Singapore has a reputation for many things -- high-tech infrastructure, great food, bans on everything from chewing gum to performance art -- but a sense of humor is not one of them. If anything, the small but affluent Southeast Asian city-state is better known for its thin-skinned response to criticisms great and small.

Such prickliness has long defined Singapore's relationships with its larger but poorer and mostly Muslim neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia. (Predominantly ethnic Chinese, Singapore calls itself the Chinese shrimp in the Muslim sea.) The paranoia isn't always far-fetched: the May 1998 Indonesian uprising that led to the overthrow of longtime dictator Suharto also led to the slaughter of hundreds of ethnic Chinese. In a 1998 front-page interview in the Asian Wall Street Journal, then-president BJ Habibie of Indonesia fanned the flames by referring to Singapore as "that little red dot" on the map, in the shadow of much larger Indonesia. Officials tried to laugh off the remark, but it definitely hit a nerve.

What a surprise, then, to see a glossy new ad campaign from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore in U.S. business magazines (including this one). The ads profile tech-savvy "real Singaporeans" as examples of the sophisticated workforce available to foreign companies there. The punch line, complete with a map: "Singapore -- the place to put a dot in Asia." And in case you missed the reference, the dot is red. Perhaps the Lion City, as Singapore is known, has matured enough to retract its claws and laugh at itself.