Don't count on me, Singapore: Singapore is clean and prosperous, but at what price? - how the obsession with societal order undermines democratic principles

National Review, May 16, 1994 by Jonah M. David

There was a time when people said we

couldn't make it,

But we did....

This is my country, this is my flag,

This is my future, this is my life,

This is my family, these are my

friends.

We are Singapore, Singapore,

Singaporeans.

--"Reach Out for Singapore"

THUS begins one of the many songs that glorify the city state of Singapore. Unlike lyrics that celebrate Paris, London, or New York, however, it is not the romantic creation of a local Gershwin or Porter. Rather, it represents the collective effort of the government's Psychological Defense Unit. Its purpose is to create, as another song reiterates, "one people, one nation, one Singapore."

Formed in the 1960s to combat the spread of Communism, the Psychological Defense Unit currently devotes itself to "nation building." Its "people bonding" songs reflect the political thinking of the island's founding father and current Senior Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. In Lee's view, the recently developed Asian dragon cannot afford to allow its increasingly affluent citizens to create their own identity. Instead, the government does it for them. Just as Lee's ruling party, the People's Action Party (PAP), intervened in all aspects of the economy to generate impressive growth in the Seventies and Eighties, a variety of government-sponsored programs now organize every aspect of the Singaporean psyche.

Feedback units monitor what people think. Education units encourage the Singaporean to "train up, be the best you can be." The Productivity Board's Quality Club encourages "quality work," and the Family Planning and Social Development Units assess the city state's eugenic progress.

Coordinating all this activity, the Psychological Defense Unit believes in the power of the catchy jingle. In the 1970s crude posters aimed at creating a "rugged society." Subsequent drives employed more sophisticated, but no less didactic, advertising techniques. Thus throughout August, the month devoted to National Day, a TV commercial features the song "Count on Me, Singapore." It shows a young female teacher addressing a multicultural primary-school class. "Now, children," she says, "I asked you today to bring in an object to show your ambition." The classroom goes into soft focus, and children's voices fill the room. "We have a vision for tomorrow," they sing winsomely, "just believe, just believe. We have a vision for Singapore, we can achieve, we can achieve. We're gonna show the world what Singapore can be." We see Singaporeans going about useful occupations: engineers, doctors, chefs, computer operators. Back in the classroom: "What have you brought with you, Peter?" teacher asks a gun-toting six-year-old. "Oh, I see--you want to be a soldier." The chorus returns with "Count on me, Singapore--count on me to give my best and more."

It is, however, in the eugenic programming that the techniques of indoctrination reach their fullest development. The Family Planning Unit's task in the early 1970s was to reduce Singapore's population. With such basic messages as: "Girl or boy--two is enough," and "Small families have more to eat," plus financial incentives for sterilization, the campaign successfully reduced the birth rate.

Too successfully. From 1984, Lee began to exhibit a more conventional Chinese concern with breeding. In his National Day speeches Lee lectured the nation. "If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards," he warned in 1984. In 1985, the government introduced the Social Development Unit (SDU), a state-run matchmaker encouraging graduates "to make a little room for love" in their overly academic lives. The new unit even hired a loveboat to take unmarried graduates on romantic trips up the Singapore River, coyly announcing: "We just provide the intro--the rest is up to you."

By 1987, Lee judged the "birth shortfall" among the Chinese majority of the population to require legislative intervention. As Professor Saw Swee Hock explains in his Changes in the Fertility Policy of Singapore (1990): "With effect from April 1st 1987, [the] sterilization incentive became no longer available to those with one or more passes at ordinary level in the GCE examinations. . . . However, it was retained for those with no ordinary level passes and with three children. What it means is that the policy encourages those who are lesser educated . . . to undergo sterilization."

The government-controlled Straits Times annually agonizes over national productivity in the procreative field, with headlines like "1990 births top 50,000 target." Simultaneously, television advertises the joys of marriage and family life. Thus, one familiar SDU commercial features a young Chinese couple meeting on a bus. We see: "the boy," "the girl," "the telephone call," "the date" and "the wonder" as they gaze lovingly into each other's eyes. This is followed by "the acceptance" (the girl meets the boy's family, demonstrating filial piety), "the joy," and finally "the future," which involves at least three babies. Another commercial features a young Chinese father proudly cradling his infant daughter. He tells us, "Now for the first time I realized what life was really about--not money, not status, but the future, and here in my arms was the future and we were a family."