We are talking about a country that maintains a squad of toilet police who patrol public toilets. When you emerge from the cubicle they can hold you then rush in to see if you have flushed. If not you are in big trouble. I've only been to Singapore once, many years ago. A guy with a ruler measured the length of my hair to see if I could enter the country.
In an interview a couple of years ago the former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew said that in rapidly developing a modern urban society from a base of millions of peasants who didn't know how to wipe their bums and who thought that spitting in lifts was acceptable, they had to be given a quick hurry-up into the 20th century. Thus some laws such as birching and the banning of chewing gum are regarded as extremely harsh by societies that have had the advantage of a slow transition into modern society as opposed to Singapore, where it had to be done basically within one generation.
Thus the social engineering that has taken place.
