Top Quotes: “Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia” — Jeevan Vasagar

“The gum ban was introduced on the grounds that gum residue stuck between train doors could disrupt the smooth running of the mass transit service. This was a genuine problem, with two incidents in 1991 of trains stopping because the doors could not close.”

“For most of the nineteenth century, the poppy accounted for between 30 per cent and 55 per cent of the colonial administration’s revenues. The island had been a fishing settlement in ancient times, and then, by the fourteenth century, a flourishing regional trading centre known as Temasek. But it was Raffles and the drug trade that laid the foundations of modern Singapore.”

“There are no statues of Lee in the city he built, and only one institution named after him — a school of public policy — but anyone who wants to see his monument has only to look around them. Lee held power as prime minister from 1959, when Singapore was granted internal self-government under British rule, to 1990, when he stepped down. After quitting as premier, he remained in cabinet, first as senior minister then with the title of minister mentor, until 2011.”

“The hawker handcarts that once prowled the streets serving up sizzling strips of fried rice cake and sloppy bowls of prawn noodles have been corralled into hygienic open-air food courts. Even the language — in so many countries a cherished symbol of national unity — is not immune to this impatience with the past; the southern Chinese dialects that were once a mother tongue for the majority were pragmatically junked to make way for Mandarin. Singapore’s success is underpinned by a determination to take difficult decisions in the national interest.”

“Singaporean children spend long hours studying under tutors after their formal school day ends. Their mothers and — especially — their fathers spend so long in the office that an Eat With Your Family Day was launched in 2003. Employers are encouraged to let staff go home at 5 p.m. to enjoy a meal with their children. But the culture of long hours is so ingrained that Eat With Your Family Day is scheduled just four times a year.”

“This demographic time-bomb, which has been building for years, will reverberate throughout the economy and society, putting strain on public and individual finances. As the need for health and welfare spending rises, there will be fewer workers to pay for it all.

It’s a familiar story, but in Singapore this comes with a twist; its model of benevolent authoritarian capitalism is built on low taxes — the top rate of personal income tax is 22 per cent, while companies have been lured there with staggeringly advantageous corporate tax deals. If Singapore is to pay its bills in future, taxes must rise. Singapore introduced a new tax on consumption, the goods and services tax, in 1994. The rate was set at 3 per cent and has since risen to 7 per cent. Ruling party politicians have warned of the need to raise taxes further to balance the books. But in 2020, a planned increase in the rate of the consumption tax was postponed amid the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“Written in Singapore’s four official languages, English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, it reads: ‘On this historic site, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles first landed in Singapore on 28th January 1819, and with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis!”

Around the globe, the impact of the West is recalled in many countries as a collective disaster. China invokes the memory of a ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of Western powers. Across Africa, imperialists brought ruthless economic exploitation in diamond mines and rubber plantations, alongside a cruel system of racial dominance. In Singapore, the name of its European founder is a mark of prestige. Raffles Place lies at the heart of the business district. Boys destined to rule the country attend the Raffles Institution. When Singapore Airlines first took to the skies, its business travellers were greeted in Raffles Class (this was the case until 2006, when the name was changed to Business Class).”

“Then as now, there are two main passageways for ships sailing between India and China, and both of them pass by Sumatra. One route is the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java. The other is the Strait of Malacca, which lies further north, between the east coast of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula. When Raffles arrived in Bencoolen, he found both under the control of the Dutch. ‘The British have now not an inch of ground to stand upon between the Cape of Good Hope and China, nor a single friendly port at which they can water and obtain refreshment,’ he wrote to London. Raffles was authorised by the British governor-general of India to establish a base at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca. His task was to find a suitable spot that was free of Dutch control.

After scouting the Carimon Islands, Raffles arrived at Singapore at the head of a flotilla of sailing ships, the red and white ensign of the East India Company fluttering from their masts and 120 soldiers from the Company’s Bengal Army on board. His ships dropped anchor off Singapore in January 1819. He knew of it already, referring in a letter home to the ancient city of Singapura.

When Raffles arrived, two half-brothers, Hussein and Abdul Rahman, were struggling for control of the Malay sultanate, which claimed Singapore along with a swath of surrounding territory. Raffles exploited the feud, siding with the elder half-brother and signing a treaty which allowed the British East India Company to establish an outpost in Singapore. Under the terms of the treaty, Hussein, the sultan, and one of his senior officials were paid annual stipends by the British, and retained their title to the land. Singapore had about 1000 inhabitants at the time.”

“The PAP offered social change too, promising to build a new nation that drew together Singapore’s disparate racial and linguistic elements. At the time, they believed the Malay language would provide a unifying force. (English has since taken the place of Malay as the country’s lingua franca, but Singapore’s national anthem, ‘Majulah Singapura,’ is still sung in Malay.)”

“Malaya’s communist insurgency was in retreat and would finally be declared over in 1960. The victory, a rare reversal for communism in Asia, was achieved in part through a massive resettlement programme that split rebel fighters from sympathetic civilians.”

“In the early hours of 2 February 1963, more than a hundred people were arrested by police and Special Branch officers in Operation Coldstore. The detainees included Lim and other leaders of Barisan Sosialis, trade unionists and student activists. Described by the authorities at the time as an essential move to counter the threat of armed insurrection by a communist conspiracy who wanted to turn Singapore into the Cuba of Southeast Asia, Operation Coldstore remains an acutely sensitive topic in Singapore. Former left-wingers and some historians argue there was no evidence of a plot and that the security sweep was used to suppress the left for reasons of political expediency. The government describes this as ‘revisionism’ and insists the threat of communist insurrection was genuine.”

“With the left-wing leaders out of the way, the island’s government pursued a merger with Malaya to form a new state, Malaysia. The union was due to come into being at the end of August 1963. When this was delayed by the government in Malaya’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to allow time for a United Nations team who were investigating whether people in two states on the neighbouring island of Borneo wished to join the new country, Lee went ahead and declared Singapore’s independence from Britain on 31 August. In a speech on the steps of City Hall, he announced the end of colonial rule and looked forward to joining the union with Malaya. ‘This proclamation today is an assertion of our right to freedom,’ he said. The unilateral declaration met with disapproval from both the Malayan and British governments, who believed Lee had grabbed the right to control Singapore’s foreign and defence affairs without being granted them constitutionally. It was an inauspicious start to the union of the two countries, which came into being in September 1963.”

“Disused since 2011, the line has become a public park, the only park in the world that runs across the entire span of a country. Just after sunrise, while it’s still cool, curious monkeys watch joggers pound past.”

“When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, the country lost the margin for error that bigger nations enjoy. A larger country with a reputation for corruption or instability might still attract investment because of the sheer size of its market. If Singapore failed to win over foreign investors in its early years, there was a risk that it would spiral into long-term decline. In a speech made in October of that year, Lee was blunt about this. ‘This is an exercise in survival,’ he said. ‘And it calls for some very savage and brutal methods sometimes!’

If Singapore genuinely had no second chances, no opportunity to recover from a serious mistake, then it had to avoid making mistakes in the first place. The result was a determination to tightly manage the daily lives of its population.”

“Both were new nations with small populations, limited space and large, hostile neighbours. Israel had earned military prestige with its victory in the 1948 war against its Arab neighbours. At the time, the Singapore government referred to their new advisers as ‘the Mexicans’ to keep the contact discreet. The Israeli advisers trained a cadre of local commanders and instructors who would form the spine of the fledgling army.

They taught the Singaporeans combat doctrine, studying the Japanese invasion of Malaya for insight into how this doctrine should be adapted to local conditions: one conclusion was to acquire small boats that would allow infantry to sneak up the shore or along jungle rivers to outflank an enemy. Singapore built an army on Israeli lines, with compulsory national service and a reserve force of men who could be called back to the frontline for years afterwards.”

“Lee took a harsh view of corruption, which had been rife in colonial Singapore. Early on, his government brought in legislation that strengthened the powers of anti-corruption investigators, authorising them to make arrests, and to search suspects’ bank accounts and premises. Reducing temptation, Singapore’s civil servants and politicians are given very high salaries compared to their counterparts internationally.”

“Trade emissaries were dispatched to Hong Kong and New York. Singapore’s man in Hong Kong once described part of his mission as hanging around the airport to intercept US company representatives heading to Japan or Taiwan, and persuading them to make ‘a little side trip’ to Singapore.”

“While they chivvied the people to be obedient, Singapore’s leaders were also scrupulous to avoid ostentation, both in their personal lives and by keeping their names off roads, public buildings and the airport. When, in 1986, Teh Cheang Wan, a minister under investigation for accepting bribes from property developers, committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, he insisted in a note to the prime minister that it was the right thing to ‘pay the highest penalty’ for his actions. It was striking that corruption had become so shameful that a government minister had chosen suicide rather than face trial.”

“An analysis in the Straits Times suggested that a high proportion of government scholarships went to some of the country’s wealthiest families. Rather than driving social mobility, public money was entrenching privilege. The highest achievers in the Singapore system just happened to be the children of the most affluent. Singapore’s system idealises meritocracy, but very few of those who rise to the top are genuine outsiders.”

“Buddhism and Taoism predominate among older and less well-educated Singaporeans, but among university graduates, Christianity is the most popular faith.”

“Language functions as a marker of status. Singapore’s elite tend to be Anglophone, educated at English-language schools and often speaking English in the home.”

“Singapore bans the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in schools and in some professions, such as the police. Muslim women, including nurses in government hospitals, claim they have been explicitly told by managers not to wear headscarves to work.”

“Singaporeans are forced to contribute a fifth of their salaries to pay for retirement, as well as healthcare and housing purchases. The savings, along with contributions from their employer, go into a personal fund, known as the Central Provident Fund (CPF). Unlike other defined contribution pensions worldwide, which are typically invested in the stock market and a range of other assets including bonds and commercial property, the funds are invested in government bonds which have been specially issued for that purpose. As with the welfare system, enforced savings emphasise self-reliance. Allowing withdrawals from the CPF to assist with property purchases, combined with a widespread public housing scheme, has led to a high level of home ownership.”

“The creation of new land from the sea has been extraordinary; between 1965 and 2019, Singapore grew from 581.5 square kilometres to 728 square kilometres. Lacking its own supply of sand for this construction work, Singapore has become the world’s biggest sand importer. Marina Bay Sands, the landmark hotel shaped like a wicket, is built on reclaimed land, but so is much else in modern Singapore. Beach Road now runs through the city centre, but as its name implies, it began life on the coast.”

“The globalisation of Singapore’s food is a recent shift. The island commercialised its agriculture to become self-sufficient in poultry, eggs and pork in the 1970s, but as the city grew, the waste and smells from industrial farming — especially of pork, the meat of preference for Chinese Singaporeans — became hard to tolerate. Instead, Singapore has outsourced its meat production, importing live pigs for slaughter from the nearby Indonesian island of Pulau Bulan, which is home to one of the world’s biggest pig farms with over a quarter of a million animals, while frozen and chilled pork was shipped from Brazil and the Netherlands. A Singapore developer has established an agricultural project in Jilin, in northeast China, to grow rice and rear pigs for the Singapore market. The venture occupies an area of 1450 square kilometres, twice the size of Singapore itself. Even the country’s signature dish of chilli crab, the famously messy delicacy that diners wear a bib to eat, is typically made with crab imported from Sri Lanka.

As well as diversifying its foreign suppliers of food, the government has encouraged more domestic production. That includes hi-tech urban farming, from multi-storey aquaculture in which fish are reared in stacked seawater tanks to growing greens in warehouses under artificial lighting, as well as vat-grown meat and manufacturing plant-based alternatives to animal protein. Urban farmers have been granted permits to turn car parks on the rooftops of apartment blocks into vegetable farms. In October 2020 Singapore became the first country in the world to approve the consumption of lab-grown chicken. Eat Just, the US start-up that cultured the chicken cells, said it planned to start manufacturing the meat in Singapore. The technology requires far less land, energy and water than rearing animals for slaughter. According to one study, cultured meat can be produced with 96 per cent less water use than conventional meat farming.

By 2030, Singapore aims to produce 30 per cent of its food needs locally. The government’s economic planners believe the agricultural technology systems being developed for the island’s needs could become a valuable export, as other countries grapple with a scarcity of farmland and overfished oceans. A Singapore start-up, Sustenir, has succeeded in cultivating strawberries, which usually do better in temperate climates, on shelves in an industrial building in the north of the city. Its success suggests that technological solutions can rear the most exotic crops in the midst of densely populated cities.

The state has also set up a stockpile of rice, to safeguard against ever running out of the staple carbohydrate. Rice suppliers are required to keep two months’ worth of imports in a government-designated warehouse. The rice placed in the stockpile continues to belong to the importer, but the government has the right to acquire it in an emergency.”

“In 1960, more than two-thirds of its estimated 1.89 million people were squatters or slum dwellers. By 1985 there were no squatters and all of the slums had been cleared. But the pace of change pulled traditional communities apart and cut Singaporeans off from a style of living that was closer to the land.

In squatter colonies known as ‘kampongs’ — the Malay word for village which gave rise to the English word ‘compound’ — families had supplemented work in factories or warehouses by growing vegetables and rearing pigs and chickens.”

“Singapore used methods more commonly associated with left-wing governments to serve conservative ends. The government nationalised huge chunks of land — by the mid-1980s more than three-quarters of the island were state-owned — and launched a massive programme to build public housing. The scale of the transformation in Singapore’s early years outstripped the capacity of the private sector. The government responded by setting up state-owned companies to produce building supplies, from sand to bricks. As thousands of graves were exhumed to make way for development, and the bodies cremated, the government even set up its own crematorium to handle the volume of remains.

The reason that Singapore has the highest home ownership rate of any rich country is that from early on, housing was available to buy rather than rent, creating a property-owning middle class with a lifelong commitment to the stability of the system.”

“It was harder to persuade overseas developers to build in run-down areas of the city centre, where the government planned for office blocks and shopping complexes. So domestic developers were incentivised to build in the city centre by allowing them to pay for land in instalments. Property tax rates were cut for new developments, and to encourage developers to build upwards, there were additional tax refunds for every storey they added.”

“The names of adult litterbugs were published in the press, while errant children were reported to their schools. People caught dropping litter could be made to clean the streets under ‘Corrective Work Orders’, a punishment which remains in force. Offenders can be seen sweeping up while wearing luminous pink and yellow vests as a badge of their shame. The vest used to be entirely yellow, but the upper half was made pink in 2019 to deliberately distinguish offenders’ clothing from the safety vests worn by public works staff.”

“Hong Lim Park, a neat little patch of tree-shaded greenery on the fringes of the business district, was designated Singapore’s ‘Speakers’ Corner’ in 2001. Singapore citizens need to register with police if they wish to speak there, but they do not need to disclose the subject of their speech in advance or ask for permission. The only forbidden topics are race and religion.”

COVID

“Singapore citizens returning from study abroad were quarantined in luxury hotels, which had been vacated as tourism evaporated. They grouched a little at their government’s strictness, but quietly felt relief at a system where the state footed the bill for quarantine at hotels with sea views and room service. ‘The check-in was smooth and we were shown to our rooms, which were big with double beds, recalled Yongchang Chin, a master’s student at Oxford who returned home to be quarantined at the Rasa Sentosa. The first thing we were served was supper from the hotel, and that was quite nice. As we were putting in our key cards, my next door neighbour and I looked at each other and were like, “Not bad, ah?” “Yeah, quite good.” And we weren’t allowed to leave our rooms at all after that.

Chin’s room had a balcony, so he could step out and get fresh air, no matter how hot and humid it was. One night, a violinist came out on her balcony to duet with a flute player, serenading fellow inmates with a Taiwanese pop tune. Another night the hotel put on a fire dancer to entertain their involuntary guests, and a fitness instructor came to the poolside to lead people on their balconies through exercise routines. ‘Another friend of mine came back to an equally swanky hotel, with better food than me, but his was some kind of room where the windows barely opened, Chin said. ‘So he had no fresh air, nothing, and could only sit and look at the outside world. Ministers acknowledged the need for shared sacrifice, forgoing their own salaries for a month — later extended to three months — in a show of solidarity with struggling workers.”

“Between the Sars crisis in 2003 and the outbreak of Covid-19, Singapore banned the subletting of private housing to most foreign labourers, and companies began building dormitories to house them. The move to establish purpose-built housing complexes accelerated after a riot in Little India in 2013, when the death of an Indian construction worker, Sakthivel Kumaravelu, prompted a night of rioting. Hundreds of foreign workers clashed with police and set cars on fire after Kumaravelu, a thirty-three-year-old from Chennai in south India, was knocked down and killed by a bus.

The new dormitories included some gleaming facilities, like the Tuas View complex, which has a cinema screen and a cricket pitch. But it also brings nearly 17,000 workers together under one roof. Elsewhere in the city, more squalid accommodation sprang up attached to factories or above shops, with little space and workers piling into bunk beds. In the twenty-first century, Singapore had reinvented the slum.”

“By late April one of the world’s smallest nations had 13,000 cases, the highest tally of infections in Asia after China and India.”

“Around 300,000 foreign workers in Singapore live in the giant dormitories dotted around remote parts of the island, often twenty to a room, sharing communal cooking facilities and washrooms. ‘We owe the foreign workers an apology for the atrocious condition of their dormitories,’ Tommy Koh, a former Singapore diplomat, acknowledged in the Straits Times as cases among migrant workers soared.

In May ministers announced the mass testing of all foreign workers staying in dormitories. A month later, Singapore announced plans to build new dormitories to higher standards, with sufficient space between accommodation blocks to ensure ventilation. Private squalor had magnified a public crisis.”

“When cleaning Singapore’s streets became a national priority, soon after independence, spitting in public – a habit associated with the spread of TB and other diseases was made illegal. Public health was one motivation for the crackdown, but so was Singapore’s reputation. Officials believed that spitting on the street tarnished the country’s character and its claim to be modern and civilised.”

“The original purpose of moving hawkers off the streets was to curb typhoid and cholera, diseases which spread when people consume food that has been prepared with contaminated water.”

“The country’s health system is a political hybrid. The government is the largest provider of services – public hospitals care for around three-quarters of hospital admissions – but citizens contribute through the compulsory ‘Medisave’ scheme, which requires them to divert up to 10.5 per cent of their pay into a health savings account. Requiring citizens to shoulder some of their own healthcare bills is intended to encourage self-reliance, as well as discouraging excessive use of healthcare services and prescription drugs. Patients who get into financial difficulties can apply for support from a government endowment fund which was set up as a safety net for the neediest citizens. Even in public hospitals, there are tiered charges for patients, who can pay more to have their own private room.”

“Citizens were encouraged to snitch on neighbours who flouted rules with an online form that allowed them to upload pictures. A robotic dog – a remote-controlled machine named Spot that trotted about on four kinked legs – was sent out to enforce social distancing in one of Singapore’s parks. Spot played a pre-recorded message in a female, Singapore-accented voice, urging walkers and runners to ‘stay at least one metre apart.’ Video of Spot was shared around the world, and for some foreign observers it was taken as a herald of a dark future in which bossy robots hector humans. In Singapore, where restaurants have used robots to serve drinks or gather dirty dishes, the machine was mostly regarded as a curiosity.

For the thousands of people made subject to stay-home notices during the pandemic, their phones became a form of electronic tagging. The government sent text messages to people required to stay at home; clicking on a link in the message used their phones’ GPS to confirm their location. Officials checked in with random phone calls, sometimes asking people to send a picture of their surroundings. But the Singapore government’s introduction of a mobile contact-tracing app, Trace Together, prompted an unexpected rebellion. The app was launched in late March 2020, using Bluetooth signals to exchange information with other app users to create a digital record of a citizen’s movements. Singapore was one of the first countries in the world to deploy app technology to fight the pandemic.

By early June, more than two months after the app was launched, just 1.8 million had voluntarily downloaded it, less than a third of the population.”

Conclusion

“Singapore inherited a system divided between English-language schools and schools that taught in an Asian language, but non-English schools were phased out in the 1980s. This partly reflected parental choice as families believed their children’s career chances would be improved by learning English. But it also reflects the political fault line that runs through language in Singapore, between the English-educated elite like Lee and his circle and the radicalism of students who attended the country’s Chinese-language schools.”

“The Speak Mandarin campaign launched in 1979 restricted the use of dialect in television and radio shows, while civil servants were asked to refrain from speaking dialect in the office, and parents were discouraged from giving their children dialect names. It was effective, with dialect-speaking households dropping from 76 per cent of the population in 1980 to 48 per cent in 1990.

Singapore has also become one of the most Anglophone societies in Asia, with around a third of the population mainly speaking English at home. But many Singaporeans favour a hybrid version of the colonial tongue, known as Singlish, combining Chinese syntax with a blend of English, Malay and Chinese vocabulary. A familiar Singlish question would be: Makan already? – have you had lunch already?’, borrowing the Malay word for food, ‘makan’, and slotting it into a Chinese word order, with the topic of the sentence coming first. The government has sought, less successfully, to suppress this too, with a ‘Speak Good English’ movement launched in 2000 to encourage Singaporeans to be grammatically correct.”

“The idea that Singapore is a meritocracy is deeply ingrained. Every year, Singapore students with outstanding academic results compete for government scholarships that pay their university fees in full, often to study overseas at Oxford, Cambridge or an Ivy League university. On their return, these high-flying scholars join the administration or the armed forces and the most suitable candidates are drafted into jobs as cabinet ministers.”

“Schools have brought in applied learning programmes to teach practical skills such as coding and encourage pupils to experiment in areas where there are no tests or grading. Mid-year exams in the first two years of primary school have been abolished. From 2021, the grading of the PSLE is being changed. Instead of the T-score, which ranks pupils against each other, children will be placed in one of eight bands according to how well they have achieved against the objectives of the curriculum. Instead of racing to finish first, children will be aiming for a personal best. This change has brought relief for some parents, though many feel the exam remains a heavy burden for young shoulders.”

“Inadequate retirement income is an emotive topic in Singapore. Although people make substantial mandatory contributions to the state-run retirement savings kitty, the Central Provident Fund, the fact they are allowed to withdraw money to pay for housing, healthcare and other needs often means their savings are eroded by the time they retire. Pensioners often find they need to keep working in old age. A government survey in 2011 found that 29 per cent of Singaporeans over the age of sixty-five were still working, up from 15 per cent in 2005.”

“This struggle burst into the open when Singapore drew up its fake news law in 2019. While plenty of countries around the world have acted to curb misinformation online, Singapore’s legislation, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, is exceptionally harsh and unusually broad. Known simply as ‘Pofma,’ the law sweeps across a range of potentially sensitive topics, from public health to Singapore’s relations with other countries, including anything which might diminish public confidence in the government. For individuals, publishing false statements can, in the most extreme cases, attract a jail term of up to ten years, a fine of up to S$100,000 or both. Companies that participate in the spread of online falsehoods or fail to comply with a correction notice can face fines of up to S$1 million.

The historian P. J. Thum, who is managing editor of the news website New Naratif, posted a video to YouTube in which he argued that the law defined falsehood so broadly that every statement could be considered false in some way. ‘This definition is so broad that the omission of a fact, accidentally or otherwise, is sufficient for something to be considered misleading,’ he said.”

“China is making determined efforts to court its global diaspora, including Singaporean Chinese. Young people have been encouraged to take part in root-seeking summer camps in which they explore their heritage and learn about Chinese martial arts and calligraphy. Militaristic propaganda videos, uploaded to YouTube and shared on WhatsApp groups, boast of Chinas strength. An older generation of Chinese Singaporeans, who were educated at Chinese-language schools and feel a close affinity with China, are particularly susceptible to these films. Their impact is to encourage viewers to side with China in foreign policy arguments. Over the South China Sea, for example, they are likely to argue that China is simply setting right a historical injustice.”

“On the face of it, few countries are more different than a landlocked and mountainous African state and an island at the crossroads of Asias maritime commerce. Yet Paul Kagame, the rebel commander who ended the genocide in 1994 and has ruled ever since, describes Singapore as an inspiration. Rwandan officials have studied Singapore’s urban design and the training of its civil service. The tiny African country has recovered from devastating communal violence to achieve political stability and rapid economic growth. The streets of the capital Kigali are clean and crime rates are low, while official corruption has been kept at bay. Poverty and child mortality have fallen and the government has introduced a national health insurance scheme.

There is a dark side to this achievement. Rwanda is intolerant of dissent. The media is tightly controlled and human rights groups report that the government operates a pervasive network of informants. The country, which remains heavily reliant on foreign donors, poses a Singapore-style dilemma: testing the degree to which it is acceptable to trade human rights for development.”

“Childbirth outside marriage remains exceptionally rare, at less than 2 per cent of births (the average for rich countries is now over 40 per cent).”

“The casinos are aimed primarily at attracting tourists and wealthy expatriates. Singapore seeks to deter its own people with a stiff entrance levy, which was raised to S$150 a day in 2019. Singaporean visitors who are deemed financially vulnerable can be banned from entering by the government, while casinos are prohibited from advertising to the domestic market. Singapore’s casinos are camouflaged. Their architecture blends in with the decorous style of its conference centres and business hotels, rather than imitating the gaudy façades of Macau or Las Vegas. Even the word casino is scrubbed out. They are officially known as ‘integrated resorts.’”

“In 1975 the death penalty became mandatory for the manufacture, import or trafficking of controlled substances including cannabis, amphetamines and opioids, above certain quantities.

The quantities involved are tiny and likely to attract the mildest sentences in western European countries: being caught with more than 200g of cannabis resin or more than 30g of cocaine brings mandatory execution in Singapore. The use of the death penalty has been on the wane in recent years but as recently as the 1990s, Singapore was hanging more than seventy people a year, making it the world’s most prolific executioner in proportion to its size.”

“Singapore brought in reforms in 2013 that gave the courts discretion over sentencing. If a defendant could prove his role had been to act as a courier, there was a chance he would be spared the noose. But the country continues to carry out several executions a year, the majority of them for drug offences though murder and the use of firearms are also crimes punishable with death. The sentence is always carried out by hanging, at dawn, inside Changi prison.”

“A government-run research agency in Singapore is funding the study of cannabis for medical treatments, and in recent years the use of a cannabis-based medicine was approved for a girl with epilepsy. But officials made clear that this medical usage did not mark a shift in their thinking on drug use.”

“Singapore has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, lower even than Japan. At 1.1 births per Singaporean woman, this is far below the level needed to replace the existing population. Coupled with one of the longest life expectancies in the world, the country is due to become one of the world’s oldest nations within a few decades, alongside Japan, Korea, Taiwan and a swath of Mediterranean nations where the demographic outlook is equally sobering.

These numbers are the outcome of a government policy that was spectacularly successful. In the 1970s, like many developing nations, Singapore’s planners feared the consequences of a population explosion that might unravel all of their social and economic progress. Large families were branded irresponsible, straining education and healthcare systems. As Asia’s giant nations launched campaigns to curb fertility, often coercing some of their poorest citizens into sterilisation, Singaporeans were encouraged to postpone starting a family, and to space out the birth of their children. The message was drummed into children in classrooms and into adults through penalties for those who strayed from the approved number of offspring: ‘stop at two’ was the message. Mothers lost paid maternity leave after their second child while bigger households fell down the waiting list for state housing.

The government set up the Family Planning and Population Board in 1966, to provide contraceptive services and public health education. The state made it easier to access abortion and encouraged sterilisation.

Singapore introduced a Eugenics Board in 1970 to consider applications for sterilisation. The name is shocking to modern ears, but the belief in encouraging couples with ‘desirable’ characteristics to reproduce remained popular with Singapore’s leaders, even after the science behind eugenics had been discredited in the 1930s and the word permanently tarnished by its horrifying association with the Nazis’ mass murder of people with disabilities. At the time, Britain still had a Eugenics Society, founded by the geneticist Sir Francis Galton, who had coined the term (the UK society changed its name to the Galton Institute in 1989). The main purpose of the Eugenics Board was not to filter out ‘undesirable parents but to be sure that applicants understood the consequences of the operation. But the government also introduced measures which encouraged less well-off families to be sterilised, such as waiving hospital delivery fees if either parent agreed to the procedure. The state regarded sterilisation as a convenient contraceptive method for poor or uneducated women, who would not want to incur the recurring costs involved in buying oral contraceptives and might, ministers suggested, struggle to understand how babies were made.

The board was abolished after just four years and sterilisation became a matter to be decided between a patient and her doctor. Measures to discourage fertility among the poor or less well-educated remained a theme of Singapores government, however. Lee Kuan Yew feared that if fewer graduate women had children it would lead to a ‘more stupid’ society. Graduate mothers who had three or more children were allowed priority admission to their first choice of primary school, a policy launched in 1983. The idea was to encourage women with degrees to have bigger families, but after lacklustre take-up from the women it was aimed at, and a furious response from less well-educated parents, the idea was binned a year later.”

“Singapore’s birth rate declined so rapidly that the goverment was forced into a course correction. For two decades, beginning in 1984, the state even turned matchmaker, setting up an agency called the Social Development Unit to promote marriage. This was aimed exclusively at graduates, while a sister organisation to do the same for non-graduates was created a year later. The two agencies laid on tea dances, wine tastings and cruises to encourage romance, as well as offering tips on courtship (men were advised to bathe regularly and pay women compliments). In nearly two decades, almost 30,000 graduates married through the Social Development Unit. Gallingly, the non-graduate network had a far higher hit rate, with more than 100,000 members getting married.

The emphasis on graduate fertility faded, giving way to an all-out push to raise the birth rate. Parents receive cash bonuses from the state for their offspring, currently S$8000 for the first and second child, rising to S$10,000 for the third and every subsequent birth. There is a government subsidy for IVF treatment, with no upper age limit.”

“The country is preparing to go silver as gracefully as it can. The government is urging companies to hire older workers, with subsidised training to brush up their skills, and is even bringing retirees back into the workforce. ‘Tap into a wealth of experience,’ ran the tagline on a government advertising campaign featuring a seventy-six-year-old inventory manager at a jewellery store and a sixty-year-old salmon filleter. It’s increasingly common to see elderly people stacking trays and clearing cutlery at food courts. At the official retirement age of sixty-two, employers are required to offer their workers a new contract, renewable annually, though it comes with a twist — the salary and perks must be renegotiated and a senior member of staff may find themselves downgraded to a more junior role.

The city’s design is changing to accommodate the shift to a greyer population. Wellness hubs scattered across the city offer tips on graceful ageing, from healthy eating and exercise to spotting signs of dementia. ‘Silver zones’ on the streets feature narrower roads, forcing motorists to take more care of pedestrians, and extend the time for which the green man flashes at crossings. Prison cells are being fitted with grab bars to cater for the rise in elderly offenders.”

“The migrants from mainland China and elsewhere in Asia on whom Singapore relies for much of its dirty, dangerous or low-paid work have no legal route to becoming citizens, and for them the experience is very different. A few years ago Filipino workers who wanted to organise an independence day parade that would take them through the Orchard Road shopping district were forced to cancel after being targeted with vitriolic abuse, apparently for giving themselves ideas above their station.”

“It is not Singapore’s authoritarianism that is key to handling a crisis well, nor its people’s supposed willingness to submit to authority.

Singapore works because it appoints diligent and talented people to positions of leadership. The system roots out corruption. Its leaders are unashamed about stealing effective ideas from elsewhere, while sticking to their own distinctive course when they are convinced this will be most successful. Among its politicians, there is a strong emphasis on managerial ability rather than effectiveness at campaigning or winning battles of ideas.”

“Passion for politics runs high when Singaporeans believe that change is within their grasp. The success in the 2020 election of the opposition Workers’ Party in gaining ten of the ninety-three elected seats in the legislature was built on a platform that opposed a tax increase, and called for a national minimum wage and unemployment insurance. For the first time in its history, Singapore’s prime minister granted the head of the opposition party the official title of Leader of the Opposition. Relaxing its draconian attitude to free speech and permitting more alternative voices is enabling Singapore to build a more inclusive future.”