First stop on our tour of East Asia was Singapore. The city state would be many an urban planner’s dream. Clusters of luxury hotels and business headquarters have appeared in mycological bunches on reclaimed land. There is a clean and efficient metro system, high quality public housing and a complete absence of the graffiti and litter that plague the great cities of the world. My local council is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds paying contractors to remove gum from our streets. No such problem in Singapore. They have a more radical solution: ban chewing gum.This has led to a whole new kind of criminal: the chewing gum smuggler. Singaporean authorities are clear about what has allowed them to make such great strides in so little time. The Minister Mentor (who addressed the opening session of the International Bar Association that I was in Singapore to attend) is of the view that key to success has been the absence of any sort of political opposition. Not having democracy has meant that the government has been free to concentrate on the business of improving lives and repressing dissent rather than having to waste time focussing on elections and answering criticism from pesky opposition politicians.
The Singaporean legal system is equally streamlined. No need for laws forbidding discrimination on grounds of sex, one female Singaporean lawyer told us, because there is no discrimination in Singapore. Of course that does not mean that women are represented equally at the top end of Singaporean businesses. However, that isn’t true of UK or US businesses either, the Singaporeans point out a little smugly. As of Tuesday this week Singapore has taken the daring step of legitimising oral and anal sex – except between homosexual couples. It was not, the minister pointed out, because the government wished to discriminate against gay Singaporeans. It was instead because it did not want to find itself on a slippery slope to gay marriage and other rights. They did not want, he suggested, to allow gay people to set the social tone.
For a democratic fundamentalist like me, things become a notch scarier still when discussing politics with lawyers from the People’s Republic of China. I had a long talk with one lawyer over dinner at the Sentosa Golf Club. My dinner companion was the epitome of the stylish new chinese man of affairs in his bespoke suit. He wore a Hermes tie and carried a Montblanc pen in his pocket (I, meanwhile, was sweltering inelegantly in the 100% humidity). He had spent some time in England and was a keen follower of the fortunes of Exeter City Football Club – a team whose obscurity is matched only by the consistency of its failures. For all his expensive western elan, on political matters he was an apologist for the PRC government. He said that China has studied other civilisations carefully and learned what made them great. The United Kingdom built an empire on trade and command of the seas – China must do the same. The thought of having China command the seas did not have for him the chilling resonance it had for me. Similarly he was a fan of Stalin’s command economy. It had, he said, allowed Russia to expand its economy in record time. It had, I pointed out, led to the deaths of millions of Russians and the displacement of millions more. He gave a measured response to this point which boiled down to “so what?”. He moved on to eulogise the rise of the Third Reich, expressing a belief that Germany’s greatness could be ascribed to the “discipline” of its people – a point, he suggested, the people of the PRC would do well to take on board. Again, the millions ground in the gears of progress did not seem to trouble him unduly. Partly this seemed to be a question of scale. China could comfortably lose 10 million people without noticing. It would be about 1 in 6 people in the UK. He illustrated some of his points by reference to a “small” coastal city with a “mere” 7 million inhabitants. Whether we touched on environmental, economic or military matters the subtext of his conversation was that China expected to be allowed a bigger and bigger impact as each year passed. It left me feeling that we are in for a scary time.
