ABSTRACT
1999, Singapore is a splendid tropical island. It is not the natural sort like Tahiti, but is rather more unusual, a highly developed economy set in an equatorial region. Malay-Muslims are indigenous to the Indonesian archipelago as well as to the Malaysian Peninsula, including Singapore, and for the most part passed from primitive animistic beliefs through Hinduism to Islam during the last millennium. Singapore is what the scholar Chalmers Johnson termed a capitalist developmental state, originally to explain how Japan's rapid growth differed from that of both Western free-market and Soviet command-style economies. Singapore is the greenest of cities. Soaring blocks of modern flats and low rows of shophouses from the colonial era are integrated with jungle groves, over which mossy trunks and branches hold aloft leafy canopies. Western expatriates sometimes complain that Singapore is a little on the quiet side, that it has a sterile and controlled environment that is too clean and well-planned to be 'authentically' Asian.
