Singapore and the Internet are a natural fit. The technologically advanced city-state has one of the highest rates of Internet connectivity anywhere: up to 40% of its 3.8 million people enjoy direct Net access. Online chat rooms have become forums for discussions as unfettered as those in any liberal democracy. No topic is off limits: participants openly discuss the touchy issues of race, religion and the Lee family's business interests, and many call for political change. For all anyone knows, the state may be monitoring the discussions, but no one seems intimidated. "For perhaps the first time, an agenda is being set outside the government, and the government is being forced to respond," says Simon Tay, a member of parliament. "That's very rare for Singapore, but it's very positive. Singapore is liberalizing, and the Net is helping." And everyone seems to be getting into the act. "I take part in [chat rooms]," says Minister Yeo, 44. "I thought, if you can't fight it, you should jolly well master it."
Singapore has long been an island unto itself, shorn from Malaysia in 1965 and left to float in an uncertain world between Malays and Indonesians. Paranoid about its drinking water--still supplied by Malaysia--about its future, its people, its lack of people, Singapore ended up becoming paranoid about its own paranoia. Immense energy was expended on state surveillance, and leaders never stopped warning residents of the dangers outside and how much better off Singaporeans were to stay in assigned Housing and Development Board (HDB) blocks with regulation windows and color TVs.
Then came Goh Chok Tong. When he was named Prime Minister in November 1990, the PAP politician was only 49--and widely dismissed as a chairwarmer for Lee Kuan Yew's older son, Lee Hsien Loong, then 38. But Goh surprised everybody--not least himself--by becoming hugely popular. A Singaporean Everyman, Goh has a homely, unassuming, slightly gawky style that connects with the masses: here was a leader with whom voters could identify, not an Ubermensch they had to fear. Goh talked a softer language of consultation, even as he set about implementing some policies of his own.
"Goh realized they needed to make a paradigm shift from the Lee Kuan Yew era," says Tommy Koh, a former ambassador to the United Nations whom Goh named head of the National Arts Council in 1991. Goh needed some support to promote his awkwardly named "heartware," the touchy-feely stuff that Singapore's stoic founders had little time for. "It was a calculated decision to build a performing arts center, put more money into libraries, museums, set up the Arts Council," says Koh. More like a calculated risk--with PAP hard-liners constantly reminding Goh that the polls showed voters were cautious on cultural matters. When Koh was put in charge of the censorship committee, he tried lifting the ban on Playboy magazine. Big mistake. An opinion poll he commissioned found nearly three-quarters of Singaporeans were against bringing in the magazine. "I can carry the 20% who are Western-educated or influenced," says Koh, who spent 20 years in the U.S. "But not the 80% in the heartland. And if you go against them, that is politically unacceptable."
Goh was nonetheless determined to forge ahead. He created the Ministry of Information and the Arts and put PAP intellectual-in-waiting Yeo in charge. The new minister enthused about fostering a global renaissance city, about making Singaporeans more creative, about forging a civic society--the buzzwords flew like hornets among government departments. With no sense of irony he talked of establishing a media hub in a country better known for limiting the circulation of offending foreign publications, and he successfully lobbied the likes of MTV, the Discovery Channel and HBO to set up their Asian headquarters in Singapore. There were limits. Yeo persuaded MTV to drop Beavis and Butt-head ("losers, bad role models for Singaporeans"). Two performance artists who snipped off their pubic hair at a New Year's Day event in 1994 were banned from further performances. But on the whole Yeo has proven to be a benevolent patron. "There must be an instinct that the Medicis in Florence had," he says. "If you are an interesting person, a gem, someone will pick you up, burnish you and set you here." If that sounds élitist, it is--and it's driven as much by enlightened mercantilism as by a transcendent commitment to the arts. At the end of May, Yeo was made Minister of Trade and Industry--go figure.
Meanwhile, Lee Hsien Loong has been busy too. Having survived a brush with lymphatic cancer, Lee--known as B.G. Lee, after his brigadier-general's rank in the Singaporean military--became Deputy Prime Minister in 1990. When the Asian financial crisis hit two years ago, he realized that Singapore, with its limited population and few natural resources, could not survive in the global economy without becoming more competitive. So he pushed through financial reforms aimed at lowering the cost of doing business in Singapore, opening the economy to more competition from foreign companies and banks and attracting some futures trading and fund management business away from Hong Kong. The master plan has always been driven by economic expediency: to nurture knowledge workers for the 21st century and to attract the smartest Singaporean graduates back from Silicon Valley and M.I.T. To achieve that, the government has opened up areas that had been out of bounds for decades.
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