Green means GO!

Is harking back to the ‘golden age’ of Singaporean student activism just a futile nostalgia trip, or a call to arms to a passive student body in a culture of control?


Singapore confuses me. I have just about worked out how to get from one part of the labyrinthine Prince George’s Park Residences to another. I have somehow managed to successfully navigate the unfathomable complexity of module registration. Finding out where my lectures are taking place is another matter entirely, but I suppose after a couple more weeks I will have mastered this too.

It seems that NUS students have to concentrate so hard on working out where we are going and how to get there, that we don’t stop to think about the motivations behind the creation of such a bizarrely convoluted landscape. What purpose could such bafflement serve?

I cannot help but compare NUS with Sussex, my home university in Britain. There our students’ union, library, main lecture theatres, arts institution, IT centre, religious building, careers centre, union shop, bar and nightclub, all surround one central square. This square is thus the focal point for student campaigns and campus events.

At Sussex we occupied the library overnight to demand better resources and longer opening hours; held protests pressurising the university management to reverse their decision to close down our excellent chemistry department; marched against ‘top-up fees’ and the increasing marketisation of our education. We campaigned to twin with a university in Occupied Palestine, and banned Coca-Cola on campus.

But I wonder: if our university was designed like NUS, would such vibrant and successful student campaigns have been possible?

My NUS experience so far almost typifies the widely-held stereotype of Singapore as a highly obedient society. No jaywalking, no littering, no loitering, no chewing gum, no drugs, no public protest, no being gay. Heavy fines and severe penalties for transgression maintain a draconian social order.

And yet the stereotype doesn’t quite hold. There is dissent; but it appears too frequently to engender disillusionment and resignation rather than political action. In a 2001 poll of NUS students, 77% said they were not interested in political participation and 88% believed there were constraints preventing them from getting involved. This context is miles away from the 1960s and 70s when student rallies here could number in their thousands, and Singaporean students were prepared to launch boycotts, hunger strikes, sit-ins and marches in protest against government attempts to curtail their freedoms. By contrast, there now appears to be the general impression that politics is the realm of the elite, and that the results of any attempt at activism would be a foregone conclusion.

Whilst such attitudes are totally understandable given Singapore’s governmental style, they are also based on a misunderstanding of ‘politics’. Politics, after all, is about power. And power is not something possessed merely by the upper echelons of society; it is present in every social relationship. Consequently, so is resistance.

So whilst it may be too much to hope that NUS students might defy the stringent laws, and rally en masse making loud and long-overdue demands to the Singaporean government, we should remember we can still act in seemingly small ways to engage in resistance against the dominant social order.


this article was first published for NUS students in The Ridge, October 2007