More Homeowners Than Hard-Liners

On a steamy Saturday night in this tiny island city-state that someone once dubbed “Silicon Valley with better-than-average Chinese takeout,” it seems as if half of the 3 million-plus population is hanging out at a large open-air market known as Clementi Center. They’re bargaining at the discount shops or dining alfresco near low-cost food stands in the humbling humidity of Southeast Asian heat. “This is the Singapore that tourists rarely get to see,” comments my companion, a well-known Singaporean economist, proudly pointing out various features of the teeming middle-class scene.

She’s right; the Singapore that America knows anything at all about is the Singapore that isn’t allowed to criticize the government with the kind of noisy public impunity so common in the West. Or even chew gum; or spray-paint walls or cars with graffiti without exposing one’s posterior to a lasting rebuke. And it is these Singaporean peculiarities, far more than anything else, that have caught America’s eye, through the infamous case of post-adolescent Michael Fay from Ohio, punished in 1994 by a caning, an incident that may very well have imprinted itself indelibly on the Western mind.

Yes, alas, few know much about the solidly middle-class Singaporean who owns his own home (almost 90% do), has a job, is entitled to a quality public education, walks the streets safely at almost any time of the night and knows full well that in all of sprawling Asia probably only the Japanese can claim a higher standard of living.

The architect of both of these Singapores is Lee Kuan Yew, now 73. He was prime minister from the get-go of independence from the British, in 1959, until 1991, when he stepped down to slide into the new position of “senior minister.” Even now, he bobs up and down as the sage behind the throne. Yes, this is yet another Asian authoritarian without remorse--but one whose flinty intolerance of such things as a vigorous free press seems buffered by the donnish accents of Cambridge, where he was educated, and whose legitimacy in Asian, if not Western, eyes derives from the impressive reality of Singapore’s economic accomplishment.

Lee, like many Asian leaders, never permits his anti-Americanism to go more than a tenth of an inch deep. In fact, the Singaporean ruling elite here views the United States as the world’s only credible guarantor of the nation-preserving principle of nonaggression: “For Singapore, so many things could go wrong,” says Lee. He is in his office at Istana, the verdant government retreat up in the hills. “As the Chinese proverb has it, big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp. We are shrimp.”

So he worries about a weakened America whose Achilles’ heel, in his view, is its excess of trendy tolerance for new social forms, a willingness to discard tradition. “One of the big problems in the U.S.,” he says, disapprovingly, “is that you’re prepared to experiment with lifestyles.” A domestically strong America, he feels, is the keystone of the all-important triangular relationship with China and Japan.

He also worries about China, which, so far behind economically, may be tempted to “make faster progress than circumstances allow,” he opines ominously, and take “short cuts that could set them back.” The best China, he feels, is a patient China. Last month he made just that point in a lecture in Beijing: “It is not only America that is concerned. Many medium and small countries are also concerned. They are uneasy that China may want to resume the imperial status it had in earlier centuries.” And he frets about Japan, whose expatriates constitute Singapore’s largest single foreign resident group. He believes that Japan’s deeply embedded insularity is not just an internal conceit but also a potential external threat, especially if Japan goes nuclear. Lee once made just that point in a speech in Tokyo: “Japan will have to moderate its emphasis on its uniqueness if it is to be fully accepted by the international community.” However, Lee also finds much to admire in Japanese tradition, especially the care of its “elders” to diminish the corrosive threat of postwar modernism to traditional order: “The Japanese are very determined to avoid changing fundamental relationships within the family.” Similarly Lee is proud that Singapore is such a terrible place for the pornographer or drug trafficker to do business, but he feels that his nation, in following America’s lead, has “upset age-old traditions too fast.” For one, rapid education of women has liberated them too quickly from “their traditional roles, as wives, mothers and custodians of the next generation.”

So, will the sharp-tongued Lee make sharp-edged points like this to an American audience in Washington next month, when the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom confers on him its “1996 Architect of the New Century Award”? I’m glad the Nixon Center, an institution founded in memory of one of the few American statesmen to show vision about Asia and China, is offering Lee this forum to challenge the West. He’ll be up to it: It’s a cold day in Singapore when Lee Kuan Yew is without an opinion. We don’t have to agree with everything he says. But why not listen? We could learn something about Singapore--and about ourselves.