The Rugged Society

Into government buildings bedecked with red and white bunting last week filed 10,000 Singaporeans with two things in common. All were 19 years old, and all were being drafted. It was a new experience for Asia's newest state, which has never even had an army before, but it did not mean that Singapore was preparing for war. The creation of a National Service was simply the latest and most dramatic step in Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's campaign to meld Singapore's polyglot population (1.5 million Chinese, 300,000 Malays, 175,000 Indians) into what he calls a "Rugged Society." Says Lee: "Societies like ours have no fat to spare. They are either lean and healthy or they die."

Pork Stomachs. At first glance, at least, Singapore appears healthy enough. Sports cars snap along its well-ordered streets, and its shops overflow with goods from all over the world -- including canned pork stomachs from Peking. Government-built high-rise apartments are rapidly replacing the sweating tenements of the city's grimy past, and Singapore's per capita income of $531 is the highest in Asia except for Japan. Yet, as Prime Minister Lee well knows, his nation is fighting for survival. Its prosperity depends on industry, which was deprived of its primary market when Singapore withdrew from the Malaysian Federation; unemployment has now piled up to 15%. Stability depends not only on prosperity but also on a much more fragile commodity: the ability of the government to give Singaporeans a sense of national identity. Lee's Rugged Society campaign is an imaginative attempt to tackle both problems at once.

To keep production lines rolling, Lee is scouring the world for markets. Singapore has already drummed up a multi-million dollar export business with Thailand, Cambodia and Pakistan, is a major supplier of machinery and tires to South Viet Nam. Last week Lee's government signed a $4,000,000 trade agreement with Hungary, thus expanding an already flourishing business with the Communist world. He is negotiating with Indonesia's post-Sukarno government for contracts that would re-establish Singapore as the main processor of Indonesian rubber. He has also an nounced a broad incentive program that he hopes will attract foreign industry to build more factories and create more jobs, and he keeps a firm hand on the demands of Singapore's labor unions, refusing to authorize wage increases unless productivity is also raised.

Singing Together. The heart of his Rugged Society program, however, is the integration of Singapore's three major races--each of which speaks a different tongue--into a single cohesive nation. That is where the newly created National Service comes in. In addition to basic military training, the city's youth will get a stiff dose of enforced togetherness. They will live in integrated quarters, eat at integrated tables and be required to learn at least one language besides their own. One Cabinet minister has already put together a composite repertory of folk songs for National Service trainees to sing. "When a Chinese sings a Malay song," he says, "this does more than any amount of preaching to bring the races together."

It may take a while before all of Singapore is singing folk songs in three languages, but the energetic Lee believes that he is making progress. "A new mood has settled on the people," he said last week. "Either you make the grade or you don't." Lee himself is obviously making it. So popular has his government become in Singapore that his parliamentary opposition is drying up, and the Prime Minister is becoming increasingly concerned that he may soon find himself at the head of a one-party state. That is not the sort of ruggedness he is trying to achieve.

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