Singapore

National identity:
Today, the influx of new first-generation migrants in this millennium has foregrounded the
continuing complications of building national identity in a young nation, raising questions of how to
accommodate more forms of multiculturalism while retaining existing traditions and values.
The governments stance is a delicate balancing act of welcoming foreigners and their talent while
reassuring increasingly worried citizens that they are valued. The latest policies in Singapore
primarily differentiate between locals and migrants, and are based on the principles of citizens
come first, in which housing, healthcare and education subsidies have been adjusted to sharpen the
distinction between locals and foreigners. Additionally, PM Lee stressed that changes in the current
Foreign Worker Levies, the implementation of Workfare Income Supplements (WIS) and a brand
new National Service Recognition Award (NSRA) are specially catered to the benefit of citizens, and
are intended to protect the interest of Singaporeans amongst fears of foreign competition.
The definition of what it means to be Singaporean is a complex one especially in the face of
increasing ambivalence regarding the assimilation of new migrants. Considering decreasing birth
rates, brain drain concerns, and the desire to perform well on the world, stage, it is evident that
government policies are implemented due to sheer necessity and pragmatism. In the 2000
Singapore census, it was found that most foreign workers in Singapore were taking on unpopular
jobs in construction and domestic help services. At the other end of the spectrum, Singapore
requires the expertise of highly skilled foreigners to attract continued multinational investment and
maintain international standards of competitiveness. Despite the knowledge of benefits and
conveniences that migrant workers can bring, citizen resistance to foreigners is actually intensifying.
Besides worries of increased competition, we complain that foreigners significantly contribute to the
overcrowding of public spaces and the housing bubble. This unhappiness culminated in the intensive
backlash when PM Lee quoted the need for an approximate 100,000 foreign residents for 2010,
which results in him revising the figure to 80,000.
The authorities have set in motion initiatives to help foreigners adapt in Singapore society to allow
for better assimilation and thus initiation into Singaporean society. Newly implemented initiatives
include the Singapore Citizenship journey, through which permanent residents get a tour around
some of Singapores landmarks, and learn about national symbols, institutions, and value systems.
When needed, they also undergo an English proficiency programme and are introduced to
community and volunteer organizations.
Race:
Singapore favours a double-barreled strategy, combining the encouragement of racial tolerance with
the punishment of racial intolerance. From micro-managing racial compositions in housing estates to
establishing English as official lingua franca, the state has worked hard to cultivate social cohesion.
Creating common spaces for civilized intercultural dialogue is done via collaborations with non-
governmental groups, religious leaders and para-governmental organizations like the National
Integration Council and the Inter Racial and Religious Confidence Circles. Fair racial representation in
government also allows the state to make sure that ethnic self-help groups and leaders who are
likelier to gain a hearing with the community handle sensitive issues. For instance, the growing social
problems of Malay delinquency and unwed mothers are generally left to Malay ministers as well as
Mendaki and Muis (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore) to handle.
A 2010 report on the state of racial politics in Singapore by UN Special Reporter Mr. Githu Muigai
opined that several legal practices were entrenching racial divisions, like the use of racial
categorization on identity cards and ethnic-specific self-help groups. Muigai also believed that limits
placed on the level of Malay Muslims in the Singapore Armed Forces due to the states concerns that
primordial loyalties of ethnicity and religion may trump the civic and secular loyalties to the
Singapore nation could cause other races serving side by side to view their Muslim Malay peers
suspiciously. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that Singapore is thankfully free of the scourge of
institutionalized racial discrimination. Her policies reveal an acute awareness of the need to balance
out ideals with tough, even unpopular measures to tackle the harsh realities of xenophobia and
racism.
Language:
In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the prospering people of Babel, who all speak the same
language; decide to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven. God sees this and confounds their
speech; they can no longer understand each other as they all speak different languages. The task of
building the tower is left unfinished and the people are scattered all over the earth. Consider a more
familiar story. A multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual melting pot of immigrants gathers on an
island to begin new lives. The government imposes a common language on the people to aid the
countrys prosperity. The parallels are striking: has Singapore, with her diverse people, managed to
build the tower that was beyond Babels reach? Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of our
post-independence language policy, said that The use of English as our working language has
helped us become a natural node in the global network of banking and commerce. He also pointed
out that as English was a new language to all races in Singapore; it fulfilled the social role of bridging
the linguistic gap between various ethnic groups. Indeed, the decision to adopt English as the first
language was pragmatically designed to open the door to the global market place and economic
success.
Despite the adoption of English, our language policy still maintains the need for bilingualism. The
mandatory learning of Mother Tongue languages in schools is a nod of respect to the main ethnic
groups of Chinese, Malays and Indians. More importantly, it also aims to be a link to citizens cultural
heritage. French linguist Claude Hagege contends that languages hold the connections and
associations that define a culture. Surely this is true as traditions, rituals and various art forms
constituting a particular culture are invariably expressed in the language that group speaks. One may
be able to survey the Malay Annals literature or traditional Bangsawan opera with interest, but it is
only with proficiency in the Malay language that one can truly experience the shifting nuances in
these works of art and retrieve value from studying them. Knowledge of ones Mother Tongue is
thus seen as crucial, as it opens the window to ones cultural heritage, which is in turn an integral
part of ones identity.


Democracy:
What obviously gets the goat of the Western press and foreign NGOs is that Singapore calls herself a
democracy when she only seems to have the bare bones of one, trampling civil liberties and crushing
political dissent with no pretence of playing nice. The PAP has governed since Singapores
independence and always held all but a few elected seats in the parliament. For the past few
decades, such political dominance has been accepted as the price for material well-being and social
stability but as the nation grows into developed nation status and strives to be one of the premier
global cities in the world, more and more citizens are feeling stifled with such limitations and hence
seeking to expand the parameters of that compact.
The international reputation that PAP has for political heavy handedness has to do with what is
described as draconian press laws and its infamous propensity of using the courts to browbeat their
opponents into capitulation and acquiescence. The overwhelming response to perceived defamation
of character or party integrity is a while salvo of lawsuits meant to be costly and painful. Stringent
internal controls see bans on political video blogging and podcasting during elections and even the
use of the Public Entertainment Act that requires a permit to speak in public, to prevent opposition
politicians from giving any form of public address. The justification behind such restrictions is that
the right to free speech is not absolute, and can never come at the expense of national security and
public order.
Highest paid politician in the world is PM Lee Hsien Loong, with an annual salary of 2.75 million.
Justice:
Where the intricacy of legal construction reveals the care with which society is regulated and peace
kept, the application of laws reflects a judiciarys commitment toward enforcement of legal control.
The upcoming appeal date for Malaysian Yong Vui Kong, convicted of drug trafficking and given the
mandatory death sentence, inspired much opposition. Yongs family visited the Istana in late August
to submit a petition signed by 100,000 Malaysians and Singaporeans, while social media like
deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com profess disgust at Singapores defence of the death sentence. But
the root of the problem is not legal leniency for young offenders: it is the need for education and
due address to social underpinnings of delinquency. Humanistic debates make for great negative
publicity with which to deride the reputation of lawmakers, but it is imperative that citizens are
discerning of underlying implications and motivations behind such clearly unpopular decisions.
Allowing for leniency would at best be stop-gap solutions for deeper issues. More importantly, there
are checks and balances to ensure a comprehensive decision making process. The presidents power
to pardon inmates on the death row and the intricate stringency that precedes the appointment of
justice ensure the integrity of the justice system. The upfront decisions that Singapore laws take do
not always adhere to easily swallowed opinions, but their unpopularity is balanced by a commitment
to peace and accountability of opinion dissemination.
Equality:
To Singapore, a classless society is a fantasy, as human ambition, inherent differences in talent and a
Darwinian instinct to thrive in comparison to others are ever-present forces. Minister Mentor Lee
Kuan Yew said in a 1960s speech, The human being is an unequal creature. That is a facthe is not
equal, never will be. Since it is impossible to engineer out the income divide, the government
focuses instead on mitigating through investment in infrastructure, employment and education, with
the aim not being equality of results but equality of opportunities. Because education significantly
impacts employability and thus fairness of income distribution, the foundation of Singapores
strategy has been in keeping public schools affordable and accessible to all school-going youths
according to merit-based selection. To this end, the state spends a substantial 20% of its annual
budget on education with the primary objective of bringing everyone onto an equal footing. All
children get six years of free primary education with heavy subsidies for secondary school, college
and university education. Since 1993, Singapore has also used the Education Endowment Scheme,
better known as Edusave Awards, to help students get on the same pacing as classmates from more
affluent families. Older workers also have assistance when seeking to keep their skill abreast with
changing times: Singaporean employers must contribute 1% of their payrolls to a Skills Development
Fund that they can use to subsidize worker training. The overt governmental intervention to ensure
avenues for education highlights consistent effort toward long-term equality.
The sore point in education is the perception that main beneficiaries of the meritocratic education
system have been the rich, who are taking up more than their fair share of national resources that
should have gone directly to the financially needy. For instance, of all the Edusave Award schemes,
only the income-biased ones are more successful in equalizing opportunity compared to purely
merit-based ones like the Edusave Scholarship for Independent Schools which often end up
rewarding bright pupils from already monied families. In 2008, 2008, a top civil servant, Philip Yeo,
publicly stated that merit alone was not the best measure of how scholarship should be awarded in
Singapore because not all applicants had the same social capital to begin with, with tuition centres
charging monthly fees up to $300-500 per subject, children from households earning less than
$2,500 are going to be left behind in the race to the top of the class. Barring above average drive or
talent, many students from lower income families may be unable to overcome the head start of their
more privileged peers.
In fact, sociological studies in Singapore show a clear relationship between parental education and
childrens educational achievements, reflecting the clear consequence of social capital and
foregrounding concerns of due and appropriate aid for the need. In1988, of the children who tended
to do well in school, 43% had graduated parents, 5% had non-graduated parents while the rest had
at least one graduate parent. Though various financial assistance schemes appear to equalize the
situation for the poor students, a hefty 42% of the education budget goes towards subsidizing higher
education, where the cohort is middle-class, implying that most of the states money might still be
going to help the haves rather than the haves-nots.
Has this inequality in school life translated into income disparity in adult life? A 2008 UN
Development Program report revealed that based on the Gini Coefficient that measure income
distribution across a country, Singapore was ranked the second most unequal nation in the world in
terms of income inequality. In Singapore, the ratio of income or expenditure between the top 10%
to the lowest 10% of Singaporeans was 17.7, compounded by growing global competition that
depresses wage at the low end and boosts wages at the higher end.
PM Lee promised during his 2010 National Day Rally to roll out more opportunities for all types of
Singaporeans to advance. This includes more secondary school with an Integrated Programme to
give more catch-up time to students with dissatisfactory PSLE scores, through-train Polytechnic
programmes for Normal Academic students, and assurance by 2015 that 30% of every cohort would
receive university education, versus the current 26%. On the economic front, repeated proposals to
establish a minimum wage for equalitys sake haven been dismissed by the state as a feel-good
solution that would ultimately do more harm than good. Singapore remains committed to leaving
market forces alone to determine the right level of pay while the state focuses on creating more jobs,
investing in education and encouraging workers to keep refreshing their skills.
Happiness:
SM Goh exhorted Singaporeans to reinvent the 1980s 5Cs dream Cash, Credit, Condo, Car and
Country club membership into something far more conducive to lasting individual and national
happiness: a good Career, a life of Comfort, surrounded by Children, and the ability to be
Considerate and Charitable.
Throughout the struggling 1960s and 1970s, the government exhorted Singaporeans to make
practical short-term sacrifices for long-term good: abandon dialect for Mandarin, perfect ones
English, have just two children, choose engineering and the sciences versus academia and the arts.
Most of the people dutifully obeyed, work hard, stayed clean and true enough, reaped tremendous
material fruits in the 1980s. But they also discovered an unhappy paradox: as society grew more
prosperous, the very things they thought they could afford when they were richer had gotten more
out of rich. Public debate in the 1990s was plagued with angst over rising costs of living, and the
greatest sore revolves around the most prestigious symbol of success a private home. A soaring
economy and scarce land had combined to price real estate out of reach of many yuppies, and those
who had hedged their bets on prestigious fields of study to buy their way out of public housing felt
betrayed, believing that the perceived social contract has been compromised.
In addition, thanks to the simple economics of competition, the possibility of everyone achieving 5Cs
would always be in doubt. Moreover, even if one attained it, they seldom deliver the kind of
satisfaction one imagined a Singaporean who might have been once pleased with a HDB flat soon
perceived it as something lowly. Ironically, as purchasing power grew, so did expectations and thus
the benchmark of satisfaction was pushed higher and higher, always out of reach. Many felt caught
in a masochistic self-woven web, a massive cultural conspiracy to keep themselves unhappily
working hard at a job they did not really enjoy, for things they did not really want for the approval of
people they did not really care about. In a bid to look right, too many Singaporeans sacrificed
leisure time, creative freedom, relationships, the pursuit of passion and ideals the very eccentric
choices that would have given them deepest satisfaction.
The idea of taking a gap year a time-out to rediscover ones life directions is fast gaining social
acceptance in Singapore. More Singaporeans are also dropping out of the rat race to establish work-
life balance and some eventually go on to start new ventures eco-friendly, family-friendly, design-
centric or socially-conscious closer to their dreams and inclinations.
Healthcare:
In 2003, SingaporeMedicine was created. Led my Singapore ministry of health, and supported by
three other government agencies, SingaporeMedicine is all about positioning Singapore as Asias
leading medical hub and a world-class destination for advanced patient care. Ranked as the sixth
best in the world and the best in Asia by WHO in 2000, Singapores healthcare system is renowned
for its excellence and credibility. Dedicated International Patient Service Centres provide top-notch
customer service, from a meet and greet at the airport to providing interpreter services and post-
treatment follow-up when patients are back in their home countries. Wealthy patients are treated in
private and exclusive facilities comparable to five-star hotels. Beyond serving patients, Singapore is
also a centre for research and clinical trials as well as a major meeting place for medical
professionals for training conferences.
Business:
Singapore has consistently ranked as one of the worlds most competitive and profitable places for
business investors. Ever since independence, Singapore has gone all out on a holistic strategy to
make herself one of the most pro-business countries in the world, building up world-class
infrastructure, capital markets, a highly educated workforce, social stability, stable political
institution and an attractive tax regime. The accolades make it very clear why Singapore is top choice
among entrepreneurs. As the worlds most globalised nation with the worlds freest economy, it is
no wonder than the world bank ranked Singapore as #1 easiest place to do business in 2007.
Rich:
Our tiny republic happens to have the highest concentration of millionaires in the world: 11.4% of
households here have fortune that runs into the millions. This means that much of Singapores real
estate, entertainment and shopping is geared towards the desires of the wealthy, making her an
attractive place for the worlds elite to come here to live, work and play. After years of resistance,
Singapore legalized casino gambling and set up two integrated resorts, Marina Bay Sands and
Resorts World Sentosa, boasting posh restaurants with Michelin-starred chefs and luxe shopping.
Already, the high-rollers are trooping in: July 2010 saw the number of arrivals in a single month cross
the one million mark for the first time.
Rejuvenation:
With vibrant cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai just a few hours away, the URA of Singapore
needed to show Singapore knew how to stay forever young, alluring and ready to party 24/7. Four
main sections of the city have been targeted for an ambitious lighting plan to liven up the city with
light shows, highlighted focal points, animated building walls and lightshows across skylines.