Rewriting Singapore's future: Change agents for changing times?

Couldn't resist posting this link ("Stories of Singapore") and an extract from it:

I step off the bus and walk towards a building called AS3, an open-air classroom building at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There’s a nice breeze in the hallway when I turn into a bright orange, green, and yellow room to find 17 students sitting in desks arranged in a circle.

Rajpal Singh, an NUS student, invited me to his discussion section for the NUS lecture “Government and Politics of Singapore.” We had spent the night discussing academic freedom in the country, and he said he wanted to show me a political discussion at his school. Twenty minutes into today’s class, the conversation turns towards Singaporean restrictions on free speech.

“You just get a sense that the government distrusts you and that they treat you like children,” says a girl sitting across the room in black, thick-rimmed glasses, clearly frustrated. “What we have are petty ways to show that we are angry, since deep down, we cannot stand there and say something.” Since the newspapers are commonly censored and protest is illegal, she explains, most Singaporeans complain via Facebook or blogs — the equivalent of “slamming the door of your room when you’re angry with your parents.” The girl’s comments stir a heated debate over whether Singapore is a free country. Would they trade some of their society’s order, the students ask each other, in exchange for fewer government restrictions?

The teaching assistant cuts in after some time, but he’s smiling and laughing. His lightheartedness seems genuine, though it’s unclear to me what his motivations are — on the one hand, the students are getting worked up about a lack of civil rights, but the class has also strayed from the course material.
“We’ll save this revolutionary talk for the next session. I’m not teaching a class on how to bring down the state,” he says, laughing. Then he turns to me and adds, with a self-mocking smile, “Make sure that’s written.”

The students echo his laughter, and the conversation turns back to the day’s proscribed topic.
It’s hard to say where the line is drawn in Singapore between government censorship and peer censorship, says Wang Yufei, a student at an elite junior college called Raffles Institution that sends students to both Yale and NUS. When the government declares a topic “out of bounds,” she says, the effect can “trickle down” to the population, and eventually the people censor each other and themselves.

Alex Au — whose blog, Yawning Bread, is widely read throughout Singapore — says he sometimes finds himself self-censoring his work in an attempt to avoid the defamation lawsuits the Singaporean government has used against those journalists and bloggers who criticize Singaporean officials. “In Singapore, our judiciary has adopted the view that the more public you are, the more watchful the law shall be to protect your reputation,” he says."