Singapore

Unlikely Power

by John Curtis Perry

Oxford, 329 pp., $29.95

This review first appeared in The Weekly Standard.

Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world’s most important cities are its location on one of the planet’s most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures – British and Overseas Chinese.

There’s no other city like Singapore, which goes back hundreds of years to a once-prosperous city called Temasek that essentially disappeared. Singapore’s long colonial status started in 1819, when it was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles as a British trading post, and ended in 1963, when Singapore briefly merged with Malaya only to anxiously turn into an independent city-state in 1965, when it became clear that a Malay marriage with a city dominated by Overseas Chinese was doomed.

But then, Singapore has always been a site of grand reinventions, some gradual and some fast. Mr. Perry, an emeritus professor of history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, provides a usually engaging history of this complicated place. Most importantly for us, of course, he explains cogently why it has become so successful. And he works in some glamour and romance, too, about a place that people of a certain age still see as “exotic,’’ like something from a Somerset Maugham story.

Being part of the mostly well-governed British Empire, which was held together by the Royal Navy and British commerce (based on free trade), was essential to Singapore’s 19th Century development. It wove Singapore into an international system that swiftly made it into a major entrepot and gave the rapidly growing city stable, competent and relatively fair government that promoted prosperity. “Thanks to its strategic location between India and China, and a commitment to free flows of goods and people, the settlement …proved an instant success asa gateway and place of exchange,’’ Mr. Perry writes.

It was, he notes, very profitably linked to two powerful networks – “regional in the case of the Chinese, global in the case of the British….Trade linked the small world of Anglo-Chinese Singapore to the globe.’’

“How pleased he (Raffles) would have been to see contemporary Singapore’s embrace of much of British tradition {especially civility, order and a commitment to fairness},’’ Mr. Perry writes. Indeed, Raffles is still revered in Singapore, where a large statue of him stands in front of the city’s Victoria Memorial Hall and many streets retain their English names from colonial days.

But Chinese entrepreneurialism, which has always included large doses of risk-taking leavened, like traditional British culture, with self-discipline, including the willingness to delay gratification in order to save and invest, was also crucial. “British dominion over the seas provided the foundation but upon this foundation stood the sturdy Chinese middleman, with Straits-born Babas {a term for the so-called Straits Chinese} leading the way with their knowledge of English and their ability to connect with other Asians.’

A lot of Singapore’s revenue was once derived from opium, although the place has been rigorously, sometimes even frighteningly anti-drug since independence. While once having the (much exaggerated) reputation amongst Westerners as a den of iniquity, Singapore has long since been famously puritanical about some behavior, perhaps most famously expressed in its ban on chewing gun and its use of caning to punish such crimes as vandalism.

The helmsman of Singapore’s progress from relative poverty to great wealth was Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015), the most important person in Singapore from before independence from Britain, through the city’s unhappy marriage with Malaysia and then in its gutsy decision to try to survive and then prosper as a maritime-based city-state (recalling medieval Venice and Genoa). Mr. Perry provides an engrossing analysis of what drove this intensely ambitious, brilliant, ascetic and authoritarian ruler and his colleagues as they made Singapore into a major world city, first primarily as a port/supply center, then also as a manufacturing hub and now as a technological dynamo, too.

As he led his crowded jurisdiction as prime minister, from 1965 to 1990, and then continuing as the dominant figure until his death, he kept driving his people to work hard, be clean, be honest, restrain their desires and plan for decades ahead. Don't get soft in this dangerous world, he warned. Be anxious! It all recalls the Puritan Ethic.

I know quite a few people who worked in Singapore, a couple of them who wrote for me when I was the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, which had a bureau and printed in Singapore and was sometimes censored there; they either loved its cleanliness and order or hated the Big Brotherism that promoted those qualities. A cousin of mine -- a merchant banker -- couldn’t wait to move out of ‘’boring’’ and “stifling’’ Singapore and move to the messy, manic, raucous and sometimes seamy life in Hong Kong, its big rival at the time in the ‘80s.

Singapore’s leaders worry a lot. For example, they fear that the island could lose much business if, as has long been proposed, a canal is built across narrow southern Thailand, diverting much ship traffic from the Straits of Malacca. They worry that an oil pipeline might be laid across the Malayan Peninsula, undermining Singapore’s status as a huge petro port and refining center, and that new technologies will leave them behind.

And as officials of an implausibly tiny, very vulnerable state, they’re hyper-alert about political, social and economic conditions in their often unstable neighbors Malaysia (on which they depend for much of their fresh water) and Indonesia. Mr. Perry amusingly quotes historian Ian Burama (via architect Rem Koolhaas) on Singapore’s existential tenseness (a tenseness that reminds me of another small place – Israel): “It corresponds to a deep primordial fear of being swallowed up by the {nearby} jungle, a fate that can only be avoided by being ever more perfect, ever more disciplined, always the best.’’

Well, more accurate is Mr. Perry’s point that leaders of the new nation, “anxious to build a sense of identity, seized upon a notion of shared values, articulating and organizing them into a collective ethos, formally approved by Parliament.’’ The ethos says that citizens “must defer to the needs of the community….with consensus {maybe more like obedience to authority) taking precedence over contention…and individualism … disparaged as selfishness…..The prescribed ethic lauds hard work, frugality, and social discipline, with emphasis on the practical and the specific….Discipline is equated with being civilized.’’

Mr. Lee went to university in England and loved English poetry and appreciated the fragility of human achievements. He liked to quote the gorgeous last lines of Kipling’s poem “Recessional,’’ written at the apogee of British power, in 1897.

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Mr. Lee believed that Singapore could never afford to rest on its laurels.

He pushed and pushed. Consider how the prime minister drove Singapore to quickly become one of the world’s first great container ports, helping to transform it into the world’s most important maritime center. Mr. Lee and his associates and successors kept looking ahead, making the island not onlya major manufacturing city but also a hub for research and technology and awide range of sophisticated business services.

His people have mostly accepted the rigorous and mostly very honest autocracy/technocracy that has run Singapore for more than 50 years because it has created such widely shared prosperity. And, after all, Mr. Perry writes, the Singaporean government “is not tyrannous. Instead it is clearly dedicated to the ideal of popular welfare.’’ So far.

Still, Singapore’s recent move into the knowledge industry raises questions about how long this new endeavor can flourish in an authoritarian state, especially one longer led by the giant figure of Lee Kuan Yew. In any event, he and his associates have left Singapore – and us – edifying reminders of certain “old-fashioned’’ civic values that we could use much more of in the West.

Sir Stamford Raffles would have approved Mr. Perry’s remark that a marriage of convenience between “shrewd Chinese entrepreneurship and stable British colonial governance spawned Singapore’s vitality {and} continues to nourish it today.’’ And, I would add, this city-state provides strong lessons to other governments on how to maximize the welfare of their citizens. That’s as long as you don’t care much about real democracy.

Which raises the question of whether Singapore’s future leaders, assuming that they’ll also be autocratic, will be as honest, competent and public-spirited as Lee Kuan Yew or his son Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister since 2004. If not, then Singaporeans may finally demand major political change. Things may get messy in this hyper-orderly place.

Robert Whitcomb, a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a partner in a healthcare-sector consultancy and editor of NewEnglandDiary.com.

*Statute in Singapore of Sir Stamford Raffles, considered modern Singapore's founder.*

Robert Whitcomb: The amazing rise of Singapore