FEER has also been sued by Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong for defamation as a result of a July 2006 article by FEER's editor Hugo Restall [1]. Based on an interview with Chee Soon Juan, an opposition politician, the article was critical of the government in a number of ways, but no more so than many articles in American, Australian or European newspapers are critical of their governments. Heck, even Taiwanese, Thai, Indian or Filipino ones.

FEER contends that since it is published in Hong Kong, Singapore courts have no jurisdiction; if the Lees want to sue, they should do so under Hong Kong law. But it's a step that the Lees are unlikely to take for reasons that are quite obvious. As Hugo Restall said in his article, "Singaporean officials have a remarkable record of success in winning libel suits against their critics."

In any case, the point is not the whys and wherefores of the ban on FEER; what will register in people's minds is simply that a Dow Jones news magazine has been banned for political reasons.

Nor will the details of this particular defamation suit against the FEER figure much in people's minds; it is simply that here again is another politically-motivated defamation suit.

Those are the headlines that matter.

This is particularly as they resonate with all the other headlines that Singapore has been generating through the last 40 years. Because we're so small, Singapore isn't important enough to billions of people from around the world to read much past the headlines; sometimes, we're not even reported beyond the headlines.

So, to the great majority of people in the world, the cumulative impressions from the headlines is the only picture they have of Singapore, the picture that they too will pass around one to another.

* * * * *

 
Nicholas is a senior business executive from the Netherlands, used to traveling as part of his job. His company has so far not invested in Asia, and so last December he came to Singapore for the first time, for some initial discussions.

"I did a search on the internet before I came," he told me. "It told me that Singapore is a very strict place."

"So before the plane landed, I took out all the remaining chewing gum from my bag and threw them away."

Jean-Baptiste was power turbine engineer I met on my most recent visit to Bangkok. He told me he had written to an online forum about 2 months earlier for advice, something along the lines of: Next month, I have 3 or 4 days for a stop-over somewhere in Asia while returning from Australia. I'm thinking of either Bangkok or Singapore, neither of which I have been. Which is a better choice?

Virtually every reply he got said Bangkok. What comments he got about Singapore were mostly unflattering.

"They said something like, 'If you like shopping malls and office buildings, then go to Singapore'," he told me. Or "you'll be bored within 24 hours because with all the rules, it’s a sterile place!"

Another one told him that it would be a bad idea to stay too long in Singapore. It would only increase the chances of his accidentally breaking some law or another, "like saying something anti-government" and ending up in jail.

"Perhaps flogged," he remembered the writer adding as his last words.

"Actually, I wondered whether some of the people who replied to me have personally been to Singapore or not," Jean-Baptiste said. "Maybe they were repeating what everybody else was saying. Does your government really whip people? Like Saudi Arabia?"

"Oh yes," I replied, "our courts do sentence people to be whipped." I had a slightly evil grin, eager to see how he'd react.

I was to be disappointed. He couldn't find a response to that, so he cleverly sidestepped the issue, saying, "In the end, it seemed so obvious that I should choose Bangkok, and so here I am!"

And he seemed to be having a good time there too.

Nicholas would come back to Singapore twice more within 8 months of his first visit, partly because his business negotiations were moving along nicely, partly too because he needed to check out other markets in the region.

"Would you believe, it was only on my second visit that I discovered there were gay bars in Singapore?"

"What took you so long?" I asked.

"I had read that homosexuality is illegal here," he said. "Why would I bother to look for anything gay and get into trouble?"

"Well, if you were searching the internet, the fact that there's a gay scene here isn't that hard to find," I said.

"Yes, but after seeing it's illegal, it didn't seem necessary to search further."

* * * * *

 
We may lose the occasional tourist [2], some will argue, but businessmen look at things more objectively before they invest. It should not make a big difference to us economically.

I think there are 3 possible counter-arguments to that.

1. Businessmen have biases too. 
2. We're moving into an age when what may be more important to us is not that of attracting capital, but attracting talent to relocate here [3]
3. The bad press trips up our own companies, particularly our government-linked ones, when they try to invest abroad.

The second and third are pretty obvious, so I will only expand on the first.

Short of citing some rigorous studies, I can't prove that inward investment decisions are affected by stereotype images of Singapore. However, I think it is utopian to assume that corporate chiefs, being human themselves, are entirely free of bias.

Even our own Temasek Holdings may offer a glimpse into this. Almost as soon as its acquisition of Shin Corp from the Shinawatra family was announced in late January 2006, it provoked one controversy after another. Within 2 months, Thaksin had offered his resignation after the 2 April 2006 election was widely boycotted by the opposition parties, losing its legitimacy. Another 5 months later, the military overthrew him when he clearly wasn't leaving of his own accord.

Journalist John Burton of the Financial Times quoted an unnamed "former senior Singapore official" as saying that Temasek Holdings failed to do "political due diligence", as opposed to financial due diligence. [4]

To be fair, it really would have been impossible to predict what eventually followed, but there is still a nagging sense that Temasek over-estimated the strength of Thaksin's position and failed to appreciate the early warning signs. Sondhi Limthongkul, for example, started his campaign to unseat Thaksin in November 2005, attracting huge crowds from the outset.

Moreover, it was obvious from the beginning that Shin Corp's businesses were critically dependent upon government goodwill. Its primary mobile phone business hinged on a telecommunications licence, its other businesses such as Air Asia and ITV depended on air routes and a broadcasting permit respectively. All three required the licence-holder to be majority-Thai. Temasek would have known how critical it was to have political support in order to continue and grow these businesses, and perhaps even to shut one eye to the fact that Temasek was in no way Thai-owned. That it still went ahead with the deal indicates that it must have taken a view that the needed political support was there for the foreseeable future, that is, that Thaksin's position was secure.

Drawn from the inner circles of the political elite in Singapore, were the corporate chiefs of Temasek seeing the political scene in Thailand through the filter of our own political experience? [addendum 1] Did they have a bias towards seeing stability and political strength based on the fact that as at January 2006, Thaksin had 375 MPs (75%) in the Thai Parliament compared to only 125 for the opposition? That, after all, would be a simple reading of a headline.

The Temasek-Shin Corp deal may suggest a bias coming out of the Singapore political experience, whereas earlier, I was referring to a bias formed out of the headlines coming out of Singapore, but the point is still the same: that it is nearly impossible to eliminate bias. So let's not be so sanguine to think that decisions by companies whether to invest here, or by top talent whether to relocate here -– and that's even more sensitive to the political and social tenor of this place -– aren't susceptible to the bad press we keep generating for ourselves.

© Yawning Bread