I had just finished a highly readable biography of Sir Stamford Raffles when a friend of almost 50 years invited me to visit him in the Lion city, which I hadn’t visited in over two years. My impression is that Raffles wasn’t a showy guy. He wanted to make this region more habitable, and after starting communities along the Sumatran coast, he had the imagination to see that the little fishing village here could be a great city.
It is. I have watched Singapore develop over a generation, adding universities, botanical gardens and the most beautifully-pruned trees in the world, especially the spreading acacias that almost define the arteries. And my favourite flower, Strelitzia, sprawling by the thousands in defined landscapes.
I wrote here that Kuala Lumpur is a city of communities. Singapore has now become — with the expenditure of a few billion — a city of landscapes and landscaping. This is not to marginalise the institutes of art and design, the universities of engineering, science and the arts (in a list of the 100 best universities in the world, Singapore is the only Asian country that made the list).
Other cities have those, however: I went to Stanford, now rated the best American university, and which also has magnificent landscaping, by far America’s best. I got a doctorate from Oxford, now rated the best university in the world, which has jewel-like gardens in every college. But, nothing is like Singapore.
My generous host, whose family history is entwined with that of both Singapore and KL (he is a Lee, as in KL’s tall Lee building in the kota), has spent several days driving me around, and truly knows just about everything and everyone here.
At the world-famous botanical gardens, I saw a huge 5kg book titled Singapore Biodiversity, which Dr Lee (London, PhD Physics) promptly bought for me. It’s An Encyclopedia of the Natural Environment and Sustainable Development, and in itself is proof of just how well-developed the world’s richest city is.
As an author/editor of 15 books, I know just how enormously difficult it is to put any book together. As I explained once to my son, when we were setting out to write a book on how Africa failed so badly and Asia has done so miraculously, a 100-page book is 50 times more difficult than a 10-page essay.
Singapore is a mere 700 sq km, but a 10th of that was set aside for parks and gardens. We drove across the island, and from south to north. In some areas approached through “organised” jungle, we came upon architecturally dazzling S$200 million (RM629 million) rumah, then saw well laid-out workers’ apartment houses with playgrounds.
All political entities have problems. Singapore may well be creating the same one that brought Donald Trump to the White House. I met numerous people, born on the island, who, though well-off now, see their position slipping as government subsidies and tax advantages go to the new arrivals, mostly from China.
The government has made a clear choice; it can’t please all, and its priority is to vastly increase the population. It can do this by subsidising large families, but it is always true that as one gets richer, he wants fewer children; this, therefore, won’t work.
Immigration is the only solution, and rich people don’t emigrate, so poorer folks alone will come (as it says on America’s Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, your poor’. They came by the millions from Poland, Italy, Japan, everywhere, and the US remains by far the richest and most powerful country in history as a direct result.)
If this is Singapore’s biggest masalah, lucky it. With no strategic depth, it must plan an IT future, a world transaction centre. The late Lim Hang Hing, a Singapore intelligence agent in America and back in Asia, once took me to Parliament, and I was privileged to watch the second founder, Lee Kuan Yew, pleading for his country to stay
one hour ahead of its geographic time zone so that it could compete directly with Hong Kong and
other major Southeast Asian hubs for the finite number of international transactions. Small wonder Singapore is somewhat of a Lee kingdom.
My strongest memory of the city from this trip is precisely what the big book analyses — the biodiversity, from its corals to its magnificent trees. It offers a challenge to every city that is expanding (which is to say, most cities in the world) to preserve the environment even while populating it. This is easier said than done: it requires intensive and extensive cooperation and coordination among an army of architects, city planners, landscapers and gardeners.
The proof of success is the ability to put together a beautiful 600-page book on what it all adds up to. I hope the mayors of every eastern and southern Chinese city have a look. Everywhere else, too.
W. Scott Thompson is professor emeritus
of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,
United States