THE taxi taking me into Singapore from the airport picked up speed along a city boulevard, and a tinkling noise like a music box came from the controls. As it slowed down the jingle-bells stopped. When it accelerated they started again. It was a warning device, the driver explained, to tell him he was exceeding the speed limit.
Singapore, one of the most controlled societies in the world, is not for the free-spirited. The roads are electronically controlled. The importation and sale of chewing bum is banned. Smoking is prohibited almost everywhere. Vandalising a car merits a caning. Selling drugs means the death sentence.
People dropping litter can be fined up to 1,000 Singapore dollars (£434), and jaywalkers 5550 (£22). As they say in Singapore, it is a fine country - there are fines for everything.
But the result of the strict discipline is that Singapore is one of the cleanest and safest cities in the world. It has made efficiency into a great natural resource. In 30 years, rule by velvet glove has transformed it from a rundown, ethnically-divided Asian city into modern metropolis of three million people, Chinese, Malays and Indians, living in relative harmony.
It is an air-conditioned city of concrete, glass and shopping centres outside which three-storey high models of Santa Claus in red robes presently swelter in the tropical damp.
Life expectancy and infant morality rates in Singapore are among the highest in the world. Lawns and parks are manicured as if with nail-scissors. Reports of mosquito bites bring in the mobile insecticide patrols. (If it was not linked to mainland Asia by a causeway there would be no pests, but expatriates find monkeys in the garden - Seamus Doherty of AIB has four - and an occasional viper.)
Singapore also has the best port in the world after Hong Kong. The sparkling clean airport is regularly voted to by world travel magazines with its record of eight minutes to clear immigration and 12 minutes to get a suitcase.
The super-efficiency has helped make Singapore the number one lion among the southern Asia economies. Once criticised internationally for its authoritarian rule, Singapore is now the model for China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and other growing economies. It has 80 officials employed full-time to show how it works to foreign dignitaries, many from Chinese cities.
Now the mandate of the ruling People's Action Party, which has been in power since Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965 and is responsible for the island's prosperity, is about to be tested. On Monday the 83-seat parliament was dissolved and December 23rd was set as the last day for nominations of candidates for the 83-seat parliament. A general elections must be held by April. It is expected in January.
The Prime Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, is confident of returning to office. The opposition is too small to field enough candidates to take power. But the PAP needs 60 per cent of the popular vote, a benchmark for its authority. Less than that and it is weakened.
As political scientist Hussin Mutalib said recently, "The Singapore electorate is in some ways predictable, meaning they want the PAP government to continue, but they are also a volatile, highly mobile electorate . .. I think there is a certain amount of jitters on the part of the PAP of not knowing where their support is."
Some observers say Singapore's young people are becoming more broad-minded and want a more liberal regime than that based on a strict Confucian relationship of obedience and respect between subject and state. The newspapers worry about complacency and a lack of creativity.
Singapore, they believe, is at a crossroads. There has been an economic slowdown which caused the government to revise downwards its projected growth rate to 6 per cent. The state-owned telephone company has just cut the cost of overseas calls by 46 per cent after a warning by Mr Goh about the city-state's waning economic competitiveness.
"We have been having it good for too long. Some people may think miracles happen all the time," Mr Goh said during the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit in Manila last month, adding that underlying causes included an overvalued Singapore dollar and high rents.
In August he warned that Singapore's very independence might be at stake, saying: "If we fall behind and cannot make a living, we may have to ask to rejoin Malaysia".
Singapore is riddled with insecurity and vulnerable to competition from other Asian countries, such as Malaysia. In August 1995 the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mr Mahathir, announced plans to build a new garden capital city by 2008 at a cost of $8 billion. It will be linked to Kuala Lumpur by a "multi-media super corridor" featuring the latest in satellite and fibre-optics technology.
Malaysia's Port Klang is being modernised to take back the 56 per cent of Malaysian exports which go through Singapore. A new Kuala Lumpur international airport, to open in January 1998, with a new terminal enclosing a small rain forest, aims to replace Singapore as the hub for Asia.
Business leaders in Singapore say that unless land prices, rents and wages are lowered, Singapore's competitiveness as an international manufacturing base could be eroded. Machinists on the island city earn nearly twice as much as across the causeway. Malaysia is also hoping to become the region's financial centre with a bigger and more liquid stock market and a new futures exchange.
But Singapore is still a long way ahead. With its safety and order compared to the hustle and bustle which still characterises other Asian cities, it remains the favoured south-east Asian location for the world's financial and multinational concerns.
The government sees the future creeping up around it and is taking steps to stay ahead by creating an "intelligent island" with the world's most advanced technology. It hears the tinkle of warning bells.