Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Revisited

As I pass through the E-gates in the passport hall at Changi airport the screen flashes up the personalized message: “Welcome Home Kenneth Andrew Jeyaretnam.” Changi still wins awards as the world’s best airport (given by magazines to which Singapore state-owned companies like Singapore Airlines are major advertising clients) but in size and sparkle it is already dwarfed by the new Emirates terminal in Dubai or even the new Bangkok airport. I might have been impressed by the e-gates a few years back but now every country seems to have them. Even Malaysia, our next-door neighbor, often cited by Singapore’s authorities as an area of backwardness, has exactly the same technology.

Still, I’m back home and all I want to do now is throw off the button-down clothes I’ve been wearing on my business trip to the West, put on a batik shirt and sandals and get some real food. I join the taxi queue which moves quickly because of the large number of taxis on the road. Without unemployment benefits, taxi-driving is one of the few options open to middle-aged Singaporeans who have been laid off. There is virtually no limit on the number of taxis, apart from the supply of drivers.

My driver, a middle-aged Chinese guy, recognizes me. For most of my working life I was forced into exile overseas. Despite graduating from Cambridge in 1983 with a first-class honors degree in economics, no one in my home country would employ me. But in 2008 I decided to return home anyway and last year I stood as candidate for the Opposition in the general elections. My driver is sneaking surreptitious glances at me in the mirror. Finally he says:

“JBJ. Very good man!”

I tell him he’s right and he goes on:

“But in the end very poor. Selling his book on the street corner. I buy a copy. Very sad, lah!” Then after some thought, “That’s what happens when you go against the gahmen (government).”

He is referring to my father, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam. When I was a boy growing up in Singapore my father had been one of the highest-earning lawyers. He was also the first Opposition politician to get a seat in parliament, breaking a 16-year monopoly by the PAP. He was subjected to multiple defamation suits and perverse judgements which forced him out of parliament and out of his law practice and eventually bankrupted him.

As a bankrupt he took advantage of the loophole which allows the destitute to sell goods on the street and he would frequently set up outside subway stations to sell his own political polemics. It made for a bizarre spectacle on our uneventful streets, this old gentleman barrister with his sandwich board proclaiming “Hatchet man of Singapore” and his little rolling suitcase full of books.

In his own unique way he was evading the censorship and control that pervades every aspect of our society. It is this endurance that he is most remembered for. That and as a poster boy for what happens if you dare to voice dissent in Singapore.

It is now nearly 20 years since William Gibson too touched down at Changi, writing his infamous article on Singapore which got Wired banned for a time. Gibson clearly found Singapore unnerving, the cleanliness, the death penalty, the lack of creativity, the totalitarianism of central planning, even the palm trees. He called us “Disneyland With The Death Penalty.”

Ultimately what saddened Gibson most was that our government might have found a way to have prosperity, progress and innovation without sacrificing central control and whilst repressing freedom. In economic terms it’s been a truism since the time of Adam Smith that monopolies are notoriously slow to innovate. If I had been Gibson I might have gone out of my head at the thought that the natural order of things was being overturned.

The thing is, he needn’t have worried.

In those innocent days of the early 1990s many of the cognoscenti were excited about Singapore’s attempts to centrally plan its way to technological dominance. The BBC had just aired, “Singapore: The Intelligent Island” and in 1991 the IT2000 plan (mentioned in Gibson’s article) envisaged productivity growth rates of three to four percent per annum brought about by bringing most business and leisure activities online. We were going to leapfrog ahead of Western countries as a high-tech hub and get rich in the process. Amongst the promises: every Singaporean kid would have a computer. Detailed real-time information would be available to the managers of Singapore’s spanking new subway system.

With the benefit of hindsight those plans look hopelessly naïve, and their targets prosaic and pedestrian.

Mostly it was just hype and self promotion. In fact we have gone backwards to our early stage of development and an industrial strategy based on labor-intensive manufacturing and tourism. Even in mainstream activities Singapore now feels very different from the high-tech, high-wage utopia envisaged by the planners.

The E-gates story is an illustration of the quickening pace and unpredictable nature of technological diffusion and the way in which other countries have caught up and surpassed us despite all the central planning. I remember GE’s comment a few years back that when they invented the X-ray machine in the 1920s it took over a decade for a competitor to bring out a similar machine. Now they say new innovations are often copied or surpassed within a few months. Singapore also compares poorly with countries like Israel or Finland as a technological powerhouse. We haven’t produced a Nokia despite fifty years of government policy.

Before Obama changed the rules on stem-cell research Singapore’s big hope (as always) was to exploit the regulatory arbitrage by being willing to do what other countries for ethical or ideological reasons would not. The plan was to become a center of stem-cell excellence. However, those hopes have also faded. A year or so ago the state-controlled media quietly revealed that a husband and wife team who had pioneered stem-cell research in the U.S. and then relocated to Singapore with much government fanfare would be moving back home.

Whilst South Korea’s advanced levels of education and ultra-fast broadband are often cited internationally, our broadband speeds seem stuck in the technological Dark Ages, badly lagging behind even the UK. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that all the mobile and broadband providers are ultimately government-owned.

In education, far from a computer for every school child, even basic education is still not free and education is only compulsory up to taking the primary school leaving examination (PSLE) stage. In 2012 Singapore is becoming increasingly isolated as it falls behind and becomes more North Korea than South Korea.

Although our city island will always be a home for me, I’m afraid we’re very much just another overcrowded Asian city with infrastructure and amenities stretched to the limit by a population bursting at the seams.

The population of 2.8 million Gibson wrote about is now 5.2 million and much of that is imported labor. While America laments the loss of automated Apple factories in the US which could not compete with labour-intensive Chinese sweatshops, Singapore has taken the opposite route. Singapore cannot compete with cheap labor overseas so it brings the cheap labor to Singapore, with no minimum wage there is no bottom to how cheap this labor can be. Not surprisingly this exploitation has fueled an explosion in GDP but not in real wages, which have stagnated or fallen.

Yes, we have clearly dropped the ball on prosperity, progress and innovation. But on the bright side we’re doing really well in the crime and punishment stakes. What’s that I hear you say? We let an internationally wanted terrorist escape?! That is true but he got out through a toilet window and central planning hadn’t envisaged that. Nor that he might be hiding at his brother’s apartment. Yes, we did also let a hit and run killer, the Romanian ambassador, escape the country. Sure, and those men who beat up the taxi driver.

But let’s look on the positive side. Plenty of other foreigners have been hung and a Malaysian teenager is currently on death row waiting to come of age before being executed. That’s got to count for something!

Tourists will be pleased to know our island is not as squeaky clean as it used to be either and now boasts two mega-casinos, euphemistically named Integrated Resorts. I have nothing against casinos but really if the only justification for allowing an activity is that it makes money then why not legalize drugs and prostitution?

With draconian laws against the former, Gibson might be relieved (no pun intended) that on the second there has been an explosion of “girlie” bars moving into even sedate residential neighborhoods and Singapore was even cited on the list of countries failing to take sufficient step to stop human trafficking.

A while ago I moved into a hotel round the corner from me whilst a builder played Armageddon with my apartment, or as we like to say here, “re-modeled.” I exited the hotel the next day through a door held open by a man dressed in 19th century Indian servant garb complete with turban.

So far, so Disney.

The Taxi chief, the only man you’ll ever see in Singapore wearing a pith helmet, tips me a salute.

“Taxi, Mr. Ken?”

I nod but as I go down into the waiting vehicle I am pushed off balance by a burly man who along with several other equally muscle bound friends leaps into my taxi. The doorman rushes to pick me up and brushes me down. “So sorry.” he says. “Those were Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards.”

Mugabe, it appears, has taken over the top floor of the hotel whilst he and his entourage stay here for shopping and medical treatment. (I understand they can’t travel to Europe or the US). One of the porters gestures to me in conspiratorial fashion and I follow him around to the side of the hotel. He points at two huge container trucks.

“See those?” he whispers, “The one on the left is already full of shopping when they’ve filled the second one they’ll be on their way.” The sight is so extraordinary that I half expect that feral boy with the boomerang to climb out of the cab.

The truth is that for years Singapore has welcomed all kinds of questionable visitors to its shores. Fugitives from Indonesia and neighboring countries are made to feel at home and Singapore refuses to extradite them when requested. Despite attempts by the EU and the US to combat money laundering and bribery, Singapore seems to accept any pariah’s money. Singapore has been one of the prime business partners of the Burmese junta and been at the forefront of attempts to stop tougher sanctions being imposed on the regime.

As a Singaporean I never quite recognized the Wired description of Singapore as a Disneyland, nor as a sterile Asian neo-Switzerland of law abiding automatons. I think our streets are clean because an army of immigrant labor sweeps up behind us. The defamation law is a line drawn in sand. Never knowing where it will be drawn we live in perpetual fear of crossing it.

We are mostly law abiding because we are afraid and repressed and we have no choice, not because we are inherently well behaved or “good.” We’re not Disneyland by a long shot but it is probably true to say that if George Orwell and Philip Dick had an illegitimate child of a theme park, then this would be it.

Gibson was a visionary in that he saw clear through the hype to the disturbing underbelly. It turns out our government doesn’t have the secret to prosperity, and progress and they are clearing failing in technological innovation and creativity. But others still believe in the hype and if the PAP’s model for pseudo democracy takes off then new democracies everywhere are in danger.

Burma’s military regime is currently a student eager to learn our formula. The biggest obstacle to restoring freedoms for Singaporeans is that our government doesn’t shoot protesters and that it does hold elections. That’s just enough to persuade the West to praise us and they in turn can take advantage of our convenient off shore, low tax regime. It would definitely be easier to protest against full blown tyranny.

Now it seems the PAP may have applied the same formula to cyberspace. They control it without resorting to draconian bans or blocks which would draw criticism and third world comparisons, by going after individuals with the same defamation tools that removed my father.

Currently a PAP Minister Shanmugan is seeking an individual with the moniker Scroobal to sue him for a defamatory comment he left on a blog article. According to a letter from Shanmugan’s lawyers:

“…the internet being what it is (sic) Scroobal has evaded detection.”

Don’t laugh! Scroobal has bamboozled so they have gone after the owner of the blog, Alex Au, instead. If Alex had been in a Nazi WWII film he would have been the guy they took outside and shot in the village square as an example to the others.

We Singaporeans are fast learners and in the days that followed his receipt of the lawyer’s letter, defamatory and potentially defamatory gossip was removed by every blogger and website quicker than you could say hard drive. Meanwhile the government has rushed through a law that allows even deleted comments to be used as evidence.

Sometimes I wonder why I came back to Singapore, what keeps me patriotic. As Lin Yutang, the famous Chinese writer and inventor said: “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” That must be it.

Later this evening I’m going out to eat in Little India’s Serangoon Road at the Banana Leaf Apolo Restaurant. There one dines deliciously off a banana leaf rather than a plate. It’s still one of my favorite places to eat. I used to go with my parents as a boy and my father used to take my son out there for breakfast. No doubt my son will take his son.

This is what it comes down to, food, community and family. There really are some things it seems, that Singapore still does best.

Opinion Editor: John C. Abell @johncabell