SINGAPORE -- This affluent city-state is a Southeast Asian Oz, a miraculous place of undeniable material achievements -- ,, complete with its own wizard, founding father Lee Kuan Yew.

But it also may be as close as you can get to a "Brave New World" -- a nation of educated sheep controlled by an authoritarian government so thoroughly and efficiently that even though Singapore is committed to capitalism, it's openly admired by the Chinese Communist Party.

"You can find anything you want here depending on how you look at it: the Star of the East or a prison without walls," says a Singapore surgeon in his early 30s.

The young doctor typifies Singapore's extreme contradictions. Educated abroad, he could live anywhere but says life here is best. Like many Singaporeans, he also fears his own government so much he won't have his name attached to any comments about it, however innocuous.

Long before Singapore threatened to punish an American teen-ager for vandalism by flogging him with a rattan cane, such contradictions posed a stiff challenge to the common Western assumption that economic and political freedoms go hand-in-hand.

The sentencing of Michael Fay to six lashes across his bare backside by a martial arts specialist -- an ordeal that will permanently scar him -- has riveted U.S. attention on this tiny, often overlooked and highly unusual island republic.

The 18-year-old American's sentence has drawn wide support from Americans fed up with crime in their own society. But embracing Singapore could prove uncomfortable for many steeped in American values.

Singapore is the modern world's first successful Confucian state, a society of largely Chinese immigrants built on the traditional Chinese cultural concepts of respect for authority and collective rights, rather than Western notions of civil liberties.

Under Mr. Lee's shrewd, at times ruthless leadership, the 240-square-mile nation has advanced in just one generation from fishing villages and swamps to one of the world's cleanest, greenest and safest metropolises.

So dull that you expect to hear Muzak in the air, Singapore is gleaming office towers, endless blocks of good public housing, immaculate parks, uncongested highways and so many shopping plazas that one wag dubs it "the first mall-state."

Singapore has the highest per capita foreign reserves in the world. Its 2.8 million residents' average income tops that of its former colonizer, England, and is second in Asia only to Japan, where many would envy the quality of life here.

About 85 percent of all Singaporeans own their homes. More than half own stocks, the highest percentage in the world.

Unemployment is negligible. Government is efficient, untainted

by corruption. Ethnic Chinese, Malay Muslims, Indians and others live here harmoniously.

But for its entire 35-year history, Singapore has been ruled by a single party controlled by one man, 70-year-old Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the nation's first and only prime minister until 1990.

Despite Mr. Lee's long history of anti-communism, Singapore's political system in some ways mirrors the highly centralized party-states of Communist regimes. His position now is much like Deng Xiaoping's within China, except that Mr. Lee appears to be in robust health.

The city-state holds fair elections with compulsory voting, but Mr. Lee's People's Action Party (PAP) always wins virtually all of the seats in Singapore's Parliament. In the last general election in 1991, the PAP only received 59 percent of the votes but ended up with 77 of the body's 81 seats.

The PAP has achieved this electoral feat by its record of good works, its sweeping bureaucratic control, gerrymandering of election districts, deep public apathy and co-opting, intimidating breaking opponents.

The party-government runs Singapore's trade unions, controls its media and owns some of the country's largest enterprises. It must approve nonsocial assemblies of more than five people.

Singapore bars Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines. It censors movies and videos for sex and violence. It sets limits on the circulation of other publications -- including the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal -- that refuse to give it the right of unedited reply to articles. It rarely allows privately owned satellite TV dishes.

It also recently used an Official Secrets Act to try, fine and threaten with jail five journalists and economists for publication of a leaked government economic-growth estimate, a move that has scared the press here.

And over the decades, thousands have been imprisoned without trials under Singapore's Internal Security Act, including both criminals and political activists.

The last political prisoner known to have been held under this act is former opposition parliamentarian Chia Thye Poh. Because he refused to confess to government allegations that he was a Communist, Mr. Chia, 53, was jailed for 26 years until 1992 -- making him at that time one of the world's longest-serving political prisoners.

A rail-thin man of gentle bearing, Mr. Chia now lives at his father's home. He cannot leave Singapore, take a job or issue public statements without government approval. "I'm still in prison," he says, "only it's just larger."

Many Singaporeans and foreign residents believe the government taps phones, sends security agents to follow people and keeps dossiers. The result is a climate of caution -- many say fear -- as pervasive and stifling as Singapore's equatorial humidity. Some dismiss this as outdated paranoia, but the net effect is chilling.

"If you just make noise, that's no problem," says Walter Woon, vice dean of the National University of Singapore's law faculty. "But if you stand against the PAP, that's a different thing. In the old days, they would destroy you. Now they don't go out of their way to do that.

"But if you give them half a chance, they will."

Not a PAP member, Mr. Woon is one of six parliamentarians nominated to sit in opposition as appointed gadflies. He acknowledges it's a brilliant tactic by the PAP to defuse the growth of pressures here for a stronger opposition.

Such maneuvers prompt Russell Heng, a fellow at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, to characterize his country's system as "a restrained but hardy authoritarianism."

"Control is always just enough," he wrote in a 1990 study of the city-state, "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Wealth." "People can put up with it because the restrictions and the fear are not unmanageable; they can often be rationalized away or ignored."

For those who have challenged the PAP head on, that's an understatement.

"Authoritarian is not too strong a word -- I would call it totalitarian," says Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, 68, a lawyer who in 1981 became the first opposition member of Parliament in 15 years and still heads one of about 20 weak opposition parties here, the Workers' Party.

Mr. Jeyaretnam, said to be hated by Mr. Lee, has paid dearly for opposing the PAP. He has been jailed and temporarily disbarred because of government charges he misused his party's funds, he says. He lost about $1 million in two slander suits filed by Mr. Lee for comments during election campaigns.

"The whole thing is so regulated here that to use the word 'democracy' taints the very meaning of the word," Mr. Jeyaretnam says.

Social engineering

This regulation often comes across to the outside world as amusing paternalism, but Singapore doesn't shy away from outright social engineering.

Chewing gum isn't allowed here; it gets caught in subway doors, causing breakdowns. Convicted litterbugs must clean up parks wearing humiliating signs that say "Corrective Work Order." Bells go off in taxis when they exceed the speed limit.

There are stiff fines for not flushing public toilets. If anyone urinates in public housing elevators, ammonia detectors lock the doors and trigger alarms that alert authorities.

The government runs campaigns to induce politeness and punctuality. It has a matchmaking service to encourage the well-educated to marry and procreate early. It pays the less educated, less well-off to stop at two children.

And as much of the rest of the world has learned this spring, Singapore takes an uncompromising stance on crime and punishment -- a stance that works.

It gives the death penalty to drug traffickers and anyone who discharges a firearm. It had 58 murders last year -- compared with 355 in Baltimore, a city with only about a quarter of Singapore's population.

Since early March when the young American was sentenced, the differences between Singapore's approach to crime and America's have been sharply drawn.

The contrast graphically illustrates what's been called a growing "clash of cultures" between the U.S and Asian societies -- what an American businessman here calls "two value sets grinding away like tectonic plates on the earth."

In interviews here last week, quite a few Singaporeans said they believe six strokes of the cane is too harsh a punishment for Mr. Fay's admitted vandalism. But none accepts the U.S. effort to influence the case with President Clinton's appeal to Singapore President Ong Teng Cheong for clemency in the Fay case.

"It's really no business of Bill Clinton's how we govern," Mr. Woon says, "and his intervention just makes it impossible for [President Ong] to give charity."

Asian values

Charity also seems impossible because the incident has been very handy for Mr. Lee, who has become Asia's leading apostle of Asian values as a viable, equal alternative to Western liberalism.

"In the eyes of your government," he asked Americans in a TV address here this week, "what's more important: the interests of the whole society or the individual? The majority of our people support the right of government to protect society."

As he has aged, Mr. Lee has also taken to pushing family values and Chinese language study to increase social cohesion and further inoculate Singapore against the West.

That fits neatly with what many believe is his final goal: to be succeeded by his son, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, 40. But heaven may squash his dynastic pretensions -- the younger Mr. Lee was diagnosed with cancer last year. The disease is said to be in remission.

In the meantime, Mr. Lee's line is eagerly supported elsewhere in Asia, where the United States increasingly is seen as arrogant intruder.

Mr. Lee is an economic adviser to Vietnam. He's hugely popular in Beijing, where Communist leaders wish they had his economic success and efficient control; Singapore has taken over a township near the Chinese city of Suzhou to create what China calls "Singapore II."

Many foreigners here also agree with Mr. Lee.

"Singapore is very much like the U.S. in the 1950s, when there was still respect for authority," says an American executive. "We live in total safety. The children get sound cultural values. As a place to do business, it's perfect. The only price is you cannot scream fire in a crowded theater -- the individual can't impinge on others.

"Singapore could teach America something about community and family values."

Singapore might be able to impart other lessons as well.

Even Mr. Lee's enemies acknowledge his many impressive achievements, particularly Singapore's brilliant housing policies, which created a stable backbone of homeowners.

Every Singapore worker must contribute about 20 percent of his salary to an employer-matched government retirement fund. Prior to retirement, this money only can be used for buying blue-chip stocks or apartments in government housing projects. About 700,000 flats have been built this way.

Thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur Ashok Kumar, his wife, three children and Indonesian maid live in one of them, a 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment with a kitchen right out of suburban America. He bought it for $92,000 two years ago, with the initial and monthly payments coming from his retirement account.

Mr. Kumar's wife, pregnant with their fourth child, can walk around his neighborhood in the middle of the night without a shred of fear. They can't recall ever hearing about a robbery anywhere nearby. "I think it's a good system where there's tight control," he says.

But in last year's presidential election, Mr. Kumar voted against the PAP. About 41 percent of all voters did likewise.

This happened even though the non-PAP presidential candidate wasn't really an alternative. He'd been chosen by the PAP to provide token opposition after Mr. Jeyaretnam and another Workers' Party member were deemed ineligible to run by a government commission.

The message of this vote: While Singaporeans aren't prepared to dump the PAP, many do want more of an opposition.

"In the end, I'd go with the PAP because they've done the job," Mr. Kumar says. "I have no real complaints about them, What they say, they mean and do.

"But it would be nice if there was someone to question them from time to time."