![]() ![]() ![]() In practical terms, achieving cleanliness meant developing quality sewage systems, creating programmes to combat dengue and disease, a decade-long cleanup of the heavily polluted Singapore River, island-wide tree planting and the transition of once-ubiquitous street food vendors into covered hawker centres. "As a newly independent city-state that was keen to attract foreign investments, Lee Kuan Yew believed, correctly, that these things would differentiate Singapore from the rest of South-East Asia," Low explained. Having separated from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore, led by then-prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, had lofty ambitions of becoming a "first-world oasis in a third-world region", as he termed it. What Japan can teach us about cleanliness."Originally, that cleanliness had at least two connotations: the first was physical, or environmental, cleanliness the second was a clean government and society that didn't tolerate corruption. "Singapore's clean reputation is something the government consciously sought to promote," explained Donald Low, a Singaporean academic and public policy scholar. While Singaporeans themselves tend to humbly shrug off the suggestion their country is especially clean, its leaders have done everything they can to procure and maintain a pristine public image. In this small city-state with just under 56 years of national independence under its belt, cleanliness has been synonymous with major social progress, unprecedented economic growth and, most recently, a coordinated containment of the coronavirus pandemic. But cleanliness is more than a merely aesthetic ideal here. ![]()
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