Singapore's super vision : a historical study on censorship and surveillance in Singapore, 1965 - 2017

• Main Author: Chen, Grace Li Qi
• Other Authors: Park Hyung Wook
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::History
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155986
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper examines censorship and surveillance in Singapore, particularly from the 1960s to 2016. It explores how state censorship and surveillance practices, implemented by Singapore’s prevailing People’s Action Party (PAP) government, have remained uncontested and achieved normative status. The paper asserts that the PAP government has framed and rationalised its censorship and surveillance schemes as advantageous to the state, by invoking survivalist and pragmatic discourses. Faced with purported threats to security, as well as social and economic anxieties peddled by the state, Singaporeans succumbed to the hegemonic survivalist and pragmatic beliefs and, consequently, recognised state censorship and surveillance as a means of protection and progress. To explore this argument, this paper historicises censorship and surveillance, through the study of 1) media censorship and 2) social control via urban planning and technology. The paper will discuss a range of issues, specifically media censorship in local education, literature, and films. Additionally, in terms of surveillance in urban planning and technology, the paper will foreground the normalisation of social control such as community and neighbourhood policing and the intensification of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance in public spaces. Ultimately, in historicising censorship and surveillance trends, this paper aspires to demonstrate how state censorship and surveillance have been legitimised insofar as such practices have remained undisputed and become normalised.