by Eric Feigenbaum
For a strange five minutes in 1994, Americans were talking about caning. An American teenager named Michael Fay drew Singapore into the international spotlight when it sentenced him to six strokes of the rattan cane for vandalism and graffiti. Our nation was shocked to even learn what caning was, let alone that a 15-year-old would receive government-sanctioned, permanently scarring corporal punishment. For the first time ever, Singapore was part of the news cycle in the United States with a focus on what was perceived as the tiny Southeast Asian country’s harshness and authoritarian bent.
Bill Clinton’s intervention got Singapore to reduce the number of strokes of the cane, but not to back down from its judgment or punishment. What wasn’t covered as well at the time was that Fay was part of a group of teens who vandalized 67 cars and stole 16 items.
Thirty years later, Singapore’s economic success and role in international business have become its brand, though for many the Michael Fay incident still colors their perception of Singapore. As a result, most Western countries ignore or dismiss Singapore’s many successes because they perceive it doling out harsh punishments and constraining free speech.
That’s unfortunately throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Singapore overwhelmingly shares most of the goals of its Western friends and moreover has found innovative solutions that create higher levels of welfare and satisfaction among its citizens than most European countries, let alone North American ones.
If anything, because Western nations are probably confused about what Singapore is, they choose to look at what it isn’t. Singapore doesn’t follow their political and social templates. Instead, it has borrowed ideas and systems and infused the values of its unique mix of cultures – deciding that there is a viable and perhaps desirable space between absolute liberties and authoritarian control.It would be easy to visit Singapore, look around, see an ultra-modern, spotlessly city with some stringent rules and take it at face value. The quick summation of Singapore might go something like this: it’s a highly successful, first world city-state in Southeast Asia with great banking and tech sectors and some questionable approaches to human rights and civil liberties.
I would guess this is the story 90 percent of the world – and maybe the same percentage of Singapore’s visitors know.
The architects of the Republic of Singapore – most of whom have died the past 15 years – were happy to share with people who wanted to know more. They were very proud of their work. Aside from the human rights part – this short summation – or let’s call it the National Story is what they wanted you to know. If someone visits Singapore and thinks this, the country’s founders would have considered it a job well done.
My first visit to Singapore left me dumbfounded. After living in Thailand, Taiwan and having traveled Asia extensively, I was shocked how a place as clean, successful, developed and multi-cultural as Singapore existed and I could know so little about it. I was compelled to begin reading and learning. At the time I recruited foreign nurses for US hospitals, and it became clear Singapore was an excellent untapped recruiting ground. From 2004 to 2006 I became based in Singapore. What I learned about it changed my entire experience of Singapore.
What I learned is the “elevator speech” version of Singapore is a simplistic story that belies the incredibly outsized significance of the tiny island nation.
The real story is complex and in fact deserves to be considered in its entirety, I plan to tell it in a series and continue on to discuss the myriad things we can learn from Singapore.
It’s always difficult to determine where a story begins, but Singapore’s deeper truth might begin like this:
“We had nothing! Absolutely nothing! And we didn’t know what to do. Malaysia kicked us out, the British were leaving and we had nothing,” an old taxi driver told me one night in 2006.
Older drivers – if their English is good – are the best. They are Singapore’s most accessible historians and disseminators of rare and useful information.
“Mr Lee (Lee Kuan Yew, the founding and longstanding prime minister) stood up and said we needed to get along and work together if we didn’t want to starve,” the Chinese man said.
He was talking about 1965 when Malaysia expelled Singapore from the Malaysian Federation.
“We didn’t have enough water, we couldn’t produce enough food. We were poor and we didn’t have enough jobs. No one knew what was going to happen. Mr. Lee and his people, they told us not to fight among ourselves, because we had to work together. We had to be neighbors. We needed each other. No one saw it this way at the time,” he said.
“They were very, very smart – Mr. Lee and his people. They gave us jobs. They told us ‘You dig this ditch’ ‘You help build this building’ ‘You wash laundry’. Then they gave us taxis and told them to drive them. They gave us jobs. Later, when they turned it into Comfort [now the largest taxi company in Singapore], they gave us our businesses. We bought our taxis from them – they helped us. And we went from nothing to having our own businesses.”
My taxi driver was one of the few left who owns his taxi. Comfort Cabs eventually was spun into a private corporation, traded on the Singapore stock exchange. It stopped selling drivers their own taxis and has them rent or lease them instead. Either way, it put 15,000 taxis on the road and almost 30,000 jobs. The original drivers who owned their taxis and were given stock in the company are some of the wealthiest cab drivers you’ll ever meet.
“Singapore has changed so much since then. We worked very, very hard. Mr. Lee and our government worked very hard too. We have so much now. You would never even recognize it from when I was a child. The young people today, they don’t know how hard we worked. They don’t know how bad it was. They have everything and they don’t know how hard their grandparents worked – and how scared we all were.”
This man is the heart and soul of Singapore – their equivalent of The Greatest Generation. In an unprecedented crisis, they bought into their government, trusted without question and reaped the rewards.
Their gamble worked because their government did right by them. That was in turn because a rare combination of brilliant and motivated people came together to form and transform Singapore using ideas and methods never before conceived, let alone used. Singapore, in a stunning way uses Western capitalism to achieve socialistic goals that are in keeping with the distinctly more collectivist values of its people.
I’ve heard many criticisms of Singapore – some valid and some not – including Singapore not being a real democracy, not respecting civil liberties, being too strict and that it’s people are like sheep.
While there are grains of truth in all of these, the criticisms don’t understand the realities. They are Western viewpoints based on ideals and values Singaporeans didn’t feel applied.
In 1965, when this dusty red sandbar of an island was cut loose from the country it intended to be part of, Singapore was little more than a port town filled with immigrants who didn’t like each other all that much. Most of the city was poor and dirty. The river smelled. Chinatown was a tenement slum housing up to 30 people per apartment. Disease was rampant, police corrupt, and there was little order or force of law.
Lee Kuan Yew and his team of Oxford educated social elites took on the task of building Singapore through their ideals – understanding their little island had few of the ingredients it took to coalesce into a nation.
Their first and foremost goal was to create nearly universal homeownership. They realized no one sends their sons to fight and die for a country that isn’t theirs. However, if they own a piece of their country, things change. Not only does homeownership create attachment to the country, it incentivizes them to take care of their neighborhoods which includes not fighting with or rioting against your neighbors.
Singapore decided to build blocks of condos and to sell them at affordable prices to everyone. The government went the next step by creating the Development Bank of Singapore which willingly gave low-interest home loans to almost anyone wanting to buy a government- built Housing Development Board (HDB) condo.
Then they added a twist of social engineering – no more than 70 percent of a condo block can be occupied by any one ethnicity. People had to move, shuffle around and not only live, but own their homes next to people of other races. Chinese, Malays and Tamil Indians had to identify as neighbors in the most literal of ways.
Eventually, the HDB program extinguished slums and dramatically reduced homelessness. Today, more than 94 percent of Singaporeans own their homes – and in many cases multiple properties. HDB’s most important achievement was turning people from transient workers and immigrants into Singaporeans. Housing bound people together. Suddenly, they all had something at risk.
That changed attitudes including how they saw one another.
This type of social engineering didn’t alone turn Singapore into a first-world economy. Lee Kwan Yew realized Singapore needed foreign investment in order to get jobs. That meant Singapore had to inspire confidence. It needed to be presentable.
Over the course of several years, the dry red sandbar got a makeover as Singapore planted trees, lawns and shrubs. “Greening Singapore” not only made it a suddenly attractive city, but it got rid of dust and disease. Trees sucked up swamps and reduced malaria, typhoid and other diseases. Japanese, American and British executives who were first solicited to invest in Singapore, saw a country that looked decent enough to take seriously. When someone like me sees Singapore today, they usually think of it as a beautiful, well-manicured city.
It also had two magic assets that made it much more attractive for foreign direct investment than any other Asian country: British common law with full property rights and the English language. Singapore’s decision to adopt its colonial language – English – as the new national language was a measure to prevent any one ethnic group from dominating. Everyone would be unified in their experience of bending to a language they most likely did not speak at home.
Malaysia chose Malay as its national language – leaving Singapore alone in fully bolstering the intangible assets left to it by the British.
As major companies built factories, they found Singaporeans were good communicators, adaptable and hard workers. As a result of foreign investment, Singapore began was able to develop itself into a beautiful, clean city-state.
Singapore’s government wasted no moves. Each initiative created jobs including taxis, public transportation, HDB construction, new military, the Development Bank of Singapore and numerous other projects.
People like my taxi driver did what they were told and made more money than they had ever made and achieved a better standard of living than they thought possible.
They trusted their government and its use of paternalistic democracy and capitalism – some people say like sheep. I think it’s more accurate to say they were just people with nothing to lose.
In future columns, we’ll explore the criticisms of Singapore, how it has grown, its pioneering of socialistic aims with capitalistic methods and the many problems it has solved with possible value and implications to the Western world.