![]()
Chapter 1
How Singapore Manages Political Dissent
Every country has to find its way to political and economic success that works best for itself, depending on its circumstances of its history, culture, values, resource endowment and levels of development (education, prosperity, middle class and institutions).
There are several main ways that Singapore manages political dissent:
Power of Incumbency
As the PAP has been the ruling party since 1965, or almost 50 years in power, it is accustomed to managing the levers of governmental power, to keep the spotlight on PAP achievements; PAP ministers have name recognition, and benefit from the social contract with voters: you vote for me, and the PAP will deliver the economic and political benefits. The opposition can never equal these advantages, since it has never captured political power through electoral victories since independence in 1965.
Quality of PAP Leaders
The PAP has been led by the country’s Founding Fathers, like Mr Lee Kuan Yew, for many decades, and his successors were well trained in the political arts. In contrast, opposition leaders do not have the same high calibre of party leadership, nor the experience, international exposure and networking. Such circumstances weaken the opposition and make it a one-sided political contest, besides the specific measures taken to manage political dissent.
Legal Suits
The ruling party, known as the Peoples’ Action Party, as befitting a party founded by a lawyer, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, is well known for using law suits against political opponents, such as Mr J. B. Jeyaratnam and Dr Chee Soon Juan who made allegations of corruption, nepotism or impropriety against PAP leaders, as well as international media, such as The Economist, International Herald Tribune, Far Eastern Economic Review, and others, for making libellous statements against the Singapore government, and academics like Dr Chris Lingle, who made allegations against the Singapore judiciary.
Some opposition politicians never learnt that it does not pay to launch personal attacks against the PAP leadership, which values its reputation, personal integrity and legitimacy to govern most highly. PAP leaders believe that it is vital to counter personal slurs, which if not vigorously rebutted, might through repetition over time, be believed by many people to be true. The PAP also insists on the right to reply to articles which slander the government, and is prepared to buy space in media to tell their side of the story, or to seek space in Letters to the Editor columns, to rebut and to place on record their views.
Co-option
When the PAP encounters top-quality persons who may be critical of the PAP but who are open-minded and fair, and who take part in political discussion groups, it seeks to co-opt them. The PAP has frequently insisted that it welcomes different opinions within its ranks, and thus is able to accommodate many strands of opinion. The PAP also engages in frequent renewals of its leadership, and scours the top performers of many professions, to try and persuade the high fliers with conviction, passion and leadership qualities to join the PAP and stand for election in general elections to parliament. The most promising are often appointed junior ministers to test them. By these methods, the PAP not only strengthens itself but also denies opposition parties of high calibre personnel. Many likely candidates are approached, but many also decline to join the PAP because of personal, family, professional commitments or differences of principles.
Making Available Channels for Dissent
The PAP is astute in exploiting the strategy and principle of letting people vent their unhappiness, grumble and dissent a little at a time, thus avoiding the build-up of extreme pressures which can result in volcanic outbursts and revolts. The PAP has also created various institutions and mechanisms to get accurate readings of the political ground, such as a feedback unit called “REACH”; regular meetings of Members of Parliament with their constituencies who can vent their needs and grievances, and their MPs will try to resolve or meet their requests; and grassroots organisations such as the People’s Association (PA). The PA is a mass mobilisation organisation, originally created to counter the ability of communist parties’ to mobilise the masses, via their control over trade unions, student bodies, media and poor people.
Setting up of the National Trade Unions Congress (NTUC), again to counter the leftist trade unions which were a stronghold of the left; grassroots leaders such as constituency leaders; business associations such as Chambers of Commerce, which can articulate business concerns; organising the Singapore Press Holdings to ensure media compliance with the ground rules, also known in Singapore as the out of bounds (OB) markers (like avoiding stirring up religious and racial dissent); even setting up a Speakers Corner for individuals to vent their grievances; letters of complaint to the editors of newspapers, which are closely monitored by ministries and ministers, and ministries are obliged to reply within a few days, after investigations into the complaints.
Another major channel is to conduct public hearings whenever a new policy is being formulated, so that members of the public, business firms and associations, NGOs and civil society, like environmental groups, can sound off their views and expressions of unhappiness, before new laws and regulations are promulgated, with public sentiments taken into account. The government usually takes care to explain that there are trade-offs and constraints, so that the resultant policy is a compromise between what is ideal and what is the real world.
Managing and Informing Public Opinion
The Singapore government makes great efforts to inform, manage and persuade the people before the launch of major policies, through speeches by ministers, grassroots briefings, and meetings with interested parties like companies, workers unions and media reports. The pros and cons, and consequences and costs are clearly spelt out by reaching out to the people, in various languages. Full-scale debates in parliament enable MPs and the opposition to discuss in detail the proposed policies, to question ministers, and to offer their amendments and opinions. Sometimes booklets are published and widely distributed in various languages, in order to inform and persuade the public, for example during infectious diseases epidemics like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARs), or to be vigilant against terrorism. The Singapore government is experienced and good at public relations engineering: one example is its success in persuading many MNCs to setup operations in Singapore, despite its small domestic market, and in persuading 12 million international tourists to visit Singapore annually, despite its lack of natural attractions. Its successful outreach is also shown in convincing hundreds of thousands of students and patients to live and study in Singapore and use its excellent health facilities.
Management of Threats
The nature of threats to Singapore have evolved and changed over time: from communism in the 1950s and 1960s; communalism and race riots in the 1960s and 1970s; and terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s; different legal instruments were established and debated during various general elections to provide general legitimacy and win public support.
These legal instruments included: The Internal Security Act, whose main feature is detention without trial — mainly used against communists and gangsters; Religious Harmony Act (setup in 1990), used against those who stir up racial sensitivities, like Tang Liang Hong in the 1997 general elections, who articulated Chinese chauvinism sentiments against the interests of other minorities; epidemic diseases like SARs were challenges to the government’s ability to control the spread infectious contagion, and especially dangerous to crowded cities like Singapore. Luckily for the people, the government demonstrated its competence in meeting the SARs challenge, and everyone learnt valuable lessons in avoiding anti-social behaviour.
Vulnerability
The government has frequently stressed and taught the lessons of Singapore’s vulnerability to the people. The older generations, who lived through the Japanese Occupation, the Malayan Communist Party Insurgency, World War II hardships and sufferings, poverty in the 1950s and 1960s, were able to accept and internalise this warning and message. But the youth who grew up in the prosperous and peaceful 1990s and 2000s were sceptical about this theme, until the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 and the global financial crises of 2008–2011 impacted upon the economy and diminished the availability of good jobs; only then did they wake up to reality. Job hopping by young workers, which was prevalent during the boom times of the 1990s, diminished greatly during recessions such as the dot.com recession. Moreover, terrorism which seemed a far-off threat, like in New York (the 9/11 terrorist attacks), suddenly hit home with the escape and recapture of Mas Selamat in 2009, who was a key member of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group: he had planned attacks against Singapore infrastructure, like Changi Airport and the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system.
The Singapore government has acted to counter these vulnerability aspects, by such measures as the Regionalisation Policy, which seeks to create an external wing of the economy through investments in neighbouring countries. Singapore’s vulnerability is real and a structural element, given Singapore’s small physical size and population, its lack of natural resources including drinking water, its small domestic market and lack of strategic defence depth. With so many real life examples of such threats, it is hard to convince voters to change the tested, successful and experienced ruling PAP for any untried and untested opposition party, especially in difficult global economic times. The opposition recognises these concerns of the voters and tries to reassure the voters that they are not aiming to displace the ruling party, but merely to increase the opposition voice and numbers in parliament.
On the negative side, fears of instability have become internalised amongst the people, so much so that there is a “kiasu” syndrome, or fear of failure, and hence a lack of the entrepreneurial spirit. Singaporeans have become too comfortable and less driven, unwilling to venture into risky situations. It could also be argued that the PAP’s comprehensive and effective policies in looking after the people’s needs have made the people dependent on the government, always looking to the government for solutions, hence becoming less self-sufficient and more risk averse. The PAP recognises this problem and tries to encourage youths to be more innovative, creative and entrepreneurial through programmes in schools and universities.
Some observers have pointed out that the issue of stability also serves the ruling party’s argument that it is best suited to maintain stability because of its long experience in ruling Singapore. There is another long-term risk; by refusing or limiting political space for the opposition, the PAP has placed Singapore in a position where a normal turnover of political power is not an established and accepted procedure. This creates systemic vulnerability, especially if the PAP deteriorates in the future and becomes less highly-principled, with less honest and capable people.
Anti-Corruption
The PAP since its foundation in the early 1950s was fully aware that many political parties had been destroyed by corruption, such as the Kuomintang in China. Hence it adopted a deliberate and conscious policy and programme of extreme anti-corruption amongst the party leaders, party members, civil service and general public. It achieved this aim by instituting harsh punishment, such as jail sentences against corrupt people, public naming and shaming, removal from office, as well as by positive measures such as public education and paying high salaries so as to remove the economic need to earn money through corruption. Bureaucratic safeguard measures such as frequent rotation of officials from lucrative and tempting positions (Customs, Immigration) which are highly exposed to corruption.
Another effective measure was the introduction of e-government, which decreases the public’s contact with government officials as transactions are conducted online; reducing the number of signatures of officials also reduced the number of extortion opportunities per signature. Since many democracies have been fatally weakened by corruption, such strong anti-corruption measures are actually essential elements of the democratic infrastructure, as important as an educated electorate or a free media for the survival of a flourishing democracy. It should be pointed out that despite the stringent anti-corruption measures in place, people being fallible human beings, there have been a few cases of high-level corruption, such as those involving a minister (Teh Chiang Wan), a Member of Parliament (Choo Wee Kiang), an NGO (T.T. Dorai, CEO of the National Kidney Foundation) and some others. The point is that with every passing year, a new generation grows up, and the messages about anti-corruption, anti-littering, the need to conserve water, energy and the environment, to be tolerant and not to be antisocial, anti-drugs and anti-smoking: all these public education themes have to be repeated annually, in families, schools, religious establishments, etc.
Managing the Opposition
The PAP is somewhat unique in that it is very clear about why it wants to win power and to maintain its grip on power, namely to serve the people’s needs. Once this argument is accepted, then the corollary is that the PAP will try every means to defeat the opposition in the elections. It makes a simple and effective argument, that it is not the job of the PAP to help the opposition to win elections. Thus it is also logical that the PAP will try to help the opposition to lose at the elections. The PAP tries to frame the opposition as being risky for Singapore using the following arguments:
- The PAP is responsible for Singapore’s success, and voting for an untried opposition is taking risks.
- Singapore does not need a functioning multiparty democracy, even though there are about 20 registered political parties, although many of these only come alive during election times. For a very small country like Singapore, such a system is not suitable: too much politicking can result in political gridlock, as was demonstrated in the US Congress in mid-2011, when the Congress could not agree on raising the debt ceiling. Such messiness and inefficiencies of Western-style democracies slow down, impede and complicate decision-making, especially during crises, when crucial decisions have to be made quickly. Another argument the PAP often makes is that the talent pool in Singapore is too small to support both ruling PAP ministerial team and an opposition shadow cabinet.
- In its desire to win elections, the PAP does not try to accommodate the opposition; one example is the ban on podcasts and video casts; hence the opposition turned to social media to get its message to the voters, quite successfully, as well as through public rallies which were well attended. Another example is the setting up of the ...
