1 Gambling, City, Nation

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Gambling, City, Nation Popular Illegality and Nation Building in Singapore, 1960s-1980s Kah-Wee Lee

I am grateful to the University of California Pacifĳic Rim Advanced Graduate Research Fellowship which funded my archival work between 2010 and 2011. The Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant (Singapore) supported the purchase of image rights and writing of this article. I would also like to thank Jerome Whitington for his comments on the manuscript. Abstract Scholars of nationalism have linked projects such as urban renewal, public housing and architectural modernization to the production of a common national identity. Few have examined the forms of state violence targeted at popular illegalities enjoyed by diffferent classes of citizens. The intensifĳication of the criminalization of gambling from the 1960s to the 1980s in Singapore was part of this complex phenomenon where the very notions of morality and legality had become bound up in the processes of urbanization and nation-building. Rather than interpreting this as part of the growing political and ideological dominance of the ruling party, I analyse the discourses and programmes centred around crime, cleanliness and the built environment so as to construct the positive order against which gambling was posed as a danger. Then, I use media reports to parse the diffferent spatial zones that described a specifĳic relationship between vice and crime. These zones were neither discrete nor hierarchical; instead they were relational and unstable, such that a similar act could be tolerated at one place but criminalized at another. Writing the history of the control of vice opens a window into a process whereby the terrain of popular illegalities was slowly but thoroughly rearranged, and how this unstable process expressed both the limits of criminalization in the context of a strident nationalism, and the relationship between the spatial order of the city and the symbolic order of the nation.

Following self-government in 1959, the People’s Action Party (PAP) of Singapore released a string of amendments to existing legislation related to the criminalization of gambling – the procedures for obtaining warrants to

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conduct searches were simplifĳied, the power to arrest people escaping from the scene in addition to those found in a space that was raided was granted, the use of legal presumptions to criminalize specifĳic forms of lotteries was extended, and the length of jail terms and quantum of fĳines were increased.1 Between the 1950s and the 1970s, police records show a drastic increase in the number of people arrested and fĳined for gambling offfences (see Table 1.1). The number of gambling offfences reported in 1967-68 exceeded that of all other offfences by a large margin (see Table 1.2). Table 1.1

1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973

Gambling-related oﬀences, 1951-1973 Number of persons arrested

Fines imposed

Number of clubs dissolved

1,192 1,147 1,437 920 888 1,216 – – 567 1227 1282 2273 – – 3454 3747 3744 3398 2499 3588 2998 1899 2822

57,722 72,342 145,680 233,725 198,449 – – – 149,825 307,365 238,943 330,023

– 9 8 6 6 2 – 12 50 5 1 0

378,588 340,590 487,150 334,975 342,792 407,342 551,770 547,720 974,046

0 0 – – – – 0 0 –

Source: Straits Settlements Department Annual Report, 1951-1959; Singapore Police Department Annual Report, 1960-1973. (‘-’ signifies no figures provided for that year)

1 Legislative changes include Criminal Justice (Temporary Provisions) (Amendment) Bill, v356 (11 June 1958), Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) (Amendment No. 2) Bill (1959), Hotels (Amendment) Bill (1959), and Societies (Amendment) Bill (1960). The Common Gaming House Ordinance was revised four times in a span of ten years. See Common Gaming Houses (Amendment) Bills (1958, 1960, 1961, 1971).

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GAMBLING, CIT Y, NATION

The intensifĳ ication of the criminalization of vice should be posed as a paradox within the project of nation building: how can the state attack its own citizens and yet integrate everyone into an ‘imagined community’. 2 Placed against the socio-political climate of newly independent Singapore, this might seem self-explanatory. The criminalization of vice was a carry-over of the anti-yellow culture campaign of the 1950s, when various political parties, intellectuals and radical elements found a common platform in the promotion of ‘healthy culture’ as a weapon against colonialism.3 Through various channels of censorship and cultural production, the PAP actively promulgated its version of the desirable national subject as it asserted its political dominance: Table 1.2

Number of prosecutions, 1967-1968

Assault, causing hurt, grievous or otherwise, with or without weapons Robbery Extortion Theft / Housebreaking Cheating Criminal Breach of Trust and Misappropriation of Property Sexual Offences Vagrancy Drunkenness Gambling and connected offences Opium smoking and connected offences Smuggling and connected offences

1,110 373 143 1,877 126 147 86 83 1,275 12,147 2,146 292

Source: Singapore Parliamentary Debates, 1968, ‘Criminal Prosecutions: Subordinate Criminal Courts’, vol. 28

[T]he ideal citizen of Singapore would be ‘rugged’, a product of ‘systematic programme for the inculcation of self-discipline’, committed to resisting the excesses of consumption in a devotion to unremitting production. And this citizen, again, would realize his potential for discipline in a modern urban environment which stressed efffĳ iciency, in which the crooked was made straight. (Holden 2004: 82; emphasis added)

This chapter explores how the spatial order of the city was intertwined with the symbolic order of the nation in a time when both were undergoing 2 3

Anderson 1991. Yao 2007; Kong 2006; Holden 2004.

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dramatic transformation. As a practice that cut across social, moral, and economic boundaries, gambling threatened the self-image of the nation during a time of purifĳication. Just as the colonial government sought to control prostitution and street hawking through the regulation of space4, the attempt to tame this popular illegality was played out in and constitutive of the urban environment. The criminalization of gambling entailed a series of ‘dividing practices’5 in order to redefĳine the scales of criminality and morality against the ideals of nationalism. Gambling was monstrous crime when inflected through secret societies and criminal syndicates and punishable nuisance when located in cultural practices and everyday forms of recreation. Such divisions extended to a spatial re-ordering where new classes of subjects were mapped onto new categories of environments. These processes were also evident in how ‘black kampongs’ around the urban fringes of Singapore were cleared in the name of modernization in the 1960s6 and how night markets were slowly replaced by enclosed shopping malls, a phenomenon Gonzaga (this volume) calls ‘sanitary modernity’. Yet, these reclassifĳications were necessarily slippery, contested, and potentially counterproductive. Like other forms of popular illegalities, gambling was never simply eradicated – it became, in various degrees and combinations, dispersed and contained, re-represented and re-adapted. In his discussion of the genealogy of discipline and punishment in the Western context, Foucault notes that ‘illegality was so deeply rooted and so necessary for the life of each social stratum, that it had in a sense its own coherence and economy’ (1995: 82). Margins of illegality were tolerated in each strata, and there were diffferent mechanisms to deal with illegalities diffferently. Rather than a rigid and uniform distinction between the legal and the illegal, he argues that each intervention generated around it a ‘fĳield of illegal practices’ from which was extracted an ‘illicit profĳit’ through the very mechanisms of control (1995: 312). These profĳits were exploited by all strata of society – for the lower classes, it could be the very condition of survival, for the elites, privileges and exceptions guarded jealously, and for everyone else in between, diffferent ways of enriching oneself outside the formal economy of legalities. Indeed, framing gambling as a form of popular illegality entails understanding the power dynamics between each social group and institution engaged in a struggle over the ‘illicit profĳits’ enjoyed by itself and in relation to each other.7 4 5 6 7

Warren 2003; Yeoh 1996. Foucault 1995. Loh 2007, 2009. Warren 2013; Chazkel 2011; Kavanagh 1993.


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Understanding these processes of control and transgression relationally is crucial to what Stallybrass and White call the ‘dialectic of antagonism’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 16). My article extends this dialectic by spatializing these processes, showing how our notions of morality and legality are place-bound – a similar act of transgression could be tolerated at one place but criminalized at another. Thus, rather than placing this phenomenon of intensifĳied criminalization against a narrative of creeping ideological and political dominance, I attempt to render the complex spectrum of dangers posed by gambling to the nascent nationalist imagination and propose spatial categories that capture the limits of criminalization in the context of nationalism. While I agree, along with various scholars, that moral and social norms often reflect the values of the ruling elites,8 paying attention to this dialectic alerts us to the possibilities of transgressions and inversions that may erupt even in the most hegemonic of conditions. Adopting this theoretical position, I fĳind that sticking closely to police and legal discourses where gambling was the overt target of attack offfers too narrow a perspective. These records seldom show the layers of social stigmatization that existed outside of positive defĳinitions of crime or the gray zones of popular illegalities that operated alongside the structures of juridical reason. Rather, I begin by triangulating a series of discourses and programmes around crime, cleanliness and the built environment so as to construct the positive order against which gambling was posed as a danger. Learning from Rabinow,9 I adopt an ethnographic approach to the historical records, listening to how various ‘technicians of general ideas’ proposed an etiology of social disorder in a rapidly transforming society. A pattern of anxiety and rationality animated these discourses where the modernization of the urban environment was always haunted by the impossibility of purging or segregating undesirable elements from it. Against this positive order, I proceed to use newspaper reports to reconstruct the complex processes of spatial re-ordering as the state attempted to reform its citizens. Though the print media generally projected a statecentric perspective on social reality – and this was certainly the case in Singapore (see Rodan 2004:19-22) – a diachronic analysis across about 20 years reveals the logical inconsistencies and impracticalities of this project. Without following a strict chronological order, my task is to identify and conceptualize diffferent zones that articulated shifting and contested relations between morality and legality, the individual and the 8 9

Hunt 1999; Bourdieu 1990; Elias 1969. Rabinow 1989.

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nation. Framed in terms of contamination, vulnerability, suspicion, and exception, these overlapping and fluid spatial categories provide a way to think through the ambivalent zones wherein acts of domination, resistance and accommodation come into play. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, I suggest that the terrain of popular illegalities was recast in ways that was dynamic, unpredictable, and ultimately illegible, expressing the limits of criminalization in the context of a strident nationalism.

Triangulating discourses: an etiology of social disorder Around the 1960s, in the police journals intended primarily for internal circulation, a meta-narrative was unsurprisingly stark. Criminality ceased to be a common denominator or residue in the native races. The usual suspects – secret societies, vices, and rising crime rates – were reconceptualized variously as ahistorical and deeply rooted evils, or as colonial legacies and foreign imports, or as the results of modernization and urbanization.10 In a 1970 conference on ‘Crime and Society’ organized by the Singapore Aftercare Association and the Probation and Aftercare Service, speakers from Singapore and overseas displayed this range of modern discourses from psychiatry to social work to criminology. G.G. Thomas, Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Afffairs, summarized: ‘What we have been discussing is not a problem of penology, not a problem of criminology but a problem of social rehabilitation and social reconstruction’ (Thomas 1971: 181). Sociologist Mak Lau Fong’s work shows how this turn towards ‘social rehabilitation and social reconstruction’ entailed an understanding of gambling as a problem of the larger social environment. In a short study he set out to test the hypothesis that social alienation resulted in a higher frequency of gambling amongst industrial workers. Working with a sample of 270 cases from a public housing estate, a set of variables was tested and the fĳindings presented in an integrated model (see Figure 1.1). In his study, gambling was not framed as inherently criminal. Rather, it was a social activity that compensated for what these industrial workers were deprived of in their familial and economic lives – decision-making, responsibility, and enduring social relationships. Mak’s study mapped gambling onto a much larger constellation of forces that impinged on the socio-economic lives of people in modernizing 10 I refer to the Singapore police journals and the Singapore police magazine.


Figure 1.1

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Factors influencing gambling frequency amongst industrial workers

Reproduced from Mak 1979: 12

Singapore. Excessive gambling was a symptom of negative social conditions rather than a result of individual weakness. This diagnosis triangulated with and reinforced police discourse around crime where social reconstruction and rehabilitation was aimed at the normalization of lives. In addition, Mak’s work provided a spatial locus – the living conditions of the industrial workers were the public housing estates that were being built by the state to house large segments of the population. In the 1960s, the public housing estate was both the crucible of modernity as well as its centre of vulnerability. As a key site in the struggle to build a new nation, this new high-rise, high-density living environment was similarly conceptualized in the idioms of order and disorder. An analysis of the offfĳicial literature will show how this modern environment became a space of reform where the symbolic order of the nation connected with the private domain of the family and the inner morality of the individual. In the 1960s and the 1970s, a series of governmental and academic studies were undertaken to track the psychological, social and economic lives of citizens resettled into public housing as a result of comprehensive urban

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renewal.11 These studies were wary of high-rise, high-density living, being influenced by the general climate of urban sociology at that time: Pushed by stress, pulled by autonomy, people in high-density conditions tend to retreat into a private world where they believe that they are selfsufffĳicient. They create a way of life, and an environment, which reflects this belief; and this way of life, and this environment, then propagate the same illusion … Unless the social and physical environment is structured in such a manner as to obviate this syndrome, urban development may produce serious and pathological mutations in human personality and perhaps in human nature. (Hassan 1977b: 233)

Thus, the research questions generally assumed the penalizing efffects of such living conditions, and sought to test its applicability or variance in the Singaporean context: How are the new residents coping? Are there signs of social fragmentation, psychological damage, or political danger? Are the residents satisfĳied with the new living conditions? Do the neighbours interact with each other the same way as they used to in the kampongs? Questions of crime and delinquency were set against the disruptive nature of resettlement and the new socio-spatial conditions of the public housing estates. Echoing Mak’s analysis of industrial workers and gambling, the normalization of lives through resettlement in public housing was central to the objectives of national modernization.12 Modern infrastructure, accessibility to work, community facilities and recreation and a sense of neighbourliness would transform the resettled workers into productive Singaporean citizens. But danger continued to lurk in the corridors, playgrounds and other unsupervised areas of these high-density environments. Sociologist Riaz Hassan foregrounds the relationship between environment and delinquency, and shows how the spectre of disorder continued to threaten the modern ideal of public housing. In his seminal study, Families in Flats (1977), he argues that poorer families in smaller flats were more vulnerable to juvenile delinquency. Working parents had no resources to supervise their children. The lack of space forced children to play outside where they became exposed to bad influences. Yet, the other option of preventing them from leaving the crowded interior of the flat hindered 11 For example: Yeh 1975; Yeh 1970; Weldon et al. 1973; Hassan 1972; Sociological Working Papers No. 47 1975; Tan et al. 1977. 12 Castells et al. 1990; Chua 1997.


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their studying and socialization skills. To compound the problem, mothers tended to be oblivious to such structural factors and perceived their children as ‘stupid’, who in turn internalized and perpetuated the stigma by becoming drop-outs and delinquents (Hassan 1977a: 145-198). This problem was also highlighted by the police, though they seemed to make a much more direct and sweeping link between delinquency and the ‘outside’ of the domestic zone: In this environment it is only natural for these youths to spend more time outside their homes thereby resulting in less parental control. For want of something better to do, they form into gangs in their respective areas and invariably turn to crime as a natural outlet for their pent-up frustrations. These then are the criminal gangs or secret societies of today. (Sandosham 1973: 49)

The theory of passive crime control through environmental design was heavily debated in the West at the same time.13 It transferred criminological attention from the individual to the opportunities affforded in the environment. This theory animated the exchanges between the police and academics of public housing in Singapore. Social disorder did not begin with the confrontation between the police and criminal. Rather it lurked outside modern flats – in the interstices of everyday life where the child might be exposed to bad elements, in the ill-design of estates which made it difffĳicult to exercise the forms of informal social controls once practiced in the kampongs, in the public spaces where idling could lead to mischief, and in the very fact that residents became used to the presence of strangers in these high-density environments. The high-rise typology was seen to be criminogenic – policemen on patrol were oblivious of everything above the ground level and the ‘heights’ gave the criminals a sense of security (Chua 1974: 18). While the police was concerned primarily with the zones outside the flats, attention to interior domestic life was just as heavy. In offfĳicial discourse, the design of the flat was often promulgated as a series of rational calculations concerned with space standards and resource allocations that matched the needs of a new social unit – the nuclear family (Wong and Yeh 1985: 56-112).14 But, Hassan’s critique of resettlement for poor families was the tip of another set of discourses designed to produce modern subjectivity 13 Boggs 1965. 14 See also Kwek 2004.

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through a disciplined and aestheticized private life. As Jacobs and Cairns (2008) show, the Housing and Development Board (HDB) actively projected a desirable palette of aesthetic and lifestyle choices through recommendations on ornamentation, colours, and furnishing. The emphasis on reducing clutter, reining in excess and using light colours was an exercise in shaping the private sumptuary practices of flat dwellers to be more in line with the general ethos of nation building. The interior domestic space was therefore a mediated zone between the family and the nation, where proper living could be constituted and nurtured behind four walls.15 In this sense, within the public housing estate, the HDB’s attempt to shape the good citizen in the private realm complemented the police’s attempt to rid the dangerous elements in public realm. Public housing is both a distinct case and metonymy of society at large. By drawing equivalence between the symbolic order of the nation, the private domain of the family, and the inner morality of the individual, a generalized positive order was put in place where opposing notions of danger, immorality, and delinquency were mapped on specifĳic types of environments. Such a system of opposing concepts, once established, illuminated upon programmes of action wherein the shaping of the built environment was inseparable from the reform of the individual. A stark example of how this positive order acted upon and connected different scales of reform was the series of nationwide ‘Keep Singapore Clean’ campaigns. These campaigns urged the individual to practice an ethic of mutual inspection and self-responsibility to keep the public realm clean. In efffect, it urged the citizens to extend the private sphere of domestic life into public life – ‘everybody can learn and acquire the habit of treating common user areas as one’s own home, to be kept clean and maintained’ (Lee 1969: 5). The range of activities held in the inaugural campaign in 1968 illustrates the blurring of the private and public within a common national imaginary. In this month of mass campaigning, spring cleaning was carried in offfĳices, factories and homes. Government agencies, statutory boards and private organizations that took part opened their premises to public inspection. Sensitive areas, such as toilets, cinemas, bus stops, and ‘other places of public resort’ received attention from ‘candid camera and photographers’. Finally, a demonstration project was undertaken at Hong Lim Park, where the Chambers of Commerce, together with local merchants, undertook a spring cleaning of the area (Ministry of Health 1969: 20-23). 15 See also Chee 2013.


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‘Cleanliness’ is a powerful trope in many symbolic systems that distinguished the self from the other. By blurring the distinction between the private and public within a common national imaginary, these programmes subjected the realm of micro social interactions to political calculations – citizens regulated each other’s behaviours through mutual surveillance and evaluation. As Erwin Gofffman (1959: 137) argues, this dramaturgical process of social interaction produces pressure to conform, as individuals contrive ‘the proper front for the demands of each audience’. Thus, while a clean environment was the measurable and visible result, it was not the real target. The real target, a Singaporean bureaucrat emphasizes, was the individual – to transform this ‘creature of habit’, to ‘revolutionize the outlook of the people’ (Chua 1972: 1). A diagram in a government report illustrates clearly what was at its heart a modernist project (see Figure 1.2). To place man at the centre of change was to act from the outside in. One must act directly on all the environments which would, through the process of interpellation, constitute the internal sensibilities of the modern subject. As the Commissioner of Public Health Dr Thevathasan (1969: 30) says, ‘the cleanliness of a city or neighbourhood or home is directly related to the attitude of mind of each of its individuals, both adult and child’. Culture, another report says, is merely the ‘sum total of the various elements constituting it and that the individual elements are constantly modifĳied, rejected and replenished with new elements’ (Ministry of Culture 1964: 6). Conversely, for those who did not respond to these interventions, they deserved a status bordering on the criminal: It is a national campaign aimed to stimulate, exhort and educate our people to participate efffectively in Keeping Singapore Clean. Moreover, this campaign is intended to be followed by efffective enforcement of the law once the campaign is over. The small minority of people who could not care less and whose anti-social acts of indiscriminate throwing of rubbish and the creating of other health hazards will be met by the full force of the law and the contempt of their fellow citizens. (Chua 1969: 7; emphasis added)

Indeed, the diagram captures the modernist belief in the malleability of human beings and a deep intolerance towards those elements that resisted change. The malleability of human beings was put to work through interventions in the social environment – the totality of his life world where the private and the public was conflated within a common national imaginary.

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Figure 1.2 ‘The individual as target’

Reproduced from F.L. Thim, ‘Health Education and Public Information for Solid Wastes Management’, in Towards a Clean and Healthy Environment, 60 (Ministry of the Environment, Singapore: Ministry of the Environment, 1972)

The resisting, inert, and inassimilable elements were also part of this world, but they were to be exposed and categorized as such. Deviance and disorder were understood within a broad social milieu where the conditions of normalization had to keep up with the rapid rate of urban transformation. While overt references to gambling were rarely made in these discourses and programmes, they constructed the internal structures of the imagined community within which the criminalization of gambling as a form of vice became necessary and justifĳiable.

Ambivalent zones The dramatic increase in the number of convicted gambling cases in the 1960s should be seen as a historical rearrangement of the terrain of popular


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illegalities. Past practices of gambling on the streets, at home, and private clubs, once tolerated, suddenly become criminal or stigmatized. Other recreational activities like pinball machines in saloons and game stalls in amusement parks became suspicious because they were swept into the orbit of ‘gambling’ as ‘games of chance’. The rest of this section attempts to reconstruct this process of spatial re-ordering by parsing the diffferent zones that described a specifĳic relationship between legality and morality, the individual and the nation. I have organized them as zones of contamination, suspicion, vulnerability, and exception. However, as should become obvious in the analysis, these zones were neither discrete nor hierarchical. Furthermore, the correlation between immorality and illegality was not isomorphic: what was more immoral was not always more criminal, and vice versa. Rather, notions of morality and legality were site-specifĳic and expressed the relationship between the spatial order of the city and the symbolic order of the nation in a moment of transition. The same activity carried out near a school, for example, would provoke greater police retaliation than if it were carried out in a rural area. Zones of contamination In gambling dens, disputes over one dollar led to murder. Another man died from 19 stab wounds after a dispute at a back-lane gambling den. Secret societies were suspected of being involved (The Straits Times, 30 September 1969: 6; 6 February 1968: 9).16 At another raid, the police remarked that ‘this centre [at South Bridge Road] is the most extensively fortifĳied one that we have come across’ (The Straits Times, 19 September 1988: 15). There were steel doors and closed circuit cameras, and the sign at the door read ‘Merlin Imitation Jewellery’ (see Figure 1.3). The dense urban conditions of Chinatown, Jalan Besar, and Geylang were the preferred haunts of organized syndicates who escorted their valued customers in Mercedes-Benzes, hid their operations behind trapdoors, and hired gunmen to exact revenge on the innocent (The Straits Times, 2 June 1975: 21). In this zone, a completely irrational escalation of crime happened, and small infractions could legitimately be returned with great force. Intense fortifĳications and elaborate techniques of evasion and counter-surveillance were developed to counter and evade the law.

16 China Street (中国街) in Chinatown was also known colloquially as Gambling Street (赌间口) (Xu 2002: 44).

44 Figure 1.3

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Exposing gambling fortifications

Source: ‘Racing Centre Raid Hits about 90 Bookies’, The Straits Times, 19 September 1988: 15

Zones of contamination were anathema to the project of nationalist modernity. Here, gambling was not just about gambling – it escalated to murders, extortions, violence, and other more serious forms of social and political disorder. There were specifĳic streets and communities – such as Geylang and Jalan Besar – but there were also concentrated pockets of illegal gambling dens hidden across the island. Organized syndicates and petty criminals concentrated in and permeated the entire ecosystem of these areas such that they were often tolerated, even protected by their customers and the residents who lived there. They were dangerous not simply because the innocent or gullible might encounter dangerous elements of society there – such encounters could happen anywhere. Rather, they were dangerous because, in these locations, fresh recruits and alibis were incorporated into the circuits of crime and vice. Zones of contamination were the thresholds where good citizens crossed to become bad. The intense attention paid to these sites echoed the vitriol directed at ‘black kampongs’ as obstacles to modernity. In that sense, urban renewal and police raids were part of the same project to demolish these zones of contamination.


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Zones of vulnerability In schools, a direct order from the Ministry of Education was given to all principals instructing teachers and pupils to stop gambling (The Straits Times, 24 September 1968: 9; 26 September 1968: 7).17 A ticking offf and some lessons on the evils of gambling were sufffĳicient to ward offf the bad elements of society. But, given the vulnerable space of the school, the smallest hint of moral turpitude would attract a disproportionate level of retaliation. Thus, the selling of ‘tikam tikam’ cards18 to school children attracted the attention of the juvenile courts (The Straits Times, 8 March 1963: 16; 15 March 1963: 7). Raids were carried out around the schools to arrest ‘gambling stall racketeers’ who used ‘wheels of fortune’ to stimulate the sale of sweets and iced drinks.19 Youths were a constant source of anxiety. They were a mobile category of their own, radiating a zone of vulnerability wherever they collected. Around community centres and public housing estates, self-employed lottery agents and organizers operating in their apartments were threatened with eviction notices (The Straits Times, 12 December 1973: 11; 1 April 1976: 10). Shopkeepers were warned not to let their premises be used to promote betting on ‘fĳighting fĳish’.20 Cofffee shops and void decks – the vacant space below every public housing block – were often places where older folks and working-class men gathered to gamble illegally on horse racing. A great amount of anxiety was directed at how to police the new high-rise typology of public housing efffectively: In order to carry out the primary functions of law enforcement, the reorganization of police patrol, especially on foot, bicycle, or motor-scooter, was a most important issue. What became known as ‘vertical patrol’ was added to police jargon – referring to constables moving by elevator from 17 See also archival materials stored in National Archives of Singapore: Ministry of Education, ‘Encouragement of Gambling and Other Undesirable Activities’ (1960-1968) 2190/60. 18 ‘Tikam tikam’ cards refers to any of those game cards where the buyer stands to win a prize. 19 The article describes the moment of the raid, and the petty nature of these operations: ‘[…] 4 hawkers selling drinks, Kelly and sweet meats, on whose carts schoolboys were placing bets dashed offf. On each cart was a wheel of chance – a wooden board with numbers and a wooden shaft with a wire needle attached. The wheel is spun and the prizes are iced drinks and food’ (‘Police Raid Gambling Stall Racketeers Near Schools’ 1952: 7). 20 ‘The police move was only against those indulging in fĳish-fĳight but also against aquarists and cofffee shop proprietors who allowed their premises to be used for such purposes […] [M] any aquarists are known to promote fĳish-fĳight as a side line. Others carry their “fĳighters” in bottles to cofffee shops where contests are held. Betting on these fĳights is heavy’. ‘Fish Fights and Gambling: A Warning to Shopkeepers’ 1961: 9.

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floor to floor of the highrise blocks. Police could now cover more territory and be exposed to greater numbers of residents than was possible in patrolling the haphazard layouts of the kampongs. (Austin 1987: 288)

Zones of vulnerability represented another site where the relationship between crime and vice became exaggerated by the nationalist project – gambling, even in the most trivial form, became threatening to national survival. If zones of contamination were the thresholds where good citizens crossed to become bad, zones of vulnerability were sites where the distinction between the good and the bad was most vexing and ambiguous. Criminals and habitual gamblers were clearly the targets in the fĳirst zone. In this zone, they were often precocious school children, entrepreneurial shopkeepers, occasional gamblers, or just youths being themselves. Sometimes, their vulnerability was accentuated by their proximity and susceptibility to dangerous elements of society. But, it was just as likely to be because of bad habits and practices carried into the new environments designed to protect and modernize them. Vulnerability was a function of ignorance and habit, as well as the social circumstances people found themselves in. In a moment of great urban transformation, zones of vulnerability often coalesced around the very spaces and groups seen to be most crucial to the new nation: youths, workers, and teachers; community centres, public housing, and schools. Zones of suspicion In hotels and private clubs, big-time gamblers had devised ways to evade police detection. These spaces were fortifĳied not by heavy doors and locks, but by their aura of respectability, the self-interest of these legitimate businesses, and advanced technologies of evasion.21 Indeed, some of heaviest gamblers, especially foreigners and the wealthier classes, could be found here (The Straits Times, 2 November 1972: 6; 15 March 1975: 7; 2 August 1973: 4; 14 April 1974: 9). Spaces of popular entertainment and leisure also became suspicious. In bars, rules and regulations were set by the Ministry of Culture: female employees were not allowed to sit or dance with customers and all performances had to be vetted to make sure there were no ‘indecent 21 In the Derrick Club run by an American, for example, guards used walkie talkies to warn the players of police presence (‘Club Used Walkie Talkies to Foil Police on Gambling Raids’ 1973: 1). In another club, hidden watchmen and specialized electrical alarm system were used to thwart police raids (‘Club’s Special Alarm Foiled Police Raids’ 1973: 7).


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gestures or actions’ and mingling (‘Barring Vice’ 1980: 2-3). In fun fairs, arcade centres and amusement parks, games that approximated pinball machines and fruit machines became objects of great suspicion. Dancing and traditional games of chance found in fun fairs amplifĳied each other’s moral dubiety when carried out in the same space (The Straits Times, 11 February 1989: 12; 24 January 1989: 17). Such activities were sometimes tolerated in the established amusement parks around the urban fringes or in bars and arcade centres, but when carried out in housing estates they crossed the line and became immoral or criminal (see Figure 1.4). Finally, in the rural outskirts of Singapore where many of the kampongs were located, the lack of police presence and good infrastructure and the general distrust between the farmers and police meant that make-shift gambling dens and huts fĳitted with tall antennae to broadcast horse racing results had taken root there. Like the private clubs and hotels, criminal elements had found a new environment to evade the police. Zones of suspicion designated spaces where the dangerous elements of society had re-emerged in a new guise, or where once tolerated objects and activities gradually took on heightened shades of criminality and immorality. Zones of suspicion fell under the police radar as sites to keep a close eye on and extend influence over, rather than sites to penetrate and break apart. They were often legitimate businesses or social clubs, which had knowingly or unknowingly become the new haunts of gambling activities. Sometimes, they were tolerated as long as private passions did not become public vice. Sometimes, class status and political influence protected them from police and public scrutiny. Surveillance and regulation were the preferred tools of passive control, rather than outright criminalization. In these spaces, vice was on the cusp of turning into crime, while ordinary citizens were on the threshold of turning into criminals. Thus, public exposure was often a way to censure such activities: those who were detected were often shamed. Like the carousing men and women in the fun fair, their faces were revealed. By exposing the act, these citizens were ‘saved’ from becoming criminals. Zones of exception In post-independence Singapore, legalized gambling could be found in the state-sponsored lottery, licensed private clubs, and the Singapore Turf Club. While the latter two were historical legacies, the state-sponsored lottery was created in 1968 in the name of channelling bad money to good causes. As such, the fĳirst project funded by the lottery was the National Stadium, thus

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Figure 1.4 ‘A gambling spot by any other name’

Source: ‘All’s Not Fair at the Fair’, The Straits Times, 11 February 1989: 12

linking the fĳigure of the modern athletic body to the idea of a strong nation.22 Reflecting the contradictions between a rugged nationalism set against the perceived hedonism of the West and an open economy built on tourism and foreign direct investment, zones of exception included spaces where foreign elements were tolerated or contained. Thus, Singapore Airlines introduced the fĳirst ‘flying casinos’ for flights connecting Singapore to San Francisco in the 1980s. The offfshore islands, by their geographical isolation, were often conceived in the same way. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew thought in 1965 that Pulau Sejahat could be used for casino development. It would cater to the sins of the West while maintaining the purity and ruggedness of the Singaporean citizen: 22 Singapore Pools, a private company, was set up in 1968 to run the fĳirst legalized national lottery. For a corporate history of this organization, see Sharp 1998.


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We’ve got an island set aside for all this. We don’t want all this. We don’t want to go greyhound racing or in the Casino – that’s no good. But the American tourists like it. And all Malaysians can go there. Singaporeans will serve them. But, for Singaporeans, we will go to sleep early. We will wake up early. Tomorrow we work hard. If you go for a massage and tomorrow your bones are weaker, we will never succeed. Let the other fellow have a good time. Never mind. We will give the full red-carpet treatment. But, for Singaporeans, I say: ‘First thing in the morning, physical jerks – P.T. Those who want a real massage, we can beat them up properly’. (The Straits Times, 25 October 1965: 1)

Zones of exception were distinguished by a specifĳic relationship between morality and legality that inverted the established norms of society at large. Acting like a cordon sanitaire, the vices that could not be deleted could be contained here, thus removing its potentially subversive force from the public domain. As a formalized threshold, the suspension of norms allowed citizens or foreigners to safely cross into such spaces without endangering their moral/ legal status in the national imaginary. Containment and segregation were often the preconditions and the expression of exception. Yet, such thresholds were fraught with contradictions and the maintenance of such zones required continuous work involving the policing of the boundaries that separated them from the norm. In that sense, they were sites of extreme surveillance, as their state of exception depended on a meticulous accounting of the capital, people and images that flowed through these enclosed economies.

Conclusion In the 1960s, various experts attempted to formalize a set of parameters that would reconceptualize crime as a problem of social reconstruction and rehabilitation. Beneath the formalization of a new order where intensifĳied state violence was deemed necessary and justifĳied, complex layers of sociospatial practices rendered the imagined community illegible as a whole. As state agents and citizens engaged each other in their everyday lives, notions of morality and legality turned out to be site-specifĳic, such that an activity could be exonerated if carried out in one place but punished if carried out in another. Furthermore, the relationship between morality, legality, and place was always in flux. Zones of exception like lottery stations and turf clubs were often places of concentrated crime where undercover bookkeepers and other criminal syndicates operated under the noses of the police, for

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example. Relationships between the police and criminal(ized) elements changed with the shifting terrains of popular illegalities. As Ganapathy and Lian have shown, the police and criminal groups enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, especially after 1970, over areas where the law could not affford full protection, such as prostitution, loan sharking, newspaper vending, and street hawking. The headmen of secret societies registered themselves with the police in return for ‘territorial monopolization and control of (both illegal and legal) economic activities within these territorial, extra-political entities’ (Ganapathy and Lian, 2002: 147). A history of the control of vice can furnish a penetrative insight into the relationship between nation building, spatial order, and subject formation. It reveals the shadowy double that transgresses and participates in the constitution of the normalized imaginary. By spatializing this dialectic of antagonism, I have tried to provide a more nuanced understanding of the city as a concrete manifestation of the irreconcilable tensions of modernity. To further this project, one can examine the institutional reforms, cultural meanings as well as the everyday tactics of citizens as they engaged in the reshaping of the terrain of popular illegalities. A considerable hurdle, however, has been the lack of archival materials, as my over-reliance on mainstream media suggests. More can be done to contextualize the politics of print media during the formative years of Singapore’s nation building, which as Lim (2014) suggests in the case of Thailand, could draw out another narrative about the relationship between policing and the representation of crime. To leaven this suppressed layer of history, oral histories and other cultural media like fĳilm and popular literature should provide valuable insights.23 On reflection, it is tempting to argue, in response to James Scott’s (2009) work on the uplands of Southeast Asia, that the ‘art of not being governed’ can also be found in the criminal genius of everyday life – the modernist project of nation building was always belittled by guerrilla acts of transgressions and petty forms of disobedience. Contrasting the order of opposites promulgated by politicans and experts with the actual messiness of social reality reveals how the dynamic rearrangement of internal boundaries as ‘a system at war with itself’, all the negative associations of gambling 23 I know of two fĳilms that might be useful to a study of the cultural representations of urban vice: Saint Jack (d. Peter Bogdanovich, 1979), based on the novel by Paul Theroux, and 墙薇处处开 (1952), based on the novel by 姚紫 (Yao Zi), a Singaporean author. The fact that Saint Jack was banned in Singapore, and Yao Zi was stigmatized for producing unhealthy culture during the antiyellow culture campaign (though the movie adaptation was a success) makes for an interesting comparative analysis that could bring to surface the cultural politics of nation building.


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had become productive because they contrasted with a ‘positive structure which must not be negated’ (Douglas 1966: 159). The result was a slow but thorough transformation in which diffferent socio-spatial practices reorganized around the margins of the idealized national space and subject. The dialectic of antagonism continues to emerge in the most mundane of situations, as criminologist David Bayley noted while acting as an advisor to the Singapore Police Force: Visiting homes for the most part calling at apartments in HDB blocks. NPP24 offfĳicers begin at the top floors and work their way down floor by floor, apartment by apartment … House visits are generally not made during the 15 days of Chinese New Year because alcohol will be offfered, and it is considered rude to refuse. Furthermore, the Chinese gamble on such occasions. Whole families play games of chance as part of the tradition of holidays. Visiting NPP offfĳicers would be caught in the invidious position of having to decide whether the gambling was among friends, which is not illegal, or among strangers, which is. (Bayley 1989: 13)

24 Neighbourhood Police Post.