Along the same lines, the classic on Singapore is William Gibson's "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" @ http://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

To bring that back to the cable area and forward 20 years, Singapore is a US ally and responsible for a lot of data flows in the SEA region. IIRC Optus, one of the major telco's in Australia, is majority-stake owned by Singtel, major shareholder Tamasek Holdings, which I believe is a vehicle basically controlled by the ruling family of Singapore. Seems the US uses one ally against another.

An associate who runs IP for one of the major wireless providers in .au told me a year or two back he was visited by the authorities and told if he accepted Huawei's bid on their infrastructure that their licenses may have trouble getting renewed.

"Free market" "democracy" at work. Politics and cables ... evil shit. Smiles from mainland China.

To be clear, Temasek Holdings is owned by the Singapore government proper, not by any one political family, though the company's CEO is the wife of the prime minister and it's a vehicle through which the government and the ruling party exert a lot of influence over the "private" sector in Singapore.