The following is an interview that was published in the 2010 issue of Social Space magazine by Lien Centre for Social Innovation: Catherine Lim’s Interview in Social Space 2010

Singapore is a society undergoing transitions. With a burgeoning migrant community, the advent of integrated resorts with casinos and an arguably increasingly effervescent non-profit, civil society sector, Singapore looks to be a society that is rapidly opening up. Yet, as writer and political commentator Catherine Lim controversially proposes, civil society and non-profit activists cannot create change without getting their voices heard and actively participating in the political process. She shares with Social Space, her thoughts on the indispensable ingredients for openness and political engagement in a society that wants to be truly global.

Has Singapore become a more open society?

I think it’s incipient. Things are changing and moving in a positive direction. This has nothing to do with any noble change of mindset on the part of the government. It is the inevitable effect of opening up, which is what the government knows people want. I was surprised to hear the Prime Minister say in January (2010) that he would focus on economic restructuring, addressing demographic changes and “updating the political system.”1 The government is also changing its tack because it knows that the profile of voters has changed. There are many young netizens nowadays and the government knows it has to engage them and win them over. However, it seems to me they are good at giving a semblance of openness without relinquishing much real power. They are not even devious about it! I like them for their honesty and lack of pretense in this respect. Read more

The following is an excerpt from an article titled “Negotiating Boundaries: OB Markers and the Law” written by Mr K.S. Rajah, where my run-in with Mr Goh’s administration was analysed and the issue of OB markers commented upon.

The article is part of the book “Impressions of the Goh Chok Tong Years in Singapore” published by the Institute of Policy Studies and NUS Press Singapore. It is republished here with the permission from Mr K.S. Rajah and NUS Press.

Catherine Lim is a Singapore citizen and a well-known writer. In 1994, she wrote two articles that touched directly on Singapore’s politics. Her first article was “The PAP and the People: A Great Affective Divide”, followed by “One Government, Two Styles”.

The prime minister’s Press Secretary responded to Catherine Lim’s second article to say that novelists, short-story writers and theatre groups would not be allowed to set the political agenda from outside the political arena. He invited Catherine Lim “to follow the illustrious example of Jeffery Archer, who became an MP and later Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party to espouse his political beliefs”. The Press Secretary also identified the charges made in the articles and replied to them. The reply by the government caused a flurry of letters to appear in the Forum section of The Straits Times.

Jimmy Tan wrote that whispering complaints to the Feedback Unit was not the way to build a Great Society. Russell Heng pointed out that two articles would not set a political agenda. The writer had merely taken up Goh’s promise of a kinder and gentler Singapore. He noted that Goh was managing an important transition period and transition is never easy. He hoped history would honour Goh’s contribution.

Lim’s position was that she had presented a problem to engage interested and concerned citizens in debate that was informed, principled and free from rancour and stridency.

Goh was of the view that there was a distinction between expressing views on political issues and destroying the respect accorded to the prime minister “by denigration and contempt”. The debate then moved up to Parliament.

In Parliament, Dr Kanwaljit Soin asked the prime minister how concerned citizens would know what the out-of-bound markers were, and their limits. She questioned whether the markers would make citizens reluctant to speak up. The prime minister replied: “It is not possible to demonstrate the boundary clearly. Use your common sense”.

A decade later, on 7 December 2006, Catherine Lim wrote: “A tight control both of the political opposition parties and of members of the public who choose to criticise the government in the media remains a cornerstone of PAP policy”. She noted that what was true of the past 40 years of PAP rule was true of the present. She bemoaned the fact that while the population enjoyed good governance and the good life, PAP rule had a dismal record for freedom of the press, political debate and room for dissent. She wondered if apolitical citizens trained to accept the good life would fight the good fight or bend their knees to the insolent might of a tyrant. Her fire was directed at the parameters of political debate, which stipulated what would and would not be tolerated, and the OB markers that existed for both the tone and content of political debate by excluding any criticism of government conduct implying lack of competence, transparency, probity and disrespect.

On 23 December 2006, two journalists, Peh Shing Huee and Ken Kwek, wrote:

“OB Markers” has since taken a life of its own, firmly entrenching itself into the local political lexicon… The phrase refers to the topics which are “permissible” for discussion here… No one knows if they have crossed the line—until they actually do… writer Catherine Lim was judged to have done so in 1994 when she criticised the prime minister Goh Chok Tong’s governance.

Catherine Lim was not “judged” by a court of law to have offended against any provision of the law that she had improperly criticised the prime minister. No judge has said that the power of the legislature can be exercised other than under the articles set out in the Constitution and through Bills passed by Parliament and assented to by the President.

Recently I was pleasantly surprised by an article on my role as a political commentator, written by Dr Kenneth Paul Tan, a respected academic and intellectual. To date, it is the most exhaustively researched, complete, comprehensive and, in my mind, the most insightful, trenchant and provocative analysis of my run-in with the PAP government 15 years ago, which continues to this day.

Very briefly, Dr Tan portrays the PAP government as an unremittingly patriarchal leadership with zero tolerance for strident female critics who dare make them lose face publicly. And he portrays me as a survivor in such a climate precisely because I have deliberately—or subconsciously—disguised my ‘masculine’ qualities of aggression and confrontation by an outwardly gentle, deferential ‘feminine’ demeanour!

I am both surprised and delighted by this very refreshing take on the infamous ‘Catherine Lim Affair’.

Download and read Dr Kenneth Paul Tan’s article, “Who’s afraid of Catherine Lim? The State in Patriarchal Singapore”

Catherine Lim, born in 1942, is an award-winning Singaporean novelist, short-story writer and poet, with 18 books to her name, published in France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US. Her literary works are often witty and at times supernatural portrayals of women, culture and love in traditional Chinese society. But this petite lady, often dressed in elegant cheongsams, is also famous—many would say infamous—as a political commentator and strong advocate of political liberalisation in patriarchal and paternalistic Singapore. In 1994, Lim wrote two political commentary pieces for the state-directed local broadsheet The Straits Times. Her intervention in the public sphere produced a new public vocabulary for thinking about Singapore’s political condition, and continues to inform how prospects for political liberalisation are described today. The two pieces were widely discussed among Singaporeans in 1994, and the second in particular drew a strong reaction from the state that foreign journalist Kieran Cooke (24 February 1995) described as more appropriate to “a government teetering on the edge of collapse than… one of the world’s most enduring political machines”. The state’s grossly disproportionate reaction was, this article will argue, vividly illustrative of how Lim’s actions had touched a nerve in state-society relations in Singapore, revealing how such relations were, and continue to be, structured in terms of gender and the unconscious.

This article will begin by discussing how images of the Singapore woman are constructed and legitimised in the public sphere. It will then demonstrate how these gender images have corresponded to the Singapore state’s “masculine” image and society’s “emasculated”, “infantilised”, and “feminised” images. Through a close reading of the spectacular interactions in 1994 between Catherine Lim and the state, this article will identify a strategy for political engagement that can be radically transformative without provoking the full violence of the state. Such a strategy may offer civil activism a way out of the dilemma it has faced since Singapore’s independence, between being crushed by an antagonised strong state and labouring passively within the terms and boundaries set by an all-defining state.

The relationship between Catherine Lim and the state in 1994 is, in this article, carefully reconstructed and analysed using close reading techniques. This analysis is set within an account of Singapore’s recent political history, specifically in the context of critical moments when ideological work was at its busiest. By drawing on psychoanalytical perspectives, some of the more significant political actions and behaviours during this moment of crisis will be explained as symptoms of repressed anxieties and insecurities. Insights into the gendered nature of the relationship between the state and Catherine Lim—and more generally between the state and civil society—will be drawn from contemporary feminist theory, especially the ideas of Luce Irigaray. Read more