SINGAPORE: Far East Story

The teen-age gangs who swagger about New York's West Side—in the standard uniform of leather jacket, ducktail hairdo and handy switchblade—like to boast that they are the Egyptian Dragons or the Assassins and that they can lick anybody on the street. But they can thank their geography that they have never had a rumble with a gang from the Far East.

In Singapore (pop. 1,500,000), with a degree of organization that makes Manhattan's West Side gangdom seem puny and primitive by comparison, at least 10,000 youths are banded into 360 gangs. Members are mostly Chinese, though Malays, Sikhs, and Eurasians have lately joined. The young gangsters dress no differently from anyone else, but their shoulders or backs are tattooed with the signs of membership: a crucifix, a woman leaning against a palm tree, a kissing couple, an eagle clawing a snake. The biggest society, the "24," has 40 separate gangs; its chief rival, the "Zero Eight." numbers 30. Using the titles and ranks of the Chinese secret societies and tongs, the gangs have a "tiger general" who hands collections to a "grass sandal," who passes them to a "white fan." Led into battle by the "tiger generals," the secret societies beat up little boys on the streets, extort money from other youths who don't belong, and fight rival gangs with knives and clubs. In the past six weeks there has been a sudden upsurge in violence, with 51 gang fights and six murders.

Last week Singapore's Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock, whose usual concern is fighting the Communist penetration of Singapore's overseas Chinese colony, declared the gang wars to be a state emergency, and asserted the government's right to hold young gangsters up to two years without trial. Even the Communist party-liners in the Legislative Assembly made no objection to this stern remedy. Police, under the new edict, promptly rounded up 80 gangland suspects.