia, Duetere in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, Xi Jinping in China, Putin in Russia and Donald Trump in the US — that it’s become much harder for soft authoritarians to look bad. They can act dictatorially with little risk of international condemnation.
Citizen participation is encouraged — but it should not get “political” or “partisan.” We are told that Singapore welcomes naysayers — as long as they are “constructive.” We want ideas that are out of the box — but not “adversarial.” Singaporeans should serve with passion — but without “agendas.” Such distinctions are in the eyes of the beholder, and in Singapore the only beholder that counts is the government.
When an advocate for change is too persistent for the government’s liking, its standard response is that he should join a political party and contest for power. This comes across as a threat, signaling to everyone that the person is being categorized as an enemy — and everyone knows what happens to enemies of the PAP.
There is no basis for such a distinction. What actually makes electoral politics a higher-level form of participation is the fact that it’s the only legitimate way to become a lawmaker and take charge of state powers such as taxation and defence. The electoral system dispenses real power. In civil society, the contest is merely over influence. That’s the difference.
As for why the Singapore government picked, first, 1959-plus-25 and then 1965-plus-50 as jamboree years, that decision wasn’t ordained by history but by political calculation. What 1984 and 2015 had in common was that they were both — you guessed it — election years.