Shanmugam said in some instances foreign interference may pose a graver danger than conventional military force in destabilising a country, and the government’s planned new legislation to deal with the problem would give it powers to “make targeted, surgical interventions, to investigate and respond expeditiously to hostile information campaigns”.

The reaction to his remarks on Wednesday has been double edged. While few, even the PAP’s harshest critics, dispute the need to thwart foreign interference, there has been alarm at hints the impending legislation may have in its crosshairs the very same ardent critics of the ruling party.

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Acutely fearing this concern are the people behind New Naratif, a rare independent news portal that covers Singaporean and Southeast Asian current affairs and organises classes on democracy.

In his speech, Shanmugam referred to New Naratif and another independent portal, The Online Citizen, as he spoke about areas where foreign influence might be creeping into the Lion City.

The government has not revealed a timeline on when the bill will be tabled in parliament, but expectations are that it will do so soon, at least before Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong calls an election.

He has until April 2021 to do so, but there is growing talk that the 67-year-old premier is eyeing a snap poll as early as December.

In his speech, Shanmugam cited examples through history and from around the world – from Ukraine to Australia, New Zealand and Britain – adding that a unique national solution was necessary for Singapore.

“International cooperation will obviously be necessary, but I am not holding my breath that a proper international cooperation with acceptable standards will materialise quickly,” Shanmugam said.

The minister’s comments have followed a lively debate about the subject on social media and in the government-friendly mainstream media’s op-ed pages.

For the most part, the government’s plan to stay ahead of the curve by introducing new legislation is a position that is likely to have the public’s support, political observers say.

Establishment figures in the city state have repeated the Chinese government’s assertions that Hong Kong’s current troubles may have been instigated by actors in the West, including foreign news outlets.

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One Singaporean making these claims was Goh Choon Kang, a former PAP member of parliament. In a widely circulated commentary published in a Chinese-language newspaper on September 18, Goh warned – while taking stock of the situation in Hong Kong – that the Lion City was susceptible to certain individuals who were seeking to bring “colour revolutions” to the country.

Judging by online comments reacting to these statements, such sentiment has widespread resonance.

The PAP, in power for six uninterrupted decades, has long asserted that it has no tolerance for outside interference.

In 1988 it gave American diplomat E. Mason Hendrickson the boot for purportedly convincing Francis Seow, a top civil servant turned government critic, to run in elections against the PAP.

More recently, the government in 2017 cancelled the permanent residency of Huang Jing, a Chinese-American professor at a local university, after accusing him of being an “agent of influence” for a foreign country. Officials did not reveal which country they thought the professor worked for, but it is widely believed he was seen as working for China.

Huang at the time told the South China Morning Post the allegations were “nonsense”.

Southeast Asian politics researcher Elvin Ong told This Week in Asia the government had “legitimate interests to be worried about foreign interference in Singapore politics”.

“Recent instances of Russian influence in American elections and Chinese influence in their regional neighbours are just some contemporary examples,” said Ong, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

The global influence operations of the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war are prime examples of how foreign influence posed a real risk in the past, he said.

‘destabilising AGENT’

The flip side of the argument, however, is that there is a possibility of governments using foreign interference as a fig leaf for their targeting of local dissidents.

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That is why alarm bells are ringing for Kirsten Han, the Singaporean chief editor of New Naratif. The activist and journalist, along with the site’s managing director Thum Ping Tjin, have emerged as among the PAP’s most vocal critics.

The government last year blocked New Naratif’s holding company from being registered in Singapore because it received overseas funds, particularly from the Foundation Open Society Institute of Switzerland – which is part of the Open Society Foundations backed by US billionaire George Soros.

After being named in Shanmugam’s speech – in a section on “nascent attempts” of foreign influence in the country – Han wrote in her blog that the minister’s remarks were yet another instance of the establishment seeking to cast her as a “destabilising agent of foreign influence”.

Shanmugam invoked comments made by Han in 2016, saying she had told a forum on activism and civil disobedience that “Singapore has failed compared to Hong Kong, because 500,000 people don’t go on the streets to march, unlike Hong Kong.”

Referring to her portal’s democracy workshops, Shanmugam said Han “wants to change that [the lack of large street protests in Singapore], through classes by New Naratif”.

He said his “primary point” in citing New Naratif as an example was to ask whether it “is it right for foreign funding to be received in order to advance these [Han’s] viewpoints”.

Volleying back in a lengthy blog post, the journalist said the minister’s interpretation of her comments was out of context.

Han added that part of her 2016 speech had been “chopped up and circulated by pro-PAP trolls on Facebook”. She said in her original comments – which Shanmugam paraphrased – she had sought to show that getting “500,000 people on the streets” was in fact not a useful key performance indicator for a society’s civil society.

On Shanmugam’s claim about the democracy classes, Han said: “Back in 2016, New Naratif didn’t even exist.” The platform was formed in September 2017.

“When there are so many other people or networks with far more proximity and access to power, why would any foreign actor choose to back members of civil society who sometimes can’t even get a government [corporate communications] department to reply to our emails?” Han wrote.

Local academics said they could not put their finger on why New Naratif – and activists such as Thum and Han – were being explicitly called out.

Loke Hoe-Yeong, author of a new book on the history of Singapore’s opposition, said “this is not the first time the government has made such a charge of foreign interference against activists”, in a reference to the ejection of US diplomat Hendrickson.

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“Similarly, in the lead-up to the 1988 general election, the former solicitor-general Francis Seow was accused of being an ‘agent’ of the United States,” Loke said.

He went into self-exile shortly after the polls after being slapped with tax evasion charges.

Ong, the Canada-based researcher, said the fine print of the proposed legislation needed scrutiny – particularly on the question of what counted as foreign interference.

“It is unclear for now how any legislation will establish clearly what counts as politics and how it is different from economic or societal issues, what counts as interference, and what counts as foreign,” he said.

“And even if any legislation can define the parameters of what are necessarily hazy and overlapping concepts, questions remain about who will exercise what kind of legislative powers under what kinds of constraints.” ■