Children play in a Singapore park in front of the city skyline. Boosters of the republic contend that it has left the developing world behind and matured into an economic powerhouse.ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images
Joanne Leow is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and the author of Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate.
When I was a little girl growing up in Singapore in the 1980s and 90s, my verdant, futuristic little island floated on developmental optimism and national exceptionalism. We seemed to have solved the most pressing issues: housing, transportation, gun violence, traffic regulation. We were impressing the world with our infrastructure and multinationals were flocking to our shores even as tourists came to see the sights and be treated in our world-class hospitals. We were told we were exceptional, had left the developing world behind and become the Switzerland of Asia.
I have come to comprehend a very different history of Singapore, although it was only after moving to Canada that I began to understand how my homeland was deeply central to the violent circuits of power that bound Southeast Asia. Now, having worked as a scholar of Southeast Asian cultural studies for the past 15 years, I have filled in the gaps of the censored textbooks that I grew up with, and encountered books, films and voices that were not available to me as a child. I see that the national pride we were taught to feel about our meteoric economic rise was underpinned by sacrifices, pollution, inequity and externalities that we were trained to ignore.
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I also learned how my past life and my current one are both entwined in petroleum. The International Institute for Sustainable Development notes that Canada is a “petrostate,” a country dependent on extraction. This is even as its international image is one of endless wilderness and natural splendour. Singapore is no less camouflaged: the most iconic representations of the city-state feature an airport draped with tropical flora surrounding the world’s largest indoor waterfall, and the epiphyte-covered Supertrees dominating its city skyline. It is known for its efficiency, cleanliness and orderliness. The highway from the airport is lined with trees whose canopies provide the most compelling introduction for visitors.
Singapore stores a vast quantity of crude oil and condensate far beneath Jurong Island, the centre of its oil refining industry.Edgar Su/Reuters
As a child, I did not realize how much of the Garden City’s burgeoning postcolonial prosperity was bound up in petroleum. While not technically a “petrostate,” Singapore nevertheless made its fortunes by being among the top five oil-refinery and export hubs in the world, and the major conduit of crude oil from the Middle East to neighbouring Asian countries. Strategically, all the oil refining takes place out of sight offshore on Jurong Island where leading petroleum and petrochemical companies have their operational bases. Underneath the island, 150 metres deep, lies Southeast Asia’s largest commercial rock-cavern storage facility for 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of crude oil and condensate.
Jurong Island was not always this way. It is an artificial island that swallowed up a series of small islands – many of which had communities and peoples who had lived there for generations. Another two offshore islands, Pulau Semakau and Pulau Sakeng, were turned into a landfill and their Indigenous inhabitants also dispossessed. Today, the descendants of the Orang Laut, or People of the Sea, hold yearly events to remember their lives on their islands.
These amalgamated islands were just some of the massive land reclamation projects that post-independence Singapore embarked on, following earlier British colonial projects that filled in mangrove swamps to enable the development of the Crown colony. The “fill” is sand, taken from neighbouring countries: Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Even after these countries banned the sale of sand to Singapore, more of it continued to arrive, but from where the state no longer reveals.
Beyond the devastation of its own coastal mangrove ecosystems, Singapore’s expansion is occupation by other means. What is land when it is removed from its source? Where did the sand from the manufactured beaches that I grew up on come from? Countries that I had never visited were already under my feet, granular between my toes. New territories, unceded.
The sand that was extracted from riverbeds in Cambodia or disappeared Indonesian islands is just one part of the equation. Low-wage migrant workers from other parts of Asia are the labour behind the terraforming of Singapore’s landscapes and the breakneck pace of its construction projects. Their labour is the only way in which new buildings, subway stations, casinos, theme parks and horticultural wonders can spring up overnight and be meticulously maintained. At last count there were over 300,000 migrant construction workers in the country. Debates on their rights often appear in the public discourse. Where should their dormitories be sited? Should their employers really be transporting them dangerously on the backs of open-bed trucks? How might the state ensure that they have better food?
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The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the workers’ abysmal housing conditions – up to 16 in a dormitory room, the perfect recipe for relentless spread of the virus. At the height of the quarantine, these men were strictly confined to their living quarters, and the numbers of infected workers were tallied apart from the figures from the Singaporean “community.” Fully autonomous robots patrolled their living spaces. A volunteer group began a website called “Migrant Death Map,” to humanize the toll of these peoples’ deaths at the workplaces – a statistic that the government does not officially track.
Singapore prides itself on its strict gun laws and safety, yet paradoxically it also celebrates the story of its successful weapons industry. In my research I have discovered that we supplied not only oil, but a great deal of the ammunition that was used by the Australians in the Vietnam War. Factories from my birthplace, a supposed peaceful oasis in the midst of the hot Cold War where American soldiers came to “rest and relax,” were churning out bullets that would end up in Vietnamese bodies. In the 1980s, Italian arms-maker Vasella sold 3,800 metric tons of weapons, mostly landmines, to Singapore – and these found their way to Iraq and Cambodia. To commemorate this industry of death, coffee-table books were produced every decade or so highlighting these “pioneers” of defence. In one of these books, there is a page featuring Chinese script that reads: “Prosperity for Our Country, Peace for Our People.”
Today, Singapore still produces an array of weaponry, from assault weapons to mortar bombs, grenade launchers to howitzers. Singapore’s signature Sterling Assault Rifles have been used in wars in Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and Somalia. While the government declared that it had stopped exporting anti-personnel mines in 1998, the state has not signed the Mine Ban Treaty or the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Yet, in this same country, possession of a single bullet can mean a jail sentence of up to ten years and six strokes of the cane.
I don’t want to deny how fortunate I was to grow up in Singapore as part of the ethnic majority. I was educated thoroughly in the Anglophone, British-legacy school system. I know my privilege has opened doors, funded my undergraduate education abroad, and allowed me to possess the qualities that made it so easy to assimilate into North American life. When I left the country, it was to pursue some kind of inchoate dream, perhaps subconsciously unsettled by what was always around me but was so hard to see. Or maybe I just didn’t know what I was looking at.
When people find out where I was born, they ask me why I left or talk about their brief layover in a clean, equatorial paradise. Inevitably, most of them adore the film Crazy Rich Asians. I hate to burst their bubble, so I simply say, yes, it’s great for tourists, investors, and expatriates – just don’t scratch too hard at its gleaming surfaces.