Disneyland With The Death Penalty
A Singapore Slingshot
Finally!
After two entire years holed up in Hong Kong without setting foot on an airplane, at long last I made a short-term escape and popped across to Singapore for a week. At the time of booking, we were still in the grips of compulsory quarantine regulations and the prospect of four days locked in a hotel room upon our return to the island. This — in fact — looked good, after the government mandated hotel lock-up of three entire weeks rapidly shrank to a week, then just four days within under a month. By the time the trip came around hotel quarantines had been done away with altogether, and now we just have to jump through nonsensical testing hoops for a week, and avoid bars and restaurants (even though we’re free to travel the city in taxis, buses, trams and subways with as many untested people as we want during the period)… I think I will manage.
But I travelled! I travelled on an aeroplane! I went somewhere that I did not need to wear a mask!
After Hong Kong, Singapore felt to me like a step into modernity, cleanliness, civility. A shiningly city of modern architecture, not nearly so densely overbearing as Hong Kong, where aging, dirty buildings feel almost slumlike in many of the denser downtown spaces, and where you can struggle to see the light of day sometimes. Not to say that Hong Kong does not have parks, and certainly the city has surprisingly easy connectivity with green space in the form of its many hiking trails up into the mountains — but it’s dirty. I can already feel the eye-rolls from some who love the “quaint” originality of this place, who will insist (quite correctly) that nature is dirty, the countryside is dirty, dirt is dirty.
Singapore — a garden city, as it describes itself — may not have such connectivity to unspoiled places, and does of course have sides that it keeps hidden from the tourist trails; and it’s a smaller city (apparently) without the challenges of terrain that have made some of Hong Kong’s construction projects so unruly. But there is a time in every life for dirt, a time for rustic charm, a time for stoic practicality…and perhaps a time when you just want to be comfortable. The city reminded me a lot of Dubai — another ancient settlement that has been mostly obliterated by the modern trappings of a prosperity driven economy — both in the good ways as well as the not so good.
Not just the obvious diversity of the population but the obviously integrated diversity of the population was utterly refreshing to experience after COVID-19 rinsed Hong Kong, devoid of tourists and (to some extent) drained of expats. I’ve seen the city no other way, and although I have been told things didn’t used to be this way, I still feel Hong Kong is discriminatory and suspicious. There are obvious racial patterns that clearly make it harder for some nationalities to truly succeed, and there lack of inter-community integration is a slap in the face when you first arrive. Language plays a huge part in that, but it feels like it shouldn’t have to. It plays a part because it’s an easy barrier to leave in place and nobody is rushing to break it down.
The presence of the a surveillance obsessed state is obvious wherever you go in Singapore. Government operated video surveillance cameras are everywhere — irrationally so, in fact. Physical protective security measures are visible too. Hostile vehicle mitigation measures, perimeter security in places. These I have no problem with. Of course, there are opportunities for exploitation of the information and potential abuse of the power that information delivers — and these are where the clean lines of Singapore might become less attractive to some.
You know you’re being watched. You know the penalties for stepping out of line are severe. Coming across the border you are reminded repeatedly that being caught in possession of controlled substances will result in the death penalty. Despite the many (many) very crowded bars and restaurants and the revelry that was going on all around me, I wondered what would happen in the event of people stepping out of line as a result of relatively minor excesses. Police in person were not overly obvious on the streets at any time of the day or night, although I did see some in the subway keeping an eye on things.
COVID’s negative impacts on Hong Kong have driven many out of the city and across the sea to Singapore in the last while, and although stories continue to suggest that Hong Kong will recover its position as the stronger financial center of the two cities, as a result of its tied into China, my somewhat skeptical brain wonders if this will in fact be trues. It is most definitely the case that Hong Kong continues to draw closer to the mainland, and the closer we get to the final handover the more this is inevitably going to be the case. It is so easy for an airport’s position as a regional hub to switch locations as long as there are competitors with sufficient capacity and sufficient connections to take up the slack. These factors are very much the case right now, with a colossal amount of ground lost by Hong Kong International Airport, still lacking direct routes to many parts of the world following the big COVID disconnect. Banking and Business are about connections and communications. Singapore’s controlling ethos could well be perceived as a safe and stable platform upon which to rebuild and consolidate for many, in the absence of potentially destabilising and unpredictable influences from an inflexible and overbearing neighbour/future landlord. Whatever the future holds for Hong Kong, it’s not going to be decided upon by the people of the country or the foreigners who would like to turn a profit on the back of the outcomes. We’ve seen this played out with COVID and the nonsensical response from the government of the Special Administrative Region — which might be more effectively described as a region that does not have the ability to administer itself.
Can you say the same thing about Singapore? Of course there are arguments to be made that there are external influences on that government also, and nobody in the region can ignore what China is doing or what it intends for the future. But there is no ticking clock in Singapore, with the big hand creeping towards midnight in the same way there is in Hong Kong.
Not that this is in any way an anti-Hong Kong piece. The city will continue to be prosperous in the future, I have no doubt, as it continues along the inevitable path to full reunification with China. The mainland will then have another populous city with a reasonably well organised set of infrastructure and a reasonably compliant, well educated workforce to use for whatever it needs to do — as long as all of those people don’t leave before it’s done.
I don’t think the leaving indigenous will go to Singapore though. That’s a place that seems more suited to the diversity that Hong Kong currently doesn’t feel to me as though it understands or appreciates.
Ironically, I imagine some Hong Kongers would choose not to go to Singapore because of the perception that it is both boring and controlling. Perceptions are interesting. I find cities where the people have no control as controlling, and I find places that don’t allow me to go anywhere as boring…
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
