Hygiene in a Landlord State: Health,Cleanliness and Chewing Gum in Late Twentieth Century Singapore

The Great Re-housing: Government as Landlord

The re-housing campaign that began in late 1950s under the colonial Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), and continued even more earnestly and effectively under the post-colonial Housing & Development Board (HDB), has been well-discussed elsewhere and need only be summarised here. This government-directed rehousing of the majority of the national population was among the most comprehensive in the history of modern cities, both in terms of the percentage of citizens affected and the speed and deliberation with which it was carried forward (Chua, 1997, 2000; Clancey, 2004; Harris, 2002; Loh, 2013). Nonetheless, it can also be seen as a part of a more widespread twentieth century re-housing project, near-global in its manifestation. One common thread in such housing campaigns around the world was the invocation of ‘emergency’ as both a rationale and rhetorical context for citizen mobilisation. Indeed almost every rehousing regime used ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ as a rationale for demolishing neighbourhoods, migrating populations and containing them within high-rise housing. Although ‘development’ was also a keyword in this project, I’ve argued elsewhere that this extended global re-housing should also be seen as part of a history of mass mobilisation linked to war and the threat of war (Clancey, 2006; Loh, 2016).

In the case of Singapore, that conflict was the Cold War. From the late 1940s through 1960, Singapore was caught up in the so-called Malayan Emergency, which resulted in almost the entire rural Chinese population in neighboring Malaya being rehoused in so-called ‘new villages’. These were essentially camps enclosed in barbed wire meant to separate the rural population from the Chinese communist guerillas whom the colonial regime was fighting in the Malayan jungles. At the same time, so-called ‘new towns’ began to be constructed by the British in Singapore city itself, with the intention of moving the urban Chinese population from the crowded Chinatown and squatter communities that had grown up as a result of the Japanese occupation. These were considered by the government to be beyond surveillance and policing. The SIT and later HDB planned for an orderly, more transparent, and (it was hoped) socially progressive new environment. But though it paralleled the British project of urban rehousing occurring simultaneously in the metropole, Singapore’s rehousing ultimately had as much to do with the fight against Communism in Asia. The same can be said of the British housing policy in Hong Kong, which helps explain why these two Chinese-majority cities, uniquely among British colonies, saw such extensive government-directed re-housing of their inhabitants (Castells, Goh & Kwok, 1990; Clancey, 2004; Loh, 2016).

Throughout the colonial period Singapore’s slums and kampungs (rural villages) were described as ‘breeding grounds’ for disease, and the rehousing was presented as mainly a public health measure (Manderson, 2002, p. 122). ⁹ This was also typical of rehousing campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the world. Whether in the United States, the UK, Japan, or the colonies which they and other powers managed, housing reform efforts through, at least, the 1920s were heavily couched on public health and medical language (Clancey, 2006). Tuberculosis and other contagious diseases were believed to have a spatial origin, and the solution was thus to re-order space. The fit between health and re-housing was so tight that under the colonial SIT, TB sufferers were given priority in moving to new housing estates. ¹⁰

In the Singapore of the 1960s, however (and much earlier in the US and other places), public health language began to drop away or became peripheral as the main justification for such mobilisation. Re-housing was now more commonly spoken of in terms of poverty-relief, wealth-sharing, technology, economics, politics, etc. One explanation is that in rehousing campaigns like that of Singapore, the targets eventually extended so far beyond traditional ‘slums’ that the medicalised language of ‘festering sore centers’ and ‘disease-breeding neighborhoods’ no longer described the more expansive landscape that planners wished to plough up and remake. The attenuation of public health language, in other words, was the result of an escalation in government ambition and scale.

Health was never fully abandoned as a justification for re-housing, it was just no longer as necessary for policy implementation. In the late 1960s, J. W. L. Kleevens, a lecturer at the University of Singapore, conducted research on the comparative prevalence of intestinal parasites (helminths) in children who lived in squatter communities or kampungs, as compared to those who were being moved in high-rise flats. The research was carried out in the midst of the second HDB five-year plan, using as a laboratory the Bukit Ho Swee district, where contrast between the two environments was most extreme. Kleevens found that residents in HDB flats in that area had fewer intestinal parasites than residents of the squatter settlement next door to those flats, whose children were more likely to be in frequent contact with the soil. He supplemented this with other studies making similar comparisons of incidents of common cold, etc., and published his findings in 1972 as Housing and Health in a Tropical City: A Selective Study in Singapore, 1964–1967 (Kleevens, 1972). Modern housing infrastructure, he seemed to have conclusively proven, was freer of germs, parasites, and all manner of maladies.

What is notable about this document is not its findings, which were unsurprising, but how relatively old-fashioned this type of research had become in the context of the early 1970s, even as it simultaneously became so precise, data-rich and sophisticated as to require a whole book. Despite its conclusiveness, it was almost entirely ignored as a useful piece of propaganda by Singapore’s housing bureaucracy, giving it little circulation or impact outside the community of helminthologists. Singapore had by that time moved beyond public health reasons for relocating its population from the ground into the sky. By the 1970s, and into the 1980s, publications on the motivation and success of the rehousing campaign were more likely to mention the threat of communism, fire or racial riots than the threat of disease as the prime movers for rehousing. Pests inside one’s body were not visible, and hence not as compelling, as those seen to be infecting the body politic.

To put it another way, the charisma of the so-called ‘public health crisis’ related to ‘slums’ began to dissipate as other perceived crises relating to the Cold War and to economic competition arose to take its place. At the same time, however, the new infrastructural ‘solution’ to perceived ills began to generate public health problems of its own. For public health officials seeking to maintain a voice in social policy, this created an environment in which the old messaging no longer resonated but new messaging was increasingly controversial and fraught with political risk.

Public Health in a Regime of Infrastructure-building

British colonial housing policy had only just begun to be implemented in Singapore when the British left. By contrast, the colonial public health agenda had been largely accomplished by the time of independence. There had been a major hospital expansion in Singapore in the early 1950s under the last colonial administration, for example, and medical training, unlike engineering or other technical disciplines, was well-ensconced in the colonial system of higher education (Singapore Ministry of Health, 1968). A brief polio outbreak in the 1950s had been effectively dealt with through a mass importation of the new Sabin vaccine, making Singapore something of a model in the global effort to defeat that disease (Wilson, 1963, p. 202). A dramatic increase in inoculations of schoolchildren was simultaneously putting diphtheria on the path towards eradication (Singapore Ministry of Health, 1968–1971). TB, which had been the major infectious disease in the colonial period, and had an entire hospital dedicated to it in Singapore, was also on the run by the time Singapore became a republic in 1965. So much so that Tan Tock Seng Hospital, built to treat TB patients, was concentrating on performing open-heart surgery by the late 1960s. ¹¹ Cancer and heart disease were then emerging as major killers in Singapore, replacing communicable diseases formerly on the top of the list, and indicating that the city’s disease environment was now radically different than the rest of Southeast Asia. Its health problems were becoming more akin to those of the ‘developed’ world. A top priority for private physicians, from 1962 onward, was indeed an anti-smoking campaign.

Without necessarily promoting it, the HDB was also fulfilling that part of the colonial public health agenda which had called for spatial re-ordering, and which TB and other epidemic diseases had so often served to justify. It was the HDB that emptied out Chinatown and the kampungs, and that greatly increased and improved the public drainage system. With kampung dwellers snatched away from farming and farm animals and relocated in flats, what might be called the traditional constituency (or target) for public health control was increasingly reduced to the street-hawker population.

To point out that traditional scourges like TB, typhoid and diphtheria were on the run in the 1960s is not to say that public health was a placid field. There was cholera in Singapore in 1972 and outbreaks of typhoid continued through the rest of the decade. ¹² Moreover, the appearance of dengue fever, which was first recorded in Singapore in 1960, posed a new challenge which continues to the present day (Kai, 1985, p. 4). The greater ease of modern travel, anti-biotic resistance, and similar factors have in hindsight, made the mid-twentieth century optimism about creating totally healthy and disease-free environments seem as much a modernist dream as unmetered electricity or personal helicopters. Still, a certain medical triumphalism was warranted in that decade, and often displayed. Parliamentary Health Secretary Sheng Nam Chin opened the World Health Day Celebration in 1961 with the theme ‘Accidents Need Not Happen’ because, as he noted, accidents for the first time in Singapore’s history now killed more people than diseases. ¹³

It was this very moment of public health triumphalism, however, which witnessed the heightened drama of new public health campaigns around cleanliness and order. How to account for this seeming paradox? The vigour and visibility of the cleanliness campaigns may have had to do with a perception of excess capacity in the old public health bureaucracy, if not a crisis of political relevance. As early as 1959, the Straits Times had declared that the period of great changes and rapid expansion in health reform was passing, and noted (disapprovingly) that the government was giving less publicity to medical services. ¹⁴ It may also have represented a desire on the part of the Health Ministry to become more integral to the new National Development agenda, which was all about the physical re-ordering of the island. ‘Health’ now took on a broader and less clinical definition in public discourse, overlapping more with cleanliness and a heightened sense of order than with anything as specifically medical as tuberculosis or helminths. One specific thing it often referenced was the habitation and maintenance of the new public infrastructure.

The most significant new Health Ministry policy of the period around 1970 indeed involved infrastructure building and required close coordination with the Housing & Development Board. This was the forcible movement of all street-hawkers (mobile food vendors) into settled enclosures. Announced in 1971 and scheduled for full implementation by 1975, the project was so ambitious that it was taken out of the Health Ministry the following year and given, with certain other public health projects, to a newly-formed Ministry of the Environment (Singapore Ministry of Health, 1970–1971). There were an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people in Singapore in the late 1960s who cooked or served food for a living from mobile street-carts scattered all about the city. Considering also their dependents and those supplying the raw materials, as many as 300,000 Singaporeans may have directly depended on this sector for their financial sustenance, not including their customers, who depended on the cheapness and availability of their food to keep the cost of living low. ¹⁵ The hawkers had long been the target of surveillance and policing by public health authorities, who were constantly concerned with their ability to spread disease through food handling. But through most of this period their mobility, and often anonymity, had mitigated against tight control. ¹⁶

In the early 1970s, with the re-housing project well under way, the decision was taken by the government to eliminate street-hawking once and for all, or rather to move all food-vendors off the street and into permanent ‘hawker centres’, many (but not all) of which would eventually be located within HDB new towns. This was, of course, partly a master planning decision related to making communal eating areas available to a newly displaced population at their sites of re-location. But it was equally and sometimes more stridently represented as a public health imperative. As such, it was largely left to the management of the Hawker Division within the Ministry of Health, which, like the HDB, now took on the added function of a construction bureau. Indeed, in taking on the new responsibility of certifying hawkers, the Ministry also became something of an employment bureau as well.

Long before the decision was taken to build hawker centres, ‘hawker control’ was often the cause of political friction, and not only between the authorities and the hawkers themselves. After a typhoid outbreak in 1965, for example, the Health Ministry identified a particular hawker as a carrier. His name, coincidentally or not, was given in the newspapers as ‘Little Pig’. The ministry publicised the fact that when he first took ill, he visited a traditional Chinese doctor and three private Western-style physicians, none of whom reported his case to the public health authorities. This complaint highlighted the tension and mistrust between public health doctors and private specialists characteristic in this era. The Singapore Medical Association (SMA), which represented private doctors, resisted ministry attempts to publish lists of doctors who ‘helped’ after such epidemics, believing that the lists were intended to embarrass doctors who were not perceived as helpful. ¹⁷ During the ‘Little Pig’ episode, the head of the General Practitioner Society of the SMA wrote in the Straits Times pointing out that typhoid was notoriously difficult to diagnose during an office visit, and stating that blaming doctors was an attempt by the Minister of Health ‘to draw attention away from himself’. ¹⁸

As in Britain, the Singapore public health service was egalitarian—doctors were of the same rank and generally low-paid—and were often suspicious and perhaps jealous of specialist colleagues in private practice. In 1963, for instance, the Health Minister referred to doctors who opposed one of his policies as ‘unscrupulous’, while in 1968, the president of the Singapore Medical Association (SMA) referred to the ‘self-generating bureaucratic arrogance’ of the Health Ministry. ¹⁹ Another editorial in the Singapore Medical Journal (the organ of the Singapore Medical Association) in 1970 spoke of a breakdown in dialogue between doctors and the government, the later displaying an ‘obvious lack of cooperation if not active undermining of professional activity’, and doctors responding with ‘arguments’ and ‘indignation’ (Gwee, 1970, p. 62). Private doctors among the civil society groups were the most apt to insist on their political and professional autonomy in the Singapore of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Hawker policing could also disturb particular ethnic communities. One example occurred during a 1971 typhoid outbreak in Geylang, a largely ethnic Malay district. The Ministry described the problem as a ‘breakdown of personal hygiene amongst residents’, and prohibited hawking there until every food-seller could be individually examined. This created a fire-storm of protest, the Malay MP representing the area saying that ‘residents had been washing their hands ever since they were kids’ and blaming the epidemic on nearby highway construction which had backed up drains and flooded the neighbourhood. This put the Ministry under great pressure to identify a Malay version of Little Pig, which it eventually did. But along the way, all the other hawkers in the district demanded that they be certified as clean. The newspapers reported on a weekly basis that about twenty or thirty hawkers have been found disease-free, cumulatively undermining the government’s original case of a large-scale ‘breakdown in personal hygiene’. ²⁰

Thus, for all the visibility of these campaigns, the Health Ministry in this period was often on the defensive, and would in the long run suffer bureaucratic losses in terms of organisation and budgets. ²¹ The new Environment Ministry would hive off many of its public health functions in 1972, including Hawker Control, while the government clinics and hospitals under its control would face increasing competition with private hospitals and clinics. It was perhaps not coincidental that the Health Minister’s personal contributions to the campaign against hippies in 1971–1977, discussed earlier in this article, came at the very moment his ministry was surrendering its historic responsibility for public ‘cleansing’, while also experiencing an exodus of doctors from the public service to specialist practice due to what the Singapore Medical Association called ‘job dissatisfaction’. ²²

Another complication for the Ministry, as suggested by the Geylang case, was the increased realisation that the new and massive infrastructure-building project may be generating its own health problems. For example, the Ministry’s anti-mosquito campaigns that began around 1965 typically concentrated on errant citizens as unwitting mosquito-breeders. One pronouncement early in the first campaign warned that hawkers and kampung dwellers who didn’t cooperate in the anti-mosquito campaign were ‘saboteurs of the nation’s war against disease and they should be punished’. This set the tone for the predictable round of inspections and fines. Fogging at that time was only done at the airport, so eradication was mainly preventative, and mainly targeted at individuals who allowed standing water to remain in plant pots and other containers on their balconies. Journalists were not shy to point out, however, that HDB land-filling in the Kallang Basin had greatly increased the mosquito population, and later that the Garden City campaign—the planting of so many trees and bushes—had possibly increased the population of the particular type of mosquito causing dengue fever. ²³ Thus was the Ministry’s emphasis on fining individuals often questioned by journalists, politicians, University of Singapore lecturers, and other knowledgeable sources, even if this made little difference to those who were fined or had their hawker licences revoked.

Some public health campaigns could hardly be separated from infrastructure-building projects, particularly those involving the word ‘pollution’. The best example was the Anti-Noise Pollution Campaign, which seems to have begun with surveys of HDB residents which indicated ‘the noise’ to be one of the major complaints about life in the new estates (Ling & Chen, 1977, p. 38). An article in one of the HDB’s own publications medicalised the problem by warning that increased and sustained noise levels could cause complications with pregnancies, trigger stress, etc. (Heng, 1974). The purpose of the article was undoubtedly to scare people into being quieter. But in medicalising noise, the government’s own policies were increasingly held to account. The Singapore Medical Association warned in 1972 that ‘with industrialization, not only will there be more sources of noise in the environment, but there will also be inevitably a growing army of shift workers’ who require sleep during daylight hours, when construction-related noise was most acute. ²⁴

Some physicians also linked Singapore’s internal migration to a rising mental health problem. By 1971, Singapore’s suicide rate was comparable to that of the ‘developed’ countries and mental patients occupied one out of three hospital beds. The newly formed Singapore Association of Mental Health (SAMH) had begun lobbying for more resources, its president listing among the vulnerable those ‘who have been used to a more protected way of life in the kampongs’. He suggested having sociologists ‘find out how people living in high rise flats … cope with their problems’. The great migration from kampungs and informal communities into HDB estates constituted a ‘traumatic change in style of living’ in the words of one journalist, with the potential to trigger a mental health crisis. ²⁵

Thus with the ubiquity of construction from the early 1960s onwards, the re-housing (and later urban renewal) campaigns began generating more and more complaints about dirt, dust, pollution, mosquitos, noise, trash, clogged drains, etc., which was the hapless task of the Health Ministry (and later the Environment Ministry) to address. One letter to the editor of the Straits Times by a writer who styled himself ‘What Price Progress’ seemed to run the full gamut of public health concerns in describing the effects of infrastructure-building in his/her neighborhood:

The cacophony of the several pile-drivers is matched for maddening effects only by the black dirty smoke which they emit. Nor is this all. All night we are treated to the music and stings of outrageous mosquitos. They emerge from the pools of water left unattended in holes and pits of the uneven reclaimed land. ²⁶

This was almost a decade after Senior Health Officer Dr Thong Kah Leong had answered a similar complaint in the Straits Times with the admonition ‘the public is urged to take a more tolerant view of the situation as we are in the process of National Development, involving tremendous development schemes’. ²⁷ But once passions for cleanliness and health were unleashed as a result of its own campaigns, and the Ministry had emerged in the public mind as the main guarantor of local cleanliness, it was under constant if not impossible scrutiny from the public. The letters to the editor section of the Straits Times in the 1960s and early 1970s is filled with admonitions to the Ministry to clean up this or that scandalously dirty spot, usually next to the letter-writer’s house. Many of these letters were written after an initial inspection had been made, and complain about the lack of follow-up. The Ministry’s responsibilities by that time included everything from removing night-soil in older housing areas without proper plumbing, to policing and relocating hawkers, to mosquito inspection, to even rounding up and putting down stray cattle, whose meat they distributed to local charities. This last team within the Ministry was known as the ‘cowboys’ and their extreme vigilance, as regularly reported by the ST, likely made them as unpopular with the dwindling number of Singaporean farmers as their urban counterparts were with hawkers and gardening homeowners. ²⁸

Chewing Gum

Nothing better illustrates the infrastructural context of the post-colonial cleanliness campaigns than the battle over chewing gum, which reached its climax in the ban on importing and selling the substance in 1992. In announcing that policy, the government referenced the threat posed by gum to civil and mechanical engineering, specifically the operation of the modern Mass Rail Transport System, or MRT. MRT engineers reported that the doors of the trains were sometimes not getting shut, and thus stopped service, because the sensors were being purposely covered with gum. ²⁹ The spectre of trains stopped in their tracks by chewing gum was only the final skirmish in a long war between Singapore’s gum-users and infrastructure-builders which began in the early 1970s, if not earlier. Singapore’s technical agencies had long identified chewing gum as the bane of a whole raft of technologies, from lifts, to public telephones, to ATMs, and even mailboxes. The material was associated in the minds of local engineers and planners not just with untidiness and the expense of clean-up, but low-level sabotage.

The habit of chewing gum was widespread in Singapore by the late twentieth century, as it was around the world. And as in other parts of the world, it had never lacked social censure. Prior to the First World War, Singaporeans associated chewing gum almost exclusively with American culture and ways of behaving. A Singapore newspaper article of 1912, for example, purporting to compare female etiquette in major world cities, singled out the girls of New York for their chewing gum habit. Another article that same year called American gum in Britain a ‘new invasion’, which was finding ‘numerous exponents’ among the working class. ³⁰ By 1916 American chewing gum was being marketed in Singapore itself, with Wrigley’s, the leading brand, advertised as an aid to hygiene. Specifically it was described as aiding digestion, quenching thirst, preserving the teeth, and perfuming the breath among other positive attributes. ³¹ In 1919, a local paper reported the substance was ‘becoming popular in the Far East’ generally. ³² After the Great War, the British military even began issuing sticks of gum as troop rations, government purchases reaching over three million packs a year by 1926. ³³ As a military garrison, Singapore must have soon been flooded with the substance.

In the same decade (the 1920s), chewing gum even became a partly local product. Malaya began to see potential in supplying American manufacturers like Wrigley with gutta jelutong—a raw material for gum extractable from a type of native rubber tree—as the cost of chicle-based gum from Central and South American sources began to rise. In 1922 a gutta jelutong refinery was established in Penang, and by 1928 it was reported that Malayan jelutong ‘is now replacing chicle to a very considerable extent’ in American gum. ³⁴ Food chemists with the Malayan Department of Forestry had worked to make the raw material even better suited for human consumption. By the early 1930s, the Forestry Department was reporting that ‘the Government of this country (Malaya) were deriving considerable revenue from the fact that our American cousins were chewing quite a lot of gum provided by Malaya’. ³⁵ Hope was expressed that Malayan jelutong might soon displace chicle altogether. ‘Will British Malaya be responsible one day for keeping most of the jaws of America’s millions active?’ asked one Straits Times article of 1933. ³⁶ This hope was dashed by the war, however, and then by the post-war development of synthetic substitutes for chicle and jelutong both.

The local relationship with gum further deepened, however, when the substance began to be manufactured in Singapore itself in 1961. The now post-colonial government provided special incentives to makers of select products, granting them ‘pioneer’ certificates. Chewing gum was one of these. The first plant was set up by Mizhamex Ltd. whose sister firm Mizrahie and Co. Ltd. was also the first local pharmaceutical company. Chewing gum thus belonged to a Mizhamex/Mizrahie product line that also included vitamin tablets, cough drops, aspirin and chocolate. ³⁷ This made sense to producers and consumers because it was still marketed as having minor health and hygienic benefits. A second chewing gum company, Merrymay Industries, Ltd. moved into a factory built by the Singapore Economic Development Board in 1965. ³⁸

The pioneer certification programme began to be questioned in the early 1970s, one newspaper editorial noting that such incentives ‘can produce a glut of certain products and shortages of others’. ‘Chewing gum and paper bags’ were singled out by the same source as lower-order industries that needed to surrender their places to light engineering and metal manufacturing, perceived as the next stage in Singapore’s development. ³⁹ Whether coincidental or not, generally positive newspaper articles about chewing gum manufacture and use disappeared around this period, replaced by articles presenting gum as not just undesirable, but an impediment to the new technological infrastructure being rolled out across the island.

The identity of chewing gum as a tool of vandals, thieves, and mischief-makers had also begun to be formed in the colonial period. A report of 1930 had a thief attaching chewing gum to a stick and using it to pull letters out of mailboxes. ⁴⁰ The same trick (chewing gum on a stick) was being used by local pickpockets in 1946 to fish money from shopping baskets in crowded markets. ⁴¹ These techniques continued to figure in newspaper crime stories into the 1970s. ⁴² They began to be surpassed in that decade, however, by reports of gum-related vandalism. The first bank ATM machines, introduced in 1974, were initially plagued not just be faulty cards, but also by chewing gum being stuck into slots. ⁴³ Public telephones were likewise under attack from gum by 1975, and continued to be so targeted into the early 1990s, when it was reported that a remarkable 700 phones were jammed with gum and other substances each month. ⁴⁴

The greatest public opprobrium, however, was reserved for so-called ‘lift vandals’ who were disabling the lifts in HDB flats by jamming gum into the button mechanism. While the practice was apparently widespread, it first made headlines in 1977 when vandals targeted lifts in the so-called VIP block in Tao Payoh Central, which was used to showcase Singapore’s HDB flats to visiting dignitaries. The lifts there were being jammed daily by what the Straits Times initially dubbed a ‘chewing gum gang’, embarrassing the government and making daily life unbearable for residents on upper floors. ‘Vigilante Corps and Special Constabulary’ were activated to patrol the lifts. The drama ended when a vandal was eventually caught by a lift mechanic, who lay in ambush atop one of the cabs for a period of three days, watching riders through a peep-hole. The culprit (an adult) claimed to be acting alone, and out of an uncontrollable impulse rather than a definite purpose, but it remained unclear whether he was one of many, or even a copy-cat. ⁴⁵

Chewing gum was not the only weapon of convenience for Singapore’s infrastructural saboteurs. Reports also mention wads of paper, matches, and even string, suggesting that anything would do when the urge to disable arose. And from the 1970s onward, it would appear the urge was strong indeed. HDB lifts, in particular, broke down so often that one newspaper dubbed them, in 1973, ‘Lifts of Shame’. Lift supplier Fuji Engineering claimed its 400 units in Singapore’s HDB flats had an excellent maintenance record, and that breakdowns were mainly caused by vandals who not only used handy materials like gum and matches, but in some instances entered the lifts with what must have been deliberately-gathered materials like screws, wood, or cardboard intent on jamming the doors. Graffiti and urination in lifts was likewise reported as common. In some HDB estates, entering a lift was to enter a closed space of anger, disorder, and filth in the middle of what otherwise was an increasingly cleansed and ordered world. ⁴⁶

While one cannot know who was sabotaging lifts, phones, and ATMs, and what their motives might have been, this was a period of brutal rapid change in the lives of Singaporeans, with kampungs being razed and people moved into new towns on the government’s own schedule, and according to social engineering protocols. Communities were disrupted and dispersed, sometimes away from family and work as well. The flats were certainly more modern than most dwellings being vacated. But many people also found themselves paying rents and utility bills for the first time, not to mention living in the air and dependent on lifts (Clancey, 2004). Surveys of HDB residents in the 1970s by research teams from Singapore’s two universities thus found a significant minority of disaffected residents, 20 per cent saying in one survey they had been ‘forced to move’, likely because of evictions and demolitions, and 27 per cent wanting to move out of the estate they’d been assigned. A full 46 per cent in the same survey describing their new environment as ‘crowded and noisy’ (Hassan, 1977; Ling & Chen, 1977, p. 29).

The ubiquity of casual sabotage suggests that some in this disgruntled minority were striking back at their landlords, ‘weaponizing’ materials like chewing gum in a form of low-level luddism. The relevant government bureaucracies likewise considered chewing gum not just an expensive-to-clean nuisance, but a readily-accessible plastique wielded by an anonymous, gangsterish youth population. While gangsterism and delinquency were the usual explanations for such behavior, sociological rather than political analysis being favoured, the persistence and intentionality of some gum-wielding vandals gives one pause. It was reported in the mid-1980s, for example, that the War Memorial at Kranji ‘has to be cleared regularly of chewing gum pressed by vandals into some of the 24,000 inscriptions on the stone walls’. Which inscriptions are unclear, but a trip to Kranji was far from casual, as was the act of covering words. ⁴⁷ Murals at HDB estates were also targets for defacement. As for the lifts, the explanation advanced by some residents that the culprits were mischievous children was rejected by the Straits Times, which asked ‘how do you account for the cigarette burnt marks on the lift buttons, the smashed lights, and the door that was so badly battered that it actually caved in?’ ⁴⁸

In any case, chewing gum turned out to be an unplanned-for and surprisingly ubiquitous impediment to infrastructure-building and re-settlement. The proposal to ban the substance outright was first publically mooted by the then-Minister for Foreign Affairs S. Dhanabalan in 1983. On a ‘walk-about’ in his local constituency, he suggested that the initiative was coming from the HDB, which he claimed was spending SGD $150,000 annually to remove gum stuck to floors and walls. The HDB then had 4,600 blocks under its charge, and ‘the problem was prevalent’ in 3,500 of them. Given his dual portfolio, the minister also anticipated the future fire-storm from foreign critics, saying ‘from being a country that has become associated with cutting the long hair of men, we’ll become associated with the banning of chewing gum’, before adding with bravado that such a foreign reaction ‘isn’t something I’m particularly concerned about’. ⁴⁹

Others, however, must have been at least concerned with domestic opinion, because the policy was quickly walked back. Gum advertising was banned from television, but there was no blanket prohibition on sale or use as yet. The HDB instead tried to persuade shop-owners within its precincts to simply stop selling it, and the airport was allowed to prohibit its sale in its own shops. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew later wrote in his memoirs that ‘at first, I thought a ban too drastic’, and indeed one was not implemented on his own watch, as he was careful to note (Lee, 2000, p. 183). Two years earlier the PAP had lost its first parliamentary seat in thirteen years in a by-election, and was facing a general election the following year. So it was hardly the time, as one newspaper opinion column put it, to ‘very quickly make law-breakers of our children, some of whom will not go along with a ban’. In fact, the newspapers were full of debate on the matter, some supporting a ban but others seeing it as the sinister (or simply ineffective) start of a campaign of larger prohibitions. ‘We might as well, at the same time, ban magic markers, screwdrivers, nails, and stones’, wrote the same correspondent, listing just a few of the other weapons regularly deployed against lifts. ⁵⁰

Banning only resurfaced as a policy option in 1991–1992 under the new Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. Again technological sabotage was the trigger, but this time it was the placing of gum over the sensors of MRT train doors, stopping them from closing, and thus stopping the trains from moving. ⁵¹ As a food item, gum had already been prohibited from MRT trains and stations, but around 400 used lumps of it were still being removed from the trains every night by cleaners, according to the government. ⁵² Instances of lift vandalism had also increased through the 1980s as the process of internal migration to HDB flats reached its peak. A Business Times article of 1986 claimed that the HDB spent 6.5 million dollars in the previous year repairing and replacing vandalised lifts, though the majority of this was due to ‘urine corrosion’. However, chewing gum was still being deployed as well. ⁵³ The heightened stakes of transport disruption on the new MRT likely tipped the balance in favor of those members of the cabinet who had long supported a total ban, which was announced in January 1992.

The timing of the policy could not have been worse, however. The American president, George Bush Sr., arrived in Singapore for trade talks a few days after the ban was announced, and the American company Wrigley’s was still the leading brand among Singaporean gum-chewers. Moreover, Bush was accompanied by the gum-chewing Washington press corps, looking for ‘human-interest’ stories about Singapore in order to acquaint their American readership with this less-familiar part of Southeast Asia. ‘Forget the pending arrival of US President George Bush’ read the first line of a UPI wire story about the presidential visit, ‘Singapore has stickier issues’ (The New Paper, 2 January 1992, p. 8). Singapore’s long-standing struggles with gum did not register in this and other reports, nor did Singaporean protests over American hypocrisy. One local source pointed out, for instance, that the substance had been banned the year before at the Statue of Liberty. ⁵⁴ What might have been the quiet roll-out of yet another domestic cleansing campaign, instead became a global news story which still shapes global consciousness of the nation.

Although far less reported, the chewing gum ban would be partially lifted in 2004 to allow ‘therapeutic gum’ to be prescribed by dentists and doctors, thus reviving the earlier, near-forgotten link between gum, health and hygiene. This policy shift did not arise from pressure by medical personnel or their patients, however, but from powerful US congressman Phil Crane, who represented Chicago (headquarters of Wrigley), and threatened to delay or scuttle the then-concluding negotiations over the US-Singapore Free Trade agreement unless gum was included. By drawing the line at a gum designed to help people quit smoking—thus cleansing lungs, the air and the street (of cigarette butts)—Singaporean negotiator Ambassador Tommy Koh effected a smart compromise between his country’s infrastructural interests & America’s pecuniary ones (Koh and Li, 2004; Pang, 2011).

Conclusion

Singapore’s modern branding as clean and healthy is largely the product of post-colonial ministries and government boards bent on fully and finally achieving British colonial aims. It was not, however, as centrally-directed and smoothly-managed as it has sometimes seemed from outside the country, or has seemed to nearly everyone with the passage of time. Infrastructure building and the government’s new role as a landlord was a context not as apparent to foreign visitors who noticed only the fines and prohibitions. This led to Singapore being branded in the 1990s with a term (‘nanny state’) crafted by British conservative opponents of Labour initiatives (e.g., bans on smoking) whose misogynist air was always out of place with Singapore’s muscular paternalism.

We have all learned the lesson that public health was and is a political realm. But how it was linked to (or de-linked from) political and social projects varied tremendously over space and time. Although public health language had long been used to direct migrations from ‘slums’ to government housing, it proved largely unnecessary to direct that migration in Singapore, except in the special case of containing street-hawkers. With the island having achieved perhaps the best public health record in Asia even prior to independence, excess capacity within the Health Ministry was directed more towards ‘cleanliness’, and making public health in that sense an appendage of the infrastructure-focused national development plan, rather than a centre of policy-making in its own right. Many of the new policies the public health bureaucracy did initiate, such as the anti-noise campaign and greater resources given to mental illness, were secondary reactions to changes wrought by developmentalism itself.

Whatever term of critique one accepts or rejects in characterising modern Singapore, most tend to miss the depth of the state’s imbrication with its built environment, and thus to neglect the boxes into which nearly all policy initiatives were packed in this period. In the case of lifts, the box is more than just a metaphor. The rooms whose doors automatically closed and left citizens alone and unseen for seconds or minutes became voting booths for an angry minority of the physically displaced.