Don't count on me, Singapore: Singapore is clean and prosperous, but at what price?

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."

Nothing Left to Chance

THUS sex, like everything else in Singapore, has come to require meticulous planning. Psychological defense reinforces the official PAP line that citizenship consists in the performance of an allotted role in an unfolding master plan.

Lee's political party and the machinery of control it has evolved in fact undermine the possibility of democratic politics. Recent events illustrate this. In November 1990, Lee resigned as Prime Minister (he remains Senior Minister), permitting a carefully groomed "new team"--Goh Chok Tong and Lee's son, Lee Hsien Loong--to take the masses along the "next lap" of development. Initially, the unprepossessing Mr. Goh announced "a more consultative and open" style of government to create a "tropical city of the future." To get this vision "endorsed," Mr. Goh held elections in August 1991. In the event, the electorate returned an unprecedented 4 opposition MPs to the 81-seat parliament. The people had somehow got the idea that "openness" entailed the expression of an alternative viewpoint. Confucian rectification followed swiftly. The PAP closed all state-funded nurseries in errant constituencies and changed their bus routes.

In Lee's understanding of democratic accountability, it is the people who are accountable, not the party. To ensure that Singaporeans internalize government directives, the courts regularly hand out harsh sentences for relatively trivial offenses, as Michael Fay has recently discovered.

The technocracy, however, reserves exemplary punishment for those who dare question its authority. Mr. Jeyeratnam, a leading opponent of the PAP, has been bankrupted for criticizing Lee's autocratic style; former Attorney General Francis Seow was forced into exile after running as an opposition candidate in 1988. More recently, university lecturer Chee Soon Juan, who ran as an opposition candidate in a 1993 by-election, was dismissed from his post for the alleged misuse of $250 worth of research funds.

Psychological defense not only justifies such personal vindictiveness, it also legitimizes arbitrary constitutional change. In 1993 an elected president was introduced, radically altering the parliamentary system, in order to ensure that the PAP would retain control of Singapore's finances in the unlikely event that it should ever lose an election. The government terms this "fine-tuning." Mr. Jeyeratnam's trial for libel offered an interesting example of fine-tuning. He was tried in a parody of a British High Court, complete with imported QCs in their bewigged finery. The forms of legal process were scrupulously observed. But there was no jury. The legal process had been "fine-tuned," and Mr. Jeyeratnam was found guilty.

Minister for Home Affairs Jayakumar, a former law professor, clarified the extent of such fine-tuning at a Symposium on Law and the Social Sciences in September 1992. The continuing application of draconian Emergency Powers dating from the Communist insurgency of the 1950s, he explained, accounted for Singapore's success in combatting crime. Over one thousand Singaporeans currently enjoy "preventive detention" under the emergency provisions. The former law professor justifies this practice on the grounds that 'the premise of the legal system--that a judge decides on the basis of evidence before him--cannot be realized in such cases?'

Significantly, the post-Maoist reformers in Mainland China are appreciatively examining Lee's Asian polis as a model of political development. In September 1993, Wu Wei Ching led a 12-man delegation from the Chinese Communist Party's Department of Propaganda to investigate psychological defense. He subsequently recommended that China's "moral education program should be based" on the Singaporean approach. Interestingly, Singapore has recently assumed the management of the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu province. Explaining this remarkable "transfer of public administration software," Mr. Lee observed, "It is like bud-grafting Singapore methods of urban and social organization onto a Chinese tree."

The inhabitants of Suzhou should be warned. Psychological Defense encourages an obsession with the precise observation of rules. This outward preoccupation with regulation allied with a desire to succeed at all costs has spawned a uniquely anxiety-ridden moral identity known as "kiasu" (from the Hokkien "scared to lose").

Kiasuism legitimizes a gamut of behaviors that would otherwise seem perverse, selfish, and anti-social. Kiasu students hide library books in order to undermine the performance of their fellows. A local writer, Catherine Lim, attributes the popularity of the "eat-all-you-can fixed-price buffet" to the kiasu desire to get something for nothing. A local cartoon strip features a figure called Mr. Kiasu. Best-selling collections of his adventures retail under such titles as Everything Also I Want and Everything Also Must Grab. At the end of the first volume you can assess your kiasu quotient by answering such questions as "Do you distrust everyone, including your mother?"

Under such deracinating conditions Singapore has evolved into a curiously featureless place. As local writer Claire Tham observed in her aptly titled Fascist Rock, "She wanted to shout, This country's boring enough as it is. Our only indigenous culture is a shopping-center culture; kicks are few and far between ... But she didn't expect anyone to understand."

This is not surprising. After thirty years of collective programming, Singaporeans cannot discriminate between the original and the fake. Indeed, they consider the copy an improvement. Such a perception applies not only to the perfect imitation of someone else's rendition of a song in a karaoke lounge, but also to copying someone else's intellectual property, or altering an inconvenient past. In this brave new world everyone aspires to the condition of a neurotic robot.