The Singapore Story – Part 1

It would be easy to visit Singapore, look around, see an ultra-modern, spotlessly city with some stringent rules and take it at face value. Singapore the short story is a highly successful, first world city-state in Southeast Asia with a great banking and tech sector and some questionable approaches to human rights and civil liberties.

I would guess this is the story 90 percent of the world – and maybe the same percentage of Singapore's visitors know.

Singapore's designers are happy to share if you want to know more (they are proud of their work), but aside from the human rights part – this is the story they want you to know. If you come here and think this, then they've done their job well.

But it's a simplistic story and one that belies the tremendous significance of Singapore.

Because the real story is complex and in fact deserves to be considered in its entirety, I plan to tell it in a series. After all, as anyone who buys the easy story will tell you, there isn't that much to do in Singapore. However, there's everything to learn.

The story goes something like this:

"We had nothing! Absolutely nothing! And we didn't know what to do. Malaysia kicked us out, the a British were leaving and we had nothing," the old tax driver told me one night in 2006.

Old taxi drivers – if their English is good – are the best. They are Singapore's most accessible historians and disseminators of rare and useful information.

"Mr Lee (Lee Kuan Yew) stood up and said we needed to get along and work together if we didn't want to starve," the old Chinese man said.

He was talking about 1965 when Malaysia expelled Singapore from the federation.

"We didn't have enough water, we couldn't produce enough food. We were poor and we didn't have enough jobs. No one knew what was going to happen. Mr. Lee and his people, they told us not to fight among ourselves, because we had to work together. We had to be neighbors. We needed each other. No one saw it this way at the time," he said.

"They were very, very smart – Mr. Lee and his people. They gave us jobs. They told us 'You dig this ditch' 'You help build this building' 'You wash laundry'. Then they gave us taxis and told them to drive them. They gave us jobs. Later, when they turned it into Comfort (now the largest taxi company in Singapore), they gave us our businesses. We bought our taxis from them – they helped us. And we went from nothing to having our own businesses."

My taxi driver was one of the few left who own his taxi. Comfort Cabs eventually was spun into a private corporation, traded on the Singapore stock exchange. It stopped selling drivers their own taxis and have them rent or lease them instead. Either way, it put 15,000 taxis on the road and almost 30,000 jobs. The original guys who owned their taxis and were given stock in the company are some of the wealthiest cab drivers you'll ever meet.

"Singapore has changed so much since then. We worked very, very hard. Mr. Lee and our government worked very hard too. We have so much now. You would never even recognize it from when I was a child. The young people today, they don't know how hard we worked. They don't know how bad it was. They have everything and they don't know how hard their grandparents worked – and how scared we all were."

This man is the kind of person who is the heart and soul of Singapore. He did what so many of his generation did – he bought in to his government, trusted without question and reaped the rewards.

That's because his government did right by him. It's also because a rare combination of brilliant and motivated people came together to form and transform Singapore using ideas and methods never before conceived, let alone used. Singapore, in a stunning way uses Western capitalism to achieve socialistic goals that are in keeping with the Asian values of its people.

I've heard many criticisms of Singapore – some valid and some not – including Singapore not being a real democracy, not respecting civil liberties, being too strict and that it's people are like sheep.

While there are grains of truth in all of these, the criticisms don't understand the realities. They are Western viewpoints based on ideals and values that Singaporeans didn't feel applied.

In 1965, when this dirty red sandbar of an island was cut loose from the country it intended to be part of, Singapore was little more than a port town filled with immigrants who didn't like each other all that much. Much of the city was poor and dirty. Chinatown was a tenement slum housing up to 30 people per apartment. Disease was rampant, police corrupt, and there was little order or force of law.

Lee Kuan Yew and his team of Oxford educated social elites took on the task of building Singapore through their ideals.

The first and foremost was homeownership. They realized that no one sends their sons to fight and die for a country that isn't theirs. But if they own a piece of it, things change. Not only does it create attachment to the country, but also incentivizes them to take care of their neighborhoods which includes not fighting with or rioting against your neighbors.

Singapore decided to build blocks of condos and to sell them at affordable prices to everyone. In order to make sure everyone owned their home, the government created the Development Bank of Singapore which willingly gave low-interest home loans to almost anyone wanting to buy a government- built Housing Development Board (HDB) condo.

Then there was another twist of social engineering – no more than 70 percent of a condo block can be occupied by any one ethnicity. People had to move, shuffle around and not only live, but own their homes next to people of other races. Chinese, Malays and Indians had to identify as neighbors in the most literal of ways.

Eventually, the HDB program extinguished slums and eliminated homelessness. Most importantly, it turned people from transient workers and immigrants into Singaporeans. Housing bound people together. Suddenly, they had something at risk.

That changed attitudes.

But that alone didn't turn Singapore first-world. Lee Kwan Yew realized Singapore needed foreign investment in order to get jobs. That meant Singapore had to inspire confidence. It needed to be presentable.

Over the course of several years, the dusty red sandbar got a makeover as Singapore planted trees, lawns and shrubs. "Greening Singapore" not only made it a suddenly attractive city, but it got rid of dust and disease. Trees sucked up swamps and reduced malaria, typhoid and other diseases. When Japanese, American and British executives came to Singapore, it looked decent enough to take seriously.

It also had two magic assets that made it much more attractive than any other Asian country: British common law with full property rights and English. Singapore's decision to implement its colonial language – English – as the new national language was a measure to prevent any one ethnic group from dominating. Everyone would have to bend equally. Everyone would be unified in their experience of being equally uncomfortable.

Only it was a golden asset. Malaysia chose Malay as its national language – leaving Singapore alone as the only country to fully bolster the intangible assets left to it by the British.

As major companies built factories, they found Singaporeans were good communicators, adaptable and hard workers. As a result of their presence, Singapore began to develop and became increasingly more pleasant environmentally.

The ball began rolling.

Meanwhile, Singapore's government began creating jobs with taxis, public transportation, HDB construction, new military, the Development Bank of Singapore and numerous other projects.

People like my taxi driver did what they were told and made money – more than they had ever made with a better standard of living to go with it.

They trusted their government and its use of paternalistic democracy and capitalism – some people say like sheep, others say like people with nothing else to lose.

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