Singapore Lightens Up
Nanny state? Hardly. Once notorious for tight government control, the city-state is getting competitive, creative, even funky
By TERRY McCARTHY with ERIC ELLIS Singapore

Sex, disease, controversy. It all came together--in Singapore!--during The Necessary Stage's stunning theater production in May of Completely With/Out Character. In an arresting one-man performance, former airline steward Paddy Chew spoke about his real-life trauma of living with aids in a society that frowns on "alternative" life-styles like his. At one point in the play, which included a free-form question-and-answer session with the audience, Chew removed his clothes, revealing a disturbingly emaciated body. And as theatergoers grappled with Chew's disquieting story, a live Internet chat-room discussion was projected on the stage backdrop. Online participants openly debated Singaporean issues: politics, race, religion. "The audience was shocked and delighted," says Alvin Tan, the theater's artistic director. Most shocking of all: George Yeo, Singapore's Minister of Information and the Arts, says the government never considered banning or even censoring the performance. "It didn't even cross my desk," he says.

Can this really be Singapore? The "nanny state" that has banned the sale of chewing gum and racy women's magazines? The country that liked to regulate how often you flushed the toilet? Without a lot of fanfare, Asia's small corner of conservatism is loosening up, transforming society in ways that until recently seemed impossible. True, the official press remains straightjacketed, and open challenges to the ruling party aren't tolerated. But in many areas the doors have been flung open, and new voices are being heard. In the economic sphere, Singapore responded to the two-year-old Asian financial crisis by improving corporate transparency and tolerating greater foreign control of local companies and banks. Culturally, Singapore is permitting artists to stage a range of socially and politically controversial performances. The club scene is wild and getting wilder. And Singapore is allowing the Internet to function with relatively few controls, prompting an explosion of online debate on formerly taboo topics. Progress has been uneven, but there is no mistaking today's trend toward greater freedom. "How can you be hard-line in the era of the Internet?" asks Raymond Lim, ABN-AMRO's chief economist in Singapore and co-founder of The Roundtable, a groundbreaking political discussion group. "You have a completely different intellectual environment. The bureaucrats have to get used to the idea that soft power is better than harsh control."


Locals looking for something lighter head to the Sugar Bar on Mohamed Sultan Road for a shot of tequila. John Stanmeyer--Saba for TIME

The transformation began after former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stepped down in November 1990. In June 1991, George Yeo, who had just been named Minister of Information and the Arts, made a speech on "civic" society that was to set the tone for much of what was to come. The "banyan tree" of the state, Yeo said, needed to be "judiciously pruned." To the man on the street this would mean, among other things, that from the following month Singaporeans over 18 would be permitted for the first time to see movies with soft-core sexual content. To the film industry it meant that outraged foreign directors would no longer withdraw their movies from Singapore's film festival in protest at the censor's scissors. To the city-state's new generation of leaders it meant arts and culture would be made to flourish as surely as the country's high-tech industries and superefficient infrastructure. "Heartware" was to follow software, by decree.

Almost immediately, however, the jitters set in. In general elections two months after Yeo's speech, the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) saw its share of the vote slip by 2.2%, so that it controlled only 77 of the 81 seats in parliament, compared with the 80 it had held before the vote. A modest decline, for sure, but enough to startle the party's senior figures. Concluding that the electorate was more conservative than had been thought, they decided to tread more cautiously. By September, adult movies were restricted to people over 21, and in May 1992 such films were banned altogether from suburban cinemas, though they could still be shown downtown.

Such has been the awkward process of change in Singapore: contentious, patronizing, coldly pragmatic, prim to the point of parody, rife with conflicting signals and jerky as a novice learning to drive a stick shift. Singaporeans themselves have often been unsure how much the chains have been loosened and still instinctively keep glancing over their shoulders--what's known locally as the "cop-in-the-mind" syndrome. Cynics see the liberalization as a new, subtler form of control. Certainly officialdom is not giving citizens complete license to say or do as they please. But pragmatism rules in Singapore, and as the government seeks to upgrade for the wired--and wider--world, the old rules of confinement have to give. Says Harish

Pillay, who heads the Singapore chapter of the Internet Society: "The world has changed."

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