Singapore the unexpected nation 9789812307958, 9812307958, 9789812307965, 9812307966, 9789812307972, 9812307974

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional centre dedicated to the study of socio-political, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia and its wider geostrategic and economic environment. The Institute’s research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES, including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS), and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS). ISEAS Publishing, an established academic press, has issued almost 2,000 books and journals. It is the largest scholarly publisher of research about Southeast Asia from within the region. ISEAS Publishing works with many other academic and trade publishers and distributors to disseminate important research and analyses from and about Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.

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History of Nation-Building Series

INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Singapore

First published in Singapore in 2008 by ISEAS Publishing Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang Singapore 119614 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg The five-volume series of Nation-Building Histories was made possible with the generous support of the Lee Foundation, Singapore and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Taipei. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. © 2008 Edwin Lee The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively with the author and his interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policy of the Institute or its supporters. ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Lee, Edwin. Singapore : the unexpected nation. 1. Singapore—History. 2. Singapore—Politics and government. I. Title. DS610.4 L47 2008 ISBN 978-981-230-795-8 (soft cover) ISBN 978-981-230-796-5 (hard cover) ISBN 978-981-230-797-2 (PDF) Typeset by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd Printed in Singapore by Seng Lee Press Pte Ltd

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For Harold Tan Zhi Yong

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Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction by Wang Gungwu

xv

Chapter One

Beginnings: From Temasek to Singapore

Chapter Two

Race, History and Nationalism

21

Chapter Three

Contestants and Contesting Visions

51

Chapter Four

The Accidental Chief Minister

99

Chapter Five

The Terminal Chief Minister

131

Chapter Six

The Embattled Prime Minister

159

Chapter Seven

Merger: Contesting Ownership and Principles

189

Chapter Eight

Terms of Disendearment

217

Chapter Nine

Dare to be Equal

239

Chapter Ten

The Way to Survive

265

Chapter Eleven

National Service: The Price of Independence

281

Chapter Twelve

Politics of Education

295

Chapter Thirteen

Home Ownership, National Stability and the New Middle Classes

323

University and Nation

359

Chapter Fourteen

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viii • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Chapter Fifteen

Toh’s Nation-Building Thrust

387

Chapter Sixteen

Nantah: Between Community and Nation

417

Chapter Seventeen

Self-Renewal: Talents for a Tough Act

453

Chapter Eighteen

The Consensual Prime Minister

487

Chapter Nineteen

Confucianism, Christianity, Chineseness

533

Chapter Twenty

Singapore Dreams, Singapore Dilemmas

559

Chapter Twenty-One

The Hyphenated Singaporean

597

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Unexpected Nation

633

Bibliographical Note

667

Index

675

The Author

708

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Preface

The Second World War sealed the old era of British rule in Malaya, and opened a new final chapter. The new men who ruled Malaya came out with liberal, Fabian ideas of colonial stewardship. They aimed to remake Malaya into a unified multiracial country, a Malayan Malaya, to which they would eventually transfer power. But they had not reckoned with how Malaya would receive them. Malay nationalists opposed them, forcing them to put Malay sovereignty and Malay rights first, though agreeing to the unification of all the Malay states in a new Federation of Malaya. Then, the Malayan Communist Party, Britain’s Chinese ally behind Japanese lines in the war just ended, edged towards a war of insurgency in the uneasy peace-time. Concurrently, the British officials who started as liberals switched to advocating draconian laws. However, successive British proconsuls worked to keep the Malayan Malaya ideal alive until they had to accept defeat not by the guns of communism but by the politics of communalism. The young Lee Kuan Yew has his political education in this war-torn, troubled period, but from Britain where he was reading law after the war. His thinking was cast in the same liberal mould as the British political and colonial establishment. He arrived at a definition of the Malayan nation that mirrored theirs. Something else very important that Lee grasped very early was that Britain had no intention to leave Malaya in the hands of the Malayan Communist Party. Lee, like a group of young, highly intelligent radicals who came slightly before him, was also to work with the communists, but unlike them, who were drawn like moths to the flame, he reserved some space, playing on the ambiguity in the connection. And the connection enabled him to beat his right wing contemporaries, helped by their own wrong moves. It also helped Lee that the state of play developed such that, ironically, both the British and the Malayan Communist Party

ix

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x • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

had to take him as the only man who could further their cause. Later still, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the father of independence in Malaya, had also to deal with none other than Lee, as one prime minister (of Malaya) to another (of Singapore). It had become clear by this time that the initiative to act belonged less and less to the British than to the two leading contenders thrown up by history: Tunku Abdul Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew. They both had to face a third contender, the Malayan Communist Party. The merger of Singapore and Malaya in a Federation of Malaysia, which included the British Bornean colonies for a better ethnic balance, made for the triple entente, Singapore, Malaya, Britain, that decimated the communists. But post-merger, Lee could make no headway in his quest for a Malaysian Malaysia, just as British proconsuls had earlier failed in theirs for a Malayan Malaya. In the upshot, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia, a profoundly bitter defeat for Lee. Yet this debacle also made Lee and his colleagues, the first generation PAP ministers, more determined to pull together and attempt to build the Singapore nation that they had once believed an impossibility. They were emboldened by desperation, did audacious things and with a severity that became their trademark style of governance. It was not until the time of Lee’s successor, Goh Chok Tong, that a gentler spirit presided over what was by then a different Singapore, affluent and more at ease with itself. At the time of independence, the English-educated were in charge. This made a big difference to the future of the nation, and therefore, to history. The first generation PAP ministers were English-educated, and likewise, the second generation too. The first generation looked to the civil service and the University of Singapore, which were the preserves of the Englisheducated, as their natural helpmates. But there was conflict with the university stemming from the scholars’ defence of their academic freedom and the government’s adamance that matters of national importance should take precedence. Another problem was that the university did not entirely sympathise with the government’s technological plans and take Engineering to itself as a faculty. It was not until Dr Toh Chin Chye, minister and academic, could be spared for the vice-chancellorship that significant progress was made. It took some time for Singapore’s “best and brightest” to see that they should be partners with the government in nation-building.

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Preface • xi

For the Chinese-educated Chinese, who were the majority of the people, independence held an unexpected reason for disillusionment. The economic development which followed, with multinationals playing a dominant role, caused Chinese language and education to decline in importance. The Chinese-medium Nanyang University ceased to exist in the form the Chinese community intended it. This was the inevitable result of the scramble for the rewards of economic development which many believed would come through an education in English as the first language. The irony was that at a later stage of economic development the government began to worry that the Chinese who chose English as their first language were losing the Chinese cultural values believed to have underpinned East Asian economic success, including of course, Singapore’s. Ironically too, the Chinese-medium schools which had inculcated these values had disappeared, save for the few specially supported as premier bilingual institutions. Other ways to reconnect the Chinese to their ancestral culture had to be found, and were, as seen over time in the promotion of Confucian ethics in school and society, in the national values initiative, and in the Speak Mandarin Campaign in which Mandarin was equated with tradition, (an ironic reversal of the May Fourth’s identification of Mandarin with modernity). The Malays, Indians and Eurasians each had their own perspective on independence. For the Malays, it meant losing the numerical edge they had in Malaysia. For the Eurasians, it aroused fears about a future without the British “protector” around. The common worry of all three minority races was that they would be marginalized. Ethnic divisions mattered more than class, despite economic modernization and the burgeoning growth of middle classes. They had another worry when they witnessed the government’s later initiatives to revivify Chinese tradition. The building blocks for constructing the Singapore nation were sufficiently complex for the master builder Lee Kuan Yew to wish that he could have had something simpler to work with. This book contains the political narrative up to Singapore’s unexpected independence and the sequel describing nation-building in Singapore which spans the rule of two prime ministers, Lee Kuan Yew and his successor, Goh Chok Tong. The book deals with the making of a national service army;

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xii • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

with the PAP way to economic development, trade unionism, education, housing and home ownership; with the position of two pre-existing universities in the new nation, a story of decolonization, depoliticization, and demise, as the case may be. The book deals with PAP ideology: how that changed from an understated Anglophone Fabian-flavoured socialism to a highly articulated American Ivy League-stamped Neo-Confucian culturalism. It shows how the culture-based thesis of the Neo-Confucian school fed into the PAP leaders’ later self-image as modern Asians, and their conviction that economic vibrancy was compatible with a consensual political culture. As well, the book deals with issues of ethnicity and national identity in the context of challenges from within and without, in the latter case from globalization and global Islamism.

This book is one of a series on nation-building in Southeast Asia. Professor Wang Gungwu, who conceived this series, invited five historians from the region each to write a book on their country. I am privileged to have been the one for Singapore. It has been a great stimulus and learning experience for me to share in this enterprise with Professor Wang and four other distinguished historians: Charnvit Kasetsiri, Cheah Boon Kheng, Reynaldo C. Ileto and Taufik Abdullah. Professor Wang chaired many discussions with us on the challenges historians face in writing nationbuilding history. He then held a conference involving more Southeast Asianist historians which resulted in another book in the series, Wang Gungwu, ed., Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005). In it, Professor Wang defined (again) the problem we faced as that of engaging with both the national and the contemporary. Another contributor, Craig J. Reynolds, commented on our attitude to the idea of the nation, saying we celebrate and embrace the nation, and believe the nation-state capable of giving expression to our political, social and economic aspirations. It has been heartening for me to be in such company. Ours is an attitude, Professor Reynolds observed, that is not universal among societies around the world which had attained independence from colonial rule.

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Preface • xiii

Yet another contributor, Albert Lau, discussed the lack of sources, of perspective, of probably objectivity, and the encumbrance of a dominant official version. But Professor Lau continued: don’t let that stop you from trying and being true to yourself, citing the late Raffles Professor Wong Lin Ken’s axiom on the historian’s integrity. This too is an encouragement to me, and also a reminder, finally, to state my authorial responsibility for the finished product. Huge thanks go to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for supporting this project. I have in mind in particular, Mrs Y.L. Lee, who heads the secretariat; Mr Tee Teow Lee, administrative officer; Mrs May Wong and Mrs Betty Kwan who typed my manuscript so beautifully; Mrs Triena Ong, Managing Editor for her useful advice, Ms Fatanah Sarmani and Mrs Celina Kiong for their kind assistance. My deep appreciation extends to the Central Library of the National University of Singapore, and to the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library in the National Library Building. I have received excellent help from their librarians and other staff. Edwin Lee

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Introduction Wang Gungwu

The Series This series of histories on nation-building in Southeast Asia had its beginnings in Bangkok at the 14th Conference of the International Association of the Historians of Asia (IAHA). At that meeting, I noted that nation-building in Southeast Asia began fifty years ago and suggested that it was time for historians to write about that phenomenon. Most books on the region’s new nations have been written by journalists and social scientists. I asked whether historians would tell the story differently. Decades of anti-colonial nationalism came to a climax with the Japanese invasion of 1941–45. New states like those of the Philippines, Indonesia and Burma were born immediately after the war, followed soon by those of Malaysia and Singapore. The independence of a unified Vietnam was delayed by a bitter war and this held back the liberation of the two other Indochina states, Cambodia and Laos, but the independence of all three was only a matter of time. Many of the protagonists of the early phases of nation-building have described their roles in this new process. Political commentators and journalists provided up-to-date accounts and analyses. But historians of the region have been concerned not to write prematurely about this subject. Many were, like me, fascinated by the first generation of nationalist leaders, men like Sukarno, Tengku Abdul Rahman and Ho Chi Minh, followed by Lee Kuan Yew, Soeharto, Ferdinand Marcos and Ne Win, but hesitant to take on full-length studies about the nations they had set out to build. Through their leadership, their peoples were offered sharply distinct visions of their countries’ future. Would historians wait, as they are wont to do, for xv

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xvi • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

all sources to be available before they began research on their countries? How long would it be before the story of each country in Southeast Asia is told by the historians themselves? When I returned from the Bangkok conference, I brought the question to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (lSEAS) and was gratified when the then director, Professor Chan Heng Chee, encouraged me to try and find out. With that support, I approached five of the leading historians of the original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN in 1968 consisted of Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore). They were Taufik Abdullah, Charnvit Kasetsiri, Reynaldo Ileto, Cheah Boon Kheng and Edwin Lee. We met to discuss the feasibility of a joint project to write the contemporary histories of these five countries. They agreed that this was worth doing and I sought ISEAS and other funding to allow us to proceed. The support we received enabled us to meet and hold a series of meetings to define the scope of the project. We began our meetings by focusing on the common features of the Southeast Asian “nation-state”. We knew that there had been attempts to study the early products of new nationalisms in the region. It was clear that some of the peoples of each country were less prepared than others to be citizens of these nation-states. Furthermore, the unfamiliar models taken from Europe have seemed alien, and each of the leaders who advocated using these models often had great difficulty explaining why anyone of them should be adopted. We also noted that historians in these countries have closely observed the stresses and strains that were generated, and some have felt the urge to study the actual business of nation-building more systematically. The five historians who met with me to discuss this phenomenon felt that they would not wait any longer before they began their task. They agreed that they would use their historical skills to take on this project. We first decided on the kind of a series we should write. Very early, we agreed that each country had its own story and each author would write a volume about his own country. At the same time, we should try to find out how much the five countries had in common and whether we should adopt a common approach to the subject. From the discussions over several months outlining the main features of the nation-building story in the

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Introduction • xvii

region, it became increasingly clear that there were several kinds of stories here. Despite their coming together in a regional organization like ASEAN, each of the five had very different experiences inside their countries. While we were not surprised by this fact, it was astonishing how contrasting their respective stories were. The more we surveyed what each country had to do to define the kind of nationhood it wanted, the more it seemed that the ingredients each started with had forced their leaders to seek very different routes to achieve their goals. We agreed that it would be a mistake for us to try to treat them as if they were different examples of some given model or models. Although the foreign models that each country used may have appeared to share common characteristics, what each country inherited from previous regimes at the point of independence was so different that we had to think afresh what needed to be done to capture the essence of each experience. We agreed that these differences justified our adopting distinct and separate approaches to each story. Ultimately, each volume would follow the dynamics of change that each country encountered and allow that to determine the shape of the history that the country should have. This series of histories is the result. The writing has taken longer than we first anticipated. We are grateful to Professor Chan Heng Chee’s successors, Professor Chia Siow Yue and Ambassador Kesavapany, for their sustained support for our project. In addition, the Lee Foundation, Singapore, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Taipei, helped to fund the project and I would like to thank them for their generous support. Let me place the series in a broader context. The study of modern nationalism was the work of European historians. The historians of the American and French Revolutions were the first to underline the global significance of the nation-state project while others looked further back to study the evolutionary stages of earlier nations like The Netherlands, Britain, Spain and Portugal. During the nineteenth century, historians worked with linguists, philosophers and lawyers to shape narrower kinds of nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Their work stimulated social scientists later to embark on theoretical explanations of what the nation-state system meant to the world. The work of historians, however, continued to be influential, most of all by providing ideas for many of the Asian nationalists of the

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xviii • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

twentieth century. Those who studied in Western universities, in particular, were inspired by these histories to use the ideas in them to prepare their platforms for political leadership. For the post-World War II period, nationalism was largely seen in the region as a positive development, an organized quest for independence, freedom, and modernization. The Cold War determined that leaders of the newly independent countries could look in at least two different political directions. Some chose to build their nations with the help of capitalism and liberal democracy. These would use the Western European models as the basis for nationhood and, for them, the best way to modernity was through an open market economy. Soon, they found the United States more than willing to help them along that route. Others chose to follow the socialist path either against the capitalist democracies or seeking some kind of neutralism in the Cold War. These were encouraged by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China to contest the global economic and military power represented strongly in Asia by the United States. The more radical among them went further to advocate the overthrow of neo-colonial and feudal structures by mobilizing the working poor who were the majority in each of their countries. The new leaders soon discovered how difficult nation-building was. It was not enough to proclaim independence. They needed outside help if they wanted to modernize quickly. Large amounts of capital were needed to build a new infrastructure for industrial development. Basic literacy was essential, so were the skills that could only come from secondary and tertiary education for the next few generations. But the nation-state as a new kind of polity was more alien than most people realized at the time. Learning from Western and Eastern Europe, or Japan, China or the United States, may have looked easy for the small group of elites who captured power in the post-colonial states, but building a stable and prosperous nation has been much more elusive. The responses by historians in the former colonial territories of Southeast Asia have varied from country to country, from those in older countries like the kingdom of Thailand to that of the Philippines, and from those in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to those of war-torn states like Burma (Myanmar), Vietnam and Cambodia. Up to now, these different national

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Introduction • xix

experiences have largely been studied professionally by political scientists, and the dominance by political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists has continued to the present day. On the whole, there have been few academic historians of the region who have ventured into the period after 1950. This is understandable. The first generation of historians had enough to do to write the story of national origins, often to meet a teleological need, because they realized that the task of nation-building from scratch was a painful one. Some felt it their duty to delineate the contours of the future by giving a new and greater certainty to their countries’ more distant pasts. However, I believe that historians here, as in Europe and elsewhere, will have an important part in shaping future understanding of the phenomenon of nation-building in this part of the world. It is now more than fifty years since many of the new states began making their respective nations. There is now a rich record for historians to study and some official files are open for the first decades of nationhood. Those who wish to bring history closer to the present can now begin to do so. Theirs is a different kind of training, and their intellectual make-up and methodology have much to offer the subject. Therefore, it is time for more historians to take up the challenge and tell the story of the nation-building that many of them have themselves lived through. More than ever, we should not depend on existing theories of nationalism and what they do to the actual task of building nations. The study of each national history should take into account the specific conditions of the nationalism found within its borders. When more historians write their countries’ contemporary nation-building history, other social scientists may look at the subject afresh, examine new facts and interpretations, and re-assess the theoretical work done so far. They might find that a new set of theories would be needed to make sense of what the new nation-states of Southeast Asia have achieved. Or, they might find that the simultaneous development of nations in the context of an exceptional regionalism like ASEAN has rendered previous ideas of nationalism inapplicable, if not irrelevant, and a new paradigm is needed. Until we have done the work, it is premature to talk about a borderless region, least of all a new world order in which nation-states and nationalisms will begin to fade away. From what is known so far of the modern history of “a world of nation-states”, it would seem that

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xx • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

nation-states are here to stay, if only as basic units of regional groupings that will increasingly play a major role as distinct protagonists. Therefore, the sooner we have the more recent developments of aspiring nationstates fully studied by historians in their regional setting, the sooner we will know how to live with them and even how to make them serve the cause of peace in our region.

Singapore The story of Singapore as a colony that had to change its borders several times but in the end became one of the world’s most successful developmental states has attracted much attention. Some of that attention is focused on the speed and direction of the republic’s economic growth. Some others choose to regret the policies used to ensure political control. This has led to lively debates about ends and means, and to accusations and refutations. Invariably these have led to growing interest in how decisions are made at each stage, not least in the way battles by leading protagonists are lost and won. The number of social scientists, public policy specialists, management experts, business analysts and journalists who have examined Singapore’s progress is growing. Despite Singapore’s reputation as a technocratic state that kept its secrets well, there is in fact more information available about how the city-state works than most people realize. But one part of the country’s story has been more difficult to tell. It concerns the complex and sensitive efforts to nurture a harmonious multicultural society in which its several ethnic groups are ready to work for a common goal. There is also the ongoing but crucial task to inspire young Singaporeans to keep focused on a single national future. The political leaders are keenly aware of the problems they face in order to sustain their vision of a Singapore nation and this is obvious in the attention they pay to this theme year after year ever since the colony metamorphosed from a state in federal Malaysia to an independent country. Their success in building a strong and stable state cannot guarantee that there will always be a Singapore nation, but they are keenly aware that the state’s determination is a necessary condition if such a nation is to emerge and thrive. However spectacularly its economic goals are achieved and even surpassed, the

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Introduction • xxi

social bonding and sharing of cultural values that provide a nation with strong political foundations cannot be engineered. Unlike nuts and bolts and the basic needs for food, clothing and shelter, this sharing needs the willing participation of the people living in Singapore. In order to be deeply felt, the hearts and minds of all levels of society have to be engaged in a sustained discourse about the kind of country they would like to see for them and their children. This issue was recognized at the start of Singapore’s unexpected independence in August 1965. Ever since then, there have been no illusions that preparations to enable the island’s people to acquire a common ideal of nationhood would have to begin afresh. No one failed to notice that three quarters of the population were of Chinese descent. And it was known that many of them hoped that, however pluralistic the rhetoric, the aspirations of the majority community should be allowed to shape the nature of that state. How that fact would impact on the minority ethnic groups of Singapore was, therefore, of immediate concern. Among the first steps towards nationhood that were taken by the new government was one that clarified to the whole world that Singapore would not be a “third China” but a Southeast Asian state that knows its place among the nations of the neighbourhood. By declaring that its national language was Malay specifically identified it as a historic part of the Malay Archipelago. All the same, the leaders knew that nation-building would have to be a long process. Their people would have to resolve to live and work together in peace while at the same time trying to formulate a new national identity. In the meantime, the country would need legitimate and effective governance, its sovereignty would have to be protected, and everybody’s livelihood assured. It is only when its people can see a long-term future together that nation-building can be deemed to have taken off. In this series on the history of nation-building, all authors agreed that it should be written as contemporary history and not to go too far back in the past to start their stories. The challenge was to concentrate on the post-colonial policies and decisions that helped to make modern nationhood possible. The assumption was that the leaders of each country gave high priority to creating a new nation. At each point of time, the governments responsible faced pressures both inside and outside the

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country. Under those circumstances, key decisions were made that had a direct bearing on the nation to be built. Edwin Lee has held firmly to that focus and has set out to tell the many strands in that story. He shows the many layers of change that must occur before the process can take firm root as he points to the multitude of policies that could shape the nation. He underlines how much more there is to tell before it can safely be said that the task is done. Coming after the country volume for Malaysia by Cheah Boon Kheng, Singapore’s unexpected nationhood dictates that the contrasts be made. Malaysia’s nationhood seems to have been carefully planned from above, precisely because its communal lumps and socioeconomic divisions looked the most precarious. Must these unruly ingredients be urgently channeled into a national oneness? From the results of the national elections of 2008, it would seem that the chosen trajectory of the late 1960s is to be closely re-examined. Singapore had to face other kinds of futures. Suddenly inheriting a great imperial harbour and a commercial centre located at a major crossroad between empires and oceans, it needed to consolidate its place as one of the nodes of rapid globalization. Under the circumstances, if nation-building turns out to be laborious, the process can perhaps live with the idea that a nation-state is not so vital, at least not so urgent, after all. Edwin Lee’s story shows that, even if this proved to be true, Singapore’s leaders are leaving nothing to chance as they strive systematically to determine the kind of nation that would best suit their long-term needs.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior FromIndividual Temasek toarticles Singapore permission of the Institute of SoutheastBeginnings: Asian Studies. are • 1 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

O N E

Beginnings: From Temasek to Singapore

Temasek

A

trading settlement began to form in Singapore in the late thirteenth century and grew in importance in the fourteenth century. This was Temasek, whose people were Malays, Orang Laut and Chinese. The Malays were the rulers who opened the port, for trade generates taxes and gifts and attracts foreign traders and people, increasing the population, all of which would contribute to the wealth and prestige of their kingdom. The Orang Laut, Malay for “Sea People”, were directed by the Malay rulers and chiefs to man war fleets and to harvest produce from the resource-rich marine environment. There was a market for this produce in China. This is important because the trade of Temasek depended on imports of Chinese silks, cottons, ceramics, iron cauldrons, and other goods brought by the junks of the “Chuan-chou traders”.1 Temasek also had resident Chinese merchants interested in, among other items, the “black wood” found on the island. Chinese writers of the fourteenth century knew of a place they called Lung-ya-men, the “Dragon’s Tooth Strait”. It is on record that the Yuan dynasty of China sent envoys to this place in 1320 “to obtain tame elephants”, and that “the people of Dragon’s Tooth Strait” sent a tribute and trade mission to the Yuan court in 1325.2 Some five years later, the Dragon’s Tooth Strait appeared again in the itinerary of a Chinese merchant who came to Southeast Asia. He has given the fullest contemporary account of the place of which the point that will be highlighted here is his culture-centric reference to “the Tan-ma-hsi

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barbarians” which helps to clinch the identification of Temasek with the Dragon’s Tooth Strait.3 Where in modern Singapore is the Dragon’s Tooth Strait? One scholar states that it is “the western entrance to Keppel Harbour, the narrow stretch of water which passes between Labrador Point and Sentosa Island”.4 Another scholar locates it at “the Singapore Main Strait, about 15 km south of Singapore”.5 In either case, the inference is that, by the fourteenth century, a waterway at Singapore had become the main route for ships going from the South China Sea to the Straits of Malacca and beyond. The people of Temasek had the Singapore River as an artery of trade. Intriguingly, they erected a thick protective wall from the coast to the foot of the hill above the river. The wall ran along what is today’s Stamford Road.6 This suggests an awareness of their vulnerability in the region, with good reason, as to the north the Siamese kingdom was in an expansionist mode, and to the south, the Javanese empire of Majapahit listed Temasek among its vassals in 1365. Malay annals ascribed to Temasek the reigns of five rulers, the last of whom came under attack from Majapahit. Differing from this account, Portuguese sagas described how a Malay prince of Palembang, southeast Sumatra, came to Temasek and took over the kingdom, which he renamed Singapura, “lion city”, by murdering its ruler. Then, in 1396 or 1397, he was driven out by an expedition sent by the King of Siam, to whom the murdered ruler was related by marriage, and probably by vassalage as well. But before long, the ousted usurper, helped by his Orang Laut followers who indicated the spot to him, founded a new kingdom at Malacca.

Malacca Malacca was founded at the beginning of the fifteenth century. When the news reached China, the reigning Ming dynasty despatched a mission to open relations with this new port arising in a region vital to the passage of Chinese shipping and trade. The Ming envoys arrived in the middle of 1404. They returned to China in early 1405 on the change of monsoon and wind direction.7 Representatives of the Malay prince who founded Malacca went with them and were presented to the Chinese court.

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The rulers of Malacca forcibly diverted ships to Malacca that used to call at Temasek. Hence, with Malacca’s advent, Temasek’s prominence was over: it had lasted a little more than one hundred years. Naval power was a complement to trade, used to compel passing ships to stop over as well as, paradoxically, to maintain security on the sea route. This consideration drove Malacca to establish control over both sides of the Straits of Malacca, bringing under its suzerainty certain parts of east coast Sumatra, and the west coast of the Malay peninsula from Perak, through Pahang to Johore, Singapore and the Riau-Lingga archipelago. The centre of the kingdom, Malacca, was where the Malay ruler held court, the traders congregated and the four harbour masters serving four major foreign and regional communities officiated. Such was the habit inculcated by commerce and brands that Chinese traders and mariners did not completely forsake Temasek. Another reason was Temasek’s great location. The name stood out in a map derived from the voyages of the Ming dynasty admiral, Zheng He, undertaken between 1405 and 1433. “At least one of Zheng He’s voyages, the sixth, which took place in 1421–1422, went through (the Dragon’s Tooth Strait)”.8 However, no legend regarding Zheng He has passed down in Singapore as it has in Malacca. But there is a current sign of interest on the part of a group in Singapore, “the Friends of Admiral Zheng He”9 who marked the six hundredth anniversary of his first epic voyage with a lecture and the opening of a maritime gallery in his honour in January 2004. Malacca was famous as the central market for the spices of the region consumed throughout the world. From Malacca, the spices were carried all the way to Venice by a relay of traders operating in different sectors of the trade route, across the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean zone. The Venetians controlled the spice trade from the European end. By the time the spices reached the households of Europe, their prices were so high as to lure the Portuguese to pioneer the sea route to the fabled East. The Portuguese seaborne empire in Asia consisted of a string of conquered and fortified bases, notably Kilwa (1505) and Mozambique (1507) in east Africa, Goa (1510) in India, Malacca (1511), and Ormuz (1515) in the Persian Gulf, to which list should be

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added two more bases where the Portuguese were there on sufferance: Macau and Nagasaki.10

The Kingdom of Johore The loss of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511 was not the end of the world for the Malay rulers who were famously able to make a comeback at another place and another time. For the next several hundred years, they survived by shifting their capital back and forth between the upper reaches of the Johore river and the island of Bintang in the Riau-Lingga archipelago. In this new territory, which was a part of the Malacca realm, Malay power and the international trade on which it was based, proved as fluid and resilient as the maritime environment itself. The Malacca line of rulers continued as the rulers of the kingdom of Johore. Johore, Portuguese Malacca, and Acheh, a new power emerging in north Sumatra in the sixteenth century, contested for supremacy over the Straits of Malacca. Johore and Acheh, separately and at different times, attacked Portuguese Malacca but without capturing it. The Portuguese and Acheh, also separately and at various times, devastated the Johore capital. Acheh’s aggressiveness suddenly subsided with the death of its most powerful ruler in 1636. This would appear to leave Johore and the Portuguese to face each other but for the fact that, by the seventeenth century, the Dutch had entered the picture. However, with two European powers at odds in the region, Johore was able to form an alliance with one of them, the Dutch, against its old enemy, Portuguese Malacca. After three earlier failed attempts, the Johore-Dutch alliance finally dislodged the Portuguese from Malacca in 1641, which then came under Dutch control. Fortunately for Johore, the Dutch were more focused on Java to the south, where they had a headquarters at Batavia (Jakarta), and were prepared to live and let live with Johore in the Straits of Malacca region. So for the first time after about 130 years, the kingdom of Johore could breathe easier. The next challenger to Johore was a new Malay kingdom, Jambi, located in southeast Sumatra. Jambi attacked and destroyed the Johore capital in

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1673. Johore recovered, exacted revenge on Jambi, and regained its preeminent position in the Malay world of the Straits of Malacca in the late seventeenth century.11 The Dutch continued to be benign towards Johore, tolerantly observing the thriving international trade at its capital. The problems of Johore were now internal ones and came to a head with the assassination of the sultan in 1699. As the slain ruler had no direct heirs, the Malacca-Johore line of rulers died with him. This act of regicide had dire consequences. Firstly, the Orang Laut lost their special tie to a distinguished Malay dynasty whose patronage had given their lives a focal point, stability, and esteem, and inclusion as one of the major components in the Johore power structure.12 As well, the Orang Laut had received from the Malay rulers in exchange for their services, highly prized imported items like the ceramics and glassware, which archaeologists have found in Orang Laut burials. Although the Orang Laut were able to transfer their allegiance to the new bendahara line of rulers (so-called because the bendahara or principal minister in Johore was made the sultan) their ties with the new non-royal rulers were never to be free from tension and ambivalence. Secondly, the weakness in the Johore kingdom exposed it to exploitation by a new immigrant group coming into the Malay peninsula. This was the Bugis from south Sulawesi. The Bugis, whose arrival dated to the late seventeenth century, were able to influence the power equation so much that the eighteenth century has been regarded as the Bugis century in Malaysian history.13 They began as mercenaries in the employment of Malay rulers and ended as their masters. Thirdly, the regicide gave the chance to a pretender from Siak, a part of the Malacca-Johore realm in east Sumatra, to lay claim to the throne of Johore in 1717. Instead of calling his bluff, many Johore subjects irked by Bugis bullying, saw him as the best hope for the resurgence of Malay power once more. When this pretender, who was backed by the Minangkabau ruler in Sumatra, came “with a large Minangabau force” to take the Johore capital at Riau in 1718, many Orang Laut deserted to his side.14 He succeeded and ruled for a period until his ouster by the Bugis who then became the de facto rulers of Johore. The Bugis adopted the title Yang Dipertuan Muda

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(junior king) to the Malay ruler whom they styled Yang Dipertuan Besar (great king). The Johore kingdom acquired a dual identity — Malay and Bugis. T.S. Raffles in the nineteenth century deftly took advantage of the complex Malay-Bugis politics of succession to secure the legitimacy of his founding of Singapore. The English and Dutch ventures in the East were backed by joint-stock companies: the English East India Company formed in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. In the ensuing rivalry, the Dutch effected the closure of every English trading outpost in the Malay archipelago save the one at Bencoolen in the pepper growing, insalubrious coast of southwest Sumatra. The English redirected their resources to the Indian subcontinent, a good move in the long term. For as the seventeenth century wore on, the game was not solely about spices, but finding new products to promote in Europe and Asia, and in so doing, to foster new trends, fashions, tastes and cravings. The introduction of the fabrics of India to Europe by the Dutch and the English led to a full blown craze for calicoes in the late seventeenth century.15 Another product which met with wild success was Chinese tea, and it established the teahouse and leisurely gossip as a permanent social institution in Europe. In terms of the volume of these two commodities traded and the profits realized, the English East India Company beat its Dutch counterpart into a decidedly second place.16 The winner faced a problem too: the amount of silver needed to pay for the tea from China was a serious drain on the nation’s wealth. The company resolved this problem by exporting Benares opium to China. The flow of silver was reversed in England’s favour. The company also learned about the produce which the Malay world had been supplying the Chinese market for centuries. A nineteenth century list of this produce, collectively described as “Straits produce”, included edible bird’s nest, rhinocerous horn, hornbill bird beak, tortoise shell, pearl, beeswax, seaweed, gambier, pepper, tin, antimony and gold dust.17 So, both to protect the China trade route in the Straits of Malacca sector, and to gather Straits produce for the Chinese market, the English East India

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Company returned to maritime southeast Asia, founding Penang in 1786 and Singapore in 1819.

Singapore Raffles was a servant of the English East India Company with a keen interest in Malay studies and in natural history. He discovered in an old Malay manuscript, the Malay Annals, that an ancient city once existed in Singapore. This furnished a historical angle to his project to establish a base that was otherwise conceived on geopolitical and commercial principles, and it eventually led him to Singapore, and afterwards was a solace to him in the personal tragedies and illness that occurred as he wound up his remarkable career in the eastern isles. The snag about choosing Singapore was that an agreement with the resident Malay chief, whose domain it was, was not good enough in international law. Raffles needed the sanction of the sultan of Johore who was at Lingga in the Riau-Lingga archipelago. The sultan was under the control of the Bugis faction in the kingdom of Johore, and worse, the Dutch who had recently strengthened their grip on Riau were certain to exercise their veto against Raffles. However, the succession to the throne of Johore had been in dispute since 1812. The sultan who had died in that year “left no male heirs by his royal wives, but had two sons by commoner wives of Bugis stock”.18 The Bugis faction supported the younger son as sultan, but he had not gone through the proper ceremony, which required the use of a regalia that was withheld by the Bugis royal wife of the late sultan, who favoured the elder son. The Malay faction in this dispute also supported the elder son. Raffles arranged for him — stalemated and living in obscurity in Riau — to come to Singapore, proclaimed him sultan of Johore, and concluded a second agreement regarding Singapore, with him and the resident chief on 6 February 1819. The agreement entitled the English East India Company to use a defined area as a port and settlement, but gave away no territory. The cession of territory came later, in 1824, and it included the whole of Singapore and adjacent islets.

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In the same year, the Anglo-Dutch treaty settled the respective spheres of influence for the English and the Dutch. Malacca, which had passed from Portuguese to Dutch control by conquest in 1641, now changed hands from Dutch to British by diplomacy (in 1824). The British ceded Bencoolen to the Dutch in exchange. Together, the three British outposts, Singapore, Malacca, and Penang were known as the Straits Settlements on account of their being constituted as a single administrative unit in 1826. The East India Company ruled them from its Calcutta headquarters in Bengal, India, until 1858. The British raj in India took over from 1858 to 1867. In 1867 the Straits Settlements were transferred to the control of the Colonial Office in London, and their status changed to that of Crown Colony.

FROM NINETEENTH CENTURY LAISSER-FAIREISM TO TWENTIETH CENTURY STATE INTERVENTIONISM Singapore possessed an advantageous location whose potential was vastly enhanced by the application of free trade principles and advances in technology. Raffles thought of free trade for Singapore as a way to beat the competition in the ports under indigenous rulers, such as Riau, or under the Dutch, notably Batavia (Jakarta), where traders were encumbered by all sorts of taxes and restrictions. Free trade when Raffles decreed it was “virtually unknown” in the region, and he scored handsomely by being the first mover.19 Yet his move was also dictated by necessity as, apart from its geographical position, Singapore had few natural resources and no products to tempt the trader. Singapore’s trade, as the British merchants coming long after Raffles realized, “was an artificial creation”.20

The Entrepot Port This artificial creation was entrepot trade. This means that the goods transacted were not produced in the island (gambier excepted), but brought in from the outside: sarongs and Straits produce borne by Bugis prahus;

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silk, nankeen (yellow cotton cloth), ceramics, cassia and camphor laden in Chinese junks; Siamese salt, sugar and rice; American firearms, British cottons, Indian textiles, opium, etc. Firearms and ammunition were a hit with the Chinese junk traders, Bugis, Siamese and Sumatran traders who returned home with them. Perhaps the most important part of the trade of the Chinese junks which called seasonally “was not in commodities but in Chinese immigrants”, the human cargo of coolies who were the manpower of the entrepot and were also re-exported to neighbouring countries.21 The business of the Singapore entrepot was to finance trade and commerce — the traditional role of the British and local Chinese banks here; to receive goods on commission from manufacturers for distribution — a role played by British and European agency houses; and to store, grade, process, repackage, transport and tranship goods — the role of Chinese middlemen who constituted the link between the hundreds of native traders and the few Western import and export firms.

The Meaning of Free Trade The British merchants believed that free trade was essential to keep the Singapore entrepot going. But what was their idea of free trade? They took it to limits which would amaze Singaporeans today. These merchant pioneers of Singapore were not only opposed to the imposition of duties on imports and exports. They were against the fees normally charged at any port, namely, tonnage and port dues, pilotage, wharfage and anchorage duties, and port clearance fees.22 Most astonishing of all, the merchants paid no personal or company income tax. Nor did they pay stamp duties, until 1863, on documents relating to business or the sale of property. The government needed money to carry out special measures: an expedition to suppress piracy, and the construction of the Horsburgh Lighthouse at Pedra Branca, completed in 1851, and of the Raffles Lighthouse, opened in 1855. The government of the Straits Settlements and the Calcutta Government thought up proposals to collect port dues to help defray expenses. But the British merchants of Singapore put up

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spirited resistance and would allow only one compromise specific to the Horsburgh Lighthouse.23 What were the permissible areas of raising revenue? They were excise revenue, licences and property taxes. Market stallholders, pawnbrokers and gunpowder manufacturers paid for licences. There were periods before 1829 when gambling houses and cock fighting were taxed, and times when pork and betel nut were also taxed. Opium and local brews called “arrack” and “toddy” were other revenue earners. Opium was farmed out to Chinese syndicates until 1910 when the government sold it directly.24 Thus, the vices, pleasures and necessities of the Asian people paid for most of the local expenses of government, and a “share of the general administration” of the Straits Settlements.25 The British merchants’ refusal to be taxed meant that “The Straits Settlements were run at a loss and the deficit had to be met from the general revenues of India.”26 This was so until the merchants finally and grudgingly accepted paying stamp duties on their documents in 1863.

The Staple Port: A Centre for Tin, Rubber, and Petroleum The geographical location of Singapore became more important with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Steamships began to call more often and used it as a coal bunkering centre. Then, in 1871–72, telegraphic communications linked it to Europe, Australia and Hong Kong. These improvements prepared Singapore for the boom in the three leading primary commodities of the twentieth century. Free trade also helped, as before. Tin was the first boom commodity, happening around 1880s and 1890s and continuing into the next century, followed by rubber and petroleum in the interwar period between 1918 and 1939. These were products of the hinterland, meaning British Malaya and also Netherlands India (Dutchruled Indonesia). It is not often realized that Netherlands India was a hinterland for Singapore.27 In this connection, the barter system used by Chinese merchants in Singapore to procure rubber from smallholders in Netherlands India was very important.

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Tin from Malaya and the Sumatran islands of Banka and Billiton made Singapore a world market for this mineral. The smelting of tin ore into exportable ingots at Pulau Brani, an island off Singapore’s southern shore, and the import and, later, the manufacturing of tin dredges, were further linkages which benefitted Singapore. After 1900, tin mining in Malaya shifted from a Chinese activity to a highly capitalized and mechanized western enterprise. With it went a trade which Singapore had of supplying foodstuffs and simple tools to the upcountry Chinese tin miners. The British smelting company which obtained tin ore from Sumatra paid cash, and so Singapore did not have a two-way trade here either.28 Rubber, on the other hand, produced more linkages. It was not an exclusively western enterprise although agency houses raised capital in London to open and manage big plantations in Malaya. The Chinese participated too, owning large estates and smallholdings. Rubber encouraged Chinese banks to form, Chinese industries like rubber milling and manufacture of rubber-based goods, and accelerated Chinese immigration, transforming Singapore into a Chinese city. As Singapore became the leading world market for rubber, the Chinese also had an important role in it29 as witness the Lee Rubber Company’s opening of a selling office in New York in the late 1930s. Under the barter system, Chinese merchants in Singapore sent rice and manufactures on credit to middlemen in various ports in Sumatra and Borneo to be passed on to growers against future deliveries of rubber. The social and financial ties built into the system linking the Chinese rubber traders in Singapore to the growers in remote rivers and jungles in Netherlands India, proved so strong that when the Dutch tried collecting rubber to mill in their outports, they could not get enough of it for the mills to be viable. Boat Quay in Singapore remained the centre for “the daily market (in) Netherlands India rubber”.30 Petroleum was produced in Netherlands India and British Borneo. The islands near the western entrance to Singapore harbour made it possible for Singapore to host the oil industry with safety. Oil was not refined at Singapore in the prewar period. Other services like the financing of the oil business

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and the marketing of oil were also not based at Singapore.31 The oil companies chose Singapore because it was well connected by shipping routes to the world and the region, and it was where they could store, blend, distribute and ship the oil, all at one convenient centre. Singapore gained from the sheer volume of oil handled, the repair of oil tankers and the bunkering of oil-fired ships.

The Centre for Japanese Textiles In addition to being a staple port, Singapore was a centre for the import and distribution of manufactures. In this area, the British and European agency houses were supreme, but the Japanese undercut them in the interwar era. The Japanese opened a commercial museum and many shops in Singapore dealing exclusively in their nation’s manufactures. The prime Japanese manufacture on offer was textiles. The competitive edge which the Japanese had was price: the cheapness of their rayon and cotton piece goods and cotton sarongs compared with established British brands of cotton piece goods. Like the manufacturers in the West, the Japanese depended on the local Asian traders to act as distributors. The big difference was that the entry of the Japanese into the Singapore market created an opening for the local Asian traders to become importers too. This was possible for two reasons. Firstly, the Japanese Commercial Museum, located at the site of the present Carlton Hotel in Bras Basah Road, operated like a business centre, showing samples, taking orders, and facilitating contacts with Japanese manufacturers. Secondly, Japanese business “is conducted on an ‘open market’ basis, as opposed to the system of agents and sub-agents upon which much of (Singapore’s) trade in manufactured goods with other countries is conducted”.32 The Chinese who distributed Japanese textiles were Cantonese. Another dialect group, the Teochew, distributed branded British cottons. The Indians in the textiles trade were Sindhi, Gujarati and Sikh merchants. One Indian company had a branch in Japan, and another was the agent “for a big cotton mill in Glasgow” though it had by the 1930s switched to importing from Japan.33

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Threats to the Entrepot Politics and War Politics and war introduced a deleterious factor. The Japanese attack on Manchuria in 1931 elicited an intense nationalist response from the Chinese in Singapore, as elsewhere. But, as the city was a multiracial one, the Chinese boycott of Japan meant that Indian and Arab firms were free to enjoy the boom in Japanese textiles, at least, until September 1937, when the Japanese assault on China itself aroused such fury as to reduce the Japanese share of Singapore import trade seriously.34

The Great Depression and its Consequences The breakdown in international order edging the world into total war was preceded by a global economic collapse of colossal proportions. Originating in the United States, the Great Depression of 1929–31 undermined “the twin principles of free trade and free immigration” which Singapore held sacred.35 A massive repatriation of Indian and Chinese coolies took place, and an ordinance enacted in 1933 limited, for the first time, the entry of male immigrants from China. In 1934, the British Government forced the Straits Settlements legislature to pass a measure setting quotas on the import of Japanese textiles, while British officials in the Malay States raised tariff barriers against Singapore’s re-exports of Japanese textiles to them.36 Elsewhere, “the Netherlands Indian Crisis Import Ordinance of 1933… permitted the taking of all kinds of measures” which hurt Singapore’s entrepot trade.37 The re-export of Japanese manufactures, particularly textiles, to Netherlands India was more severely restricted than similar re-exports to the Malay States. From mid 1934, consequent on the International Rubber Restriction Scheme, Singapore’s rubber trade with the hinterland was “adversely affected”.38 The volume of rubber from British Malaya and Netherlands India fell. The Dutch authorities also imposed a prohibitive tax on exports of smallholder’s rubber to Singapore. The Singapore Chinese in the barter trade responded by relocating to Netherlands India and exporting directly from there.

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In 1931, a Dutch oil company which had been using Pulau Sebarok for storage and distribution shifted their operations to Bintang.39 This may be seen as another hit at Singapore’s trade in an atmosphere of self-sufficiency and protectionism.

Reactions to Japanese Competition in Rubber Exports and Shipping Roland Braddell, the third generation in a local British family of barristers, described Singapore in the 1930s as “a Clapham Junction of the world” served by eight shipping lines.40 Three things, namely, location, free trade, and a primary producing hinterland covering British Malaya (the Malay States) and “even more, Netherlands India” had come together to make Singapore so important.41 By the 1930s the staunchest supporters of free trade were the British and European firms which depended on rubber exports and shipping. The logic of the business was that, in order to get rubber from the hinterland to re-export, Singapore must have cheap imports for the hinterland: “Freedom for both exports and imports is necessary because of their reactions on each other…”42 The exporters and shippers were therefore not in sympathy with the British textiles manufacturers and their lobby who cried for quotas on Japanese textiles imports into Singapore. Then, entered Japanese competition in rubber export and shipping, and “by 1935, Singapore’s (British) exporters and shippers began to support some form of trade restriction”.43 By this date, the Japanese were not just supplying Singapore with cheap textiles, which were dominant in “the bazaar trade”.44 They were giving strong competition in rubber exports and shipping from Singapore. The British business community stepped up their pressure in 1936. This pressure decreased “at first… because the Japanese directed their competitive efforts elsewhere”,45 and dissipated because of the East Asian crisis of 1937.

Post-war Nationalism and Independence in the Region After the war, tin exports in Singapore “regained pre-war levels until after the mid-1950s”.46 The reason for the decline from then on was the

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transfer of tin smelting from Pulau Brani to Butterworth, opposite Penang island. Singapore’s trade in the 1950s “still depended” on rubber, with fourfifths sourced from Indonesia and “ the rest mainly from Sarawak and North Borneo”.47 But nationalism and independence in Indonesia and Malaya threatened to “cut (Singapore) off from its natural trading hinterlands”.48 Malaya’s rubber exports through Singapore dwindled markedly. Indonesia talked about setting up free ports to divert exports away from Singapore. Jakarta, understandably, disliked the barter trade with Singapore, but Indonesian Government regulations only made free port Singapore a more attractive place for Indonesian traders to barter rubber for manufactured goods. Singapore resumed the re-export of textiles to neighbouring countries, textiles being its “single largest manufactured export” in the 1957–59 period.49 But this was done against the determination of these countries “to by-pass Singapore if they can”, and engage in direct trade themselves.50 The greatest threat occurred when nationalism was allowed to override economic considerations as Sukarno demonstrated in his konfrontasi gambit which disrupted Indonesian trade with Singapore from 1963 to late 1965, and was immediately felt “in a downturn in staple exports” and “a drop in GDP”.51 National pride may be expected to assert itself in the oil producing countries of the region and when it does it would obviously have an impact on Singapore’s petroleum trade. In 1960 Singapore began to refine oil sent from the Middle East, but Indonesia and Malaysia also sent their crude to be processed. It took time for Indonesia to develop its own oil refinery and be independent of Singapore.52 This did not happen until 1985. Malaysia moved slowly with a proposed refinery in Malacca.53 Since Middle Eastern crude and Chinese crude too were the basis of Singapore’s oil refinery business, these developments would not be too serious. What mattered was that Singapore had the best refineries in the region. The multinational oil companies located in Singapore had seen to this, making it the Houston of Asia.

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State Interventionism After the Second World War, the British returning to govern Singapore decided that the days when income was not taxed were over. Previous attempts to introduce income tax by the Calcutta Government in 1860, and by governors of the Straits Settlements in 1910 and 1921, were defeated by the merchants. In 1947, the first post-war governor of the new Crown Colony of Singapore (now detached from the other settlements) enacted the income tax ordinance by decree over the protests of the unofficial members on his advisory council. The unofficial members were an exclusive group of business and professional elites. When one of them — the rubber magnate and banker Lee Kong Chian — opted to step down, he and another member, Tan Chin Tuan, who had the ear of the governor, recommended a schoolmaster they knew and respected, as a replacement.54 This was Thio Chan Bee whom the governor duly appointed to the advisory council in June 1947. Thio was a gentle and compassionate advocate of measures to help the poor. The governor was impressed and appointed him to the legislative council when this body superseded the advisory council.55 In June 1948, Thio was the first legislative councillor to broach the issue of a social security scheme for Singapore.56 Government service was pensionable. The western firms had a provident fund for their European staff. Thio was concerned for the local staff as well as the employees of local companies who had nothing comparable. His proposal to provide for them was supported by the rich man’s party, the Singapore Progressive Party, who pressed the government to adopt it. The Central Provident Fund scheme was legislated in 1953 and put into effect on 1 July 1955. Based on the principle of equal contribution by both the employer and the worker into the latter’s account, it was a form of state-enforced saving which the People’s Action Party (PAP) Government was to raise to a considerable level, and in which it was to see all kinds of possibilities. In 1959, the PAP took office. From 1959, if not earlier, the PAP noted the inadequacy of the entrepot trade for sustaining the people of Singapore in the long run. Although the volume of primary exports (excluding petroleum) in the 1957–59 period was higher than pre-war levels, it fell in

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per capita terms.57 Thus, there was a need to shift towards manufacturing. This signalled the beginning of a change from colonial laisser-faireism to PAP interventionism, which would see the government even playing the role of entrepreneur. NOTES 1

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John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds., Early Singapore 1300s–1879: Evidences in Maps, Texts and Artifacts (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004), p. 44; Malcolm H. Murfett, John N. Miksic, Brian P. Farrell, and Chiang Ming Shun, Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 20. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, p. 19. Miksic and Low, eds., Early Singapore, p. 44; Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, p. 20. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, p. 19. Ibid. Miksic and Low, eds., Early Singapore, depicts the position of this ancient earthen wall in Map 1 on p. 18. In Wang Gungwu’s fascinating reconstruction, the Ming envoy, after calling at Malacca, went to India and north Sumatra, and returned to Malacca in early 1405 with envoys from these places, “to pick up the first Malacca mission to China”. Wang Gungwu, “The Opening of Relations between China and Malacca, 1403–5” in J. Bastin and R. Roolvink, eds., Malayan and Indonesian Studies: Essays presented to Sir Richard Winstedt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 90. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans, p. 25. I thank Erik Holmberg for additional information about “the Friends of Admiral Zheng He”. C.R. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961), pp. 1–21, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993), p. 58. Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya, A History of Malaysia (London: Macmillan, 1982, reprinted 1995, 1996; second edition, Palgrave, 2001), p. 76. Leonard Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor: 1641–1728 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 44 to 51. Watson Andaya and Andaya, Malaysia, p. 81. Ibid., p. 87.

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15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), pp. 239–45. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 176–77, 199–201. Wong Lin Ken, “Commercial Growth before the Second World War”, in A History of Singapore, edited by Ernest C.T. Chew and Edwin Lee (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 42. C.M. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements 1826–67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony (London: Athlone Press, 1972), p. 272. Wong Lin Ken “Commercial Growth”, p. 47. Turnbull, Straits Settlements, p. 190. Wong Lin Ken, “Commercial Growth”, p. 43. Turnbull, Straits Settlements, pp. 190–91. Ibid., pp. 193–94. “The government continued to manufacture opium until the Second World War” by which time “opium could only be purchased under licence”. Opium was eventually superseded by tobacco, petrol and alcohol as a revenue earner. C.M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819–1988 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1989), p. 114. Turnbull, Straits Settlements, p. 188. Ibid. W.G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 83–84. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., pp. 236–43. Report of the Commission to enquire into and report on the trade of the Colony, 1933–34 II, p. 508. Quoted by Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 268. Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 269. Ibid., p. 268. Turnbull, Singapore 1819–1988, p. 135. Ibid., Wong Lin Ken, “Commercial Growth”, pp. 55–56. Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, pp. 110–11. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., pp. 243–44. Roland Braddell, The Lights of Singapore (London: Methuen, 1934), p. 5. Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 273. Singapore Chamber of Commerce Report 1934, pp. 16–17. Quoted by Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 274.

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43 Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 275. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 278. 47 Ibid., p. 279. 48 Ezra F. Vogel, “A Little Dragon Tamed” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 1059. 49 Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 283. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 308; Cheng Siok Hwa, “Economic Change and Industrialization” in Chew and Lee, eds., A History of Singapore, p. 194. 52 Fereidun Fesharaki, “Singapore as an Oil Centre”, in Sandhu and Wheatley, eds., Management of Success, pp. 307, 309. 53 Ibid., pp. 307, 311. 54 Noel Ong Tiong Puay, “A Bridge Builder: The Life of Dr Thio Chan Bee” (B.A. Hons dissertation, History Department, National University of Singapore, 1994–95), p. 27. 55 Thio Chan Bee was elected to the Legislative Council in 1951, as the member for Balestier Ward. He later joined the Singapore Progressive Party and the Liberal Socialists, from 1955 to 1958, and the Singapore People’s Alliance, from 1958 to 1963. 56 Ibid., p. 32. 57 Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 278.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are • 21 Race, History and Nationalism available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

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Race, History and Nationalism

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ingapore’s strategic location has ensured it an importance which meant that it was never alone throughout the ages of history. In the Temasek era, it was involved with rising powers in Thailand and Java, and a fading empire in Sumatra. Later, Singapore was a part of the Malay empires of Malacca and Johore. In the age of European overseas expansion, Singapore was a vital link in Britain’s maritime route to China. From 1874, as Britain extended its control to the peninsular Malay states, Singapore became the capital of the expanding imperial frontier known as British Malaya, and the main port for the trade in Malayan staples, tin and rubber. The administrative and economic ties between Singapore and Malaya were further enhanced by social and even familial ties, for both territories had a population characterized by the same ethnic diversity, though in different proportions. Singapore was the site of colleges which the British opened and later combined as the University of Malaya. Students from all over Malaya came to study in these institutions and many stayed on, giving the city state an extra layer of talent in all departments — commerce and the professions, the civil service, the judiciary, and not least, the executive branch of government, as PAP cabinet ministers. But, on the other hand, from Malaya, there also came many troublemakers and conspirators. For all the above reasons, Singapore was often included when people referred to “Malaya” as a place or a state (generally speaking, and not specifically the “Federation of Malaya”) and to things “Malayan”. Even when, after the Second World War, Singapore was reconstituted as a Crown

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Colony by itself, it was still considered inseparable from Malaya, and was expected to be merged with Malaya some day. The experience of separate independent statehood was completely new for Singaporeans when it happened, abruptly, on that fateful 9 August 1965. The ethnic variety of Singapore is greater than is suggested in the broad classification used by the PAP Government, and more or less followed here. In this book the ethnic components are, in order of size, the Chinese, the Malays (including their compatriots in the faith,1 the Arabs and Indian Muslims), the Indians and the Eurasians. Except for a small number of indigenous Malays and Orang Laut, the population of Singapore which grew under British rule were immigrants from the immediate region, and from China, India and more distant parts of the world. The immigrants did not meld into a single society, but lived as separate communities with people of their own race, language, culture and religion. Their only common ground was the trade and commerce which had lured them to these shores with their hopes and dreams. In the course of their long history of imperial hegemony, the British had evolved a method of dealing with this social pluralism. Raffles’s town planning marked out the zones for the different ethnic groups to settle in. Arguably, it was intended to suit the people concerned, and to avoid needless conflict. But it also indicated a desire on the part of the ruling class to keep a spatial and psychological distance from the habitation and bazaar of the natives, meaning the indigenes and Asian immigrants alike. The tendency for ethnic groups to congregate was very common in immigrant communities. Arrived at a strange place they organized their own associational life in their own districts, around the landmarks and symbols they recreated. Singapore was, for good or ill, exceptionally conducive for immigrant communities to preserve their uniqueness. It was a major port and communications centre. South China, south India and Indonesia, from where the most immigrants came, were not that far off. There was a constant flow of people and information from the old country to the Singapore diaspora. Even the British found, by the 1870s, that aided by technology Europe was nearer than half a world away. While the leaders of different communities got to know and honour one another, their respective identities were stubbornly intact. When they

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awakened to national consciousness, it was in response to ideas from different parts of the world: the Malays responded to the land of their faith, the Chinese and Indians to the land of their forefathers. For one radical Malay group, Indonesia provided the inspiration. Nationalism divides as much as it unites, and in Singapore, it most certainly divided. At the end of the day, what kept the ethnic communities apart was not the physical spaces demarcated by Raffles, where the boundaries were easily crossed and blurred, but a profound emotion gripping their heart and mind, generated by the divisive power of race, history and nationalism.

The Malays British rule was not superimposed on an older society. Old Temasek had long vanished. Raffles would hardly have known of its existence but for his study of old Malay manuscripts. The island when Raffles first landed was the barely inhabited domain of a Malay chieftain at the periphery of the Johore empire, an empire troubled by factionalism and soon to be carved into British and Dutch spheres of influence. The Malay sultan who came to live at Singapore had been arranged by Raffles who needed the credentials to found a port and settlement. In the new, bustling, business-like immigrant society that developed in Singapore, both the Malay sultan and the chieftain were seen by the British as superfluous, even an embarrassment. So, in the time of the descendants of these two Malay rajas, the British deliberately caused the sultan’s title to lapse, and later revived it again for the chieftain’s descendant whom the British had persuaded to move to his larger territory in the peninsula north of Singapore, which took the name, sultanate of Johore. The imperial British in the nineteenth century took over the role first held by the invincible Bugis in the eighteenth as kingmaker in the Malay court of Johore. Johore was the southernmost of the peninsular Malay states. Beginning in 1874, the British extended their control to the Malay states, and in this setting they were committed to preserving the position of Malay sultans and chiefs. The British were the actual rulers but they carefully kept up the appearance of Malay sovereignty. The British opened the land to

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immigration and development. The new economy prospered the old tradition: there was revenue for the Malay sultans, chiefs and Islamic jurisconsults and clerics to set themselves up in grander state, with finer palaces, offices and mosques. The sultan was never more secure on his throne with the Pax Britannica, and therefore, according to tradition, all would be well for the Malay people. In Singapore, the Arabs stepped into the leadership position vacated by the descendants of the Malay rulers who treated with Raffles. Three Arab heads of family, named Alsagoff, Aljunied and Alkaff should be noted. They were wealthy traders who acquired shophouses and land which they made into family trusts (wakafs).2 They endowed Koranic schools (madrasahs) and gave feasts at the mosque. The British were suspicious of the Arabs, particularly in the late nineteenth century, fearing that they would import the politics of the Middle East into Malaya. The Aljunieds were honorary Ottoman consuls-general though the British refused to ratify their appointments. During the First World War and after, certain Arabs in Singapore supported the Ottoman empire which took the side of Germany against Britain, France and Italy. But the colonial government in Singapore was not unduly worried because the Arabs were divided on this pro-Ottoman issue, and the Malays were indifferent to the fate of the Ottomans.3 The Arabs specialized in the pilgrimage business. The British uncovered an abuse: hajis who could not pay for the return passage to Singapore were consigned to bondage in Alsagoff’s estates. Despite the suspicions and controversies surrounding the prominent Arabs, the British still needed them as intermediaries with the Malays and others in the Muslim community. The Alsagoffs were appointed Justices of the Peace, and in one instance, a municipal commissioner. But the socioeconomic gap between Arabs and Malays meant, inevitably, that the day would come when the Malays would not want to be led by their wealthy co-religionists. The first sign of this, and indicative too of a growing Malay consciousness, occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century when new ideas of Islam were propagated in Singapore.4 These new ideas were

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derived from a source outside Singapore, by men who had travelled widely and had been educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. One of these men loved his alma mater so much that he added the suffix “Al-Azhari” to his own name. These men were a group of Malays and Arab-Malays (mixed parentage) from the surrounding region having to make their way in a city state ruled by the British and owned by the rich Arabs and the Chinese. They were in commerce, journalism, publishing and teaching, and thus had the means and skills matching their motivation to spread their message. Their message, published in Malay, was intended to get the Malays to change their mindset. They urged Malays to use their judgement when dealing with customary rituals and socio-economic issues on which the clerics or elders had given their ruling. Blind acceptance of such authority was hindering their progress. In keeping with their advice, the reformists started a school in 1907 which offered secular subjects, mathematics, geography, history, as well as religious knowledge, taught English as well as Arabic and Malay, and trained pupils to write compositions and speak in public. The contrast with the school founded by the Aljunieds may be drawn. A member of the Aljunied family, while attending this latter school, took afternoon lessons with his parents’ consent in a business school to learn English and mathematics. He felt that it was not enough for him to know only Arabic and Malay. But the principal of the Aljunied school was very angry when he found out and “severely punished the pupil for learning a European language”.5 The reformists were in conflict with the old school of Islam. This conflict spread to the Malay states too. There the sultans’ religious establishments did not care to have their pronouncements questioned and debated. They expected nothing but obedience from the peasant community of believers. So they banned reformist literature, restricting its circulation to Singapore and Penang, both urban centres and ports. The 1920s marked a significant change. The British proposed appointing a Muslim representative to the legislative council. A group of Englisheducated Malays wanted a Malay, and not someone from what they dubbed the “rich man’s club”, i.e., a prominent Arab or Indian Muslim.6 The British

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acceded to their wish, and Mohammed Eunos bin Abdullah, “the father of Malay journalism”, was appointed in 1924. In 1926, the group of supporters around Eunos formed an association, the Singapore Malay Union, to give him institutional back up. Eunos raised various Malay issues. The British had devised a uniform primary school system in Malay for the Malay states and Singapore alike. It had a rural bias which, he argued, was not suited to Singapore. What the urban Malays needed was a knowledge of English and technical education. Eunos succeeded in getting English introduced in Malay primary schools so that pupils could go on from there to the English medium secondary schools. This was all the more important since there were no Malay secondary schools. As to technical education, Eunos managed to get a trade school opened by government in 1930. Eunos is best remembered for Kampong Melayu, an area in the eastern part of the island reserved for Malay families squeezed by non-Malay population growth and high rents in the city. Politically, Eunos and his friends were pro-colonial. They gave tea parties for incoming and departing British governors, and presented loyal addresses to the British monarch at appropriate royal occasions. Yet Eunos, through his Malay newspaper, was introducing his audience to a modern concept of state and nation.7 Historically, Malays knew only of a state in which their loyalty to the sultan was key. The sultan was the linchpin holding the state together. In Eunos’s modern concept it was race — the Malay race — that constituted the central unifying factor. It is not hard to see in Eunos’s thinking the Victorian notion of race and the input of Social Darwinism. Eunos, and indeed also the Al-Imam editors who were his contemporaries, saw valuable lessons to be had in the Japanese success in modernizing their country, and in defeating a Western power, Russia, in 1905. In Singapore, where they were based, they saw great peril for the Malay people from Chinese and Indian immigration: Chinese towkays and workers and Indian money-lenders and shopkeepers being noted for their competitiveness and ruthless efficiency. The Al-Imam editors were anxious for the umat, the universal community of believers, and not primarily for a particular race or region. But in spite of themselves, these Muslim reformists were stirring and guiding their audience to think of race and nation in terms that were very current in the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth century world, and thereby contributing (albeit less overtly than Eunos) to a new, modern political vocabulary for the Malay people living under British colonial rule. Meanwhile, north of Singapore, in the Malay states, British policy was creating new Malay elites by design as well as by accident.8 The British educated the sons of sultans and chiefs in a college specially opened for them in 1905, modelled on the English public school. The British were introducing in this college the system they had of nurturing the ruling elite of Britain and the empire. The Malay rajas were trained to be modern rulers. They were admitted to the prestigious Malayan Civil Service which the British established and staffed with Britishers, to run the country. Malay sultans and aristocrats took the cue from the British to have their children educated in English, whether at the Malay College or overseas universities. The first generation of nation-builders of Malaya who emerged after the Second World War belonged to this privileged English-educated elite class, notably, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak, his deputy and successor, and Tun Dr Ismail bin Datuk Abdul Rahman, home, and later foreign, minister. The British educated the Malay peasants too, not in English but in Malay, not to take them out of their agrarian or maritime environment, but to be better skilled in it. For this purpose, a college was set up in 1922 to train Malay school teachers. The trainees were from the peasantry, and were to return to the peasantry, as instructors. But it did not always turn out as planned: some were discontented with being so typecast by the British. They made up a group of young Malay radicals who were opposed to the British and to the Malay sultans. Their heroes were the Indonesian communists, Mas Alimin, Tan Malaka and Musso, and the Indonesian nationalist, Sukarno. They dreamed of a union of Malaya and Indonesia. They formed a party, the Kesatuan Melayu Muda (Young Malays’ Association) in mid-1938 in Kuala Lumpur. Their leader, Ibrahim Yaacob, came to Singapore in 1940, bought over a Malay newspaper, and published articles against the British. Behind Ibrahim was the Japanese military intelligence, ominous of things to come.9 Post-war, Malays of radical hue made a bid for national leadership, but could not win against Tunku Abdul Rahman and his colleagues who were

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the natural leaders of the Malay peasantry, and possessed modern organizational know-how combined with ancient charisma.

The Chinese The first Chinese to come to Singapore when it was founded in 1819 were from Malacca where there was an earlier Chinese settlement. These were the Straits Chinese. They were joined by immigrants from China. From the 1870s, the scale of Chinese immigration increased phenomenally. Singapore became the centre for the import of Chinese coolies to work in the mines and plantations of colonial Southeast Asia. Coolies were retained to work in Singapore itself, which became a coolie town within a trading entrepot. When they had served out their indenture, many coolies stayed on. Some other coolies entered Singapore as free men. Coolies made up the greater part of the Chinese population in Singapore, which fell into two classes: coolies/artisans and traders. The Straits Chinese, a tiny minority, were the only Chinese fortunate to have a family life and even an extended family. The great majority of Chinese lived as an all-male community: their families did not emigrate with them. On coming to Singapore, the Chinese looked for other Chinese who spoke their dialect or shared the same surname, and therefore, the same presumed ancestor. Associations founded on the basis of dialect and surname clan were common. Men of the same dialect and surname clan shared another attribute: they came from the same region in China. The immigrants defined themselves by these attributes: dialect, clan and region in China. They knew no larger social horizon. For protection, the immigrants had the triad or secret society. Usually there was a triad for each dialect group. The triad of another dialect group was seen as a rival. In a society where men lived without their families, the brotherhood of the triad assumed more than usual significance. And the triad was more prone to violence. The immigrants came from the south-eastern provinces of China, Fukien and Kwangtung. They were mostly peasants and artisans from the

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countryside. Some were townsmen. The countryside in these provinces were linked to market towns. The peasants and artisans learned how to use money productively. The money was often borrowed. Borrowing and lending were something endemic in Chinese society. Many were in debt for their entire life. But, amazingly, they betrayed no sign of embarrassment or worry over it. To them, “Indebtedness was nothing to be ashamed of, was public knowledge, and was readily incurred.”10 And this, we may add, holds a clue to the psychology of the Chinese entrepreneur. It is worthwhile to look to culture and geography to shed more light. Confucian culture in south-eastern China seemed to have evolved in response to a coastal environment and the possibility of maritime trading. The proverbial Confucian scholar’s distaste for trade as a low activity was not the attitude of the educated gentry class in Fukien. The gentry of this province had gone into maritime trade since the sixteenth century, and it was “quite common” in the nineteenth century for “gentry families” to be involved in business.11 Scholarship was the classic route to success, honour and prestige. But not everyone was cut out to be a scholar, or could get the opportunity to be one. Many chose to go into trading, and with their wealth, found a roundabout way to a place of honour and prestige in their community: they sponsored educational and cultural institutions. Many resorted to maritime trading because of the pressure on agricultural land, which was subject to multi-layered rights owned by various people in the peculiar Chinese way. They looked to the sea as to a paddyfield, and to trade to yield them a harvest.12 The peasants and artisans of south-eastern China, migrating to Singapore as coolies, fitted easily into the entrepot trading system. They brought with them their habit of hard work and frugality, and their habitual attitude of productive indebtedness. Many coolies were able to start a small business, going from there to bigger things. Some did not come as coolies but as businessmen and later sent for a son or a brother to join the family firm. Some found work with a clansman from the same district in China, and later struck out on their own. Tan Kah Kee, born in 1874 in Tong An, a district in Fukien, came to Singapore as an

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apprentice in his father’s business, and became a rubber magnate. Tan Lark Sye, born in 1897 in the same district, came to Singapore in 1916 and was hired as a foreman by Tan Kah Kee. Later, he went into the rubber business himself and sent for his brothers in Fukien. Tan Kah Kee and Tan Lark Sye were two of the greatest Hokkien entrepreneurs in Singapore, and earned high repute as movers and financiers of Chinese education as well.13 The Chinese in nineteenth century Singapore lived autonomously. They provided for, organized and regulated everything themselves. Coolies newly arrived in the British colony did not know that a government existed. The Chinese gradually lost their autonomy, from about the 1870s onwards, as the colonial government started to assert itself. By then, the import of coolies had become a lifeline of the Singapore and regional economy. The coolie trade was notorious for the abuses perpetrated by Chinese coolie recruiters, which the British feared would deter emigration: the whole business could come to a halt at the China end. It might help if the British did something at the Singapore end. So, in 1877, a Britisher was appointed the Protector of Chinese. He was to keep a watchful eye on the coolie trade and its adjunct, the import of young girls for prostitution. But the Chinese continued to be autonomous: they depended on the power and influence of the triad more than they did on the authority of the colonial government. The British put up with this until 1890. In that year, a governor who had been the colonial secretary, and who knew the language and ways of the Chinese, took the decisive step to ban the triad. In the same period that the British were cutting back the autonomy of the Chinese in Singapore, the imperial Ch’ing dynasty was altering its policy towards immigrant Chinese societies. Where once the Ch’ing dynasty had branded the Chinese who emigrated as renegades, it now rebranded them as a valuable resource worthy of imperial regard. The Ch’ing dynasty opened a consulate in Singapore in 1877, later upgrading it to consulategeneral, and sent a succession of envoys to confer brevet titles on Chinese merchant subscribers to the Ch’ing cause. It was a revelation to these Chinese merchants that their government in China was interested in them. It gratified them and gave them a larger vision of China than they had ever thought possible.

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The Ch’ing consuls, consuls-general and envoys distributed honours among the towkays so well that the British Protector of Chinese and British governors racked their brains for something with which to compete with them. But there was nothing, no precedent they could use: the Colonial Office archive held none. The loyalty of the Chinese in Singapore was being contested by two empires, Chinese and British, and it was quite clear which one was winning.14 An important Ch’ing consular function was to promote a sense of Chinese identity and culture. This was done by means of literary activities and education. In China itself, the Ch’ing dynasty sought to revitalize the state by educational reform, and established a modern system of schools, using Japan, admired for its transformation from a feudal to a modern state, as the model. Ch’ing diplomats introduced the new system to the Chinese diaspora. But first the diaspora must have the children to educate. Chinese women and children started coming to Singapore in the late nineteenth century. In 1890, for example, 3,820 women arrived, and the number rose steadily over the years. Thus, it became possible to have a small but growing number of children. The different dialect groups had founded schools teaching Chinese in their dialects even before the Ch’ing dynasty’s modernization of schools. In 1907, the Hokkiens opened the first modern-type school, the Tao Nan School, with ninety students. The Chinese revolution of 1911 ended the Ch’ing dynasty, and began the republican era in China. Sun Yat Sen, the provisional president of the new republic, gave priority to education, believing it to be the key to national strength. The study of Confucian classics was replaced by new texts intended to free young minds to receive new ideas like republicanism, democracy and nation-building. Inspired by a surge of national pride, the Hokkien Huay Kuan, the biggest and richest dialect association in Singapore, founded two more modern-type schools, the Ai Tong School in 1912, and the Chong Fu Girls’ School in 1915. The change of the medium of instruction from dialect to Mandarin was an important aspect of the post-1911 era in China, which was transmitted to

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Singapore. In 1916, the Tao Nan School, where teaching was conducted in the Hokkien dialect, began to “phase in” Mandarin.15 The schools founded so far were all primary schools. Tan Kah Kee called on dialect groups across the board to cooperate in establishing a secondary school, the Chinese High School, which opened on 21 March 1919. With this, Singapore led the region in starting secondary education in Chinese. Penang followed in 1923 with the Chung Ling High School. The impact of modern Chinese education at the primary level and of the advance to secondary level was incalculable on the way the Chinese began to think and feel about themselves and their country. This comes out in Tan Kah Kee’s rhetoric, his talk of “rescuing the nation through education”, of “our cultural essence” and “our national spirit”.16 The nation was, of course, China, now named the Republic of China. After the 1911 revolution, the ruling party in China, the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party, established branches in Singapore and Malaya. The KMT Government claimed all Chinese living overseas as Chinese nationals and appointed consuls-general to “bond” with them just as the Ch’ing dynasty had done. The Kuomintang Party had a rival in China in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), formally organized in Shanghai in 1921. The CCP created a network in Southeast Asia. This enabled the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern in Shanghai to establish the Malayan Communist Party in 1930. For a long time, it was thought that Singapore was the birthplace of the Malayan Communist Party, but a recent study put it at Buloh Kesap in Johore, not far from Singapore, but obscure enough to be safer from detection and arrest by the colonial police. Ho Chi Minh, the Comintern’s Southeast Asia agent, was present for the occasion. This was a lot of nationalistic and revolutionary activity all happening within a certain time span. Why? What was agitating people in China? What were they going through at this time? Chinese people were under great pressure from certain highly draconian demands that Japan imposed on them in 1915. They suffered again from the peace settlement at the end of the First World War when the former German-held Shantung province was taken over by Japan. The Chinese had hoped to resume sovereignty over Shantung. They had contributed labour to the victorious war effort,

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which should lend moral backing to their case, and they further banked on the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s liberal rhetoric. But in the end, the Chinese were disappointed and humiliated. It was in this state of mind that what was known as the May Fourth movement erupted in 1919. This was about firstly, a series of Chinese student protests against Japan, the Western powers, and the Chinese officials who treated with them. Secondly, and more vitally, this was about a mental rebirth. Chinese students and intellectuals pushed various doctrines in a bid to thrust China into the modern world, freed from a feudal, Confucianridden past. Anarchism, liberalism, pragmatism, socialism, indeed a profusion of “isms” were floated for the sake of China’s national survival. The intellectual and ideological ferment reshaped the Kuomintang and gave rise to the Chinese Communist Party. The frenzy in China spilled over to the Chinese diaspora. The university and college students’ protests in China were mirrored in Singapore by the more junior students’ involvement in anti-Japanese and anti-British incidents. Chinese students in Singapore participated also in what may be called the May Fourth’s China modernity project. Their schools began to switch from dialect to Mandarin. Mandarin represented the new China: it was the national language. Mandarin was modern: it was more accessible in both spoken and written forms than the classical Chinese that it was displacing. In China, the “new culture” writers of the May Fourth era deliberately favoured Mandarin to popularize it. Singapore’s Chinese High School students, who were an elite in their own way, were an audience for China’s “new culture” writers, including émigré ones sojourning in the British colony and writing for local Chinese newspaper supplements.17 The political impact of May Fourth on Singapore should also be noted as students, and workers too, were drawn into the overseas networks of the nationalist and communist parties in China by activists coming over from there. May Fourth was the seedtime of the radical tradition, which took root among the Chinese educated in Singapore, and blossomed forth as the Malayan Communist Party, and the later communist united front in Singapore from the fifties through to the seventies. The inevitable and unbearable event finally happened: on 7 July 1937, an incident signalled the start of full-scale Japanese aggression against

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China. This provoked the Chinese in Singapore to a highly emotional protest and boycott of Japanese goods. The local KMT and communist organizations vied with each other in demonstrations and in fund-raising and other programmes to help China. The British, whose home government had diplomatic ties with Japan, were in a difficult position. They had also been keeping a tight lid on KMT and communist branches in Singapore and Malaya, and did not want them to benefit from the situation and win more followers. So the British turned to Tan Kah Kee, the most prominent, and then still neutral, Chinese leader to take the lead in the “Save China” movement. He would be, the British hoped, a safe conduit for the tidal wave of Chinese national passion that could not be stopped. Everything in Tan Kah Kee’s launching of the “Save China” movement had a meaning: the grand meeting he convened on 10 October 1938 (China’s national day); the venue, which was the Chinese High School; the couplet which Pan Kuo Chu, a Tao Nan School teacher, composed for the occasion; and the delegates at the meeting who were Chinese leaders from the whole Southeast Asian region.18 Pan Kuo Chu’s couplet, rendered by him in bold calligraphy, emblazoned the exterior of the meeting place. It told of the Chinese nation’s adamance and “blood”, and of the determination of “eight million overseas Chinese” to keep “a white sun (the national flag) shining”.19 Tan Kah Kee’s journey to wartime China opened his eyes to the fact that the KMT Government, then at Chungking, was feckless and dissolute, whereas the communists immured in Yenan were hardworking, austere, dedicated, and civic-minded. He met Mao Tse Tung, and believed he had beheld China’s saviour, then a man in his forties. Tan’s openly spoken admiration for the Yenan spirit caused a rift between him and Chungking.20 Back in Singapore, the pro-Kuomintang faction heaped their anger on him as they engaged in a fiery exchange with the pro-CCP faction.

The Indians The Indian diaspora in Malaya and Singapore was much smaller than the Chinese one. It consisted mainly of the Tamils of south India. Many came

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as coolies. The indenture of Tamil coolies was more closely regulated than in the case of Chinese coolies, though abuses still occurred. Tamil coolies ended up being less independent than Chinese ones, less able to venture for themselves after their indenture period. There was a chain reaction as Indian nationalists criticized the indenture system, the British had to be more careful, and British paternalism in turn bred the unadventurous Tamil attitude. Caste was another reason. The caste idea that, by birth, brahmins were of the highest spiritual order, and the lowest caste people were spiritually polluting, had worked to keep the latter in their place in the social order with their own consent. This was why Tamil coolies did not strive to change things and improve themselves. But, in Singapore in the 1930s, a Tamils Reform Association did try.21 It did away with the performance of rituals by brahims in, for example, nuptial ceremonies. The reformists were following a movement begun earlier in Madras, which sought justice for the oppressed and humiliated lowest caste. Another Indian ethnic group, the Sikhs, were traders, policemen, and watchmen in Singapore. They were excited by the Ghadr Party (1913–17) of North American Sikh émigrés, aimed at raising a revolt against the British in the Punjab.22 They were also riveted to the struggle in the Punjab to regain control of Sikh temples from Hindu administrators, which saw results in the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. Indian Muslims in Singapore and Malaya specialized in the bookshop trade, among other businesses. Their bookshops were stocked with literature protesting against the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by Western imperial powers at the end of the First World War (1914–18). The Ottoman emperor was the caliph, temporal ruler, of the Muslim world. The Indian Muslims out here were reacting like their compatriots in north-western India who started the khilafat (caliphate) movement (1920–24). All these episodes were aspects of the broader nationalist struggle in the subcontinent of India for freedom from British rule. But they also reflected the ethnic and regional rivalries tearing India apart. The prospect of Indian independence encouraged separatist movements: the projected

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casteless federal state comprising Tamil, Telegu and Malayalee regions, the campaign for a Sikh homeland, and the Indian Muslims’ quest for Pakistan. Each of these had its passionate following in the diaspora. Then, there was the vertical division noted in Malaya: the division by class between middle class Indians and Indian coolies. Indian coolies were influenced by the left wing of the Indian nationalist movement. They joined the Chinese in strikes at a colliery in Malaya, at a Singapore bus company, and at the port of Singapore in the 1930s. But they were suspicious of the predominantly Chinese Malayan Communist Party.23 Middle class Indians distanced themselves from the nationalist struggle in India in the 1930s. The colonial authorities in Malaya had sent out clear signals when they “vetted literature and screened visitors coming from India”.24 But there were those who showed no fear, such as the family of James Puthucheary, a Malayalee family in Ayer Molek, Johore.

The Eurasians A people with education and background rooted in the region, Eurasians were “second to Europeans in the English-speaking community” of colonial Singapore.25 Eurasians were sportsmen, scholars, musicians, and public servants. Yet there was discrimination against them. The discrimination was greatest in the age of steam and the Suez Canal, when European society in the East became more rigidly middle class and centred on family and club. In this period, the 1870s to 1900, the Eurasians resorted to starting their own clubs and newspapers (in English), developing “a sense of community and identity” among themselves.26 But it was still the aspiration of Eurasians, and the Straits Chinese as well, to be like the English gentleman. The well-known Eurasian lawyer, Richard Eber, sent his son John (born in Singapore in 1916) to England in 1924 for his education: “prep school, Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple”.27 After being called to the bar, John Eber returned to Singapore in 1939 and had his law office at a prestigious address in Raffles Place. After the war, he would dash his father’s hopes by becoming a revolutionary Malayan nationalist.

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The Japanese Occupation (1942–45) and the Aftermath The Japanese invaded a society deeply divided by race and politics. The British feared the rise of Chinese nationalism in Southeast Asia. Tan Kah Kee’s “Save China” movement seemed to be pointing that way. Victor Purcell, Advisor on Chinese Affairs in 1945–46, said that Tan Kah Kee “might conceivably become the George Washington of a Nanyang Chinese Independence movement”.28 But the swift Japanese advance down the Malay peninsula towards Singapore activated a last-minute British plan to involve the Chinese against what was, after all, a common enemy. The British agreed with the Malayan Communist Party to train and arm Chinese guerrillas. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) was formed in January 1942. Another, and more desperate, step taken was to have Chinese volunteers — coolies, triads, students — make a last stand at Singapore’s northern shore.29 Strong of will but poorly armed (British distrust fatally to blame), they were cut to pieces by the invading Japanese divisions. This was followed by a greater tragedy when the Japanese vented their anger on the hapless civilian population, massacring thousands of Chinese men. At the moment of victory, the Japanese set aside all military honour and discipline and descended into war criminality. The Japanese treated the Malays with special consideration, starting from the top of the Malay hierarchy. Yoshichika Tokugawa, the nineteenth, and as it turned out, last lord of that noble house, asked to accompany the invading force.30 Lord Tokugawa had visited Malaya before the war and befriended the Sultan of Johore. He offered his services to the Japanese army as an advisor on relations with the Malay sultans. Evidently, because of him, palaces and mosques were unharmed, the sultans received their stipends as usual, and Muslim officials continued to rule on religious matters. He became the governor of Malai (Malaya). To run the country the Japanese had Malay civil servants, policemen, district officers and village chiefs who were already there. To support the Japanese army, Malays were organized as a volunteer defence force, a reserve corps, and an auxiliary unit meant to supply labour services. Ibrahim Yaacob, the leader of the radical Kesatuan Melayu Muda was put

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in command of the Malay volunteer defence force. Another Malay radical was made the editor of a Japanese-sponsored Malay newspaper in Singapore. Also in Singapore, the Japanese trained Malays, women included, for jobs in office and factory previously held by other races only. In addition to learning new skills, Malays were put through new experiences like mass rallies and drills, from all of which they emerged more confident and conscious of their ethnic identity. As for the Chinese, the massacre they suffered and what followed it — the Japanese extortion of a huge sum of money from them — was to overshadow totally the softer line that the Japanese adopted towards them later. The discrete treatment that the Japanese meted out to Malays and Chinese was to have a terrible consequence. The Japanese were causing the Malays to be seen as collaborators by the Chinese. At the same time, the Japanese themselves were being hated by the Chinese. But the Japanese themselves did not suffer the consequences. The Malays did, and then the Chinese too, in the Malay backlash. When Japan surrendered, its soldiers withdrew safely to their barracks, with their guns, leaving the Chinese and the Malays to an orgy of revenge killings. As for the Indians, the Japanese directed them to an external objective: the liberation of India. This differed markedly from the Japanese deployment of Malays for internal exigencies: Malay policemen, volunteers and village chiefs were used in operations against communist guerrillas, and Malays often guided police raids on Chinese villages.31 For this reason, although Indians could not escape the taint of collaboration, they were spared the communal slaughter that occurred at the end of the Japanese occupation. The Japanese sponsored an Indian Independence League and an Indian National Army. This would create an important diversion for the Indian troops brought over by the British who were now in captivity like the British. But the scheme lacked a charismatic leader. This was remedied when Subhas Chandra Bose, a Bengal revolutionary on the run, arrived in Singapore from Tokyo in July 1943. He brought new dynamism and purpose. He set up a government, the Azad Hind, and recruited the civilian population — coolies and middle class Indians alike — to the

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cause. His impact was electrifying and only limited by the refusal of Indian Muslims to take part. Bose’s legacy was the politicization of the coolies and middle class Indians who became imbued with “a strong commitment to continue the independence struggle, not only for India, but also for Malaya itself”.32 For many, this led eventually to joining the Malayan Communist Party. Others opted for the moderate Malayan Indian Congress. In Singapore, there was a flurry of political activity among Indians in the early post-war era, much of it personal and fractious. But Indians were to participate in a durable multiracial party that came up later, and has stayed up ever since — the PAP. As regards the Eurasian community, they, more than anyone else perhaps, felt let down and abandoned by the British defeat. Then, the Japanese victors harangued them to think of themselves as Asians. Postwar, many Eurasians, worried by the surge of nationalism and communism, planned to leave for Britain and Commonwealth countries. But there were Eurasians who decided that their place was here, with the nationalists and communists at the frontline of the anticolonial struggle. John Eber was one major example. He was interned during the war, and afterwards worked hard for Britain to quit Malaya. Two other Eurasian lawyers, Kenny Byrne (Oxford, Middle Temple) and E.W. Barker (Cambridge, Inner Temple) were among the first generation of PAP cabinet ministers and nation builders of Singapore. The British returned in September 1945 to a country where Malays and Chinese were fighting each other. The racial conflict continued for some time though there was a temporary halt when British forces landed and provided some security.33 The Malay fighters in the racial conflict were from the villages, wielding simple village tools as lethal weapons. They charged into battle wearing amulets of invulnerability. In their hour of peril, they turned to the things which belonged to the world of the peasant and the village holy man. The modern world, the modern political organization like the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, was of no help to them.34 Many Chinese lived in rural areas, in villages separate from Malay villages. When they were attacked, the Chinese villagers appealed to the

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MCP-MPAJA as to their ethnic compatriots.35 The MCP-MPAJA responded, as well they might, not for race alone, but because they had brought on the racial conflict in the first place. Upon the Japanese surrender, Chinese guerrillas had come out to hold summary trials and executions of alleged collaborators, notably, Malay officials, policemen and village heads.36 The MCP-MPAJA had succumbed to a terrible human failing: vengeance. In the madness of revenge killings they lost sight of something very important that they should have done. They should have thought of a strategy towards the British who were coming back to reoccupy Malaya. The MCP-MPAJA, if they had been so minded, could have opposed the British return. They could have quickly switched from their wartime alliance with the British to resistance against the British. The MCP-MPAJA had come out of the war as heroes. Although the actual damage their guerrilla action inflicted on the Japanese was minimal, what counted with the helpless civilian population, especially the Chinese, was that they were able to hit back at the brutal Japanese. So they were admired as heroic. When the war ended, they still had the guns. Surely the thing to do then was to use their guns on the British even as they landed. After all, did not Mao say (in 1938): “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”?37 The MCP-MPAJA should have heeded this dictum. They should have capitalized on their dual advantage — reputation and guns — and mounted their attack on the British. But they did not. Why? Why the failure to think clearly on this strategy? The short answer is that they were engrossed with revenge. But a closer look at what was happening inside the MCP would reveal another, more startling, reason. There was a master spy within the MCP. He was Lai Te, a Vietnamese whom the French in Indochina had used until his cover was blown, and then handed to the British for a fresh start as a double agent. Lai Te worked his way into the central committee of the MCP which was in Singapore. He attained the top post of secretary-general in 1938. During the Japanese occupation, he offered his services to the kempeitai, Japanese military intelligence. He switched back to spying for the British after the war. In the Japanese period, Lai Te betrayed to the kempeitai, and therefore, to their deaths, the central committee of the MCP in Singapore, and key

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senior MCP cadres in Malaya at a meeting near Batu Caves.38 When he perceived that the end was near for the Japanese, he steered the MCP to the constitutional path, i.e., working with trade unions and political parties, disappointing the senior cadres who had hoped for an armed revolution. Lai Te was not found out for many years. He had slipped away by the time he was unmasked (in absentia) at a meeting of the MCP central committee specially convened in Kuala Lumpur on 6 March 1947. The meeting appointed Chin Peng, aged twenty three, and the number three man in the party, as the new secretary-general. Chin Peng and other leaders decided on armed revolution in June 1948. By then the British were more firmly back in place, and starting to repress the communistcontrolled trade unions. If the MCP-MPAJA did not try to stop the British at the point when they were returning, neither did the Kesatuan Melayu Muda. This radical Malay organization had received military-style training under the Japanese. The Japanese regarded the Malays as “conscripts” for the defence of their fatherland with Japanese guidance. The national service analogy is not out of place here, and, as in national service, there were restrictions on training with weapons and on contact with the civilian population. As a result, the Kesatuan Melayu Muda had neither the firepower nor the people power for a war of independence. Far from wanting to fight, they wished to avoid the British who were certain to put them on trial and imprison them for collaboration. Kesatuan Melayu Muda leaders went over to Indonesia, the land of their heroes, who were engaged in real fighting against the Dutch for national independence. The story of nationalism is about men and women who discovered who they were, where they belonged, and what shaped their convictions as they went through historic ages of reform, revolution, war, and the aftermath of war. Nationalism divides as much as it unites. It divides people of different ethnic groups within the same territory and, for this reason, it is sometimes called “ethno-nationalism”. But, equally, nationalism is a force which divides persons belonging to the same race. It divides man from man, brother from brother: seized by the demon of nationalism, all men are not brothers.

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For the Chinese in Malaya, the late 1930s through the 1940s was a time when their identity as Chinese, allegiance to China, and willingness to sacrifice for China, were at fever pitch. Yet they were never so politically polarized as in that era. Tan Kah Kee, who initiated building the Chinese High School in Singapore, and founded Amoy University in China, was the only one able to unite the Chinese in Southeast Asia in the bid to save China during the Japanese assault. Tan was a leader of integrity and fortitude. He supported Chiang Kai Shek at first, but switched to Mao Tse Tung. His principles allowed him no other option. He became the lightning rod for the storm which erupted between the KMT and CCP factions in Malaya. To further demonstrate the polarization in the Chinese community in that wartime era, we may cite two other iconic figures. One is Chin Peng, born in 1924 in Sitiawan, Perak, Malaya, and educated in Chinese up to senior middle school. He was very excited when an older schoolmate answered the KMT recruitment drive in Malaya and went to train as a fighter pilot in China. Chin Peng himself, then aged twelve, was too young to go, but dreamed of joining the KMT military college.39 Then, a teacher got him involved with the MCP’s Anti-Enemy Backing Society in Sitiawan. Chin Peng was an avid reader. One day he read Mao Tse Tung’s tract, On Protracted War, about the efficacy of guerrilla tactics in the war against Japan, and was greatly impressed. Mao at Yenan began to replace the KMT in his thoughts and plans. Before long, in January 1940, the MCP recruited him as a probationary member. He was slightly over fifteen years old. The rest, as they say, is history. The other icon is Lim Bo Seng. Born in China in 1909, he came with his parents to Malaya as a boy, and at aged sixteen, moved with them to Singapore and continued his education at Raffles Institution.40 He then went to the University of Hong Kong. Fluent in English and Chinese, he was a director in the family business. He participated in an agency which sold bricks and material to the British who were building the great naval base in Singapore. When Japan attacked China in July 1937, Lim Bo Seng threw himself into working for the KMT cause as an agent of the Chungking regime.

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When Malaya fell, Lim went first to India, and then to Chungking, twice, to recruit Malayan-born Chinese university students there to be trained by the British in India as secret agents. From India, these men, including Lim himself, were stealthily returned to Japanese-occupied Malaya as Force 136. Their mission was to start a spy network. Chin Peng and Lim Bo Seng met in November and December 1943 because the British wanted to negotiate with the MCP-MPAJA on a coordinated plan of action to be put into effect when the Allied forces landed. Lim Bo Seng was the translator in the negotiations held in mountainous jungle terrain. Chin Peng’s narrated memoir contains his impression of Lim Bo Seng at the time. Lim was “a youthful looking Chinese”, “bespectacled”, and “spoke impeccable Mandarin”.41 It was “obvious” to Chin Peng that “he had enjoyed a privileged upbringing”.42 At the meeting, Lim sat with three British officers of Force 136 while Chin Peng sat opposite them, with his superior, the insidious Lai Te. The thirty-fouryear-old Lim Bo Seng and the nineteen-year-old Chin Peng “viewed each other with considerable scepticism”.43 Though these two iconic figures were on opposite sides of China’s political divide, they were bound by their historical fate. They each paid a fearful price for their chosen loyalty and convictions. Lim Bo Seng died a martyr at the hands of his Japanese captors and tormentors in June 1944. Chin Peng led the MCP in an insurrection against the British in June 1948. He lives on to this day, but communism has taken him on a lifelong journey of lost dreams and exile. After the Second World War, Malay nationalism surged powerfully. The nationalist leaders were Malay royals and aristocrats who were educated in English, and possessed traditional authority and charisma combined with a knowledge of the modern world. They were thrown up by an event of great consequence to Malays. The British returned to Malaya with a plan, the Malayan Union, that eliminated Malay sovereignty and would swamp the Malay people with a citizenship proposal that was inclusive of nonMalays. Malay royals and aristocrats abandoned their customary reserve and decorum to protest against the Malayan Union. The British were surprised, but it dawned on them that they were looking at a true blue

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royalist Malay nationalist leadership. It was, moreover, the modern educated elite that their rule had begotten. They had better work with it or risk seeing the Malay people have recourse to Indonesian aid as the misbegotten Malay radicals had done. In the story so far, there has been no sign of the growth of a Malayan nationalism, only Malay nationalism, Chinese nationalism, Indian nationalism, moving as separate streams. There seemed to have been no concept of Malayan in a national sense. But what about the Malayan Communist Party? What meaning did they attach to the term “Malayan”? Apparently, they meant it as little more than a geographical expression. None other than Chin Peng said that he regarded himself as a Chinese, and not a Malayan because there was no such thing as a Malayan.44 The MCP was a mainly Chinese movement closely following the CCP line. Another important point should be noted. In the post-war era, some English-educated intellectuals came forward to collaborate with the MCP. They urged people to think of themselves as Malayans, promoting a Malayan political consciousness. But they could cut no ice with the MCP’s leaders who were Chinese-educated and looked on them with suspicion.45 The war years had given people a common experience. Whatever their race, political affiliations and loyalties, they were bound by the fellowship of suffering in a war-ravaged, economically ruined, Japanese-ruled land. They did not immediately appreciate this: the end of the war brought forth racial violence. It was only later, when people have had the time to reflect, that they realized how much they had been through together. It helped them to bond as Malayans. The bonding as Malayans came more easily and naturally to the Englisheducated. The English medium schools were attended by Eurasians, Chinese, Indians, and Malays. These students mixed with friends of other races with whom they shared a common language: English. They were socialized by study, play and language into becoming Malayans. The Second World War and Japanese Occupation gave a political boost to the sense of being Malayan. People who had witnessed British power and prestige collapse so swiftly and totally could not but wonder if Western colonial rule was not over. The generation that reached adulthood started to

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examine the implications of Malayanness. What was the Malayan identity? What would be the Malayan national language? Would English serve? Should it not be Malay? How to create the political norms that would make a reality of Malayanness — loyalty, unity, equality, harmony — in such a divided society? Lee Kuan Yew, born in 1923, exemplified this new politically conscious generation. Educated at Raffles Institution and Raffles College, he had finished his second college year when the Japanese invaded. After the war, he read law at Cambridge University from January 1947 to June 1949. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in June 1950. In the same year he addressed the Malayan Forum, a political discussion group in London, formed by Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian students from Malaya enrolled in U.K. universities. Lee presented his vision of a Malaya identified not with one race, but with every race that made up the country, a Malayan Malaya as he put it. Lee acted on his multiracial vision: he and some friends who were as ethnically representative as the Malayan Forum, and indeed included members of that London group, started the PAP in Singapore in 1954. Lee and his friends belonged to the English educated elite class. They did not share in the passions of Chinese nationalism or its landmark associations: Tan Kah Kee’s Save China convention at the Chinese High School, Pan Kuo Chu’s heroic verse, the founding of Nanyang University. But as the government of a predominantly Chinese Singapore, they were going to have to deal with them. An important legacy of Chinese nationalism was the MCP. With the advantage of ethnic affinity, the MCP had covered Singapore with its network. The PAP therefore had to have a strategy to work with, face off, and phase out the communists. And so they did. The communists, on their part, indeed the whole communist world, understood and practised this united front strategy. In all cases, they were the ultimate winners, but Singapore was an extraordinary exception: here Lee managed to ride the communist tiger to victory. The issue which helped Lee to defeat the communists was the merger between Singapore and Malaya. The then conventional wisdom was that Singapore could not transit from a British colony to independent

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nation alone. The PAP objective was independence through merger with Malaya. Lee fervently wished for the two territories to be united. He got his wish. But nationalism — the divisive force so often encountered in this chapter — made it highly unlikely that the merger would last. The aristocratic Malay nationalists had established a nation where Malays were dominant and non-Malays had to bargain with them for citizenship rights. Lee believed in equality for all ethnic groups, which meant no single ethnic group should dominate or be specially privileged. He believed in what he called a Malayan Malaya, the antithesis to a Malay Malaya. After the political merger of Singapore and Malaya in what became the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, Lee again advanced his vision of multiracial equality, calling it a Malaysian Malaysia. But a Malaysian Malaysia did not exist, and the attempt of a state government, the PAP of Singapore, to create it, set the PAP on a collision course with the Malay-led federal government. This was averted by separation. The hearts of people in Singapore went out to their leaders. Many were convinced that the PAP was right, on this and other issues of interest to Singapore, and was being bullied by the powerful but unreasonable Malay nationalists in Kuala Lumpur. Lee sensed in the pre-merger negotiations: “People wanted me to stand up for Singapore.”46 Academics have descried in the post-merger conflict “the first stirrings of Singapore nationalism”.47 NOTES 1 Strictly speaking, Arabia was the land of the faith and of the pilgrimage, but AlAzhar University in Cairo, Egypt, was the powerhouse from which originated the reformist ideas important to this story. 2 The wakaf is discussed in Ulrike Freitag, “Arab Merchants in Singapore: Attempt of a Collective Biography” in Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade and Islam in Southeast Asia, edited by Huube De Jonge and Nico Kaptein (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 120–23. 3 Mohammad Redzuan Othman, “Conflicting Political Loyalties of the Arabs in Malaya before World War II” in De Jonge and Kaptein, eds., Transcending Borders, pp. 47 and 50. 4 W.R. Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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5 6 7

8 9

10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20

1967); (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994, second edition), Chapter 2. Freitag, “Arab Merchants”, p. 133. Roff, Origins of Malay Nationalism, p. 189. See Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), paperback edition, 2002, Chapters 4, 5 and 7. Roff, Origins of Malay Nationalism, pp. 100–13, 126–27, 142–43, 172–73. Lt. Gen. Fujiwara Iwaichi, F. Kikan: Japanese Army Intelligence Operations in Southeast Asia during World War II, translated by Yoji Akashi (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1983), pp. 41, 99, 189–90 and 227–28. M. Freedman, “The Handling of Money: A Note on the Economic Background to the Economic Sophistication of Overseas Chinese” in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman, edited by G. William Skinner (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1979), p. 23. Ng Chin-keong, “The Cultural Horizon of South China’s Emigrants in the Nineteenth Century: Change and Persistence” in Asian Tradition and Modernisation: Perspectives from Singapore, edited by Yong Mun Cheong (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1992), p. 11. Ibid., p. 15. See Yen Ching-Hwang, “Hokkien Immigrant Society and Modern Chinese Education in British Malaya” in Chinese Migrants Abroad: Cultural, Educational and Social Dimensions of the Chinese Diaspora, edited by Michael W. Charney, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Tong Chee Kiong (Singapore: Singapore University Press and World Scientific, 2003), Chapter 7. Edwin Lee, The British As Rulers: Governing Multiracial Singapore 1867–1914 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1991), pp. 185–99. Yen, “Hokkien Immigrant Society”, p. 131. Ibid., p. 135. Sally Borthwick “Chinese Education and Identity in Singapore” in Changing Identities of Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II, edited by Jennifer W. Cushman and Wang Gungwu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1988), pp. 37 and 42; see also David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919–32 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 166–77, 187–88 and 191, note 3. C.F. Yong, Tan Kah-Kee: The Making of an Overseas Chinese Legend (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 31, 214–15. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., pp. 249–50 and 255–60.

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30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

S. Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia and Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1970, revised edition, 1978, reprinted, 1979), pp. 172–74. R. Ampalavanar, The Indian Minority and Political Change in Malaya, 1945–57 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia and Singapore, p. 82. Myrna Braga-Blake, ed., Singapore Eurasians: Memories and Hopes (Singapore: Times Editions, 1992), p. 18. Ibid., p. 17. Note on the author in John Eber, Malaya’s Freedom is Vital to Britain (London: Britain-Malaya Committee, April 1954). Yong, Tan Kah-Kee, p. 324. Cheah Boon Kheng, “Japanese Army Policy toward the Chinese and MalayChinese Relations in Wartime Malaya” in Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire, edited by Paul H. Kratoska (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), pp. 97–100. E.J.H. Corner, The Marquis: A Tale of Syonan-to (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1981), pp. 10 and 106. Cheah, “Japanese Army Policy”, p. 105. Ampalavanar, The Indian Minority, p. 9. Cheah Boon Kheng, Red Star Over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict during and after the Japanese Occupation, 1941–46 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983, second edition, 1987, third edition, 2003), p. xiii, 232–40. Ibid., p. 298. Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), p. 127. Cheah, Red Star Over Malaya, pp. 295–96. Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: F.A. Praeger, 1963, third printing, 1965), p. 209. Chin Peng, My Side of History, pp. 76–84. Ibid., pp. 44–47. Romen Bose, The End of the War: Singapore’s Liberation and the Aftermath of the Second World War (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2005), pp. 28–29. Chin Peng, My Side of History, pp. 14–15. Ibid. Ibid., p. 16. C.C. Chin and Karl Hack, eds., Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), p. 63. Cheah Boon Kheng, “The Legal Period: 1945–48” in Dialogues with Chin Peng, edited by Chin and Hack, p. 257.

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46

Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 477. 47 W.E. Willmott, “The Emergence of Nationalism” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 587; see also Sandhu and Wheatley, “Challenges of Success”, the conclusion to Management of Success, p. 1081.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Contestants Contesting Visions permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.and Individual articles are • 51 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

Contestants and Contesting Visions

The Trouble with the Term, “Malayan”

A

fter the war, the British returned with a plan to make Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, and others equal citizens sharing a common Malayan identity. The plan involved, firstly, the political reconfiguration of the territories under British control. The British had three settlements on the Straits of Malacca and treaty arrangements to “advise” nine Malay states. Two settlements, Penang and Malacca, and the nine Malay states would be merged into a single unitary state. The sultans would be cajoled into transferring their sovereignty to the British monarch, thereby placing their states under direct rule by the British, which was a radical change from the previous status of indirect rule. The whole Malay peninsula thus became a crown colony, under the name Malayan Union, which was inaugurated on 1 April 1946. Singapore was reconstituted as a separate crown colony until the proper time for another imperial design to be worked out. The nation-building aspect of the Malayan Union is seen in its provision, for the first time in Malaya, of a common citizenship for Malays and nonMalays alike. Citizenship would be granted to all who were local-born, and to immigrants who had stayed for ten years. Newcomers would need only five years’ residence to qualify. The Malays feared that as a consequence of the Malayan Union they would become a dispossessed people in their own country. They rallied to protest under the leadership of a Johore aristocrat, Datuk Onn bin Jaafar, and the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) founded with him as president. 51

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The British caved in and reached a compromise with the Malay rulers and UMNO on an alternative plan. There would still be a centralized state but under a federal arrangement. The governor of Malayan Union, the deputy of the British monarch, would be substituted by a British high commissioner for what would become the Federation of Malaya. The sultans would be restored to sovereignty, but as constitutional rulers. In the prewar era, the Malays, based on a certain interpretation of the treaties concluded between the sultans and Britain, had laid claim to a special position and special rights. These would be honoured in the new federation. The British high commissioner’s powers and duties covered, among other things, that of protecting the sovereignty and dignity of the Malay sultans, and the special position of the Malays. As for the non-Malays, they lost the citizenship on jus soli as offered under the Malayan Union. The terms of citizenship for them under the Federation of Malaya agreement, effective on 1 February 1948, were more complex and restrictive. The Malayan Union protest sharpened the nationalist sensibility of the Malays. They became very wary of the term “Malayan”. They felt it sidelined and reduced them to one of various races in the country. UMNO representatives in the negotiations with the British on the Federation of Malaya agreement objected to the use of the term “Malayan”. Consequently, “Malayness” was enshrined in the [Federation of Malaya] constitution, whereas the idea of the “Malayan” had no status at all. The new political entity was translated as Persatuan Tanah Melayu. It contained no legal definition of the “Malayan”. It was a state, not the template for a nation (that the British wanted, and continued to want.) For many Malays, after the Union fiasco, “Malayan” was a dirty word.1 Clearly, because of this difficulty, citizenship in the Federation of Malaya agreement was something divorced from nationality. The linking of citizenship to a Malayan nationality would help to foster a sense of belonging, but it would have been abhorrent to Malay nationalists. As it turned out, the de-linking of citizenship from nationality suited many Chinese and

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Indians at this time (1948) as they had not been weaned from their allegiance to their motherlands. The Malay radicals who emerged after the war as the Malay Nationalist Party (MNP) joined in the debate, proposing a citizenship with a Melayu (Malay) nationality. The word “Melayu” was meant to denote not the Malay race but Malay culture. The concept was inclusive of non-Malays. A Chinese or Indian could become a Melayu national; the condition was that he “had to embrace Malay culture unequivocally, ‘to live and die as a Malay’ ”.2 To be a Melayu national was an act of will that a Chinese or Indian could make, just as conversely, though unlikely, a Malay could decide not to. Like their rivals in the UMNO, the Malay radicals in the MNP also had a problem with the term “Malayan”. Whereas the British and non-Malay parties saw the “Malayan” as encompassing and inclusive of the various races, the Malay radicals viewed it as restrictive, forcing the idea of a Malay nation into a colonial mould. Dr Burhanuddin Al-Hemy, the Malay radical theoretician, argued that the idea of “Melayu” being cast in a bigger mould could accommodate the idea of the “Malayan” which was a smaller mould. But the reverse was not possible. Based on what he had written, we can be sure that the debate between the proponents of “Melayu” and “Malayan” “will never end” (as he put it).3 Certain English-educated Chinese, Indians and Eurasians regarded Malaya as their native land. Tan Cheng Lock, the influential Straits Chinese businessman in Malacca, was a leading example. While in India during the war, he discussed the future with some people also taking refuge there whom he compatriotly called “We Malayans”. From Bombay in 1945, Tan petitioned the Colonial Office to accord “true Malayans” of all races in Malaya “equal rights and responsibilities, politically and economically”.4 Certain young English-educated radicals in a Singapore party, the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU), shared Tan Cheng Lock’s vision, and would have a use for him. The MDU was a satellite of the MCP, the organization through which the MCP attracted the English-educated into its orbit. But the English-educated radicals were “Malayans” who associated with the MCP in an anti-colonial struggle. The English-educated radicals embraced multiracialism, they sought equality for individuals of all races,

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and founded a non-communal party, the MDU. Most tellingly, they supported the Malayan Union.5 This surely is the touchstone of their Malayanness. The MDU only put in a rider that Singapore should be included in the Malayan Union, and suggested improvements to the common citizenship proposed in the scheme.

The Strange Behaviour of the MCP The MCP had yet to attain such a definitive level of Malayan consciousness and identity as the English-educated radicals. MCP leaders and members were mainly Chinese-educated. The party had failed to win significant numbers of Malays, Indians, and Eurasians. It had not developed into a Malayan nationalist movement. Its involvement in the racial clashes of 1945–46 showed a damning lack of national vision. The MCP failed to capitalize on the Malayan Union. It did not support the Union and rally the non-Malays as it could, and, indeed, should have done. It was the UMNO which, by leading the Malay protest, established its primacy as a nationalist force in post-war Malaya. In this respect, the MCP had lost out by default to the UMNO. The MCP’s attitude to the Malayan Union was something of a puzzle. Far from supporting it enthusiastically, the MCP actually attacked it. Why, when the citizenship proposals for the Chinese, and non-Malays generally, were so liberal? Yet Chin Peng stated in his memoirs that the citizenship proposals were too restrictive for the Chinese. What was he thinking of? Chin Peng had a second objection relating to the Malayan Union’s provision for executive and legislative councils which, he said, would be totally under British supervision and control, and “would not have the slightest tinge of democracy”.6 The turn of phrase Chin Peng used was Lai Te’s. This should alert us to a give-away. Lai Te, the double agent, had deflected the MCP, as the war neared the end, from armed revolt, and set it on the peaceful, constitutional, road. On 25 August 1945, Lai Te had initiated an eight-point programme from which the fundamental goal of the MCP, establishing a communist republic in Malaya, was dropped, to Chin Peng’s dismay. In other words, independence from colonial rule would not be demanded. Instead, the MCP now sought a form of self-government with elected

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representative councils. No wonder the British thought the MCP’s agenda was compatible with the Malayan Union objectives. Lai Te was steering the MCP to cooperate with the returning British. But he had to make a show of attacking them. “Mr Wright [Lai Te’s codename] reveals the nakedness of [the] White Paper [on the Malayan Union]” blasts the communist journal, The Democrat, of 9 March 1946. The White Paper proposals had “not the slightest odour of democracy”.7 The accusation was disingenuous, but it succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of Lai Te’s young and inexperienced colleagues. They were misled into thinking that the Malayan Union citizenship scheme was worthless because there would be a centralization of power in British hands facilitated through the executive and legislative councils.

The Anti-Federation Campaign In the last quarter of 1946, non-Malay disquiet mounted, because of concerns that the Federation agreement, negotiated with secrecy, would prove discriminatory and inimical to the concept of the “Malayan”. The articulate advocates of the “Malayan”, Tan Cheng Lock and the MDU radicals, together formed a Council of Joint Action (CJA) in Singapore on 14 December 1946, with Tan as the chairman. Gerald de Cruz, a Eurasian leader in the MDU and also an MCP member, played a big part in its formation, and it was through him that the MCP exercised a strong influence on it. The CJA’s purpose was to get the British to talk with them on a proposal that included the reattachment of Singapore to Malaya, selfgovernment, and equal rights. The CJA expanded into an All-Malaya Council of Joint Action (AMCJA) involving, among others, the Malay radicals of the Malay Nationalist Party (MNP). Taunted by the UMNO as a betrayer of Malays, the MNP left to form a Malay-centred opposition to the Federation, the Pusat Tenaga Ra’ayat (PUTERA). But soon there was renewed cooperation in what became the AMCJA-PUTERA. It was, to say the least, a coalition of contradictory principles as the PUTERA stood for a Melayu nationality, and the AMCJA’s leading figures espoused a Malayan nationalism. Some fudging of the citizenship issue was done to hold the coalition together.

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The Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce was hesitant at first, but later joined the AMCJA-PUTERA in time to stage the coalition’s most dramatic act of protest. This was a hartal, a general strike by labour and business on 20 October 1947, which shut down Singapore and towns across the Malayan Union. The British feared a recurrence and communal riots as well on the day that the Federation of Malaya would be inaugurated, 1 February 1948. The preventive measures they contemplated included the detention of Lee Kong Chian, the leader of the Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce. In the event, they did not detain Lee. But then neither were there any major disturbances. The Federation agreement came into force as scheduled. The British had settled it with the Malay rulers and UMNO, and treated the anti-federation campaign as of no account.

The Communist Insurgency The MCP took stock of the new situation. The wartime alliance with the British had earned it a semi-legality. It had the freedom to organize labour unions and to direct them to go on strike, helped by the poor working conditions of the period. It was following Lai Te’s strategy and continued doing so even after his exposure in March 1947, because, Chin Peng said, the strategy was still considered correct. Yet it was looking less and less plausible. For despite controlling the workforce of the whole economy from plantations, mines, wharves to land transport, the MCP was unable to obtain any concession from the government. The gun salute ushering in the Federation, heard by the MCP politburo whose meeting was in session on that day in their headquarters in Klyne Street, Kuala Lumpur, was a reminder that they were going nowhere. But it was not easy to switch to a militant course. Lai Te’s betrayal had killed off many senior leaders. The men in charge now were young, inexperienced, stunned by his duplicity, and broke from his making off with the party’s funds as well. The new secretary-general, Chin Peng, was a little over twenty three years old. He looked to communist parties in China, India, Indochina, Indonesia, and Australia for leads. The Australian communist, Lawrence Sharkey, called at Singapore en route to and from a conference in Calcutta held from 28 February to 6 March

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1948. Both times he met up with Chin Peng at the MCP’s office in Queen’s Street. On the second occasion, as pre-arranged by Chin Peng, Sharkey gave an account of the Calcutta conference to a meeting of the MCP politburo at the Queen’s Street office. Sharkey was with them for a day or so, and then left them to their deliberations for the next few days without him present. The question is whether he had influenced the politburo in the decision they arrived at to adopt the principle of armed revolt. Chin Peng gathered from what Sharkey said that the tenor of the proceedings at Calcutta was militant, but some in the politburo did not see it as he did.8 Historians have been wanting to know if the Calcutta conference had precipitated the series of communist-led uprisings across Asia in 1948, in India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. We may infer from Chin Peng’s memoirs that it had, in Malaya, at least. In Malaya, it had an impact on men who deprecatingly saw themselves as novices by the standards of international Communism. Apart from getting the general drift from Sharkey that the Calcutta conference was prorevolution, the MCP learned from his Australian experience a way to deal with “scabs” (strikebreakers) that was the trigger for the revolution. In 1947–48, the government and employers in Malaya were getting tough on labour unions and strikes. Employers went so far as to hire thugs as strikebreakers. Someone in the politburo asked Sharkey how the Australians responded to strikebreakers. He carefully but chillingly explained that they did away with them. After Sharkey had left the meeting, the politburo considered a related matter: a trade union bill about to be rubberstamped in the federal legislative council that would destroy communist power over the workforce. The politburo needed the information and the justification to act. Sharkey and the trade union bill met their need. But there remained a big gap in their experience and ability. They issued a directive on the elimination of strikebreakers without clearly stating the type of persons targeted, and made other mistakes as well. The comrades down the line gunned down three European planters in Perak on 16 June 1948. The government declared a state of emergency in Perak and Johore on the same day, and extended it to cover the whole country two days later. The politburo had not intended the insurrection to start so soon, and was ill-prepared for it.

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Malayan Democratic Unionists, Malayan University radicals and Malayan Forum moderates The Malayan Union was to have been the political architecture of a new Malayan nation. The educational foundation for this new nation was envisaged in another post-war British plan: the founding of the University of Malaya. Malcolm MacDonald, the British Commissioner-General in Southeast Asia, was the chancellor of the new university. His address on the foundation day, 8 October 1949, inevitably drew the connection between the university and nation-building, but also revealed the late imperial mission to create a nation in Malaya that was multiracial, non-communal, and truly Malayan. MacDonald first narrated the English, British and American experiences of nation-building. In each case, he said, it involved “a mixed population of native and immigrant stock” recognizing their common interests and welding themselves into a “potent” and “even more potent” nation.9 In America, it involved, additionally, the severance of ties with motherlands beyond, but in the Dominions, the ties with the mother country were strengthened through membership of the British commonwealth of nations. MacDonald lauded nation-building as “one of the memorable, creative and compelling acts of human history”, adding that “this great work…has now begun in Malaya”. He was concerned to emphasize that the nation being built should be Malayan. …the national population will contain a mixture of races. It will include, besides Malays, Malayan Chinese, Malayan Indians and others…It is essential that communal barriers between them shall be broken down… The bonding between young Malayans, he suggested, would be strongest if it started in the schools and playgrounds, and continued in a residential university where they learned not to differentiate by skin colour and form “Malay clubs, Chinese clubs, European clubs and so on”. (The University of Malaya forbade ethnic-based clubs, and ensured a racial mix in the allocation

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of hostel rooms.) MacDonald declared: “The University will be a cradle where a truly non-communal nation is nurtured”. MacDonald was a Fabianist. “We are witnessing in Malaya the birth of a nation. Of course, so great a change cannot happen over-night nor even in a few years. It is a process to be accomplished carefully and gradually, step by step.” The acting vice-chancellor, Professor T.H. Silcock (Economics), and the special branch officer of the colonial police, R.B. Corridon, were also Fabianists. In this section, we look first at the English-educated radicals of the MDU, some of whom were tertiary-educated, and the student radicals of the University of Malaya. They turned to models other than Fabianism and the British commonwealth of nations. Their sources of inspiration were Communism and the Asian revolution, in particular, the rise of the People’s Republic of China. In contrast to these radical elites, there were the students who went to U.K. universities after the war and organized the Malayan Forum in London. They took as their models the down-to-earth Fabian society, and the junior British Government leaders they came into contact with, who had enlightened views on independence for the colonies. The constitutional face that the MCP showed to the world was the Malayan Democratic Union, and this party may be said to have kicked off the post-war political history of Malaya and Singapore. Five men in it may be specially noted. John Eber was a Singapore-born Eurasian educated at Harrow and Cambridge and practised law. Lim Hong Bee, also Singapore-born, was educated at Raffles Institution and won a King’s Scholarship to Cambridge, going there in 1937. Lim Kean Chye, Penang-born to a rich family, was a law student at Cambridge where he met Lim Hong Bee. Eu Chooi Yip was born in Kuantan, Pahang, and educated at Victoria School and Raffles College in Singapore, and in the latter, he was noted for his brilliant mind and excellent performance in Economics. P.V. Sarma, born in India to a

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brahmin family but brought to Singapore at the age of three, was educated at St. Joseph’s Institution and Raffles College, and worked as a teacher. The MDU was inaugurated on 21 December 1945, with more than 500 hundred people present, in the hall of the Liberty Cabaret in North Bridge Road, Singapore.10 The purpose of the MDU was to achieve a united, selfgoverning Malaya with an elected legislature, where all communities would have the right to vote and work without discrimination, and enjoy all the civic freedoms, social security and free education and health care. These five young men and others with them were serious about their aim, and even obsessed by it. Living at a time when revolution was happening all across Asia, they found it easy to believe, that the revolution would lead to a new dawn of freedom from want and poverty. They were swept up in this heady triumphal march of Asian revolution. Eu Chooi Yip, for example, was deeply moved by the courage and endurance of the Chinese Communist Party as told in Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China.11 After such suffering, Eu clearly thought, there must come the socialist millennium, and he avidly read up everything he could lay hands on about the Chinese revolution. Turning to Malaya, the MDU intellectuals believed only the perfidious British stood between them and the political and social revolution they wanted to bring about. Oust the British — that was the task of the moment. They were disposed to plunge headlong into working with the MCP whom they saw as pursuing the same goal as themselves, only better experienced, organized, supported by the people, disciplined for the task, and dedicated to it. The MDU intellectuals were the ones with the brains, the superior intellect, but they were happy to accept the MCP as their master. They were idealists and romantics to the hilt, and their vision was hopelessly clouded. They did not apparently think of the long term implications of working with the communists.12 They were not communists at first, but were later to be converted. Eu Chooi Yip was the first one to take this step and did so by the end of 1948. He joined the Anti-British League, an intermediate-level cell group, and was the only one to go the whole way to full-fledged membership of the MCP.13 He, in turn, converted P.V. Sarma and others. Sarma became one of the five top Anti-British League (ABL) leaders. Eu Chooi Yip and P.V. Sarma

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contacted Lim Kean Chye in August 1949 upon his return from London after finally completing his law degree, and brought him into the ABL. The ever zealous Eu Chooi Yip renewed contact with yet another friend, John Eber, who had been abroad in New Zealand and Australia from April to December 1948. Eu Chooi Yip did not have much trouble converting Eber, using the argument “that nationalists had one and only one choice — an armed revolution for Malaya’s independence”.14 Eber’s own thoughts in this period were also tending in this direction. As an ABL member, Eber was placed under the mentorship of Lim Kean Chye. Among the other converts of this period was one C.V. Devan Nair, a Malayalee Indian born in Malacca, and working in Singapore as a school teacher. He attended an MDU meeting one day in 1947 and was noticed by P.V. Sarma who took him under his wing. Sarma gave him Marxist books to read, counselled, and even helped him with money needed in the family, and made him assistant general secretary of the Singapore Teachers’ Union, of which Sarma himself was the general secretary. When he judged the time was right, Sarma invited Devan Nair to join “the final revolution that will transform humanity”.15 Sarma arranged an initiation ceremony for Devan Nair held “one dark night” in the presence of several people, one of whom was Lim Kean Chye. Sarma began by detailing the merits of his nominee, and at the penultimate moment, turned to Devan Nair, saying: These are comrades in a cell of a great underground revolutionary organization — the Anti-British League. You are considered worthy to join us. Will you take a solemn oath that you will bind yourself in comradeship with all of us in the great revolutionary task of ending British rule and winning independence for our country?16 Devan Nair, recalling this event many years later in 1984, could not avoid caricaturing it: “I gave my oath. Then each of those present gave me a firm and solemn handshake. I went home thrilled. I had become part of a great revolutionary movement.”17

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Another convert who should be mentioned was A. Samad Ismail, a Singapore-born Malay whose parents were from Java. He worked as chief sub-editor of the leading Malay newspaper, Utusan Melayu. He was “a protégé of Eu Chooi Yip” who had roped him in and then placed him in the care of P.V. Sarma to help in the Malay section of the ABL.18 The MDU intellectuals overlapped with the next wave of young intellectuals thrown up by the post-war tertiary educational scene. In October 1949, the British formed the University of Malaya located in Singapore, basing it on two pre-existing institutions, Raffles College (for the arts and sciences) at Bukit Timah, and the King Edward VII College of Medicine at Sepoy Lines, adjacent to the General Hospital. The first batch attending the university included, because of the war, more mature students, a number of whom were returnees to the former colleges. The majority of students were concerned to make up for lost time and were more focused on their studies, with the view to graduating with good degrees and thereafter to lucrative careers. But a small minority made their presence felt as student radicals. It was a dual campus and each sector had its core of radicalism. At the Bukit Timah campus where the arts and sciences were, one James Puthucheary was the leading light. James Puthucheary was a Johore-born Malayalee Indian who grew up in a family where the conversation was frequently on the Indian nationalist struggle, and where people involved in that struggle came to visit and stay.19 He had a childhood friend, William Kuok Hock Leng, with whom he was very close, bonded by a mutual interest in the history and politics of Asia. During the war, Puthucheary enrolled with the revolutionary Indian National Army which took him to Burma and India. In 1947, from Calcutta, he started a correspondence with William Kuok, followed by his arrival in Singapore to meet him. “They were teenagers when they had last met,” and now “they were impatient, angry, dedicated young men of twenty-five”.20 Their dedication was to the anti-colonial struggle, the creation of an independent Malaya and the eradication of “poverty, ignorance and racialism”.21 William Kuok was from a rich Johore family and could have gone abroad for further study (his father’s wish), but instead he was working in Singapore at the office of the MDU of which he was an important

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member, “a brilliant MDU intellectual” according to one historian,22 “a top propagandist and intellectual of the MCP”, according to the British.23 He was later to go into the jungle with the communist guerrillas, and was killed in an ambush in Pahang on 8 September 1953.24 Puthucheary went to Raffles College in 1948 when it was about to become part of a university. William Kuok was a major influence drawing him into the communist fold, but it was P. V. Sarma who was instrumental in actually initiating him into it. This happened sometime in 1949 when Puthucheary was at the university.25 He became the leader of the ABL group at the Bukit Timah campus, and was the centre of attention, flanked by admirers and befriended by budding writers and poets. For he had a “formidable intelligence, a corrosive and most enjoyable sense of humour, and a great personal charm”.26 At the medical school in another part of town, a young Singapore-born doctor, Joseph Tan Kwang Meng, who joined as an assistant lecturer in 1949, was the focus of another student group. He was from a wealthy Teochew family who owned land in the Jalan Hock Chye area near Upper Serangoon. He graduated from the King Edward VII College of Medicine with distinction in surgery in 1947, and worked in a private clinic before he took up teaching in what became the medical faculty of the University of Malaya.27 Eu Chooi Yip inducted him into the MDU in 1947, and from the end of 1949, he was slowly lured into the communist fold, and then together with Eu Chooi Yip, P.V. Sarma and Lim Kean Chye, “moved into the top leadership of the English-speaking ABL movement in Singapore”.28 Dr Joseph Tan had a helper, Lim Chan Yong, a medical student. Lim Chan Yong was a Cantonese born and bred in Chinatown, south of the Singapore River. On completing his secondary education at Raffles Institution, he enrolled at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in October 1946. He was present at the inauguration of the MDU in December 1945. He came to know Eu Chooi Yip and Dr Joseph Tan, and was inspired by their dedication and sincerity. By being close to them, he soon basked in a reflected glory which helped in his work of winning undergraduates to the cause.29 James Puthucheary and Dr Joseph Tan and their friends easily gained a foothold in the University of Malaya Students’ Union and various other

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student societies. They proposed the formation of a student political party, but could not get it passed by the Board of Student Welfare into which they had earlier tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain direct student representation.30 They believed that a university education was not complete without some training for future political leadership of the country. Malaya could import all sorts of experts and professionals, “but not political leaders who had to be Malayans nurtured in the local milieu”.31 They ran the Malayan Undergrad, mouthpiece of the students’ union, and the Malayan Orchid (financed by Dr Joseph Tan and first edited by Lim Chan Yong), and took over The Cauldron, making it politically more relevant as The New Cauldron. The Malayan Orchid was Lim Chan Yong’s idea, and he invited Puthucheary to join the team, and he himself was the editor until he failed his examination in mid-1950 and had his enrolment terminated. Through these publications, the student radicals hoped to give the campus a sense of purpose other than study. The tone was set by Puthucheary in a piece he wrote in anticipation of the founding of the University of Malaya. “A true evaluation of the University and of University education must necessarily be in terms of its purpose to society,” he stressed.32 As he saw it, the most important challenge facing Malaya was the battle for a Malayan nation. “If the University is to play its important role in the development of the country, it must become the advocate and guardian of the concept of the Malayan nation and work for the achievement of this ideal.”33 The university had a role in solving problems and synthesizing ideas appropriate to the Malayan situation. “If University students are to fulfill their social functions and justify the existence of the University, they will have to help in solving Malaya’s problems by adapting foreign ideas and thoughts to her special conditions and developing them according to the genius of her people.”34 The university should tackle the country’s illiteracy problem and do community service. Puthucheary commended the effort made by a few Malay students of Raffles College for their community, saying that “the work of these pioneers should be continued and expanded to include students of all communities”. He also praised “the work of a handful of senior medical students undertaking St. John’s Ambulance classes in the city”.35

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But what was the Malayan nation? What did it mean? Whatever it was, Puthucheary was emphatic that it should not be a Malay nation. “The concept of a ‘Malay’ nation is reactionary in that it is essentially racial and would result in suppressing the rights of the majority who have contributed extensively to the wealth and progress of the country.”36 On the other hand, the Chinese and Indians must change their mindset: “the Chinese and Indians must cease to treat this country as ‘happy hunting grounds’ to which they owe nothing but a chance to make money. Indians and Chinese who intend to live in this country must cut their ties with their lands of origin and become integral parts of the nation. The various communities must fuse with one another, lose their separate identities and evolve the Malayan Nation”.37 The idea of fusion is a difficult concept which continues to daunt us. But in that exuberant springtime of nationalism, everything seemed possible, and there was confidence in “a synthesis of the different cultures”.38 The student radicals thought they could start by jettisoning British symbols, pastimes and manners, replacing the English rose with the Malayan orchid, the Lark (title of a student publication) with the Pelandok (Malayan mousedeer, used as a pen-name). Lim Chan Yong named his journal the Malayan Orchid because to him, this flower was “an indigenous plant and a symbol of independence and the culture of the Malayan nation”.39 The Malayan Orchid roundly denounced the adoption of British social etiquette as a grotesque affectation.40 Many other views and ideas were examined in this period, echoes of which have resonated in later nation-building policies in Malaya and Singapore. The student radicals debated the use of Malay as the common medium in schools; the use of English for utilitarian purposes; whether primary schools should teach in the mother tongue (seen as encouraging communalism) or in Malay (which would foster a Malayan outlook from an early age); the advantages of having both Malay and English as the medium of instruction when pupils go up to secondary school; the “Malayanization” of the school curriculum, in history, replacing Richard the Lion-heart with the Malayan hero, Hang Tuah; whether Malay or English should be the national language (the student radicals strongly championing Malay while another lot, the conservative students, proposed English).

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A number of Singapore and Malayan students enrolled in British universities were to play a crucial part when they returned. They met one November day in 1949 in the flat of one of their friends, Abdul Razak (the future Malaysian prime minister), at Cornwall Gardens near London Underground’s Gloucester Station, and formed a club known as Malayan Forum.41 The object was to discuss the future of Malaya, a united, independent Malaya in which Singapore was included. The club had the blessings of the Colonial Office and established its venue at the Malayan Students’ Hostel at 44, Bryanston Square. Abdul Razak, Mohamed Sopiee, Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, Toh Chin Chye, and two Eurasians, Maurice Baker and Kenneth Byrne, were among the members. Lee had been in Raffles College but, deciding not to resume his studies there after the war, he left Singapore on his twenty-third birthday, in a British troopship, to study law at Cambridge.42 In England, these students were exposed to all shades of political opinion, including communism. Lim Hong Bee, who had forfeited his scholarship long ago, was in London trying to study law, and at the same time, represent the MCP. He and the British Communist Party sowed their tracts among the students. England was a free society and it was up to the students whether or not to pay any attention to them. There were other more engaging people in politics they could listen to. Junior Labour Ministers like Woodrow Wyatt, and Conservative and Liberal MPs, were guest speakers at the Malayan Forum. The students made friends with members of the Labour Party. Lee campaigned for a Cambridge friend who stood as a Labour candidate in a rural seat in the 1950 general election. Lee and Goh Keng Swee got to know Lady Hilda Selwyn Clarke, a Fabian Socialist, who was a mentor to them, and later, even a guardian angel vouching for them with the colonial police in Singapore. The students in England had access to political circles and experiences, which made for a rounded political education with excellent role models to emulate. This was invaluable. However, the point should not be overstressed, as Lim Hong Bee, John Eber and Lim Kean Chye also had the advantage of studying in England, but were unmoved by any party or creed save communism. Perhaps it was because they were at Cambridge in the mid-1930s when communism was very strong, recruiting some key British spies.

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In 1950, Lee Kuan Yew then twenty-seven years old, was called to the Middle Temple. In the same year, he addressed the Malayan Forum on the subject, “The Returned Student”. It is instructive to compare his thinking with that of the MDU intellectuals and the student radicals in the University of Malaya. Lee would appear to make the same observation as they when he said: In the brief space of four years, we have seen the emergence of six Asiatic countries to national independence: India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, the Philippines. Malaya now finds herself the only remnant of colonial imperialism left in Southeast Asia, surrounded by these new Asiatic national states. The only other fragment of colonialism left in Asia is French Indo-China.43 But Lee differed from them in one essential: China. He did not include China in his survey as Eu Chooi Yip and others did: “what had fired the imagination of the English-educated radicals was the Chinese communist revolution in China, which had opened up new vistas of national struggle and revolutionary change”.44 This set Lee apart from them. He got his ideas from seeing the pattern of events in the newly emergent states of Southeast and South Asia. The dominant idea in the mind of MDU intellectuals and Englisheducated student radicals was a social revolution.45 To them an independent Malayan nation would mean very little if the toiling masses continued to be exploited as before. Independence was associated in their mind with socialist restructuring towards a more just and equal life for everybody. They were driven by a double obsession with independence and socialism. They spurned the good life that was theirs to enjoy, and instead cherished hopes and dreams to remake society. Lee shared their ideals. He believed in these ideals, but held that one did not have to be a communist to have these ideals and practise them. In his speech to the Malayan Forum in 1950, we could discern a hint of the future PAP democratic socialist platform: For any independent Malayan Government to exist, it must win popular support, and to gain any popular support, it must promise,

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and do, social justice. Indeed, and this is a fact important enough to warrant repetition, the continued existence of the new Asiatic state depends upon whether they are able to carry out long overdue reforms; whether they can, without the communist religion, do all that a communist state can do for the masses.46 Lee identified communism as one of two major problems in Malaya. The other was communalism — the ethnic loyalties that militated against national social cohesion. Lee set these two problems in the context of colonialism. There was, in fact, a trilogy of interacting forces in his analysis: communism, communalism and colonialism, with colonialism, which had been around longest, as the father to the other two. The experience of colonialism — its might, greed, inequality, and racism — was what drove the nationalist leader, also one of its progeny, to fight it. The returned student was this nationalist leader. Lee characterized the returned student as the spear-head of the nationalist movement. As such, the returned student had to face the challenge of communism, communalism and colonialism. He had to face the fact that the Malayan Communist Party was an established and organized force. Lee said: In [India, Burma, Ceylon, etc] the leaders from the educated classes, the returned students, had time to organize and were already organized, like the Indian Congress Party, before communism became a force in the political life of these countries.47 This was not the case in Malaya. Here, the communists preceded the returned student by some thirty years at least. Lee added: At the moment, it is clear that the only party organized to force the British to leave, and to run the country, is the communist party. They are not merely so many bandits, shooting and being shot at in the jungle, and creating terror for the sake of terror. Theirs is a tight knit organization making their bid for power.48 Lee apparently included international communism as a part of this powerful communist organization. Because of this power, Lee reasoned, the British would not grant independence to Malaya anytime soon. The pace at

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which India, Burma, Ceylon, and other countries gained their independence was not likely to be repeated in Malaya. Another challenge which the returned student had to tackle was communalism. Malay nationalism unleashed in the Malayan Union controversy accentuated Malay communalism at the same time. The Malays might have won a famous victory and got the British to reinstate Malaya as, first and foremost, a Malay country. But there was no escaping the fact that, as Lee said in his address to the Malayan Forum, Malaya had “a Chinese community almost as large as the Malay (one)”.49 Had this not been the case, he continued: I venture to suggest that British imperialism in Malaya would be well on its way out. But the facts being what they are, we must accept British rule for some time, during which we can attain a sufficient degree of social cohesion, and arouse a sufficient degree of civic and political consciousness among the various races of Malaya. This time is vital if we are to avoid a political vacuum that may otherwise follow British withdrawal from Malaya.50 Lee gave a definition of the multiracial society that Malaya must have before it can become independent. The prerequisite of Malayan independence is the existence of a Malayan society, not Malay, not Malayan Chinese, not Malayan Indian, not Malayan Eurasian, but Malayan, one that embraces the various races already in the country.51 This is another idea that Lee shared with the MDU intellectuals and the student radicals in the University of Malaya. Simply stated, Lee’s definition was to be his guiding principle in politics, and to resurface as his banner in a potentially explosive conflict when Singapore was merged in the Federation of Malaysia. Lee’s Malayan Forum talk suggested firstly, that communism, which had a head start in Malaya and was organized, would take over if the British were to leave forthwith. Secondly, he proposed the continuation of British rule to allow time for the returned students to build up social cohesion among the various races.

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It is instructive to set Lee’s speech beside a statement written by John Eber, a leading MDU intellectual. In a letter to the Colonial Office dated 22 December 1948, Eber painted three scenarios. The first was “the current British policy of taking Malaya slowly towards full internal selfgovernment”, which he considered untenable because it set Malaya too far back in the parade of Asian independence. The second scenario was “a new British policy of granting early, if not immediate, full internal selfgovernment to Malaya”.52 This was not yet an option that the British had thought of, but Eber clearly meant to press them to do so, failing which the third scenario would happen: the Malayan nationalists (a term by which Eber implied MDU intellectuals like himself) would be forced to take to armed revolution with the communists for the independence of Malaya. But what Eber did not say (as Lee did in his speech) was that the second scenario would favour a communist takeover. The second scenario was a takeover by constitutional means, the third by force, an armed revolution. Either way the communists would win. Eber did not present the British with any viable option. Eber’s conceptualization had also left out one important factor, and this was, the kind of national leaders that must be in place before the British would speed up self-government. The choice for the British was not simply, as Eber posited: the constitution or the revolution. It was a choice between communism and a congenial alternative. Lee was in no doubt which the British preferred. We, the returned students, would be the type of leaders that the British would find, relatively, the more acceptable. For if the choice lies, as in fact it does, between a communist republic of Malaya, and a Malaya within the British Commonwealth, led by people, who despite their opposition to imperalism, still share certain ideals in common with the Commonwealth, there is little doubt which alternative the British will find the lesser evil. Yet Eber was generally correct in his reading of history. Some MDU intellectuals had already gone into the jungle with the communist guerrillas,

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and their armed revolution did hasten the day of Malaya’s independence. But Eber and the MDU intellectuals (save for a very few rehabilitated ones) were not the inheritors of the British transfer of power and sovereignty. Eber and his colleagues had forfeited their chance when they joined the communists. At the start of the armed revolution and the passing of Emergency laws, Eu Chooi Yip took a quick decision to dissolve the MDU. In January 1951, the police arrested and detained without bringing to trial, John Eber, P.V. Sarma, A. Samad Ismail and C.V. Devan Nair. The police looked for Lim Hong Bee too and reportedly searched his house (he was away in London) and removed documents in full view of his wife, Dr Maggie Lim. Eu Chooi Yip escaped to Indonesia, and Lim Kean Chye to China. In February 1953, Eber was released, and in June, went to England. In the same year, Sarma was repatriated to India, and from there he made his way to Peking (Beijing). Among others arrested in the January 1951 swoop was the student radical James Puthucheary, and Lim Chan Yong, the former medical student and originator of the Malayan Orchid.

Mentris Besar and their Alliance Rivals The British lost some of the best minds in the rising generation to the communists. The communist insurgency from June 1948 made the battle for hearts and minds more critical than ever. The Chinese population had to be motivated not to support the Chinese guerrillas. The best way was to incorporate them as equal citizens. So the debate on this subject continued in the shadow of the emergency. The debate also continued in the shadow of the failed Malayan Union. In the Union controversy, the British saw a leader who struck them as a compelling personality: Datuk Onn bin Jaafar. MacDonald and High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney cultivated him in the aftermath.53 The British continued to hope that Malayan people, Malays and non-Malays alike, could be persuaded to cross into non-communal, multiracial politics, and believed that Datuk Onn was the one to lead them into it. For a considerable time, MacDonald, Gurney, and Gurney’s successor, General Sir Gerald Templer, supported Datuk Onn behind the scenes, and he, on his

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part, seemed willing to take on the role of Malayan, as opposed to Malay, leader. He soon began to call for the creation of a Malayan nationality. But Datuk Onn was not totally suitable for the part as leader and reconciler of Malayan races and parties that the British cast him in with such high hopes. Certainly, his background was impeccable. Born in 1895, he was sent to boarding school in England at an early age, and had to learn the Malay language on his return.54 He later attended the exclusive Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, the royal capital of Perak. He was from a family that boasted three mentris besar (chief ministers to the sultan of Johore) before him, and he himself was to hold this office. But for all that, he lacked the gift of diplomacy. He clashed with Sultan Ibrahim who then forced him to choose between being mentri besar and UMNO president. He chose the latter. His ambition to be the deputy high commissioner of the Federation was blocked by the sultans who considered him arrogant. He had dispensed with consulting them before he made his call for a new Malayan nationality. And in politics he was as likely to offend other leaders as he was to reconcile with them. However, he had other attributes: as an Anglophone gentleman, as a courageous peacemaker in the 1945–46 racial clashes, as a close friend of a well-known Chinese family, the Kuoks, and as a journalist who had lived and worked in Singapore for nine years. These aspects in his outlook and career arguably helped the British to win him over to non-communal politics. MacDonald initiated the Communities Liaison Committee which met at intervals from December 1948 to mid-1951. The chairman was EEC Thuraisingham, a lawyer and president of the Ceylon Federation. Datuk Onn and Tan Cheng Lock were among other key leaders in it. The most significant outcome was Datuk Onn’s acceptance of automatic citizenship for non-Malays born in the Federation i.e., the principle of jus soli. He had enormous difficulty though, in getting the UMNO to endorse it, but he asserted his personality, threw in his resignation, and eventually, at the UMNO annual meeting on 27 August 1950, it was passed with some amendments.55 His next move was to open UMNO to all races, making it non-communal. The British backed him, and the UMNO executive acquiesced in it, but for many in the party, especially the rank and file, a

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multiracial party was a leap too far! Sensing defeat, Datuk Onn told the UMNO annual meeting on 25 and 26 August 1951 that he would not stand for re-election as he was going to form a new party. He launched the Independence of Malaya Party (IMP) on 16 September 1951. The party’s name sounded gungho, but in truth, Datuk Onn and the elites in it wanted only gradual constitutional progress. MacDonald and Gurney had encouraged Datuk Onn in this new venture. At the same time, they did not wish to split the Malay ranks, and urged Datuk Onn, without success, to head both UMNO and IMP against the day when the two parties could be united under him. Tan Cheng Lock welcomed the IMP. He had become president of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA), formed on 27 February 1949, to rally the Chinese against the MCP. The MCA helped to resettle Chinese squatters from the jungle’s edge in new villages where they would not be intimidated into giving food and information to communist guerrillas. It raised funds through legalized lotteries for this task. In return, it hoped the Federation Government would be sympathetic to Chinese grievances and interests. Many MCA leaders were Kuomintang activists in Malaya, so much so that the MCA was synonymous with the KMT.56 Tan Cheng Lock and other English-educated leaders of the MCA, who centred their loyalty on Malaya and not KMT China, had to accommodate themselves to this group who were not only the great majority in the MCA, but also prominent in the Chinese Chambers of Commerce and dialect associations. This was why, although Tan Cheng Lock wanted to make the MCA non-communal and team up with the IMP, he was frustrated on both counts, and the MCA eventually formed an alliance with another communal party, none other than the UMNO. The UMNO reasserted its Malay identity as soon as Datuk Onn stood down. The new UMNO president, Tunku Abdul Rahman, focused his acceptance speech on the theme: “who are these ‘Malayans’ that Datuk Onn speaks of? This is a Malay country…”57 He continued: “This country was received from the Malays and to the Malays it ought to be returned. What is called ‘Malayans’, it is not yet certain who they are; therefore let the Malays alone settle who they are.”

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UMNO’s base had dwindled since its founding, and the Tunku built it up again, drumming up support from Malay schoolteachers, journalists, clerics, and peasants. In Perak he built a new UMNO, distinguishable from the old UMNO loyal to the state’s mentri besar who backed Datuk Onn. The MCA Selangor branch initiated an ad hoc alliance with the Selangor UMNO to contest the Kuala Lumpur municipal elections of February 1952. This was how the famous Alliance Party began, much to the disapproval of Tan Cheng Lock, who preferred the IMP, and even to have MCA candidates stand on the IMP ticket.58 But Tan had to accept it as done. The MCAUMNO success at the polls in Kuala Lumpur was followed by more successes in six urban centres in the Federation in December 1952. The UMNO and MCA formalized their alliance at the national level in eagerness to contest the federal or national election. (The municipal and town council elections were followed by the first ever federal legislative council election. The state legislative council elections were bypassed, even though Templer liked to have a step-by-step approach to elections.) The members of the state and federal legislative councils were appointed by the British, and here the UMNO and MCA were a small minority compared with the appointees who went on to form the IMP. Some appointees on the federal council were given portfolios as a kind of training for cabinet responsibility. Datuk Onn was the Member for Home Affairs. EEC Thuraisingham was the Member for Education. Thuraisingham had been an associate UMNO member at Datuk Onn’s request and would work with him after the IMP was formed. These men liked the member system to continue for several more years. They reasoned that the country was in an emergency, that elections were premature, more likely to result in chaos than democracy, and that it was more important to give the people good, honest, efficient government.59 Their attitude was very elitist and paternalist. They were alarmed that the UMNO was pressing for federal elections as soon as possible and for an elected majority in the federal legislative council. It was to stage a counter move that the mentris besar of seven of the nine Malay states proposed a National Conference, which was held on 27 April 1953. Some of these mentris besar were also senior officials of the

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Malayan Civil Service and had the bureaucrat’s distrust of the mass politics that the UMNO and MCA were working up. MacDonald and Templer had suggested the conference. Their idea was to help Datuk Onn, the IMP, and the mentris besar seize the political initiative. The National Conference chairman was the Perak mentri besar Panglima Datuk Bukit Gantang, a close associate of Datuk Onn’s. He simultaneously chaired a government committee on Malay participation in commerce and industry. Datuk Bukit’s greatest concern was the economic one: how to help the Malays regain the share of economic wealth that was theirs historically; their forefathers had been renowned for trade. He was convinced that UMNO’s rush to ally with the MCA and push for federal elections and independence were all wrong because the Malays had not yet attained a reasonable stake in the economy. There could be no political compromise with non-Malays, “no ‘Malayan nation’, without economic equality”.60 The National Conference was well received by the associations of minority groups: Eurasian, Ceylonese, Sikh, Pakistani, and Straits Chinese. They had done well under British rule and joined the conference as a way to preserve their status. The Malayan Indian Congress and Pan-Malayan Islamic Party also participated in it, but soon withdrew owing to their members’ objections. The National Conference was having little impact. Templer launched his plan B, a special committee on elections with a strong mentri besar presence. The special committee’s report predictably recommended an elected minority for the federal council. The Alliance demand, announced in April 1953, was for a three-fifths elected majority. The Conference of Malay Rulers met to mediate the difference. The Rulers decided on a federal council with fifty-two elected and forty-six nominated members. The Alliance was far from happy with a majority of only six seats. It called on its members to demonstrate by resigning from councils at every level of government. UMNO held protest marches. Templer’s successor, Sir Donald MacGillivray, was reminded of the Malayan Union crisis. MacGillivray feared public disorder would break out. He secretly met Tunku Abdul Rahman and gave the undertaking to consult the majority elected party on the appointment of five nominated members. The Tunku was placated.

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Datuk Onn apparently tried to stiffen the Rulers’ Conference not to give in to the UMNO’s demand for a three-fifths elected majority. He abruptly disbanded the IMP and formed the Party Negara in February 1954 to support the Rulers. This was perhaps why the UMNO reacted so strongly to the Rulers’ decision, which cannot be said to be unreasonable, and did, after all, grant an elected majority. MacGillivray, it should be noted, was quick to shift the focus of the crisis away from the British. He emphasized that the UMNO was confronting the Rulers and Party Negara, and not confronting the British Government. The prime objective of British policy in post-war Malaya was to create “a multiracial ‘Malayan’ national identity”, and “its flagship was the Malayan Union”.61 Though the Union had to be scuttled, the British continued to pursue this objective. Their hope was anchored on Datuk Onn. He was their man to carry out the task to decommunalise politics. But it proved too difficult and complex a task. He failed in his effort to decommunalise the UMNO just as Tan Cheng Lock also failed in a similar attempt in the MCA. Datuk Onn tried again by forming a new party, the IMP, and calling for a National Conference packed with mentri besar power. He was no more successful in these ventures. He had to contend with the forces of communalism in the shape of the rising UMNO-MCA alliance. However, historians have attributed a large part of the failure to Datuk Onn’s personality:62 his manner was abrasive, his rhetoric could be extreme, and he tended to make sharp about-turns. His latest venture, the Party Negara, was a switch back to a Malay communal stance. But by this time he was rapidly losing credibility. Tunku Abdul Rahman was the dark horse that would upset all British calculations. Born in 1903, a prince of Kedah, the Tunku read law and history at Cambridge in the 1920s, but did not clear his bar exams. After the war, he resumed his studies and was called to the Inner Temple in 1948. At Cambridge, and later in London, he acquired a taste for English clothes, cuisine, sports cars and racehorses. But this should not obscure the fact that he was a Malay prince raised in old courtesies and old ways of power and authority. In his days as a mature student, he was president of the Malay Society of Great Britain.

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UMNO leaders and their rivals in the IMP and the National Conference belonged to the same eminent traditional background. Their rivalry was the rivalry between top Malay elites. Occupationally, the Tunku was like the mentris besar who were senior MCS men. He too held an important federal government job, as deputy public prosecutor, but unlike the mentris besar, he gave up his post for politics. Another important difference between them was in their attitude to the idea of the Malayan. The Tunku rejected the proposition that independence should be handed to the Malayans and was critical of Datuk Onn and the elites for stating this. The Tunku stressed that the British had acquired Malaya from the Malays and ought to return it to the Malays. This leads us to the third and most striking difference. The Tunku would speed up the constitutional advance, even provoke a crisis to achieve his goal. The mentris besar favoured the gradual approach in line with the Fabianism of British officials, MacDonald, Gurney, Templer in the Federation, and others in the Colonial Office. The Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton, on a visit to Malaya in 1951, advised that independence would come only when Malayan people were united. The Tunku grasped the message. So did Tan Cheng Lock, whose quest for a non-communal party had come to naught, and now sought to carve a place in national politics as unifier of all the Chinese through the MCA. Tan, the Straits Chinese leader, had to admit that the Straits Chinese were only a sub-group. So the UMNO-MCA alliance was forged. The British were hoping for a single unitary non-communal party, not the alliance kind of unity. But it was the only kind possible. The Malayan Indian Congress was the third and smallest communal party in the alliance, joining up in 1954. Previously, under a local-born Punjabi president, K.L. Devaser, the MIC had associated with the noncommunal IMP. In 1954, he lost the presidency to V.T. Sambanthan (from the largest Indian ethnic group in Malaya, the Tamils) who took the MIC into the alliance. The federal election on 27 July 1955 was a triumph for the Alliance Party. Malays comprised 84 per cent of the registered electorate, Chinese, 11 per cent, and Indians, less than 5 per cent. Yet, on the Tunku’s insistence, the

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number of UMNO candidates on the Alliance ticket was limited to 35, while the MCA was generously allotted 15 candidates, and the MIC, two. The Tunku’s motive was to ensure the degree of unity necessary for the transfer of power from the British. The voters were asked to vote for independence, and they did. The Alliance won 51 of the 52 electoral seats. But this landslide was not a vindication of a multiracial Malayan unity. The Alliance was to go on to achieve independence without passing the test of Malayanness. In the next section we deal with the elites in Singapore who were the counterparts of the mentris besar and Alliance leaders of the Federation of Malaya. The Singapore elites were, firstly, the English-educated businessmen, bankers, and professionals who had prospered under British rule, and wanted constitutional change to be introduced slowly. Secondly, there were the Chinese-educated and Chinese dialect-speaking towkays whose loyalty still lay in China, and who were aligned on opposite sides of the civil war in China. Few were as adamant as Tan Kah Kee in making their stand. Many simply clung to their Chinese nationality and, at the same time, demanded to have their rights in the colonial state. The advent of the People’s Republic of China forced them to reassess their position. The PRC caused many towkays to put their roots where their money and properties were located. Yet even as they began to root themselves in Malaya, they continued to see themselves as Chinese. They felt they had the right to live as Chinese and to contribute from the excellence of their cultural and heritage to the enrichment of the Malayan nation in the making.63 The right they sought was the right of a community on a par with other communities. It was the equal status of communities, not of individuals that mattered to them.

Progressives and Towkays The political life of Singapore went through a sea change. The MDU disappeared over the horizon. Returning over the waves were certain men of influence who had sat out the Japanese Occupation in India or Britain. Among them was Tan Cheng Lock whom we encountered in the previous section.

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John Laycock, an Englishman well established as a lawyer in Singapore, returned from India, and got together with C.C. Tan and N.A. Mallal, both also lawyers, Yap Pheng Geck, a banker in the Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation, and others to form the Singapore Progressive Party on 25 August 1947. The party reflected the concerns of the English-speaking professional and middle classes, and thereby, also of the local-born Straits Chinese who belonged or aspired to these strata. These concerns fitted nicely with the colonial government’s policy to expand education in English, use English as the only language in the legislature and administration, and promote an orderly and gradual progress towards self-government. The party membership was open to local-born people of all races. But about half the adult population of Singapore at the time consisted of China-born Chinese who had migrated there before the war, and they numbered 220,000. The Progressive Party was negative towards them, refusing to consider the obvious need to enfranchise and make citizens of them.64 When elections were introduced based on an electorate made up of British subjects only at first, and then, in 1951, inclusive of British-protected persons from neighbouring territories as well, the Progressive Party won three out of six seats in 1948, and six out of nine seats in 1951. They sat in a legislative council where the majority were official members, unofficial members elected by the chambers of commerce, and unofficial members nominated by the governor. The most influential nominated member was one Tan Chin Tuan who represented the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the legislative council. Tan, a banker in the Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation, had helped in civil defence and in certain contigent tasks when Singapore was falling to the Japanese. He was one of the evacuees in India, but he was to look after his bank’s transferred assets and business. In India, he had written to Stanley Jones, Colonial Secretary, Straits Settlements, then in England, offering his services, and Jones had given him a strong endorsement so that when the British returned after the war, he was to return with them as the leading Chinese whom they would consult and use. As to his standing in the Singapore Chinese community, he was of the predominant Hokkien dialect group, and was supported by powerful Hokkien leaders in his

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election as the candidate of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to the legislative council.65 Tan was sensitive to the plight of the China-born Chinese whose status, or lack of one, made life very difficult. This was highlighted by the case of a prominent businessman, Aw Boon Haw, in which he personally intervened. Tan got the British to modify the immigration rules to enable China-born Chinese, who had to travel, re-entry to Singapore.66 He won another concession: a relaxation of the language requirement for naturalization.67 In diverse other ways, Tan was to speak up for the interests of the China-born Chinese. His influence was all the more important as the new British administrators appointed after the war had little or no knowledge of the people under their charge. It was a deliberate policy to replace the old Malaya/Singapore hands, whose wartime experience, including internment, had brought them undesirably close to the population. One example of how Tan’s mediation had prevented a disaster may be cited. This occurred during the anti-federation movement in which an Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation chairman and highly respected Hokkien leader, Lee Kong Chian, was involved on behalf of the Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce of Singapore and Malaya. One morning after a meeting of the Singapore Advisory Council, Sir Franklin Gimson, the governor, asked Tan Chin Tuan and another member, Thio Chan Bee, to stay behind. Sir Franklin then told them “in confidence” that he had received word from Kuala Lumpur that the British authorities there had proposed the arrest and detention of Lee Kong Chian.68 The governor asked them how the Chinese in Singapore would react to that. The look on their faces was enough to tell him what a huge blunder this would be. Tan Chin Tuan was an independent-minded British subject, the best helpmate that the colonial establishment could have. He was on all the key committees, the legislative and executive councils, and had the ear of two consecutive governors. The Chinese at this time were in the peculiar position of being under British protection and law, but as nationals of China. The Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Government recognized Chinese living abroad as Chinese nationals on the principle of jus sanguinis. Congruent with this principle, British naturalization law did not require renunciation of Chinese

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nationality. The Chinese opted to hold on to their Chinese nationality in a period when it was uncertain what belonging to a British territory like Singapore or Malaya meant, and where it would lead them. With China, they knew where they were. It was their homeland, which had become a sovereign nation. They were the people of a nation, with their own national flag, which they were at liberty to display at their chamber of commerce, clan association, and school on British soil. They had Chinese consulates and consuls-general in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to look after them. Chinese nationality was great. But although all were Chinese nationals, there was a split into two main political factions.69 One faction supported the KMT Government with its capital at Nanking. The other faction was for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the Federation of Malaya, the pro-KMT faction was dominant in the multiple Chinese chambers of commerce. In Singapore, the presence of Tan Kah Kee was a powerful check against this happening in the single Chinese chamber of commerce. The two factions took sides in the politics of the Chinese republic from 1945 to 1949. Tan Kah Kee was convinced that the KMT and the CCP could never reach agreement and that the issue of which party would rule would be decided on the battlefield.70 To Tan, the KMT Government was a dictatorship with whom one could negotiate for democratic rights with no more success than one could ask a tiger to give one its hide. Tan Kah Kee’s criticism of the KMT Government during the inevitable civil war concentrated the attack of the pro-KMT faction, especially in Malaya, on him. In 1948, the election in March and installation in May of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek as president of the Chinese republic by the national assembly at Nanking, was received with both cheers and jeers by the two opposing factions out here.71 This time, the colonial government in Singapore intervened. G.W. Webb, Secretary for Chinese Affairs in Singapore, warned against insulting the head of state of a country that was friendly with Britain. He feared public disorder, and reprimanded the two sides, separately. The CCP and its military, the People’s Liberation Army, won decisively in the civil war. Chiang Kai Shek retreated to Taiwan and re-established the Nationalist Government on the island. On 1 October 1949, Mao Tse Tung

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inaugurated the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at its capital, Peking. On 6 January 1950, Britain recognized the PRC and severed diplomatic ties with the Nationalist Government under Chiang. The pro-CCP faction celebrated the diplomatic accord between Britain and the PRC, but their triumphalism must be set against the realities they faced in Singapore/Malaya. Britain and the PRC were friends, but in Singapore/Malaya the British colonials and the Chinese communists were adversaries. The KMT-established Chinese consultates were shut down, but not replaced by PRC-accredited ones. Associations connected with the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) were banned. Arrests and deportations were carried out until the PRC would accept no more deportees.72 Even so, after a halt in January 1951, the deportations resumed. The pro-CCP Mayfair Musical and Drama Society in Singapore was banned, and its chairman arrested and deported in late 1950. Four Chinese journalists in Singapore and two in Penang were deported between 1948 and 1950. 73 Members of MCP-affiliated farmers’ associations and innumerable Chinese farmers were deported in about the same period. Some committed suicide by leaping off the deportation ships. Tan Kah Kee went to China in May 1949 at the invitation of Mao Tse Tung, stayed for ten months, and was made an official of the PRC on the day it was founded. The colonial government in Singapore wondered “whether to cancel his British naturalization or his British passport” or to deter him from coming back “by an indirectly-conveyed threat of detention”.74 In the event, Tan re-entered Singapore without problem. But colonial displeasure with him was evident. The big entourage around him, a testimony to his influence, was a provocation to the authorities. He might put his followers at risk from the wrath of these officials if he was not careful. So, when he went to China again, this time for good, he chose to leave quietly, on 21 May 1950, three days before the scheduled date. Tan Kah Kee had bestridden like a colossus the two most important Chinese organizations in the region, the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan and the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce. His departure made it easier for the leaders who stayed put to rethink their positions. Lee Kong Chian, Tan Kah Kee’s son-in-law, and a rubber magnate in his own right,

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had been saying since the end of the war that the Chinese should cooperate politically with the Malays. He had also sought for less restrictive terms of citizenship for the Chinese than were provided under the Federation of Malaya Agreement concluded between the British and the Malays. In February 1949, he was one of the founders of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) which would fight for the livelihood, language, education, and other rights of the Chinese. Lee Kong Chian, a China-born Hokkien, was becoming conscious of a Malayan identity. Another prominent China-born Hokkien, Tan Lark Sye, had been proCCP like Tan Kah Kee, his mentor, and was regarded as his successor. Tan Lark Sye would make Malaya his homeland, but the Malaya of his vision was a Chinese Malaya at the centre of which he would place the crown jewel of Chinese culture and education — the Chinese university. In an address he gave as chairman of the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan at a charity performance by no less than the Peking Drama Circle of Shanghai on 9 September 1950, Tan Lark Sye said: When I left our country twenty years ago, I wanted to make a lot of money, then triumphantly return home to the fatherland as a rich man, raise a prosperous family and enhance the fame of my ancestors. I don’t think like that anymore. Since the end of World War II, I have come to think of Malaya as my home…There are many Chinese residents in the South Sea area and many children of high school age. We should build them a university in the region’s centre, Singapore, as soon as possible.75 For the pro-KMT faction, their world of China had shrunk to the island of Taiwan. At the same time, problems affecting the Chinese in Malaya had loomed larger. The MCP’s armed revolution caused security forces in the Federation of Malaya to burn Chinese villages and forcibly resettle Chinese farmers, seen as supporting the guerrillas with food and information. The MCA had plenty to do, assisting in the claims and relief of the resettled. The pro-KMT faction joined the MCA president, Tan Cheng Lock, in this work. Besides this, there were other urgent matters which concerned the Chinese in urban areas. There were, in addition, voters to be registered for

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impending elections. The MCA grew into a major party representing Chinese interests in an inter-communal alliance with the United Malays National Organization and the Malayan Indian Congress. The pro-KMT faction found their place as leaders of the MCA, and came to be involved in the politics of Malaya which substituted for the politics of China. The MCA was to have a much more significant role in its territory, the Federation of Malaya, than the Democratic Party, started in 1955 by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, was to have in the island state of Singapore. The colonial government faced difficult challenges from the Chinese community undergoing post-war transformation. One of these challenges was over a kind of citizenship that would give China-born Chinese the right to vote and to travel without hassle. It would be a citizenship separate from nationality. In 1948, when the proposal was first debated, the governor, Sir Franklin Gimson, and the Colonial Office rejected it outright. But the proposal made sense if the British were to prepare Singapore for eventual self-rule with an understanding of how democracy worked and what citizenship entailed.76 The holding of limited elections signalled the first step in this direction. But there was a problem too: to grant citizenship to so many China-born Chinese would upset the long term plan to unite Singapore with Malaya again. The Colonial Office remained undecided on this issue, and a new governor, Sir John Nicoll, arriving in April 1952, put paid to it. Nicoll confirmed the suspicions of the Colonial Office about whether the towkays were as keen as they professed to be to have voting rights in order to serve the colony. Travel documents, not voting rights, were what they were really after, he alleged. For another reason against it, he imagined an angry Malay reaction in the Federation of Malaya, which would damage the chances of uniting the two territories in future. Thanks to Nicoll, the towkays could get no satisfaction for the time being. Another issue which greatly concerned the China-born Chinese was that of getting equal treatment for Chinese schools, and acceptance of Chinese as a language in the legislative council. Chinese businessmen and merchants had traditionally opened schools teaching in the Chinese language, and financed and governed them by sitting on the school board. The colonial government, adopting a laisser-faire attitude towards

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education as to much else, had left the system of Chinese schools pretty much to itself. After the war, however, communist subversion was on the rise in Chinese schools, forcing the government to enforce their registration, including the power to search and close them. The Chinese schools’ towkay sponsors, on their part, became more demanding of government funding, necessary if they were to upgrade their schools. They asked for funds as a matter of right too since their students were locally born. They saw no reason why the government should not treat Chinese schools in the same way as the state-run English schools, and the state-aided, Christian-mission English schools. The government’s post-war educational plans accepted the principle of equality. But in reality the government failed to honour it. Revenue was never enough, and whatever was available was devoted to the building and staffing of more state-run English schools. There was a strong bias for education in English, abetted by the Progressive Party, which urged the government to accelerate this part of the educational programme. Both the government and the Progressive Party thought alike and idealistically — that English schools were non-communal, admitting Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians equally, would give them all a common language, and inculcate in them a Malayan outlook. There was no denying this. But it would be foolish to ignore the claims of the great segment of Chinese fighting for a place in the sun for their schools, language and culture. To their credit, the British did not ignore these claims. They tried to accommodate them, but on certain conditions. It was these conditions which made the British offer so hard for the Chinese schools’ sponsors to accept. For example, the British tied grants-in-aid to the inclusion of teaching in English in Chinese schools, the object being to nurture the bilingual Chinese middle (or secondary) school student. But the Chinese schools feared this as a ploy to supplant gradually, teaching in the Chinese language. The British also wanted to have some control as a trade-off for funds, through a statutory board with some official appointees on it, but the towkays, who had known no other school governing body except themselves, would not accept it. The government, they were certain, would appoint Straits Chinese unsympathetic to Chinese language and culture to the statutory board.

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On the other hand, the towkays’ demand for unconditional funding was not acceptable to the government either. The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce (SCCC), which was the pressure group behind the Chinese education issue, had to continue the fight another day. On the horizon was the proposal for a Chinese university. Three Hokkien leaders, Tan Lark Sye, Lee Kong Chian, and Ng Aik Huan, had been mulling over it since 1946. Around this time too, the colonial government resumed looking into the establishment of an English-medium university for the whole of Malaya, picking up from where an earlier exploratory initiative had been halted by war. The Hokkien leaders clearly welcomed this English medium University of Malaya to be located in Singapore, and contributed generously in funds to it. But their dream was to have a Chinese university as well. This the British opposed, but could think of no alternative, no compromise solution. The SCCC was led by some of the most wealthy, ambitious, and powerful towkays, and some of the most humble and reasonable, as well as some of the most strong-willed, proud, and truculent of men. Often the colonial government was at a loss to know what to make of them and their extraordinary proposals. The SCCC campaigned in 1953 for languages other than English to be permitted in debates in the legislative council. This would facilitate the representation of the Chinese-speaking majority by candidates who spoke Chinese and who were believed to be more sensitive to their needs. The Progressive Party was against it, insisting on English as the sole language of the legislature. The governor, Sir John Nicoll, was against it too, as might be expected. Nicoll sensed that many English-speaking Chinese were opposed to the idea too, but remained silent because their Chinese-speaking compatriots had stated their case with such fervour. The case was unlikely to succeed. As in the matter of a local citizenship, so in this issue of multilingualism, which in effect meant conferring official status on the Chinese language, the British took the cautious line, advising the SCCC that Malay opinion in the Federation would be offended.77 The question of merger between Singapore and Malaya cropped up in relation to the citizenship, education, and language issues. It is important to deal with it in its own right.

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The Progressive Party’s thinking on Malaya shifted from the idea of reviving the former Straits Settlements, comprising Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, which was plainly unrealistic, to the proposal for a confederation of Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo territories, which was prophetic. The Straits Settlements idea, which the Progressives held from 1948 onwards for a few years, was a reaction to the Federation of Malaya Constitution of the same year, which placed Malay rights over and above non-Malay rights. As a second line of defence, if the Straits Settlements could not be reconstituted, they would press for Singapore to be given self-government, and then consider merger with Malaya. This idea coincided with that of Tan Cheng Lock, who also said Singapore “should go it alone” first.78 Around 1952, the Progressive Party began to veer towards the confederation proposal. Their rationale for it was that firstly, the member states would have equal status, and secondly, Malay dominance would be moderated down by the addition of Chinese, Dayaks, Kadazans, and other ethnic types from the Borneo territories. The fear of Malay dominance in politics and government was clearly very much on their mind. The communist revolt — the Malayan Emergency — was another worry, though it was absurd of them to think that Singapore island could be insulated from the peninsula by a looser constitutional form like the said confederation. There were other reasons. The Progressives were lawyers and constitutionalists, and could not help noticing the inequalities in the federal constitution, and the fact that Singapore had already embarked on democratic experiments, namely, elections, whereas Malaya was lagging behind (with no state and federal elections until 1955). They were capitalists, and their first concern was for the free port status of Singapore to be preserved, and the government’s revenue not to be raided in any tie-up with the Federation. They were city fathers — Singapore achieved city status by royal proclamation in 1951 — and did not want Singapore to take second place to its upcountry cousin. Chinese towkays of the SCCC also favoured the idea of a confederation. The leading Chinese newspaper, Nanyang Siang Pau, run by a Hokkien directorate, took it up in 1953, envisaging the making of a “Switzerland of

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the Orient of ten million people”.79 Chinese towkays were well aware of the important ties of geography, family, and business between Singapore and Malaya, and they sought an arrangement which would keep these connections going, yet allow them autonomy to run their businesses and Chinese schools, and to promote Chinese language and culture. Politics in the early postwar years took on a parish pump character. The Progressive Party represented only a privileged minority. Chinese towkays of the SCCC did not think their interests could ever be handled by the Progressive Party. And the British were at a loss as to how to deal with the towkays. The British turned to the one person whose independence and singularity of mind set him apart from the rest — Tan Chin Tuan. Tan Chin Tuan’s role as the captain on whom the British relied to navigate the shoals of Chinese towkay politics was indispensable, but it was also necessarily transient. The time when leaders could wield power without having to stand for election and be directly elected by the people was passing. The British were committed to providing practice-training in democracy as the way to self-government. The early elections, confined to British subjects and British protected persons as the electors and elected, touched only a small part of the population. This would have to change. The British would have to extend the franchise to the China-born majority. Politics would increasingly become mass politics, with the verdict of the people registered at the polls. Tan Chin Tuan voluntarily stepped down from all the offices he held as the colony’s senior unofficial in 1955 to concentrate on his banking and business enterprises. His going symbolized the end of the parish pump era and the beginning of the era of mass politics in Singapore. Another sign of the times was the eclipse of the Progressive Party in the general election of the same year, 1955.

The Accidental Politicians and the Returned Students In the first two elections in Singapore, the number of Indian voters was disproportionately large because they were eligible as British subjects, and the vast majority of Chinese were not. It was possible to conceive of winning

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on the Indian vote. M.A. Majid, M.P.D. Nair, and P.M. Williams (the latter two Indians in clerical jobs), and Francis Thomas, an Englishman teaching in Singapore, had this in mind when they founded the Singapore Labour Party on 1 September 1948.80 In 1949, Lim Yew Hock, a Straits Chinese in the Progressive Party, and a trade unionist for English-educated office workers, left his party and joined them. The Singapore Labour Party lacked a coherent programme other than wanting to win seats in the city council and the legislative council, and the leaders fell to quarrelling among themselves. In October 1953, Lim Yew Hock who had been expelled from the party, and Francis Thomas, decided to form a new party, and after a period of negotiations and changes in party names, finally came up with the Singapore Labour Front in time for the 1955 general election which was designed under a new constitution, the Rendel Constitution. For the post of chairman, Lim and Thomas got David Marshall, a Shepardic Jew and a well-known criminal trial lawyer with a brilliant intellect and oratorical skills of the highest order. But, as we shall see, Marshall attained the highest elected office and captured public imagination for only a brief period. His successor, Lim Yew Hock, held power for only the remainder of the electoral term. Both Marshall and Lim were transitional figures who unexpectedly shot to the top of Singapore politics and then lost control and crash-landed. The sensation of accidence and transience in Singapore politics lasted throughout the second half of the 1950s through to the early 1960s. The communists were the only party to buck the trend, to be able to claim both a history and continuity, but, alas, also the power to disrupt constituted authority through strikes and riots. They were the reason for the turbulence and chaos of the 1950s, and the uncertainty over who would rule Singapore beyond the one electoral term that seemed to be the life span for party government in Singapore, until political volatility started to give way to stability in 1963. The ever present communist threat did not bode well for hopes of independence and democracy for Singapore through a union with Malaya. The future of Singapore depended on the returned students who dreamed of a Malayan nation to enter the political arena and put themselves and their ideas to the test.

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After four years in England, Lee Kuan Yew returned to Singapore, arriving by ship on 1 August 1950. When he started his pupillage at a reputable law firm in Singapore, he automatically entered the circle of the Progressive Party leaders who owned the firm. John Laycock, the firm’s senior partner, asked him to be his electoral agent in February 1951. He found himself assisting in a pantomine that his boss was acting in that was on the way out, taking the lead actor along with it. Laycock had clearly meant to recruit Lee for his Progressive Party, but it was useless. Yet, working in Laycock’s office gave him the entrée into the sociopolitical milieu that he was to master for the revolution that would end British colonialism, and for the transformation that would make his name synonymous with modern Singapore. In 1952, while he was yearning for some really hard-hitting political action, a postmen’s union sought him out to represent their case for salary revision. Lee consulted Laycock before accepting, as the payment was negligible, and Laycock kindly said that the goodwill gained thereby was reward enough.81 The postmen meant to go on strike, but were afraid until Lee assured them of the legality of it. In connection with the case of the postmen’s strike, which was an opportunity for him, Lee had another lucky break. He found an ally who was good, not just for this case, but for his entire life in politics, that is, until he outlasted his ally. Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, a Tamil raised in Malaya, was a journalist who had spent twelve years in London up to 1947. In May 1952, before the start of the postmen’s strike, Goh Keng Swee introduced him to Lee.82 Rajaratnam was then an associate editor of the Singapore Standard. He too was keen to confront the British, but first he must locate a good issue. This was it. He agreed to support Lee in the fight for the postmen’s rights, and did so by writing the screaming headlines and editorials that well complemented Lee’s own more understated arguments. Lee had found the polemicist he would need for his future party. Lee was gratified with a number of aspects of the strike. It was conducted within the law and was unmarred by threats or violence. It delivered a satisfactory agreement. It won public sympathy and showed up the inadequacies of the colonial government. It would embolden more people to come forth and fight for their rights.

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Of particular relevance to the discussion here was the way it helped Lee find his way into politics. He “had led striking workers, spoken for them, and was trusted by them.”83 As their legal adviser, he aimed for a just and reasonable award, not the most lucrative one, and they understood. The young Cambridge-trained lawyer was discovering he had a way with working class people. And he had also found the key to organizing a political party. He and his friends from the Malayan Forum days had wondered, while quaffing beer in London pubs after their meetings, how they should organize a party with a mass following. The answer, they now realized, lay in the unions. The unions constituted the mass base of politics, the muscle power to back up the leaders’ robust approach. Next, a spate of trade unions and clan associations retained Lee as their legal adviser. His credentials and potential mass base were growing fast. Lee had a group of friends, including Goh Keng Swee, S. Rajaratnam and Toh Chin Chye (a university lecturer in physiology) meeting on Saturday afternoons in his house at 38, Oxley Road, for political discussion.84 This group of like-minded persons felt as if they were carrying on an activity in a bubble. There was a revolutionary situation out there that they were not a part of. They felt the need to connect with it. But how? Again, Lee’s work in John Laycock’s office handed him an opportunity. Lee did not have to wait long or to go out to seek the opportunity. It came to him, clearly because his reputation had preceded him into that other world of revolution and conspiracy that the communists dominated. In September 1952, Yusof Ishak, proprietor, editor-in-chief, and managing director of the Utusan Melayu, approached him to represent his chief subeditor, the political detainee Samad Ismail. Lee “decided to take the case without referring to John Laycock”, the fees not being an issue as the Utusan Melayu would pay.85 But perhaps there was another reason. Through this case he got the pretext to see the Special Branch of the police in charge of political affairs and was able to establish his credentials with them. And, of course, he came to meet Samad Ismail, whom Richard Corridon at the Special Branch described as “the most brilliant communist I know”.86 At the detention centre on St. John’s Island, he got his first look at another detainee, Devan Nair, whom he was soon to represent as well,

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hired by the Singapore Teachers’ Union to do so. He also met up with James Puthucheary who struck him as very loquacious. In April 1953, these three men and other detainees were released. Samad Ismail and Devan Nair joined Lee’s Oxley Road circle in their weekly discussions. It was Samad Ismail who joined first, and after a couple of meetings, asked “if he could bring his friend Devan Nair along because he could make a useful contribution”.87 So Devan Nair joined the team, despite some uneasy first impressions that Lee had of him. James Puthucheary returned to his studies at the University of Malaya. Active and passionate as ever, Puthucheary proposed forming a political club. The vice-chancellor, Sir Sydney Caine, agreed to it, and the University of Malaya Socialist Club was launched. In May 1954, the club’s publication, Fajar (Malay word meaning “dawn”), carried an editorial which caused Puthucheary and several others in the editorial team to be arrested. There was to be a trial, and the students asked Lee to defend them. He agreed, and after some thought, decided to treat the case as “a political contest, not a legal one”, for which he would get D.N. Pritt, a Queen’s Counsel “famous for championing left wing causes”.88 The students would only have to pay for his airfare from London and back, accommodation, and give him a small fee (in the event it was the gift of a ruby). The whole episode had a farcical aspect to it, from the pre-trial exercise to get a senior Queen’s Counsel admitted to the local bar to the actual trial itself where Pritt made mincemeat of his opponents. The Fajar trial, which began on 23 August for three days, ended in the acquittal of all the eight students charged. Two of them, Puthucheary and Sandrasegeram Woodhull, were soon to join Lee in forming a party. Did they perform another important function? One historian has it that the leaders of the University of Malaya Socialist Club introduced Chinese school student leaders to Lee.89 It is not clear whether this was an introduction in person or just a recommendation to see him. Lee’s memoirs stated that his “introduction to the world of the Chinese educated” came about when “five students turned up at [his] home one evening in 1954, soon after the Fajar trial”.90 Chinese school students had protested against a military service call-up made by the colonial government. Their march to Government House to

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present a petition had led to riots followed by barricades at the Chung Cheng High School and a camp-in, in all of which the communists had a hand. Forty-eight students were arrested, and eventually only seven were charged with more serious offences. The purpose of the visit to Lee’s home was to get his help to hire D.N. Pritt to handle an appeal for these seven students. The students seeking Lee’s help for their seven friends did not flinch when Lee told them that the Queen’s Counsel’s fee was $30,000. There was a good reason for this. Chinese schools, as the nursery of Chinese language and culture, engaged the hearts and minds of the Chinese-educated at the most profound level. If it could be shown that the colonial government was acting unfairly or high-handedly towards the Chinese schools, the towkay backers of these schools, newspaper editors, parents, and all others who were concerned in the Chinese community would protest with force and solidarity. The communists knew this and had formed a close network with Chinese schools and made Chinese education an issue on which to rally support. The students grasped this too, and were confident of raising the money for Pritt’s fees from the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Chinese firms. Lee knew where the students could get the money (he had informed Pritt who then asked for $30,000), but he was still amazed by the signs of resourcefulness and unity he was witnessing in them which contrasted sharply with what he had seen in the Fajar students, in other words, in the English-educated sort.91 Through the five Chinese school students who called on him at his home, Lee was put in touch with his next, and most important contacts ever. He told the students that he “wanted to meet some leaders in the Chinese trade unions”.92 This was how it was possible that two key leaders turned up at this house “one Sunday morning in 1954”.93 They were Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan who had just been appointed by the communists to lead the Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union and the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union respectively. Both were young exChinese High School students. Lee liked the look they presented. He said “they were the Chinese-educated equivalent of the Fajar boys who were prosecuted for sedition, but more determined, more selfless, more hardworking, the kind of lieutenants we had been searching for”.94 The

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circle of friends and colleagues he needed for his intended political party was now complete. While Lee was appraising and selecting his men, he and his friends in the Oxley Road circle were being wooed by David Marshall’s group, who were in the throes of forming what was to be the Labour Front. At Marshall’s invitation, a few meetings took place to discuss a possible cooperation between Lee’s group and Marshall’s. Marshall, after breaking with the Progressives, had started to mix with a circle of journalists and writers, including S. Rajaratnam, Alex Josey and Han Suyin, interested in socialist topics.95 In this socialist phase of his development, and socialism sat well with his anticolonial fervour, he was, not surprisingly, keen to work with Lee’s band of democratic socialists. But, in reality, it would have been a mismatch. Lee’s group met in a basement in Lee’s house, symbolic of their determination to rough it out. Marshall’s meetings were in the manner of a salon, complete with champagne and elegant tidbits. Anyway, Lee dismissed Marshall’s group as politically naive and not to be taken seriously. Marshall was “stung by Lee’s refusal to work together, and dismissal of his group”.96 Francis Thomas, who was with Marshall, charged that Lee had prolonged the discussion to check out the competition and mislead it.97 One Sunday in late October 1954, the newspapers announced the inauguration of a People’s Action Party to be held on 21 November. On the appointed day, without fanfare but in an august building, the Victoria Memorial Hall, the People’s Action Party was launched. The convenors were Lee Kuan Yew, secretary-general, Toh Chin Chye, chairman, and S. Rajaratnam, to name the trio at the core of the new party. Goh Keng Swee, then reading for his doctorate in London, and Kenneth Byrne were certainly in the core too, but they were civil servants and their part in convening the party could not be openly acknowledged. They both later resigned from the civil service in order to contest the general election of 1959. The other convenors, not in the core group, included men whose names raised eyebrows and goose pimples in that parish pump era: Samad Ismail, Devan Nair and Fong Swee Suan. Lee had wanted both Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan to be convenors, but he got only one of them, Fong. This was the decision of the communist supervisors of the two young men.98

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However, Lim Chin Siong became a member as did Sandra Woodhull and James Puthucheary. Lee invited Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tan Cheng Lock to the occasion and they were present. The Tunku and Tan were shaping up the alliance of their communal parties. What did they make of Lee’s enunciation of the PAP’s aim to “end colonialism” and establish a nation state comprising Malaya and Singapore under a “unitary government” based on a “Malayan nationality”?99 Just when they thought their battle with old Datuk Onn was all but over, a young, cerebral and vigorous challenger was now entering into the breach. NOTES 1

T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, paperback, 2001), p. 90. 2 Ibid., p. 87. 3 Cheah Boon Kheng, Malaysia: The Making of a Nation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002 and first reprint 2003), p. 7; Harper, Malaya, p. 349. 4 Tan Cheng Lock, Malayan Problems: From A Chinese Point of View, edited by C.Q. Lee (Singapore: Tannsco, 1947), p. 64. 5 Yeo Kim Wah, “The Anti-Federation Movement in Malaya, 1946–48”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies IV, no. 1 (March 1973): 34; Albert Lau, The Malayan Union Controversy 1942–1948 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 130. 6 Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Master, 2003), p. 161. 7 Harper, Malaya, p. 77; Yeo, “Anti-Federation Movement”, p. 34. 8 Chin Peng, My Side of History, pp. 202–05; C.C. Chin and Karl Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), pp. 119–22. 9 Malcolm MacDonald, speech as Chancellor of the University of Malaya, University of Malaya Foundation Day 8 October 1949 Souvenir (Penang: The Federal Advertising Bureau, 1949), pp. 12–17. 10 Yeo Kim Wah, Political Development in Singapore 1945–55 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1973), p. 89. 11 Yeo Kim Wah, “Joining the Communist Underground: The Conversion of English-educated Radicals to Communism in Singapore, June 1948–January 1951”, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 67, Pt 1, no. 266 (June 1994): 38.

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12 Ibid., pp. 35 and 52. 13 Ibid., p. 38. 14 Ibid., p. 45. 15 Ibid., p. 44. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., pp. 45 and 52. See also John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), p. 84. 19 Dominic J. Puthucheary and K.S. Jomo, eds., No Cowardly Past: James Puthucheary: Writings, Poems, Commentaries (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 1998), p. 22. 20 Ibid., p. 26. 21 Ibid. 22 Yeo, “Communist Underground”, p. 34. 23 Quoted by Cheah Boon Kheng, The Masked Comrades: A Study of the United Front in Malaya, 1945–48 (Singapore: Times Books International, 1979), p. 126. 24 Puthucheary and Jomo, eds., No Cowardly Past, p. 11. 25 Yeo Kim Wah, “Student Politics in University of Malaya, 1949–51”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (September 1992): 351. 26 Quoted by Yeo, Ibid., p. 351. 27 Ibid., p. 349. 28 Ibid., p. 350. 29 Yeo, “Communist Underground”, p. 53. 30 Yeo, “Student Politics”, p. 359. 31 Ibid. 32 Puthucheary and Jomo, eds., No Cowardly Past, p. 172. 33 Ibid., p. 173. 34 Ibid., p. 175. 35 Ibid., p. 176. 36 Ibid., p. 173. 37 Ibid. 38 Yeo, “Student Politics”, p. 372. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Yeo, “Communist Underground”, p. 56; Drysdale, Singapore, p. 33. 42 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), pp. 92–93 and 98. 43 Alex Josey, Lee Kuan Yew, Vol. 1 (Singapore: Times Books International, 1980), p. 29. 44 Yeo, “Communist Underground”, p. 49.

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69

Ibid., pp. 35 and 52. Josey, Lee Kuan Yew, p. 31. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 31–32. Yeo, “Communist Underground”, p. 45. Harper, Malaya, pp. 309, 318–19, 327–29 and 331. Mohamed Abid, Reflections of Pre-Independence Malaya (Subang Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 2003), p. 29. Cheah, Malaysia, pp. 24–25. Heng Pek Koon, Chinese Politics in Malaysia: A History of the Malaysian Chinese Association (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 84–93, 158–61. N.J. Funston, Malay Politics in Malaysia: A Study of UMNO and PAS (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1980), p. 137; Tan Sri Dato Mubin Sheppard, Tunku: A Pictorial Biography 1903–57 (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1984), p. 117; Harper, Malaya, p. 322. Heng, Chinese Politics, pp. 159–62. Harper, Malaya, pp. 327–28, 341. Ibid., pp. 261 and 328. Ibid., p. 358. Cheah, Malaysia, p. 28; Harper, Malaya, pp. 318–19. Tan Liok Ee, The Rhetoric of Bangsa and Minzu: Community and Nation in Tension, The Malay Peninsula 1900–55 (Clayton: Monash University, 1988), pp. 38–41, 44. Yeo, Political Development, p. 100. Lee Su Yin, “British Chinese Policy in Singapore, 1930s to Mid-1950s: With Particular Focus on the Public Service Career of Tan Chin Tuan” (MA thesis, History Department, National University of Singapore, 1995), pp. 122–25. Ibid., pp. 119–20. Ibid., p. 132. Thio Chan Bee, Extraordinary Adventures of an Ordinary Man (London: Grosvenor Books, 1977), p. 73. The pro-KMT faction consisted of KMT branches in Singapore and Malaya, KMT youth corps, Chinese chambers of commerce, Chinese assembly halls, regional dialect associations, and diverse other Chinese associations. However, certain Chinese chambers of commerce and other kinds of associations were in the pro-CCP faction. The pro-CCP faction included the Malayan Communist

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70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Party (MCP), the China Democratic League (Malayan branches) set up in September 1947, trade unions, and associations of teachers, journalists, farmers, women, musicians and actors. Chui Kwei Chiang, The Response of the Malayan Chinese to Political and Military Developments in China, 1945–49 (Singapore: Institute of Humanities and Social Studies, Nanyang University, 1977), p. 10. Ibid., pp. 47 to 58. Fujio Hara, Malayan Chinese and China: Conversion in Identity Consciousness (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), pp. 31 and 64. Ibid., pp. 29–30. C.F. Yong, Tan Kah-Kee: The Making of an Overseas Chinese Legend (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 331. Quoted by Hara, Malayan Chinese and China, p. 34. Lee, “British Chinese Policy in Singapore”, p. 138. Yeo, Political Development, p. 167. Yeo, Political Development, p. 46. Ibid., p. 48. Yeo Kim Wah and Albert Lau, “From Colonialism to Independence 1945–65”, in A History of Singapore, edited by Ernest C.T. Chew and Edwin Lee (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 125. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 146. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 157. Drysdale, Singapore, p. 84. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 160. Ibid., pp. 161–62. Yeo Kim Wah and Albert Lau, “Colonialism”, p. 130. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 166. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid. Ibid., p. 178. Chan Heng Chee, A Sensation of Independence: A Political Biography of David Marshall (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 73. Ibid., p. 76. Francis Thomas, Memoirs of a Migrant (Singapore: University Education Press, 1972), p. 95. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 178. Quoted by Drysdale, Singapore, p. 90.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are • 99 The Accidental Chief Minister available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

F O U R

The Accidental Chief Minister

Malayan Repercussions on Singapore

T

he Alliance Party made the winning of independence the foremost issue in the federal election which swept it to power. But the Emergency consequent on the communist insurgency, now in its eighth year, could be a pretext for the British to delay the constitutional process. The Alliance saw this issue as both obstacle and opportunity. The Alliance manifesto set out the aim to end the Emergency and bring peace through an offer of amnesty to the communists. The MCP had been watching the political scene and concluding about the same time as the British did, that the Alliance was the rising contender. It befitted the MCP, therefore, to respond to the offer of amnesty. Why was the MCP willing to discuss amnesty? It was because the guerrilla war was all but lost, and the guerrillas were starving in the jungle. Food denial was the simple idea ruthlessly implemented by LieutenantGeneral Sir Harold Briggs, director of operations in Malaya from 1950–52. In less than three years, the Briggs plan moved 470,509 rural squatters into 440 new villages. Templer improved on it by ordering centralised cooking facilities. This reduced the chances of people carrying food supplies intended for the guerrillas through village main gates. Chin Peng replied to the amnesty offer in May 1955, choosing the moment when the federal election had been announced, and the date set for the dissolution of the federal legislative council.1 Chin Peng addressed his letter to the Federation Government headed by the British high commissioner, as the Alliance, the proposer of the amnesty, was not yet in office. A copy of the 99

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letter was sent to the newly elected chief minister of Singapore, David Marshall (who is the main subject of this chapter, and whose appearance here indicates the integral oneness of Malaya and Singapore in history). Chin Peng’s letter asked to discuss amnesty terms, but High Commissioner MacGillivray, after consultations in London, declared that the MCP must first surrender. So nothing came of Chin Peng’s response. The federal election in July brought the expected Alliance victory. Tunku Abdul Rahman became the chief minister (a title which was changed to prime minister on independence). The colonial secretary, Alan LennoxBoyd, came for the first meeting of the new legislative council. He repeated to the Tunku a complaint from the high commissioner that the Tunku had inappropriately referred to the government as “my government” when the British were still in control, with executive power and 46 nominated to 52 elected seats. The Tunku could not wait for the day when “my government” would be a reality. He impressed on Lennox-Boyd the urgency of creating a fully elected council, and negotiating the transfer of power. He stressed that the British Government and the Malay Rulers had no choice but to agree to granting independence to the Federation of Malaya as soon as possible. The alternative was to “hand over this country to the Malayan Communist Party”.2 (Tunku Abdul Rahman in September 1955 was in a vastly stronger position than John Eber ever was in December 1948, to present the British with the ultimatum: independence or communism.) On 8 September 1955, the Tunku renewed his amnesty offer. Chin Peng replied, asking for talks, and again addressed a second letter to David Marshall. The Tunku agreed to the talks. The British feared that the Tunku would make concessions to Chin Peng. This forced a statement from MacGillivray before the talks began that the British Government would give self-government to Malaya whether or not the Emergency ended. However, self-government did not amount to independence. The distinction to be noted is that in the case of self-government, the British hand over a large measure of power but retain control over internal security, defence and external affairs until independence is conferred. The Tunku recognized this distinction when he promised in the election campaign to obtain self-government within two years, and independence within four.

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Victory revved up the tempo of change. In December 1955, only five months later, the UMNO general assembly passed a resolution demanding independence by 31 August 1957 — in less than two years! The Tunku later told MacGillivray that he had been embarrassed by the resolution, but “had not felt able to oppose it”, and “had thought it wise” only to amend it with the words “if possible”.3 Yet the Tunku’s memoirs told a different story. They told of the anger he felt with the Federation Government for the scant respect shown to him and his ministerial colleagues. They were not given official residences and cars in Kuala Lumpur, in stark contrast to the privileges in this department accorded to mentris besar, judges and other top MCS officials. Presumably, after complaining, the Tunku was offered a clerk’s twobedroom quarters which he rejected, and then an old single storey house, with a spacious compound (its only redeeming feature in his view) which he moved into with his wife. They did not know that the roof leaked until one stormy night when they got thoroughly drenched in bed. There and then, the Tunku said, he vowed “to win our freedom in half the time — two years, not four”.4 Chin Peng and other MCP leaders noted the UMNO resolution on the independence date with disbelief. Not for a single moment did they think it was feasible. The UMNO resolution was passed in the week before the Tunku was scheduled to meet Chin Peng to discuss the amnesty: the historic Baling talks, named after the town in Kedah near the Malayan-Thai border. The Tunku’s schedule was very tight. After the Baling talks in the last week of December, he would leave for London in the first week of January to negotiate independence with Lennox-Boyd. Chin Peng was under the impression that the Baling talks would be the first round of discussions, and that after the Tunku returned from London, there would be a follow-up round. Chin Peng, in his memoirs, claimed to have received, during the preliminary discussions between representatives of both sides before the main event at Baling, a message from the Tunku to this effect. Chin Peng’s impression is consistent with his conviction that there was not a hope of the British agreeing to independence by 31 August 1957, and that the Tunku would return from the London conference strengthened in some way to

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continue the constitutional struggle, and parley with the MCP. Chin Peng was proven wrong on every count. No one could have foreseen how amazingly the Baling talks would boost Tunku Abdul Rahman’s standing and bring independence within his grasp. The talks were held on 28 and 29 December 1955, with the Tunku, David Marshall, and Tan Cheng Lock on one side, and Chin Peng and two other MCP leaders on the other. At the outset, the Tunku explained the position of the Alliance on independence and the amnesty. He opined that “there is no way of bringing about peace other than to offer suitable terms for the surrender of the Communist Party…”5 Later, he made it very clear to Chin Peng that “people in Malaya” regarded the MCP as belonging to an external power, and as giving “allegiance to that foreign country and not to Malaya”.6 He was emphatic on the matter of recognizing the MCP: it was a definite no. Chin Peng probed to find out how much weight the Tunku’s word carried, what right he had to speak as he did. Was the Alliance Government the final authority on whether the MCP would be recognized? Did the matters being discussed have to be approved by the British Government? The Tunku’s reply was magisterial: “If I decide, and Mr Marshal agrees with me, that will be all.”7 What would happen, Chin Peng queried, to the insurgents who accepted the amnesty? The Tunku explained that they would be held in camps to be investigated for a time. This applied to those who chose to stay in Malaya. Those who wished to go to China or another country would not have to be investigated. The government would be pleased to help them go. Chin Peng’s negotiating tactic was to ask first for the maximum condition, namely, recognition for the MCP and assurance that the comrades would not be detained for questioning. He would then work towards his minimum position which was to be allowed to form a political party that did not espouse communist ideology, and again, to avoid detention and interrogation. But the Tunku was firm. And in the face of the Tunku’s steadfastness, and what Chin Peng described as Marshall’s grandstanding and steamrolling method, Chin Peng had no chance of securing even his minimum term. However, he was told that once MCP members had been cleared, they could join existing political parties.

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As the talks entered their final session, Chin Peng argued one last point. The government, though popularly elected, was still not independent, he said. It had no control of internal security and national defence. On this point, Chin Peng was to be trapped. When the Tunku replied that this was the thing he would be bringing back from the London talks, Chin Peng had to say, in that case, he would straightaway stop hostilities and disband his armed units.8 Then the discussion took a surprising turn which the official transcript played down, but Chin Peng’s memoirs dramatised. Malaya and Singapore were two separate entities. “What would happen”, the Tunku asked, “if Malaya got control of internal security and Singapore didn’t?”9 The Tunku had drawn unwelcome attention to the problems Marshall would have in this area. The two chief ministers then fell to arguing out their different situations before the communist supremo. Chin Peng intervened, stating that he would be satisfied if the Tunku succeeded in his mission in London in January 1956. Marshall was not due to go to London until April. Chin Peng would not wait for the outcome of that mission as a condition for keeping his bargain. Who came off best in the Baling talks? It was doubtless the Tunku. He went on to keep his date at Whitehall, and obtained all he desired from the British Government. On his return, he chose Malacca as the place to announce the independence date for the Federation of Malaya: 31 August 1957. The Tunku meant to invoke the original Malay sovereignty at Malacca before the arrival of the first external power from the West, the Portuguese, and to suggest that 400 years of European colonization had come to an end with the reversion of Malaya, the nation, to the Malay people in full sovereignty and power. Chin Peng wrote to the Tunku in February 1956 about a follow-up meeting. The Tunku released the letter to the press. It was his way of telling Chin Peng “game over”. Chin Peng had his hands full with the safe dispersal of his comrades from the failed guerrilla campaign in Malaya. The MCP would return to the peaceful struggle and work with trade unions, political parties and a host of other associations. In this new phase beginning in the mid 1950s, Singapore would be the main arena, and an ideal one at that. MCP operatives took to

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this predominantly Chinese society like fish to the sea, and moved with the flow of Chinese nationalism and anti-colonialism. This was to be Marshall’s problem, a severe test for him. He would need all the knowledge and skill he could muster, but after Baling, he was obsessed with gaining control of internal security, and it proved to be his undoing. The Baling talks brought home the unity of Malaya and Singapore, but also the difference between them. With David Marshall seated on his right, Tunku Abdul Rahman looked across to Chin Peng and explained the amnesty-peace initiative, stating “Malaya includes Singapore for this purpose”.10 The MCP must cease its operations “including those in Singapore”.11 But when it came to negotiating independence with LennoxBoyd, the Tunku did not consider it odd to exclude Singapore. He did not seem to have asked: if Malaya obtained independence first, where would that leave Singapore? Yet, Marshall, and the Singapore leaders who came after him, had to bear in mind that Singapore must fit in with the Tunku’s Malaya.

The Accidental Chief Minister The British had set Singapore on a very gradual course politically. They stretched the provision of elected minority representation in the Singapore legislative council over two periods, the first from 1948 to 1951, with six elected members in a twenty-two-member council, and the second from 1952–55, with nine elected members in a twenty-five-member council. Only then did the British permit an elected majority. This came with the Rendel Constitution, effective in February 1955, with elections held in April. There would be twenty-five elected members in the thirty-two-member council. The three chambers of commerce would cease to elect members to the legislative council. There would be a Council of Ministers composed of the governor and three officials and six elected members. The three officials would be in charge of finance, foreign affairs, defence, and internal security, including the police. The six elected members would have the remaining departments, and one of them would serve as chief minister in addition to

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being a minister with a departmental portfolio. The Rendel Constitution would run for four years. The British had designed everything with the Progressive Party in mind and looked forward to the participation of its pro-British leaders, who would appreciate a safe and measured pace of change. The Progressives would certainly give what this new constitution needed to function smoothly: maximum collaboration with the British. They were, as Marshall put it, “to act as the gold-plated shock absorbers for imperialist rule”.12 They were widely expected to win the elections and form the government. The contestants in the general election of April 1955 were, apart from the Progressive Party, the PAP, the Alliance (made up of UMNO and MCA branches in Singapore), and others. Among these others were Independents without a party, the Labour Party from which the Labour Front had branched out, and a new party formed by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, oddly called the Democratic Party. “The election results were a shock to the victors, the losers, and the British alike.”13 The party favoured to win, the Progressives, fielded twentytwo candidates, but only four had won. The towkays’ Democratic Party set out to challenge the Anglicized Straits Chinese capitalists, fielding twenty candidates, but only two had won. What had caused this major upset? Firstly, vast numbers of Chinesespeaking, lower income workers and young adults graduated from Chinese high schools came onstream as voters, assisted by the automatic voter registration provided for by the Rendel Constitution. The second factor was the strategy of the PAP and the Labour Front. Both parties had decided not to win to form the government under the restrictive Rendel Constitution, but to get in as the opposition. They made a deal not to contest each other, which was extended to the other contestants, except the Progressives and the Democrats.14 The third and more important factor was the hand of the MCP in this election. The MCP directed the Chinese working class voters to vote against the Progressives and the Democrats.15 This explains why the Democrats, who were Chinese-speaking like the voters, and were from the class that produced the normally respected Chinese community leadership,

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were so thoroughly trounced. The MCP delivered the mass support to its united front partner, the PAP, enabling three out of the four candidates presented to win. Surprisingly, the MCP also helped the Labour Front of David Marshall. This was done through the medium of Chinese school students who canvassed for the Labour Front in exchange for a promise that if, by chance, it should form the government, it would help them get their Chinese high schools’ union registered.16 This secret deal should be factored into the Labour Front’s winning of ten seats out of the seventeen it contested. Winning ten elected members was far short of the majority the Labour Front needed to form the government. So it entered into a coalition with the Alliance which had three elected seats. The three officials in the Council of Ministers would sit with the Labour Front, raising the number to sixteen. The governor then added two more by choosing Labour Front members among the four nominated councillors he was allowed to appoint. Marshall, who became chief minister, had a government of eighteen members, including key officials with whom he must work and trust. How could he do this and yet project himself as an anti-colonial nationalist? On the other hand, he had to face the communists coming back “to till the ground and sow seeds again”.17 This was Marshall’s predicament. He was caught between the British and the communists. Marshall had not expected to become chief minister. He apparently had no wish to form a government under the Rendel Constitution, which he believed to be unworkable and representative of unregenerate colonialism. But this stance was belied by the Labour Front’s number of candidates, seventeen in all. One possible explanation was Marshall’s lack of authority as party leader to decide how many and who should stand in the election. When the candidates put themselves up, he could not say no, and ended up with seventeen of them. It was a different case with Lee Kuan Yew who only had to say he would field four candidates, and that was that. Arguably, Marshall’s inability to rule his party had a lot to do with his inadvertently becoming chief minister. The office was thrust on the man. How good was the man for the office? Marshall was famously someone whose feelings, temperament, beliefs, and

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ideals hampered his political judgment and his ability to act or respond correctly in the tough situation he found himself in, between the Scylla of colonialism and the Charybdis of communism.

The Communist Revival Marshall’s term of office coincided with the MCP’s early revival phase when they were prepared to try street violence. In February 1955, Fong Swee Suan made a bid to take control of workers in the Hock Lee Bus Company, forming a branch of his Singapore Bus Workers’ Union there. The management of Hock Lee Bus Company, who were Chinese of the robust Hockia clan, would not take this lying down and organized a rival union. There followed disputes between the SBWU branch and the management in April and May, which led to strikes, pickets, and riots with Chinese high school students participating in sympathy with the busmen. Four people died: two policeman, a student, and an American journalist. The student, who was accidentally shot in the lung, was not immediately taken to the hospital, but paraded in the lorry for three hours. He died, as doubtless he would, and was hailed as a martyr. Before the violence occurred, the governor, Sir John Nicoll, wanted Marshall, as chief minister, to make a request to him to call out the troops, if necessary. But Marshall refused. He was not privy to the security information which the governor had, and he held to the position that it was the governor’s business, and not his, to call out the troops. Rebuffed by Marshall, Nicoll reported to Alan Lennox-Boyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies, that “the Chief Minister was still pinning his hopes on Committees and publicity campaigns to bring workers and students into a less inflammatory frame of mind, and he deprecated my strong warning that time was getting too short and the risk of violence too real for such palliatives”.18 When violence broke out, Nicoll had to give the order himself. As he complained to the Colonial Office: “I should have brought them [the troops] out on Thursday [12 May] or earlier, which I wanted to, but deferred, because I felt I must, to Marshall’s kid-glove line. He would have resigned if I had insisted on taking earlier action…”19

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Marshall’s sympathy was entirely with the workers, whom he saw as the hardworking, downtrodden poor in a city flushed with wealth. He obtained a settlement of the dispute which in every respect favoured the SBWU branch.20 The terms included the reinstatement of the strikers and the dissolution of the rival union started by the management. Marshall’s treatment of the Chinese high school students was even more incredible. He appeared to be tough at first. On 12 May, his government ordered the Chinese High School and Chung Cheng High School, whose students had contributed to the tense situation, to be closed for a week starting on 14 May. The students responded by occupying their school buildings and grounds. On 17 May, another order threatened the de-registration of these two premier Chinese high schools and called for the explusion of certain students whose names would be submitted soon. The students, already encamped inside, carried on regardless. A week later, on 22 May, the order was withdrawn. The students exploded in triumphant displays, including a procession joined by their parents and visitors at the extensive grounds of the Chinese High School.21 Lim Chin Siong was there too, at his old school, and the students made him chairman of a parents’ association, formed to mobilize parents to support the students’ cause. Again, Marshall had opted for the soft approach out of compassion and sympathy. He confessed to having “a very high regard for the Chinese parent… usually a sober, solid, sensible, peaceable person”,22 and he viewed the Chinese school student rioter as “one who is ill”. For them both, he would not use “the whip or the knife”, but would administer a “gentle nursing”.23 Marshall also had some larger idealistic purpose. It was important to him to be able to convince people that they could be anti-colonial without being communist. The use of force would ruin this lesson. Years later, he recalled “the agony of patience, of waiting for our people to learn and understand and reject communist sacrifice of the workers. To have used truncheons and bullets would have resulted in the chaos we sought to avoid and played into the hands of the enemy”.24

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He had a passionate belief in the freedom of the individual, which he associated with democracy, fair play (the “Queensberry rules”, as he put it), and with compassion for the underdog of which the Chinese worker and student were the obvious examples for him. This also held him back. To have sent in the police into the Chinese high schools, especially a police force which he considered unprepared to handle a student revolt, “would have resulted in bloodshed to a dangerous extent and would have antagonized our people against their government and destroyed a burgeoning hope in the possibility that existing partial democracy might lead us to freedom and healthy government”.25 But what really happened was that his moderation was taken as weakness and fear by the workers and students, and the communists who were instigating them. Far from helping the cause of democracy, his downplaying of power and authority actually set it back amidst derision and defiance. It was communism which gained from this. In the Hock Lee episode, Marshall helped the communists to destroy the kind of traditional Singapore-Chinese business, based on family and clan, which might have fought back successfully with some help from the government taking firm action. The terms of the settlement in the Hock Lee case were seen by Nicoll and the English language daily, the Straits Times, as a total capitulation to the strikers, and by extention, the communists. The Chinese press, on the other hand, credited the Marshall Government with having passed its “first great test” and “finally achieving complete victory, winning the support of the labour class”.26 These were the comments of the Sin Chew Jit Poh and the Nanyang Siang Pau. But who controlled the Chinese media? It would not be surprising if it was the communists, in which case, their praise of Marshall would have to be seen in that light. Marshall was anxious to demonstrate and even magnify every incident to show that he was no British puppet. But, on the other hand, was he not being used by the communists and was, unwittingly, their puppet? Francis Thomas, Minister for Communications and Works in the Labour Front Government, had a hunch that something was going on. He said so in his memoirs published in 1972, in the section beginning with the Labour Front’s success in the 1955 general election:

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My own belief was that the deciding factor was a Communist decision to back the Labour Front against the Progressive-Democrats. From their point of view, this was an obvious tactic. The Labour Front could be expected to be weak and incompetent, and to use its power unwisely. In the effort to retain some support, we would go too far in giving way when the Communists put the pressure on. We would become cat’s paws for the Communists, eroding the strength of the bourgeoisie, but not gaining strength ourselves. But I have no evidence this was their analysis, and I never tried to find out. For practical purposes, this was not important.27 Recent researchers have confirmed Thomas’ guess.28 Marshall had made a deal with Chinese high school students in the general election of April 1955. They would deliver the ground support, and he, in turn, should he get to form the government, would secure the registration of the Singapore Chinese Middle School Students’ Union, which had previously been turned down by the colonial government. As chief minister, Marshall then had to fulfil his part of the bargain, and he attached a proviso that they should not take part in politics or industrial action. The students were unhappy with this condition and resisted it for some months until the communists finally ordered them to accept it, advising them that it could be set aside easily.29 In October 1955, their union was registered. There followed the registration of all sorts of associations — for farmers, school alumni, cultural groups, sports, and women — all representing communist expansion under Marshall’s benign chief ministership. Marshall even came to depend on Lim Chin Siong’s support in the Legislative Council, and, fatally, when he later negotiated with the Colonial Office in London. However, the politics of appeasement under Marshall did produce something of lasting value. The rebelliousness of Chinese high school students was a symptom of the still unresolved problem of Chinese education. Marshall, concurrently with the Legislative Council, appointed a committee consisting of Chew Swee Kee, Minister for Education, Lim Yew Hock, Minister for Labour, Abdul Hamid bin Haji Jumat, Minister for Local Government (from the UMNO-Labour Front coalition), Lee Kuan Yew, M.P.D. Nair, and four others. Its merit was that it was inter-racial as well as

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inter-party (Labour Front, UMNO, PAP and Labour Party), and could deal with Chinese education in a multiracial context. A grave crisis was on, and through lack of experience, this all-party committee gave Marshall the wrong advice at its first sitting on 20 March. It proposed a retraction of the government’s order on the deregistration of the Chinese high schools and expulsion of students. This would allow its work to proceed “in an atmosphere of calm and goodwill”.30 Marshall took this advice, and handed victory to the students. The good that the all-party committee would do became more apparent as the months passed. Lee took an active part steering Chew Swee Kee and Abdul Hamid who accepted his lead to practical compromises.31 The committee recognized the importance of Chinese education but recommended that Chinese school students should, additionally, be taught Malay or English when they were in primary school, and both when they went on to secondary school. The English-medium schools, which admitted students of all races, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, should take on the teaching of a mother tongue as well to the relevant student group. The schools teaching in Malay and in Tamil should offer English as a second language. All schools in Singapore classified, as was the custom, as English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, should be treated on a par. Another issue agreed on was the writing of common textbooks for the schools. The content of these texts would be Malayan-centric, and this, like the teaching of Malay, was recommended with the expected inclusion of Singapore in a larger Malayan nation in mind. The all-party committee arrived at the key principles on which education in Singapore was to be built: bilingualism and trilingualism, equal treatment of schools, and a national curriculum. During the working period, Lee felt the concern of the MCP, expressed through Lim Chin Siong, to preserve Chinese education in the face of the spread of English education which “would dry up their breeding grounds”.32

Marshall as St. George The historian, Lennox A. Mills, said of Marshall that “his favourite role was St. George slaying the dragon of British colonialism”.33 He played this role

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with total conviction. It was his way to prove that he was a nationalist, to himself and to others — the people of Singapore — whose eyes and ears he wanted to open to the need to confront colonial rule. In relation to this aim, he started the “meet the people” sessions as a means by which to debunk the aura of power and privilege around the colonial civil service which tended towards arrogance. If Marshall was St. George, the governor he encountered, Sir John Nicoll, was the perfect characterization of the dragon of colonialism. Ever so often in history, two men, each the epitome of all that the other abhors, are forced to work together. This is one of those times. Marshall, while yet a Labour Front leader about to publish his manifesto, was sent for by Nicoll and told not to publish it. Marshall had written a statement of his anticolonial beliefs, “patterned after Emile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ ”.34 Nicoll objected, as he was wont to do, on grounds of political correctness and propriety. Nicoll was strict on the dress code. Marshall did not want to conform with what was the standard colonial attire, coat and necktie, and opted for something different but also decent. However, his coming to Government House wearing a bush jacket caused quite an uproar. He attended the ceremonial opening of the Legislative Assembly in the same “offensive” garb. The white bush jacket became inseparable from his image, standing for his protest by dress. The two men clashed over the matter of an office for the chief minister. Marshall was the Chief Minister as well as the Minister for Commerce and Industry. Nicoll, apparently, expected him to use the office he had in the latter ministry which he held concurrently. But Marshall insisted on having a separate office as chief minister. Not to have one was, in his view, a downgrade for his post, which he suspected was Nicoll’s intention.35 He threatened to bring a desk to the green in front of the municipal hall, as a form of protest at not being given an office as chief minister. The colonial secretary, William Goode, acted quickly to avert what would have been a public scandal. A cubicle under the stairs of the Legislative Assembly building, occupied by the sergeant-at-arms, was cleared and given to Marshall, who thus scored a point for the dignity of his title. The Rendel Constitution assumed a good working relationship between the chief minister and the colonial government which would have been

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realizable with the Progressives, but impossible with the would-be populist chief minister, Marshall. The democratic socialist, and communist forces stacked against him would have driven him further along the populist road. But Marshall had also developed his own brand of populism, loud as thunder, flamboyant of word and gesture, and portrayed by him standing daily under the “old apple tree” as he put it, to denounce colonialism to that temple of colonialism, the cricket club, across the road. In the same extravagant way, he gave an election pledge to repeal “the hated Emergency Regulations”.36 Imposed to deal with the communist threat, they curtailed free speech, assembly and publication, allowed people, vehicles, and houses to be searched, and suspects to be arrested and detained without trial. After the 1955 election, Marshall had to make good his promise to scrap all that. But would the security situation permit him? Special Branch said no, advising him against the repeal. The governor, Nicoll, offered to help him out. Marshall recalled: “The governor advised me to go ahead and repeal them and thereby gain credit for our Party with the people, and he would reimpose them under his reserve powers and take the odium.”37 Marshall responded to the governor with moral indignation (sincerely felt, no doubt): “My reaction to his well meant hypocrisy somewhat startled him.”38 So he ticked off the governor, refusing to be a party to colonial realpolitik, but he was still in a dilemma. And he came under pressure from the British authorities in Malaya responsible for counterinsurgency. He said: “The Federation Government (i.e., the British there) made strong representations, pointing out that abolition of the Emergency Regulations would create an R & R centre for communists in Singapore, and would make Singapore a springboard for their activities in Malaya.”39 He, apparently, could not ignore this advice and hence: “After anxious consideration, we decided to abolish the Emergency Regulations and to replace them with the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance, which was to be for one year only in order to give us time to understand better the realities of the Communist threat to us and to Malaya.”40 Marshall claimed to have brought in an element of liberality, but in actual fact, the new ordinance and another one, the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Bill, introduced at the same time, made life even harder for the communists.41 As was to be expected, the communists campaigned

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vigorously against these new laws at the second reading in the Legislative Assembly in September 1955. But they did so in vain. Marshall, of course, was vilified for going back on his election promise. He was in a tight spot, but he did not try to get out of it by accepting the governor’s expedient offer. He could not, in any case, have done so without getting attacked by the PAP and the communists. In his position, he could not afford to be in cahoots with the governor. The Rendel Constitution introduced the concept of power-sharing between the colonial government and elected ministers. The assumption was that the governor and senior officials, steeped in well tried principles and usages, would be a valuable resource for the education of local ministers, who would doubtless want to take the cue from them. But when Marshall came in, unexpectedly, as chief minister, there was not a chance of this happening. Instead, the lack of a clear definition of “the powers of the ministers, especially those of the Chief Minister”,42 became a real problem. One question that inevitably cropped up was: if the chief minister were to advise the governor of something, was the governor bound by the constitution to act on it? This question came to the fore in a dispute which Marshall started with the new governor, Sir Robert Black, who arrived in July 1955 to take over from Sir John Nicoll. The origin of this dispute was Marshall’s nomination of a number of assistant ministers, ostensibly to share the workload and improve the efficiency of his government. But it was really to help him maintain unity within his party and government.43 The Labour Front was never free from the bickering and place seeking which had plagued its forebear, the Labour Party. From the moment he formed his government in April 1955, Marshall disappointed colleagues who were passed over and queried his choice of ministers and nominated legislative assemblymen. The appointment of Francis Thomas, a nominated legislative assemblyman, as minister, was particularly galling. The obvious solution for Marshall was to get more posts to distribute and he thought of the provision for nine assistant ministers to be appointed by the governor. On 11 July, he submitted four names to Governor Black for appointment, intending to follow up with nominees for the remaining posts in time.44 When Black judged that two

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was enough instead of the four he was asked to appoint, Marshall turned the matter into a fight over constitutional principles, in other words, over whether “the Governor governs or we govern”.45 The governor held that Marshall was according the position of chief minister “an importance not intended or foreseen when the constitution was framed”.46 This was true. Yet Marshall would not be Marshall if he did not push for an interpretation of the constitution in his favour so as to create for himself a semblance of the real power that a prime minister exercises under a self-ruling constitution. But Governor Black insisted, correctly, that Singapore was still a colony, had not been given self-rule, and constitutionally and morally, he was obliged to sustain his primacy over the chief minister.47 Marshall’s trump card in this constitutional crisis that he worked up was his threat to resign. The circumstances guaranteed its effectiveness. The Rendel Constitution was new, the governor was newer still, and it simply would not do for the British Government to have a resignation at this juncture. The governor would have to call for new elections barely three months after the April general election, and the next government was certain to be more left, even communist-penetrated, which would be most awkward, not to say, dangerous. Black urged Marshall to hold back his resignation for a period. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, LennoxBoyd, was due to visit the region in August, and the issue in dispute could be placed before him.48 Marshall then decided to play for still higher stakes. He would present Lennox-Boyd with a demand for “a new constitution which would provide for self-government to be ‘granted immediately’ ”.49 The winning streak was still with him. Lennox-Boyd, after talking with the governor and Malcolm MacDonald, sent a cable to London with encouraging results. The British Government removed the governor’s discretionary powers so that henceforth he would have to heed the advice of the chief minister. The appointment of the four assistant ministers, and indeed, other matters too where the governor had the power of veto, could now be handled solely by the chief minister alone. The next piece of good news was an invitation to “a representative delegation from Singapore” to come to London “to consider the situation in the light of a year’s working of the constitution”.50

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Marshall’s strategy had certainly paid off handsomely. The governor’s refusal to appoint four assistant ministers for him was his “heaven-sent opportunity” to work up “a major constitutional crisis”,51 which he exploited to create an even bigger opportunity to opening up the vista towards selfgovernment. He was to declare, apropos of the talks in London to review the Rendel Constitution after a year’s operation, that he would resign if he failed to achieve self-government. He had been lucky so far, but the next time round, his resignation threat might not work so well.

Marshall and Merger Marshall was committed to the idea of a united Malaya. He wrote it into his statement of beliefs, and when he became the chief minister, checked out what it meant in practical terms. He was not the first Singapore leader to ponder the merger issue, but he was the first to do so as chief minister. To realize his goal, he needed to be able to convince his counterpart in the Federation of Malaya, Tunku Abdul Rahman. This proved to be much tougher than anticipated. Marshall’s attitude towards the Federation was not unlike that of the Progressives. They were sons of Singapore, and proud of it, and of its past achievements and future destiny. It was an attitude that claimed for Singapore in relation to the Federation, in economics, first place, in constitutional advance, the lead, and in merger, equality. But things could change suddenly and did. What Marshall could not foresee, and for that matter, neither could the British, was the Tunku’s ability to read the situation in Malaya, make the right moves, and win his prize, with such aplomb and speed as to leave Singapore behind, in the lurch, and gasping in astonishment. Marshall became chief minister of the Labour Front Government on 2 April 1955, at which point in time, Malaya had a federal legislative council with only British officials and nominated members and no elected members. But this was due to change soon with the first federal elections to be held in July 1955, at which fifty-two seats (single-member constituencies) would be up for grabs as against forty-six nominated seats, giving the federal legislative council an elected majority. The Tunku led the Alliance Party to a thumping

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victory, winning all but one of the fifty-two seats contested, and on 31 August 1955, he became chief minister of the Alliance Government. Malaya went from a nominated federal legislative council to one with an elected majority at one go, omitting the intermediate stage of elected minority. Clearly, the communist insurgency had strengthened and not weakened the Tunku’s bargaining position with the British, helping him to achieve this constitutional leap. This sudden spurt in the political affairs of Malaya was a challenge to Marshall. Almost immediately, he had to take it into account in a key project he was working on in the national interest of Singapore. This was a citizenship bill in aid of some 220,000 China-born Chinese residing on the island. Towkay leaders, in particular, Tan Lark Sye, had “with stubborn missionary fervour” taught him, Marshall said, “to understand the need” of their China-born compatriots for some such measure.52 Those who were businessmen, especially, sought it as a means to obtain passports to travel out with the assurance of returning without getting themselves barred as aliens by immigration officials. These people still saw themselves as Chinese nationals, refusing to be naturalized as British subjects, an option which was given to them. Yet they had contributed to making Singapore what it was, a thriving economy, and felt entitled to some rights for as long they chose to live and work there, including the right to vote for candidates to the legislative assembly. Marshall agreed, as in this way, they would have a reason to recentre their loyalty to Singapore. In August, when the Tunku came to Singapore for the first formal meeting between the two chief ministers, Marshall sounded him out on his proposed citizenship bill and on the merger issue. The Tunku’s reaction to both issues was negative. The two issues were, in fact, related, as is clear from the warning which the Tunku gave Marshall that any hasty measure to make citizens of the China-born Chinese would jeopardize the prospects of merger of their two territories.53 Yet it was Marshall’s conviction, fortified by Tan Lark Sye, that he was adopting the right measure. He could not abandon it, but only modify it after hearing the Tunku’s objection. Marshall’s proposed citizenship bill met with opposition from parties within Singapore too. The Singapore UMNO and the Singapore Malay

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Union concurred with the Tunku, sharing his fear of the overwhelming number of new China-born citizens who would come through the door that Marshall would open. The PAP also objected, though for a different reason. Marshall was initially working to create a citizenship that was not a nationality and that would exist alongside British subject status. The PAP did not like this as it would, it said, lead to a second tier of citizens with an implied lower status than the first-tier citizens (i.e., British subjects), which was derogatory. Marshall accommodated their views. He presented in late September a new proposal for a single Singapore citizenship which would incorporate the China-born Chinese as well as British subjects.54 The residential qualification period was made longer than in his previous bill, and the ties of nationality and allegiance to another country must be renounced on oath. The PAP found this revised citizenship bill more acceptable, but the Singapore UMNO and the Singapore Malay Union were still dead against it. On 2 December 1955, Marshall led an all-party delegation to London for a preliminary meeting on the talks proposed by Whitehall as an outcome of the crisis over the appointment of four assistant ministers. Among the issues raised was the proposed citizenship bill. Lennox-Boyd, deferring to Malay feelings, said the bill should be kept in view to be discussed “in the context of wider constitutional issues”. This meant clearly the question of self-government for Singapore, but it could also mean Malaya as well. Lennox-Boyd would be holding talks with Tunku Abdul Rahman in January– February 1956. This was a strong hint from Lennox-Boyd to Marshall that the British were still thinking of Singapore and Malaya as one territory which they would try to unite again, and therefore, the Tunku’s cooperation was essential in any plan that a Singapore chief minister contemplated. “After London, Marshall began wooing the Tunku in earnest” wrote his biographer, Chan Heng Chee. He went to see the Tunku in Kuala Lumpur to interest him in a merger. The Tunku said that Singapore could enter the Federation as one of the states. He was not motivated to offer a better term although it was generally known that Singapore leaders from the Progressives to Marshall considered Singapore to be on a par with the

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Federation as a whole. Marshall proposed a confederation in which equality of status might be more acceptable, but the Tunku rejected it.55 Marshall made another significant move. He already had a Malay in the cabinet, the Singapore UMNO’s Abdul Hamid bin Haji Jumat, Minister of Local Government. He appointed another Malay, Mohamed Sidek bin Haji Abdul Hamid, as assistant minister. This has been interpreted as an attempt to buy Malay support for his Singapore citizenship bill,56 but it could also have been to impress the Tunku with a view to merger. If so, it did not succeed. The Tunku would not go along with Marshall on the merger. Instead, he would use Marshall to advance his own plan: the Baling talks with Chin Peng. Baling showed the Tunku as the absolute master in control of the event from beginning to end. He asked Chin Peng to invite Marshall, and Chin Peng did it. He disregarded the nervousness of the British on learning of his proposed talks with Chin Peng, and overrode British advice not to bring Marshall along. He entered the meeting room at Baling followed by Marshall and MCA leader Tan Cheng Lock, and sat down flanked by them on either side, opposite Chin Peng, who was already seated, and waiting, presenting to the communist leader the solidarity and authority he had orchestrated. Baling saw the Tunku as a strong player, who held all the cards and knew it, offering amnesty on his terms, and resisting Chin Peng’s demand for recognition of the MCP so that it could resurface to operate openly. Baling was a reminder that a Chinese-based armed revolution could not win in a land where half the population was Malay, and solidly behind a Malay leader, and where Malay political dominance was forged in alliance with conservative Chinese and Indian economic interests. But the significance of Baling could not be extended beyond Malaya to cover Singapore, an entirely different political puzzle. The Baling talks, on 28 and 29 December 1955, was well-timed to strengthen the Tunku in his talks with Lennox-Boyd in London from 18 January to 8 February 1956. Prior to the talks, the study group in the Colonial Office concerned with Malaya got to work. They inevitably made a comparison between Malaya and Singapore. Singapore suffered in every way, with a government, “Mr Marshall’s Labour Front: whose “future

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prospects…are obscure”, a political situation “far more unstable…than it is in the Federation” and an internal security problem that “gives ground for concern”.57 A Colonial Office despatch to Governor Black in Singapore summed up thus: It is already clear that we shall have to treat the Federation and Singapore almost entirely separately, that the balance of advantage lies in going a very long way indeed to meet the wishes of the Federation politicians, and the Secretary of State may be forced to the conclusion that he cannot go nearly as far in Singapore.58 The Colonial Office was well aware of the Tunku’s intention to go the whole way: independence within two years, i.e., by 31 August 1957, “if possible”, “on the second anniversary of the establishment of the Alliance Government”.59 He made Lennox-Boyd see that, after his electoral victory and Baling, to hold him back now would be to the advantage of Chin Peng. Consequently, he “obtained practically everything he asked for”: internal self-government as soon as it could be arranged, an estimated period of three months, and independence by 31 August 195760 as desired. Most importantly, his internal self-government would come with internal security and defence being transferred into the hands of a Malayan minister. The snag was that the British and Australians had troops in Malaya engaged in the anti-guerrilla war and “it was impossible to put them under the orders of a Malayan minister”.61 This was resolved by forming an emergency operations council with the Malayan minister for internal security and defence as chairman, and a British general who would be given command of the troops, as one of the members. The Tunku had told Chin Peng that he meant to get control of internal security and defence from the British, and this was it. The Alliance Government was now a national government with real power. Chin Peng no longer had any grounds for continuing his armed struggle. Marshall wanted desperately to jump on Malaya’s independence wagon. On 3 March 1956, he went with Lim Yew Hock to see the Tunku in Kuala Lumpur to interest him again in the merger.62 Lee Kuan Yew was also there, separately, with the same idea. But the Tunku was in no mood

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for it. He could consider Singapore only after, and not before, he had secured merdeka for Malaya. His triumphant success in London had closed the door to merger before merdeka, on Marshall and Lee, not to mention the British as well.

The London Conference There were two London conferences in 1956, the Tunku’s in January– February, and Marshall’s in April–May. The Tunku’s spectacular success had a profound effect on Marshall. He began to place more confidence in what the Tunku got than in what he himself was going to get. Why else did he go once more on a wild goose chase for merger? Afterwards, he continued to be mesmerized by the Tunku’s success to the extent of wanting the same thing in his own negotiations with Whitehall. This goes a long way to explain his absolute refusal to let go of the issue of control over internal security. How could he let it go when the Tunku had got it? In the months running up to the London conference, Marshall looked for ways to increase his political leverage. He tried to expand the Labour Front-Alliance coalition by including the PAP, but the PAP, when asked in January 1956, did not think it was in their interest to accept. On the other hand, a right-wing party now saw its future as belonging with Marshall’s centre left government. The towkays’ party, the Democrats, had merged with the Progressives in a move which represented the closing of ranks across the language divide by Chinese-speaking and English-speaking rightwingers and capitalists. The amalgamated party, known as the LiberalSocialists, offered to join the Labour Front-Alliance coalition. In a hastily convened Labour Front meeting on 11 February, Marshall and Lim Yew Hock, who were in favour of it, came up against Francis Thomas and another colleague who opposed it as a retrograde step. No integration with the Liberal Socialists occurred. Marshall’s next plan was a week-long campaign to stir up popular frenzy for independence, in which thousands would be asked to sign a petition and attend a rally at Kallang Airport. A group of six British MPs was due to come to Singapore on a study visit in mid-March 1956. Marshall had invited the British Government to send such a delegation

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when he was in London the previous December for a preliminary round of talks. The British MPs would be presented with the bound books of signatures, and invited to the mass rally which was to be the high point of the week’s campaign. Marshall intended the rally, set for Sunday 18 March, to have a big impact on the British MPs. This it certainly had, though not in the way Marshall hoped. On the appointed day, a huge crowd, estimated at 25,000, gathered at the airfield. A raised wooden platform had been erected and equipped with a public address system for Marshall to lead in the call for merdeka (independence). But when the crowd surged forward, the platform gave way and Marshall fell out of sight. The six British parliamentarians arrived at the airport building in time to commiserate with Marshall on his “collapsible stage”.63 Soon after this, they had to leave quickly as riots were breaking out all over the place. Francis Thomas, who never liked what he called “mass agitation” in the first place, began to have his “first serious doubts of David Marshall’s practicality”.64 In order to make the rally appear as free and spontaneous as possible, Marshall had refused permission for the police to guard the rickety stage that he and others were to use. What happened that day was a disaster, but it could have been worse. But Marshall had no time to brood. He had to dust himself off and get to work on the London conference, which would be a make or break mission for him. Marshall had difficulty finding an acceptable definition of selfgovernment, acceptable not least to himself. For a while, he thought he had found one. On his trip to London with his delegation in December 1955 for preliminary talks, he had visited Nehru en route and got a lead from him about “dominion status”. He had tried this idea on Lennox-Boyd in London, and had been advised it was outdated, no longer a term in Commonwealth parlance.65 Even if it were not, Singapore would not qualify, because, as Lennox-Boyd later explained in a despatch to the governor, it was not possible for a country that was not responsible for its own defence, external affairs, and even internal security, to be elevated to a dominion within the Commonwealth. Nevertheless, Marshall on his homecoming at Kallang Airport, used the term “self-governing dominion” in his usual (self) rousing

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manner.66 This had Lennox-Boyd worried that Marshall was betting on a “non-starter”.67 The Colonial Office was thus alerted to the need for a good substitute term, such as “statehood”. They would have to put a spin on things — change the status of Singapore from “Colony” to “State”, replace the governor with a high commissioner, and call the chief minister a prime minister.68 Marshall’s delegation at the talks was made up of representatives from the Labour Front-Alliance, the Liberal Socialist Party, and the PAP, this last consisting of Lee Kuan Yew and Lim Chin Siong. On the opening day of the talks, 23 April 1956, Lennox-Boyd remarked on the shift in the agenda from internal self-government, as agreed on in the preliminary talks of last December, to something amounting to total independence. Marshall denied this, saying that he had already signalled his intention to ask for dominion status. Lennox-Boyd stated, clearly and authoritatively, his government’s thinking that Singapore could not survive if granted independence, citing the well-known reasons. “We do not intend,” he said, “that Singapore should become an outpost of Communist China and, in fact, a colony of Peking”.69 Marshall had argued, in a document he submitted for the talks, that “merdeka (independence) will rally the majority of the people against Communism”.70 The Tunku had used the same argument with regard to Malaya, to great effect, but in Marshall’s case, it simply cut no ice. This was a big disappointment to Marshall at the start of the talks, but it only brought out the St. George in him. He was now in the dragon’s den face to face with the dragon king himself, Lennox-Boyd. He returned to the charge. When the talks resumed on 1 May, he produced a draft Independence Bill proposing independence for Singapore by April 1957. The bill provided for a transitional period of six years during which Britain could still exercise control, including the right to suspend the constitution and rule directly. The point of it, as Lennox-Boyd figured out “is to give Singapore nominal independence next year, but to withhold the substance at least for the interim period”.71 The Colonial Office was willing to cooperate in a spin if it would help, but they thought that this time Marshall had gone too far. His proposed Independence Bill would involve “a measure of deception and disingenuity”

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which would make it very hard for the British Parliament to endorse it. “We should deceive nobody, either in the House of Commons or in Singapore,” the Colonial Office said.72 The bill, if accepted, would reflect no credit on the Singapore delegation. Rather, they “would be accused of having been duped by HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) into believing they got something more than, in fact, we were prepared to give them”.73 The British side were prepared to concede practically every area under discussion to Marshall, save one, namely, internal security. For much of the three weeks that the talks lasted, the focus was on this one area. The British wanted adequate power to manage internal security, including a majority vote in a proposed Defence and Internal Security Council, in order to discharge their responsibilities in defence and in fighting communist subversion. Subversion of the body politic may be likened to cancer. In both situations, early intervention would yield the best results. Lennox-Boyd wanted the British Government to have the power to take early remedial action. Marshall refused to let him have it, contending that the British Government already had the reserve power to suspend the constitution. Lennox-Boyd’s position was that the power to suspend the constitution was to be used only in the last resort when all else had failed. In other words, he meant that to wait until things reached this point was tantamount to delaying the treatment of cancer until it was too late. The British side proposed the appointment of a high commissioner as the queen’s representative, and empowered to deal with matters affecting internal security. The high commissioner would act in conjunction with a Defence and Internal Security Council which he would chair. The council would have equal numbers of British and Singapore members, three on each side, and in the event of a tie when a vote is taken, the high commissioner as chairman has the casting vote. Next, the British side bargained for a measure of power commensurate with the difficulty of dealing with internal threats. They proposed that the British Government be permitted to pass legislation authorizing the high commissioner to make emergency regulations.74 Alternatively, the high commissioner should have the power to compel the Legislative Assembly

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in Singapore to make them. Marshall would not agree to this. Lennox-Boyd then asked him how else could the British Government discharge its responsibilities, adding that this power would be used only selectively. Marshall asked for a precise definition. Lennox-Boyd came back the following day to state that his government would enact power to control external affairs and defence after consultation with the Defence and Internal Security Council in Singapore. He explained that defence was related to wider issues such as land acquisition, essential supplies and services, and law and order, to the extent that they affected British bases in Singapore. Lennox-Boyd further said that the high commissioner should have the authority to make emergency regulations, good for seven days pending legislative action to be taken by the British Government. These powers may be described as the powers of early intervention. Lennox-Boyd emphasized and reiterated his government’s need to have them, but Marshall would not hear of it. As Lennox-Boyd later explained to the House of Commons, Marshall refused to acknowledge that the British Government must reserve to itself some powers “other than the power totally to suspend the constitution”.75 Lennox-Boyd began to mention, privately, on 8 May, of a possible breakdown in the talks. But the next day turned out to be better as the discussion was on other topics, namely the Singapore citizenship bill, Malayanization of the civil service, and the transfer of Singapore from the Colonial Office to the Commonwealth Relations Office, yet another spin to make it seem less like a dependency. Happily there was agreement on these issues. On 12 May, three days before the talks closed, both sides returned to the most contentious issue which had been holding them up. Marshall continued to reject Lennox-Boyd’s arguments and would only allow him what the latter regarded as the “repugnant sanction of suspending the Constitution”.76 There was also the question of the chairmanship of the Defence and Internal Security Council. Marshall objected to having a British chairman (the high commissioner). He proposed that the United Nations be asked to appoint the chairman, but this was unthinkable to Lennox-Boyd.

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The Singapore side then called for an adjournment for three days. Most members of the all-party delegation were tired of Marshall’s uncompromising attitude. Lee tried to persuade him to accept LennoxBoyd’s terms, because it set up a “fine balance” between what Singapore needed to go forward, and the power the British retained as a safeguard.77 Marshall remained unconvinced, and looked for support to a most unlikely ally for him: Lim Chin Siong. Lim had his own reason for wanting Singapore to gain control of internal security. Lee observed “in the last stages of the conference” Marshall coming “totally under the influence of Lim Chin Siong”.78 During the break from the talks, Marshall telephoned his Labour Front ministers in Singapore and was given the idea of a Malayan chairman for the Defence and Internal Security Council. It was a brilliant idea,79 but it had come at the wrong time. Lennox-Boyd was impressed by it when Marshall made the suggestion, but still wanted the British chairman to stay. However, he offered to reduce the tenure of the Defence and Internal Security Council from four years to two, at the end of which a review would be held. Marshall rejected this last offer and the talks ended, in failure. Later, Marshall tried to reopen the talks when he realized that his threat to resign should the talks fail meant that only he would go while the rest of the ministers stay put. But Lee put paid to Marshall by holding a late night press conference to state that the talks were really over, and the next morning it was in the papers, even in Singapore, thanks to the wire services.80 Marshall stepped down on 7 June. Could he have done better at the talks? The Straits Times thought so and berated him roundly for failure. “He was getting far more even than he intended to ask for when he visited London in December. He then chose to play for still higher stakes. He lost as he was bound to… His egotism, his impatience, and his inexperience broke the merdeka mission. Failure in London lay in his own personality more than anything else.”81 The Straits Times could have added that the St. George in him was a strong and tenacious fighter, but this same attribute ill-suited him to be the lead negotiator in a constitutional conference which called for a cool head, political acumen, and the art of compromise, all of which were lacking in his performance.

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On the other hand, unlike the Straits Times, the Chinese media was distinctly sympathetic to Marshall. The Nanyang Siang Pau said: “Marshall’s resolute stand is praiseworthy because what we want is real selfgovernment and not a sham constitution… We do not think that the breakdown of this Conference is a failure. On the contrary, it is honourable. Marshall has not fallen short of the mandate given him… Marshall does not need to resign…”82 The Nanyang Siang Pau said that the people of Singapore were with him right up to the breaking point in the talks. Based on his “capable and audacious record” of the past year, the paper urged that “Marshall should continue as chief minister”.83 The Sin Chew Jit Poh agreed, and interpreted Marshall’s repeated warnings of resignation should the talks fail as “a sign of his determination”, suggestive of a man “burning his bridges behind him”.84 The obvious point here is the coincidence of these views with the line taken by Lim Chin Siong in London. The Chinese media and Lim solidly backed Marshall, refusing to blame him. This suggests that the communists had got their message through to the editors of the Chinese newspapers. The evidence for this is the action taken by Marshall’s successor, who had two employees of the Nanyang Siang Pau arrested on the grounds that they had brought this major Chinese newspaper under the influence of the communists to be used as their mouthpiece.85 Clearly, the Chinese media had encouraged Marshall to stay on as chief minister to continue being the tool of the communists. Lennox-Boyd was right to have been as firm as he was in the talks. Still, the praise heaped on Marshall was not altogether out of place. His was an honourable defeat. He was audacious. The Chinese media had chosen their words well. They made a fitting tribute to a man whose role has been compared to the singular vocation of patron saints and dragon slayers.

NOTES 1 2

Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), pp. 361–62. Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj, Looking Back: Monday Musings and Memories (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1977), p. 53; Quoted by Lennox A. Mills, Malaya: A Political and Economic Appraisal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 97.

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3 A.J. Stockwell, ed., Malaya Part III, The Alliance Route to Independence 1953–57 (British Documents on the End of Empire, Series B, Volume 3) (London: HMSO, 1995), p. 211. 4 Tunku Abdul Rahman, Looking Back, pp. 55–56; Political Awakening (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1986), p. 56. 5 Stockwell, ed., Malaya, p. 215. 6 Ibid., p. 216. 7 Ibid., p. 220. 8 Ibid., p. 224; Chin Peng, My Side of History, pp. 383–84. 9 Chin Peng, My Side of History, p. 384. 10 Stockwell, ed., Malaya, p. 215. 11 Ibid., p. 217. 12 David Marshall, “Singapore’s Struggle for Nationhood 1945–59”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (September 1970): 102. 13 C.M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819–1975 (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1977); rev. edn. A History of Singapore 1819–1988 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 258. 14 Lee Ting Hui, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954–1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), p. 65. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 17. 18 Quoted by James Low Choon Sai, “Kept in Position: The Labour Front-Alliance Government of Chief Minister David Marshall in Singapore, April 1955–June 1956” (MA thesis, History Department, National University of Singapore, 2000), pp. 31–32. 19 Quoted by Low, Ibid. 20 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 83. 21 John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), p. 116. 22 Marshall, “Nationhood”, p. 118. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 102. 25 Ibid., p. 103. 26 Quoted by Low, “Marshall”, p. 35. 27 Francis Thomas, Memoirs of a Migrant (Singapore: University Education Press, 1972), p. 96. 28 Drysdale, Singapore pp. 124–25; Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 93. 29 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 93.

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30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Drysdale, Singapore, p. 117. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore Times Editions, 1998), p. 216. Ibid., pp. 214 and 221. Mills, Malaya, p. 123. Chan Heng Chee, A Sensation of Independence: A Political Biography of David Marshall (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 78. Drysdale, Singapore, p. 102. Marshall, “Nationhood”, p. 103. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, pp. 97–99. Kevin Y.L. Tan, “The Evolution of Singapore’s Modern Constitution: Developments from 1945 to the Present Day”, in Constitutional Law in Malaysia and Singapore by Kevin Tan Yew Lee, Yeo Tiong Min and Lee Kiat Seng (Singapore: Malayan Law Journal, 1991), p. 49. Yeo Kim Wah, Political Development in Singapore 1945–55 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1973), pp. 65–66. Chan, Sensation, p. 115. C.M. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements 1826–67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony (London: Athlone Press, 1972), p. 262. Quoted by Low, “Marshall”, p. 44. Chan, Sensation, p. 116; Low, “Marshall”, p. 44. Chan, Sensation, pp. 116–17. Drysdale, Singapore, p. 127; Chan, Sensation, p. 119. Drysdale, Singapore, p. 129. Marshall, “Nationhood”, p. 103. Ibid., p. 103. Chan, Sensation, pp. 138–39. Yeo, Political Development, pp. 152–53. Chan, Sensation, p. 157. Yeo, Political Development, pp. 309–10. Quoted by Low, “Marshall”, p. 75. Ibid., pp. 76–77. Mills, Malaya, p. 97. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid.

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Chan, Sensation, p. 158. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 227. Thomas, Memoirs, p. 101. Low, “Marshall”, p. 71. Albert Lau, “The Colonial Office and the Singapore Merdeka Mision, 23 April to 15 May 1956”, Journal of the South Seas Society 49 (1994): 109. Ibid. Ibid. Mills, Malaya, pp. 137–38. Quoted by Mills, Malaya, p. 137. Lau, “Colonial Office”, p. 112. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 114. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 229. Ibid., p. 239. Chan, Sensation, p. 170. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 238. Quoted by Mills, Malaya, p. 141. Quoted by Low, “Marshall”, p. 100. Ibid. Ibid. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 128.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior The Terminal Chiefarticles Minister permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual are• 131 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

F I V E

The Terminal Chief Minister

L

im Yew Hock succeeded Marshall as chief minister in June 1956 and served for the remainder of the tenure of the Rendel Constitution. He went out as chief minister together with the constitution in June 1959. A Straits Chinese educated in English in local schools, he had worked successively as a clerk, stenographer, private secretary, and trade unionist. He was the general secretary and then president of the Singapore Trade Union Congress (STUC). He went on a British Council scholarship to England and Wales to study the trade union and cooperative movements.1 The unions grouped under his STUC represented the English-educated workforce of multiracial Singapore, comprising mainly the Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians. Lim hoped to bring these workers into a “new era” of trade unionism.2 He “introduced a new Labour Code to give them a better deal”.3 But for all his striving for modernity, Lim was also prone to thinking and acting in a traditional Chinese way. He was paternalistic, and set great store on building consensus and bridging differences. When he became chief minister, he chose to hold concurrently the post of Minister of Labour and Social Welfare (his previous portfolio) so as to continue using his personal influence to settle trade disputes, calling both sides to his presence, and making it impossible for them to refuse a compromise without serious embarrassment or loss of face.4 He was capable of behaving like a triad boss. Francis Thomas recalled: “There was an attempt to intimidate PAP helpers by a thug attack” during one by-election.5

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Chinese high school student rebels soon got a taste of his robust methods. On one occasion, students in a certain Chinese high school decided to boycott classes and camp out in their school field instead. Lim requested the governor to send for the police commissioner. He then got the police commissioner, who was to take no action, to cooperate with his plan. “From my own sources,” Lim wrote, “I found out that there were only two really active ringleaders in the particular school. I had their photographs, their names, and their addresses. I selected two tough and hefty men and assigned them the task of assaulting and frightening the two ringleaders away from the school”.6 After two days of their absence, the students at the school checked at the homes of the ringleaders, and finding them skulking there, lost all faith in them and returned to their classrooms. In good Chinese fashion, Lim looked to the parents of Chinese school students to play their part. He, in turn, was approachable to parents who came to him for help. There were a number of boys from “families of some means” who escaped to China when the colonial government started a military service register in 1954.7 Once in China, they missed the good life they had in Singapore and pleaded with their parents to help them come back. Their parents came to beg Lim, and found him very sympathetic and willing to help in every case, subject to a proper check. He hoped these errant sons would not forget their “bitter lesson”.8 Lim was not given, nor would he have accepted, anything from the grateful parents, he said. The tears of joy on the mothers’ faces were an adequate recompense for him. However, the goodwill he earned was useful when he had to look for donations for charitable causes. On a more dubious note, he also called on the families to whom he had done this favour for donations for the running expenses of his political party, and did so “at regular intervals”.9 Sometimes, Chinese from the rural areas came to him for help, and with them, he had to deal also with their custom of giving presents, which in their case, took the form of livestock and other produce from their farms. Once, a woman came to his house to say that her young son, “a good and obedient son”, had been inexplicably arrested by the police.10 Lim wrote: I got in touch with the Police Station concerned and spoke to the Officer-in-Charge. I was told that the boy was taken in for

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questioning. I asked that the questioning should be carried out soonest possible, and if there was nothing found against the boy, he should be released without delay. Two days later, the woman came again. She brought a teenage boy with her, who came towards me, folded his two hands into a ball and moved them up and down three times saying thank you to me. This is the Chinese way of paying respects to an elder while saying thank you.11 The mother presented Lim with two chickens. Lim reckoned that she would not understand the public service rules on gifts, and would take his refusal as a belittlement of her offering. So he took her two chickens and gave her two tins of a well known brand of biscuits. This was his way of reciprocating the poor, rural folks who came to him with their eggs, ducks, and vegetables. Lim was compassionate towards supplicating parents and their penitent sons. But as for the Chinese school students who persisted in creating disturbances, he was determined to come down heavily on them with the law. He had the Chinese distaste for chaos and disorder. As a Straits Chinese he abhorred what was called in Malay “kuran haja”, meaning insolence, in this context, in the young. However, such attitudes caused him to miss the point of these disturbances. He failed to grasp the social and political revolution going on in the Chinese-educated world of which chaos and disorder were the outward signs. He was to see some of the boys whom he had helped to return from China taking to the political platform to vilify him, and thought it indecent of them.12 But then these boys were caught up in a revolution that had no regard for niceties of behaviour. Lim’s answer to this communist-driven revolution was to take tough repressive action. This would set back, but could not prevent, the recovery and rampage of the forces opposed to him, and which totally engulfed him in the end.

The Singapore Revolution Singapore in the 1950s had high unemployment, high birth rate, dilapidated housing, falling entrepot trade, and great disparity in the educational system,

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and in career prospects. Chinese schools were underfunded, and their graduates were unwanted in the civil service and western commercial firms where a knowledge of English was mandatory. These factors created a fertile ground for revolution. The communists initiated this revolution in the mid 1950s. But the roots of the revolution stretched back to the anti-Japanese resistance in China and Malaya, starting in 1937, and the tremendous wave of Chinese nationalist passion that was evoked. The Chinese Communist Party and the Malayan Communist Party vied with the Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party to tap into this surcharge of Chinese nationalism. At the end of the war in 1945, the Malayan Communist Party emerged as the winner over its Kuomintang rival, and stood very high in prestige because it had engaged the Japanese as guerrillas. An even greater boost to communism’s standing locally was to come from China where Mao Tse Tung’s forces routed Chiang Kai-shek’s armies, and Mao declared the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The PRC was warmly acclaimed in China and the Chinese diaspora. For it heralded the arrival of a single, unified, modern nation in China, and the pride of the Chinese everywhere at knowing this was immeasurable. They looked up to Mao as the new, victorious, national icon, and to communism as no longer an internationalist creed, but a Chinese dogma, Maoism, and one which they could take to their hearts. One of the most valuable things that the PRC’s advent did was to give the Chinese people hope, optimism, confidence, and a clear sense of purpose.13 They came to believe that they had a future, and moreover, a future that was connected with the rise of a new China. All their endeavours in whatever area seemed suddenly infinitely more worthwhile. Not the least importantly, their endeavour in the field of education, language, literature, arts, and culture was all the more meaningful because there was now the PRC. The power of Mao and the PRC to create this state of mind was, for better or worse, evident in the Chinese communities abroad. In one of the most spectacular manifestations of it, the whole of Chinese Singapore rallied behind the leading Hokkien towkay, Tan Lark Sye, to found a tertiary institution, Nanyang University, located in Singapore, but meant for the entire diaspora in Southeast Asia.14 What was also

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remarkable was that the making of Nanyang University was carried out despite objections from the colonial government, the withholding of recognition of the degrees that will be conferred, and not a cent’s worth of contribution from the colonial coffers. The Mao and the PRC factor ensured communism a natural and easy access into Nanyang University. Nanyang University was inaugurated in March 1956. The communists formed a united front with the Nanyang University Students’ Union and a number of other students’ societies devoted to choral singing, drama, film, wireless, and the subjects in the curriculum, namely, history, geography, political science, biology, and the English language. The communists also tried to set up a link between the Nanyang University Students’ Union and the University of Malaya Students’ Union, which was at the well-established English medium university.15 The goal of establishing a communist republic of Malaya, which would include Singapore, was seriously set back by the losses suffered in the armed revolt in Malaya from 1948 to the early fifties. The communists turned to Singapore in the mid 1950s to recoup their strength, and to rebuild the open front organizations which had been neglected during the armed phase, with a view to resuming the struggle by constitutional methods.16 Their reach included the Chinese-educated workers, students, alumni, farmers, women, sportsmen, musicians, and others. The number of unions and associations under communist direction expanded rapidly, sustained by the upbeat mood for the PRC, which easily translated into anti-colonial fervour as well. The communists selected cadres who worked hard and effectively in their assignments. If it was trade unionism, the cadres would shape the workers “into a coherent force”.17 If it was disaster relief for flooded out farmers, they would mobilize with good cheer. The cadres made a good impression by their energy, selflessness, dedication, and discipline. That was how they were able to get “the people to support their political stand”.18 The cadres were the key to the whole communist movement. They, “the few hundred active cadres, could muster and rally thousands of people in the unions, cultural organizations, and student societies”.19 The power of the communists did not consist of having massive numbers

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in the party, “but in the band of trained and disciplined cadres, who lead the masses into Communist causes, often without the masses knowing they are Communists”.20 Lim Yew Hock did not know what he was up against. Neither did Marshall before him. Marshall used the soft approach and Lim the very opposite. Neither way was right for putting out the fires of revolution. Lim’s paternalism and his tactic of using the triads would have been seen by the young revolutionaries as decidedly feudalistic. Lee Kuan Yew was one of the few men who understood what the revolution was about. Lee described himself and his friends as “Englisheducated revolutionaries” determined “to fight the British colonial system, for freedom, for a more just and equal society”.21 This fight was to be conducted through the ballot box. The British who had governed for so long without democracy started to bring in democracy at the decolonization stage, which made the support of the Chinese-educated world which was going to dominate in the electorate, critical. The Chinese-educated world was intensely pro-PRC and anti-British. This was the basis for Lee’s extraordinary statement: “any man in Singapore who wants to carry the Chinese-speaking people with him cannot afford to be anti-Communist”.22 Lee needed to win support in the Chinese-educated world. His work as legal adviser to unions, associations, and students created the opportunity for him which he seized. As Lee put it: “We bridged the gap to the Chinese-educated world — a world teeming with vitality, dynamism, and revolution”.23 But it was also “a world in which the Communists had been working for over the last thirty years with considerable success”.24 So, as latecomers, the English-educated revolutionaries were impinging on the communist preserve, but were accepted because the communists in return needed a niche in the English-educated bourgeoisie world. Lee came to know dozens of pro-communist cadres. These were the open front leaders and operatives. His game plan was to have them inside the PAP, to work with them “at close quarters in a united front against the British”,25 to visit them when they were in detention, to have long dialogues and arguments with them, to be always one step ahead of them, and to choose the right moment and issue to break with them.

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Lim Yew Hock’s Offensive Lim Yew Hock moved against the pro-communists between September and November 1956, arresting 300 activists and banning ten key organizations.26 The centrepiece of the action was the banning of the Singapore Chinese Middle School Students’ Union on 24 September, followed in the next two weeks by the arrest of its leaders, and an order to the Chinese High School and Chung Cheng High School to expel 142 students who had been active in the banned union. The students of the two schools staged a camp-in. The chief minister went on the radio on 24 October with a message to parents to remove their children from the schools within twenty-four hours. Significantly, the parents’ associations of these two schools supported the students’ camp-in, and tried to talk the parents and guardians who had come for their children into ignoring the chief minister’s order. On the night the ultimatum expired, there were attacks on the police and police cars outside the Chinese High School. Riots also occurred at the Chung Cheng High School in another part of the city. Although the ultimatum had run out at 8 p.m. on 25 October, the police did not move into the schools until daybreak on 26 October. They caused a great shock by launching tear gas. One episode in the turmoil of this period should not be overlooked. Chinese High School students, evicted from their school, made their way to the Hokkien Association in Chinatown, as well as to the headquarters of the Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union in Middle Road.27 The students managed to stay at the Hokkien Association for only a day and a night as the police got them to move on. But what was important was that the students knew exactly where, and whom they could count on for support. The Hokkien Association represented the biggest Chinese dialect group in Singapore, and its chairman was none other than Tan Lark Sye. On 26 October, the communist-led unions went on strike, and riots “resumed all over the island”.28 At Jurong and Bukit Timah, members of a farmers’ association gutted an English-medium school and attacked a police station. The unions held large assemblies which could then form processions and spread the rioting.

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The police conducted raids on the unions as they held their meetings in the early hours of 27 October, arresting 219 persons, including Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Devan Nair, Sandrasegeram Woodhull, and James Puthucheary. Another 37 persons were nabbed later. The farmer’s association and another rural-type association, consisting of wooden house dwellers, were banned. The Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union was served a notice of deregistration which was carried out in February next year. The initiative in this period of turbulence was not held by the procommunist cadres. It was held by Lim Yew Hock. He had taken the battle to the pro-communists and had prepared for it with a well-coordinated plan worked out between the police commissioner and the British General Officer commanding the Singapore Base District.29 It provided for “the then novel use of helicopters”, armoured cars, police radio cars, road blocks manned by troops, and mobile riot squads.30 Consequently, it was possible to track the movement of people and to prevent the mass gatherings that the pro-communists called up for marching towards the city. This plan, together with the curfew, kept the situation under control. Even so, “the riots left 13 dead, 123 injured, 70 cars burnt or battered, two schools razed, and two police stations damaged”.31 In political terms, Lim Yew Hock’s offensive was a disaster for him. By targeting the two premier Chinese schools in Singapore, and indeed the region, he had incurred the wrath of the great majority of Chinese who would be voting in the next election. The immediate task for the Malayan Communist Party, apart from some soul searching, was to find substitutes for the cadres temporarily out of circulation. Among the new leaders found was Lim Chin Siong’s brother, Lim Chin Joo, who took the place, but could not match the act, of his elder brother now in detention.32 The key organizations which were lost or in the process of being shut down, were replaced almost one for one. The leaders of the banned Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union found a new cover in the Singapore General Employees’ Union. The Singapore Chinese Middle School Students’ Union was gone, but a new focus for student activism was found in the Nanyang University Students’ Union. On another front, the communists still had a share in the PAP, and they could still use

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Marshall, whose lone voice in the Legislative Assembly now sounded more and more like his unacknowledged master’s voice.

Lim Yew Hock’s London Talks The British welcomed Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock, after his crackdown on the pro-communists, to talks in London on the next stage of Singapore’s constitutional advance. Lim led a delegation to these talks consisting of three ministers, including himself, from the Labour Front–Alliance coalition, and one representative each from the PAP and the Liberal Socialists. The talks went smoothly with none of the crisis atmosphere as in Marshall’s performance eleven months ago. They took four weeks from the starting date, 11 March 1957, to complete because Lennox-Boyd had to go away to deal with a crisis in another part of the empire. The British made the constitutional advance look as good as possible. Singapore would have a head of state, styled the Yang di-Pertuan Negara, instead of a British governor. The head of state would represent the Queen. A British official, the high commissioner, would represent the United Kingdom Government. The legislative assembly would have fifty-one elected members, and instead of a chief minister, there would now be a prime minister in the cabinet of ministers. The British Government would be responsible for defence and foreign affairs. Internal security would come under joint jurisdiction in a council consisting of three British and three Singaporean members, and a seventh member to be appointed by the Federation of Malaya. The British high commissioner was one of the three British members, and he would chair the Internal Security Council, but would have only one vote, and not a second or casting vote. Thus the vote of the Malayan member would be crucial in the event of a tie. This indicates the confidence that both Britain and Singapore had in Malaya, now months from independence, and the primacy of their continuing quest for merger. Lim Yew Hock, who was a good friend of the Tunku, had asked him beforehand about the appointment of a Malayan member, and had obtained his warm approval.33

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On the last working session on 10 April, Lennox-Boyd introduced a non-negotiable term to exclude “persons known to have been engaged in subversive activity”34 from standing in the first general election to be held under the new constitution. This was like throwing a spanner in the works at the last minute. But, in fact, Lennox-Boyd had spoken to Lim about this provision some time ago, and Lim had consulted with Lee Kuan Yew and with the governor, Black, as well, about it. And at the talks itself, LennoxBoyd had seen members of the Singapore delegation privately and probably raised the matter with them. He certainly did with Lee over tea with him alone “in his home in Eaton Square”.35 As a result, Lennox-Boyd’s condition was accepted when he seemingly sprang it on the delegates. However, both Lim and Lee had to speak against it “for the record”.36 As it turned out, the communists were not as dismayed as might be expected over Lennox-Boyd’s condition. They could always find cadres and sympathisers who had never been detected for subversive activity for the general election. What was more important to them was when the election would be held.37 They strongly urged an early date, and seized on a promise given by Lim Yew Hock that he would hold the election in August 1957. Strangely, both Lim Yew Hock and the pro-communists reckoned that an early election would increase their chances of survival. They could not both be right. Lim’s reason was the hope that the communists would not recover so quickly from his purge of them. As for the pro-communists, their reasons related to the London talks. The pro-communists had no first-hand information on the talks, and could only learn of it from afar, with great anxiety. There was no Lim Chin Siong present at the talks to push their views. They did what they could from the Singapore end. Men from Lim Chin Joo’s pro-communist unions went to see Toh Chin Chye, PAP chairman, and others in the third PAP central executive committee, while Lee was in London as a member of the Singapore delegation. They wanted to use Toh and the committee to make Lee do their bidding. They tried to wear down Toh and the committee into submission by a long harangue lasting seven hours until 3 a.m. But Toh and Ong Pang Boon “slogged it out” with them, refusing to yield.38

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What did the pro-communists want Lee to fight for in London? It was immediate independence. This was their goal, and the reason why Lim Chin Siong had supported Marshall all the way in the failed negotiations of the previous year. They also wanted Lee to reject the proposal to set up an internal security council. The pro-communists had a third demand which they impressed on Toh, namely, early elections. Their motive was quite transparent. Whatever was agreed to in London would have to be crafted in the form of a new constitution for Singapore, and the delegates would return to London for another look when it was done. This was the point of the call for early elections. If the pro-communists won, they could repudiate the, as yet, tentative terms, and reopen talks with the British on a clean slate.39 They could then rewrite the constitution to their liking. Additionally, they would press the British for “the release of Lim Chin Siong and other detainees”.40 The pro-communists had no effect on the outcome of the London talks. Lee had always felt that to have the British continue as sovereign with shared power in internal security, and residual power to suspend the constitution if need be, was a wise and acceptable arrangement for the immediate future. He could never make Marshall understand this line of reasoning, but it was different with Lim Yew Hock, a more down to earth leader. When the Singapore delegation returned, and speeches were made, Lee purposely slanted his message for Lim Chin Joo’s men to hear. Lee said that the delegates “had been able to get only tiga suku merdeka (Malay for threequarters independence), but that those who believed a small country like Singapore could gain full independence by itself must be mad; the only way to it was through merger with Malaya”.41 Lim Chin Joo and his union men had one card they could play — Marshall. They “planned to use him to force a dissolution” of the Legislative Assembly, so that they could have the early elections they wanted, and believed Marshall also wanted, as a means to get back into power.42 But, unfortunately, Marshall was, as usual, too volatile. The pro-communists could not get him to behave according to plan. When the Legislative Assembly debated the terms of the London talks, from 26 to 30 April, Marshall launched into the attack, with the

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Malay words Lee had used, but with the meaning altered by the addition of one more word thus: tiga suku busok merdeka (three-quarters rotten independence).43 Then, in the heat of the debate, he challenged Lee to resign as assemblyman for Tanjong Pagar and seek re-election on the “three-quarters independence” constitution, and he himself would resign from his Cairnhill constituency to contest Lee at Tanjong Pagar. Lee accepted Marshall’s dare. But within two days, Marshall announced that he would not stand in the Tanjong Pagar by-election, and would retire from politics for good. Why? He had discovered that Lim Chin Joo and the unions would not support him. “It was not yet their policy to abandon Lee”, and they were unhappy with a situation where the choice was either Lee or Marshall.44 They wanted both men to be in the Legislative Assembly and to use Marshall to bait, provoke, and force Lee “into a position more favourable to their cause”.45 They asked Marshall to go back to Cairnhill, but when he did not, they gave their support to a Chinese independent candidate who had spoken fiercely against the terms of the London talks. But Cairnhill was a millionaires’ row, and the by-election victory, not surprisingly, went to the Liberal Socialist contestant. The PAP used the Tanjong Pagar by-election as a test of their strength, to see if they could win on their own, “without the communists or even against them”.46 They had moved among the people, winning their trust, for some two and a half years now, and felt confident of the ground support. Dr Goh Keng Swee, who had recently returned from London with his PhD, argued the pros and cons of a break with the communists, concluding that it was better to break and be rid of them.47 On their part, the communists had no intention of letting the PAP go. A document transmitted to an underground unit “at this time advised that assistance must be given to Lee Kuan Yew in the Tanjong Pagar by-election”.48 The united front must go on. Chinese middle school students came with offers to canvass for Lee, and Lim Chin Joo’s unions urged members to vote for Lee. But Toh Chin Chye “made it clear” to them that they were not needed.49 Lee won against two other candidates, an Independent and a Liberal Socialist, securing 67.5 per cent of the votes.

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United Front: Breaking up is Hard to Do The united front meant living with ambiguity and distrust for both sides in it. Each side tried to make more use of the other for its own ends. The procommunists sensed that they were losing their grip on the PAP after the London talks. Lee had taken a completely different stand from theirs, and had created “a very favourable impression” on the Untied Kingdom Government, according to Sir Robert Black in an interview many years later.50 If anybody could deal with the communists, it was he: “he was the best bet”, Black said, thinking back to 1957. The colonial authorities in Singapore began to revise their view of Lee, seeing him no longer as a crypto-communist but as a crypto anti-communist. Likewise, the pro-communists also came to value Lee as their prize catch, and were loath to lose him to the British. They started to plot to gain control of the PAP central executive committee, and through it, the secretary-general Lee. The timing was significant: “after the Tanjong Pagar and Cairnhill by-elections”, where again there was evidence of the PAP slipping from them.51 There was a tacit understanding when the PAP was founded in 1954 that the pro-communist wing would have about one third of the seats in the central executive committee. The pro-communists had adhered to it until this moment when Lim Chin Joo and his second-echelon teammates decided to go for a two-thirds share of seats in the fourth PAP central executive committee, the election of which would be held at the annual party conference on 4 August 1957. A two-thirds share was eight out of twelve seats. The annual party conference only decided, by election, who would fill the twelve seats in the central executive committee, not what office they would hold. That would come later when the twelve successful candidates chose office bearers from among themselves.52 This was a game that both sides engaged in. Lee and his cohorts in the democratic-socialist wing of the PAP were planning to ditch the procommunist wing. They would provoke the pro-communists to leave the PAP and “form another party using David Marshall as cover”.53 Marshall had made no secret of his intention to form a new party in June 1957. The democratic socialists planned to do as follows: they would come to the

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party conference to pass a series of resolutions that served as a communistcleansing ultimatum. They would then present themselves “as a block of eight candidates” to execute this policy, “leaving only four seats open for voting”.54 They deliberately leaked this plan to the press. Now the PAP was intended as a party for the masses. Anyone with two dollars for the annual dues could join it. This made it easier to get a large, unusually large, turnout on that memorable Sunday, 4 August 1957. The outcome was a tie. The pro-communists won six seats and the democratic socialists six seats. Later, when they met to decide the office bearers, the “pro-communist six” offered the “democratic-socialist six” the key posts of chairman, secretary, and treasurer. The “pro-communist six” feared a high profile and the high risks along with it. Their vulnerability was the point Lee and his cohorts capitalized on to beat them, by simply refusing to accept the proffered posts. The “pro-communist six” were in a quandary. They had to step into these dangerously exposed positions after all. They then sought to insure against a crackdown. They did this by offering to form “a socialist front” with Lim Yew Hock’s party “to fight the forthcoming election”.55 They asserted that unity in the PAP was “rock-like” in an attempt to create an “air of normality under new management”.56 But Lim Yew Hock knew better. A police report, referring to the situation by the middle of August, said that the communists “had largely regained their hold on the trade union movement” and “had also gained the upper hand in the PAP…”. Additionally, “women, students, and farmers were again being organized as a Communist United Front”.57 This was success, indeed, and a remarkable recovery from the losses suffered in Lim Yew Hock’s offensive several months ago, in September to November 1956. The credit doubtless belonged to Lim Chin Joo and the second-echelon cadres like himself. But, at the same time, it has to be said that they had overreached themselves, or had taken on more than they could handle. They lacked experience and skill, and yet were pitting themselves against some very astute and cerebral opponents. Lee and his cohorts easily turned the tables on them. Lim Chin Joo and company were to make another strategic error, which would bring sudden disaster on them. Lim and his trade union men had

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their base in the unions of the Chinese-speaking workforce. They coveted the unions of the English-speaking workforce which were under the Singapore Trade Union Congress of which Lim Yew Hock was president. The Singapore Trade Union Congress was Lim Yew Hock’s mass base in politics. What Lim Chin Joo and his cohorts planned to do was, in effect, the poaching or stealing of Lim Yew Hock’s mass base. Their plan was “to have the communist unions to join the [S]TUC as members and then to take over the leadership of the organization”.58 On their part, the leaders of the Singapore Trade Union Congress innocently thought of the gain in strength to be had by “admitting the left-wing unions into their fold”.59 Talks between the two sides were held in July and August 1957. They were brought to an abrupt halt by the security sweep Lim Yew Hock unleashed on the night of 22 August. Special Branch arrested and detained thirty-five people, among them Lim Chin Joo and twelve other trade unionists, and five of the “procommunist six” in the PAP central executive committee. Lim Yew Hock’s action made it possible for Lee and the others who constituted the “democratic-socialist six” to return to the top positions in the central executive committee of the PAP without feeling that they were stooges of the communists. The communists were worried that Lee might start to cooperate with Lim Yew Hock, and the PAP might form an alliance with the Labour Front–Alliance Government.60 They wanted Lee and the PAP to remain faithful to them. Marshall was their instrument for driving a wedge between Lee and Lim Yew Hock. Marshall was goaded “to attack the incompetence and corruptness of Lim Yew Hock’s regime to impress upon Lee Kuan Yew that it was not in his interest to team up with him”.61 Marshall was also not sparing of Lee, and had fiercely contended with him to prove who was more anti-British. The communists then “influenced [Marshall] into taking a softer line, so that Lee would not become exasperated and move even nearer to Lim”.62 Marshall was in the process of forming a new party. One Cheng Yuet Tong (also known as Chang Yuen Tong), the secretary of a pro-communist union, the Radio and Wireless Technicians’ Union, joined Marshall in the new party called the Workers’ Party. Cheng “persuaded many other communist unions… to follow his lead”.63

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In December 1957, local government elections were held. This was the election of councillors to the city government of Singapore. The PAP won thirteen of the fourteen seats it contested, and David Marshall’s newly formed Workers’ Party won four out of five seats. Both PAP and Workers’ Party candidates were “massively assisted by Chinese school students”,64 a sure indicator of communist support. Lim Yew Hock’s Labour Front did poorly, securing only seven of the thirty seats contested, and the Liberal Socialists were no better, with success in only four out of sixteen seats. The PAP teamed up with the Singapore UMNO, which won two of the three seats it contested in Malay majority areas, to dominate the city council with a PAP mayor. The city council elections were a guide to how the PAP and other parties would perform in the state elections to herald the new constitution in 1959. The PAP’s running of the city government would ensure more popular support by the results it delivered in terms of street lamps, standpipes, power-line extensions, and drainage, particularly in rural areas. The PAP mayor made dramatic gestures to acknowledge street hawkers, street urchins, and slum dwellers in the city area, which did wonders for the party’s populist image. The PAP’s electoral prospects looked extremely bright while that of the government in power, Lim Yew Hock’s Labour Front, was contrastingly dim. With the well known pro-communist cadres and their substitutes locked away in the two major operations mounted by Lim Yew Hock, who would the communists send to maintain the united front with the PAP? The answer was soon revealed. Sometime in March 1958, Lee had a tryst with a young, slim, pale Chinese man who came up from the communist underground. Lee sensed he was meeting with “someone truly ‘underground’ ”.65 He had come to tell Lee to put behind the regrettable attempt by the cadres to take control of the PAP at the annual party conference on 4 August 1957, and to reassure him of the sincerity of the communists to work together against their common enemy, the British. But who was he? He was the head of the propaganda and organization divisions of the communist movement in Singapore.66 He appeared to have taken over as head of organization, when the former head was discredited as a result of Lim Yew Hock’s offensive of 1956. Lee referred to him as the Plen, not

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knowing his real name until sometime later. He told Lee he was who he was. When Lee pressed him for evidence of his identity, he smiled confidently, looked Lee in the eye, and said he “had to take his word for it”.67 But Lee still insisted on testing him. Lee was unhappy with the communists for using David Marshall’s Workers’ Party to keep the PAP in check. He thought of Cheng Yuet Tong, the winsome pro-communist and chief asset of the party. Cheng had won a seat in the city council. Lee asked the Plen to order Cheng Yuet Tong to resign from the Workers’ Party and the city council. Without this crowd puller, the Workers’ Party would “lose most of its mass support”.68 At the same time, Lee would have proof of the Plen’s authority. It was agreed. “It will be done”, the Plen said.69 In May 1958, Lee went to London to join Lim Yew Hock and other members of the Singapore delegation to examine the draft of the new constitution. Lee’s standing with the British was at a new peak. LennoxBoyd gave him the honour and attention due to a future prime minister. At the conference, Lee studied carefully item by item of the new constitution now crafted in legal language. He wanted to make sure that there was nothing he could not live with later. The other members of the Singapore delegation deferred to what Lee said as carrying more weight than the views of the chief minister, who was the official leader of this side of the conference table. At this time, when he was in London and his political fortune was stacked so high, Lee was suddenly reminded of the Plen. One afternoon he “read on the front page of the Straits Times” about Cheng Yuet Tong’s resignation from the city council and the Workers’ Party.70 “The Plen had given his orders and had been obeyed” — so quickly too.71 Lee realized with a frisson that he was not someone to be trifled with.

Towards the 1959 General Election and Lim Yew Hock’s Demise The Plen sent Lee a message. The occasion was the city council by-election in July 1958 for the Kallang seat vacated by Cheng Yuet Tong. The PAP fielded a candidate and so did the Workers’ Party of David Marshall. The

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Plen’s message wishing the PAP success in this by-election was a signal to Lee that the communists would support the PAP candidate and not the Workers’ Party candidate. This was borne out by the results. Without Cheng Yuet Tong to ensure support for the Workers’ Party, its candidate could get nowhere. Lim Yew Hock’s Labour Front also entered a candidate in the Kallang by-election. Lim Yew Hock desperately needed to have his man win to turn around his declining political fortunes. He resorted to what his own disapproving colleague, Francis Thomas, noted as “dirty tactics”, the intimidation of the PAP’s helpers by thugs.72 This was one of the hardest-fought by-election. The PAP obtained 4,278 votes to the Labour Front’s 3,566, winning by a majority of 712 votes. The Workers’ Party received a pathetic 304 votes. Lee had to think forward to the date, sometime in 1959, when the PAP was expected to win the general election and form the government. His words and deeds in the run-up to 1959, and the strategy and platform he adopted to win the general election, must be consistent with the way the PAP would act once it became the government. This was imperative not only because he had to keep faith with the electorate. He had to be seen as honourable in the eyes of the communists with whom he had formed a united front. The Plen would be scanning his every word and every move. It was not easy for Lee. In October 1958, the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance was due for another three-year renewal. There would be a debate in the legislative assembly. What would he say? Back in 1955, when the PAP put in a token number of four candidates in the general elections, it had promised that it would abolish these emergency laws. To be consistent, Lee had to speak against the renewal of the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance in the legislative assembly, but at the same time, he inserted an important caveat “that as long as they (the emergency laws) are necessary for the maintenance of the security of the Federation, so long will they be necessary for Singapore”.73 This was a strong hint that he would retain the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance when the PAP became the government. It also gave notice of his intention to pursue merger with Malaya. 21 November 1958 marked the fourth anniversary of the PAP. The party issued a policy statement reaffirming support for merger with

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Malaya. Then, at a special party conference, it adopted a new method of electing the central executive committee. For this purpose, party membership was divided into two tiers: ordinary and cadres. The central executive committee, currently in office, would decide who was fit to be cadres. Only cadres would now have the right to be candidates and voters in the election of the central executive committee. The PAP got this idea from the Papacy. The Pope was elected by a college of cardinals. The reigning Pope had the right to appoint and add to the number of cardinals who would elect the successor Pope. “The strength of the system”,74 as attested to by history, recommended it to the PAP leaders who needed a foolproof means of preventing the pro-communists from ever again taking control of the central executive committee. In December the PAP gave another signal of what to expect in its future policy. The PAP newsletter of that month stated a clarification that the party was non-communist, and would retain the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance if it came to power. The Chinese press picked out this statement and reprinted it to be seen by those with eyes to see. Lee knew that the Plen would notice the cadres system and the shift in party line. He was not surprised when the Plen asked for another meeting with him. They met for two hours on a certain night. Once again the Plen was conciliatory, assuring Lee that he “need not be so suspicious of communist intentions”.75 True, he conceded, Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, and Lim Chin Joo had given Lee a hard time, but that was because of “the organization’s difficulty in communicating with their cadres”.76 But that was over. Lee was now “dealing with the top leadership” and “there would be no more misunderstandings”.77 What were the Plen’s options? Lee believed that the Plen “was totally confident” of the ability of Lim Chin Siong and another 150 odd cadres now in detention “to rebuild their strength” upon being released, and once this was completed “within 12 to 18 months”, Lee estimated, he (the Plen) “would dictate the terms” to Lee.78 And if Lee should move against the cadres and their refurbished united front organizations, he “would be destroyed electorally”, like another Lim Yew Hock.79 Lim Yew Hock had detained the pro-communist cadres. But Lee would have to release them. They would then pose a threat to him, but this was a

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risk he had to take. They had been his helpmates in the anti-colonial struggle, and when he took over where Lim Yew Hock left off, he would have to give them their freedom and call it quits with them. The PAP meant to win the 1959 general election. The release of the detainees was an essential part of the electoral strategy. The Chinese masses expected it as a moral obligation that the PAP had to discharge. Lee gave a pledge during the legislative assembly debate on the new constitution in April 1958 that “the PAP would not take office if it won the election unless the detained leaders were first released”.80 Lee took into account what he called “the values and social norms of our people”.81 In other words, people looked to a government that they could trust to act justly and honestly, and keep its promises. This made him aim for the high moral ground as the only way to win “the fight for hearts and minds”.82 The PAP had to be known to be as good as its word. This gave him an idea for dealing with the pro-communist cadres. Before he released them, he would commit them to a position which they could renege on only at the cost of their reputation and honour. “Throughout 1958–59”, he visited a number of cadres “in their new detention camp, just outside Changi Prison, once every three or four weeks”, bringing them curry chicken, bread and beer.83 These cadres were Devan Nair, Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Sandrasegeram Woodhull, and James Puthucheary. Lee steered their conversation over the curry meal to the subject of the 1959 general election. He hinted that he was not certain if the PAP should fight this election to win because a PAP Government would be the target of a takeover bid by the Malayan Communist Party. Lee observed that his listeners were “alarmed… for unless we won and took office, they could spend more years in detention”.84 In time Lee softened them up enough for them to offer “promises to support the party unequivocally”.85 Lee required their support to be stated in writing, and on terms that would incorporate the PAP’s uncompromising stand. The PAP was going to contest the 1959 general election on the platform — “independence for Singapore through merger with a democratic, socialist, but non-communist Malaya”.86 Devan Nair wrote and rewrote, and Lee vetted until he himself was satisfied, a statement supporting the PAP’s platform for these selected detained leaders to sign.

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After some resistance, Lim Chin Siong signed it, followed by the others, in what order is not known. The names of the signatories as typed on the document for them to sign above, show the following order: 1. S. Woodhull 2. Fong Swee Suan 3. Lim Chin Siong 4. C.V. Devan Nair 5. Chan Chiaw Thor.87 While in detention, Devan Nair had started to lose faith in communism, and he was the only one to sign the statement and abide by it in the long run. James Puthucheary did not sign it. Instead he had earlier sent Lee a letter discussing the hard choices he had to make in his “return from Communism”.88 Lee accepted the statement signed by the five cadres “on the understanding that when freed they would immediately declare their positions and release the document at a press conference” (which he would arrange). Nomination day for the 1959 general election was 25 April and the voting day was 30 May. Lim Yew Hock had promised an earlier date and the communists had jumped at it, but Lee talked him out of it. Lee had good reasons for doing so. He needed time, firstly, to select the candidates to stand in all the fifty-one constituencies. This was a complex task, and was only a little easier by the fact that the Malay, Indian, Eurasian, and a good number of Chinese, candidates had a common language in English. They satisfied two criteria. One was multiracialism: they were a multiracial group. The second was dependability, in the sense that they would support the PAP democratic socialists and not the communists. The English-educated types, even among the Chinese, were generally not exposed or sympathetic to communism. The same cannot be said of the Chinese-educated Chinese. Any Chineseeducated activist worth his salt was a passionate believer in the communist way to a just and equal society. And it made no difference to him whether communism was established through the ballot box or the barrel of a gun. Lee made an effort to “talent spot” the Chinese-educated Chinese by holding training classes for them. He found it immensely hard, because of their background and mindset, to get through to them his ideas of parliamentary democracy, socialism, and multiracialism. He could not be one hundred per cent sure that the ones he hand-picked as candidates were sound and reliable. He “later discovered to [his] dismay” that quite a few were stubbornly unregenerate communists.89

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The fifty-one PAP candidates were made up of thirty-four Chinese, ten Malays, six Indians and one Eurasian. What these figures mean is that Malays and Indians, were over-represented relative to the Chinese, in terms of candidates per head of population. Doubtless, this was because so many Chinese activists, who would make good candidates, were communists or communist sympathisers. Lee’s second reason for preferring a later rather than earlier date for the polls was the communist control of the PAP branches which he was trying to counter. Lee’s lieutenant in this exercise was Ong Pang Boon, the bilingual organizing secretary of the PAP, whom Lee had persuaded to leave his job in Kuala Lumpur to come to Singapore and work, at a lower salary, for the PAP. The PAP central executive committee was securely with Lee and his democratic-socialist cohorts, but the committees at the level of the PAP branches were in communist hands. The pro-communists running the party branches were not regular paid workers. Lee and Ong Pang Boon appointed “full-time paid staff” to the branches as their organizing secretaries.90 They appointed twenty-three of them, after careful screening.91 These “new appointees” were expected “to take charge” of the branches and to offset the power of the communist-controlled committees.92 For the purpose of winning the 1959 general election, this attempt to create a check and balance was not all that important since the PAP and the communists were on the same side. But Lee was thinking beyond the immediate event to the aftermath, when the communists would begin their hostile bid. Lee mentioned this in one of his election rallies. He “stated that the real fight would begin after the general elections in which the ultimate contestants would be the PAP and the MCP”.93 He had to make sure that his side could withstand the full blast of the communist attack. The communists fully backed the PAP in the 1959 general election. During the electioneering period, the MCP “gave orders to all its members” to help the PAP and the PAP only.94 They did not like the new constitution that would come into effect, but the release of the detainees would provide the opportunity to overturn it. Not least, they were also keen to wreak vengeance on the Lim Yew Hock Government at the polls. Lim Yew Hock did what he could to survive. He tried to organize a new party out of three existing parties which would be dissolved, namely the

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Labour Front, Liberal Socialists, and Workers’ Party. He did not succeed with the Labour Front “because dissolution was not provided for under the party’s rules”.95 The majority of members agreed with him, but if a vote was taken, it was legally possible for the minority who disagreed to block the dissolution. In the other two parties too, there were people who objected to disbandment. So Lim Yew Hock’s new party, the Singapore People’s Alliance (SPA), had to be formed with individuals leaving their parties to join him. Lim Yew Hock played up his friendship with the Tunku to increase his voter appeal. His party, the SPA, held out the prospect of merger, saying “Merger, which was ‘Singapore’s only salvation’, could only be brought about by Tun Lim Yew Hock”’.96 This point was emphasized by the use of the title Tun, the highest that Malaya could confer, which the Tunku had arranged for Lim Yew Hock. Federation ministers openly supported Lim Yew Hock during the election campaign. The Singapore UMNO-MCA formed an electoral alliance with the SPA. The Tunku warned members of Singapore UMNO, who preferred the PAP to the SPA, not to stand as independent candidates as a way of registering their displeasure with the SPA. The PAP could not retaliate against the Federation for its flagrant interference in the election, favouring Lim Yew Hock, because good relations with the Federation were essential to the PAP’s merger goal. The PAP could only tell voters to choose between merger with Singapore at heart (the PAP’s version) or merger with subservience to the Federation (the SPA’s version).97 The Cold War which divided up the world in those days also made an intrusion into the Singapore general election of 1959. An unnamed American donor, fearing a PAP and communist victory, put some $800,000 into an American bank account of Chew Swee Kee, the SPA Minister of Education. The PAP exposed the SPA’s receipt of this secret fund. The PAP had its own way of finding out, but Lee had also heard of it from Francis Thomas.98 Thomas, who was the conscience of the Labour Front/SPA, had two things weighing on his mind prior to the election. One was Lim Yew Hock’s “reliance on secret society gangsters”.99 The other was this American donation. He stepped down as minister and later crossed over to the opposition benches. The secret fund revelation damaged the SPA irretrievably.

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There were many parties and independent candidates in this election, but the main contenders were the PAP and the SPA. They were bidding for the votes of an electorate greatly expanded by the inclusion of the Chinaborn working class Chinese, who were enfranchised as a result of the citizenship bill initiated by Marshall, and passed under Lim Yew Hock. Another fact worth mentioning is that, starting in 1959, voting was compulsory, and in that year produced a voter turnout of 89.4 per cent of the 587,797 names on the electoral roll.100 The PAP won forty-three out of fifty-one constituencies, securing 53.5 per cent of the votes cast, a remarkable victory. The SPA went down in crushing defeat, managing to win in only four out of thirty-nine constituencies, on 20.4 per cent of the votes cast. Lim Yew Hock stood in the Cairnhill constituency and won, returning to the new Legislative assembly as an opposition member. Lee Kuan Yew became the prime minister in a PAP Government. For him the real battle had only just begun. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Lim Yew Hock, Reflections (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1986), p. 21. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., pp. 66–69. Francis Thomas, Memoirs of a Migrant (Singapore: University Education Press, 1972), p. 110. Lim, Reflections, pp. 81–82. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 74. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 56 and 58. Edwin Lee and Tan Tai Yong, Beyond Degrees: The Making of the National University of Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1996), p. 156. Lee Ting Hui, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954– 1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), p. 141.

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16 Ibid., pp. 14–17. 17 Lee Kuan Yew, The Battle For Merger (Singapore: Government Printing Office, n.d.), p. 19. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 22 Quoted by John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), p. 112. 23 Lee, Battle For Merger, p. 16. 24 Ibid., p. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 17. 26 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 126. 27 Ibid., p. 130. 28 Ibid., p. 131. 29 Drysdale, Singapore, pp. 154–55. 30 Ibid., p. 155. 31 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 249. 32 Ibid., p. 253. 33 Lim, Reflections pp. 87–88. 34 Quoted by Lennox A. Mills, Malaya: A Political and Economic Appraisal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 143. 35 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 258. 36 Ibid. 37 See Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 145. 38 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 262. 39 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 146. 40 Ibid. 41 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 261. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., p. 263. 44 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 147. 45 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 266. 46 Ibid., p. 267. 47 Drysdale, Singapore, p. 174. 48 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 147. 49 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 267. 50 Quoted by Drysdale who interviewed him, Singapore, pp. 168–69.

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51 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 149. 52 See Fong Sip Chee, The PAP Story: The Pioneering Years (Singapore: Times Periodicals Pte Ltd, n.d.), pp. 55–60. 53 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 268. 54 Ibid., p. 269. 55 Quoted by Drysdale, Singapore, p. 182. 56 Ibid. 57 Quoted by Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 138. 58 Ibid., p. 137. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., p. 152. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 153. 65 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 281. 66 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, pp. 134–35. 67 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 282. 68 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 154. 69 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 283. 70 Ibid., p. 285. 71 Ibid. 72 Thomas, Memoirs, p. 110. 73 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 287; Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 155. 74 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 287. 75 Ibid., p. 288. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., p. 289. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., p. 263. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 290. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., p. 291. 87 See Lee, Battle For Merger, Appendix 9, p. 189. 88 The letter was dated 2 September 1957, Changi Prison Camp. See Lee, Battle for Merger, pp. 196–203; Dominic J. Puthucheary and K.S. Jomo, eds., No Cowardly

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89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Past: James Puthucheary: Writings, Poems, Commentaries (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 1998), pp. 161–70. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 280. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 156. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., pp. 156–57. Lee, Battle For Merger, p. 29. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 157. Thomas, Memoirs, p. 118. Ong Chit Chung, “The 1959 Singapore General Election”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies VI, no. 1 (March 1975): 75. Ibid., p. 76. Lee, Singapore Story, pp. 293–95; Drysdale, Singapore, pp. 207–11. Thomas, Memoirs, p. 111. Ong, “The 1959 Singapore General Election”, p. 80.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior The Embattled Prime Minister permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are • 159 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

S I X

The Embattled Prime Minister

Coping with the Communists

O

ne of the first words Lee exchanged with the governor, Sir William Goode, after the election concerned the release of the detainees, a matter on which Goode had to refer to London. Lee had a schedule as follows: hold a post-election rally, release the detainees, and hold a press conference on the same day, and then be sworn in as the government. He wanted to have a rally without the detainees, and it was held on the night of 3 June. The detainees were released to face the press on 4 June. The government was sworn in on 5 June. Lee had planned the order of events to ensure that each one would grab the day’s headlines. Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Devan Nair, Sandrasegeram Woodhull, and James Puthucheary were among the eight detainees released. Their signed statement was given to the press in a conference and published the next day. The statement contained the key sentence: “To achieve complete identification with the ideal of a united Malayan nation, and to struggle by peaceful, democratic, and constitutional means for the enduring objective of a united, independent, democratic and non-communist, and socialist Malaya.”1 Lim, Fong, Nair, and Woodhull received appointment as political secretaries in various ministries, while Puthucheary was made the manager of a new Industrial Promotions Board. Clearly they were thought of with cautious optimism. Meanwhile, the labour scene was in some kind of disarray. The Lim Yew Hock Government, while closing the communist unions, had 159

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encouraged others to form, and these had mushroomed, aided by the Trades Union Ordinance which permitted any seven persons to form a union. Lim Yew Hock’s idea seemed to have been to replace the big communist federation of unions with lots of small unions, and by 1959, when the PAP took office, there were more than 200 unions around, more than 50 per cent of which had fewer than 250 members.2 K.M. Byrne, the PAP Minister for Labour and Law, did not like these “splinter” unions which he thought were easily exploitable by employers. So it was decided that a union must have a minimum of 250 members, must fit into one of nineteen categories, each to be formed into a federation, and must be affiliated to something big, meaning, “obviously the Trades Union Congress”.3 The Trade Unions Bill, passed in the legislative assembly in 1960, set out these points of reform. The impending reform suited Lim Chin Siong who had resumed his work in the unions. He speedily organized two new federations, one for land transport workers, and the other for building construction workers, which were registered in February 1960. He had a third federation of unions, this time for factory and shop workers, registered in May. By May, the Trade Unions Bill was about to be passed into law, requiring only the assent of the Yang Di-Pertuan Negara. At this point, the government had “second thoughts”, and advised the head of state not to sign the bill.4 The government also withdrew the registration of Lim’s three new federations. Suddenly, the fear had arisen that a unified labour movement would facilitate the pro-communist cadres’ return to the political struggle. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) was nearly swallowed by the procommunists during Lim Yew Hock’s time. The PAP Government had to guard against this possibility by having its own man as secretary-general. This was G. Kandasamy, a leader of the public services employees’ union who had stood as a PAP candidate in the 1959 election, and won. Kandasamy had nine secretaries under him of which three were Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, and Devan Nair. He had some trouble with Nair who vied with him for the post of secretary-general, but he managed to push him into the research department to be its head. He had to allow Lim Chin Siong to take charge of industrial disputes negotiated in Chinese while he himself supervised those negotiated in English. The post of treasurer of the TUC

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was important for a good reason. Kandasamy insisted that the incumbent should be his nominee.5 Kandasamy watched over the TUC until the breach between PAP leaders and the pro-communists was wide open in 1961 and the TUC was dissolved. Then the unions which were with the PAP formed the National Trades Union Congress. The TUC had included unions that were neither with the PAP nor the pro-communists but neutral, but they now joined the pro-communist unions in a new Singapore Association of Trade Unions (SATU). The NTUC had twenty-seven unions under it, SATU had eighty-two, and was the bigger battalion by far. The pro-communists had an interest in keeping the labour scene festering with disputes and strikes. The government countered it by setting up an industrial arbitration court and empowering the Minister for Labour and Law to refer cases to it. The pro-communist union leaders resented what they saw as the usurpation by the minister of a right that should really be theirs.6 Nor were they pleased with the ruling that when a case was referred, all industrial action must cease, pending the outcome, and if unheeded, could lead to de-registration for the offending union. They felt that they had been robbed of the initiative and power to direct the labour movement, which, indeed, was as intended by the government. As another counter measure, Lee and Dr Goh launched the People’s Association. It was a statutory board tasked with looking after community centres, and as its name suggests, it was to reach out to people who came for the services and activities which were organized for them. The community centres increased from an initial number of twenty-eight to fifty-four by 1961. Varying from “big ones in the city” to “small wooden huts in the rural areas”, they were places “for education and recreation” opened to the masses.7 Their covert purpose was to help the PAP Government retain its link with the people, should the PAP branches, located island-wide, defect to the communist side, which was deemed very likely. The People’s Association “was directly controlled by the Prime Minister himself”.8 The Works Brigade was formed to provide work and discipline for unemployed young men and women. They might also be mobilized as strike breakers “when the expected crisis came”.9 The minister for law and labour was the director of the brigade.

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The man put in charge of the People’s Association was Chan Sun Wing, PAP assemblyman and parliamentary secretary in the prime minister’s office. Another PAP assemblyman, Wong Soon Fong, “an electrician by profession and a man of upright and stable character”, was in charge of the Works Brigade.10 But in fact both Chan and Wong were working for the communists, and “had been planted in both these sensitive posts by the Malayan Communist Party”.11 This discovery was a part of the aftershocks which occurred when (as we shall see) the fault lines between the PAP and the pro-communists erupted into a major political earthquake. The behaviour of the ex-detainees (Devan Nair excepted) suggests that the fault lines were still there though temporarily covered up. James Puthucheary returned to the University of Malaya Socialist Club to speak to a new batch of students on “why I believe that Socialists have a particularly important role in nation-building in Malaya”.12 Fong Swee Suan was under observation to see if he would really turn from communism. He was not a Singapore but a Malayan citizen, and there were no plans as yet to make him one. He resumed union work, and by March 1960, was an honorary adviser of the Singapore General Employees’ Union. He came under “the pressure of emotional blackmail from pro-Communist union leaders”.13 Lim Chin Siong, who was also an honorary adviser in the same union as him, reclaimed him back for the cause. Lim and Fong teamed up again to win over unions in the TUC, so successfully that when the TUC was shut down, the unions which regrouped under the SATU far outnumbered those which did so under the PAP-sponsored NTUC. Prior to the showdown between the PAP and the pro-communists, a separate conflict arose within the top ranks of the PAP, which allowed the pro-communists to try and gain leverage. Lim Chin Siong got ready to fish in troubled waters.14 The origin of the conflict had nothing to do with Lim. The conflict was initiated by Ong Eng Guan, the former PAP mayor and now Minister for National Development. Ong was an accountant trained in Australia, and president of a Melbourne University club and founder-president of the Asian Students Federation of Melbourne. None of this prepares us for his adopting the stance of poor man’s mayor, combined with an anti-Western demeanour. His extreme populist style caused his inaugural ceremony as

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mayor to be aborted, only to be held again the following day with no visible and audible difference to the pandemonic scene of the first occasion.15 His public denigration of the City Council’s officials was taken by the rest of the civil service to be a foretaste of life under a PAP regime. When the cabinet posts were decided after the May 1959 general election, Ong appeared to have been discontented with his allotment. There was a belief “that what Ong did for the ordinary people in Singapore during his tenure in the City Council made a significant contribution to the success of the PAP in the 1959 elections”.16 Ong apparently shared this belief. It seemed to have been the justification for his next move, which was “to make a bid for the premiership”.17 Ong was a hero in his constituency, Hong Lim, a Chinatown district, where his fluency in the Hokkien dialect and his popularity with hawkers, shopkeepers, and tenement dwellers counted for much. But for his next, more ambitious move, he needed the pro-communists to give him the requisite extra degree of support. To achieve this, he must look more left than the prime minister, Lee. Accordingly, he came to the PAP conference in June 1960 and tabled a slate of sixteen resolutions. One called on the party to reaffirm its anti-colonial struggle, another pressed for “fresh talks” in London because the present constitution “cannot meet the demands of the people”,18 and yet another asked for the release of all detainees. Ong knew that this last point would hit home as the release of detainees had not been as thorough as the pro-communists would have liked, with some eighteen persons still “kept in custody”.19 The outcome of Ong’s filibuster was a predictable expulsion from both the party and government of the PAP. Ong became an independent member opposing Lee in the Legislative Assembly. In August 1960, Lee made a statement in the house about “a possible collusion” between Ong and the communists.20 In his memoirs, Lee hinted at the possibility that the communists could have asked certain proxies close to Ong to unleash his sixteen accusing resolutions.21 On the other hand, an expert view has it that the communists detested Ong (as Lee also knew) and that it was Ong who sought to form an alliance with the communists against Lee, and not the other way round. The communists remembered that Ong had spoken against them in the past, and saw through his opportunism in the

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present episode. It was unlikely, even though Ong was now speaking their language, that they would have thrown Lee over in favour of him as their leading frontman. Indeed, the Plen wrote Lee a letter in response to his statement in the Legislative Assembly, to disclaim any connection with Ong and his sixteen resolutions.22 For some months Ong fought Lee from the opposition bench and challenged him to resign and subject himself to a by-election, and Ong would do the same, each man returning to his own constituency to stand again. Ong made certain allegations for which the government asked the Legislative Assembly to censure him, but while the matter was still being debated, Ong resigned his seat. The government set up a commission to investigate his allegations which found against him, and then held a by-election in his constituency. The election campaign period was nine weeks, from 11 March to 29 April 1961. The PAP clearly banked on having this time to win over Ong’s territory. But this was also time enough for the communists to work on Lee. The MCP instructed its cadres to give support to the PAP candidate against Ong who was out to prove his invincibility. At the same time, the cadres should exact concessions from Lee. Lim Chin Siong, the leading cadre, asked for the abolition of the Internal Security Council. Lee “refused to budge on [this] issue”.23 Lim proposed asking for Singapore’s independence in the next constitutional talks due in 1963. Lee responded by stating that “he did not believe in an independent Singapore”.24 The PAP’s stand was that there should be a merger between Singapore and Malaya. Failing to get any satisfaction from Lee, Lim Chin Siong “quietly passed the word around in Hong Lim not to support the PAP”.25 PAP campaigners visited “every house, shop or hawker stall … several times over” in those gruelling weeks.26 But the cadres’ whispered message undermined all this effort. On polling day, 29 April 1961, Ong defeated the PAP candidate, Jek Yeun Thong, in a straight fight by 7,747 votes to 2,820 votes. The defeat was the penalty Lee suffered for not moving to the more revolutionary line indicated by Lim Chin Siong. But this “stinging defeat”,27 as Lee put it, also made him more determined than ever to fight on for a non-communist, united Malayan nation.

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Creating National Unity On 5 June 1959, prime minister-designate Lee and his colleagues were sworn into office by Sir William Goode, the last governor of Singapore and the first Yang Di-Pertuan Negara (head of state). On Sir William’s departure six months later, the Malayan-born Minangkabau Malay, Yusof bin Ishak, was installed as Yang Di-Pertuan Negara on 3 December. The PAP Government’s choice of Ishak as head of state, as well as the adoption of Malay as the national language, and an anthem in Malay — Majulah Singapura (“Let Singapore Flourish”), were intended to foster the sense of being Malayan that was fundamental to the PAP’s merger plan. On the same day as Ishak’s installation ceremony, the government launched a National Loyalty week. Singapore was a city state built through the immigration of people from the region and as far as China, India, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The people would have remained immigrants all their lives, Lee said, but for the tremendous upheavals throughout Asia in the last ten years. “The immigrants have decided to stay and make this their home,” he continued. “They have taken Singapore citizenship, acquired the rights and privileges of being a citizen, and promised to share the responsibilities of the state.”28 Diversity of race, language, and culture was part of the richness of Singapore, he conceded. “But in one thing we cannot afford diversity — diversity of loyalty.” This would be the case “if our new citizens are loyal not to Singapore, but to the countries of their origin”.29 It was “to emphasize this paramount need for singleness of loyalty” that the National Loyalty Week was declared.30 In the following year, 1960, the government declared 3 June as National Day, and Lee delivered his first National Day message. The same day in the previous year was marked by the PAP’s night-time post-election rally, held without the detainees who were to be freed only on the following morning. This coincidence passed unremarked. Instead, Lee went on to explain what the National Day was for. He said: Most newly independent countries have chosen the day of the proclamation of their independence as their National Day. We in Singapore have chosen the 3rd of June, not because it is the day of proclamation of our independence, for we are not independent, but

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because it is a day that marks a step forward in our advance towards independence. And every year on the 3rd of June, it is our hope that the people of Singapore will cease their routine daily toil, reflect on the past, assess the present, and plan a common course for the future.31 Lee also talked about keeping up “morale and confidence” and “the stability and sanity” essential for economic enterprise, which in turn would create “more jobs” and bring “the good things of life which all of us want”.32 But in order to have stability and sanity, he said, the government must be seen “to be fair, just, and honest”. If all this was important for economic endeavour, one may argue, how much more so for the nurturing of national unity and loyalty? Lee’s idea of the nation included the promise to deliver social justice. Since his Malayan Forum days, he had envisaged the creation of Malayan unity as going hand in hand with the fulfillment of a just and equal society. Only then, in his view, could the Malayan nationalist hope to beat the Malayan communist who was already there — with the people — long before him. The PAP Government started to address the vertical division in Singapore society early on taking office. British rule had encouraged a relatively small number of people to be educated in English, after which to train for a profession or, as in most cases, to work in a commercial firm or a government department. The high end of this English-educated class consisted of an administrative elite who were yet lower than the colonial masters under whom they worked. Also in this class were doctors (in public or private sector), engineers, lawyers, architects, accountants, business executives and, lower down the scale, teachers, pastors, chief clerks, and secretaries. The English-educated, as a class, had voted against the PAP in the 1959 election. The English-language press and the Catholic church had taken an anti-PAP position.33 Dr Goh Keng Swee who made this charge, said: The English-educated must essentially lose the privileged position they enjoyed under British colonial rule… They must first try to understand what is going on in the society in which they live and get to know the tremendous social forces that lie beneath and on the surface of things…

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The English-educated must find his way back to the people. He must break out of the cultural and class isolation in which he now lives… He must regard himself as one of the people, work with them, fight for the rights of the common man, make life more just and more decent for the hundreds of thousands who live in our slums.34 The PAP Government inherited the English-educated civil service from the British. They proceeded to re-educate the top civil servants. They needed them to help build the new social order. One of the first “lessons” was a pay cut. Dr Goh, the new finance minister, expected a budget deficit in 1959, and told Prime Minister Lee who agreed with him on cutting ministerial salaries as well as the pay of civil servants in the upper income ranges. In all, 6,000 of the 14,000 civil servants were affected. This was not just a money-saving thing. It was also intended as an atonement for the failure to note how the other half, the underside of society, lived. Lee said: We wanted to show everyone in Singapore, especially the Chineseeducated majority, that for the public good, the English-educated were prepared to make sacrifices, led by the ministers. I thought it not unreasonable that they make this sacrifice to help us get the message across that, in this new era, we would all share hardships and joys equally.35 Already in shock from waking up to an elected PAP Government, the English-educated civil servants had to face the prospect of financial pain as well. They fought the pay cut, but unsuccessfully, as might be expected. Lee and Dr Goh took the next measure, which was to send the top civil servants to “school”. Opened on 15 August 1959, the political study centre at Goodwood Hill was meant, in Lee’s words (to the first cohort), not only to stimulate your minds, but also to inform you of the acute problems that confront any popularly elected government in a revolutionary situation… Once these problems have been posed to you, you will be better able to help us work out the solutions to

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them, by making the administration more sensitive and responsive to the needs and mood of the people.36 The English-educated were white collar workers who saw themselves as superior to menial workers. One way to correct this attitude was to make them soil their hands once in a while. PAP ministers set the example by coming out to clean up the beaches or sweep the streets, accompanied by civil servants and community leaders. This was one of the good practices which the PAP borrowed from their communist rival. Besides the outward demonstration of solidarity with the people and service to them, this switch from the office to the streets, with a broom or a basket in hand, on weekends, had a spiritual value. It was believed to prevent ministers and civil servants from letting power get to their heads. The variety of races in Singapore was amazing, but the Chinese, through their sheer number, had given the city state a Chinese identity. The Chinese community was a complex world in itself, as was the case with every other ethnic community in the state. There were the Chinese who spoke their own dialect as well as the dialect of the majority subgroup, like Hokkiens. There were the Chinese who were educated in Mandarin, which had enjoyed renewed interest and pride on the back of the PRC’s rise to world prominence. Both the dialect speakers (who were described as “Chinese-speaking”) and the Mandarin speakers (who were described as “Chinese-educated”) were suffused with revolutionary fervour as a result of communist penetration and national inspiration drawn from the PRC. The convergence of influences — educational, ideological, and nationalistic — shaped the Singapore Chinese identity of those times. This made the Chinese a great challenge to any would-be Malayan nation builder. Lee understood the size of this problem and was anxious for the English-educated, civil servants especially, to understand it too. As Lee saw it, the task before them was firstly to compete with the communists for the support of the Chinese majority. “[W]e had to prevent”, he recalled, “the communists from exploiting the grievances of the Chinesespeaking, whose voting strength was now decisive…we had to convince people that this government would govern in the interests of all”.37 Upon

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the success of the first part of the task hinged the second part. “Only then,” he wrote “would we be able to tackle the lack of a Malayan consciousness among the Chinese, and imbue them with a commitment and loyalty to the country of their adoption; and this was all-important, for they had to change their attitude before the Malay leaders in Kuala Lumpur would agree to merger and enable Singapore to achieve independence as part of Malaya”.38 History had given the English-educated “an important role to play”,39 Lee said, urging them to join his mission. “They can help us in bridging the gulf between the colonial past and the egalitarian future.”40 The consequences would otherwise be dire. Lee warned: “If we failed to close the chasm between the Chinese-speaking and the English-educated elite, the result would be painful. For if the Chinese-educated won power, the Englisheducated would suddenly become the new dispossessed under a government that would be conducted in Chinese.”41 The hard lesson Lee was driving home was that national solidarity could not come without cost. Lee, Dr Goh, Dr Toh Chin Chye, Kenneth Byrne, and S. Rajaratnam belonged to the privileged English-educated class, and were, in Lee’s words, “their natural leaders…[who] did not want them to be a dying breed”.42 For Lee personally there was a price to be paid too. He took a pay cut along with his ministerial colleagues. But the more gruelling part of his sacrifice was the tremendous effort he had to make at language learning while doing the work of prime minister, at a time when everything was new or had to be fixed urgently. Malay was the only language of the people that he had learned from young and was good at. But the Hokkien dialect which flowed so naturally in the oratory of Lim Chin Siong and Ong Eng Guan, it being their native tongue, was foreign to him, a “Baba” Hakka, and something he had to learn from scratch. He had no choice but to do it since he could no longer rely on them to articulate his vision for the future. Additionally, he had to learn Mandarin. This was the official language of Chinese nationalism which was the only nationalism that the Chinese-educated of Singapore knew and revelled in, and he must speak their language if he was to persuade them to switch to a Malayan-centred nationalism. When he started to

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speak in his newly acquired tongues, falteringly at first, the mass audience warmed up to him as they realized how seriously he meant to identify with them and their needs, in order to lead them.

Lee’s Three Lieutenants Lee had three men who were particularly important in helping him win over the Chinese-educated ground. They were Jek Yeun Thong, Ong Pang Boon, and Lee Khoon Choy. Proficient in Mandarin, they made up for his earlier deficiency in it, and were his trustworthy, dependable, and loyal lieutenants. The turning point in their lives occurred when they embraced the PAP’s ideal of a united Malaya. They sided with Lee in the struggle with Lim Chin Siong, the pro-communist conspirator, and Ong Eng Guan, the personal challenger. Jek Yeun Thong, born in Singapore and graduated from the Chinese High School, worked as a newspaper reporter. He wrote Lee’s first speech in Mandarin for him, and “then spent several hours coaching [him] to read [it]”.43 Jek Yeun Thong was the PAP’s candidate of hope in the by-election battle with Ong Eng Guan. Though he lost, his campaign was symbolic of the national interest that the PAP represented versus the chauvinistic parochialism that his opponent relied on to win. Jek’s speech at his first rally on Hong Lim Green was so memorable to the PAP cadres that they never stopped talking about it.44 Ong Pang Boon, born in Kuala Lumpur, was educated in Chinese and English. He worked for Lee in the 1955 election when Lee first stood at Tanjong Pagar, and later answered Lee’s call to become the organizing secretary of the PAP, tasked with combating the pro-communists who were thick at the branch level. Ong was for socialism as the answer to the economic inequalities brought about by British colonial rule. But it had to be a socialism rooted in a Malayan consciousness.45 He talked of the need to promote interest in Malay as the National Language, and to encourage the Chinese to give the Malay people “reasonable deference and understanding, in hope for a smooth completion to the task of merging Singapore and Malaya”.46 As Minister of Home Affairs in 1959, Ong Pang Boon mounted

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a campaign to purge the cultural scene of pornographic magazines and films, and of jukeboxes. In part, this was to compete with the pro-communists who were adopting a holier-than-thou attitude. But Ong also let it be known that the culture to cultivate must not only be wholesome, but also Malayan, in outlook. Additionally, he indicated that “the Malayan culture he envisaged was a fusion of all cultures in Singapore and Malaya”.47 Lee Khoon Choy, born in Penang, was educated there at the Chung Ling High School. This school was exceptional for its bilingual education, and the prominent intellectuals from China as well as local teachers of English on its staff.48 He worked as a journalist for various newspapers and had a stint in London in 1949. Exposed since his student days to Chinese politics in Malaya, which mirrored the polarization between the nationalist and communist parties of China, he was to see the same two factions when he went to the China Society located in the British capital. Only, now the division was between the pro-Beijing and pro-Taipeh camps. But Lee Khoon Choy also joined the Malayan Forum in London, and it was this involvement that was instrumental in moulding, he said, “my identity as a Malayan Chinese”.49 He then severed his ties with the China Society and its members. His loyalty was now firmly directed at where he had decided to stay permanently — Singapore and Malaya. Lee Khoon Choy was keen on art, drama, song, music, and dance. When he was the parliamentary secretary and later minister of state for culture, he undertook projects to get the different ethnic groups to appreciate each other’s culture, saying “it was time for a fusion of our major cultural strands to create a distinctively Singaporean culture”.50 He strongly believed in “interaction and fusion” as the way to multiculturalism.51 The significance of these three men was that they were able to rethink the matter of belonging in the light of Malayan realities, and to tell others. They had to define constantly what it meant to be a Malayan Chinese, in the electoral and parliamentary battles, and the campaign for merger, that they engaged in as PAP stalwarts. They were thus well placed to persuade people of the immigrant generation to embrace a Malayan identity along with their newly acquired Singapore citizenship, thereby guiding them on the road to merger.

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Making Education More Equal and Malayan Chinese-school students took to the streets in the 1950s to challenge the colonial government and the chief ministers, David Marshall and Lim Yew Hock. At the heart of this Chinese-school crisis was a grievance about not being fairly treated. Chinese schools did not receive the same degree of government support as the schools teaching in the English medium, and their graduates were not given the same opportunity to enter government service. Marshall ordered an All-Party Committee to look into the Chineseschool problem. The committee laid down the principle of equal treatment for all schools and teachers. It asked the government to give assurance of the fact that the aid to be granted to Chinese schools would not result in “Anglicization”, i.e., conversion from Mandarin to English as the medium of instruction, but that instead “there will be positive steps taken to encourage the fostering of Chinese culture, together with other cultures which have richly endowed this land of ours”.52 However, it also recommended that the teaching of Malay and English be included in the curriculum of Chinese schools, and that the textbooks used in all schools be rewritten with a Malayan content. Lee, who was on the All-Party Committee, had steered it to incorporate all these ideas of Malayanization. The responsibility to implement them became Lee’s when he became prime minister in 1959. Chinese-school officials and teachers willingly accepted the teaching of Malay and English as additional subjects. So Malayanization was not as difficult as was anticipated. A further change thought desirable was to have the Chinese schools follow the model set by the English medium schools. Both Chinese schools and English-medium schools offered six years of primary education. This would not be changed. At the secondary level, the Chinese Middle School offered three years of junior school followed by three years of senior school. These six years would now be reduced to four years. The Ministry of Education would set a common examination for all Chinese Middle Schools at the end of the fourth year, namely the Secondary Four Examination. Only those who had passed at the required standard (the cut-off point was rumoured to be twenty-five per cent of the total cohort) would be allowed

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to proceed to another two years of study in what would be pre-university classes.53 This was how it was in the English-medium schools, and the Chinese Middle Schools were asked to conform to it. Everybody, from the towkays who managed the Chinese Middle Schools, to the teachers, parents, and students, felt threatened by the restructuring. One reason was, in a word, dilution. The majority of students would receive four years of secondary education instead of six, as at present, and would be poorer in their knowledge of Chinese language and culture. There would follow a “lowering of the cultural standard of the society in general”.54 Another reason was attrition. The average age of students completing four years of secondary education was seventeen years. The majority would leave school at this age. The two more years they would otherwise have, studying in the Chinese Middle School, would make a difference to their maturity and preparedness to make a living. It would not be so bad if the government created opportunities for the training of these seventeen-yearolds, but nothing was said on this score. One plan, which was suggested to the government, was the setting up of a polytechnic for these Chinese school leavers. On top of the feared injury to the Chinese schools was the added insult of being made over on the model of the English-medium school. But the main reason was the fear of extinction. Chinese primary schools were fast losing out in enrolment to English-medium schools. This translated into fewer students going up to Chinese Middle Schools. Alarmed, the Chinese school lobby looked to the PAP Government to intervene and restrict the intake into English-medium primary schools. This was how they interpreted the principle of equal treatment for all schools, taking it to mean also parity in student numbers.55 The falling enrolment made them even more suspicious of restructuring. It could lead to their demise. These fears and concerns spelled opportunity for the communists. Here was a chance to rebuild their strength in the Chinese schools which had been hit by Lim Yew Hock’s closure of the Chinese Middle School students’ union in 1956. The Plen had his own misgivings on the school reform. Like many in the Chinese school lobby, he too considered the four years of secondary school as inadequate for the purpose of earning a living. But

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more important to him was the concern that students would be launched into the corrupt and decadent working world before they were mature enough for ideological training.56 The Ministry of Education held the first Secondary Four Examination from 27 November to 1 December 1961. The communists instructed students to boycott it, and to make sure they did, set up pickets at examination centres.57 Lee did not fall into the trap of calling out the police to break the pickets, as the communists had expected, so that they could discredit him as an enemy of Chinese education and culture. Instead, he appealed to the parents and offered police protection for the parents to take their children through the communist pickets. This tactic worked, reinforced by his message to the parents “that if their children missed this examination, they would lose a whole year before they could take it again”.58 The examination boycott was a failure. The communists formed a students’ working committee to direct the boycott and hoped to turn it into a new Chinese Middle School students’ union. This was a vain hope as the PAP Government “would never have approved its registration”.59 The examination would decide who would go to the new pre-university classes in the Chinese Middle Schools. The new pre-university classes, which entailed two years of study, would not begin to show results until 1963–64 at the earliest. In 1960 the government took an important interim measure. Consequently, in June that year, the Singapore division of the University of Malaya opened pre-university classes in all faculties to selected students from the Chinese Middle schools. Seventy two students were admitted, nineteen to the Arts, sixteen to Law, seventeen to Science, and twenty to Medicine. In April 1961, examinations were held by the respective faculties, after which the number of students who qualified to read for fulldegree courses were nine in the Arts, ten in Law, fifteen in Science and nineteen in Medicine.60 The significance of this was that the University of Malaya, for long the preserve of the English-educated, was made to play a part in the creation of national unity by admitting the Chinese-educated who had the potential to go further. There was a Chinese university in Singapore, teaching in Mandarin, known as “Nanyang University” (“Nantah” in Chinese), but it had fared

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none too well. The idea of a university for the best and brightest of the Chinese-educated in Singapore, Malaya and the region, was magnificent, but the actual implementation fell short of the promise. Nevertheless, there was no denying the importance of Nantah. The whole Chinese community had chipped in to make it possible, and it was the nearest thing to a national icon for them. The colonial government in Singapore would have nothing to do with Nantah, whose incorporation in 1953 it had opposed. But the elected leaders of the people could ignore Nantah only at their peril. Lim Yew Hock had the first crack at the challenging problem that Nantah presented, and after May 1959, it fell to Lee Kuan Yew to try and resolve it. Nantah as yet had no government appointees on its executive council, chaired by a prominent businessman and rubber baron, Tan Lark Sye. Tan, acknowledged as Nantah’s founding father, was also, as it turned out, its chief obstacle to progress. Tan might have excelled in business and industry, but he and others of his ilk in his council knew precious little about academia. Therefore, the government sought to create a new university council, with a number of government appointees on it, who would steer the university through the reforms and upgrading of standards necessary before the government would recognize the degrees awarded. This process involved the appointment of international and local assessors, and got the government into a tussle with Tan Lark Sye and his council, and with students loyal to Tan Lark Sye. It was a lengthy, embattled, and time-consuming episode. Meanwhile, the first batch of Nantah graduates was coming out in 1959–60. Where would they go for employment? The newly elected PAP Government had to worry over them. The civil service customarily took in graduates of the University of Malaya (located in Singapore) because they were educated in English, the language of administration, and their degrees were recognized. The PAP Government decided to make a bold departure from usual practice. As Lee explained: “[It] would have been politically unacceptable to allow the first batch of Nantah graduates to be without hope of government recognition and employment. We discussed this carefully in cabinet and decided that we had to give a few of them a chance to enter the public service, but at a lower level than the University of Malaya graduates”.61

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Lee then acted on this decision: I drove down the then winding Jurong Road to Nantah in October 1959 to speak to its one thousand students. The first batch of 400 wanted jobs, and I said the government would absorb 70 graduates — 50 for the education service, 20 in other departments. The performance of these 70 would determine the future of those that followed. If the first batch proves your worth as able and disciplined workers, prepared to compete on par with the English-educated and make your contribution to society, then you will get your worth recognised.62 In addition, the government gave “suitable candidates scholarships for postgraduate study in universities abroad, particularly in science and engineering”. “We believed”, Lee said, “this would mollify the brighter ones and test their real worth.”63 There was a need to pacify them because the communists were hard at work and daily winning recruits from among them. Lee understood the competition he was up against and had to be innovative as well as determined. He had taken the first steps on the long and winding road towards resolving the Nantah conundrum, and the whole question of making the Chinese-educated feel that they belonged, and had a stake in becoming Malayan.

Merger, He Said Colonial rulers tended to have an elastic view of the territories under their control, expanding, contracting, dividing, and reuniting them depending on time and circumstance. The patchwork called British Malaya, comprising crown colonies, protectorates, both federated and unfederated, is a case in point. In contrast, the Malayan Communist Party adopted a unitary view. In the early post-war period, the MCP set up a coalition reflecting the widest spectrum of interests possible to oppose the formation of a Federation of Malaya which excluded Singapore. The MCP’s armed revolution in 1948,

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had it succeeded, would have resulted in the reintegration of Singapore and Malaya under the red star of Malayan communism. But the MCP lost the guerrilla war before the end of 1951. This and other landmark events — the rise of the nationalist rightist Alliance to power, Baling in 1955, and Malayan independence in 1957 — forced the MCP to defer the goal of a united Malaya for an indefinite period. It settled for Socialism in a small place. The larger hinterland territory can wait. For this purpose, the British must be forced to grant Singapore independence without a merger with Malaya. This conflicted with the PAP’s objective, which from the start, had always been to bring Singapore into the Malayan fold, and never intended Singapore to be home alone. Lee was to use the issue of merger to engineer a break with the pro-communists inside the PAP, and flush them out into an open fight with him and his democratic-socialist colleagues. Once this happened, the Plen retaliated with all he had at his command. It was to be the greatest battle ever waged for the future of Singapore. Sometime in mid-1959 the newly-elected PAP Government initiated discussion with the Alliance Government of Malaya on the subject of merger. The latter was uninterested. More talking was needed, and in this regard, it was fortunate that the new constitution now in place had provided for an Internal Security Council with three British and three Singapore members and a Malayan member. Through the meetings of this council, Lee came to be on terms of mutual trust and respect with Dr Ismail bin Dato Abdul Rahman, the Malayan member. Dr Ismail was “number three in the leadership of UMNO, after the Tunku and the deputy prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak”.64 With the British side Lee gained even more warmth and confidence. Three men very important to Lee were Sir William Goode, the former (and last) Governor of Singapore and now U.K. Commissioner, and chairman of the Internal Security Council, Goode’s successor, Lord Selkirk, and Selkirk’s deputy, Philip Moore. Goode held the first meeting of the Internal Security Council in August 1959. Citing special branch experts who stated that the communists were rebuilding their strength again in Singapore, he wanted to know what Lee had to say. In fact, Goode knew already, but he purposely asked for the benefit of the Malayan member, Dr Ismail. The Malayan method of dealing

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with the communists was simple: knock them out at the first sign of revival. The Malayan Government could get away with it, Lee explained, because of its mainly Malay mass base. The Singapore Government could not. The predominantly Chinese electorate would not forgive the PAP Government for taking action against the pro-communists for no better reason than that they were good at reorganizing the unions and associations. The government must “first prepare the ground”,65 and come up with demonstrable evidence that what the pro-communists were doing would hurt the economy and cost workers their jobs. A security action out of the blue was out of the question, as far as Lee was concerned. If he was to survive politically, Lee would have to fight the procommunists openly and cleanly, and preferably, have a good issue to fight on. This issue could only be the merger. Malayan leaders, and U.K. Commissioners too, viewed the rebuilding of communist power in Singapore as reason enough for security action to be launched as soon possible. But Lee would have argued no, it was the merger that must be launched in a timely manner. Lee and his colleagues in the PAP were frustrated with the Tunku’s repeated rebuff of their overtures. Lee feared that the Tunku’s “insensitive” public comments every time the subject of merger was broached, amounted to “giving the advocates of a separate, independent Singapore increasing credibility”.66 On his part, Lee tried to create a sense of urgency about the merger. He spoke to Selkirk and Moore, warning them “it might be too late”, and that “we were at a critical juncture”.67 He had more luck with the British than with the Malayan leaders. The Tunku, Tun Razak, and even Dr Ismail, were unreceptive, the first two, totally. Selkirk and Moore at least gave Lee the feeling that he was not all alone. They were with him. It was the intention and hope of the British to reunite Singapore and Malaya someday. This was part of the British grand design to bring all their charges in Southeast Asia under one roof in the care of independent Malaya. Selkirk and Moore asked Lee to prepare a paper incorporating this grand design, which included in its sweep, Singapore, Malaya, North Borneo (Sabah), Brunei, and Sarawak. Lee believed that this paper was meant to be

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delivered to Tun Razak. He assumed that Sir Geoffrey Tory, the British high commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, had talked to Tun Razak about the concept. Encouraged by this thought, Lee finished his paper in early May 1961. The key person to convince was the Tunku. This was work for the very top men in the British Government. Duncan Sandys, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, came in January 1961 on a visit to the governments of Singapore and Malaya to brief them about Britain’s move to join the European Common Market. It was an opportunity for Lee to tackle him which he did not miss. Duncan Sandys went on to confer with the Tunku. When he returned to London, he filled in Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister. The Tunku attended the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London in February 1961. Everything now depended on Macmillan playing his part well with the Tunku, and the future Earl of Stockton did not fail to win over the Malayan prince and premier. The Plen came to know that something was going on and asked Lee to meet him in March “to clarify matters”.68 How did the Plen know? Clearly, he knew through communists who were PAP members. Sometime in late 1960 or in 1961, Lee discussed the merger of Singapore and Malaya with some members of the PAP. The PAP, being “full of MCP members”, the Plen would have been told of it.69 Then, sometime in 1961, Lee went on one of his periodic visits to Cameron Highlands, and there had a meeting with the Tunku to talk about the merger. A communist who served as one of Lee’s parliamentary secretaries knew of this, and could have passed it on. Lee’s memoirs made no mention of a meeting with the Plen in March 1961, but described one which took place on 11 May. Since the previous October, Lee had found out the identity of the Plen, from a special branch file he had seen when he visited that department, as prime minister, in the course of acquainting himself with the work of various ministries. The Plen was named Fang Chuang Pi, a graduate of Chinese High School who had “worked at Nan Chiao News, a pro-communist newspaper shut down soon after the Emergency began”.70 Something about the name caused Lee to connect him to a Chinese middle school girl whom the PAP had chosen as a candidate in the 1959 general election. Lee “realized at once” that the Plen

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“must be the elder brother” of the twenty-five year old girl who “was now the PAP assemblywoman for Stamford”.71 Lee made sure that the Plen knew that he knew who this girl was. At the meeting on the night of 11 May the Plen wanted certain answers from Lee which may be summarized under three heads. The first and foremost was whether the Tunku was likely to agree to a merger soon, to which Lee replied, not likely. This was true in so far as the Tunku was still mulling over it and had kept his counsel. The Plen then argued his position, namely that in the constitutional talks expected in 1963, the British should be asked to abolish the Internal Security Council, thus giving Singapore greater autonomy, and that the question of independence for Singapore, whether through merger with Malaya or by itself, “should be deferred”.72 Lee listened, taking the measure of the Plen, but promised him nothing. The second topic was the Plen’s concern regarding the speculation, after the PAP’s defeat in the recent Hong Lim by-election, that Lee and the entire cabinet would resign. Lee had threatened this, and he explained to the Plen that if the PAP Government saw no “prospect of its policies succeeding”, then it was better to make an end of it rather than sit out the five-year tenure.73 This worried the Plen. It brought him to his third topic, which was that the PAP Government should carry on as normal. The Plen only asked that Lee should grant more democratic rights, allow unions to form large federations, give citizenship to the leading communist cadres, described as prominent anticolonial activists, and allow a freer flow of books from China and “freer immigration permits”.74 Even as the communists were counting on Lee, they made a contingency plan. They approached a number of PAP assemblymen, including those who were parliamentary secretaries, to form a second team ready to take office should Lee and his colleagues step down, refusing “to be frontmen any longer”.75 The leader of this second team was one Dr Lee Siew Choh, an English-educated medical doctor, a former rugger player, and a chess player, reportedly without guile in both games, and as a man, something of an idealist. Dr Lee was not a communist. Dr Lee was a friend of Dr Goh Keng Swee in their college days, and the two of them had often played chess. He

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was not in the PAP until Lee chose him as a candidate in the 1959 general election, and he enrolled in the party there and then.76 After the election, in which he won as PAP assemblymen for Queenstown, he was made parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, which covered internal security. Slightly more than two weeks after Lee’s meeting with the Plen on 11 May, the Tunku astounded everybody by announcing his support of merger. He did so in a lunch-time speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of South East Asia at the Adelphi Hotel in Singapore on 27 May 1961. The Tunku, having signalled go-ahead, there was a flurry of activity on the part of Selkirk, and his colleagues in Malaya and the Borneo territories, to keep the ball rolling. The communists also acted fast, intent on blocking the ball. The intra-party struggle between the pro-communist and the democratic wings of the PAP escalated. First, the pro-communists called on the PAP central executive committee to meet with the branches. Lee knew better than to do this. Next, the pro-communists asked Lee “to step down in favour of Dr Toh Chin Chye or Dr Goh Keng Swee”.77 This did not work. Then they demanded the resignation of the whole cabinet to make way for a second team they got up, led by Dr Lee Siew Choh. All these demands failed, but it only meant that the intra-party struggle would continue at the next stage, one in which the pro-communists were more certain of their power. There was a by-election in Anson constituency pending, with nomination day on 10 June 1961 and polling day on 15 July. David Marshall sought to come back to the Legislative Assembly by standing as the Workers’ Party candidate. He was thus handy to the pro-communists who needed someone to set against the PAP candidate. In the run-up to polling day, the pro-communists began a war by statements, with increasing intensity. The statements called for abolition of the Internal Security Council, release of all political detainees, latitude for unions to federate, and liberal granting of citizenship and democratic rights. Significantly, one statement declared that the terms of merger had never been defined, and queried what the form and content would be. This statement would, by way of contrast, make their own stand even stronger:

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self-government for Singapore with control of internal security to be wrested from the British in the 1963 constitutional talks. It was not so much the statements but the way they were marshalled that was exceptional. Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Sandra Woodhull, and three other union leaders fired the first volley. Then two days before polling day, Dr Lee Siew Choh, leading eight PAP assemblymen and fortythree trade unions, made separate statements in support of Lim Chin Siong. Prime Minister Lee did not budge. Instead, on the eve of polling day, he publicly asked Lim, Fong, and Woodhull, who were political secretaries in the government, to resign. The next day, David Marshall won by a small margin, with the PAP man in second place out of five candidates (three of whom were Independents). For the second time in a by-election, Lee was punished for not bending to the will of the communists. This made two by-election defeats in a period of two and a half months between 29 April and 15 July 1961. After the second defeat, in Anson, Lee wrote to the PAP chairman Dr Toh Chin Chye, offering to resign as prime minister. Toh and other leaders would not think of it. If Lee stepped down, as the communists had wanted him to do, the whole issue of merger between Singapore and Malaya would be jeopardized. Persuaded to stay and fight for the merger, which, as Dr Toh wrote in reply to Lee, “was the objective upon which the party was founded and from which we cannot deviate”,78 Lee immediately used a simple test to find out who among the PAP assemblymen were with him and who were not. He called the Legislative Assembly into session to debate and vote on a motion of confidence in the government. In this way, the PAP assemblymen would be forced to stand up and be counted. Lee meant “to purge the party of any waverers in the Assembly, and compel the communists to fight us in the open”.79 The date set for the “motion of confidence” was 20 July 1961. Two days before it, on the morning of 18 July, James Puthucheary telephoned Selkirk, the British commissioner in Singapore, “to ask if he could see him with ‘one or two friends’”.80 He sounded rather urgent, and even Selkirk’s suggestion that he came for lunch the following day would

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be too late. Selkirk then “invited him to tea at 4 p.m. that afternoon”.81 At the appointed hour and place, Eden Hall, the British commissioner’s residence, Puthucheary, Woodhull, Fong Swee Suan, and Lim Chin Siong walked in. They had come to test Selkirk’s reaction to the idea of a second team taking over from Lee and his colleagues. They had previously tried to sound out Selkirk through proxies. Now they were face-to-face with him. They promised him that British bases would not be affected, and that the second team would act constitutionally and not resort to violence. Selkirk told them he had no objections, but did not mean it. He gave them an audience, but this did not prevent him from putting on a Janus face, as friend and foe to them at the same time. Selkirk, as chairman of the Internal Security Council, had been wanting Lee to agree to have the very people sipping tea with him put away. But Lee had refused to give his assent, knowing that he would have to pay dearly for it. The Chinese electorate in Singapore would regard it as a vile and unrighteous thing. He would have to deal with the pro-communists in a fair and just way, and it must be seen to be done. For this reason, he had obtained a signed statement from the leading political detainees to the effect that they supported the PAP’s merger platform, and had arranged for the statement to be given out at a press conference on the day of the detainees’ release. Merger then seemed a long way off. But suddenly it was not: the Tunku spoke. And Lee knew it was now or never. The timing, the issue, and the moral advantage were all in his favour. “Merger,” he wrote, “was the perfect issue on which to break” with the communists.82 The right place to engage the enemy was the Legislative Assembly, where he stood a better chance, and not the PAP branches as Lim Chin Siong would have him go to, to be savaged. Thus Lee had chosen to call for a vote of confidence in the house. Even so, he could not be sure “how the voting would go”.83 Lee and a PAP loyalist “did a headcount and were certain only of 25 — one short of a majority”.84 The one person who could make the 26th member was in hospital. This was the PAP Malay assemblywoman, Sahora binte Ahmat. In the intense struggle for her support, she changed sides twice, once when the Plen’s sister got to her, and the second time when the PAP loyalist who

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did the headcount with Lee won her back. An ambulance took her to the Legislative Assembly in the nick of time for the voting. This was one of the legendary moments in the PAP’s history. Whenever it is relived in memory, the marginal 26th vote is always invoked, although a non-PAP assemblyman had also voted for the motion, making the 27th vote. For the record it may be noted that David Marshall of the Workers’ Party, and Lim Yew Hock of the Singapore People’s Alliance, were among the eight who voted against the motion. Ong Eng Guan of the United People’s Party abstained. Thirteen PAP assemblymen abstained from the voting. These thirteen included eight who had grouped around Dr Lee Siew Choh as the second team, and five new defectors. Not all were pro-communists, but they believed the communists would ultimately win, and so took sides with them against the PAP social democrats.85 The pro-communists had Dr Lee Siew Choh, with his undoubted sportman’s stamina, to talk on interminably during the debate from the afternoon of 20 July to the predawn hours of 21 July. The purpose was to gain time for more defections. But when the division was finally called, they had no more than thirteen PAP abstainers, including Dr Lee Siew Choh himself. Having thus known who was what, Lee took the next step. He expelled these thirteen PAP assemblymen and all persons connected with them from the PAP. In so doing, he made a clean break with the communists, and broke up the PAP–MCP united front which had been in existence since the PAP’s inception in November 1954. The Plen ordered the formation of “a new proxy political party”.86 He instructed all communist members in the PAP to leave and join the new party. So those expelled by Lee were followed by others who “left of their own accord”.87 Lee, with the help of Ong Pang Boon, had appointed, with due care, twenty-five organizing secretaries to serve in the PAP branches. Twenty of them now defected together with their committees. The new party, which the expelled as well as resigned PAP members joined, was called, in Malay, the Barisan Sosialis Singapura (Socialist Front of Singapore). Lim Chin Siong was the secretary-general, Sandra Woodhull the vice-chairman, and the rest of the committee included Fong Swee Suan

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and James Puthucheary. The post of chairman was bestowed on Dr Lee Siew Choh, a leftist idealist whom the communists clearly meant to front for them. The split in the PAP was paralleled by a split in the National Trades Union Congress, with the majority of unions, non-communist ones as well, going over to the communist-led Singapore Association of Trade Unions. The many pro-communists on the staff of the People’s Association broke up the organization. Community centres were vandalized. The Chinese Middle Schools, under communist direction, boycotted the Ministry of Education’s Secondary Four Examination in November 1961. The Works Brigade mutinied in December when their request to form a union was denied by the government. Chan Sun Wing, the communist plant in the People’s Association, and Wong Soon Fong, his counterpart in the Works Brigade, surfaced in the committee of the Barisan Sosialis Singapura. Communist-driven workers’ strikes abounded. One source cited seventyseven strikes between August and December 1961. Another source put the number of strikes from 1 July 1961 to 31 January 1962 at ninety-six, with sixty-nine strikes “brought about by left-wing unions”.88 In Lee’s memoirs, the number of strikes “in the 15 months from July 1961 (the PAP split) to September 1962” (the referendum on merger) was 153, “a record for postwar Singapore”.89 The Plen was marshalling his forces on every front for an all-out assault. This was the beleaguered Prime Minister Lee’s finest hour. NOTES 1 2

3

4 5

Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 310. Ang Li Choo, “A General History of the Trade Union Movement in Singapore (1959–1963)” (BA Hons thesis, History Department, University of Singapore, 1973), pp. 8, 10, 15–16. Raj Vasil, “Trade Unions” in Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 149. Ibid., p. 150. Lim Heng Loong, Peter, That Fellow Kanda: Biography of G. Kandasamy, 50 Years a Unionist (Singapore: AUPE, c1996), p. 129.

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6 Lee Ting Hui, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954– 1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), p. 192. 7 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 324. 8 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 193. 9 Ibid. 10 John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books Internatioinal, 1984), p. 236. 11 Ibid. 12 Dominic J. Puthucheary and K.S. Jomo, eds., No Cowardly Past: James Puthucheary: Writings, Poems, Commentaries (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 1998), p. 144. 13 Drysdale, Singapore, p. 236. 14 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 196. 15 Drysdale, Singapore, pp. 188–90. 16 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 195. 17 Drysdale, Singapore, p. 238. 18 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 215. 19 Ibid., p. 191. 20 Ibid., p. 197. 21 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 351. 22 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 197. 23 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 354. 24 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 198. 25 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 354. 26 Fong Sip Chee, The PAP Story: The Pioneering Years (Singapore: Times Periodicals Pte Ltd, n.d.), p. 92. 27 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 354. 28 Talk, Radio Singapore, 3 December 1959, Prime Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, Etc. 1959–61. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Speech at National Day Rally and March Past on 3 June 1960, Prime Minister’s Speeches 1959–61. 32 Ibid. 33 Drysdale, Singapore, p. 227. 34 Quoted by Drysdale, ibid., pp. 226–27. 35 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 318. 36 Lee quoting from his speech, ibid., p. 321. 37 Ibid., p. 319. 38 Ibid.

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39 Ibid., p. 320. 40 Lee quoting from his speech, ibid., p. 320. 41 Ibid., p. 320. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., pp. 184 and 353. 44 Fong Sip Chee, PAP Story, p. 92. 45 Sai Siew Min and Huang Jianli, “The ‘Chinese-educated’ Political Vanguards: Ong Pang Boon, Lee Khoon Choy, and Jek Yeun Thong”, in Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard, edited by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Y.L. Tan (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 140. 46 Quoted by Sai and Huang, ibid., p. 141. 47 Sai and Huang, ibid., p. 143. 48 Lee Khoon Choy, On the Beat to the Hustings: An Autobiography (Singapore: Times Books International, 1988), pp. 11–12. 49 Ibid. pp. 28–29; Quoted by Sai and Huang, “ ‘Chinese-educated’ Political Vanguards”, p. 142. 50 Sai and Huang, ibid., p. 143. 51 Ibid. 52 Quoted by Drysdale, Singapore, p. 122. 53 Lim Kok Hua, “The Boycott of the Chinese Schools Secondary Four Examination 1961: An Analysis” (BA Hons thesis, History Department, National University of Singapore, 1981–82), pp. 29–30. 54 Part of a statement by Lim Seck Kian, President of the Singapore Chinese Schools Teachers’ Union, quoted by Lim Kok Hua, ibid., p. 50. 55 Lim Kok Hua, ibid., pp. 30 and 63. 56 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 242. 57 Ibid., p. 243. 58 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 409. 59 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 245. 60 Annual Report of the University of Malaya 1960–61 (Kuala Lumpur: Art Printing Works, 1962), p. 10. 61 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 333. 62 Ibid., pp. 333–35. 63 Ibid., p. 335. 64 Ibid., p. 348. 65 Ibid., p. 349. 66 Ibid., p. 362. 67 Ibid., p. 360. 68 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 200.

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69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., p. 218. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 330. Ibid. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 202. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 359. Ibid., p. 359; Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 202. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 201. Ibid. Ibid., p. 204. Quoted by Lee, Singapore Story, p. 372. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 372. Quoted by Selkirk, Drysdale, Singapore, p. 277. Drysdale, Singapore, p. 277. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 373. Ibid., p. 376. Ibid. Drysdale, Singapore, p. 283. Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 205. Ibid. Ibid., p. 235. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 389.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Merger: Asian Contesting Ownership andarticles Principles permission of the Institute of Southeast Studies. Individual are • 189 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

Merger: Contesting Ownership and Principles

T

he Tunku’s volte-face on the merger shocked everybody — the British, Lee Kuan Yew, and the Plen. For the British and Lee, who were overjoyed, it meant to get cracking right away. For the Plen, it called for a new angle. This was to demonstrate that the PAP Government was going to sell out Singapore. Through the Barisan, the communists used the constitutional method of opposition and avoided any resort to violence, choosing instead to tackle the PAP Government verbally, point by point, argument by argument, in public debate. For all other opposition parties in Singapore, the merger was an opportune time to revive themselves and stake claims to a piece of the action, and to speak out on matters of principle: what form should the merger take? Who should decide this? The PAP Government, as the chief stakeholder, was not going to have an easy time of it. The synergy between merger and internal security was seen in two events in August 1961. The first was a meeting of the Internal Security Council at Cameron Highlands which Lee and Dr Goh Keng Swee attended. This meeting dovetailed nicely into another, in Kuala Lumpur, at which they conferred with Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Abdul Razak on the merger. Afterwards, on 23 August, the Malayan and Singapore prime ministers jointly issued a communiqué stating that they had reached agreement in principle. They mentioned two specific points, namely that (1) internal security, external affairs, and defence would be the responsibility of the Federation of Malaya and (2) Singapore would retain “local autonomy

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especially on matters of education and labour”.1 It was “also agreed that a working committee should be set up to go into the overall financial and other implications” of a merger on these terms.2 It was clear from the first interview Lee gave to reporters after the joint communiqué that “the question of Singapore citizenship in the event of merger” was a problematic one.3 When asked about it Lee merely said: “this [along with a host of other topics] was also a matter for the working party” to go into, but that “as far as he could see, there could be no disagreement that Singapore citizens and Federal citizens would be Malayan or Malaysian nationals”4 (my italics). Only a lawyer could have put it so finely, and it took another legal mind, David Marshall’s, to decode its meaning. Lee was also asked about Singapore’s representation in the Federal legislature. He explained that the number of representatives must be balanced against the number of subjects, such as education and labour, that “Singapore reserved to itself”.5 Marshall immediately reacted to Lee’s statements, exclaiming “there will be no single citizenship and no proportional representation according to population [ratio]” in the Federal legislature.6 “These are very disturbing features” he added, “and they are consistent only with colonial rule over Singapore, whereby the imperial power of Britain will be transferred to the Federation of Malaya, and Singapore will be a colony in a worse position than it is today under the British”.7 Dr Lee Siew Choh, pro tem chairman of the Barisan Sosialis, accused the PAP leadership of trying to “cut a deal with the Federation Government” without consulting the people of Singapore, despite their weakened position through the loss of five parliamentary secretaries and eight assemblymen, and despite the “total collapse” of PAP — the party.8 Dr Lee called “the present deal which Mr Lee is waving before us” as “nothing but a phoney merger”.9 He pointed out “that on the vital question of citizenship in the event of merger, Mr Lee had chosen to be purposely vague and had dismissed it as ‘also a matter for the working committee’”.10 He warned that “By the PAP’s proposals, the people of Singapore will only be reduced to the status of second-rate citizens”.11 Finally, he set out the Barisan blueprint for “a full and complete merger”12 (about which more will be told later).

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Opposition Stakeholders The acting prime minister, Dr Toh Chin Chye, wrote to all parties represented in the Legislative Assembly requesting their views on the two basic points of the agreement on merger. If all parties accepted the two basic points, Dr Toh said, he hoped to invite them to submit their views on other matters as it would be an advantage for the government to have the views of all parties represented in the Assembly to assist and guide its deliberations.13 The two basic points were (to recapitulate) (1) defence, external affairs, and internal security would come under the control of the Federation Government and (2) Singapore was to have autonomy in education and labour policies. Dr Lee Siew Choh, replying for the Barisan, dismissed the second basic point as “meaningless” since Singapore already enjoyed this autonomy.14 He then said that the government be aware that a “very thin line” divided internal security from education and labour.15 “People who criticise the Government’s education policy may easily be classified as security risks and be deprived of their citizenship and professional status,” he stated.16 This was clearly an allusion to the Malayan Government’s revocation of the citizenship of Lim Lian Geok, a diehard advocate of Chinese education, which occurred in the same period as Dr Lee’s statement.17 Dr Lee continued: “The security laws and powers [of the Federation] are primarily used against labour — the working people and their unions.”18 David Marshall, chairman of the Workers’ Party, described Dr Toh’s letter and the joint communiqué attached to it as a kind of “strip-tease politics”, which left him “bewildered”.19 He deplored this practice of “seeking decisions by circular on matters of grave moment”.20 Marshall had earlier said that “the basic principles [of the merger] must be fully debated in the Assembly and throughout the country, and, if necessary, a general election should be held before the details are worked out”.21 In the present reply to Dr Toh, he chided the acting prime minister for not “giving that freedom of debate in the Assembly” that he cherished.22 Ong Eng Guan, chairman of the United People’s Party, in his reply to Dr Toh, called for “an all-party conference” to be held “without delay”.23 He had previously expressed his “deep concern” over “the unilateral action of the Government party”.24

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Thio Chan Bee, vice-chairman of the Singapore People’s Alliance, was the only one who welcomed the joint communiqué and who replied on a positive note to Dr Toh’s letter. However, Thio had earlier stated that an allparty delegation should represent Singapore “at further discussions on the future of the state”,25 and in keeping with this spirit, he associated leaders of UMNO, MCA, and MIC in Singapore in his reply to Dr Toh. What alternative proposals to the PAP’s did the Opposition parties advance? The Barisan Sosialis wanted “a full and complete merger”, whereby Singapore citizens would “automatically” become “Malayan citizens” and enjoy “proportional representation in the Federal Parliament, “like people in any of the present eleven states constituting the Federation of Malaya”.26 The Barisan Sosialis further said that “this is a vital question that can only be decided by the people of Singapore and the Federation” in general elections to be held in both states.27 They stated that they “fully realise that many policies of the present right wing Government in the Federation are unacceptable” to them.28 Nevertheless, they were “prepared” to go through a complete merger “provided it occurs immediately and is followed by pan-Malayan general elections”.29 Their hope, openly stated, was to join forces with their “Socialist comrades in the Federation” in the latter’s long and “determined struggle against the reactionary policies of the Federation Government”.30 As a preparatory “stage to eventual merger” on the rigorous terms set out, the Barisan Sosialis “would accept a constitutional arrangement for a confederation” in which Singapore would have “full autonomy in internal matters, including internal security”, and concede “by treaty, the fields of external affairs and defence to the Federation Government”.31 The United People’s Party was also for a complete merger. The SPAUMNO-MCA-MIC Alliance had a query, and so deferred taking a stand. Their leader Thio Chan Bee had been under the impression that the joint communiqué of the Malayan and Singapore prime ministers was about a confederation. The confederation idea had been advanced by the Progressive Party as a way to protect Singapore’s free port and financial interests. The SPA had taken over the idea. Thio Chan Bee, who had started as a Progressive, understandably had this notion in mind. But Dr Toh’s letter seemed to be about something else, and Thio asked him to clarify.32

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Marshall said that his party, the Workers’ Party, “believed wholeheartedly in a merger”.33 But it rejected what the PAP and Malayan Governments had proposed as worse that British colonialism. This implicitly meant that it favoured a complete merger. But Marshall also felt that a confederation “was a valuable concept”.34 This was not surprising for Marshall, who had gone from the Progressive Party to the Labour Front (precursor of the SPA) and then to his present party. He had shared the Progressive’s view of Singapore’s uniqueness and never quite shed it. The acting prime minister, Dr Toh, replied to leaders of opposition parties with identical letters dated 6 September. He wrote: “Since most opposition party leaders in the Assembly propose complete merger as their first objective, if I get a categorical assurance from opposition political parties that they will ask their followers to support complete merger, the Government is prepared to put forward complete merger as an alternative basis for negotiations between Singapore and the Federation.”35 Dr Toh also cleared up the doubt as to the form of merger, saying it was a federation and not a confederation. The opposition parties were not agreed on a complete merger. The SPAUMNO-MCA-MIC Alliance, despite Dr Toh’s clarification, still held to the goal of confederation. It was “the only practical solution”, the Alliance said, the time was not ripe for a Singapore-Federation merger.36 Their idea of a confederation was that the Federation would take charge of defence, external relations, and internal security, “while Singapore would retain control over all other matters”.37 David Marshall of the Workers’ Party was on a postponed honeymoon in Australia when Dr Toh’s letter of 6 September came. He read it in this euphoric mood “free from anger and suspicion”,38 and cabled his reply stating that his party preferred a complete merger, but was prepared to support a merger in which Singapore enjoyed more autonomy than any one of the other states in the Federation (in short, as in the two basic points to which Dr Toh once again referred). The Barisan Sosialis, the biggest opposition party in the Assembly, adhered to its stand for a complete merger. The United People’s Party did the same. The Barisan Sosialis’s inaugural meeting at the Happy World Stadium on 17 September 1961 provided the occasion for publicizing its

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stand before thousands of cheering supporters. Secretary-General Lim Chin Siong’s speech made the headlines in the English language Sunday newspapers. Lim said that the Barisan Sosialis was committed to “a full and unreserved merger with the Federation”.39 But if there was no immediate prospect of this, and no progress towards a confederation, “then we must struggle for full internal self-government by 1963”40 (for which read autonomy in internal security and no more internal security council). Lim defined a complete merger as one in which Singapore citizens would automatically become citizens and have proportional representation in the proposed Federation. Thus, he said, the people of Singapore and Malaya would be “sharing a common political life and destiny”.41 This meant that people in one state of the Federation might stand for election in any other state, he said. “They may have the right to influence the people throughout the length and breath of Malaya on all political issues.”42 Lim called on history and his own martyrdom in support of his argument. “The reunification of our country has always been the stand of all Malayan socialists. Now that the Tengku wants to accept us… we unequivocally support a full and complete merger without any reservations on education and labour policy”.43 He described this as “an important progressive step forward”.44 “It is a correct step. It will make an important milestone in the history of Malayan socialism.”45 As to what the fate of Malayan socialists will be, he said: We say this fully aware of the possible sacrifice that we will have to make after genuine merger. As one who has tasted political detention and repression, I say we are prepared for this sacrifice. As socialists, we cannot allow our personal security to stand in the way of the unity of the people… we are prepared to go back to the people and convince them that this is a right step forward. He added that the people of the two territories to be merged “must have the final say [through] general elections”.46 A few days later, Ong Eng Guan of the United People’s Party was to echo Lim’s words in a remarkable fashion. Ong said: “a full merger would

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in the long run be better for the overall interests of all the people in a reunited Malaya. Such a step would mean a victory for socialism in the whole of Malaya…”47 Not for the first time, Ong was adopting a similar line to the communists’. After these two rounds of exchange of letters between Dr Toh and opposition party leaders, there was a radio forum, on 21 September, for both sides to discuss issues put to them by representatives of the local and foreign press. The first question, in two parts, was (1) “the manner in which the people of Singapore will eventually decide (the merger) for themselves” and (2) “does the forum feel this matter should be decided by a referendum now or a general election later?”48 A.P. Rajah, reportedly representing the SPA-UMNO-MCA-MIC Alliance, made a strong appeal for all-party consultation and the holding of “a referendum soon”.49 Ong Eng Guan, the United People’s Party chairman, wanted an “all-party conference” to be held “immediately” and a referendum later, provided the parties could “work out a common programme” to set before the electorate.50 Dr Lee Siew Choh, the Barisan Sosialis chairman, was not in favour of a referendum (giving a silly reason underestimating the intelligence of the electorate) and argued for a general election “not later but now”.51 Dr Goh Keng Swee, speaking for the PAP Government, asked how an all-party conference could help. That would depend, he said, on the sincerity of the opposition parties in seeking a merger. He referred to the diversity of views among them saying, “At present, I cannot see any agreement among opposition parties on the type of merger they want, and the terms and conditions, and therefore, an all-party conference, far from accelerating the rate of merger, will merely impede it.”52 Dr Goh next answered Dr Lee’s point that a general election should be held now. The merger was “the principal platform” of the PAP “in the general election in 1959”, he said, “we have [the] mandate of the people of Singapore to proceed”.53 Dr Goh continued: The only thing that we did not expect in 1959 was that we would be able so soon to talk terms with Tengku Abdul Rahman’s Government.

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Therefore, I say the correct way of determining the wishes of the people on this issue is a referendum as soon as details of the merger — the constitutional and other details — have been settled, as soon as it is announced [in a white paper] in the Legislative Assembly, and [then] the people will have a chance to decide for themselves.54 A.P. Rajah disagreed with Dr Goh on one point. He felt passionately that merger or confederation or whatever “was a national, not a party, issue”. Yet the PAP was making it a party issue, which was quite wrong”.55 It was “a national issue” he repeated, “it affected everyone”, and all parties representing all views in Singapore should be consulted.56 Dr Lee and Ong Eng Guan joined Rajah in protesting that it was a national issue. But Dr Goh countered: If you have a conference of political parties with divergent views, are you likely to get any agreement? Will it not be a fact that Singapore will make a laughing stock of itself — political parties quarrel over details of one type of merger and another, and in the meantime, attitudes in the Federation may change.57 The last part of the sentence was significant: the Tunku had, only a few days before, told the press that the talks he was holding with Lee Kuan Yew might not make “immediate headway…because of the ‘trouble’ from the Singapore Opposition”.58 The second question in the forum was to have been: “what form does the forum think merger should take?”59 But, after what Dr Goh had just said, it seemed redundant, not to say, inappropriate. The forum was asked a modified question: “what is the forum’s opinion on the question of citizenship?”60 A.P. Rajah quoted Prime Minister Lee as having said on the Sunday before the forum that all Singapore citizens and all Federation citizens would become Federal nationals. Rajah disliked this playing with words, and charged that “the prime minister is dodging the issue and not telling the people the truth”.61 Ong Eng Guan agreed. The government, he said, had not stated what would happen to Singapore citizens, and he asked for a clarification of the statement by the prime minister that

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Rajah had quoted. Dr Lee reiterated the Barisan stand “for a full and complete merger…with Singapore coming in as the 12th state of the Federation”, in which case, “Singapore citizens should automatically become Federal citizens”.62 This was the turning point in the forum. It was the moment when Dr Goh crushed his Barisan adversary decisively. Dr Goh asked whether Dr Lee had studied the Malayan Constitution with regard to citizenship. The reply, a devastating no, allowed Dr Goh to expose the Barisan’s inadequacy. “Federal citizenship can be obtained in three ways” he expounded,63 (1) by process of law, that is to say automatically, as in the case of anyone born in Penang or Malacca, (2) by registration, as in the case of anyone born in states other than Penang and Malacca, and (3) by naturalization as in the case of anyone not born in any of these states. Dr Goh continued: Now in Singapore, we have an electorate of roughly 630,000, of which only 320,000 are born in Singapore. Therefore, under the Barisan Sosialis scheme for full merger, when they have to accept citizenship laws of the Federal government, nearly half of the present citizens (will not qualify as citizens and) will be disenfranchised.64 To overcome this difficulty, Dr Goh explained, “some special arrangement must be entered into with the Federation government [whereby all] Singapore citizens will have the right to vote”.65 This was what an as-yet undisclosed, key aspect of the PAP’s merger proposal was about. Dr Goh had won the debate by exploding the Barisan notion of merging as the 12th state with automatic citizenship for all Singapore’s people. But the Barisan depiction of the people as second class citizens upon the merger continued to haunt the citizens of Singapore, and thus also the PAP.

The PAP Government as Stakeholder and Strategist The PAP Government was the biggest stakeholder in the merger. This was the issue on which to break with the communists, to win the support of the people while doing so, and to achieve independence for Singapore, all in

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one blow. The Tunku and Tun Razak regarded it as fundamental that the central government should have control of Singapore’s internal security. Lee readily acceded to this. He was to record in his memoirs a comment by Duncan Sandys who said, “he had never met a leader in power who was keener to hand it over to another centre”.66 Lee had stressed to Duncan Sandys “the danger we faced if there were no merger by 1963, when constitutional talks were due — an independent Singapore that would go communist would be the inevitable result”.67 Lee needed the Federation of Malaya to provide an external arm to check the communists in the city state when British rule ended. The survival of the PAP Government and the future of Singapore depended on there being a merger. This was the stake. What was the strategy? It was simply to reach the goal in the safest, fastest way, and to do it, the government clearly decided not to involve the opposition parties. Marshall, in his time, had conceived of independence as an all-party responsibility as witness his delegation to London in 1956. Lim Yew Hock was to do the same in 1957 and 1958. This was the example that the opposition parties wanted the government to follow. Dr Lee cited the Marshall precedent.68 But Marshall and Lim Yew Hock both did not command a majority in the Assembly — theirs was a coalition government — although this reason was never stated by the PAP leaders, perhaps because of their own increasingly precarious majority. PAP leaders based their right to negotiate the merger on their victory in the 1959 general election. Dr Toh dismissed as nonsense the charge that the PAP Government had no mandate for merger. Forty-three of the fifty-one assemblymen in all, he said, were elected in 1959 on the PAP ticket. Of these forty-three, sixteen had since “broken away, thirteen to the Barisan Sosialis, and three to the United People’s Party”.69 But they, along with all other PAP candidates, who stood in the 1959 general election, had signed a pledge in April 1959 to support categorically the PAP’s merger policy, Dr Toh revealed. Dr Toh, and Dr Goh too, gave, as the reason for not holding an all-party conference, the fact that there was no agreement on basic points. But there was no agreement in Marshall’s time either. Truth to tell, PAP leaders kept the plan to themselves to prevent opposition parties from sidetracking or derailing it. If there was a precedent for what the PAP did, it had to be the

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one set by the British-Malay working committee which deliberated over the Federation of Malaya, 1948, without letting in the MCP-sponsored coalition of anti-federation parties and associations. In the 1960s merger, as in the 1940s federation, secrecy was at a premium. Speed in the merger process was also of the essence. Lee spoke of a merger “before or by 1963”, and declared about the Tunku and himself, “we are off the launching pad”.70 When asked about the relation of the merger to the Greater Malaysia plan incorporating the Borneo territories, Lee said that he liked to see the two as “two concurrent movements”. “But whatever happened,” he added, “Singapore and Malaya would move together”.71 After a second round of talks with the Tunku in Kuala Lumpur in midSeptember 1961, Lee said that they were “now in orbit” and that “In June 1963, we will land on earth quite safely.”72 Despite the clamour of the opposition parties, the PAP Government resolutely excluded them, and went ahead with negotiations with the Federation government in a joint working committee. Dr Toh simply stated in his letter of 6 September to opposition parties: “When the deliberations of the Working Party are completed and agreement is reached they will also be published” [like the earlier agreement in principle].73 Dr Goh confirmed this in the radio forum of 21 September: We shall proceed with our consultation and discussion with the Federation Government and when that has reached a stage where concrete details can be announced, then we shall announce them, first in the Assembly, and then before the people.74 The government also decided on its own the manner and time to consult the people. Dr Goh said that a referendum would be held “at the right time”.75 Interestingly, both A.P. Rajah and Ong Eng Guan, agreed with Dr Goh on the holding of a referendum, though not necessarily on the timing of it. By so doing, they isolated Dr Lee Siew Choh who was the only opposition leader insisting on a general election. Opposition leaders, Dr Lee, Marshall, and Ong Eng Guan, made another attempt to be included. They wrote a joint letter, dated 6 October, to Prime

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Minister Lee, requesting him to call a special Assembly meeting to “debate the basic principles of merger” and to hold “an all-party conference”.76 They were told no, not to be concerned, they will be “informed in good time”.77 For now, they could help check “any unnecessary sense of tension and excitement among the people”.78 Prime Minister Lee was thinking of a way to counter-attack. He decided on writing a series of twelve talks to be aired in English, Mandarin, and Malay. He went on the radio “three times a week, each time in [the] three different languages”79 between 13 September and 9 October. In his first talk, Lee said that merger terms (as publicized so far) had aroused “protest from interested parties in Singapore”.80 “The most important interested party is the MCP. They do not want to see security in the hands of the Central Government”, fearing “they would be worse off”.81 Being “an illegal organization”, Lee said, “they are unable to make any official statements to the press or through other open channels of information. But they have proxies”.82 These proxies “have not been so foolish as to oppose merger openly. They have all agreed to merger in principle. But they want a different kind of merger, one in which security is not under the control of the Central Government. Or if security has got to be in the hands of the Central Government, they ask for unreasonable, and even impossible, conditions which they hope will frustrate merger. The Communists through their proxies are therefore trying to cloud and confuse the merger issue in order that you may come to the wrong decision”.83 Lee gave a serial account of the communist united front, explaining why the PAP had to join it and break with it. He mentioned the key people, but withheld their real names in some cases. He avoided demonizing them, but instead gave them credit for dedication, courage, and sacrifice. Lee hoped that by telling “the whole story”,84 he would win over the people, especially Chinese people who were merely communist sympathizers or who supported communism as an insurance policy. The talks, with supporting documents, were published in a 207-page booklet under the title, The Battle for Merger. James Puthucheary came to see Lee after the publication to congratulate him and to ask him to autograph a copy. Lee did so, and asked him, “if he would be prepared to take part in

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a radio forum” with him. Puthucheary, Lee wrote, “looked at me, grinned, shook his head, and said ‘After you have set up the stage props, I would not stand a chance’ ”.85 The citizenship problem would not go away. Lee had to address it in a broadcast on 9 October, in a recorded press conference at Radio Singapore, reported in print on 26 October, and in an extensive note he wrote to clarify the press report of his conference, which was published on 27 October. Lee was at pains to show that there would be no difference between Singapore citizens and Federation citizens in the new Federation. However, he disclosed something new. He said that “Singapore citizens will vote for their representatives to the new Federation Parliament in Singapore”.86 And by way of reciprocity, “the present Federation citizens will vote in the present Federation”.87 Lee could not say more while negotiations in the joint governmental working committee were still going on. But what he had let on would have brought little comfort to people in Singapore, who would have seen that the condition was levelled more at them than at their counterpart in the Federation. And they would have been right. It was all part of the hedge against future risks that the Tunku had to make after he had so obligingly agreed to a merger.

The Tunku’s Compensating Act The Tunku was uncomfortable with the size and politics of Singapore’s predominantly Chinese population. This had been the reason for his rebuff of all previous overtures from Singapore leaders, including his good friend Lim Yew Hock. On the other hand, he had to face the fact that Malaya and Singapore were essentially one in matters of security. The two territories were just too close, linked by a causeway. It was also a fact that the activists making their mark in Singapore, men like Fong Swee Suan and Puthucheary, were from his side of the causeway. And there was also the story about Lim Chin Siong as the young, potential revolutionary who came out of Johore.88 The by-election reverses of the PAP in April and July 1961, the months before and after the Tunku’s famous speech on merger,

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evidently clinched the argument for him that it was safer to have Singapore in with him than out. Part of the Tunku’s worry was met by the inclusion of the Borneo territories, giving him a more favourable demographic picture. Malaya and Singapore combined would have a total of 7,724,687 people, of which 44.3 per cent were Chinese, 43.0 per cent, Malays, and other indigenous peoples, 10.6 per cent, Indians, and 2.1 per cent, Others. The Chinese had a numerical edge over the Malays. With the inclusion of the Borneo territories, the total population was 9,007,514 of which Malays and other indigenous people constituted 46.6 per cent, the Chinese, 41.9 per cent, and all Others, 11.5 per cent.89 The balance was tilted against the Chinese. There were still far too many Singapore Chinese for the Tunku’s peace of mind. He came up with the idea of giving Singapore citizens the title of “nationals” of the new Federation and not “citizens”. The citizens of Borneo states would be citizens of the new Federation — founder citizens at that, as the Tunku was pleased to call them — but not the citizens of Singapore, who would be Federal nationals, not Federal citizens. Citizenship was precise as to rights, privileges, and responsibilities; nationality was more ambiguous. The Tunku preferred ambiguity. It allowed space to manoeuvre. The Tunku handled politics instinctively and confidently. He assumed the Borneo indigenous people were like the peninsula Malays and their endearment was certain if he extended to them the special rights of Malays. He assumed that the Alliance system of politics was right for them. That the reality might be quite different never occurred to him. In the same way, he assumed that the people of Singapore would accept his fiddling with nomenclature. This sounded very arbitrary of him, but it was a benign arbitrariness, centred in the mind and personality of a benevolent prince who trusted himself, and was trusted by all Malayan races to act justly, balancing different interests.

The Long-Awaited Merger Debate The joint government working committee having finished its job, a document titled, The Heads of Agreement For A Merger between the Federation of Malaya

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and Singapore, was presented in November 1961 to the Legislative Assembly. It was listed as Command Paper 33 of 1961, and technically called a white paper. It was also issued to the public in a booklet, titled, The Merger Plan. The key items were: All Singapore citizens will keep their citizenship and automatically become nationals of the larger Federation. Singapore citizens will vote in Singapore for their representatives to the new Federation Parliament, and the citizens of the present Federation will vote in the present Federation for their representatives to the same new Federation Parliament. Singapore will be entitled to 15 seats in the House of Representatives…and to two members in the Senate. The present Legislative Assembly will continue as a State Assembly, but it will have no power to enact laws relating to Defence, External Affairs, Security, and those matters which have been agreed to be Federal matters. Singapore should have local autonomy in education and labour policies and, generally, a larger measure of reserve state powers compared [with] the other states in the Federation; Singapore shall retain a very large proportion of the present state revenue to discharge these responsibilities.90 The debate that opposition stakeholders had long called for finally took place. On 20 November 1961, the Legislative Council began debate on the government’s motion for merger as set out in the Heads of Agreement. Much of the thirteen-day sitting was taken up with Dr Lee Siew Choh’s filibustering, a pointless tactic, and his attempt to move an amendment, inserting the words “genuine merger” with the Federation of Malaya, with Singapore as the twelfth state, and “with all its citizens automatically becoming Federal citizens on Merger Day”.91 One salient point which Dr Lee made concerned proportional representation. His argument was that Singapore, on the basis of the size of its electorate, “should have 25–30 seats out of a hundred”.92 Prime Minister Lee was

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compelled to explain that he “had asked for 19 seats, but the Tunku was not willing to concede more than 15, the number allotted to the urban centres of Kuala Lumpur and Malacca”.93 In the end, when the voting on the government’s motion was called, on 6 December, there were 33 “Ayes”, no one against, and 18 “Absent”. Apart from the PAP assemblymen, who accounted for the majority of the “Ayes”, a number of others are worth noting. Three SPA assembly members (Lim Yew Hock, Thio Chan Bee and Seow Peck Leng (Mrs)), and the two UMNO ones, voted with the government.94 So did the independent member A.P. Rajah. Now that the merger terms had been cast in a white paper, and both prime ministers, Lee and the Tunku, had confirmed it in an exchange of letters, they let their better judgment guide them. The 18 absentees included Dr Lee Siew Choh and his fellow Barisan Sosialis assemblymen, David Marshall of the Workers’ Party, and Ong Eng Guan of the United People’s Party. They preferred to stay away rather than vote against the merger.

Managing the Referendum The government had promised to hold a referendum when the terms of merger were published and before the final decision was taken. But this did not happen immediately, or soon after, the Legislative Council debate. There was to be a lapse of nine months before the referendum was held. The government had the right to set the date. But why the long delay? Lee was looking for a way to change the name by which Singapore citizens would be called in the new Federation, and so cast out the doubt sown by the Barisan depiction of them as second class citizens. To do this, Lee had to await an event in another front — the Borneo states. The British had commissioned an enquiry team, headed by Lord Cobbold, to ascertain the views of their colonies, North Borneo, and Sarawak, about becoming part of Greater Malaysia. Lee wanted to know what the Cobbold team had to say about citizenship which could be helpful to him. Next, the form that the referendum would take was a crucial matter. How should it be presented to the people? The government and the opposition parties, notably the Barisan, had a stake in it, as the way it was presented could materially affect the outcome. Their vested interests were

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clearly seen in the Legislative Assembly debate on the Referendum Bill, which was another long, drawn-out session, from 27 June to 11 July 1962. Dr Lee Siew Choh, David Marshall, and Ong Eng Guan moved that there should only be one question, the question should have only one issue, and the voters should only be required to answer “yes” or “no”. The Assembly voted against this with 30 “Noes” to 17 “Ayes” and 4 “Absent”.95 Marshall proposed another amendment in which more than one question or issue could be posed, but the voters should be allowed to answer “yes” or “no” to each one. In other words, the principle stays, unaffected by the number of questions. This met with 29 “Noes” to 17 “Ayes” and 5 “Absent”.96 Prime Minister Lee moved that people should be asked to choose between two alternatives (a) merger in accordance with the white paper or (b) “a complete or unconditional merger”97 (in which case only half, or, at most, two thirds of the electorate would get citizenship according to the constitution of the Federation of Malaya). Lee added that among the amendments lined up for debate was one “in the name of the Member for Cairnhill [Lim Yew Hock] moving for a third alternative, (c) merger on terms no less favourable than those given to the Borneo territories. Lee gave notice of “the Government’s intention to accept the amendment”.98 Lee’s two alternatives, with Lim Yew Hock’s third one tagged on, won the day by 29 “Ayes” to 17 “Noes” and 5 “Absent”. Marshall bemoaned: “…the smokescreen is now complete. We have before the people allegedly three questions for a referendum, when, in fact, there is but one, and that is not a question, Sir, because you are not allowed to give an answer yes or no… You must say yes”.99 People could, however, leave the ballot paper blank or spoil it to register their protest. Lim Chin Siong was likely to give them this order (and in fact did so). Lee had to take care of this Barisan tactic. He inserted a clause whereby “unmarked or uncertain” ballot papers would be understood as indicating that those responsible for them would accept the decision of “the majority in the Assembly [meaning the PAP]”.100 This was endorsed in the Assembly by 24 votes to 17. Midway through the fifteen-day debate, on 3 July, assemblywoman Hoe Puay Choo, on whom the communists had been working, sent Lee a letter, resigning from the PAP. With that, the government slipped into a

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minority position, with 25 members versus the combined opposition’s 26. But no matter. Lim Yew Hock and his SPA colleagues, and the UMNO assemblymen and A.P. Rajah, the independent member, were in no mood to upset the apple cart by this time. In fact, Lim Yew Hock’s constructive intervention, suggesting the third alternative, delighted Lee as it anticipated what he himself had planned to do.101 Meanwhile, the British had allowed Lee to see the final draft of the Cobbold Report. The report said that “there is no reason for a separate citizenship for the Borneo territories”.102 The inference was that “all those born in the territories could qualify for Malaysian citizenship”. “This was a disaster”,103 Lee said. For how could Borneo people be called Malaysian citizens, but not Singapore people? The referendum was sure to fail. But the report also heartened him on one point. It said that Borneo citizens would exercise their electoral rights in the territories where they “were normally resident”.104 In this respect, Borneo citizens were like Singapore citizens. So why shouldn’t the same term, “federal citizens”, be used for both, equally? Lee pressed this argument in despatches to Reginald Maudling, the new secretary of state for the colonies, the Tunku, and Duncan Sandys, the secretary of state for commonwealth relations. He had effectively given the British notice “to press the Tunku to grant (Singapore) equal citizenship”, failing which “he would not be able to get merger through the Assembly”.105 It was on his mind and the minds of his closest colleagues too that “in that case”, they “would not even want to go through with it. The Tunku and the British would then have to take the consequences”.106 The Tunku was presented with an advance copy of the Cobbold Report, and was expected to go to London in mid-July 1962 for talks on the Borneo territories. Lee planned to be there in time to settle the citizenship issue one way or another.107 He had another mission to perform. Eighteen assemblymen had, after the referendum debate, appealed to the United Nations to intervene. Because of this, Lee had to combine his trip to London with one to New York first, going by the Pacific route. He set off with Dr Goh. The UN’s Seventeen-Nation Committee on Colonization heard the key petitioners from both sides — Lee, Dr Goh, Dr Lee, Woodhull, Marshall — and concluded that no action was needed.108

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Their business in New York over, Lee and Dr Goh hurried to London, arriving there on 27 July. A curious state of play awaited them. The Barisan factor in Singapore had become linked to the talks between the Tunku and the British Government on the incorporation of the Borneo territories into Malaysia. The Barisan had been a source of great anxiety to the Tunku and the British, which became even more acute as they could not agree on what to do about it.109 To explain the Tunku’s viewpoint first, the Barisan, which he identified unreservedly with the MCP, should be crushed, the sooner, the better. His attitude was mixed with creeping doubts about the wisdom of the merger, and this added to his impatience with the Barisan and communists in Singapore in general, who were the reason for his having embarked on this troublesome project in the first place. His doubts and exasperation caused him to lash out verbally. After one such outburst, Lim Chin Siong wrote to him.110 In the letter, the secretary-general of the Barisan Sosialis associated his party with the Tunku’s “desire to see the creation of one country sharing a common feeling, outlook, and destiny,” adding “we are completely with you”.111 Lim asked for a meeting with the Tunku, to have “a free and frank exchange of views and discussion which can contribute a great deal towards national unity”.112 The Tunku replied, welcoming Lim’s assurance of support for national unity, and said he would be pleased to meet Lim and other leaders of the Barisan Sosialis, and would let him “know when this can be arranged”.113 Lim’s motive for writing is not known. Was it fear? To buy time? The Tunku’s motive in this episode, however, is quite clear. He was leading the communists on, playing the same trick as Selkirk had played at the Eden Hall tea party. And with the same unfailing courtesy. Also, the response of the Tunku, like Selkirk’s, could have been intended to serve a warning to Lee that, if he persisted in giving the communists free range, or if he was personally awkward or difficult, he could be displaced. The Tunku’s London mission was twofold: to press for the expeditious incorporation of the Borneo territories into the new federation of Malaysia, and the round-up of the communists in Singapore before the merger. On the second issue, the Tunku was well supported by his ministers, his (Chinese) psychological war expert, his (British) police chief, and the British

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commissioner in his capital, Sir Geofroy Tory, who wrote ahead to London, warning that the “Tunku regards the neutralization of the Communist leadership in Singapore as an essential condition of merger”.114 The British Government was torn between the need for urgent action and the advice that it was receiving, cautioning against undue haste. Lord Cobbold and the two other British members of the commission of enquiry had strongly impressed on the British Government, under confidential cover, that there should be a transitional period of three to seven (with five as the optimum) years during which British officials would stay on with considerable local powers. This view conflicted with the thinking of the Tunku and Lee who wanted to wrap things up as soon as possible. Lee had given the advice to colonial officials, who saw him after visiting Borneo, that the British Government should tell Borneo leaders that merger was a done deal. The Tunku was so angry with the idea of a long transitional period that he refused to come to London for talks until Macmillan had placated him. Macmillan, bothered by this aspect of the Cobbold Commission, lamented to his cabinet colleagues that “the main disadvantage of independent missions was that they were independent”.115 Macmillan and Sandys, his newly appointed Colonial as well as Commonwealth Relations Secretary, were under pressure from the Tunku and Tun Razak to transfer sovereignty over the Borneo territories to the Federation of Malaya by 8 February 1963 (the Tunku’s birthday) and, following a short transitional period, to have the new Federation of Malaysia established by 31 August 1963. When it looked as if Macmillan and Sandys were about to give in, the Borneo governors protested, wanting more time to work in constitutional safeguards for their territories. Macmillan, now more impatient, revealed that it was not just Borneo that was weighing on his mind, but also the problem that lay at the heart of the merger project, namely Singapore, where the Barisan was “apparently gaining ground against the PAP government”,116 and the Tunku was asking for something to be done, but the British Government was mired in inaction. Macmillan minuted his dilemma over “(a) our weakness in Singapore, (b) our urgent need to hand over the security problem there” (to the Tunku).117

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While the British prime minister was worrying over the dangerous Barisan upsurge, the British Commission in Singapore, led by Selkirk and his deputy, Philip Moore, were sending home reports which put a different complexion on the Barisan leadership, depicting them as a bunch of constitutionalists who posed no security threat at all. Moore was, if anything, actually more unhappy with Lee and the PAP for determining to hold a referendum that was rigged to make sure that they could not lose. Moore had repeatedly urged Lee not to hold the referendum which people were saying was dishonest and phoney. But Lee believed that he understood the mind of the Singapore electorate better. He could rely on the people’s sense of realism and understanding that, to fight the communists, it was not possible to use purely democratic tactics as Moore would have liked. A guided referendum was better than no referendum, for in the latter case, both the government and the people would lose by default. All these issues were on the table or lay beneath the surface of the negotiations between the Tunku and the British Government. Malayan leaders appreciated Lee’s position, and agreed that the Barisan should be around for the referendum that would, as he put it, nail their lie. The Tunku made the qualification that the clean-up could take place after the referendum and before the merger. On their part, the British hoped, vainly, to buy time for the Borneo territories, which meant that Singapore and Malaya might, of a necessity, have to consummate their merger first, if the security situation so dictated, to be followed at a later date by the entry of the properly safeguarded Borneo territories. They tried this idea on the Tunku, meeting with his swift rejection, and after more sessions with him, were close to accepting his terms and timescale for the incorporation of the Borneo territories and the security clean-up in Singapore, when the alarm and protest of governors in Borneo, and Selkirk and Moore in Singapore, gave them reason to pause. The Anglo-Malayan negotiations were stalled at this point when Lee and Dr Goh burst in on them. On the day they arrived, 27 July, Macmillan had a briefing from his foreign affairs private secretary, who advised him that it was more important to settle the citizenship issue that Lee and Dr Goh had come for, than to quibble over the transitional period leading to

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full membership of the Borneo territories in Malaysia.118 This advice worked. The result was that the Tunku made the vital concession to Singapore. On their part, the British promised to discharge their task in the matter of Borneo and of the Barisan, in a way that was timely, but also subject to their requirement that it must be presentable to the House of Commons as well. And an elated Lee offered to support a security clean-up in Singapore once he had held his referendum. The deal on these issues was struck at a conference on 29 July between Sandys, Tun Razak (representing the Tunku), Lee, and Dr Goh. On the following day, the Tunku, Tun Razak, Lee, and Dr Goh sealed their agreement with lunch at the Ritz, the Tunku’s home away from home, and in an exchange of letters between the two prime ministers on the change in nomenclature. Lee’s letter to the Tunku stated that paragraph 14 of the white paper should be amended so that citizens of Singapore will be citizens of Malaysia instead of nationals of Malaysia. The Tunku replied in confirmation with a letter addressed from the Ritz Hotel. The major constitutional obstacle to the success of the referendum was now removed. By getting the Tunku to redesignate Singapore citizens from nationals to citizens of Malaysia, Lee and Dr Goh had obtained the only effective answer to the Barisan’s charge of second class citizenship. Lee specially asked for it to be kept secret for him to return home to announce it, but, unfortunately, the news leaked out ahead of him. Yet, since it had not been officially publicized, Lee believed that he could still make a big impact. He would, after he had proclaimed it, hold the referendum as soon as possible, before the Barisan could come up with something else with which to accuse the government. In fact, the Barisan’s masters, the Malayan Communist Party, had been busy testing out their tactics. They got the Political Science Society of Nanyang University and the Socialist Club of the University of Singapore to organize gallop polls. These were conducted in two urban wards. The Barisan were more confident of support in rural wards. They targeted first, the prime minister’s ward of Tanjong Pagar on 15 July. The voters were asked a straight yes or no to merger, according to the government’s white paper, and 90 per cent said no.119 The second gallop poll was taken in

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Dr Goh’s ward of Kreta Ayer. Here the organizers of the poll presented the three alternative types of merger and asked voters to cast blank votes. Some 97 per cent of them did as advised. This second gallop poll seemed to have been intended as a dry run for the blank vote tactic in the real referendum. It was held on 12 August. On 14 August, Prime Minister Lee announced the date of the referendum as 1 September, allowing two weeks of campaigning. He “assured all Singapore citizens that they would automatically become Malaysian citizens”.120 He was certain that he had disabled the most powerful weapon in the Barisan’s arsenal, namely second class citizenship. But, perhaps because of the gallop polls, he decided to use a fearheightening tactic on the electorate, particularly the more conservative Chinese businessmen in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and the Chinese dialect, clan, and trade associations. Lee declared “that if there were large numbers of blank votes, they might well have to be counted as votes for alternative ‘B’ — complete and unconditional merger — for it would mean that the majority had responded to the Barisan’s call for them. But in that case, all those not born in Singapore, but naturalized through registration, could lose their citizenship”.121 Lim Chin Siong also targeted the Chinese businessmen, hinting darkly of consequences. The president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Ko Teck Kin, and his colleagues, were caught between Prime Minister Lee and Lim Chin Siong. But Prime Minister Lee’s manipulation of their fear of losing their citizenship — the nightmare scenario for thousands of Chinese businessmen — worked better than Lim Chin Siong’s veiled threat of retaliation. In the week leading to the referendum, twelve trade associations came out to make their stand with the government. They appealed to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce on 23 August “to convene a meeting to advise people not to cast blank votes but to vote for Alternative ‘A’ ”.122 Three days later, three more organizations, including, notably, the Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Association “came out in favour of alternative ‘A’ ”.123 Then the council of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce “asked its members to vote for alternative ‘A’, and on the same day, six more Chinese organizations came out in support of it”.124

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The results of the referendum on 1 September were: 397,626 votes or 71 per cent for alternative “A”, 144,077 or 25 per cent blank votes, and 7,911 or 4 per cent divided between alternatives “B” and “C”. When the results were read that morning, Lee was overwhelmed with joy, with tears of joy. In that moment was the vindication for all that the PAP had done with the pro-communists — work with them, argue with them, free them, break with them, and tolerate them so as eventually to defeat them in the political arena with popular backing. People were overcoming their fear of the communists. The tide was definitely turning. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Straits Times, 25 August 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 26 August 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 30 August 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 29 August 1961. Straits Times, 2 September 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Tan Liok Ee, The Politics of Chinese Education in Malaya 1945–1961 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 273. Straits Times, 2 September 1961. Straits Times, 30 August 1961. Ibid. Straits Times, 26 August 1961. Straits Times, 30 August 1961. Straits Times, 31 August 1961. Straits Times, 26 August 1961. Ibid.

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Straits Times, 30 August 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 31 August 1961. Straits Times, 30 August 1961. Ibid. See also Straits Times, 10 September 1961 for Dr Toh’s interpretation of what Marshall wanted. Straits Times, 10 September 1961. Straits Times, 12 September 1961. Ibid. Straits Times, 16 September 1961. Straits Times, 18 September 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 22 September 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 12 September 1961. Straits Times, 22 September 1961. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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64 Quoted by John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), p. 292. 65 Ibid. 66 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 364. 67 Ibid. 68 Straits Times, 22 September 1961. 69 Straits Times, 26 September 1961. 70 Straits Times, 25 August 1961. 71 Ibid. 72 Straits Times, 18 September 1961. 73 Straits Times, 10 September 1961. 74 Straits Times, 22 September 1961. 75 Ibid. 76 Straits Times, 15 October 1961. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 394. 80 Straits Times, 14 September 1961. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 394. 85 Ibid., p. 399. 86 Straits Times, 27 October 1961. 87 Ibid. 88 Drysdale, Singapore, p. 442, and Lee, Singapore Story, p. 470, state that Lim Chin Siong was born in Pontian, Johore. But Tan Jing Quee and K.S. Jomo, eds., Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 2001), p. 56 says that he was “born at Telok Ayer, in the Hokkien heartland of Singapore’s Chinatown, on 28 February 1933”. It is perhaps only right as a sign of the mystique of the man that his birthplace should have become a contested fact. According to Tan and Jomo’s book, Lim, from 1936, at aged three, lived in Johore, where he attended a Chinese primary school, and was there through the Japanese Occupation and immediate post-war years. He returned to Singapore in 1949, a sixteen-year-old or so, enrolled at the Catholic High School, but soon transferred to the Chinese High School. Here, at this latter premier institution for the Chinese-educated, the Lim phenomenon accelerated and took off blazing through Singapore politics.

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89 James Ongkili, Nation-Building in Malaysia, 1946–74 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 153–54. 90 The Merger Plan, Ministry of Culture, Singapore (n.d.), pp. 5 to 7. 91 State of Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 15, Government Printer, 1964, column 406. 92 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 407. 93 Ibid. 94 State of Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 15, Government Printer, 1964, column 1524. 95 State of Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 18, Government Printer, 1963, columns 86, 296 and 361. 96 Ibid., columns 397 and 398. 97 State of Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 19, Government Printer, 1963, column 26. 98 Ibid., columns 26–27 and 246. 99 Ibid., column 391. 100 Lee, Singapore Story, pp. 429–30. 101 Ibid., pp. 431–32. 102 Ibid., p. 432. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., p. 433. 107 Ibid., p. 436. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., p. 439. 110 Lim Chin Siong wrote in April 1962, but the letter only came to light in July that same year. 111 Straits Times, 12 July 1962. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Quoted by Matthew Jones “Creating Malaysia: Singapore Security, the Borneo Territories, and the Contours of British Policy, 1961–63” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, no. 2 (May 2000): 95. 115 Quoted by Jones, Ibid., p. 94. 116 Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 78. 117 Quoted by Jones, Ibid., p. 85.

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118 Ibid., p. 92; see also Jones, “Singapore Security”, p. 97. 119 Lee Ting Hui, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954– 1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), p. 248. 120 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 446. 121 Ibid., p. 449. 122 Ibid., Straits Times, 24 August 1962. 123 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 449. 124 Ibid.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are• 217 Terms of Disendearment available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

Terms of Disendearment

T

he London talks of July 1962, based on the Cobbold Report, set the target date for the incorporation of the Borneo territories into Malaysia at 31 August 1963, allowing an intervening period of a year and a month during which constitutional safeguards and other details would be settled. This period would also be used for more bilateral discussions between Malaya and Singapore, and Malaya and Brunei, on important issues on which their positions were still far apart. However, the definitive significance of this period, marking the run-up to Malaysia, lies not only in these discussions. The Malaya-Singapore discussions were accompanied by a growing rift and rivalry between their two prime ministers, the Tunku and Lee. The two men of different personality, world view and political power base, felt, in the approach of merger, a heightening of the otherness of his opposite number and a desire for mastery over him. The issues at stake in this contest of will and power, which were inseparable from the outstanding issues of the merger itself, threatened to scuttle the merger completely. The strife between the two prime ministers was not the only danger on the merger horizon. Key national leaders in the surrounding region, which comprised island Southeast Asia, began to advance a territorial claim (the Philippine claim to North Borneo), and to oppose Malaysia as a neo-colonial design meant to perpetuate Western influence in their neighbourhood. This external dimension of conflict was to have major impact on the internal merger programme.

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The Tunku and the “Troublemaker” The Tunku and Lee were agreed on the danger posed by the communists and communist proxies in Malaya and Singapore, but differed in their attitude towards communist countries of the world. The Tunku extended his uncompromising stand against communists within his territory to communists globally, resembling the American attitude in that cold war era. Lee’s approach was more neutral and pragmatic: he would trade with communist nations on the understanding that trade should be kept separate from politics and ideology. For the present, his purpose was to visit them and explain that he was no British stooge, but a nationalist who believed Malaysia was for the best. When he discussed with the Tunku his plan to visit Belgrade, Moscow, and Beijing as well as New Delhi and Cairo, the Tunku was aghast. Lee went anyway to Belgrade and Moscow, though not to Beijing, in the course of 1962, and fell from the Tunku’s favour, his sin compounded by the fact that his standing with the Tunku was seen by the Tunku as that of a courtier in a princely court, and he had given offence to the prince.1 On his return from Moscow, Lee made it a point to say that he had gone there “to learn and had not been contaminated”.2 The practice of neutrality required him to appraise intelligently and understand what was going on inside the big powers. He explained his stand to the Tunku who remained unconvinced. Lee’s visits to Belgrade and Moscow had not weakened his resolve to take action against the pro-communists in Singapore. He had pledged his support for action to proceed after the referendum. But as the signs of the Tunku’s displeasure with him mounted, he began to think again. Tun Razak pressed for action at an Internal Security Council meeting in September 1962, failed, and called for another meeting in October, where again he was disappointed, the Singapore and British members blocking him both times. Lee’s strategy, as he confided in the British, was to delay the arrests of the pro-communists so that he could play them against the Malay leaders in Kuala Lumpur. Lee was convinced that the Tunku was seeking to remove him and put Lim Yew Hock in charge of Singapore. The Tunku had asked Lee to release a jailed gangster chief, Chua Hoe Ann, who was a friend of Lim Yew Hock’s, and had directed thugs against PAP branch workers in the 1959

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general election. There were other ominous signs. The Malayan Alliance was rebuilding the UMNO and MCA branches in Singapore. The Tunku wanted to test out their strength in a by-election in Sembawang (occasioned by the death of the sitting PAP assemblyman and minister) and requested Lee to forgo putting up another PAP candidate, and let his man stand against the Barisan.3 Lee wanted to give the Tunku an object lesson. He would hold the election of the fifteen Singapore representatives to the federal parliament before the merger, and he asked the British to help him with a constitutional technicality to make this possible. He “would create the 15 constituencies by amalgamating the existing 51 into groups of three or four”.4 He needed the Barisan to contest, hence his deferment of arrests, as they could win a number of seats which would otherwise go to Lim Yew Hock’s SPA in coalition with the Malayan Alliance in Singapore. The Barisan was a part of Lee’s plan “to inflict a crushing electoral defeat on Lim Yew Hock and the Alliance in Singapore to show the Tunku and Razak that they had to do business with the PAP and no one else”.5 Admittedly, Lee’s reading of the Tunku’s intention to replace him with the compliant Lim Yew Hock is not corroborated by evidence on the Tunku’s side. However, independent studies may be cited to show how the Tunku could indeed arrange to have his way in a situation similar to Lee’s case. When in the MCA election of office-bearers in 1958, a new guard led by Dr Lim Chong Eu took over the helm, the Tunku continued to give his patronage to the ousted MCA president, Tan Siew Sin, whose father, the first MCA president, Tan Cheng Lock, was the Tunku’s old and trusted friend. The Tunku retained Tan Siew Sin as Minister of Commerce and Industry despite his failure to be elected as the leader of his party. The new guard worked with the Chinese teachers’ lobby, thereby garnering more support through championing Chinese education, to bargain for a greater share in the pre-election allocation of seats, as was the practice among the Alliance partners. The Tunku repudiated the new guard’s challenge, bringing to a head the MCA-UMNO crisis of July 1958. In the end, the Tunku dictated the terms for the MCA’s continuation in the Alliance partnership. He stipulated the number of seats the MCA would have in the 1959 federal parliamentary election. Furthermore, the MCA candidates were to be picked

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by him. The MCA General Committee “voted by a narrow margin of 89 to 80 to accept the Tunku’s conditions”.6 Yong Pung How, MCA publicity chairman, and one of the new guard, could not accept this “abject surrender” of the MCA and resigned, as did several other high-ranking leaders, including the president, Dr Lim Chong Eu.7 Tan Siew Sin, whom the Tunku favoured, became the MCA president in 1961, in succession to an interim acting president. The historian of the MCA has drawn this moral: “The outcome of the crisis, which drove Lim Chong Eu and his major supporters from the party, taught the Chinese community a major political lesson: that the UMNO possessed the means to make or break any MCA leader.”8

Operation Cold Store Finally, an event coming out of the blue made it impossible for Lee and the British to put off any longer the security action that the Tunku repeatedly asked for through his deputy, Tun Razak. This was the Brunei revolt. The oil-rich state of Brunei, a British protectorate, whose sultan was in two minds whether to join Malaysia, or stay out of it and retain his unique royal status and enviable oil wealth, was jolted by an armed revolt on 8 December 1962. The man behind the revolt, A.M. Azahari, leader of a radical party with considerable popular support, aimed to unite the Borneo territories and Brunei into a single state with the Sultan of Brunei as the head of state. The Malaysia project and the British sponsors of it gave Azahari the pretext to act. Azahari was in Singapore a few days before the revolt started, and the Barisan secretary-general, Lim Chin Siong, had met up with him, not clear for what purpose. As soon as the revolt was raised, the Malayan Communist Party declared its support for it, followed by the Barisan.9 The Brunei revolt was easily quelled by the British, with units flown in from their Singapore base, but it had struck a chord among leaders in Indonesia, evoking memories of their own nationalist revolution and war of independence against the Dutch. D.N. Aidit, Chairman of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) Indonesian Communist Party, called on the Indonesian Government to recognize Azahari’s proclaimed North Borneo state, and give it “concrete assistance to make the revolution a success”.10 Thus, when the Barisan held

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a mass rally on 23 December in support of Azahari, it seemed to be trying to line up with dangerous and powerful external forces to help fight its antimerger battle within Singapore. The Barisan presented the Internal Security Council with what Lee called “a heaven-sent opportunity of justifying action against them”.11 At the Tunku’s request, the Internal Security Council held an emergency meeting on 13 December 1962, but the plan of action agreed upon was called off at the last minute, and another meeting was convened on 1 February 1963, this time with the Tunku giving final warning that, if action was not launched, “merger with Singapore was off”.12 Published accounts of the discussions in the Internal Security Council differ in emphasis and detail, which is understandable given the tripartite (British, Singapore, Malayan) membership of the council. Lee’s account was that he asked that Dr Lee Siew Choh (Barisan chairman) should not be arrested, and that the pro-communist trade unions should not be shut down though their leaders would be rounded up. Lee also asked that the Singapore branch of Partai Rakyat (a communist front organization founded in Malaya) “should not be proscribed so that the remaining communists would gravitate towards it rather than to Ong Eng Guan’s United People’s Party, who would take a Chinese chauvinist line”.13 But he wanted Ahmad Boestaman, chairman of Partai Rakyat in Malaya, who was also a federal MP, to be arrested together with another federal MP, Lim Kean Siew, secretary of the Malayan Labour Party. This was a quid pro quo for the nine Singapore Legislative Assemblymen who were listed for arrest. British historians have their version of the arrest programme. For them, “one of the most striking findings” yielded by their research into the archives is “the extent to which the United Kingdom Commission in Singapore attempted to stall and block these arrests”.14 In the end, Sandys, with the permission of Macmillan, had to overrule the officials in Singapore, Selkirk, and Moore, saying that the British Government had no choice but to accede to the Tunku’s demand, and instructing Selkirk to ensure an unanimous decision on the arrests in the Internal Security Council. British historians have also noted what transpired on the side of Lee and the Tunku. They stated that Lee wanted Ong Eng Guan and two other members of the United People’s Party to be included in the arrests, but

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Selkirk strenuously objected, and Lee apparently gave in to him.15 The Tunku at first acceded to Lee’s request on the arrest of Ahmad Boestaman and Lim Kean Siew, but later decided against it on being advised that “there was no security case which could justify it”, and became angry with Lee for allegedly taking the opportunity “to include a number of political opponents in the list of arrests on purely political grounds”.16 Hence, the Internal Security Council meeting on 13 December 1962 led to an aborted operation. This controversy offers further evidence of the conflict of wills between the two prime ministers. In this regard, British historians cited Moore’s interpretation of the dilemma that the arrest programme presented to Lee. Lee, like the entire British establishment from Sandys to Selkirk, had to comply with the Tunku’s demand for the arrests, issued with an ultimatum. Yet, as Moore stated, “once he had given way to the Tunku on the arrests, he had played his last card, and there would be no guarantee that the Tunku would accept Singapore into Malaysia if [the next lap] negotiations went sour”.17 Put another way, “Lee was concerned that, by sanctioning the arrests, he would be expending his most valuable bargaining chip in the negotiations, and might even diminish the rationale for Merger itself”.18 When the Internal Security Council met again on 1 February 1963, the Tunku’s continued refusal to put Boestaman and Lim Kean Siew on the arrest list was compensated for by Lee’s removal of six Barisan assemblymen from the list. Lee also managed to pull off “one final surprise”.19 He secured the concurrence of the Internal Security Council to allow Lim Chin Siong, originally meant to be arrested and detained, to leave for any country he chose. He felt a certain obligation to make this gesture to Lim, and though, as he expected, Lim “turned down the offer”, it had served Lee’s “political purpose”.20 The public would know that he had been fair to Lim. The Plen would also come to know that he had “observed some rules of decency and honour” and he hoped the Plen would, in return, “behave likewise”.21 Operation Cold Store, codename for the arrests, was launched on 2 February to hunt for a list of 169 persons, and managed to nab 115 of them, among whom were twenty-four members of the Barisan, including Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, James Puthucheary, and Sandrasegeram Woodhull.

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Puthucheary had, for some time, resigned from his various offices in the Singapore Government, and was reading law at the then University of Malaya (in Singapore). He had just finished writing his last examination paper when he was arrested. This was his third arrest and detention. Ten months later, he was released and deported. He was a Malayan citizen. Woodhull was also released on the same day, 28 November 1963. Puthucheary was to give up politics, having decided that he would never find a home anywhere to accommodate his political ideals.

Confrontation Indonesia, as a unified nation, comprised a great crescent of islands from one end to the other of the Malay world of Southeast Asia. From Indonesia’s vantage, the territorial scope of Malaysia, stretching from the Straits of Malacca region across the South China Sea to northern Borneo looked like an encirclement, an image easily invoked by many who were only too ready to oppose the formation of Malaysia. Other scenarios were also imagined. General Abdul Nasution of the Indonesian army, invoked the yellow peril, the Chinese in Southeast Asian countries, whom he regarded as unassimilable and owing their loyalty primarily to their motherland. The Singapore Chinese soon to be included in Malaysia, he said, had the potential to win political power, owing to their economic dominance which was likely to continue, and they “would constitute [a] military fifth column” when the mainland Chinese begin their southward expansion.22 The PKI leaders, who were the army generals’ great rivals, and inclined to the PRC rather than the Soviet line, painted a different picture. They stressed the neo-colonial aspect of Malaysia in the sense that the British were using it as a means to suppress freedom movements in Borneo, while in Singapore, it was the means whereby they could “borrow native hands” to beat down “the people’s movement”.23 The Indonesian president, Sukarno, had fashioned his own unique ideology, which depicted a world locked in struggle between “the new emerging forces and the old established forces”,24 the former being the Afro-Asian nations whose leaders, notably Jawaharlal Nehru, Chou En-Lai,

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Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Norodom Sihanouk, had come to his celebrated Bandung Conference in 1955, and the latter, consisting of former Western colonial empires in their neo-colonial guises. The proposed Malaysia could be nothing but a neo-colonial fabrication in terms of Sukarno’s political lexicon. For Sukarno, this was a perfect issue occurring at a perfect time. To unite a nation as vast, diverse, and complex as his, a common enemy in the world outside was a great help. Sukarno was able to point to the Dutch, Indonesia’s former colonial ruler, as the external enemy, because the Dutch held on to West Irian, the last remaining bit of the Dutch East Indies, which the Indonesians demanded to be handed over. From 1954 until the settlement of the issue in Indonesia’s favour in August 1962, West Irian was Sukarno’s rallying point. After West Irian, Malaysia was on hand to give Sukarno his next foreign adventure, to help him maintain unity, and his hold on power in the domestic front. Sukarno’s dominance of Indonesia depended on his ability to keep “a balance between opposing forces”,25 especially the army generals and the communist party leaders. He was like a puppet master. Passionately against Malaysia himself, he would represent and direct the opposition of the army and the communist party to it. Confronting Malaysia would divert them from confronting each other, which could lead to catastrophe. (This catastrophe eventually happened, in October 1965, when power passed from Sukarno into the hands of a major general, Suharto.) President Diosado Macapagal of the Philippines joined Sukarno in the confrontation of Malaysia. Beginning with a claim to North Borneo territory which led nowhere, Macapagal went on to attack the Malaysia scheme as a British-sponsored Malayan takeover in violation of the North Borneo people’s right to self-determination. In place of Malaysia, Macapagal proposed a loose confederation comprising Malaya, Philippines and Indonesia, which he called Maphilindo (MAlaya, PHILippines, INDOnesia). As its composite name suggests, it would stand for Malay national solidarity across the archipelago. Sukarno and Macapagal were to call for summit meetings, which the Tunku and Tun Razak attended. This summitry established a landmark principle. It was that Southeast Asian nations had the right to discuss

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a situation arising from the end of a Western empire in the region, independently of the Western power concerned. The British became onlookers26 only, as three Southeast Asian nations engaged in a diplomatic process which involved the fate of the their colonies and even their military base in Singapore. They had to bear with their position of disadvantage and apparent weakness, because to reverse it, would open them to the charge of provocativeness and bravado in their imperial twilight, and could prove more costly than they could afford. Besides, they had to consider what their transatlantic ally, America, would say. The Americans were containing the communist tide on the mainland of Southeast Asia, with neutralization in Laos and war in Vietnam, and the last thing they needed was a situation offering communism an opportunity to make gains in island Southeast Asia.27 This meant that Sukarno must not be pushed hard, lest he turned to the PKI, and thence into the embrace of the PRC. The Americans favoured an Asian solution to the Malaysia dispute, which was great for Sukarno and Macapagal. Sukarno invited the Tunku to a meeting at Tokyo which took place on 31 May and 1 June 1963. They pledged to resolve their differences amicably and agreed to a foreign ministers’ meeting in Manila.28 At the Manila meeting, held from 7 to 11 June, the Philippine and Indonesian foreign ministers did their best to make Razak accept a postponement of Malaysia in order that an assessment of opinion in the Borneo territories could be carried out in keeping with the principle of self-determination. Finally, with Razak still refusing to hear of a postponement, the meeting settled for the idea of inviting a UN assessor into the Borneo territories. On 11 June, the Tunku gave Razak his assent to this idea, “subject to the agreement of the British government”.29 This was the main point of the Manila Accord which Razak and the other ministers signed. Among other issues included were some references to the Maphilindo concept. The Manila Accord would lead to a summit meeting between Sukarno, Macapagal, and Tunku Abdul Rahman at a later date. The Tunku and Tun Razak made light of the concession they had given regarding the UN assessor, and asked the British Government to agree to it quickly, saying that it was little more than a face-saving device. But at the Commonwealth

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Relations Office, Sandys was not so sure. Expressing his surprise that the British Government had not been consulted beforehand, he preferred not to give a formal reply until the forthcoming heads of government summit had endorsed the Manila Accord.30

The Merger Ultimatum Did the Manila Accord mean that confrontation was over? Malayan leaders would have hoped so, while at the same time, were prepared for worse to come. The idea of Maphilindo would have given the Tunku and Razak something to think about, but it has to be recognized that their identity with the Malay world would extend only to the further shore of the Malacca Straits, i.e., Sumatra. This was their historical legacy. Their present reality was an artificial, racially problematic, creation called “Malaysia”. They still had some outstanding issues to negotiate with Lee and the Sultan of Brunei regarding the entry of Singapore and Brunei into Malaysia. Malayan leaders were finding the prolonged negotiations, for which they tended to blame Lee and the Sultan of Brunei, very vexatious. The Malayan cabinet resolved to truncate the talks. On 19 June 1963, eight days after the Manila Accord, the Tunku publicly announced that Lee and the Sultan of Brunei were being presented with the Malayan cabinet’s final terms, and were advised that there would be no more negotiations, and they had to reply within forty-eight hours.31 When the deadline passed, with no result, Sandys invited them all to London for his mediation. The Tunku was thinking that he might drop Singapore and Brunei, and have a reduced Malaysia with only the Borneo territories and Malaya in it. Likewise, Sandys was independently weighing his options as follows: “(1) force Singapore to join Malaysia against its will; (2) abandon the Malaysia project; (3) allow North Borneo and Sarawak to join a reduced Malaysia, leaving the door open to subsequent membership by Singapore”.32 Sandys thought that he might have to scare the Tunku into agreeing with Singapore by proposing a “separate independence for Singapore” as this would affect the continuation of the Anglo-Malayan defence arrangement which needed Singapore, and place at risk, British tenure of their Singapore base (this, a

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hint at possible Barisan takeover of the government).33 But Sandys had to be careful as there was “some slight evidence” that the Tunku was thinking if, to secure his object of “combating the Chinese influence in Singapore”, he was not better off pursuing friendship with Indonesia than going through the hardship of creating Malaysia.34 Lee and Dr Goh went to London for what had become a routine, the make or break conference. The issues they were concerned about were, in part, economic and financial, namely (1) a common market, which Singapore was more keen to have than Malaya; (2) tax collection in Singapore, whether the central or state government should do it, and the percentage of Singapore’s taxes to be contributed to the central government; and (3) the aid that Malaya wanted Singapore to give for the development of the Borneo territories. There were other issues which were politically loaded, and of major importance to Lee. One was Lee’s request to have the power to detain secret society gangsters without trial delegated to Singapore, even though internal security would come under the central government. Another was Lee’s proposal to amend the state constitution with a clause requiring an assemblyman who resigned, or was expelled from the party under which he had been elected, to vacate his seat. This was more evidence of the distrust and fear between Singapore and Malaya. Lee was trying to prevent the use of thugs, and the enticement of assemblymen, in a future struggle with the central government at Kuala Lumpur. That the Tunku and Tun Razak were most reluctant to agree to his two proposals confirmed his worst suspicion. Malayan leaders had a special request too. They asked for a constitutional amendment to provide for the restriction of movement of Singapore citizens into Malaysia. Lee agreed to this, on the condition that the Singapore Government could, in return, prevent the entry of Malayan Malaysian citizens. Sandy’s way of mediation was to hold talks with the two sides separately before bringing them together. The final session he mediated, on the evening of 4 July 1963, lasted till the following dawn. Even this was not the end. The Tunku had refused to come to London for the negotiations, sending Tun Razak instead to deal with Lee. The Tunku was displeased with Lee, and

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had complained in private to Selkirk of Lee’s serpentine calculation.35 The Tunku would come to London only for the ritual signing of the Malaysia agreement, if there was one. He arrived on 6 July, and on 7 July, Lee engaged him in last-minute discussions at the Ritz Hotel, the Tunku’s usual posh London abode. The terms Lee obtained from the Tunku were that, in the area of finance and economics, Singapore would give the Borneo territories a $150 million loan on generous terms, and that fifty per cent of the labour for projects funded from this loan should come from Singapore. The political terms were those proposals noted above. Lee took a used envelope from a side-table in the Tunku’s sitting room, wrote Ritz Hotel at the top, jotted down the points agreed, and the Tunku signed and dated it 7 July 1963. The formal signing of the London (Malaysia) Agreement was to take place the following day, 8 July, the number “8” being a lucky number to the Tunku, but the dinner and speeches marking the occasion delayed it until past midnight into 9 July. The London Agreement did not include Brunei, whose Sultan remained skittish to the end about joining Malaysia. The Tunku had found the Sultan most tiresome, and had described him, again in Selkirk’s private hearing, as an old woman.36

The Manila Summit The London Agreement committed the British Government to a transfer of sovereignty in the relevant territories to make Malaysia happen on 31 August 1963. The defence agreement between the British and Malayan Governments since 1957 would be extended to the new Malaysia, and the British base in Singapore would continue. The one cloud on the horizon was the regional heads of government meeting due at the end of the month, the Manila summit. Sukarno and the PKI slammed the Tunku’s signing of the London Agreement as a preemption of the Manila summit. What would Sukarno do? British and American officials, who kept a close watch on the proceedings of the Manila summit, devoted more attention to Sukarno and the Tunku, as the two leading protagonists, and less to Macapagal, the leader of the host country. To the Americans, Sukarno was, like it or not, the kingpin in the

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sector of Southeast Asia in which Malaysia was located, but to the British he was, for this same reason, an abomination. A British official trying to make the Americans understand how the British felt about the Indonesian president hit the right button when he said that the British looked upon Sukarno “in the same way [the] US regards Castro”.37 Worried by Sukarno, the British were at the same time anxious over the Tunku who was too friendly, conciliatory, and open-minded as he arrived at Manila. The Manila summit picked up where the foreign ministers’ meeting left off on the matter of ascertaining the views of the Borneo people by a UN representative. What was to be the method of ascertainment? The Tunku was prepared to leave it to the good judgement of UN SecretaryGeneral, U Thant, who would be contacted during the summit.38 The Tunku had already requested Malayan cabinet approval for this, as well as for some postponement of Malaysia Day, if the UN Secretary-General could not complete his work in time. The Tunku expressed the hope that, over at the Commonwealth Relations Office, Sandys would give him some leeway to negotiate. But this was exactly what Sandys would not do. Sandys cabled the British embassy in Manila to remind the Tunku of the 31 August date for Malaysia, and to tell him that anything more than a visit to the Borneo territories by the UN Secretary-General or his representative, such as a referendum or plebiscite, would be unacceptable to the British Government.39 Despite this advice, the Tunku went ahead to leave everything to the UN Secretary-General. U Thant’s reply, cabled to his representative at the summit meeting, electrified the Tunku and Sandys. U Thant said that a referendum would be appropriate, and that in view of the need to clear with the UN General Assembly and various other authorities, and to work out the logistics of the operation, it would probably not begin until 15 October, and would take up to the end of November. In London, the British cabinet to whom Sandys broke the news, saw danger in a postponement of Malaysia. Sandys’ second message to the Tunku at the talks “warned against any postponement or referendum” and assured him of British support in “any conflict with Indonesia”.40 British records on their consultation with the Tunku reveal the Tunku’s game plan at this stage. He would tell Sukarno and Macapagal no referendum, citing British objection. He would be happy to have the UN

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Secretary-General handle “the ascertainment himself or through a personal representative within a month to six weeks” (so as to meet the Malaysia deadline).41 If the Tunku could not secure agreement on this, he would concede to a post-Malaysia referendum. The precedent for this was the West Irian referendum, held, not before, but after, the handover of the territory by Holland to Indonesia. The Tunku’s last option was to walk out of the conference should none of the above prove acceptable to Sukarno and Macapagal. The Tunku replied to Sandys affirming that Malaysia would take place as scheduled. During the conference session, the Malayan side, true enough, put the onus for not agreeing to a referendum on the British. Sukarno was furious at this overt British manipulation. And when the Tunku started to read a letter from the British embassy in Manila “instructing [him] to hold firm on the 31 August date”, Sukarno and Macapagal felt that was the limit, and a “blow-up” was averted only by the presidential host’s “adjourning [of the] meeting for lunch”.42 Macapagal was driven to appealing for American help to check the interfering British. The Americans had been annoyed with the British for behaviour which would come across as neo-colonialist or worse. American policy — it was claimed — was to let newly independent countries find answers to their regional problems without outsiders butting in. The near “blow-up” at the summit meeting made them more certain that they were right. After that high octane session, U Thant’s man at Manila made an urgent telephone call to him asking for a fresh proposal which might save the conference from collapse. U Thant cabled back one which entailed a kind of survey, but was definitely not a referendum. This new procedure to be conducted by an UN official to be nominated by the Secretary-General was, in fact, close to an option which the Tunku had contemplated, but did not propose himself. The Americans asked the British to give the Tunku maximum flexibility to consider U Thant’s new proposal. The U.S. state department believed Sandy’s intransigence had prevented the Tunku from agreeing to a delay of Malaysia, and so it advised President Kennedy to write to Prime Minister Macmillan to present the American case at the highest level. President

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Kennedy expressed his concern that the “hopefully successful Manila summit will be torpedoed unless [the] 31 August date for Malaysia can be postponed briefly to give Sukarno a fig leaf”.43 By this, he meant giving Sukarno a facesaving way out. This raises some key questions. Did Sukarno want a fig leaf, a small gesture to save face as he retreats from the policy of confrontation? Or did he have a more serious objective, and if so, also a definite plan for achieving it, or did he just take one step at a time, cashing in on whatever opportunity came his way? The Tunku would seem to have played into Sukarno’s hands by giving U Thant carte blanc, and when U Thant proposed a referendum, he simply seized on it. American reading of Sukarno from the state department to academia44 was that all Sukarno wanted was a fig leaf. Macmillan in his reply to Kennedy cast doubt on this notion. Macmillan wrote that “he did not believe Sukarno can be bought off with a fig leaf. He would need something bigger to cover himself”.45 The British prime minister warned that the latest reports from Manila showed Sukarno as trying to get foreign bases out of the Maphilindo zone. British official thinking on Sukarno did not preclude his wanting to dominate and absorb the whole region of Malaysia into his Indonesian empire. British and Australian historians, while not going as far as some official views, have argued that Sukarno was looking for delays and dissensions to unravel the Malaysia project.46 The bottom-line was how the British should treat Kennedy’s suggestion? In their dialogue with the Americans at departmental level, the British had argued on the basis of their responsibilities in the region, stressing that if things should go wrong, they would have to pick up the pieces. This argument no doubt underscored Sandys’s insistence on the 31 August date, and his determined effort to make the Tunku stick to it. But the British had to realize too that if things went horribly wrong, they would need the Americans to bail them out. In a worst case scenario, the British bail out the Tunku, and the Americans bail out the British. It was this scenario that prompted Kennedy’s message to Macmillan and gave it clout with the top people in Whitehall. Lord Home, the foreign secretary, began to say “if we agree to a small postponement [of Malaysia] to meet American wishes, we

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are more likely to obtain full American support afterwards”.47 Macmillan agreed: “I do not think we should risk forfeiting future American support against Indonesia by adopting an intransigent attitude”.48 American pressure overcame British resistance to the Tunku’s acceptance of U Thant’s new proposal to send a UN survey mission to the Borneo territories. Sukarno and Macapagal accepted it too, grudgingly: it was not what they wanted, which was a full-scale plebiscite. The wording of the Manila Agreement, which the three leaders signed, was sufficiently ambivalent as to be productive of more discord in the near future.49 Thus ended the Manila summit of 30 July to 5 August 1963. For the Tunku and the British, it must have felt like the longest week in their political calendar. The British desperately plotted their counter-move to the UN survey mission soon to enter their Borneo territories. They still needed the Tunku as their instrument as they did in Manila. Sandys began to give advice to the Tunku again, through the British commissioner, Sir Geofroy Tory, in Kuala Lumpur. The Tunku had, on returning from Manila, publicly said that he was willing to postpone Malaysia Day to accommodate the completion of the UN mission’s work. Sandys did not like an open-ended kind of postponement. If there has to be a postponement, the Tunku must set a definite date and stick to it no matter what the UN Secretary General’s report says. Sandys advised that “if the report was unfavourable, the Tunku could go ahead with Malaysia and then offer an after-the-event West Irianstyle plebiscite”.50 Sandys spelled out the position of the British Government to the Tunku. The British Government was admitting the UN survey mission into the Borneo territories “only at the special request [of] the Malayan government…in order to help them”.51 They themselves did not wish “to be associated with the request for an enquiry or with the eventual report”.52 They did not wish “the Secretary General’s decision on the report to be addressed to [them]”, nor did they wish “to be committed to recognising the validity of the findings”.53 Finally, Sandys reiterated a point he had made earlier, that he would not permit Indonesian and Philippine observers to accompany the UN survey mission into the Borneo territories. The Tunku, at the receiving end of Sandys’s torrent, felt compelled to set a new date for Malaysia, choosing 16 September 1963. Sandys required

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the Tunku to state this in a letter, and the Tunku did so on 10 August. The British Government wanted the UN Secretary-General to factor in this new date in the survey mission’s timetable, but U Thant could offer them no guarantee that the work would be completed by then. The UN survey mission arrived on 16 August. The British came round to allowing observers from Indonesia and the Philippines as well as Malaya, but there was still a problem as the Indonesian list of observers included intelligence officers which the British were anxious to exclude. Sandys came out to Kuala Lumpur on 23 August, “to hold the Tunku’s hand”, he said54 (it was more like twisting the Tunku’s arm), into Malaysia Day. The Tunku, understandably, was not keen to have Sandys around him. He turned to the American ambassador for any help that the American Government could give “to persuade [the] British ‘to have more confidence’ ” in him.55 The Tunku was evidently unaware of how much the Americans wanted him to have the flexibility to deal with Sukarno, and that they had said so to the British. Sandys interpreted the Tunku’s wish to be flexible as wavering and a lack of resolve, and any initiative towards Sukarno as appeasement. The Tunku had apparently informed Borneo leaders that Malaysia might have to be abandoned if the UN Secretary-General reported unfavourably. Sandys was most disturbed to hear this from the Borneo leaders after his arrival in the region. Then the Tunku told him of the Malayan Government’s desire for flexibility despite the setting of a new date at 16 September. The Tunku hoped “that the date for Malaysia could be any time before 30 September”.56 Sandys was adamant it had to be 16 September. On the next occasion, Sandys and the Tunku clashed over another issue. The Tunku was thinking of inviting Dr Subandrio, the Indonesian foreign minister, for bilateral talks in Singapore. Sandys objected to this move. He did not want Borneo people and the UN survey mission to notice this wavering behaviour on the Malayan front. The Tunku “said that he must be allowed to conduct his relations with Indonesia in his own way. This was his ‘cold war’ and he must handle it as he thought best”.57 It was a highly charged and stormy meeting, which ended with the Tunku saying “I have reached the end of my tether and I do not want to discuss anything further with anybody.”58

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The Malayan cabinet met. An invitation was sent to Subandrio to come to Singapore, and Tun Razak (not the Tunku) would meet him there. Subandrio declined the invitation to Singapore, and invited Tun Razak to Jakarta instead. The permanent secretary of the Malayan foreign ministry, Ghazali bin Shafie, went in place of Tun Razak, to forewarn of his government’s intention to announce publicly the new Malaysia date, 16 September.

Singapore Declares Independence In Singapore, Prime Minister Lee was in the thick of a campaign to swing ground level support away from the Barisan. He had decided that the next general election, after the landmark PAP victory in 1959, “could not be delayed beyond the merger”.59 Once the referendum on merger was over, he embarked on “a series of visits to the constituencies”, starting with the ones which had cast the most blank votes (Jurong, Thomson, Kampong Kembangan, and Jalan Kayu), and eventually covered all fifty-one constituencies, going to them at an adrenaline-pumping pace as Malaysia Day (the revised one) drew near. The people that the prime minister arranged to meet were businessmen, clan leaders, village shopkeepers, and headmen of all races — people with needs and responsibilities — whom he knew would be useful in his fight with the boisterous, youthful Barisan movement. These constituency visits took place in between his other urgent tasks, bargaining hard for the final terms of merger, and his manoeuvres to stay ahead in his struggle with the Tunku. He had suffered a setback. He wanted to hold the election of the fifteen Singapore members to the federal parliament before Malaysia Day, because after, that control of the police in Singapore would pass into the hands of the central government at Kuala Lumpur. Lim Yew Hock, the Tunku’s friend and leader of the Singapore People’s Alliance, combined with the Barisan against the passage of the Federal Election Bill in the Legislative Assembly, effectively blocking Lee’s plan.60 More disappointment was in store, borne in with dangerous portents, from the direction of the Manila summit. Lee discussed the risks of a postponement of Malaysia with his colleagues. The Barisan would be

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encouraged. “They might decide on direct action in the hope that Sukarno would intervene and scare the Tunku off completely.”61 If the Tunku should come to the point where making peace with Sukarno was more important than creating Malaysia, then the British and Lee would be thrown back to square one, their credibility shattered, while the PAP’s chances in the next general election would be nullified. Lee had to turn the situation around in his favour. Lee’s plan was that, on the original Malaysia date, 31 August, Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo should declare their independence, and wait for Malaya to come in with them into Malaysia on 16 September. Ironically, this was a reversal of the Tunku’s (earlier) last-ditch plan to merge Malaya, Sarawak and North Borneo, reserving Singapore and Brunei for later inclusion. Lee wrote to Sandys and publicly announced that Singapore would not be bound by the post-Manila postponement decision, and “he would insist on independence on 31 August as provided by the London Agreement”.62 He then visited the Borneo territories and talked the chief ministers of Sarawak and North Borneo into acting in concert with him. Sandys moved quickly, and with success, to detach the two chief ministers from Lee’s scheme. They were compensated with an offer of internal self-government, effective on 31 August, as they waited for Malaysia Day to arrive in some two weeks’ time. Sandys tried to deflect Lee from his intended course, but failed in the end. The Manila summit, and its outcome in a postponement of Malaysia, gave Lee a chance to call the shots that he never had before. All along in the merger process, he had been the supplicant, waiting on the Malayans and the British in order to have his wishes fulfilled. Suddenly, he could be the master dictating terms to them. Sandys called this political brinkmanship. In his despatch to Macmillan, he described Lee as “unashamedly exploiting the delay in the establishment of Malaysia to further his personal ambitions”.63 Sandys was alluding to a series of events that Lee was threatening him with, and the Tunku as well, in the final lap to Malaysia. On 31 August, from the City Hall steps, Lee made a unilateral declaration of independence for Singapore. On 3 September, he dissolved the Legislative Assembly and announced general elections, with nominations to be made

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on 12 September. Lee had earlier reminded Sandys that the items he negotiated with the Tunku at the Ritz Hotel, London, had not been ratified or implemented. He now issued an ultimatum, saying that unless these items were “cast in iron” by nomination day, he “would fight the election on a platform of independence, and immediately ask a number of countries for recognition as from 16 September”.64 Sandys and Selkirk persuaded the Malayan Government to meet Lee’s demand. From the British point of view, it was a relatively small concession to make for the sake of the far greater goal of bringing Singapore safely into Malaysia on 16 September. The Malayan attorney-general and Tun Razak completed endorsing the items in question by 7 September. However, there was one item, “the delegation to Singapore of the right to detain secret society gangsters”, which they did not want to be written into the constitution, and Lee “had to be content with a simple letter of authority”.65 Lee had successfully pushed the British into pushing the Malayans, with the result that he got nearly total satisfaction well before the deadline he set, 12 September, nomination day for the general election. By the morning of 12 September, Lee had just finished his visit to three constituencies made during the previous night. The government announced 21 September as voting day. This would be five days after Singapore was incorporated into Malaysia. Lee had fought to the bitter end for the maximum that he could get in the merger negotiations to ensure that Singapore, the PAP, and not least, he himself, would not be at anybody’s mercy in Malaysia. He had expended his energy in many strenuous days and nights of constituency visits, and then called a snap election, in order that the PAP Government might win a second term to bring Singapore forward, and to beat the Barisan soundly at the polls, and end all hopes of a Singapore UMNO-MCA and SPA revival. On 14 September, the UN Secretary-General released the report on the UN survey mission’s findings. The report was favourable, but came with U Thant’s strictures, notably on the British and Malayan Governments’ fixing of a new date for the inauguration of Malaysia before his report had been made known. Sukarno and Macapagal, not surprisingly, rejected the report as incredible. Indonesia’s confrontation entered into a more belligerent phase, as may be expected. At the same time, relations between Singapore

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and the federal government at Kuala Lumpur took a sharp turn for the worse. This too is no surprise. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), pp. 417, 423, 457–59 and 462. Ibid., p. 458. Ibid., pp. 474–75. Ibid., p. 463. Ibid. Heng Peck Koon, Chinese Politics in Malaysia: A History of the Malaysian Chinese Association (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 257. Tan Liok Ee, The Politics of Chinese Education in Malaya 1945–1961 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 264. Heng, Chinese Politics, p. 257. Lee Ting Hui, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954– 1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), p. 256. Quoted by John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), p. 317. Quoted by Matthew Jones “Creating Malaysia: Singapore Security, the Borneo Territories, and the Contours of British Policy, 1961–63” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, no. 2 (May 2000): 99–100. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 101. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 470. T.N. Harper, “Lim Chin Siong and the ‘Singapore Story’ ”, in Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History, edited by Tan Jing Quee and K.S. Jomo (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 2001), p. 38. Ibid., p. 42; Jones, “Singapore Security”, p. 101. Harper, “Lim Chin Siong”, p. 42. Quoted by Jones, “Singapore Security”, p. 100. Harper, “Lim Chin Siong”, p. 38. Jones, “Singapore Security”, p. 103. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 473. Ibid. Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 133; John Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno: British, American, Australian and New Zealand Diplomacy in the Malaysian-Indonesian Confrontation, 1961–65 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), p. 42. Quoted by Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 99. John Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography (London: Penguin Press), p. 343. Ibid., p. 373.

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 149. Ibid., pp. 58–60. Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno, p. 57. Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 157. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 161; Lee, Singapore Story, p. 478. Quoted by Lee, Singapore Story, p. 479. Ibid. Ibid. Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 161. Ibid. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 172. J.A.C. Mackie, Konfrontasi: The Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute, 1963–1966 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 160. Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 173. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 177. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 179. The late Professor G.McT. Kahin of Cornell University exemplified this view. Quoted by Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 179. See Mackie, Konfrontasi, p. 162; Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 169. Quoted by Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 179. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 182. Mackie dubs it “a masterpiece of evasion and compromise”. See his Konfrontasi, p. 163. Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 183. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 183. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid. Ibid., also quoted by Lee, Singapore Story, p. 494. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 484. Drysdale, Singapore, pp. 333–35. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 497. Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 185. Quoted by Jones, ibid., p. 192. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 499. Ibid., p. 503.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Dare toarticles be Equal permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual are• 239 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

N I N E

Dare to be Equal

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ingapore was in Malaysia, but without love, and with instead, much illwill. The conflict between Singapore and the central government dominated all else within Malaysia. At the same time the new federation was under serious threat from without as Sukarno stepped up his confrontation agenda. Confrontation guaranteed that the Western bloc powers would be focused on the troubled region. Britain, whose forces were engaged in defensive action, and America, Australia and New Zealand, all inter-linked as allies, cast their anxious eyes on Malaysia, the victim, and Indonesia, the aggressor. This created a rare opportunity for the contending leaders within Malaysia to draw strength from this international group of Western powers to support their internal struggle against each other. The Western powers in question were out to influence the leaders of Malaya and Singapore to conform to their strategic and political interests in the region. But on this score, they came up against the assertive nationalism of the Malayan and Singaporean leaders who were determined to have their own way. While these leaders looked upon the Western powers as a valuable resource to tap into, they made it very clear that they should be in charge of their own destiny. This limited the capacity of the Western powers to affect the course of the internal struggle in Malaysia, and of the confrontation outside it sustained by Sukarno. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee believed that, for the Malaysian nation to succeed, all who belonged to it, regardless of race, religion, or creed, should be equal. This was his abiding nation-building imperative. When,

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as a budding nationalist, he addressed the Malayan Forum all those years ago, he had emphasized the importance of a Malayan Malaya over a Malay Malaya, a Chinese Malaya, an Indian Malaya, and an Eurasian Malaya. This idea became the founding principle of the PAP, which he led to victory and into merger. The experience of the final stages of the merger negotiations, amid signs that the Tunku was seeking to replace him with a more amenable leader, was a brutal reminder to him not to assume equality as a matter of right, but to be prepared, if necessary, to fight for it. Once in Malaysia, Lee accepted that his “task now was to re-establish good relations and mutual confidence with Kuala Lumpur”, but he “would cooperate with the centre on a fair and equal basis, not as servant with master”.1 How this could be done, and with what results, is the dramatic story of the next twenty two or so months.

Loveless Match Lee had banked on the advantage of holding a general election in Singapore five days after Malaysia Day, and on a surprise announcement of the nomination day, coupled with a minimum period of electioneering before the ballot was cast. This snap election of 21 September 1963 paid off handsomely for him. The PAP contested in all fifty-one constituencies and won in thirty-seven. The Barisan contested in forty-six constituencies and won in thirteen, of which number, eleven were rural ones, where the party’s strength had been demonstrated in the merger referendum voting. The PAP had decisively beaten its feared Barisan rival, despite the fact that two cabinet ministers were defeated by Barisan candidates, and the deputy prime minister, Dr Toh Chin Chye, had beaten Barisan chairman, Dr Lee Siew Choh, only by “the slimmest majority of 89 votes” recorded in this election.2 This election had something of the passing of an era. On nomination day, Lim Yew Hock unexpectedly announced that he was not standing, and went out of Singapore politics to other (non-combative) roles that his good friend, the Tunku, found for him. Marshall, however, refused to give up. He stood as an independent candidate in Anson, and (since the communists

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had already dumped him) was badly mauled, losing even his deposit. But the old warrior prided himself in going down fighting. The Singapore branches of UMNO, MCA, and MIC joined forces with the SPA, under a collective name, the Singapore Alliance, to contest in fortytwo constituencies. The performance of the Singapore Alliance was a relevation. To their utter shock and anguish, they won not a single seat. The most significant losses were in the predominantly Malay constituencies, Geylang Serai, Kampong Kembangan, and Southern Islands, where the Singapore Alliance fielded Singapore UMNO candidates. They were all defeated by the PAP’s Malay candidates. Southern Islands was a fight to an exciting finish, with the PAP’s Yaacob bin Mohamed winning by a slender majority of 540 votes. The Singapore Alliance’s total rout, doubtless, brought great cheer to Lee. “The Tunku’s dream”, of having Lim Yew Hock’s SPA team up with the Singapore UMNO-MCA-MIC, and control Singapore, “vanished”.3 Lee wrote this in his memoirs, recalling the jubilation of the moment. But he also recorded, retrospectively, his failure to understand the impact of these electoral losses, particularly those in the Malay constituencies, on the Tunku. The Tunku was completely shattered. Only two days before the polling, he had visited Singapore and made a supporting speech at a tea party given by the Singapore Alliance at Federation House in Changi. Unable to accept the devastating outcome in constituencies which UMNO had held in previous elections, and come to regard as their traditional strongholds, the Tunku spoke of traitors in the Singapore community and their betrayal of UMNO. Lee blithely dismissed the Tunku’s accusations as “post-election morale-boosting”.4 Lee had been angered by the Tunku’s personal appearance, seeing it as undue interference in the Singapore election, but as the victor, he could easily forgive this trespass. The Tunku was the vanquished who was unable to get over it, his anger fortified by his belief that wherever there were Malays, UMNO would be there for them, and not to recognize this was utter treachery. Was this UMNO rout, so grievous to the Tunku and potentially ominous for the future, avoidable? A Malaysian author has argued that it was. According to him, Lee “should have arranged for Singapore UMNO

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candidates to win at least in the Malay majority constituencies”.5 “Since there were only three such seats”, he said, giving them to UMNO candidates would not have affected “the PAP’s political primacy”.6 He tantalisingly concluded, “Had [Lee] done this [that is], saved the Tunku’s face in the Singapore elections, the course of the history of Malaysia would have been different indeed.”7 So why didn’t Lee do it? He would be betraying his principles and his people if he did it. He had founded the PAP on the basis of multiracialism, and drawn Malays into it as well as Chinese, Indians, and Eurasians. He had fielded a significant number of Malay candidates in elections in 1959, and again in 1963, and they had proven their loyalty and courage in battles with communists and chauvinists. A PAP Malay Minister of Labour, drawn from trade union ranks, stood up to pro-communist, militant, strike-happy trade union radicals. A Malay assemblywoman cast the vital single vote to secure the government’s survival in a motion of confidence debate, without the government having to seek recourse to the votes of non-PAP assemblymen. Another telling case is the Malay leader, Yaacob bin Mohamed, who left the UMNO for the PAP, because the PAP had championed key issues concerning Malay language and education, a Malay head of state, and most important of all, merger with Malaya, showing up the Singapore UMNO which had omitted to take up these causes.8 What would the worthy Malay stalwarts of the PAP think if Lee had done a deal with the Tunku? It was totally out of the question. Besides, there was another consideration not to be overlooked, namely that Lee himself was on the look-out for possible moves by the Tunku to replace him. Following the September 1963 election, Lee felt empowered to go all the way with the federal government to finish off the communists. Lee also moved quickly to deal with a person he had made a mental note of for some time, but had not the strength to tackle. This was Tan Lark Sye, the honorary president of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and the “father” of Nanyang University. He was Number One on Lee’s list of “prominent figures who had acted as front men for the communists, believing that their wealth and standing in the Chinese-speaking community gave them

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immunity”.9 It seems a paradox, this tale of the rich man and the communists, until you see the chauvinism and cultural nationalism fanned by a resurgent China that bound them. Tan Lark Sye had given his blessing to ten Nanyang University graduates who stood as Barisan candidates in the general election. The PAP managed to get only two Nanyang University graduates to be their candidates. Another thing about Tan Lark Sye was that he was chairman of the Nanyang University Executive Council, and as such, he could block any PAP Government initiative that he didn’t like. The PAP Government was keen to introduce reforms that would bring this university more in line with academic standards worldwide, and end the isolation from excellence that had so disposed its students to a communist bondage of the mind. On 22 September, the day after the election, the PAP Government “started proceedings to cancel [Tan Lark Sye’s] citizenship, which had been acquired by registration”.10 Three days later, Tan resigned his chairmanship of the Nanyang University Executive Council. He knew the game was over for him. Lee’s next move was a public warning to the Plen to leave Singapore within two weeks, after which time, he announced, he was obliged to reveal the Plen’s identity to Tun Ismail, the Malaysian home minister in whose portfolio lay the power of internal security. Lee was told years later, by the special branch, that the Plen had left Singapore, soon after the referendum, for the Riau Islands, Indonesian territory, and directed his network in Singapore from there. Lee cooperated with the central government in Kuala Lumpur to extend the arrest programme from where Operation Cold Store had left off. On 26 September, the special branch arrested twenty Nanyang University graduates, including a number who were prominent in the university’s guild of graduates.11 Three of them were unsuccessful Barisan candidates in the election just over. On 3 October, two rural and three hawkers’ associations were deregistered. This put an end to the communist effort to organize farmers and hawkers in a united front.12 There were seven strong unions grouped under the pro-Barisan Singapore Association of Trade Unions (SATU) which had been spared

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closure under Operation Cold Store, at Lee’s request, to show that Singapore would be in charge of its own labour policies in the merger. However, as a prelude to the election campaign of September 1963, the government served these seven SATU-affiliated unions notice of dissolution, and froze the bank accounts of the three largest ones.13 They protested, and after the election, continued their agitation, planning a general strike. But on 8 October, just hours before the strike was due to start, the police raided and arrested seventeen union leaders, including S.T. Bani, the SATU president and Barisan assemblyman, who had defeated a PAP minister in the election.14 Two other Barisan assemblymen were among the seventeen arrested. That effectively was the end of SATU, making space for a new chapter in trade unionism to grow into what is now the multi-faceted, entrepreneurial National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) movement. Lee characterized this latest wave of arrests and detention, together with deregistration, as clearing “the way for the post-election, post-merger situation”.15 The result was a post-communist Singapore. But this also means that the central government now had less reason for retaining the (cleansed) city state in the federation. Lee would have that much less bargaining power with the Tunku. He was back to being the supplicant in the Tunku’s court, not a role that would sit well on him. He did try, though, to make a success of it. He appointed as one of the two Singapore senators to the Federal Parliament, the UMNO candidate defeated in Geylang Serai by the PAP’s Malay candidate. Lee took the Tunku’s suggestion that Singapore should receive an official visit by the Malaysian King, and made the occasion, from 11 to 13 November, one of pomp and ceremony. But there continued to be an underlying strain in Singapore–Kuala Lumpur relations. The fifteen Singapore seats in the federal parliament were filled by a simple division of this number, proportionately, among the parties represented in the Singapore State Assembly. The PAP, with thirtyseven assemblymen, got twelve federal MPs, the Barisan with thirteen assemblymen, got three, and the United People’s Party, with one assemblyman, Ong Eng Guan himself, got none. The PAP nominated all its ministers as federal MPs. Lee was unhappy when he went to Kuala Lumpur for parliamentary sittings. His time at the federal capital was unfruitful. The Tunku had no time for him in more than one sense of the word.

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What did Lee want? This was a subject of much speculation, firstly in London where British officials interpreted his manoeuvres in the run-up to Malaysia as a bid for power.16 Sandys was convinced that Lee aimed to become the prime minister of Malaysia. After the PAP’s fine showing in the September 1963 election, there was even more talk, generated in diplomatic circles and the media, in Malaysia. In American and Australian diplomatic despatches, Lee was said to harbour an ambition to become the prime minister of Malaysia. The Australian High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, T.K. Critchley, gave it a slant as “the first Chinese prime minister of Malaysia”, and the media insinuated, “So you don’t think a Chinese can be prime minister of Malaysia in the foreseeable future?”17 in a television interview of Lee. Lee’s own view was that “as long as the Tunku is there, he will be the leader of Malaysia” and that, realistically, the prime minister of Malaysia would have to be a Malay “for the next two decades” or until “the next generation”.18 If not prime minister, what about minister? Malaysian historians, James Ongkili and Cheah Boon Kheng, have strongly intuited that Lee wanted to be included in the Tunku’s cabinet.19 Singapore historian Albert Lau has adduced some evidence of Lee’s interest: (1) Lee was pleased when a senior Malaysian official told him that the possibility of his joining the federal cabinet was being considered, (2) Lee, in conversation with Philip Moore, U.K. Deputy Commissioner, said he was gratified that the Tunku considered him “fully acceptable as one of the team”, and asked Moore whether the British “could prepare the ground a little in Kuala Lumpur” for an appointment on which he was obviously “very keen”.20 Unfortunately, the Tunku in whose lap the matter lay, had grown very wary of Lee. He had always thought Lee a little too clever and restless for his liking. But, perhaps, he had never expected some of the tactics that Lee had used lately to get what he wanted. In particular, the Tunku had been deeply affronted by Lee’s exploitation of the postponement of Malaysia Day, and instigation of the Borneo leaders to do likewise. Not surprisingly, when the Tunku announced his cabinet line-up on Malaysia Day, he named a leader from Sarawak, and another from Sabah (North Borneo), but none from Singapore. This was, in effect, a rebuff to Lee.21 Then, after the Singapore election which came five days later, the Tunku was too fixated on the

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problem of UMNO’s betrayal and restoration to be able to think of Lee other than as a rival and a threat to Malay power.

Confrontation: Malaysia Fights Back The Tunku’s main priority externally was to defend the sovereignty and independence of the new Malaysian nation from Sukarno’s confrontation. He had British forces to do the defensive fighting for him against Indonesian infiltrators on the Sarawak border, but he himself must attend to winning confidence and unity within the nation, and getting international opinion on the side of Malaysia. He had made a start by including Borneo leaders in his government. True, he still had Lee to contend with, but he began to see that having an internal challenge could be useful in his bid to win international support and sympathy for his moves in the diplomacy of confrontation. On 20 September 1963, the Tunku announced, in response to calls from the Philippines for another tripartite summit, that there should be recognition (of Malaysia) first, before any talks, and that, additionally, Indonesia should end guerilla activity and withdraw its forces from the Sarawak border region. The Americans were eager to have the Maphilindo states meet once more to work out an Asian solution to the conflict. They particularly wished the Tunku to attend a summit without preconditions. Dato Ong Yoke Lin, the Malaysian ambassador to the United States, listened to an impassioned attack from the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, on Malaysia’s stubborn refusal to negotiate without preconditions, and parried him by referring to “the Tunku’s problems in avoiding internal dissension”.22 Dato Ong said that the Tunku would have trouble “especially from Lee Kuan Yew, if he should appear to show weakness”.23 British policy makers, much to the annoyance of their American counterparts, supported the Tunku’s position. They did not want him to go and meet Sukarno without getting some concession first, fearing the effect it would have on the fragile internal situation. They were concerned for the morale of Borneo leaders, and since they had already formed an

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opinion of Lee’s ambitiousness, they would have understood the additional stress this placed on the Tunku. Confrontation had made it necessary for the British to commit more forces and material to the region than the British economy could bear, and they were looking for a diplomatic track out of it too, but they did not want the Tunku to pay too high a price for peace with Sukarno.24 The Australians felt the same way. In this period, the British also took care not to force their views on the Tunku; there was no repeat of the Sandys’s episode. This bigger picture should be borne in mind when considering the problems that Lee had with the Tunku. Lee looked to the British for a restraining hand on the Tunku, but the British were concerned to boost the Tunku’s authority at a time of danger from without, which meant that Lee should not be abetted to rock the boat. In October, Macmillan was succeeded as prime minister by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who, in his former avatar as Lord Home and foreign minister, had overseen the beginning of Sukarno’s confrontation. Another change was the arrival of Lord Antony Head as U.K. High Commissioner in Malaysia in succession to Sir Geofroy Tory. A former cabinet minister whose career later included a posting in Nigeria, Lord Head was to prove an invaluable mentor to Lee. He found a way to advance Lee’s interest, without undermining the Tunku’s interest, but to serve the larger purposes of Malaysia. He advised Lee to get the Tunku to send him on a mission to Africa to win support for Malaysia. This was important as Indonesia was trying to turn the Afro-Asian world against Malaysia, isolating it. But there was another reason. Lee wrote in his memoirs: “He (Lord Head) also foresaw that it would make me better known internationally, which would mean that if things ever came to the point where the Tunku wanted to lock me up, there would be a bigger price to pay”.25 When Lee spoke to the Tunku about the mission, the latter, to Lee’s surprise, readily agreed. The Tunku wanted Lee to be accompanied by Borneo leaders as well, unafraid of more contamination by him. Lee set off on 20 January 1964, and went through seventeen capitals in thirty-five days, returning to Kuala Lumpur on 26 February to report on the success of his mission to a wellpleased Tunku.

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The Tunku himself had been busy with key diplomatic engagements. The day after Lee left for Africa, the Tunku received a visitor from America, and a prince from a neighbouring kingdom, two separate visits on the same day. The American was Robert Kennedy, U.S. Attorney-General and brother of the recently assassinated President John Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson, the new U.S. president, had sanctioned Robert Kennedy’s shuttle diplomacy tour to Far Eastern capitals to press for an end to the Malaysia-Indonesia dispute. The state department did not consult the British Government about this initiative, raising fears that Kennedy would make the Tunku drop his preconditions for a summit, which would then damage his credibility with Borneo leaders who would suspect a “sell-out of their interests”, and with Lee, who, the British imagined, would “seize on any sign of weakness in the Tunku to enhance his own leadership credentials”.26 Kennedy got Sukarno to agree to order a ceasefire in Borneo, and the Tunku to accept this as a basis for a meeting of Maphilindo foreign ministers. Officials in London, Canberra, and Wellington thought Kennedy’s intervention produced a bad deal for the Tunku as Indonesia gave no undertaking to withdraw its guerrillas or to formally recognize Malaysia. Sir Garfield Barwick, the Australian Minister for External Affairs, expressed his personal concern to Dean Rusk, asserting that the Tunku should not be expected to make any further concessions.27 Why did the Tunku accept Kennedy’s intervention? A little while back, on 29 December 1963, an Indonesian assault in Sabah had left eight Malay soldiers killed and nineteen wounded. The Tunku was very shaken by this incident, and this could have induced in him a more flexible attitude towards negotiations. Another reason was provided by the new American ambassador to Malaysia, James Bell, who sensed “a feeling of somewhat greater reliance on the United States. Having moved away from political ties with the United Kingdom, and having developed a reluctance to accept British political advice, the Malaysians may, over the next few months, seek a closer relationship with the United States”.28 The Tunku would have known by now that the Americans liked him to do things his way. Indeed, the Malaysians used the occasion of Kennedy’s visit to complain about Sandys. This had a hilarious sequel. Kennedy routed his return journey via

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London, and there, at a lunch at Chequers with British ministers, he introduced himself to Sandys, remarking, “I have heard a lot about you in my travels and I must say that you are just as popular in the Far East as I am in Mississippi and Alabama.”29 The foreign ministers’ meeting was held at Bangkok from 6 to 10 February, and again on 3 March. The Thai foreign minister, Thanat Khomen, offered to supervise the ceasefire, but the contending sides could make no progress, and the second round of talks “immediately produced deadlock”.30 At the end of the first round of talks, there was a meeting between the Tunku and Macapagal. This came about as a result of Prince Sihanouk’s visit to Kuala Lumpur (coinciding with Kennedy’s visit) and to Manila and Jakarta as well. Sihanouk was clearly “trying to outmanoeuvre Thanat, whose antipathy towards the Cambodian ruler was well known”, by brokering peace talks between the Maphilindo powers.31 But he ended with a scaled-down summit between the Tunku (who refused to meet Sukarno) and Macapagal at Phnom Penh on 11 and 12 February. This mini-summit led to a Philippine offer to restore consular relations which was gladly accepted by Malaysia, and taken as a small victory.32 The British avoided being too upfront with the Malaysians during these negotiations, especially after Kennedy had blurted out how unwelcome this was. Razak was very firm at the Bangkok talks, not giving in to Subandrio, to the relief of the British who tended to think “that the Malaysians were prone to making concessions if left to their own devices”.33 There was clearly a switch to a more robust stance on the part of Razak, and the Tunku too, and the key to it was the federal parliamentary election due very soon, in April 1964, in anticipation of which they could not afford to appear conciliatory or weak. Indeed, they had become very warlike. Razak organized a local defence corps made up of the youth movement of the UMNO, MCA, and MIC, whose duty was to guard important buildings and bridges, and so free the regular troops for combat duty. The Tunku wanted to call a general mobilization against Indonesia, and was dissuaded only by British entreaties and a personal telegram from the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The British began to worry in early March 1964 that the over-belligerence of the Malaysian leaders could be a greater problem than

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their previous habit of compliance. The Tunku and Tun Razak were gearing up for an electoral campaign that would focus on the external issue: Sukarno’s confrontation. They did not expect, and were to be astounded, that the PAP would be coming in to contest.

Singapore–KL Relations: A Turn for the Worse The PAP central executive committee took a fateful decision in February 1964 to contest in the federal parliamentary election in April. Why? The PAP aspired to a place in the Tunku’s cabinet so as to participate in national decision-making. Singapore had a limited legislative voice, through its fifteen allotted federal MP seats, but no executive voice in the making of national policy. Singapore was targeted by Indonesian saboteurs who set off bombs, but it had no say, and was not consulted on how Kuala Lumpur would deal with the manifold problems of confrontation.34 Lee offered to help, but the only thing the Tunku accepted was his going away for a good thirty-five days. While Lee was away, the Tunku received Kennedy and Sihanouk and went to the mini-summit at Phnom Penh, while Razak attended to the Bangkok talks. They did not need him. When Lee returned, the Tunku had another job for him which involved going away again, this time to the UN and the United States to present the Malaysian case, but when the PAP announced its intention to contest in the federal parliamentary election, the Tunku promptly cancelled Lee’s assignment. The PAP Government, despite seeking cooperation with the central government, doing the things that would please the Tunku, had continued to be left in the cold by him. Since being nice had brought no results, PAP leaders decided to try turning on the heat a little. Their decision was not taken lightly. On 20 January, before he left for Africa that day, Lee held a meeting to consider a token participation in the forthcoming federal election, and said no decision was to be taken until his return. The minutes of the meeting stated that “the objective would be to gain influence over the Central Government and get them to adopt a correct attitude. So far the reasonable line had not been productive”.35 During his African tour, Lee had the time to think it over and began to have some reservations. Dr Goh Keng Swee, in Singapore, was “absolutely against” the idea, which he

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believed “would sour relations between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and jeopardise his plans for industrialization with the Federation”.36 But the PAP ministers who were born and bred in Malaya felt differently. Half of the PAP cabinet of eight ministers were from Malaya. The Malayans were Dr Toh Chin Chye, S. Rajaratnam, Ong Pang Boon, and Dr Goh Keng Swee (this last only technically a Malayan, as he was born in Malacca but raised in Singapore). Dr Toh, Rajaratnam, and Ong persuaded the PAP central executive committee, during Lee’s absence abroad, to accept the decision to contest. Lee did not overrule their decision, but went along with it, trusting in the political judgement and passion of this Malayan trio, who were his close colleagues and worthy lieutenants. Lee expected the Tunku and Razak not to like it, but felt that there was a mitigating circumstance. The number of PAP candidates would be small, and would concentrate on constituencies where MCA candidates stood, signalling a direct challenge to the MCA for the urban vote, and a deliberate avoidance of contest with the UMNO. This strategy would hopefully make the Tunku see the PAP as a more effective partner for the UMNO than the MCA. But during the hustings, the Tunku stood by the MCA and rejected the PAP, declaring “we don’t want them”.37 Lee remained confident that the Tunku would come to see the MCA as replaceable. The campaign went very well for the PAP despite the short preparation time. But the results told a different story. The Tunku campaigned on just one issue: confrontation, and appealed to the loyalty vote of the electorate at a time of dire national crisis.38 He got it. On polling day, 25 April 1964, the Alliance “won 89 out of 104 seats, doing better than in the previous election”, and “every Alliance cabinet minister [was] returned with a bigger majority”.39 The PAP won only one seat out of the nine it contested. This was a famous victory for the Alliance, but, sadly, there was none of the Churchillian dictum, in victory, magnanimity, in the aftermath. UMNO had a younger leader, Syed Ja’afar bin Albar, “well known for his passionate and fiery speeches”, earning him the sobriquet, “the lion of UMNO”.40 Sometime in 1964, Albar went from Chief Publicity Officer of UMNO to Secretary-General, in which capacity he took on Singapore, the Lion City. His object was to punish the PAP for daring to participate in the federal

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parliamentary election, and to reclaim Singapore Malays for the UMNO. His method was to stir up the Malay ground with his brand of inflammatory oratory and have it disseminated by the UMNO-controlled newspaper, the Utusan Melayu. The senior UMNO leaders left their younger colleague, Albar, to do his worst, while they turned to more important national affairs. The talks process to end confrontation beckoned them again. If Sukarno had hoped for domestic opposition at the polls to compel the Tunku to seek compromise with him at any price, this hope now evaporated. Tun Razak stiffened the Tunku’s resolve on his preconditions for a summit meeting, and would not let him attend one merely on “Indonesian agreement in principle to withdrawal” of guerrillas from Borneo.41 Finally, after a Philippine mediation, and much wrangling over detailed arrangements, the Tunku met Sukarno in Tokyo on 20 June, and, simultaneously, a token number of Indonesian guerrillas withdrew from Sarawak at a checkpoint supervised by Thai observers. Sukarno had nothing new to say, while the Tunku pressed him to call an end to confrontation and withdraw all his troops. The talks broke down. Macapagal proposed having an Afro-Asian Conciliation Commission, and Sukarno accepted it, but the Tunku insisted that first, all aggression against Malaysia must cease, and the proposal went no further. The Tunku was on the brink of a great diplomatic victory over Sukarno. In July, after attending the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Meeting in London, he went to America, taking on himself the trip that he had earlier assigned to and then withdrawn from Lee. There had been a change in American thinking on Southeast Asia, which made Malaysia and the Tunku better appreciated. As President Johnson settled into his office, he had new policy makers who had no time for Sukarno. In early 1964, the Johnson administration was considering direct action against North Vietnam in order to win the war in the South. Johnson could use more Allied support, but the French were proposing a contrary policy of neutralization, which made the British stand out as a more amenable and reliable friend by far. The British adopted the tactic of arguing to the Americans that Britain’s war in Borneo was a part of the Western defence effort in Asia, of which America’s war in Vietnam was the critical frontline.42 This succeeded. On 12 February 1964, President Johnson and Prime

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Minister Douglas-Home met in Washington and afterwards issued a declaration of mutual support, Britain for U.S. policy in South Vietnam, and “the US for the peaceful national independence of Malaysia”.43 By mid-1964, Vietnam was all that Johnson and his advisers could think about, and they were desperate for help. Malaysia was strongly anticommunist and providing some training assistance to South Vietnamese personnel, and this put the Tunku in a good light, “easing [his] important passage to Washington in July 1964”.44 As to Sukarno, the Americans were still anxious to keep him and Indonesia from going over to the communist camp, but they were now more inclined to listen to the British argument that the best way to achieve this was to drive a wedge between the Indonesian army and the PKI, rather than to keep pandering to Sukarno. This cleared the way for President Johnson to receive the Tunku formally, and to offer some military and economic aid to Malaysia, and most importantly, to be seen to show support for the new federation. The Tunku’s official visit to Washington was a great diplomatic triumph. But back home in Malaysia, in the streets of Singapore, there was tragedy. Albar’s racist tirade climaxed in a deliberately engineered riot involving Malays and Chinese, from 21 July to 2 August, which left twenty-three dead (about equal numbers of Malays and Chinese) and 457 injured. The Singapore riots occurred at a time when Sukarno was about to address Indonesia’s Independence Day, the 17th of August, in which he was to respond in a predictably reckless fashion to Johnson’s favourable reception of the Tunku. On the same day, and clearly motivated by evidence of internal disruption in Malaysia, Indonesia sent its guerillas across to a beach near Pontian, in south Johore. This was followed, in the early hours of 2 September, by the landing of paratroopers in Labis, in north Johore. By the nightfall of 2 September, fresh riots occurred in Singapore, which were believed to have been instigated by Indonesian agents. These riots, which lasted till about 9 September, caused thirteen deaths and 109 people injured, again with about equal numbers of Malay and Chinese casualties. Pontian and Labis were centres of communist insurgency from 1948 through the 1950s, and the Indonesians clearly meant to reignite them, but failed, and were rounded up by Malaysian soldiers and police, with the local inhabitants reporting the presence of the infiltrators.

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The riots were confined to Singapore. This gave UMNO leaders the confidence to treat them as localized issues, and to be unrelenting in their attitude towards the PAP, and unheeding of advice from friends, notably British ones, about bringing the PAP into the national government. After the July riots, Lord Head spoke to Razak, who was acting prime minister, emphasizing the need to form “a more representative Cabinet” which would include “two representatives from Singapore and one each from Sabah and Sarawak”.45 But Head’s advice “was not enthusiastically received by the Malaysian deputy premier whose antipathy towards Lee was apparent throughout the meeting” between Head and him.46 A week after the July riots, Dr Goh Keng Swee went to confer with Razak, staying at Razak’s house, as they were friends since Raffles College days. Razak presented two options to Dr Goh, and although he meant them to be tentative, and later withdrew them, they were indicative of his thinking. Option 1 was “a coalition government on the condition that Lee resigned as Prime Minister” and perhaps go away to the UN for a period.47 Option 2 was that both the federal government and Singapore agreed on their respective spheres of influence, but with the proviso that “the PAP dealt with the Singapore Malay community only through Khir Johari”, the federal minister appointed to oversee the Singapore UMNO.48 Dr Goh asked if Lee stepped down, would Albar also, in fairness, do likewise? Razak had no intention of removing Albar, and said he could deal with him. Dr Goh had a strong impression that Albar’s racist agitation had the “full backing of Razak”, and was designed “to remove Lee from office”.49 Dr Goh went away with the feeling that Razak’s terms were “those of [a] victor to [the] vanquished”.50 The Tunku’s position, when he returned, was no different. From Washington, the Tunku had gone back to London for a period of medical treatment. Lord Head had written to Sandys, suggesting that the British prime minister, or Sandys himself, “should try to press the Tunku for a more inclusive national government”.51 Head argued that the British Government had a strong reason and the clout to do this because of the military, financial, and other forms of aid it was giving Malaysia. But Head must have been ignorant of the previous encounter between Sandys and

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the Tunku to suggest such a move to Sandys. Sandys wisely abstained and let the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, speak to the Tunku, which he did on 6 August. Sir Alec tried to persuade the Tunku that “the best way to consolidate Malaysia after the communal riots in Singapore would be to form a coalition with the PAP”.52 It was useless. Malayan leaders would no longer do as the British say. A few days after his return, the Tunku came to Singapore, on 18 August, and informed Lee that he could not accept Sir Alec’s advice. The Tunku said that the UMNO “would never accept” a coalition with the PAP because the PAP would not hand over total control of the Malays in Singapore to the UMNO.53 This was a fundamental condition required by the Tunku and Razak. But the PAP’s acceptance of it would mean a denial of its very existence as a party open to all races. As his struggle with the UMNO intensified, Lee relied on a resource he had known since his undergraduate days in Britain — the Socialist International movement. He went for the Socialist International celebrations in Brussels in early September 1964, and while he was there, the second wave of rioting occurred in Singapore. He met Anthony Greenwood, the British Labour leader and shadow cabinet minister, and accepted his invitation to London, after Brussels, to meet other British Labour leaders and attend a function. In London, Lee had a one-to-one conversation with Harold Wilson, the Labour Party chairman, on Sukarno’s confrontation, and the difficulty he was having with the Tunku and UMNO on account of their policy of Malay dominance in Malaysia. The Labour Party was expected to win in the approaching British general election, and with Wilson as prime minister, Lee believed, the Tunku would have to adopt a more reasonable attitude towards the PAP Government. The Tunku was more comfortable with Sir Alec, the 14th Earl of Home, feeling “a certain affinity as between two noblemen”.54 Wilson’s socialist and technocratic style of government would swing in favour of Lee’s rational approach, and the Tunku would have to heed that, Lee thought. On 17 October, Lee eagerly listened to the election results that brought Wilson to power. To return to the dispute between the Alliance and the PAP, there was supposed to be a two-year truce agreed in September 1964, after the riots, but it lasted barely a month. Their dispute had an economic dimension to it.

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In November 1964, Tan Siew Sin, the finance minister, introduced a turnover tax which would be hard on Singapore businessmen who depended on a large turnover with small profit margins, and a payroll tax which would hit workers, unions, and employers alike. Tan was also unfriendly as a gatekeeper of companies wishing to enter Singapore to set up factories, and in the implementation of the common market agreed with Singapore, by purposely moving at a glacial pace. The Tunku began to speak privately of a looser federation, and broached this subject with Lee on 19 December 1964 in Kuala Lumpur, asking him to prepare a paper on it. Lee’s memorandum, completed by 25 January 1965, proposed basically a return to the position just before the merger: the two governments would share power over internal security in an Internal Security Council, while “the central government would be in charge of defence and external affairs in consultation [with Singapore]”.55 But there were insuperable obstacles. It soon became apparent that the Tunku wanted the PAP out of the federal parliament, but this could not be done without also forgoing Singapore’s considerable financial contribution. Lee invoked the mother of all constitutional principles: no taxation without representation. Next, UMNO leaders revisited the argument that the PAP must surrender all political claims to the Singapore Malays in favour of the Singapore UMNO, which was just not feasible to the PAP. The high commissioners of Australia and New Zealand, alarmed by the escalating dispute, obtained the Tunku’s permission to invite Lee to visit their countries. It would make for a cooling-off period. Lee went to New Zealand first, then Australia, for a month, from 4 March to 3 April 1965. He gave talks and interviews which were misconstrued back home in Malaysia. New Zealand and Australia, contrary to the hopes of the high commissioners, turned out to be a minefield in terms of Lee’s relations with the central government.

End-Game In about January 1965, Lee started the process of forming a coalition of opposition parties which shared the PAP’s vision and were in the same

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predicament as the PAP. On 8 May, the coalition was launched under the title, Malaysia Solidarity Convention. Among the invited participants were D.R. Seenivasagam of the People’s Progressive Party in Perak, Dr Lim Chong Eu, former MCA president and now leader of the United Democratic Party of Penang, Stephen Yong of the Sarawak United People’s Party, and Michael Buma of the Parti Machinda of Sarawak (a party made up of Malays=MA, Chinese=CHIN, and Dayaks=DA). PAP Chairman, Dr Toh, was the convenor. Lee was away from Singapore, probably for a strategic reason. His presence would have drawn more controversy to the convention than was good at this incipient stage. The rocky road taken by the Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) towards merger, and their post-merger expectations were so similar to those of the PAP that it is no wonder that the twain had converged. SUPP Chairman Ong Kee Hui and Secretary-General Stephen Yong strongly supported joining Malaysia, believing it to be in the best interest of Sarawak. However, the SUPP had a powerful pro-communist wing which was unremittingly opposed to Malaysia even after nearly two years of its establishment.56 Ong and Yong suffered intense criticism from this SUPP wing just as Lee and Dr Toh did from the PAP wing which later formed the Barisan. Having seen Sarawak into Malaysia, the two SUPP leaders wanted to make sure of two things, democracy and equality. Their participation in the Malaysia Solidarity Convention led to a crisis in the SUPP because (1) it signified acceptance of Malaysia as an established fact, (2) the PAP had excluded the Barisan Sosialis and the Partai Rakyat (Socialist Front of Malaysia). Ong and Yong tactically resigned from their respective posts in the SUPP and were reinstated three weeks later. They laid down as a condition for their reinstatement that they be allowed to continue in the Malaysia Solidarity Convention.57 The SUPP and Partai Machinda had experienced something in common with the PAP. They had all been through the Malayan Alliance’s intervention in their state elections, and the incitement of communal passion by Syed Jaafar Albar. In May 1963, the Malayan Alliance sent a delegation which included Albar to help the Sarawak Alliance, modelled on the Malayan prototype, in the state election. The SUPP, and a Malay party estranged

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from the Sarawak Alliance, protested at this “interference in Sarawak’s domestic affairs even before the Federation of Malaysia had come into being”.58 Historically, there were two Malay factions in Sarawak, and this had led to the formation of two separate Malay political parties. Both were in the Sarawak Alliance at first, but one later left as a result of rivalry with the other, and the Malayan Alliance delegation had come to bring it back in. But Albar started to side with the one in the Sarawak Alliance against the one that had gone out. This caused more bad blood among the Sarawak Malay community, and their loss in the state election to the Dayak party. Partai Machinda’s Malay members were mostly from the Malay party outside the Sarawak Alliance, which was the victim of Albar’s intervention in the intra-Malay conflict.59 It was with some justice that they should join another victim, the PAP, in the launching of the Malaysia Solidarity Convention in Singapore. The key moment of the convention that day, 9 May, was the signing of a joint declaration calling for a Malaysian Malaysia, defined as follows: “A Malaysian Malaysia means that the state is not identified with the supremacy, well-being, and interests of any one particular community or race. A Malaysian Malaysia is the antithesis of a Malay Malaysia, a Chinese Malaysia, a Dayak Malaysia, an Indian Malaysia, or Kadazan Malaysia, and so on…”60 Here was an updating of the Malayan Malaya principle that Lee propounded in his Malayan Forum speech during his student days. However, the Malayan nation of which the Tunku was the founding father, gave the Malays political dominance and constitutionally guaranteed special rights, and was not as the young Lee had envisaged. But now in Lee’s prime years, there was Malaysia, with many more races and tribes making up the electorate, and this was the best argument, Lee believed, for a change towards giving equality to all. UMNO disagreed, insisting that Malays must have political dominance so long as the Chinese have economic hegemony in Malaysia. It was in this sense that Tun Ismail, the minister for whom Lee had the greatest respect, once said to him, “whether [it’s] PAP or MCA, there is no difference, it’s Malays versus Chinese”.61 And, implicitly, Malays must not lose out. The PAP and UMNO were swiftly heading towards a dangerous collision. In mid-May, UMNO youths demonstrated with an effigy-burning

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of Lee, and banner slogans calling for the suspension of the Singapore constitution and the detention of Lee. Fortunately, Lee had to be away from Singapore during this intemperate time, “attending a Socialist Youth Conference in Bombay, and then visiting Laos and Cambodia”.62 The socialist and non-aligned world would protest in the event of his detention, and this, he clearly hoped, would serve as a deterrent to Kuala Lumpur.

Breaking Point The meeting of the Malaysian parliament in the last week of May was memorable for a speech Lee made of such impact that the Tunku felt there was nothing for it but to part ways. Lee was preceded by another speaker, Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, UMNO MP and future prime minister of Malaysia, who was in an attacking mode. Mahathir’s speech, depicting the PAP as “pro-Chinese, communist-oriented, and positively anti-Malay”, and of the Chinese in Singapore as having “never known Malay rule and couldn’t bear the idea” of it, deserves a place in the best collection of vintage Mahathirism.63 On the following day, 27 May, it was Lee’s turn to speak. He affirmed his “vested interest in constitutionalism and in loyalty”, believing “that if we are patient, if we are firm, this constitution must mean a Malaysian nation emerges”.64 He alluded to Mahathir’s speech as implying “that this could never happen”.65 He “drew a distinction between political equality and the special rights for the economic and social uplift of the Malays”.66 He said “that he accepted the special rights, but if the other peoples in Malaysia were denied political equality with the Malays, we would not need Sukarno and Confrontation to crush us”.67 He proceeded to exposing “the inadequacy of UMNO’s policies”.68 This was “the most sensitive part of [his] speech” and, for even greater effect, he switched from speaking in English to Malay.69 He said that “if the Alliance did not have the real answers…it should not stifle the opposition”70 which did. The PAP had an alternative that worked: “In ten years, we will breed a generation of Malays, educated and with an understanding of the techniques of science and modern industrial management.”71 Lee argued that UMNO’s emphasis on special rights might benefit a few Malays, “make

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a few Malay millionaires”, but was ineffective in dealing with rural poverty in Malaysia.72 He pointed out that the use of Malay as the national language, which he supported, would not in itself create the economic miracle that the Malay peasants were being led to expect from it. What was needed was a practical programme of agricultural and educational improvement. Little of what Lee said that day would have been news to the Tunku.73 What was new and stunning was that he said it in the federal parliament, in Malay, before Malay MPs and a gallery packed with more Malays, and the Malay MPs from the rural areas were nodding in agreement at the points he made. He was getting his message through to the Tunku’s own backbenchers. This was unforgiveable. It was the proverbial last straw.74 The Tunku had to choose between two courses — (1) to cast Singapore out or (2) to cast its prime minister into prison, as clamouring UMNO voices wanted him to do. The second course would lead to more trouble, possibly riots and disturbances. The British sensed that the second course was very likely. In the first few days of June, cables on the subject of Lee’s arrest passed between Lord Head in Kuala Lumpur and Arthur Bottomley, the secretary of state for commonwealth relations, and were read and commented on by Wilson. Between Wilson, Bottomley, and Head, some kind of protective shield was erected for Lee. Head actually told the Tunku that the arrest of Lee would “much shock and embarrass the British government, and would undoubtedly have far-reaching effects among world opinion”.75 The conference of commonwealth prime ministers to be held in London was drawing near, and Wilson was faced with an awkward dilemma. He minuted: “(1) Should I send a message to the Tunku? (2) Should [the] High Commissioner quietly suggest to Lee he gets lost [goes abroad] for a week or two. We do not want him put inside before [the] PM’s Conference”.76 Wilson settled on the first option, a restraining word to the Tunku.77 The British did not discuss the likelihood of the Tunku’s other course: to hive off Singapore. This was the course he eventually took. He did not tell the British, but let them know only on the day itself, and secretly worked out the constitutional arrangements for a separation with Dr Goh and Lee. Singapore was separated from Malaysia on 9 August 1965. The Tunku still had the Borneo states over which he strengthened his hold by manipulating their ministers, and easing out the British officials

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whose continued presence had been intended as a safeguard for these states. He was more sure of his control now that he did not have Lee around as well to teach the Borneo leaders how to fight the central government. For Lee, separation was a blow, the end of the dream of a united Malaya which all young Malayan nationalists had aspired to, and he had achieved only to have it dissolve again. Lee was also remorseful over having to leave in the lurch his Malayan and Bornean allies in the Malaysia Solidarity Convention. For the British, it was the moment, finally, to wind up their empire in Southeast Asia. The Wilson Government took the Tunku’s unilateral decision to expel Singapore as the chance to review their defence commitment to the region with a view to downsizing.78 The rupture within Malaysia in August was followed in October by a major upheaval in Indonesia which sent Sukarno crashing down, the PKI to its doom, and an army general to the top, making possible the end of confrontation. This had come not a moment too soon for the Wilson Government, compelled by continuing balance-ofpayment problems and recurrent sterling crises to accelerate their military withdrawal. In Singapore, the British withdrawal would not only leave it defenceless. Many thousands of civilian jobs would be lost through the closure of British land, sea, and air bases, worsening the already grim unemployment situation. The economic future of the fledging republic looked bleak indeed. For the Americans, Southeast Asia in 1965 held a mix of surprise, consolation, and deepening crisis. Internal developments in Indonesia which led to the destruction of the PKI was an almost windfall fulfillment of their objective of containing communism in that great and strategically key nation. It was a stark contrast to the situation in Vietnam, where they were deeply engaged, and had started to bomb the north, but yet were failing to stem the advance of the Viet Cong. As to the situation in Malaysia, the ousting of Singapore was a surprise to them, but then they had always wanted the Tunku to have his way. In any case, the communist threat in Singapore was close to nil. The newly independent Singapore was looked over by a series of American leaders. Former Vice-President Richard Nixon came in September 1965, and was followed by Senator Edward Kennedy in October, and a

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number of congressmen from October to December. Singapore opened full diplomatic relations with the United States in April 1966. Lee went to the United States in October 1967 to see Johnson, the first in a series of visits that he was to make to every newly elected president. Significantly, Lee also met with bankers, businessmen, and industrialists, setting a pattern for his subsequent visits. Lee’s purpose in this first visit in 1967, as in later years, was to ask for trade, not aid. In a televised interview with the American media, he make it clear that Singapore would not become a client state of the United States, and when asked whether he would help the United States stay committed to Vietnam by contributing “a small token force”, he flatly said no.79 Lee’s American visits were important in bringing American multinational companies into Singapore, and their coming made all the difference. At the same time, Lee was zealous for the independence of the new Singapore nation, and the principle of equality among nations, regardless of size, and the Americans came to respect that. NOTES 1 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 515. 2 Quoted by Albert Lau, A Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the Politics of Disengagement (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998), p. 49. 3 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 508. 4 Ibid., p. 515. 5 Dato’ Abdullah Ahmad, Tengku Abdul Rahman and Malaysia’s Foreign Policy 1963–1970 (Kuala Lumpur: Berita Publishing Sdn. Bhd., 1985), p. 89. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Zuraidah Ibrahim, “The Malay Mobilisers: Ahmad Ibrahim, Othman Wok, Yaacob Mohamed & Rahim Ishak” in Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard, edited by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Y.L. Tan, p. 125. 9 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 511. 10 Ibid. 11 Lee Ting Hui, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954– 1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), p. 263; Lau, Moment of Anguish, pp. 51–52. 12 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 269. 13 Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 32. 14 Lee Ting Hui, Open United Front, p. 267.

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15 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 512. 16 Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 192. 17 Quoted by Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 92 to 93. 18 Quoted by Lau, ibid. 19 James Ongkili, Nation-Building in Malaysia 1946–1974 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 180–81; Cheah Boon Kheng, Malaysia: The Making of a Nation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), p. 99. 20 Quoted by Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 71. 21 Cheah, Malaysia, p. 99. 22 Paraphrased by Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 215. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 251. 25 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 522. 26 Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, pp. 243–44. 27 John Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno: British, American, Australian and New Zealand Diplomacy in the Malaysian-Indonesian Confrontation, 1961–65 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), pp. 97–98. 28 Quoted by Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 252. 29 Quoted by Jones, ibid., pp. 252 to 253. 30 R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War Vol. 2, The Struggle for South-East Asia, 1961–65 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 217. 31 Ibid. 32 Dato’ Abdullah Ahmad, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Malaysia’s Foreign Policy, p. 51. 33 Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 257. 34 Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 102. 35 Quoted by Lau, ibid., p. 100 36 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 540. 37 Ibid., p. 541; Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 108. 38 K.J. Ratnam and R.S. Milne, The Malayan Parliamentary Election of 1964 (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1967, reprinted, 1969), pp. 110–11. 39 Lee, Singapore Story, p. 547. 40 Sanid Said, Malay Politics in Sarawak 1946–1966: The Search for Unity and Political Ascendancy (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 100. 41 Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 265. 42 Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno, pp. 102 to 104; Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, pp. 260 to 261. 43 Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno, p. 103. 44 Jones, Conflict and Confrontation, p. 280. 45 Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 182.

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

Ibid. Ibid., p. 183; Lee, Singapore Story, p. 568. Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 183. Quoted by Lee, Singapore Story, p. 569. Lau, Moment of Anguish, p. 183. Ibid., p. 193. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 583. Ibid. Ibid., 573. Ibid., p. 584. Chin Ung-Ho, Chinese Politics in Sarawak: A Study of the Sarawak United People’s Party (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 92. Ibid. Sanid Said, Malay Politics in Sarawak, p. 100. Ibid., pp. 100–01; M.B. Leigh, The Rising Moon: Political Change in Sarawak (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974), p. 85. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 605. Ibid., p. 582. Ibid., p. 605. Ibid., pp. 608 and 610. Ibid., p. 610. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 611. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 612. James Puthucheary’s book, written in detention, titled Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy: A Study of the Structure of Ownership and its Effects on the Development of Secondary Industries and Economic Growth in Malaya and Singapore (Singapore: D. Moore for Far Eastern Universities Press, 1960), contained similar ideas. Malay socialist politicians and even UMNO ones had espoused them too. Tunku Abdul Rahman Al-Haj, Looking Back: Monday Musings and Memories (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1977), p. 128. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 661. Quoted by Lee, Ibid. H. Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–1970: A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 130–31. Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno, pp. 200–01. Straits Times, 29 October 1967.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior The Way articles to Survive permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual are• 265 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T E N

The Way to Survive

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he two hard years in Malaysia ending in expulsion gave Singapore leaders an angst to put to good use in subsequent nation-building. Without it they might not have set about their task with such a vengeance, nor taken such desperate measures in the name of national survival. The British East of Suez withdrawal targeting their Far Eastern base at Singapore struck a further blow at the new nation’s viability. But at the same time, it galvanized the fighting spirit of Singapore leaders who went on to rally their people all the more. “Students of history know,” Lee said, “that the destiny of a people is not preordained. It is not predetermination but determination which decides what happens to a people.”1 The post-colonial landscape in Asia and Africa was strewn with the wreckage of states which have failed. These failed states provided a lesson for Lee. As he observed: The first-generation leaders are the men who had led their people to independence. They seldom understand that government means more than just mobilizing mass support for protest against the injustices of colonialism. After independence they cannot deliver the goods. They had not learned about administration and economic growth. They are not able to create confidence in a government’s promises and undertakings. They cannot get foreign investments to add to domestic capital. Then they have not educated and trained their young in the skills and disciplines which can use this capital and machinery to bring about the better life.2 265

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Clearly, the economy would be very high on Lee’s agenda. In fact, the above statement was made in a speech delivered in April 1971, only about six years into independence after Malaysia, and with a track record already set up. As well as the economy, education and defence would also have high priority. In the same speech, Lee spoke of “the ingredients of success” in nation-building as “First, a stable political situation. Second, a well trained and educated population … Third, ability to attract higher-level technology industries. Fourth, better standards of life, and in a cleaner, greener, and more gracious Singapore. Fifth, the competence of our defence forces to ensure that no one believes he can just walk in and take over what we have created and built”.3

The Strategy of Rapid Economic Growth On the morning of 9 August 1965, Dr Goh Keng Swee, the Finance Minister, was in his office in Fullerton Building “brooding over the enormous problems facing the country and the Government”.4 The only way out of this “grave situation” was to have rapid economic growth. At the same time, population growth had to be curbed. Singapore’s population rose rapidly from 1.5 million in 1957 to over 2 million by 1970. The rate of population growth peaked at 4.5 per cent in 1957. The reason was natural increase. Immigration was no longer an important factor as strict controls were imposed after the war, and with it, the distortion in the sex ratio whereby men vastly outnumbered women also began to correct itself. From 1957, the number of Chinese, Indians, and Malays in Singapore is accounted for by natural increase. Dr Goh worried about jobs for a population half of which was below 21 years of age. The government went into overdrive with its anti-natal policy to safeguard the gains of economic growth. It propelled reform in other areas too. The British had left behind, in good working order, a civil service, a popularly elected parliament and a judiciary — institutions that inspired investors’ confidence in a place. On this institutional foundation, PAP leaders imprinted their own moral values and principles. They were against corruption and nepotism in public life,

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and in business and industry, and they set up the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau which went a long way to ensure a state of incorruptibility. In this one respect, Singapore under the PAP stood out from so many countries in both the developing and developed world, then, and ever since then. Another kind of public morality which the PAP sought to enforce was the work ethic. They began with the enactment of some tough labour laws. The first of these laws dealt with the strike-happy habit acquired during the anti-colonial struggle. The Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) (Amendment) Bill of January 1967 made it illegal for workers in essential services, such as water, gas, and electricity, to go on strike. In other services, notice of at least fourteen days must be given prior to a strike. A secret ballot must also be taken: no more the show of hands method as those who were unwilling were afraid to indicate it. Another law, the Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill passed in May the same year, 1967, broke up the Amalgamated Union of Public Employees into separate unions. Arguably, this was to prevent them from becoming a force that could defy the government.5 Following the announcement of the British base’s closure, the government held an early election in April 1968 to secure a mandate for two radical bills: the Employment Act and the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act. The two acts drastically shifted power in the workplace from the unions to management. Unions suddenly found themselves barred from negotiating issues like recruitment, work assignments, promotions, transfers, retrenchments, and dismissals. “These [matters] were now to become entirely the preserve of employers.”6 The union’s rights were confined to dealing with wages, benefits, and certain conditions of work and employment. The search for a way to promote the interests of workers and, at the same time take into account national interests led to the formation of the National Wages Council in 1972. It consisted of representatives of the unions, the employers, and the government. Each year, the Council sat down to make recommendations for wage adjustments based on the previous year’s economic performance and the projection for the coming year. This tripartite bargaining proved to be a successful formula, demonstrating to workers

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“that there are ways other than strikes by which union members can secure their fair share of economic growth”.7 As wages and the standard of living rose, so did the level of forced savings imposed on workers. There was in existence a retirement scheme, the Central Provident Fund, which the Progressive Party had urged the colonial government to open and manage in 1955. Initially, a worker paid 5 per cent of his pay into his account, and his employer matched it with another 5 per cent. In 1968, the PAP Government amended the Central Provident Fund Act to raise the contribution by each side to 6.5 per cent. The contribution was raised even higher in later years, to 8 per cent from 1969, 10 per cent from 1971, 20.5 per cent on the employer’s side, and 18 per cent on the worker’s side in 1980, and climaxed at 25 per cent on both sides in 1984. This was another winning formula. It ensured that wage increases did not lead to inflation and consumerism, and allowed the government low interest loans to build the infrastructure, and the leeway to shape “a fair, but not welfare, society”.8 The base from which the economy took off after independence must include the modern entrepot of trade which the British had nurtured and equipped. Upon their military withdrawal, the British handed over more assets: the Royal Navy dockyard with two floating docks, RAF airfields, army camps with their buildings and land. All these were converted to good uses, principally as a major shipyard, a new international airport, and a new national university, each to play its part in generating rapid economic growth. The centre administering economic growth was an agency established by the PAP Government in 1961, known as the Economic Development Board (EDB). It was a statutory body after the model which the British had set up for managing certain facilities and services such as, for example, the port of Singapore. The first EDB chairman, Hon Sui Sen, had been a senior civil servant in the British period. The ideals of that tradition — integrity and rationality — were carried over into his role as EDB chairman, as was a hallmark practice, seen in his insistence on “total written documentation” from his subordinates.9 But Hon had innate qualities as a teacher, mentor, and leader, and was a

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good judge of men and talents. His reputed gentleness with subordinates made them want to do their best so as not to disappoint him. His “knowledge of land management”,10 learned as an administrator in colonial service, helped him as EDB chairman to decide the allocation and tenure of land, and most importantly, to convince investors of the correctness of his judgement. The man who played the part of adviser and cheerleader was Dr Albert Winsemius. He was the head of a UN industrial survey team invited by Dr Goh Keng Swee to Singapore in 1960. He was a businessman in the Dutch shipping industry and a former director-general for industrialization in the Netherlands. During his first visit, Winsemius liked what he saw of the simple metal-working craftsmen plying their trade in Beach Road shophouses, and the family-based ship repair enterprises operating from the Kallang basin. His favourable report confirmed Dr Goh’s own impressions, and he came on board as economic adviser from then on for the next twenty-three years until 1984. Anyone familiar with the history of the region will find it ironic that the champion of Singapore’s survival some one-hundred-and-fifty years after Raffles should have come in the guise of a Dutchman. Winsemius himself was untroubled by the historic Anglo-Dutch rivalry in Southeast Asia. He even asked for Raffles’s statue to remain where it was, a positive signal to investors. If he had a focus on the past, it was most likely to have been that Singapore was analogous to the Netherlands, a small nation struggling against great odds. What really motivated Winsemius’s long and ineffable connection with Singapore? Lee Kuan Yew has provided an insight into it. Lee recalled: “He [Winsemius] once told me he could not explain why he felt a great affinity with Sui Sen and me, and could only conclude that there was a congruence of the Calvinistic and Confucian philosophy of life. Whatever the reason, it was Singapore’s good fortune that he enjoyed working with us.”11 This suggests that ideas from different cultures came together to effect Singapore’s economic transformation through the EDB. The British civil service tradition and Winsemius’s Dutch Calvinistic background were Protestant values. Lee and Dr Goh represented Confucian values. This begs

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the question: Since when? Their entire education from school through university had been in English and had taught them Western values. True, but in later life, they decided that their true self was Confucian or ought to be. They did not begin to embrace Confucian values openly until about 1979 when they were about to embark on their second industrial revolution, plugging into ever higher technology.12 It was at this point that it seems as though doing the right things from an economic point of view was not enough; they needed an ideological angle as well, and looked to Confucian ethics. Confucian values taught men to respect hard work, honesty, thrift, education, and the learning of skills. These were the right values which they wanted to instil in the Chinese who constituted three-quarters of the population of Singapore. One more person was important in the making of the cosmopolitan dynamics of the EDB. Prior to the founding of the EDB, Dr Goh and Lee had fruitful encounters with E. J. Meyer, the industrial planner of the government of Israel. Meyer recognized in the Singapore situation a very familiar predicament. He therefore gave the advice “to leapfrog the region”,13 which meant to invite the developed world — America, Europe, and Japan — to use Singapore as a manufacturing base, and to “export their products to the developed countries”.14 Meyer advised Lee to pick the best of the only resource he had, people, and use “their brains and their skills”.15 This was to be reflected in the EDB’s recruitment of officers. Meyer’s impact on Lee and Dr Goh was such that he was appointed the first managing director of the EDB. With Meyer, there came the Judaic element into the business culture of the EDB. It offered further proof that PAP leaders were open to ideas from any part of the world, willing to learn from any tradition or culture, and ready to hire the right man from the international community for top jobs. On this last point, when the EDB decided in 1966 to open a new division overseas, Winsemius recommended that it should be in New York, and called from retirement someone who had worked with the Dutch Economic Development Board to be its first director. Winsemius intended this man to share his experience with Chan Chin Bock, the EDB’s appointee to head the New York office. The outward-looking example of the top PAP leaders was

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adopted by EDB officers, and was one of the great strengths of Singapore’s industrial development.

The Leap To High Technology The EDB went through an import-substitution phase between 1961 and 1965. The kind of manufacturing consisted of textiles, toys, plastic flowers, and the like, and was labour intensive, but useful for cutting back the unemployment of those times. The import-substitution phase went out with the separation from Malaysia and the hoped-for common market which never materialized. Post-August 1965, the imperative goal was to manufacture for export beyond the region. Fortunately, this starting point “relates to a highly favourable world economic environment”,16 with booming economies in Germany, the United States and Japan. As William Huff notes: “In 1966, just when it was needed, a new flow in the world economy quickly began to gain strength”,17 and multinational enterprises searched for suitable locations for the manufacture or assembly of goods for export to the West. China was then disrupted by the Maoist cultural revolution, and the proximity of Hong Kong and Taiwan to the mainland ruled them out for investors. Singapore was a safe distance from the upheaval. In addition, the PAP Government was very pro-business, and the EDB went all out to attract investors and to demonstrate that nothing was too difficult for it to resolve. The location of Singapore could not be surpassed for connections in, and around, the Asian and the American Pacific. Not the least important factor, the leaders and people of Singapore spoke English. From the start, electronic goods were the leading sector of the manufacturing for export engaged in by the multinationals. The range of products included transistor radios, tape-recorders, television, stereo sound systems, electronic computers, and satellite communications equipment. The big names brought in by the EDB were Philips, General Electric, National Semiconductors Corporation, Texas Instruments, and Continental Devices, among others. Rollei of West Germany, the camera maker, also set up here, and their factory was a seventies landmark.

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Another type of industry represented by Caterpillar, Allis Chalmers, International Minerals Corporation, Santa-Fe Pomeroy, Dillingham Corporation, and McDermott and Procon was interested in Singapore as a base for operations in the region. The region was opening up, in particular, the vast Indonesian archipelago under the Suharto regime, to economic development and oil and mineral extraction, and needed a well-located centre, which Singapore was, for the assembly of oil rigs and other heavy machinery. Singapore has often been mentioned in the same breath as the booming economies of East Asia: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan. But it is also different from them. “Singapore took in its entirety the MNE ‘package’ of capital, technology, entrepreneurship, management, and marketing”.18 The East Asian economies had their own people experienced or trained (in American universities) in these areas. But not Singapore, which had to depend on multinational enterprises to launch it into new growth industries. The EDB ran joint training programmes with them to ensure that workers would have the requisite technical skills. Another way in which Singapore is different was in the extent to which the government was prepared to enter into business. “The government itself became an entrepreneur in a big way”,19 while the traditional Chinese businessmen, accustomed to trade and commerce, “took a backseat”.20 This was the case because the PAP was a strong government, committed to social democratic ideals, and could not wait to make things happen. As Dr Goh said: “We had to try a more activist and interventionist approach. Democratic-socialist economic policies ranged from direct participation in industry to the supply of infrastructure facilities by statutory authorities, and to laying down clear outlines to the private sector as to what they could and should do”.21 With the multinationals taking care of manufactures and exports, and the government building the infrastructure, and services like Singapore Airlines, the outcome could only be spectacular. “The period 1968 to 1973 saw very fast economic growth, between 11.5 per cent and 13.7 per cent annual increase in the GDP.”22 The oil crisis of 1973–74, which hit the economies of the West and Japan very hard, affected Singapore too, but not as badly as was feared. The momentum built up in a run of good years

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ensured a still positive growth, though it slowed down considerably to, for e.g., 4.1 per cent in 1975. The job prospects of people changed dramatically. The spectre of unemployment consequent on the British pull-out evaporated. The labour market tightened up and had to be thrown open to foreign labour, mainly from Malaysia next door. There were 100,000 “guest workers” by 1975. What is also gratifying about the exceptional economic growth and employment rates is that it was achieved without inflationary pressures, in part because of the forced savings through the CPF scheme, and the fact that CPF contributions were increased in line with greater progress. Progress measured in per capita income was spectacular. In 1965, the per capita income was US$450. By 1975, the tenth year of independence, it had risen to US$2,500. Prime Minister Lee worried that Singapore might lose its developing country status. The World Bank set a rough figure of below US$1,000 as the qualification for developing country status, above which a country was deemed as transitional towards developed status. Singapore was in a dangerous position on this calculation, Lee explained, and the full impact would come in five years’ time when its per capita income was expected to cross the US$3,000 mark, at which point it would be impossible to borrow at concessionary rates from either the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, no matter for what project.23 Lee also disclosed that the International Monetary Fund wanted to promote Singapore from a donee country to a donor country, placing it among the big league. This was premature, he thought, because in “in per capita terms, Singapore with a population of 2.2 million was only slighter better off than the population of the main cities of developing East and Southeast Asia.”24 This is a comparison of city with city, minus the rural sector which Singapore does not have. Some measurements combine rural and urban sectors. Singapore is “uncomfortably placed with the middle-income countries of the Mediterranean with a large percentage of workers in the agricultural sector, like Spain, Greece, and Israel.” “This is a dubious distinction”, Lee said, and he hoped to fend it off a while longer.25 Sooner than Lee had expected, the per capita income cleared the US$3,000 benchmark by a big margin at US$3,721 in 1979. Singapore leaders were now resigned to being reclassified as a developed country, but they still

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hoped for a deferment: inflation might cause the US$3,000 benchmark to be raised.26 As it turned out, they got a deferment by arguing to the IMF that there was a big “foreign” component (18 per cent) in their GDP, made up of salaries of expatriates working in Singapore, and of returns from foreign investments. If this component was subtracted from the GDP, they would fall back into the category of underdeveloped country.27 The rapid growth of industries would not have been possible without an adequate supply of trained personnel. In Singapore, the human resource was present in abundance. All that was needed was the training and education which went into high gear. The initial effort included crash courses, notably in 1971, “when the economy was experiencing a grave shortage of welders”,28 on-the-job training, and the expansion of vocational institutes from three in 1968 to eleven in 1973. “New schools had to be built, thousands of teachers had to be trained — and all this in a hurry”.29 The language used in the schools, institutes, and workplaces was English because this was the language of the MNEs. English gained ascendancy over every other language in this multiracial society because it was regarded as the means to acquire scientific knowledge and technological skills. The demand for trained personnel was insatiable, for engineers it was more than the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Singapore, whose first graduates came out only in 1969, could cope with. As to the number of engineers working in Singapore, Dr Goh confessed in 1975 that “nobody knows”.30 Winsemius estimated that from 1974 onwards, for the next five years, there would be a shortage of between 450 and 500 engineers each year.31 The technicians who would be the supporting staff to engineers would be found to be even more acutely short, Winsemius reckoned. On another kind of professionals, accountants and managers, he estimated that they too would be in short supply by some 200 a year over the next three years. It was not surprising then that “by the late seventies, the official view was that there had been underinvestment in human resources, and that a major effort was needed … for the next phase of development.”32 The next phase was a reaching out for even higher technology and higher value-added industries which would create even higher wages for skilled technicians and the professionals. This was a logical move to

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make, and would have been made earlier but for the 1973–74 oil crisis, which had caused the leaders to hesitate and play it safe. Yet, it was this same oil crisis wreaking havoc on the economies of the West, turning them protectionist, that made it necessary for the leaders in Singapore to act by 1979, when another oil crisis occurred. This year is said to herald the switch to the new industrial policy. The sort of industries that increasingly faced protectionist pressures was the labour-intensive type such as textiles and garments. Lower-grade electronic products, like pocket calculators made in Singapore, were banned from European markets. Another problem was the stiff competition in the making and export of this type of goods from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and nearer home, Malaysia and other countries in the region fast moving into this level of industrialization. It was high time Singapore moved out of this stage. The “high tech” industries aimed for offered a way to overcome protectionism. A product like the constant-speed drive devices meant for installation in jet engines, which an American company was manufacturing in Singapore, knew no protectionist barrier and was also recession proof! The “high tech” way also meant automation and the cutting down of labour, an important consideration for Singapore as the seventies wore on. By 1979, the traditional source of guest workers, Malaysia, had reached its limits, and other sources were resorted to, namely Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. There is a social cost and also a numerical limit that any country using guest workers must calculate, and this consideration provided yet another argument for Singapore to go “high tech”. The way to do it had to be carefully thought out as much as the timing, as the attempt was not without risks and uncertainty. It was for private enterprise to carry out the move to “high tech” industries, but the government must give them the incentive. One way of giving the incentive was to stop the import of all new guest workers suddenly, which would have the effect of raising wages all round, thereby forcing employers to adopt higher-value industries if they wanted to stay in business and justify the high wages they had to pay out.33 This method might cause wages to spiral out of control. The government had to be careful here. So it continued to let in guest workers and used an instrument that it had to activate the

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increase in wages. This instrument was the National Wages Council (which, to recapitulate) was a body comprising representatives from the government, employers, and unions, which met each year to determine the appropriate degree of wage increase for that year, based on all relevant data. The National Wages Council agreed on a wage increase of 20 per cent for the year 1979. This was extraordinary, but the government was behind it and controlling this experiment in wage inflation. Workers would, all of a sudden, have more money in their pay packet, but in order to prevent a spending spree, the government withheld 4 per cent (Lee would have liked it to be 5 per cent)34 to be put in the Central Provident Fund, and another 2 per cent which was set aside as a retraining cess. Workers would thus be saving more money, if by compulsion. The government, on its part, would have a margin of 6 per cent to deploy in the event of the experiment going awry, or a world recession, in which case this margin can be reduced without the workers feeling the pinch.35 Why choose 1979 to launch the new industrial policy? The outlook in 1979 for foreign direct investment was good. There was a $2 billion petrochemical project on the cards. It was the dream MNE investment, highly capitalized, intensively automatized, with controlled pollution, and would offer good wages for chemical engineers and technicians, computer programmers, and all other kinds of specialized and skilled workers. EDB, which was responsible for winning this project, had another $1.2 billion worth of investments in its books which would translate into 18,000 jobs over the next three to four years. Thus reassured, the leaders took the plunge.36 The MNEs would be the vanguard of the move to “high-tech” industries. But the small local companies also had a part to play. They would be compelled by the rising wages to economize on labour, to mechanize, and automatize their operations.

Economic Growth and Nation-building Singapore aimed for rapid economic growth to meet headlong the challenges of survival after severance from Malaysia, which were further

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compounded by an impending British military withdrawal. The strategy worked. Strong, proactive government and timely multinational investments were key to this economic transformation. How did this success translate into nation-building? Times of hardship, poverty, and sacrifice might have served the nation-building objective better, but it was Singapore’s lot to have to do nation-building not in the crucible of adversity, but rather, in the lap of success. What special problems did this pose? Dr Goh Keng Swee, who, along with other PAP leaders, saw these problems coming, started to talk about “the trade-off between economic growth and nation-building”.37 At first sight, it might appear that there is no conflict of choice between the two. You may argue that economic growth helps nationbuilding and nation-building in turn helps economic growth. As people improve their standards of living, they become more conscious of their common identity and common interests, and as unity and solidarity improve, people are better enabled to increase the GNP. This, I am afraid, is a simplistic version of social and economic processes. In the real world, in Singapore, things do not work out this way. There are several reasons for this but I will deal with only two major ones. In Singapore, we have mounted the main effort to achieve fast economic growth through the free enterprise system. There is no other realistic alternative. The free enterprise system, as you know, depends on individual initiative. It is not the Government that makes the crucial investment decisions on which our economic, particularly our industrial, growth depends. It is people in the private sector… The type of people who run the [free enterprise] system are necessarily those who are hard-headed, ambitious, and pretty ruthless in overcoming obstacles. Such people are conditioned to placing their individual interests and that of their firms above all other considerations. These are the successful and they set the trend, the style, the ethos — call it what you will. Unless our society is tempered with

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a broader vision, it is easy to see that the prevailing values will be self-centred, self-seeking, and concerned with short-term interests. Nation-building does not flourish in a climate of this kind. There is a second unfavourable element in this free enterprise system. And it is that the greater the inequality of wealth, the larger will be the proportion of national income saved. Big corporations and rich people save a larger part of their earnings than the poor do. Savings make capital investment and economic growth possible. It is a sad but nevertheless true observation that inequality of income is good for economic growth. So here you will find, readily, the elements of social tension. People compare their present income not with what it was five or ten years ago, not with what it would have been if there had been no economic growth; they compare their present income with the income of those who are more successful. Discontent of this kind is good for economic growth as it spurs people to put in more effort to increase their income. But the result is that the big economic growth of the type we have had in the past few years, far from leading to unity and contentment, produces the reverse effect.38 The effects were quickly registered in two essential areas which had to be attended to urgently, namely education and defence. The government built schools at a rapid rate and opened an Institute of Education to speed up the training of teachers. But with the economy growing so strongly, teaching was not a career of choice. The teachers’ image suffered from a comparatively “low economic and social status”.39 The government had to build an army in a hurry by requiring male citizens to do National Service. But for many, this meant putting study or career on hold in order to serve when the economy was steaming ahead. This was one early thorny issue of nation-building in a booming economy. Many could only think of the opportunity cost of the time they were required to give to National Service.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Straits Times, 1 January 1969. Prime Minister’s Speeches, 28 April 1971, Republic of Singapore. Ibid. Goh Keng Swee, The Economics of Modernization (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1972), p. 228. Raj Vasil, “Trade Unions” in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by K.S. Sandhu and P. Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 156–57. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 162 From the title of Chapter 7 of Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000). E.H. Schein, Strategic Pragmatism: The Culture of Singapore’s Economic Development Board (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 63 and 67. Ibid., p. 62. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 79. John Wong, “Promoting Confucianism For Socioeconomic Development: The Singapore Experience” in Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four MiniDragons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 287. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 75; Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, p. 33. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 75. Schein, Strategic Pragmatism, p. 35. W.G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 36. Goh Keng Swee in an interview with W.G. Huff, in Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 320. Huff, Economic Growth of Singapore, p. 299. Goh Keng Swee, The Practice of Economic Growth (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1977), p. 104. Goh Keng Swee, Wealth of East Asian Nations (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1995), p. 77. Straits Times, 17 August 1979. Straits Times, 17 October 1979. Ibid.

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Straits Times, 22 January 1980. Straits Times, 4 July 1980. Goh, Practice of Economic Growth, p. 122. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 148. Goh, Modernization, p. 237. Pang Eng Fong, Tan Chwee Huat and Cheng Soo May, “The Management of People” in Management of Success, edited by Sandhu and Wheatley, p. 128. Straits Times, 20 August 1979. Ibid. Straits Times, 16 September 1979. Straits Times, 30 August 1979; 16 September 1979. Goh, Modernization, p. 41. Ibid., pp. 41–43. Quoted by Goh, Practice of Economic Growth, p. 213.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior National Service: The Price of Independence • 281 permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

E L E V E N

National Service: The Price of Independence

T

he overbearing attitude of a Malaysian brigadier stationed in Singapore in the aftermath of separation was worrying to Prime Minister Lee.1 The unduly prolonged stay of a Malaysian regiment at Camp Temasek was another worrying sign. In the short run, the British bases on the island served as a deterrent to any move to take back Singapore’s independence. But they were no substitute for the defence force that the new republic must provide for itself quickly. As Dr Goh Keng Swee said, “The most dependable guarantee of our independence is a strong SAF [Singapore Armed Forces].”2 He added, “A strong SAF, in turn, depends on the political will to make the effort and pay the price.”3 The price was National Service (NS). The hardest part for the government was to get people to accept it. As of 1965, Singapore had two infantry regiments. The government decided to form more units of regular soldiers like these, but the bulk of the army would be made up of boys and men drafted to do National Service. The first batches of National Servicemen of the new republic were called up in 1967. While recruits were plentiful, those considered to be officer material were in short supply owing to the deferment from NS then freely given to all attending university or polytechnic, or working in the civil service. In late 1967, the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) had to issue a “brainpower call-up”, which tapped the civil service, the two universities, the polytechnics and the vocational institute.4 The age group liable for NS ranged from eighteen to forty, and to fifty, in the case of officers and persons with special skills. Thus a whole lot of people and interests were affected in those early years of NS. Many were hit after the shock announcement of 281

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British withdrawal in January 1968, when MINDEF had to speed up its programme. There was a large number of command and technical positions being created, and obviously, the normal eighteen-year-old NSmen could not be appointed to them. “Accordingly, it was necessary to enlist at short notice large numbers of graduates to fill the expanded establishment.”5 Then, in 1969, MINDEF decided to lengthen the full time service period of NS officers from two to three years. This decision caused a strong reaction from graduates, expressed in the newspapers, and a deputation from the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to see the Defence Minister to voice the concern of employers. But the decision stood. MINDEF had Israeli officers as advisers, and they had evidently recommended that three years were needed for a thorough training of officers, based on the experience of the Israeli army. The issues raised by graduates about NS boils down to money and resentment at being away from civvy street at a time when job prospects were so great. Graduates looking for jobs prior to their call up were chagrined to find employers unwilling to hire anyone who had not completed NS. Graduates who were already working and subsequently drafted, would invariably find their army pay lower than their civilian pay. If they were in government service (and this applied to non-graduates too) they would be compensated for the difference. Those in the private sector had no guarantee of compensation. The Enlistment Act of 1970 did not make it obligatory on the bosses. Graduates were envious when some of their cohorts, deemed essential personnel by the government or private sector employers, were permitted to serve part-time, or when MINDEF, for whatever reason, “let off” lots of graduates as happened in 1969 and 1970. In NS, graduates could not help noticing the preferential treatment given to their fellow draftees who were doctors. Doctors were made captains and had better pay. The graduates in Engineering, Accountancy, and Arts were not so privileged. In NS too, graduates expected to be given roles commensurate with their previous courses of study. But the army’s concept of productivity, let alone job satisfaction, was not the same as theirs. It was not unusual to find “electrical technicians turned into cooks, teachers into

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drivers, and graduates into guards”.6 Graduates, English-educated ones, no doubt, were also unused to a system where they had to obey without thinking or questioning, a stark contrast, one complainer said, to “the hallowed university education we received”.7 Students formed an important group in NS, and their views should be noted. Although eighteen was the usual age at which boys went from school to university, vocational institute, or polytechnic, there were more mature students too. Prior to 1968, students only did part-time in one of the auxiliary uniformed services, like the special constabulary and the vigilante corps, on the understanding that they would continue to do it after graduation. But after the British announced their withdrawal, the need to accelerate the build-up of the NS army caused a revision to be made. These part-time serving students, upon their graduation, would have to go into full-time NS. They felt cheated, they had sacrificed their study time to perform part-time duty for nothing. Certain categories of students were allowed to defer NS: engineering and technical subject students; students with scholarships awarded through the government; students who completed pre-university before the age of eighteen; and the physically disabled. All others who had applied and gained admission to their chosen institution could never be certain that they would not be suddenly summoned to NS, but would have their places reserved for them to return to afterwards. The criteria governing deferment were publicized, but the actual implementation remained a mystery. Arts and Law students were at a loss to know why some of their cohorts were called up and others were not.8 And a harassed MINDEF was unable to clarify this mystery for them. Could not MINDEF have administered NS better, and if not, what was the reason? This was a massive exercise in which, inevitably, mistakes would occur and problems overlooked. Too much had to be done in too short a time. MINDEF’s manpower division had also to work on the basis that the elites it required were critical to the economy too. The result was “a mixture of part-time and full-time National Service, and a system of exemptions and deferments”,9 which seemed to those affected as ridden with anomalies, obscurities, and inanities.

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However, MINDEF did make a concession to sweeten the full-time NS of undergraduates, as well as to motivate them. They could, on passing the cadet officer’s course, and as commissioned officers, go to the university to fulfill their first-year requirements, and return to the camp to do NS during the university vacation. This would save them a year as they could later re-enter the university at the second-year level. Dr Goh Keng Swee, who was the architect of the SAF and served twice as Defence Minister, announced an important change of policy in November 1970, with advance notice of it released in the previous month.10 The cue for this was the British general election of June in the same year in which the Conservative Party, helmed by sailing enthusiast, Edward Heath, won. The withdrawal from the Singapore base would go on as planned under the Labour Government, but Britain “would retain some of its forces in Singapore on an equal basis” with Australia and New Zealand, under a five-power defence arrangement being planned which would include Singapore and Malaysia as well.11 This new situation allowed MINDEF some room for readjustments. “Many positions now held by graduate national servicemen would gradually be transferred to regular officers.”12 As fewer graduates would now be needed, the decision was taken “to confine the call-up of graduates for full-time service only to those born on or after January 1 1949”.13 In other words, graduates who were twenty one years of age and above in 1970, when the policy was announced, would be exempted. The same term for exemption was given to two more classes of people: (i) public servants, whether in a government department or a statutory board (ii) private sector workers doing correspondence courses in banking, accountancy, and business administration in order to qualify as members of a (relevant) professional institute. As with any change of policy, the last batch from the old system would not be able to benefit, and their outcry was as loud as the jubilation of the exempted ones. There were many students at the University of Singapore and Nanyang University who were doing part-time service, and they asked to be allowed to continue serving part-time after their graduation since the new ruling, effectively, meant that no graduates would be called to full-time service in future. But Dr Goh said no, and

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further said that they would be “demobbed” as soon as practicable from their part-time service. These students, when they graduate, would be the last batch called to full-time service. They would have one consolation however. The opportunity was taken during this policy review to reduce the length of service of officers. This change was necessary to address the problem of graduates purposely failing their officer cadet’s course to save themselves a third year of service. Instead of three years, officers would henceforth serve two-and-a-half years, a reduction by six months. At the same time, the service of non-commissioned officers (NCOs) was extended by six months to two-and-a-half years. By equalizing the service period for officers and NCOs, the canny Singapore male would see that it was better to make the grade of officer for the higher status and pay that came with it. Henceforth, NS recruits would be school leavers and pre-university students at the point before they entered the university. To avoid depleting the universities of students, the intake into NS was staggered, starting with half of the total male cohorts who completed pre-university classes in 1970, to three-quarters in 1971, and about all in 1973. Those drafted in January 1970 would have completed their training, if they were officers, by mid 1973. The start of the academic year at the two universities was changed to July from 1973 onwards to suit them, and subsequent batches. As always in NS recruitment, there were exceptions. Pre-university students accepted into Medicine and Dentistry were given a waiver to proceed. But they would, upon graduation, do full-time NS as medical and dental staff. Students on scholarships administered by the Public Services Commission were also granted deferment, and would have the additional privilege of getting their postgraduate full-time NS count as part of their bonded government service. A problem which came to light in the NS exercise was that of the artful dodger. There were any number of tricks people would try to avoid the draft. One took the form of asking the employer to write on behalf of the worker for deferment, and the more times a worker was deferred, the better his chances of escaping altogether. Another way was to not register oneself, on the excuse that, if in doubt, do not register. The third way was to leave

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the country. Many youths did this, prolonging their study or stay abroad with the help of rich parents. The rich kid draft dodger was bad in himself and bad also for the morale of those who loyally served in NS. Fortunately, it was easy to target him by getting his parents to provide security, by bond or bank guarantee, against his return to serve when he reached eighteen.14 The first three troubled years of NS were noted for the unrestrained airing of problems in letters to the newspapers. The authorities had to come in to impose discipline. This was the army after all! Dr Goh thought it extraordinary that the regular soldiers of the Singapore Infantry Regiments should also have participated in complaints “with great zest”.15 These regular soldiers were unhappy with the attention given to graduate NSmen, compared with whom they were educationally lower, no doubt, but had far more experience. Dr Goh reminded them that they were bound by the Queen’s Regulations which had been partially incorporated with the laws governing the SAF. These laws were binding on NSmen too and forbade them to write to the press. As for the press, its people would do well to remember the law under which editors, reporters, and managers must reveal the identity of letter writers and other sources of information when required by the government.16 Soldiers were given another outlet for their grouses: the SAF’s own monthly magazine, the National Pioneer. In addition, regular officers and men would be planted among NSmen to enquire discreetly into their grievances and report back to MINDEF for redress. Brain power is important to the army, but it must come with the right attitude. The question of attitude, in turn, is an interplay of economic, educational, and cultural factors. Thus a difference may be expected in the attitude of English-educated and Chinese-educated Chinese, and also between men of higher and lower education and career prospects. The simple truth is: the more qualified a man is, the more his eye is on the main chance, the worse will be his attitude in NS. This chapter has concentrated on the position of English-educated Chinese graduates in NS. Generally, his type was not interested in a commission. “He is motivated by individualistic and materialistic considerations.”17 His attitude presented “a real challenge” to MINDEF.18 By contrast, Chinese-educated (Nanyang University) graduates were more

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keen on a commission. They had few job options as witness their overrepresentation in the police and customs departments. For them, it was no bad thing to be an officer in NS, and they were prepared to sign on as regular army officers. For the present, they considered their salaries and conditions in NS adequate and reasonable. This level of satisfaction was not to be found among the English-educated Chinese graduates, especially those with professional degrees, who wanted to be recognized as such, and be “adequately compensated”.19 The English-educated Chinese below tertiary level and the Chineseeducated Chinese at the same level were happy to be commissioned. The latter tended to take their military training more seriously. “To them, a good army record is an added advantage [in a society] where [the] Chineseeducated still encounter some problems in seeking satisfactory jobs”.20 The issues which exercised the English-educated in NS meant little to their Chinese-educated counterparts. Issues like deferment of service, anomalies in the call-up, the gap between civilian and army pay, and the missing out on the best jobs out there, were essentially the woes of the English-educated Chinese, especially graduates. For the Chinese-educated, the central issue was language. The language of instruction in NS was English. They had considerable difficulty following lessons and answering tests conducted in English. They thought this unfair as it affected their chances of promotion to higher ranks and officers.21 Still on the topic of education, career, and attitudes, another factor should be noted. Studies done by MINDEF psychologists show that the environment the soldier grew up in is an important determinant of attitude. Dr Goh cited an example concerning Chinese youths who hailed from the countryside and who were, additionally, dropouts from the Chinese-medium schools in their villages. Their attitude in NS was surprisingly good. They did not take to drug abuse unlike the dropouts from the English-medium schools who constituted the great majority of drug abuse cases in the army.22 Dr Goh stated magisterially: Studies of soldiers who are school dropouts and who live in the countryside show none of the character weaknesses seen in the sample of drug addicts in the SAF. In their childhood, these soldiers

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displayed no aptitude for study, spending their time roaming the countryside in search of spiders, crickets, butterflies, and other insects, birds, fish, lizards, and so on. All claimed to have thoroughly enjoyed their childhood. Parents were sympathetic, even indulgent. Their schools were Chinese village schools, not particularly well-run. When asked whether they would not have done better if they had played less and studied more, they admitted that if they had passed their school examinations, and were able to get a university education, undoubtedly, life would have been better for them. But they said that they were not made for study and that a university or professional education was not a realistic objective. None regretted what many would consider a misspent childhood. They are all good soldiers, present no disciplinary problems, subscribe to most of the traditional ethos, including the belief in the virtues of hard work, and surprisingly, also believe that they have a bright future after they leave the Army … there is little doubt that these countrybred youths have a robust psychological make-up.23 While it was gratifying to have good men in the rank and file, they must be ably led. Dr Goh and Lee “started to induct some of our best students into the SAF in 1971”.24 They “selected some of the best officercadets each year for SAF overseas scholarships.”25 While studying, these cadets would have rank, full pay as well as the scholarship emoluments, and promotion after serving in the SAF during the long vacation of their first year at the university. They were bonded to serve for eight years after graduation, during which period they would go abroad again, first, to train for specialist positions, then, for staff and command positions, and finally to do “a course in public or business administration at a top American university such as Harvard or Stanford”.26 When they had served their bonded period, they could choose to go to top jobs in the government or private sector, in which case they would do their annual in-camp training like every other NS reservist. Among the first SAF overseas scholars were Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister’s elder son (clearly a case of leading

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by example), George Yeo, Lim Hng Kiang, and Teo Chee Hian. They had since moved from high command in the army and navy to higher responsibilities in government and politics, as cabinet ministers. In addition to the overseas scholarships to study at Oxbridge and other universities in Britain, the SAF also offered scholarships tenable locally. In 1974, the Defence Committee at the inner core of MINDEF launched something called Project Wrangler. This plan was meant to select 250 SAF officers or about ten per cent of the regular officer corps, and track their performance and postings with the view to assessing their potential for senior and staff appointments.27 All the scholar-officers were automatically included, but officers who were not graduates were also considered on their individual merits. A number of the latter group attended special classes in military history at the University of Singapore as a preliminary to a special degree course at Duke University, the United States. They were the chosen, fortunate ones. Many of their brother officers who were not chosen, would have been disappointed by the scholarship schemes, and Project Wrangler, and felt that the future belonged, not to them, but to the scholarofficers and the “wranglers”. The government called on the community to give its support, rightly as NS should be everybody’s business. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce responded by minting 5,000 NS medallions to be presented to the first 5,000 recruits.28 This gesture would appear even more significant if we take into consideration the fact that the Chinese, who were the great majority in the population, had a traditional contempt for soldiering. The Chinese Chamber was doing its bit to change this mindset. Community Centres gave gift packages of simple, useful items, and organized send-off dinners at which recruits were encouraged by Ministers and MPs. The departures to the training camps were also arranged to start from the Community Centres, with parents and grassroots leaders on hand, beside the waiting lorries. National Servicemen in their uniforms were invited to National Day dinners in their constituencies. The government continued to think of how to involve the community. In 1979, MINDEF approached school teachers to help prepare their students mentally for the call-up, and arranged for these teachers to make

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familiarization visits to the SAF’s headquarters and training camps. In 1981, MINDEF started to invite parents to the camps to see their sons at their basic military training. Since 1981 too, MINDEF invitations also went out to employers and heads of government departments. MINDEF needed them to understand and cooperate in a system whereby men had to work for a living and periodically discharge their duty as citizen soldiers. On reaching the runout date (the longed-for ROD), the NS soldier became a reservist for the next twenty years, and if he was an officer, for the next thirty years. The term “Reservist” was deemed misleading and was later changed to “Operationally Ready NSman”. To ensure that he lived up to this name, MINDEF required him to do fitness tests, in-camp training annually, and to respond to mobilization exercises, in full gear at the shortest possible time. MINDEF wanted the bosses of the soldiers to see for themselves what their men had to do and were capable of doing in the army, and many came away with a higher opinion of their employees, and a reason to trust MINDEF’s claim that NS had trained and motivated men to be good in the workplace as well as in the mock battlefield. What did the soldiers themselves think about NS? In retrospect, many regarded their basic military training as an ego-stripping, mental and physical toughening, and self-confidence building experience. They even appreciated their officers, NCOs, and peers for meting out stiff punishment for selfish, indolent, and indifferent attitudes. They formed strong bonds with their comrades and officers, helped by the adoption of the Israeli practice to have officers eat with their men in the same dining hall. They made friends for life. In June 1980, MINDEF organized the men into groups of 500, who would stay together throughout their full-time NS and subsequent service. In September of the same year, another change to promote bonding was introduced, this time at company level. Each company of 100 men were chosen from the same population catchment area, such as the Housing and Development Board estates.29 For those who were officers, NS had a value beyond the military. Leong Choon Cheong, a MINDEF psychologist, found that the majority of officers in his survey claimed to have learned something “in the area of human

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relations and man-management”.30 They were glad to have had “the opportunity to meet, interact with, and understand people from all walks of life, from the son of a boatman to the son of a business tycoon”.31 A related aspect of defence and National Service was the defence industries that arose as a result. The AR 15 rifle, which was light and short and suited to the slim-built Singaporean man, had to be imported from America, and was arriving too slowly, one case at a time.32 It was therefore decided to make the weapon in Singapore, and the Chartered Industries of Singapore was established in 1967. It was followed by other new companies,33 namely, Singapore Shipbuilding and Engineering in 1968, Singapore Electronic and Engineering in 1969, to make products for the air force; Singapore Automative Engineering in 1971, to service vehicles and tanks; Ordnance Development and Engineering in 1973, to make medium-calibre weapons; Allied Ordnance of Singapore, to make and sell Bofors cannons; Singapore Food Industries, because, as Napoleon said, an army moves on its stomach; SAF Enterprises, which worked like the NTUC supermarkets, but with the addition of big-ticket consumer durables; and Singapore Aerospace Maintenance in 1975 to attend to RSAF aircraft. Instead of being a drain on the country’s resources, defence actually helped it to save, and to even make, money through the sale of armaments and ammunitions, and fuelled the industrial sector, and helped it to attain even higher realms of technology. Besides, the presence of these new industries with their executive offices and boardrooms, was to be very handy when the time came for the superannuation of the senior staff of the SAF.

National Service and Nation-Building This issue has been discussed from different points of view. One, a cynical view, “takes the position that Singapore, being small in population and in land area, is incapable of defending herself against armed attack by countries bigger in size”.34 This view regarded NS as principally serving a nationbuilding objective, by conscripting young men to let them experience “the collective life” and to instill in them some “discipline, loyalty, leadership, and other useful qualities”.35 Dr Goh refuted this view, saying “we are not

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creating a large body of enthusiastic amateurs”.36 Rather, the men would be trained to be a truly professional force, armed with the best weapons. Another view, that of Leong Choon Cheong, took the clinical approach. With reference to NS, he stated that the actual outcome in terms of nationbuilding values is hard to measure.37 The most positive and unequivocal view was one expressed by the men themselves, recalling their full-time NS. They swore that NS had made them identify with the nation. Many testified to the virtues of a system that impacted on every strata of society: in short, NS was a great social leveller and unifier. But there is another side to this picture. The SAF was not, and could not, be egalitarian. Some were called to be officers while the majority remained as privates, and the decisive factor was the level of education. This was true of National Service soon after it began, with the “brain power” call-up, and continued with the scholarships schemes and Project Wrangler. The question is whether this meritocratic principle would bust morale in the army and ruin its nation-building potential. The way to look at this is to ask how Singaporeans regarded meritocracy. If people in general believed in it, then it would work, the SAF scholarships would work too, and indeed this seems to have been the case. It is argued here that for most people, the SAF was a source of pride as a great national institution with brains as well as brawn, and holding its own with other key institutions known for their brain power. This approach views defence and National Service in a broader than usual context. Still on this approach, the defence industries may also be seen as having a significance that should not be overlooked. Quite apart from the hardware they manufactured and sold, they also yielded intangibles like satisfaction and pride to their creators and the country, both aspiring to high-tech production and setting great store by knowledge, skills, and inventiveness. For most Singaporeans, this was nation-building at its best, by way of defence and National Service. This may indeed sound too one-sided for some. Meritocracy in the SAF had its less happy side. The search and grooming of scholar-officers inevitably led to a class distinction between them and the others. These others, many of whom were capable and experienced, could not accept the fact that

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academic qualifications should count for so much in the profession of arms. In army lingo, they were the “farmers”, having to plough their way through, while the “scholars” were on the fast track, and were even high fliers. Their discontent, which the NS men knew of, with varying degrees of empathy, could be detrimental to nation-building as a by-product of NS. Finally, the real test of a national spirit in NS would only come in a crisis. So far, the indications have been reassuring that NS men will find this spirit in them, and will overcome in the test when it comes. The May 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur had repercussions in Singapore, and regular troops as well as National Service men were deployed at roadblocks and on patrol. Incidents occurred in which the training and bonding which the men had undergone held firm. Their reflexes in acute moments were nonracial, “colour-blind”, and in a larger sense, Singaporean. This was how Mickey Chiang, the insider and official narrator of the SAF, saw it.38 Chiang read further encouraging signs in another event, the coming of the Vietnamese boat people in the mid-1970s. National Service midshipmen and their counterparts in the Singapore navy worked in operations called for by this great human tragedy. Refugee boats, often heavily armed, and heading for Singapore’s shores, had to have their weapons removed, and the boats themselves prevented from landing. They had to be refuelled, revictualled, and repaired for the onward journey, as Singapore was too small a place to accommodate the many thousands of boat people seeking refuge. The experience of this mission caused many young Singaporeans to vow never to let their own country be overrun.39 In actual active service, these NSmen were forced into a sense of the nation, on their feet!

NOTES 1 2 3 4

Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), p. 26. Goh Keng Swee, Wealth of East Asian Nations (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1995), p. 150. Ibid. Albert Lau, “National Service” Pointer: Journal of the Singapore Armed Forces Supplement (November 1992): 21.

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Straits Times, 18 October 1970. Straits Times, 4 August 1970. Straits Times, 23 October 1970. Straits Times, 28 May 1970. Singapore Herald, 24 October 1970. Straits Times, 18 October 1970; 5 November 1970. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 65. Straits Times, 18 October 1970. Ibid. Straits Times, 14 November 1970. Straits Times, 5 November 1970. Ibid. “National Service — Singapore Style”, The People II, no. 2 (October 1970): 2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid; see also Singapore Herald, 27 October 1970. Goh Keng Swee, The Practice of Economic Growth (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1977), pp. 225–26. Ibid. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 44. Ibid. Ibid., p. 45. Straits Times, 7 September 1981. Mickey Chiang, SAF and 30 Years of National Service (Singapore: MINDEF Public Affairs, 1997), p. 50. Lau, “National Service”, p. 36. Leong Choon Cheong, Youth in the Army (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1978), p. 264. Ibid. Chiang, SAF, pp. 73–74. Ibid., pp. 75, 189–90. Goh Keng Swee, Wealth of East Asian Nations (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1995), p. 6. Ibid. Ibid. Leong, Youth in the Army, pp. 260–61. Chiang, SAF, pp. 79–81. Ibid., p. 88.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Politics ofarticles Education permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual are • 295 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T W E L V E

Politics of Education

T

he economy, the army, and now education, were important pillars of nation-building under PAP rule. As democratic socialists, PAP leaders believed in education as a social good, and sought to bring it to as many as possible through promoting universal primary education and the expansion of secondary education.1 But the PAP Government did not begin on a clean slate. It had to deal with the system it inherited as a colonial legacy. At the same time, it had to carry out its own objectives. What it inherited were schools in four different languages, together with their attitudes, and in the case of Chinese-medium schools, entrenched suspicions and resistance to governmental interference. What it sought to create, with new principles in mind, was an education system that was responsive to the demands of industrial and business growth and modernization, and supportive of multiracial national integration. The pursuit of these objectives and principles brought in train consequences which were predictable to some extent, but the scale of these consequences, and the magnitude of the impact on key constituencies were not, and were overwhelming like a river at full flood. Once in power in 1959, the PAP endorsed the 1955 All-Party Committee Report on Chinese education, which laid down the principle of equal treatment for the four streams of schools, English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, in existence in the then British colony. This principle, as applied to Chinese-medium schools, meant that the school buildings and resources were upgraded, the teachers received training at the Teachers’ Training College for the first time, several Chinese teachers’ unions gained recognition,

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and the Ministry of Education started to appoint officials knowledgeable about Chinese education.2 The PAP Government also carried out the All-Party recommendation that the four streams of schools should use textbooks with a common content, but written in their respective languages. In 1960, it introduced a common examination at the primary level, the Primary School Leaving Examination, sat for by students of all four streams of schools. At the secondary level, the Chinese Middle Schools were restructured on the lines of the English-medium secondary schools, amid much controversy. The Ministry of Education’s introduction in November 1961 of a Secondary Four examination for Chinese Middle Schools, which used to run their own examinations, met with a students’ boycott under orders from the communists, but it was neutralized by Lee’s tactic of warning the parents that their children were going to waste one year of study. Communist influence over Chinese education still offered a strong challenge. The apex of Chinese education was Nanyang University, and here the government began proceedings in September 1963, to revoke the citizenship of the university’s founding father, Tan Lark Sye, and detained twenty students. Then, in December 1963, the government acted to purge Chinese primary schools of teachers known to have sown communist thought. Happily, the Malay and Tamil streams were easier to manage. Under British rule, there was primary but no secondary education in Malay in Singapore. The PAP Government built the first ever Malay secondary school, the Sang Nila Utama, with the promise of more to come. Interestingly, from 1963 to 1968, students of Malay secondary schools in Singapore completing their final year sat for the Malaysia Certificate of Education Examination, one of the happier arrangements of the merger era. It was not until 1969 that the Ministry of Education in Singapore started to hold its own Malay school-certificate examination, based on the model which it had formulated for Chinese Middle Schools in 1961. After the PAP had taken office in 1959, Tamil schools, hitherto run by Christian and Hindu missions, became government and government-aided schools. In 1960, “the first and only secondary Tamil school in Singapore was established” — the Umar Pulavar Tamil High School.3 In 1963, it presented students for the first Tamil school-certificate examination.

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These were some of the ways the government honoured the principle of equal treatment. On the part of the schools, they were expected, as they received support from the government, to accept the government’s central control, which was aimed at achieving uniformity in curricula, syllabi, and standards in all the four streams. The work towards this goal attained another “first” in 1971, when all four streams presented students for a common General Certificate of Education “Ordinary” (GCE “O”) Level Examination. The PAP Government was not content to leave the four streams of schools equal but separate. One of the first tasks it did was to bring different streams together in one place even though each would teach in its own language.

Integration of Schools The existence of four separate and unequal media of education was a problem which all political leaders were agreed on since the troubled days of the Rendel Constitution. They believed that the task of creating a more cohesive, united, and equal society should start with the schools. The English-medium school was multiracial, with Chinese, Malays, Arabs, Indians, and Eurasians present in numbers reflecting the ethnic ratio. The other schools, called “vernacular” by the colonial education department, drew their students from one particular race. Thus, a student in a Malay-medium school would not have Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian pals studying alongside him, and a Chinese-medium school student would have no Malay, Indian, and Eurasian pals either. It fell on the PAP to do something about this, by rehousing schools which taught in different languages under one roof. It could be an integration of two schools, English-medium and Chinese-medium, or three schools, with the inclusion of a Malay-medium one. The integrated schools came under a single principal, and success or failure depended to no small extent on him. Some details on how the integrated school worked were provided by a Straits Times interview with Eugene Wijeyasingha, the headmaster of the Changkat Changi Secondary School.4 This school, opened in 1967 in a then rural area in the eastern part

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of the island, was “thoroughly modern”, and well endowed with buildings, amenities, grounds, and playing fields.5 It was an ample setting for its three streams, English, Chinese, and Malay. “When we first came together, we were far from being a community,” Wijeyasingha said. “A common bond had yet to be forged.”6 But he had a clear goal and communicated it to everybody, the teachers, the menial staff, and the pupils, getting them to embrace it “enthusiastically” and to plan “carefully” to realize it.7 The school held separate classes, necessarily, as it had a triple media of instruction. The students mixed in extra-curricular activities. In clubs and societies, the rules were that the chairman could come from any one of the three streams, but there must be three “representative vice-chairmen”.8 The exposure to each other’s languages would hopefully help the learning of the second language. The Literary, Debating and Dramatics Society organized its events with this principle in mind. Debates were conducted “on a three-language basis”.9 A mini-copy of parliamentary multilingualism? It would, at any rate, be more stimulating, with opportunities for cross-cultural banter. The best intermingling of students occurred in sports, especially athletics, which attracted equal numbers of participants from the three streams. There was a tendency for an ethnic group to specialize in a game, the Chinese in basketball, and the Malays in sepak takraw. The school continually took steps “to make games a shared experience, like everything else”.10 An example to note is that of Chinese basketball players coaching students from other streams with the view to getting them into the school team. The headmaster and teachers were under no illusion about the results that were achievable. If something was done that was later seen as not such a good idea, they admitted it. This was the case with a month-long contest in 1967 to see who could make the most friends with students of another stream, which was little short of a farce. Wijeyasingha learned not to go about it too overtly. The important thing was to create the “right atmosphere” and ambience.11 Only time could tell if he was successful in coaxing his students to live up to their motto “Through School To Nation”.12 Taken as a whole, the integration of schools cannot be said to have been a success. The chief problem was that it privileged the English-medium school. The process of integration began in 1960 with a small number of

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schools. By 1970, the number of integrated schools was 110 out of 526 schools, involving over 200,000 students out of a total school enrolment of about 514,000. The 110 integrated schools were government primary and secondary schools of which ten were an integration of English, Chinese, and Malay streams, seventy-one, English and Chinese streams, twenty-six, English and Malay streams, two, English and Tamil streams, and one, Malay and Chinese streams. The common denominator in the different combinations of schools was the English-medium school. The perception grew that it was the dominant partner, the main trunk on which the others were to be grafted. It was a perception which the English-medium school did little to dispel because it was consistent with its self-image. The English-medium school had a long period going back to the colonial era in which to develop itself, with the favour of government behind it, and had a certain air of cocky elitism about it. The principle of equal treatment was but a notion of recent origin, which the English-medium school had not yet taken in, anymore than did many of its counterparts of the other language streams. This accounts for what investigators have noted — that students from the other schools integrated with the English-medium school felt themselves to be inferior, and kept to themselves, despite the provision of a common tuckshop, common playing field, and common Sports’ Day. Their teachers, likewise, tended not to mix with the English-medium teachers though they shared the same Common Room, and “when they talked it was mostly business”.13 Also, there were school principals who did not treat teachers of another language stream equally.14 No one was more to blame than them for the failure of integration.

Bilingualism and Bilingual Blues Why bilingualism? It would be simpler if the education of school children could be done in one language, but such an approach would have serious consequences in a multiracial society. The consequences were seen firstly in the colonial era when people went to school to be educated in one language. Then it made a difference whether people were educated in English or in

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any of the other three languages of instruction — Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. It made a difference in the occupation they could command. It also made a difference in people’s attitudes and loyalties as each language of instruction was a pathway to a different world of thought, culture, and political orientation. Since the political turmoil of the mid 1950s, all political parties had agreed on bilingualism as a corrective to the colonial monolingual legacy. When negotiating for merger, the PAP Government had purposely asked for education to be under the state’s control in order that the special form of bilingualism that this place demanded could be implemented. The PAP Government made a second language compulsory in all primary schools from 1960, and in all secondary schools from 1966. This meant that in the English-medium school where English was the first language, provision must also be made for teaching in a second language, in Mandarin to Chinese students, in Malay to Malay students, and in Tamil to Tamil students. Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil were designated as mother tongues to the relevant ethnic groups. The government decided which language to use for which subject. We note, for example, that from 1964, Chinese-medium primary schools had to teach mathematics and science in English, and the English-medium primary schools had to teach a Primary 3 subject called Education for Living, which combined bits of history, geography, civics and ethics, in the mother tongue of the students. Certain other subjects were also taught in the mother tongue, namely, physical education, art, crafts, music, and history, this last being a subject by itself in the upper primary levels, 4, 5, and 6. How much time was devoted to teaching in the second language? There were considerable variations on this score. In 1966, the Ministry of Education came up with a measure which it called “Language Exposure Time”, and kept changing it over the years. The second language was, of course, also offered as a language subject in itself. From 1964, the second language was a compulsory subject in the GCE “O” Level Examination, and the Ministry of Education’s Chinese Secondary Four Examination. The birth of bilingualism entailed a long and painful labour. It was as if something unnatural was being born, and the government was begetter and midwife to the whole woeful process. Twenty years after the advent of

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bilingualism, Dr Goh Keng Swee commented “It has not occurred to many Singaporeans how unnatural the present school system is.”15 He was wrong. They perceived it from the beginning. People would have to change their way of thinking before they could accept bilingualism. “What will help bilingualism”, Prime Minister Lee advised, “is a positive attitude from parents, principals, and teachers. This is more important than methodology or exposure time.”16 But it was not easy to adjust to the change. Bilingualism caused shortages in one school, or medium of instruction, and redundancies in another. Many teachers were asked to switch from first- to second-language teaching in the same school, or get transferred to another school. Their self-esteem and morale fell. Teachers in Malay-medium schools, in particular, disliked a transfer to an English- or Chinese-medium school where they felt reduced to second class status. The English-medium schools were not alone in failing to show a proper respect for second-language teaching. In Chinese-medium schools, principals, teachers, and other staff down the line could hardly overcome the “mental or emotional block”17 to teaching in English as a second language, let alone set a positive example to their pupils. Bilingualism had to contend with another major obstacle. The great majority of Chinese pupils did not speak the languages they were instructed in at school in the home. Their home language was a Chinese dialect like Hokkien, belonging to the largest dialect group in Singapore, or Teochew, the next largest, followed by Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese. It was amazing how many managed to overcome this difficulty and passed. But, overall, the attrition rate was, as Lee put it, “terrifying”.18 The crunch-point was the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) which every student after six years of primary school had to pass before proceeding to secondary school. To amplify, the number who failed the PSLE was of the order of 40 to 45 per cent in 1976, and in 1977, it was 32 per cent for English-medium schools, and 28 per cent for Chinese-medium schools.19 “The wastage is unbelievable,” Lee said. Yet bilingualism must go on. “We cannot have monolingual education.”20 Families that spoke English or Mandarin or both at home had a head start with bilingualism, provided they had the motivation, and better still, the ingenuity to capitalize on their advantage. Cabinet ministers, MPs, and

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senior civil servants were in this category. They used English at work and in the home as the first language. But they sent their children to Chinesemedium schools for the first few years, and then transferred them to Englishmedium schools.21 That way, their children would be immersed in Mandarin at an early age, and helped at home in English through family conversation and books. One cabinet minister who was educated in Chinese did the reverse: he sent his children to English-medium schools. Another minister, fortunate to have been educated bilingually, tried an interesting experiment, sending one child to an English-medium school and another to a Chinesemedium school. Prime Minister Lee educated his children in Mandarin as the first language throughout their school life, and it was not until they reached the tertiary level that he switched them to the English medium.

English: the Promise and the Problem Even as bilingualism was being introduced, there was a countervailing factor at work which grew in strength and momentum. Dr Goh Keng Swee characterized it as “the gradual but inexorable switch in primary school registrations from Chinese-stream schools to English-stream schools”.22 He cited statistics showing the trend, of which only a sample will be quoted here.23 In 1959, when the PAP took office, there were 28,113 enrolled in the English stream, and 27,223 in the Chinese stream. In 1965, the year of independence, the number in the English stream had risen to 36,269, and the number in the Chinese stream fallen to 17,735. By 1978, the latest year in Dr Goh’s compilation, the number in the English stream was at a high of 41,995, and the number in the Chinese stream had sunk to just 5,289. Dr Goh commented that “the drift from the Chinese-stream schools to English-stream schools has created some delicate political problems for the government”.24 The enrolment in Malay-medium and Tamil-medium schools had fallen just as dramatically. Figures from another source25 show a decline from 23,938 in Malay-medium primary schools in 1969 to 1,029 by 1979, and a parallel fall in the same period in Tamil-medium primary schools from 1,315 to 54. Where had all the students gone? To the English-medium schools, of course.

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Why the big switch? Firstly, certain principles and policies laid down by the government in education had led to it. The integration of schools gave the English-medium schools a pivotal importance. Bilingualism did the same, and worse, as will be seen, it raised doubts about the ability of Chinese-medium schools to teach English as a second language effectively. Then, another key principle of education which the government enunciated, namely, the emphasis on the study of science, mathematics, and technical subjects, clearly established English as the leading language. The government’s strategic decision to invite multinational enterprises to generate economic growth sent another message about the indispensability of English. Parental ambition for their young did the rest. Once parents got the message that their children’s career prospects would be better with English as the first language, there was no stopping or reversing the trend. The government, which had to take care of the supply side, came under great pressure. Dr Goh spoke of “severe problems”.26 “The first”, he continued, “was the construction of large numbers of new English-stream primary schools, and later, secondary schools. Then there was the need to recruit and train large numbers of teachers and to send them to the new schools with little teaching experience.”27 In more graphic terms, Lee described the mass production of schools of the same design, and in many cases, simply named after the streets they were in. This was nothing like the schools he had known in the colonial era, which had a name, a history, an illustrious roll call, and proud principals. Worse, these massproduced schools were manned by mass-produced teachers “as anonymous, faceless, and listless as the institutions” they were assigned to.28 The schools were double-session, class sizes were big, and promotion from one level to the next was automatic. The resort to multiple choice questions and the disregard for grammar, sanctioned at one time by GCE “O” Level Examiners, compounded the problem.29 After school, students could get no reinforcement in the home or community as English was not widely spoken in those days. So, although parents opted for the English-medium school, Dr Goh cautioned that the benefits might not be realized, if they were dialect-speaking parents. There was a large number of dropouts from English-medium schools who reverted

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to illiteracy because their families spoke no English and “they lived in dialect-speaking neighbourhoods”.30 Dr Goh highlighted this problem in 1975, saying, “If we make calculations of how much money we spend to produce this enormous number of illiterates, the sum must come to well over $1,000 million. Most countries produce illiterates without spending any money.”31 In the same year, MINDEF conducted a study on recruits from English-medium schools who did not pass the GCE “O” Level Examinations. “Only 11 per cent of them were found to have an adequate working knowledge of English”, suggesting that “regression had taken place” since they left school.32 The dropouts from Chinese-medium schools were better, retaining their ability to converse in Mandarin and to read newspapers. MINDEF which had to train those NSmen who could understand neither English nor Mandarin, started to form the Hokkien-speaking platoons.

Managing The Fallout The government had to manage two sets of problems at the same time. One was the massive shift to English-medium schools from Chinese-medium schools. The other was the impact on the ongoing bilingual system. These problems had to be tackled at the political as well as the pedagogical level. As Lee stated, All these years since 1959, we have just been mass producing schools and teachers, and juggling with the languages of instruction. It was a messy, massive exercise as much in [politics] as in [education]. And it was, and is, highly sensitive politics because language and culture arouse great passions.33 The interest groups concerned with Chinese education, from the teachers’ unions to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and the newspapers, made their views known to the government. The Sin Chew Jit Pau reported on the so-called “unfulfilled promise of the PAP to treat all streams of education equally”.34 The Chinese-educated community interpreted the principle of

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equal treatment as meaning that the government should do something, if necessary, to boost Chinese education, or cut down the intake of the English-medium schools in order to bring it “on a par” with Chinese medium schools.35 The government was loath to set a quota, as suggested, because it would upset parents and worry employers. The Nanyang Siang Pau openly and directly attacked the government and Lee personally. This Chinese daily championed the greater use of Mandarin in public life and the curtailment of English. Its game plan was, apparently, to overawe the government which it charged with killing Chinese language and culture, and to push for Mandarin to be made the language of administration and the law courts, and of official publications like the Government Gazette. Such a policy, if implemented, would only end in disaster, Lee said. The other people, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians would feel “squeezed out” as “they can never hope to learn Chinese and compete for places and jobs with the Chinese”.36 Paradoxically, Lee and his Nanyang Siang Pau accusers both cherished Chinese language, culture, and values. The difference, a vital one, is that to Lee, the multiracial context was equally important, and so the Chinese must not appear threatening, whereas to the Nanyang Siang Pau men, a Chinese majority was an entitlement to Chinese superiority, which must be made manifest. This episode ended in the arrest of four of the newspaper’s executives, including the editor-in-chief and a senior editor, on 2 May 1971, under the Internal Security Act. On a brighter note, the government had a respected member of the Chinese interest groups on its side, thanks to its foresight in recruiting able Nanyang University graduates as MPs in the later 1960s. Ho Kah Leong, elected in 1968, was both an MP and the president of the Singapore Chinese Middle School Teachers’ Union. The union was understandably agitated over the decline in student enrolment year by year. Ho could help the government to weather the storm, but he could not stem the prevailing tide that was swamping the Chinese-medium schools. Still, he was not ready to give up the fight. He urged Chinese-medium schools to upgrade the teaching of English as a second language so as to win back the approval of parents. He proposed setting aside a day or two

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of the week when everybody must speak only in English. He commended a rural Chinese-medium school for holding a “Second Language Month” focusing on the use of English.37 One Chinese interest group threw up the idea of allowing students to switch streams, and asked for a more transparent set of criteria for this procedure. Parents would then have no reason to fear that their children would be in a Chinese-medium school for good if they were enrolled there at primary one. The Ministry of Education said that it supported the idea, had given the schools “details” on it, and suggested that “liberal changeovers” be allowed after Primary Six or Secondary Four.38 Chinese-medium schools and newspapers ran campaigns at enrolment time appealing to parents not to sacrifice knowledge of Chinese language and culture for the sake of materialism, which they equated with English. Lee lent his support, advising English-educated Chinese to send their children to Chinese-medium primary schools and thereafter to Englishmedium secondary schools. He had set the example of educating his children in Chinese-medium schools. But few were as brave as he. The bottomline in all these proposals was the standard of English that the Chinese-medium schools could achieve. The Singapore Chinese Middle School Teachers’ Union said that the standard could be raised if the Ministry of Education sent the best English teachers to more Chinese-medium schools, instead of to just twenty-eight selected Chinese-medium primary schools. The general picture of the teaching of English as a second language was not good. A Ministry of Education specialist described it as a “farce”.39 Teachers, he said, simply went through the motion of covering the syllabus in the given number of periods. Students had not “the foggiest idea” of the six tenses taught in six weeks, amounting to less than four contact hours, and their compositions were “usually full of errors in grammar and syntax”.40 They had gone on from primary to secondary school without having learned the basic rules of grammar. This criticism, published in the Straits Times, would have done little to reassure parents. Parents had to be satisfied that Chinese-medium schools were the right environment for learning English, and were not convinced that they were. Principals and older teachers were known to have “fixed notions about the superiority of [the] mother tongue and its dominance in all aspects of

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school life”.41 The teaching of English as a second language was impossible in “such a stifling environment”.42 The experience of teachers in Chinesemedium, and for that matter, Malay-medium schools too, who wished to pick up English, was such that they had to ask for a transfer to an Englishmedium school where they could learn English as they teach in the mother tongue. Ho Kah Leong was aware of this problem too, and called for a change of attitude. He said that the Chinese-medium schools had persisted in viewing English as the language of the colonial master, “even after the termination of the colonial period”. This was “an incorrect approach”.43 Five Chinese educational bodies came up with a plan. They were the Singapore Chinese School Teachers’ Union, Singapore Chinese Middle School Teachers’ Union, Singapore Chinese Schools’ Conference, Singapore Secondary School Principals’ Association, and the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce’s education sub-committee. Their plan would do away with the division of schools into different streams: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Then there would be no more worry about choice and switching from one stream to another. There would only be one “Singaporetype” school following a common syllabus. There would be no more distinction between first and second languages. Instead there would be equality, with 50 per cent of the teaching conducted in English, and 50 per cent in the mother tongue. At both primary and secondary levels, science and mathematics would be taught in English, and other subjects, namely, Education for Living, civics, literature, geography and history, in the mother tongue.44 The plan allowed for the separation of pupils into three groups, the first one consisting of students capable of learning in two languages, the second, of students good in English who would be catered for with more periods of instruction in English, and the third, of students capable of learning only in one language, who would be taught mainly in the mother tongue. In short, the plan incorporated an element of ability streaming into separate classes within a single school system. On the face of it, this was a laudable plan to end the segregation of schools handed down as a colonial legacy, and to create a national system. The real purpose was, of course, to avert the demise of Chinese-medium schools by repackaging them in a new form, and to save the profession of

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Chinese school teachers and principals. But the plan would also make Mandarin co-equal with English as the two languages mandatory for Chinese pupils. This would upset the equation implied in the government’s bilingual policy, in all sorts of ways. The plan would rattle parents across the whole of society. The English-educated Chinese, Malays, and Indians were almost certain to oppose it. Among Malays, even those solely educated in Malay would not approve of a plan which gave equal weightage to English and the mother tongue. When in 1974 the Ministry of Education set a 43 per cent exposure time for teaching in the mother tongue in English-medium primary schools, this was considered excessive for Malay students.45 The Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union petitioned, stating that Malay was effectively learned in the home, and that the Malay students’ time in English-medium primary schools was better spent in learning English and upgrading their English proficiency. The union succeeded in persuading the Ministry of Education to revert to the previous exposure time of 33 per cent as a special case for Malay.46 Malay teachers were in the same boat as Chinese teachers. Malaymedium schools were, like their Chinese counterparts, going under the waves, sunk by the tsunami of enrolment in English-medium schools. The Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union also devised a plan to stay afloat. They named it, admirably, “a National School System” and said it was “a merger of various streams existing today…that would pave the way for a truly effective integration”.47 It had three components. The first was that English would be the main medium of instruction. It “will help sustain our economic development” and a neutral space in our multiracial society.48 Secondly, Malay, being the National Language, would be made “compulsory for all students”.49 Thirdly, the mother tongue too would be made compulsory. This was said to be in line with the current policy, which required students in English-medium schools to have a second language i.e., their mother tongue. The significant angle in this scheme is the compulsory study of Malay. This was said to be consistent with the government’s convictions regarding Malay as a National Language and with geopolitical principles which made the choice of Malay singularly appropriate. To do otherwise than “making

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it compulsory in schools would only mean rendering lip service to the status of our National Language”.50 The Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union had reasoned magnificently. But the issue central to their argument needs to be put in historical perspective. It is arguable that the choice of Malay as the National Language, together with a Malay as the Head of State, and a National Anthem in Malay, was done as earnest of the intent to join in a united, multiracial Malaya, or Malaysia, as it turned out. That political venture did result in a merger, and regardless of the fact that the merger was shortlived, the deposit given in advance must remain in place post-1965. However, it could be, and was, invested with a new meaning as a guarantee that the government would enshrine multiracialism in the new republic, and that multiracialism would be the cornerstone of the new nation. It was also meant to convey the message that the new nation would live with the geopolitical realities of the region. The practice of multiracialism called for prudent restraint. From time to time, the government had to act to restrain the imprudent. Prudence made Singapore the only nation in the world where the language of the numerically and economically dominant Chinese was placed lower than the National Language, and was but one of four official languages, whereas Malay was at once the National Language and an official language. Admittedly, Malay had attained little more than a symbolic importance as a National Language. The Malay teachers’ union wanted it to become a language of education for all. But the government had kept the National Language issue separate from the education issue. True, it had been necessary for civil servants and teachers to pass a test in the National Language at standard one level, but this civil service regulation was far from the idea of making Malay compulsory in all schools. It will be recalled that the government had specifically asked, from the very first merger talks, to be given autonomy in education. In Malaya at the time, the schools and the university were converting their languages of instruction to the National Language. In Singapore, all four languages would continue to be used in teaching. Bilingualism was the rule. But the Malay teachers’ scheme would alter the rules in favour of the Malay language.

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Lee, on examining the Malay teachers’ scheme, said that: in effect, it means closing down the Chinese [medium] schools and teaching Chinese [i.e., Mandarin] as a third language, next to first English, and second, Malay. If any government is mad enough to accept this proposal, it can only provoke the Chinese-educated to hostility. Perhaps most Chinese-educated know that the present Singapore Government will never agree to this. That is why there has been no violent outcry from them.51 Lee found the plan submitted by the coalition of Chinese-medium school teachers’ unions equally unacceptable. Referring to the key aspects of the plan, namely to relabel the schools as a “Singapore-type national school”, and “to have the teaching conducted for half of the time in Chinese [i.e., Mandarin] and half in English”, he said, “this is politics, this is not education”.52 And if he were to put it to the parents in a referendum he did not think they would say “yes, I agree with the Chinese Teachers’ Union”.53 At best, the plan was “only valid for the Chinese [medium] schools”.54 The 50 per cent of the time to be given to English “can bring the Chinese-stream schools more in keeping with realities”.55 But it was nonsense to suggest that the plan should also be imposed on the English-medium schools.

Reviewing Bilingualism The results of any education reform would only be known many years later. Thus the consequences of the government’s education principles and policies came to a head in the late 1970s. The main consequences were (1) the rising dominance of the English-medium school, (2) the demise of schools of the other language media, and (3) the high failure rate registered under the bilingual system. The first and second consequences worked on Lee’s mind until he conceived his brainchild: the Special Assistance Plan (super) schools. The third consequence set Lee thinking how to promote Mandarin in place of dialects, and how to realign the bureaucratic wheels of education. Then Lee appointed Dr Goh to look into the Ministry of Education and this led to a way to bring bilingualism forward.

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Lee himself took on the burden of relooking at bilingualism in a major televised discussion held on 6 April 1978. As usual with the prime minister, he adopted a wide-ranging approach. He said that he had set very high targets, but had not realized them, firstly because education had become a political football. Secondly, “we failed to understand the complexities of our own society [for example], the inadequacy of the schools in matching what was lacking in the home”.56 As the third reason, he said that the best period for learning a language was “between birth and primary school”.57 He continued: We did not use these critical years, these critical learning years when oral expression could have been taught so painlessly… written fluency you can acquire however late in life — but oral fluency… we missed that. That was a pity.58 Fourthly, Lee said that the situation would not have been so bad but for the dialects. Chinese parents continued to speak in dialect, and their children had to put up with carrying two languages in school and an additional one in the home. The problem with dialects, in Lee’s view, was that there were so many of them, some mutually intelligible, others not, and the dialect speakers ended up speaking to each other in English, thereby reinforcing English as the common language. Those speaking the same dialect were able to get by without learning Mandarin. This, Lee said, accounted for the slow progress made by spoken Mandarin. He noted with “horror” that in the army, the contagion of speaking in dialect had spread from the Hokkien-speaking platoons to their officers and into the officers’ mess. They should be speaking Mandarin instead. Lee was adamant on this. Mandarin was the universal Chinese language, and “the fullest advantage” would come from learning it.59 Parents should be reconciled mentally to the gap between what they want and what was achievable. Parents “want so much for their children” — English and Mandarin at school, while they keep “the dialect alive at home”.60 The average child could not manage all three. Lee estimated that 80 per cent of children could be educated bilingually, and about 20 per cent

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or, “if we are unlucky”, 25 per cent, could not, and these must be taught in Mandarin at least, with a smattering of English for them to cope with working life.61 “How do we bring that about? By an edict? By a dictat?” This was not possible. Instead, he would apply “social pressure… that small modicum of coercion”.62 Air no more radio or television programmes in dialect, make sure every Chinese in school or army camp spoke either Mandarin or English, order the staff in government offices to speak Mandarin to Chinese who came for their services. Chinese members of the public in the thirty- to forty-year age group who spoke dialect would be served last. “As the government,” Lee said, “we can change the ground rules.”63 In another change, starting in 1979, Chinese students seeking admission to the Englishmedium University of Singapore must have at least a Grade 7 Pass in Mandarin in the GCE “O” Level Examinations. As rational and ambitious beings, they would try to make the grade, Lee believed. Lee gave most time and attention to bilingual issues affecting the Chinese. The choice of Mandarin over dialects was good politics as Chinese language pressure groups were proud of Mandarin. He apparently thought that the Malays and Indians did not have the same dilemmas over language as the Chinese did. He was right about the Malays because, although there were varieties of spoken Malay, there was also a greater convergence over the years between the Malay learned in school and the language spoken in the home. The case of the Indians was more problematic. Tamil was only one of many Indian languages, albeit the major one locally, owing to historical factors. Another problem was the gradual supplanting of Tamil by English in many Tamil-speaking homes.

Introducing the SAP schools The Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools represented Lee’s answer to the decline of Chinese education. He would let the great majority of Chinesemedium schools go, but would pick a select few and give them whatever it takes to survive, indeed, more than just survive. He would add value and prestige. The students for these schools would be the cream of each year’s cohort in the PSLE. They would be instructed in Mandarin and English at

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first language level by the best teachers available. No less importantly, the scheme would allow students to “absorb in a Chinese school environment, social discipline, and other desirable Asian values”,64 which Lee admired. Politics was never far from Lee’s thinking on education, or for that matter, that of his critics in the Chinese-educated world. It would not have been possible for Lee to preside over the passing of Chinese education, without salvaging the best of that tradition. The SAP schools proposal was announced on 30 November 1978. Nine Chinese-medium schools were chosen for it, each one written up for the Straits Times, which featured all nine in as many days, in prominent style. The standard of English in the nine schools needed improvement in the initial period. Lee proposed sending their students to English-medium schools for what was called “immersion classes”. The English-medium schools were reluctant to receive these students. So Lee called for a meeting with the principals and vice-principals of both the prospective receiving schools (English-medium secondary) and the sending schools (Chinesemedium secondary). The immersion process which has students with Mandarin as the first language sit in the same class as students with English as the first language, and be given lessons in English “may slow down the class for three to four months, but it is a social responsibility we have to discharge to help one another”, Lee exhorted them.65 He told them that he took personal responsibility for the immersion exercise. He sorted out the difficulties which they claimed to have had, such as finding enough places and keeping to the right class sizes. He was prepared to go over the minutest detail with them.66 It was for the sake of the SAP schools, which he was determined to turn into models of success. No Malay-medium school was remade as a SAP school. In 1974, the Sang Nila Utama Secondary School, which was the only school to have preuniversity classes in Malay (since 1965) had shut down, and new applicants that year had been channelled to junior colleges teaching in English as the first language. The closure was emblematic of the end of Malay education in the republic. No protest or any untoward incident occurred. The Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union had become quite resigned, judging by the tone set by its Secretary-General Encik Latif Taris. Encik Taris said that “the mastering of English would improve the students’ chances… in today’s bilingual

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society… more and more Malay parents were becoming aware of this and sending their children to English-medium schools. Registration at Malaymedium primary schools had decreased noticeably.”67 Thus, the end came, with an understatement and not with a bang. The sole Tamil school with a secondary section, the Umar Pulavar Tamil High School, closed its doors for the last time in December 1982. Like the Sang Nila Utama, it too had its fate sealed by the decision of parents convinced of the benefits that their children would derive from an education in English. S. Dhanabalan, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Culture, was very frank: “What can those with [GCE] “O” and “A” Levels from Tamil schools expect?”68

Starting Pre-Primary Schools In the discussion forum he led, Lee had touched on an issue which had been overlooked, that oral fluency was best acquired at a very young age. Lee’s ideas, generated in major speeches or forums, were usually followed up by action taken by the relevant department. Hence, in this instance, plans were made to start pre-primary bilingual classes in Chinese-medium schools in 1979, and to do the same in the schools of the other language media, English, Malay, and Tamil, in 1980. But not everyone welcomed this move, showing once more the complexity of education in a multiracial society like Singapore’s. Dr Ahmed Mattar, Minister of State, Social Affairs, warned Malay parents not to go for it, saying it would be “a backward step” for them. He said that he did not doubt the usefulness of the proposed scheme, but “he thought Malay children were already learning to be proficient in English and Malay in English [medium] schools and progressing well in both without (it)”.69

Bureaucratic Shake-Up and Bilingual Streaming The bureaucracy which implemented education policy did not escape scrutiny. In August 1978, some four months after his discussion forum, Lee asked Dr Goh “to look into the problems of the Ministry of Education”.70

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Dr Goh and his team uncovered deficiencies in leadership, planning, communication, and feedback in the headquarters of the education system. Dr Goh’s team examined how the Ministry of Education carried out the bilingual policy. It noted that the Ministry had failed to set specific targets, such as competence to read newspapers, or to converse, or to attain a certain level of literacy. The Ministry had no concept of what Dr Goh’s team called “effective bilingualism”, meaning bilingualism “in terms of functional usage”.71 The Ministry used a measure known as Language Exposure Time (LET). LET “means the total time allotted to learning the [second] language as well as to subjects taught in the [second] language”.72 The Ministry’s way of promoting bilingualism consisted simply of raising the LET, to 25 per cent of the total teaching time in 1973, 33.5 per cent in 1974 and 40 per cent in 1975. “These figures were arbitrary and not based on any study,” Dr Goh’s team commented in their report.73 The Goh Report justly singled out the subject of History as an example of the Ministry’s uncertain and ill-informed approach. In 1969, the Ministry “directed that History be taught in English for Primary 3 in the Chinesemedium schools”, but “rescinded the directive” the following year.74 The lack of clearly defined goals for bilingualism was cited in the Goh report as one of the two factors contributing to the problems in the education system. The other factor was the curriculum, which was heavy, and pitched at the top 12 per cent of students, but used for teaching all students without consideration for their varying capacities. It may be recalled that all political parties had dreamed of creating a common, single curriculum. This distant dream had become the current nightmare. Dr Goh said, when presenting his report to Parliament, “we must accept the principle of teaching children of different learning capacities at different rates”.75 This meant devising “different streams of education to suit the slow, average, above average, and outstanding learners”.76 The Goh Report “resulted in a radical restructuring of the education system into a system of ability-based streaming”.77 It began in 1980 with pupils who had completed Primary 3 in the previous year. They would go to “normal”, “extended” or “monolingual” classes at the upper primary

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level. The “monolingual” classes were meant for students who were the lowest 20 per cent of the cohort. They would not have bilingualism forced on them, but would be instructed in one language. Streaming was also introduced in secondary schools, with classes described as “special”, “express”, and “normal”, the last type allotted to weaker pupils. Dr Goh had taken into account the high expectations and competitiveness of parents, and given them a say in the streaming of their children. If, for example, parents were not happy that their child was slated for a monolingual class, they could negotiate an upgrade, in which case they would be responsible for seeing their child through, by providing home support and private tuition. Should the child fail, the Ministry of Education had the right to return him or her to the monolingual class. The streaming policy was undeniably elitist. Dr Goh’s team was aware of the critics of streaming in the West, but was more concerned to have a practical solution that would work in Singapore. As a minister who alternated between finance and defence, Dr Goh himself knew only too well from important vantages what happened when an education system produced too many failures. “These school dropouts,” the Goh Report noted, “especially those who could not pass the PSLE, constitute the majority of problem soldiers… drug addicts, and attempted suicide cases. Case histories of these soldiers have been published recently by a former MINDEF officer. It should be made compulsory reading for senior officials in the Ministry of Education.”78 In this connection, it is pertinent to note that five Chinese education bodies had earlier proposed some form of streaming as part of a desperate plan to keep Chinese-medium schools alive. So, although streaming would generate controversy, the government could also be sure of a degree of consensus. Some students and lecturers at the University of Singapore expressed reservations and opposition, but the government clearly begged to differ.

Conclusion The PAP Government implemented the principle of equal treatment endorsed by all parties prior to independence. It went further, as under its

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rule, secondary education in Malay and Tamil made its debut with official blessing and support. It did not, however, want the four streams of schools to go their separate ways but sought to converge them at one point to share a common ambience. At the same time, it began to convert the schools from a monolingual to a bilingual mode, again keeping faith with the all-party agreement. Despite the principle of equal treatment, the integrated school scheme favoured the English-medium school as more than a first among equals. The principle of bilingualism had the same effect, singularly privileging English, and seriously raising doubts about the will and ability of Chinesemedium schools, in particular, to teach English as a second language. The government introduced yet another principle of education — the emphasis on science, mathematics and technical subjects — which further boosted the use of English. This principle was obviously linked to economic development, and was not lost on parents who started to switch from the Chinese medium to the English medium, as the school of choice. This change in parental preference was to spell disaster for the schools in the Chinese, Malay, and Tamil streams. The impact may be likened to the erection of a dam, diverting all the water into it, and reducing the flow downriver to a trickle, before drying it out completely. Parents were the eager beaver dam builders, playing out their role as a key agent of change in education. In sum, the government’s principle of equal treatment was subverted by the other principles which it also introduced, of integration, bilingualism, and the importance of science and mathematics. It became difficult for the government to claim that the schools of all four streams were different but equal. The diversion of enrolment to the English medium was unstoppable, and was the single most powerful factor reshaping education, and all the government could do was to keep abreast of its sweep. The politics of education under PAP rule began when the government stepped in to manage the four separate and unequal streams of schools it inherited from the colonial era. But the PAP Government was not a neutral agency. It introduced new schemes into the system, predicated on new principles which were biased towards modern industrial and business knowledge and technology, and gave a fillip to an international Western

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language — English. The PAP Government thus had to manage the consequences and repercussions it had unleashed through its intervention. The people most directly impacted were Chinese teachers and principals, and Malay teachers, whose petitions the prime minister commented on publicly. Lee thought up the SAP schools as a way to prevent the total submergence of Chinese-medium schools. At Lee’s request, Dr Goh’s team looked into the bureaucracy operationalizing bilingualism, and revealed the lack of specific objectives, as well as recommended the system of abilitybased streaming. These solutions would not solve every problem, and might indeed create new ones. But there were no easy answers, none, that is, which also fitted the ruling party’s values of pragmatism and excellence. Lee cited another reason: Ideally, you want a society that speaks one language, and it is also the language of the home. Then you have got the perfect situation. Well, we haven’t got the perfect situation because we started with an imperfect set of building blocks for this particular nation. And I don’t think there are facile answers.79 Language and education were highly emotive issues. But the government had, at the outset in 1963, taken care of Tan Lark Sye, and in 1971, of the Nanyang Siang Pau, signalling no tolerance of inflammatory talk and possible street-rioting as in the recent colonial past. The government was determined to deal with Chinese language and education issues in its own way, through ministers leading by example in the education of their children, through enforcing the use of Mandarin instead of dialects, and through initiating the SAP schools. Hopefully, these measures would go across as the right political gestures to all except the most irreconciliable groups. Additionally, it set the tone for petitioning and dialogue in a civil manner and impressed on petitioners the full authority of government. The extent of success it enjoyed may be gauged from Lee’s reply to Dr Goh, on receipt of his report: “To be able to publish your findings, and this exchange of letters is a watershed in our history. A generation of Singaporeans is coming of age.”80

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NOTES 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

The Straits Times editorial of 27 November 1966 stated: “Singapore has crossed the threshold of universal primary and secondary education — a tremendous achievement, far surpassing most of the targets set by UNESCO in 1960 (for Asian member countries)”. It was, however, an achievement more in quantitative than qualitative terms. S. Gopinathan, “Education” in A History of Singapore, edited by Ernest C.T. Chew and Edwin Lee (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 275. K. Palanisamy, “A History of the Umar Pulavar Tamil School 1946–1982” (BA Hons, thesis, History Department, National University of Singapore, 1983–84), p. 18. It started as a primary school and added on a secondary school in 1960, with the support of the new PAP Government. Straits Times, 22 October 1970. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 19 September 1970. Singapore Herald, 7 January 1971. Dr Goh Keng Swee and the Education Study Team, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978 (Singapore: Government of Singapore, 1979), Chapter 1, p. 1. Straits Times, 30 May 1974. Straits Times, 15 May 1978. Straits Times, 29 December 1977. Straits Times, 7 April 1978. Straits Times, 29 December 1977. Straits Times, 29 April 1971. Goh, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978, Chapter 1, p. 1. Ibid. Ibid. Seah Chee Meow and Linda Seah, “Education Reform and National Integration”, in Singapore: Development Policies and Trends, edited by Peter S.J. Chen (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 254, see Table 11.5. Goh, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978, Chapter 1, p. 1. Ibid.

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Straits Times, 21 November 1966. According to Vivian Quek, formerly English master at St. Andrew’s School. Straits Times, 6 February 1975. Straits Times, 27 July 1975. Ibid. Goh, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978, Chapter 1, p. 2. Straits Times, 29 December 1977. Lim, “Boycott of the Chinese Schools Secondary Four Examination 1961”, p. 30. Ibid. Straits Times, 7 April 1978. Straits Times, 1 October 1974. Straits Times, 24 October 1975. Koh Kong Chia, specialist adviser on English as the second language, Ministry of Education. Straits Times, 16 August 1975. Ibid. Straits Times, 6 June 1978. Ibid. Straits Times, 1 October 1974. Straits Times, 15 February 1976, 18 March 1978, 28 March 1978. Straits Times, 26 June 1974. Straits Times, 28 November 1974. Singapore Herald, 15 May 1971. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 26 May 1971. Straits Times, 7 April 1978. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 8 April 1978. Ibid. Straits Times, 7 April 1978. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 1 December 1978.

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65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

Straits Times, 11 March 1979. Michael D. Barr (ironically?) commends Lee for “his mastery of the minutiae involved in the implementation of policy”, quoting an exchange between Lee and a school principal whom he wanted to take in more “immersion students”. See the author’s Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs Behind the Man (Richmond: Curzon, for the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2000), pp. 235–36. Straits Times, 30 November 1974. Quoted by K. Palanisamy, “Umar Pulavar Tamil School”, p. 76. Straits Times, 1 July 1978. Goh, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978, p. iii. Ibid., Chapter 4, p. 4. Ibid., Chapter 3, p. 5. Ibid., Chapter 4, p. 4. Ibid. Goh Keng Swee, Wealth of East Asian Nations (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1995), p. 188. Ibid. John Yip Soon Kwong, Eng Soo Peck and Jay Yap Ye Chin, “25 Years of Educational Reform”, in Evolution of Educational Excellence: 25 Years of Education in the Republic of Singapore, edited by John Yip Soon Kwong and Sim Wong Kooi (Singapore: Longman, 1990), p. 17. Goh, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978, Chapter 1, p. 3. Straits Times, 7 April 1978. Goh, Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978, p. vi.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of Home the Institute of Southeast Studies. articles are • 323 Ownership, National Asian Stability and theIndividual New Middle Classes available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T H I R T E E N

Home Ownership, National Stability and the New Middle Classes

O

ne way of approaching the residential districts of the different races and classes of people in Singapore in the colonial era is to note the location of the fresh produce markets. The Orchard Road Market, and next to it, the grocery and frozen meat store, the Cold Storage, and the Grange Road Market in the Tanglin area, served the British ruling elite and the commercial elite, both European and Asian. These elites lived in districts later prosaically numbered 9, 10, and 11, in fine brick and stucco houses with trees, flower beds, lawns, hedgerows, and parks. Nearby were the Botanic Gardens and the University of Malaya/Singapore. The campus was composed of plain arched cloisters enclosing an upper and a lower quadrangle datable to 1929, flanked by buildings of 1950s and 60s origin, the whole dissonant assemblage softened by the leafy landscape around it. The Asian masses resided in a separate zone, another world altogether, and obtained their daily provisions from one of the great markets in their part of town, namely, the Telok Ayer Market, Maxwell Road Market, People’s Park Market, Ellenborough Market, all four in Chinatown, the Clyde Terrace Market in Beach Road, and the Kandang Kerbau Market in the Serangoon area, later depicted as Little India. Since independence, all but one of these markets, the Maxwell Road one, have disappeared, swallowed by the urge to modernize and redevelop the city state. This is another reason for taking notice of the humble, but landmark-evoking fresh produce markets. It serves as a reminder of how things had changed and progressed, and of how quickly it had all happened after independence. 323

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In what was the first of its kind in Singapore and the region,1 a shopping mall piled high with multi-storey offices and flats, was built in Singapore between 1970 and 1973. This was the People’s Park Complex, erected on the site of the People’s Park Market. The Telok Ayer Market, its original function over, is preserved as a national monument on account of its history and ornate wrought iron structure. The Clyde Terrace Market was absorbed into the site, mostly reclaimed from the sea, of the knife-edged twin towers of I.M Pei, known as the Gateway. The Kandang Kerbau Market too has gone. The stall operators there were moved across the road to occupy the base of the new multistorey Zhu Jiao Centre.2 The land along Orchard Road and Tanglin Road was assessed as too valuable for anything except shopping malls, luxury apartments, and fourand five-star hotels. Thus, the old Cold Storage was rebuilt as Centrepoint with the supermarket in the basement, and the Orchard Road Market was replaced by the multi-storey Orchard Point. The Grange Road Market gave way to the Singapore Handicraft Centre, which in turn was knocked down for the Tanglin Mall and Trader’s Hotel. The proximity of districts 9, 10, and 11 to the smart mall and hotel strip was a great draw to the multinational companies and diplomatic missions seeking to establish their residences. Likewise, the old and new moneyed people of the local Asian community, and the ethnic Chinese from the region coming to buy property, delighted in a residential area which combined the beauty of home and garden, and a prestigious and fashionable address, with the convenience of supermarkets, clubs, cinemas, malls, and restaurants within striking distance. In a city state which had seen so much change, this place retained its tone and texture; the past had survived in the elegance and affluence of the present. Elsewhere in the city state, dilapidated and overcrowded tenements and straggly makeshift urban and rural villages were razed, and in their place arose high rise flats, slab blocks and tower blocks of them, fitted with modern amenities and clustered in self-contained estates. There were schools, clean, low-pollution factories nearby, transport hubs, community centres, and neighbourhood shops and markets. The markets were not as atmospheric

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and vibrant as the old pasars, but then so much else had also changed and for the better. People were on the move, in their jobs, their way of life, and their place of abode. The role of women changed. Housewives were no longer confined to the home, or only employed in domestic service for others, but worked in factories like the men, gaining new skills, higher selfesteem, and better prospects. Why did all this happen? The PAP Government was serious about implementing its promise to the electorate to have them decently accommodated. At the same time, it attempted to liberate a colonized people, ignored, discriminated, disgruntled, and desperate. Lee offered them hope and a future, but they must work for it. The PAP Government would transform Singaporeans into a purposeful, disciplined, educated, skilled, industrious, productive, and suitably remunerated workforce, which they had to be to pay the rental, utility bills, and even the mortgage on their public housing flats. The frenetic pace of construction, extending from the central areas of the city to the outskirts, creating the new towns — Toa Payoh, Ang Mo Kio, Woodlands, Tampines and so on — was a feat spectacular in the scale and speed of execution. No less importantly, it was a great experiment in socioeconomic engineering for national survival and stability. Prime Minister Lee wanted his citizens to be homeowners.3 This went further than the socialist dream of providing low-cost housing for rent. People must not just rent, they must own, Lee believed. Ownership gives them a sense of pride, makes them more responsible, and creates a more stable and orderly society. It is important to give people a stake in the nation, a tangible asset. Then national servicemen, for example, would be defending their own or their fathers’ properties, and not someone else’s.4 Citizens, locally born and bred, with a place to call their own, will identify more with the nation and feel more strongly that they belong. They will exercise the right to vote with more care. Lee knew the perverse voting pattern usually registered in cities, and attributed it to the absence of stakeholding. There was another issue. PAP leaders were aware of the fiercer competitiveness and the greater disparity between the haves and have-nots

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that would inevitably stem from the economic growth strategy they pursued. The liberal governments of the West, faced with a similar problem, extended their social welfare provisions — free medicine, hospitalization, education, low cost housing, and unemployment benefits. The PAP Government rejected this system as wasteful, untenable, and breeding a culture of dependence. If they had to redistribute wealth, they would rather do it by helping everybody, no, every family, to own a home. Property is different from all other forms of consumption. It is a basic need. It encourages saving, or should. Its value rises, it’s an investment in the future. Government-promoted home ownership, if it is at all possible, seems the best way to manage the widening income gap between the rich and poor in a rapidly expanding economy. It was not by chance, but choice, that Dr Goh Keng Swee spoke on the theme of striking a balance between economic growth and nation-building when he opened a conference on leadership held by the University of Singapore Students’ Union in May 1971. This was the time of the first big property boom, 1970–73, since the PAP came to power. By then, the government’s home-ownership scheme had been launched, and the boom gratifyingly ensured its success. How did the government go about it? Before the PAP’s time, there was a housing authority, the Singapore Improvement Trust, but after thirty-two years in existence, it still left an unacceptably large number of people unaccommodated. The PAP Government replaced it with the Housing and Development Board (HDB), established on 1 February 1960. The HDB was an effective statutory body, continuously setting and exceeding its targets. The HDB’s work cannot be understood without reference to the government’s policy on land. Lee said that he was “the major formulator of this policy because it so happened I understood the law — the law of acquisitions, the law of property, the law of the values of property”.5 What he did was “unprecedented anywhere in the British Commonwealth or in America”.6 He passed laws which allowed the government to acquire land “at subeconomic rates”, and to reclaim land on the foreshore without compensation to owners of houses and land for the loss of their sea front.7 When a big fire occurred at a squatter area, Bukit Ho Swee, he changed the law to treat the burnt out area as if it was still occupied. This was to prevent

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the landowners from getting a profit on land, which was now providentially unencumbered, and to allow the government to factor in encumberance when it paid for the land. Lee saw himself as playing Robin Hood. “Land value is crucial to the concept of wealth”,8 he said, and he was taking from the rich to help the poor. He was, he admitted, “in breach of one of the fundamentals of British constitutional law, the sanctity of property”.9 But he had to do it “because the sanctity of society preserving itself was greater”.10 Land and house owners were naturally nervous to have the law of acquisition hanging over them. In 1976, the residents of Serangoon Gardens were rattled by talk of the takeover of their estate for building HDB flats. Their MP, L.P Rodrigo, raised the issue in parliament to which Lim Kim San, the then minister for national development said no, insofar as he could tell, it was not the policy to acquire a well laid out and established estate like it. Serangoon Gardens, a private, landed housing estate, was developed in the 1950s. The government acquired mostly pre-war properties. The wakafs, Arab properties held as family trusts, belonged to this category. Income derived from wakafs had already suffered from the rent control law imposed in the colonial era, which effectively blocked the redevelopment of these properties. The decline of the great Arab landowning families, which had long since happened, continued during the urban renewal and public housing construction of the 1970s and 1980s.11 The government was able to sell land cheaply to the HDB. The HDB in turn was able to do what no sane developer would have done. For example, on prime land at Marine Parade, it put up low-cost apartments. These apartments had a view of the sea, ships, and in the distance the city skyline, but this was treated as of no account by the HDB. The people were the winners. The government gave HDB annual cash grants and sixty-year loans at low interests. The HDB had its own granite and sand quarries, its brickworks, and wall tile factory, long-term contracts with cement manufacturers, and enjoyed government representation on the National Iron and Steel Mills. This meant that HDB flats came with many built-in subsidies. But critics,

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including MPs, contended that the HDB operated with “hidden surpluses”, and asked: what subsidies?12 As with any organization, the HDB needed the right men. Prime Minister Lee picked Lim Kim San as the HDB chairman. Lim was a fourth-generation Singapore Chinese, born in 1916, and educated at the Anglo-Chinese School and Raffles College. He was a businessman with diverse experience, and had run his own sago production plant, “his father-in-law’s pawnshops and his father’s petrol stations, besides being a director of one of the bigger local banks”.13 Not surprising for a businessman of his generation, and the fact that Malay was his spoken language at home, he was a friend of Tunku Abdul Rahman. The Sultan of Kelantan honoured Lim with the title of datuk in July 1963. Lim was also a supporter of the PAP from its inception, doubtless, because Dr Goh Keng Swee, his contemporary and friend at Raffles College, was also involved (discreetly, as he was then a colonial civil servant) in the making of the party. Lim Kim San was there at the critical moments prior to Malaysia’s break-up with Singapore. Twice Lee brought him along, and Dr Toh Chin Chye as well, for consultations with the Tunku in Kuala Lumpur. Of the second occasion, Lee has written “Chin Chye, Kim San, and I played golf with the Tunku”.14 The Tunku, on his part, included Lim Kim San as a member of his delegation to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London in June 1965, the time when the Tunku fell ill with shingles and missed the conference. Lim visited “the old boy” confined to bed in a private clinic, a comforter to the Tunku in a painful affliction, and afterwards was most important to Lee as interpreter of the Tunku’s mood and intention.15 As it turned out, both Lim and Lee were too focused on their own idea of how things should work out to be able to read the Tunku’s tortured body language and cryptic words correctly. But this in no way diminished Lim’s standing as the confidant acceptable on both sides of the causeway. Lim is better known for his work in resolving Singapore’s housing problem. He received the Ramon Magsaysay award in 1965 for this achievement. On his appointment as HDB chairman, he asked to be given a free hand, and not have to prove that he was a model employer in the

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socialist manner, as Ong Eng Guan, the then minister for national development, required of him.16 Prime Minister Lee agreed, and Lim went on to deliver the housing units at a phenomenal rate, relying on his knowledge of traditional Chinese contractual labour practices, and other skills gained from long experience of business management. Lim was fortunate to be supported by a good team of which one notable member was Teh Cheang Wan. Born in China in 1928, and coming to Penang at age seven, Teh was determined to catch up on life, learning English at age eighteen at Chung Ling High School, Penang, then graduating as an architect from the University of Sydney in 1956, at age twenty-eight, and lastly marrying at age thirty-two, somewhat late for a Chinese of his generation. He worked for successive housing trusts in New South Wales, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore before becoming the chief architect in the HDB when it was founded in 1960. Ten years later, he was made chief executive officer of the HDB, and he left this post in 1979 only for a higher calling, in politics, as minister for national development. Teh, the late starter with much to catch up on, beautifully personified the HDB in its attempt to stay ahead of long overdue reform on the housing front. He was clearly the dynamo in the HDB driving its expansion and progress from the first emergency one-room flats to the later luxury-class executive apartments. He strongly supported the government’s home ownership scheme. As cabinet minister, he slanted the rules in favour of home ownership and would hear of no exceptions. The HDB built for the greatest number of families. But there were families in the squeezed middle class whose household income exceeded the limit set by the HDB, and yet was not enough to enter the rising private housing market. These families had to be catered for too, and was, by a HDB-related corporation. Then there were families in the middle classes who bought from private developments. Given the rapid social mobility of the time, and the strong aspiration to upgrade constantly and invest in better housing, it would be unreal to deal only with public housing without reference to the private housing sector. Together, both sectors made up what Prime Minister Lee hoped would “become a one hundred per cent property-owning democracy” in Singapore.17

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To complete the picture, this chapter looks into the effects of the property market cycle, and the pressures created which led to the government’s decision on releasing CPF savings for the purchase of privately developed residential units. This decision had a far greater impact on asset inflation than an earlier policy to use CPF funds to promote HDB flat ownership. Yet, eager, frustrated, potential buyers had wished this decision on the government and on themselves. In retrospect, they should have been forewarned: be careful what you wish for.

From Renters to Owners Until the industrial take-off began to have an effect, many people were unemployed, underemployed, or earned very little. In 1960, the government directed the newly set-up HDB to build “Emergency Type” one-room flats in or near heavily populated areas. The number of units built had to be enough for the multitudes, including hawkers, who worked in the central areas. Additionally, the HDB built two- and three-room flats. The three sizes of flats were rented out at (Singapore currency) $20, $40 and $60 per month respectively. The rents were fixed after a sample survey had found that they would be within the means of “75% of the working population in Singapore whose monthly incomes range from $100 to $500”.18 In 1966–67, the HDB experimented with the four-room flat. When the HDB described a flat as having four rooms, or three or two rooms for that matter, it meant that one of the rooms was the living room. The four-room flat was offered for rent at $120 per month, plus $6.50 per month as conservancy charge. The response was poor as people simply could not pay. But in a few years, the children of these people would be wanting these four-room and even five-room flats. These children, including many who were born to hawkers, bus drivers, and the like, were educated in English, unlike their parents, and were fortunate to be alive and young at the dawn of a new nation invigorated by economic growth. Hence from 1970 onwards, the applicants to the HDB got younger and the flats got bigger. However, the HDB was to continue to build the smaller flats for the older generation and for the many people with only a primary-school education or were drop-outs.

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Flats were offered for sale for the first time in February 1964 under the Home Ownership for the People scheme. They were two- and three-room flats located at Queenstown and MacPherson estates, and priced at $4,900 and $6,000, respectively. They were on what was to be the standard HDB leasehold of ninety nine years. In 1965, an improved type of three-room flat at Toa Payoh was offered at $7,500. Many families bought, but many more could not afford to buy. Prime Minister Lee then decided to allow buyers to use their Central Provident Fund (CPF) accounts, and legislation to this effect was introduced in September 1968. In anticipation of this move, the HDB, which had never before sold one-room flats, offered an improved one-room type in Bukit Ho Swee for sale in July 1968. In the same month, the HDB “encouraged” sitting tenants in the one-, two-, and three-room flats to buy them by lowering the amount required as downpayment.19 For those who refused the offer, “special arrangements were made to resettle them in nearby blocks” where they could continue renting.20 The Straits Times welcomed the home ownership and the CPF link-up. No one could now say that the forced saving in the CPF account was without compensation, the paper argued, workers could now realize the advantage of owning their homes. “At the same time, the larger social purpose of increasing the number of property owners is achieved. By enabling workers to acquire tangible assets which will appreciate, a greater stability will be assured at a time when this is more than usually necessary for economic survival.”21

Providers and Developers Besides the HDB, there were other providers of housing that had an impact on the housing market. The government was one provider since colonial times, when the job of civil servants came with the house as well. However, under the PAP Government, this practice was being phased out. Dr Goh Keng Swee, the finance minister, said, “Civil servants should be encouraged to own their homes.”22 So the time would come when the only people still residing in government quarters would be those in military camps or out at sea in lighthouses!

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The British military establishment was another provider of housing, which it rented from civilian owners in Bedok, Opera Estate, Serangoon Gardens, Seletar Hills, and Oxley Rise. In 1965, it purchased Chipbee Gardens, off Holland Road, consisting of tower blocks and terraced houses. Malaysia and Indonesian Confrontation ensured that there was no let-up in the search for homes for the armed services. The next set of providers were private sector developers. They built for the rich and the not so rich who, nevertheless, earned more than the income level permitted to renters and buyers of HDB flats. After 1971, with the withdrawal of the British military presence, there was one less provider of housing in Singapore. There was fear that as the troops leave property prices would fall. Declining prices did hit the districts where houses rented out to British forces were thickest, but only for a time, because the economy was surging and rising rental in districts 9, 10, and 11 were helping less choice areas. The main players on the property scene were the HDB on one side, and a whole lot of private developers on the other. The government later found it necessary to build flats for sale to middle-level and senior civil servants. The Jurong Town Corporation also started building for its own people. But the main contenders were the HDB and the private sector developers. Ideally, the HDB and the private sector developers were supposed to operate in different spheres to meet the needs of different clientele. But the volatility and uncertainty of the housing market, with its periodic booms and busts, combined with the rising expectations of people, made it practically impossible for the HDB not to encroach on the other’s territory if it was to carry out the government’s mission of striving towards a homeowning democracy. This encroachment became even more acute when the HDB and the Urban Redevelopment Authority had perforce to set up the Housing and Urban Development Company jointly to build and sell middleincome apartments and maisonettes.

Speculators, In-betweeners and Baby Boomers The years 1970 to 1973 witnessed a property boom. Political stability and economic growth were great incentives to investors and speculators.

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Indonesian Chinese businessmen chased up land and property prices in districts 9, 10, and 11. Hot money flowed in from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s, the China breakthrough, had something to do with this. Contact between Washington and Beijing “was officially re-established with Nixon’s visit to Mao’s residence in the Forbidden City” in 1972.23 Hong Kong and Taiwanese businessmen started to see a rosy future for East Asia, and the American multinational presence in Singapore was a strong recommendation to them. One after another, superluxury apartment projects were announced, such as Beverly Mai and Westwood, both facing Orchard Boulevard, and Futura at Leonie Hill. They were all designed by a young Singapore architect, Timothy Seow. Seow also experimented with his “bungalows in the air” concept on his parents’ land at the junction of Holland/Belmont Roads. The name was the Maxima apartments, now called the Belmont. The developer was Mrs Seow Peck Leng, the SPA legislative assemblywoman for Mountbatten from 1959 to 1963. The price of this class of apartments was of the order of $200,000 to more than $300,000. The buyers were locals, or Chinese from the region, who purchased for their own occupancy or for renting out. The renters were the multinational companies, the American oil companies setting up a base for regional exploration, and foreign banks and consultancy firms looking to participate in this incipient world financial centre. They thought nothing of the high rental. Where did all this leave the average Singaporean citizen? How would it impact on the government’s policy of home ownership? What would or could the government do? Singaporeans howled about speculation and there certainly was a lot of that. But how do you separate the speculator from the investor? The speculators were the weeds interspersed with the good plants in the garden, and it was impossible for the gardener to remove them without destroying everything he had tended. Business confidence, as everyone knows, is a very fragile plant. The government’s action was thus measured. The HDB had set a certain family income level as the condition for buying its flats. This was raised to make several more thousands of people eligible. When HDB flats were first put on sale in 1964, the condition was that the buyer’s total family income

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must not exceed $1,000 per month. This ceiling was revised to $1,200 from 1 January 1970. Then, in his National Day speech on 9 August 1970, Lee announced a further raising by $300, from $1,200 to $1,500, which came into effect on 1 July 1971. When this date arrived, a new rule came with it which restricted buyers in the family income range of $1,201 to $1,500 to getting only the five-room flats which the board was introducing “in line with the Government’s policy of improving the standard of public housing”.24 Architects hailed the HDB’s plan to build five-room flats “as a bold and imaginative move which will eventually help to bring down the cost of middle class housing”.25 They could not have been more wrong. Private developers protested the move, but their fears were proven to be groundless. As the boom roared on, the public urged the government to various courses of action. Rezoning more land for residential use was one idea advanced. An MP proposed increasing the built-up density, mentioning Tanglin, the constituency of E.W. Barker, minister for law and national development, to which the minister retorted: Did he know the boundary of Tanglin? He explained: “It stretched from the Lido cinema to MacRitchie Reservoir. If one bought a piece of land with one-to-three density, and if it was increased to one-to-ten, the owner was going to make a lot of money.”26 More calls for government action were forthcoming. The government, it was argued, should immediately impose a capital gains tax, and ban foreign ownership of land and houses. An economist, Professor Lim Chong Yah, speaking at a symposium, warned that spiralling property prices could check the accelerated economic growth that Singapore has been enjoying.27 In due course, when the government acted, it allowed for a considerable degree of flexibility. It announced a new policy on 10 September 1973, which was to have effect “as from tomorrow, 11 September”.28 The policy imposed an immediate restriction on foreign ownership of land and residential property, with certain qualifications. Those who had already bought, or had binding agreements to buy, would not be affected. Those wishing to buy would have to obtain written permission from the government, which would look at each case on the basis of its usefulness to the Singapore economy.

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The new policy did not forbid foreigners or permanent residents from buying land or residential property. They just had to get governmental approval. The preamble to the policy showed the government’s concern for Singaporeans, but this would be addressed in a number of other ways, and not by a total ban on foreign ownership. The official explanation for the policy stated: The Government believes that, to achieve rapid economic development without social discontent, home ownership should be widespread. Our young engineers, teachers, officers in the Police and Singapore Armed Forces, and junior executives must be enabled to own their own homes. The security and progress of Singapore depend on their performance.29 The young people mentioned here were born just before or during the war, or after the war. The last category, the post-war baby boomers, were clearly the largest group. These young people were leaving the homes of their parents to start their own families. The number of them doing so was greatest in the later sixties and early seventies, the years when the HDB was under the most pressure. They registered their names with the HDB and had to put up with a long wait for their turn to be balloted with a flat, as long as three to four years. While they waited, the property market heated up, adding to their frustration. The HDB catered to the general public, but owing to the government’s concern for employees in the civil service, statutory boards, and the security services, the HDB came up with a scheme to give priority to them. This took care of those who were eligible to buy from the HDB. The baby boomers and the slightly older ones included many who were not eligible, and yet could not afford a private property. They were the inbetweeners, also known as the sandwiched class. Again, the government looked after those who were civil servants with a scheme to build executive apartments and five-room flats on sites in the East Coast, eventually named Neptune Court and Lagoon View. The government had to think of the general population too, which had its share of in-betweeners. So the HDB and the Urban Redevelopment

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Authority organized the Housing and Urban Development Company (HUDC) to build flats and maisonettes for citizens whose family income did not exceed $4,000 per month. The locations chosen were Farrer Road, Braddell Rise, Amber Road (Amberville), East Coast (Laguna Park), and Thomson Road, overlooking the MacRitchie Reservoir, hence the name Lakeview. The buyers of HUDC units were, according to one report, “doctors, teachers, lecturers, stenographers, assistant managers, system analysts, research officers, architects, sales executives, accountants, public relations officers, housewives, private secretaries, and quantity surveyors”.30 The majority had a monthly income of between $1,000 and $2,500. HUDC units cost between $55,000 and $100,000. The buyers were allowed to use their CPF accounts. This had the private developers gnashing their teeth. Price inflation in one sector tended to spill over into another. This was what the buyers depending on the HDB found out, to their alarm and pain, when the HDB gave notice of a price hike, effective on 1 January 1974. The two-room flat would cost $2,000 more, the three-room, $4,000 more, the four-room, $6,000 more, and the five-room, $8,000 more. The increases were of the order of 22 per cent to 64 per cent, with the median rise at 36 per cent. These increases, though steep, were still “much lower [according to the Straits Times] than the 300 to 400 per cent jump, over a two-year period, noted in the private sector real estate last September, when Government restricted the purchase of residential property [by foreigners]”.31 Only the one-room flat would stay at the old price of $3,300. The people living in one-room flats were not forgotten. Ong Pang Boon, minister for labour, asked the HDB to provide them with a bigger space. The one-room emergency flat was 240 square feet.32 The HDB built an improved type in the early 1970s which had 350 square feet. Dr Augustine Tan, MP for Whampoa, wanted more of this type to be built. He had seen in his walkabout the old one-room flat occupied by as many as ten people. The one-room emergency type, associated with the resettlement of people from slums in the 1960s, was deemed to have served its purpose in the 1970s. Teh Cheang Wan had plans to convert them into bigger one-room and two-room flats. By 1972, certain blocks at Bukit Ho Swee had already

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been converted, work was ongoing at St. Michael’s Estate, and would be steadily extended to Tiong Bahru, Red Hill, Alexandra, the Old Kallang Airport area, and Tanjong Rhu. In the 1970s a new private housing concept, the condominium, came into vogue. But at the outset, strangely enough, the talk of condominiums spooked investors. They rushed to buy houses, on speculation and rumour, including the notion that perhaps no more houses would be built. The pioneers of condominiums locally were Timothy Seow, whose Beverly Mai project was the first, an American company, and DBS. Dillingham Corporation, a builder of condominiums in Honolulu, and keen on expanding into Southeast Asia, began the Ridgewood project in 1973, bringing a touch of Hawaii to a plot of land at Mount Sinai, Ulu Pandan. DBS Realty launched Pandan Valley.

The Property Bust The Singapore economy was plugged into the world economy and the world economy was in trouble from the Arab oil embargo which hit it in 1973. It was a strange time as world trade stagnated, but prices kept going up. The Singapore Government enforced an anti-inflation credit squeeze in March 1974. The global economic slowdown persisted. The American oil riggers, sensing the good times over, departed from their Singapore base. Their landlords and landladies felt the chill of palatial apartments going vacant and into forced bank sale. Property development companies had some $450 million tied up in unsold residential units. They were quick in looking outside themselves for things to blame: the restriction on foreign ownership, the HUDC, the high interest rates (11.3 per cent to 13.5 per cent in October 1974; 9.5 per cent to 10 per cent in August 1975) and the short loan repayment period of fifteen to twenty years. Were they right? Despite the downturn, condominium units at Ridgewood, Pandan Valley, Hillcrest Arcadia, and Sherwood Towers were selling. The developers who suffered the most were those who had not done a proper market analysis. They had not targeted the middleincome citizens who were still in the market, but rather, the well-heeled

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people who had taken flight. The Business Times commented on 30 May 1977: “Have they studied how many Singaporeans have the kind of income to acquire a house costing six figures? In a society where only 10 per cent of the tax-paying population earn incomes in excess of $24,000 a year, it would take many a lifetime to achieve anywhere near the price of one of our luxury class flats.”33 The developers pleaded for government help, but what could or should the government do? Not much. Just as when the market was up, the government could not do much to stop the speculators, so when the market was down, it could not do much to help the developers. Still, a number of measures were forthcoming. The Monetary Authority of Singapore allowed the banks to reduce their holdings of government securities and cash reserves, and thus have a bit more leeway to give loans for the purchase of unsold new properties. This measure was in place from January 1975 to January 1977, but did not help much. Another measure: The government had, as from 1 January 1974, made foreign absentee owners pay a surcharge of 10 per cent on the property tax of 36 per cent. This surcharge was cancelled on 10 January 1975. On the same day, the government announced that the rule on foreign ownership was modified to allow non-citizens to buy and sell residential units in buildings of not less than six storeys. From 3 September 1976, non-citizens could also own units in “approved condominiums”. One big question of the day was whether CPF funds should be used for the purchase of private property. In the preceding boom, it was the buyers — the in-betweeners — who asked for it. One of them wrote to the press: “I hope I’ll live long enough (I’m in my 30s) to see the day when a genuine “Home Ownership Scheme” is implemented — a scheme that will not be confined only to the buying of HDB flats, but also private houses. After all, it’s OUR money.”34 The writer signed off as Frustrated, Long Waiting List, Singapore. In the time of property bust, it was the developers who pressed for buyers to be allowed to use CPF funds. They did so with greater, selfserving subtlety. The Singapore Land and Housing Developers’ Association lobbied for the unlocking of this great source of liquidity: the CPF. Sensing that the use

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of CPF money for full payment would not be allowed, the association asked: How about for just the 20 per cent downpayment? A backdoor approach was also proposed, under which the HUDC would buy over the private developers’ unsold units, workable, since people buying from the HUDC could use their CPF accounts. Alternatively, the HUDC could act as sales agent for private developers. This way the HUDC need not look for money to buy the properties first, and would instead earn a commission from the developers. Either way, it was a winning formula, so the argument ran, as the developers would get the much needed cash flow, and the HUDC’s clients would get to buy privately developed homes. Another ingenious idea thought up by developers was the release of CPF funds for a limited period, to help clear the 3,000 unsold privately built units currently on the market. Properties at the $100,000 mark would begin to meet with buyer resistance and those above $120,000 were hardest to move. For some months, the HUDC was unresponsive to the pleas and offers directed at it. Then in December 1977, it agreed to purchase some 100 terraced houses at Pasir Ris Beach Park from one company. The HUDC then sold them, the ninety-five terraced houses and three semi-detached houses, at between $85,000 and $120,000: The HUDC’s mediation was the only way that young professionals, teachers, and junior executives on the HUDC’s waiting list could purchase them. Property developers were happy, hoping for more such interventions. Colin Chee, a reporter on the property scene, said that the private developers had found the chink in the HUDC’s armour.35 With hindsight we know what came next. Now that the private developers had gained the back door access to the CPF reserves through the HUDC, what would prevent the front door from being thrown open to them as well?

The Second Industrial Revolution and Second Property Boom In 1979, Singapore embarked on its second industrial revolution. It was a move out of the labour-intensive manufacturing that other countries in the region could do better, and which was facing protectionism as world trade remained sluggish. “The plan was superbly conceived”, the Business Times

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cheered.36 The government induced businessmen to raise wages so high that they would have to move up the value chain or ship out. The Business Times of 3 March 1982 observed: Over the past three years, the National Wages Council has urged employers to boost wages by 65 to 70 per cent. This has been costly for them, and has caused a certain amount of dislocation, as workers are laid off because they cost too much. It has undoubtedly caused some labour-intensive businesses to locate in areas where labour is cheaper, like Indonesia and Malaysia, rather than in the Republic. The pay-off, however, has been encouraging. Productivity is growing more than twice as fast as it was three years ago. Businesses are investing in better equipment and are mechanising more of their operations. They are moving up-market and producing more sophisticated products. Meanwhile, workers are learning new skills… Singapore is employing its limited labour pool more effectively.37 The remarkable success of the wage reform in the first three years encouraged speculators and investors to return to the property market. They were ethnic Chinese from Malaysia and Indonesia as well as Singaporeans. As property prices rose above their peaks in the 1970–73 boom, there were more urgent pleas with the government to curb speculation. But the government discounted this factor. Goh Chok Tong, a young minister of trade and industry (he was born in 1941) and a future prime minister, said of the boom: “In a nutshell, it is a supreme sign of confidence in the stability and security of Singapore.”38 He continued: When we talk about [the] checking of escalating property prices, we have to decide whether we want to intervene with the basic factor that causes property prices to rise. Do we want to intervene with the confidence factor? I think we should not rush in very quickly without proper consideration of the subject. Just to curb

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rising property prices without understanding the basic factors behind the rise could undermine the very confidence in Singapore that has brought about high property prices.39 Goh Chok Tong went on to state that various measures suggested by his parliamentary colleagues, namely “a credit squeeze and rent or price controls… are undesirable as we believe in a free market economy”.40 Yet the government had intervened in a big way in the free market economy with its wage correction upwards in order to launch the second industrial revolution. Clearly, property was one area where the government was happy to let things be. Clearly too, the government believed that property prices would go up as wages go up, and as the cost of construction and materials also go up, and that people should learn to accept this. In fact, this was the very lesson that Teh Cheang Wan was concerned to drive home to them. Teh’s public statements were increasingly attempts to educate people to get real and to accept that HDB prices could not forever stay down, but would have to increase quite dramatically. The HDB “raised the selling prices of all types of flats by 15% and rentals by 10% from [1] July 1979”.41 The family income ceiling was raised from $1,800 per month to $2,500 per month. Thus “the door to public housing was opened wider”.42 So this was the kind of solution preferred. No check on property prices needed, just open the HDB’s door wider. At the same time, build something close to what private developers were offering. This was the HDB’s executive apartment, bigger and better finished than the improved five-room flat. Around mid-December 1979, Teh Cheang Wan signalled another substantial price increase, saying nothing fixed yet, but “the writing is on the wall”.43 This came on 1 July 1980 — a 20 per cent hike in the selling price of HDB flats. Something had to be done for the in-betweeners, too “rich” for public housing and yet too “poor” to buy private. They were hard hit by the price inflation. In their case, it’s the HUDC’s door that had to be opened wider. In mid April 1980, Teh announced that the family income ceiling relating to the HUDC would go up from $4,000 per month to $6,000 per month. The

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Straits Times praised this “welcome news” as “with better education and more working couples… the combined income of many middle-income households has exceeded the HUDC’s income ceiling”44 (of $4,000 per month set in 1974 when the HUDC began). “The only flaw… is the long waiting period of up to four years”.45 How many more purchases will “the new $6,000 limit unleash”? And, as the Business Times asked: “Can the HUDC meet this increased demand?”46

The Difference between the Middle and Lower Income Groups The middle-income groups were more keen to buy their own home than to rent, which happily agreed with the government’s policy. When they exceeded the level at which they were eligible for HDB or HUDC flats, the bar could always be raised for them. In fact, when the bar set by the HDB was raised to $2,500 per month, Teh said “I expect [it] will be further raised in future.”47 This was bound to happen as the middle-income groups moved into more and better positions created by the economic restructuring. It was different for the lower-income groups. They lacked the education or training to get more than marginal types of work. Many could not afford to buy a flat, having to rent instead. They opted for the smallest flat available — the one-room improved type. The HDB was prepared to help them by raising the family income ceiling for renting the one-room flat from $400 to $500 per month in September 1979. The family income ceiling for renting the two-room flat was unchanged at $500 per month, and for the three-room flat was retained at $800 per month. These limits did not agree with the realities which MPs found on the ground. Lai Tha Chai, MP for Henderson, and Dr Yeo Ning Hong, MP for Kim Seng, knew of families with a joint income in excess of $800 per month, who wanted to rent, but were prevented by the HDB’s income ruling.48 The lower-income groups tended to have large families and needed to save. Some even asked for the one-room flat, unable to afford anything bigger. Shouldn’t they be allowed to rent one? And shouldn’t the income ceiling for renting be raised above the $800 per month level?

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Teh Cheang Wan said no. The government’s objective was to promote home ownership, but regretfully to him, some people “are still insisting that they want to rent”.49 He continued: “We have fixed the income ceiling at $800 because we believe that any family which earns about $800 is in a position to buy a three-room flat.”50 The income ceiling was purposely fixed “in order to encourage or even force people to buy three-room flats”.51 Teh believed that “people who save their money to buy HDB flats will eventually be benefited by their investment”.52 The HDB had three blocks of three-room flats in Teh’s constituency of Geylang West and Kolam Ayer. It sent letters to the tenants giving them the option to buy the flats. The tenants said that the price was too high. They were hoping to buy at the price when the flats were first built. Teh told them (this was in April 1980) that “it was government policy to sell the flats at the market price now”,53 meaning, presumably, the current HDB price. The new three-room flats would cost even more. He further advised his constituents “to buy their flats now” as the price was going up.54 This was Teh, the self-made man and the plain-speaking technocrat. He was so driven in his mission as home builder to the nation that he sometimes seemed unsympathetic and impatient with the less well-off. But he evidently thought that the logic and timeliness of investing in a three-room flat justified the pressure he was putting on them to do it.

The Last Rampart: The CPF and Private Property Teh Cheang Wan picked the first day of the new year, 1981, to announce that the era of cheap public housing was over. He said that a future HUDC flat could hover around $200,000. He did not put a figure on HDB flats, but mentioned a 48 per cent increase in construction costs which the board had to bear in the past twelve months. He cited spiralling fuel prices (there had been a second oil crisis in 1979), and explained that a lot of fuel was needed in the production of building materials. In addition, the HDB had to contend with labour shortage, rising wages in the construction sector, and re-tenders for its projects at higher prices, submitted by contractors who were in demand in a booming property market.

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On a later occasion, Teh made the interesting point that Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong had surplus construction workers for export, but Singapore did not have enough for its own needs, let alone for export. He said: “Our people want bigger and cheaper flats quickly. But they do not want to build flats.”55 On 1 June 1981 the HDB raised the sale price of its flats by an average 38 per cent, much steeper than the increases of the two previous years, 15 per cent from 1 July 1979, and 20 per cent from 1 July 1980. The price of HUDC flats in roughly the same period rose by close to 100 percent. These increases set new benchmarks for the private housing market. As the Straits Times commented: “Every time the HDB and HUDC post higher prices, the private developers do the same, adding that much more to cover their higher costs — possibly plus a little extra for greater profit. And so it goes on, hurting all Singaporeans in the process.”56 This prompts the question: did the HDB and HUDC not take the cue from private developers in the first place? It is not hard to visualize a double spiral at work, the public and private sectors intertwined and feeding off each other’s momentum and propelling the property market out of control. The public statements of ministers in this period suggest a debate going on within the government. Teh Cheang Wan, the minister for national development, commenting on public pressure to intervene in the escalating property market, said: “That is beyond the control of my ministry.”57 But Ong Pang Boon, the minister for labour, stated that something could be done to increase the supply of houses in the market and stop developers from profiteering. The situation was that demand exceeded supply. Although the minister for national development had approved the building of more than 7,000 residential units, Ong said, “less than 2,000 units are in fact under construction”.58 “One can assume”, he charged, “that private developers are hopping around with the planning approval to make a quick profit”.59 They appeared to have no intention to build. Under existing laws, work had to start within two years after the grant of the planning approval. However, a developer was deemed to have begun if he only did the piling. Ong said that the laws had to be changed to take care of that. In

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the meantime, the HUDC will build more flats “to help keep down the prices of private property”.60 Ong stressed that the supply of houses should be increased before the release of CPF funds for the purchase of private property. This qualification is consistent with his views on another issue: the use of CPF funds to buy company stocks. When asked about this, he dismissed it out of hand, saying the risks of using CPF funds in equity investment other than the governmentapproved Singapore Bus Services shares, “is too great”.61 The people most anxious to buy private property with their CPF savings were the in-betweeners, ineligible for HDB and HUDC units, and yet could not otherwise afford privately built ones. But if the liberalization of the CPF were to send property prices to a new high, they would find themselves back to square one. The Straits Times commented on 14 November 1980: If this is the case, it would seem foolish to inject extra funds into an already highly volatile market and fuel speculation. The real beneficiaries in such a situation are more likely to be the developer and the speculator, not the CPF member. Would it not be a better alternative to raise the income ceiling eligibility for HUDC housing and increase the pace of construction of such flats to take care of the needs of this group? Building a nest to roost is fine, but caution should be exercised lest a wrong move should break the nest egg itself.62 The HUDC had been conspicuously slow compared with the HDB: It did not want to upset private developers by building too prolifically and quickly. But given current market conditions, and especially in view of Ong Pang Boon’s stricture on the private sector, the HUDC need not worry anymore. After Ong had said his piece, the Straits Times, immediately and heartily endorsed his views, followed by the Business Times editorial, somewhat tardily, on 29 November. But the minister and the media were up against the psychology of the moment.

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Since 1971, buyers and developers had been asking for CPF funds to be used for purchasing private property. The government allowed CPF funds for HDB and HUDC purchases, but firmly drew the line at private property. In the current runaway market, buyers returned to the charge, with super inflation as their ally. This time, the final stronghold of government resistance was breached. The government (Ong excepted?) was convinced by the inflation argument. The official mantra now was that property was a hedge against inflation. It seems totally bizarre until you think further, that in order to beat inflation in the long run, you need something with the power of super inflation, and that could only be property — the single sure-fire inflation fighter. Ong Pang Boon spoke of tight housing market and the developers’ waywardness as matters to be addressed before freeing the CPF further. He declared his views on 16 November 1980. Less than two weeks later, on 28 November, Sia Kah Hui, the acting minister for labour, made the formal announcement in parliament on the CPF and private property, but without taking into account Ong’s reservations. As the Straits Times pointed out, Sia “made no mention of equating supply and demand as a condition”.63 Instead, he seemed to have pulled up all the stops. He was, to quote the Straits Times again, “certainly far more generous and liberal than the hopes of even the most optimistic”.64 However, Sia mentioned two phases of implementation. In the first phase from 1 June 1981, CPF savings can be used “to redeem the whole or part of the outstanding mortgage on one residential property”.65 In the second phase, from 1 January 1982, the scheme will be extended to allow a CPF member to purchase a private residential property for his own living in or for rent. “It does not matter if the member is already a property owner,” the Straits Times clarified.66 He may still use his CPF savings to purchase another residential property. A CPF member may combine with anyone in his immediate family, who also has a CPF account, to make a joint purchase. The two-stage plan was clearly intended to allow a delay for the supply of houses to increase. Goh Chok Tong, the minister for trade and industry, predicted that when the first phase begins in June 1981, “property prices

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will go up initially because of greater demand”.67 But when the supply of houses is increased later on, “hopefully, we should see some stabilization of property prices”.68 Since the middle class dream was a private residential property and the middle class fear was to see their CPF savings eroded by inflation, the government decided to grant them their wish and to calm their fears. The middle classes were important to the nation. For this reason, Sia Kah Hui, the acting labour minister, was prepared to be indulgent to even those who preferred not to live in HDB or HUDC housing. They too must be helped to become a part of the home-owning democracy. Another reason springs to mind. The government was at this time, beginning in 1979, embarked on an economic restructuring in which the role of the middle income groups was crucial. Ever since the HDB started in 1960, the government had given priority to housing the lower-income groups. By 1979, “with two-thirds of the population living in our housing estates”,69 the government was able to refocus and do something for the middle-income groups. This was a delicate exercise as the government could easily be seen as favouring the better off. Take for example the government’s argument about inflation. Inflation, no respecter of persons, affected everybody, the rich and the poor alike. Yet a private property owner could buy another property using his CPF funds, as a hedge against inflation, whereas a HDB or HUDC flat owner was not allowed this privilege. The obvious reason is that the latter already enjoyed a government subsidy built into their properties. But being human they did not see it this way. They could, however, take comfort from the fact that their flats had tripled or quadrupled in price since they first bought them several years ago. The government found a way to sweeten their prospects further. They were at liberty to sell their flats, after five years’ occupancy, for a tidy profit, and reapply for another one at the prevailing subsidized price. Many took advantage of this scheme which the government aptly termed “getting a second bite of the cherry”. Few countries have been able to house their citizens as adequately as Singapore has. None has achieved this level of property-owning democracy.

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The New Middle Classes The war-baby and post-war baby boomer generation were a people undergoing rapid change. Change that might have taken many more decades to work out was, in their case, compressed into their growing up years. The speed with which they transited from under class to middle class had resulted in their being middle class in material and tangible assets, but not in their intellect, not in their emotions, not in their tastes, and not in civic virtues, and responsibilities. The signs of a newly arrived middle class were to be seen everywhere. Note, for instance, the great number of privately owned cars on the roads, the complaints of inadequate parking lots at HDB estates, and parking fee hikes, the overnight queues by residents for season parking tickets, and the call for multi-storey car parks which the HDB eventually had to build. Another sign was the upward trading from the three-room to four- and five-room flats, abetted by the HDB’s own desire to innovate and try out improved and bigger units all the time. After buying their flats, the proud owners went to great lengths to renovate them, sometimes at a cost equal to the price of the flats. Ministers and MPs were horrified by the profligacy of it, which they saw as defeating the whole purpose of asset-building. The middle class family is a nuclear family, formed when children leave their parent’s home to live in a home of their own with their marriage partners and own children. Dr Toh Chin Chye observed this happening in his constituency of Rochore with some concern. He was MP in an area comprising streets of shopkeepers, hawkers, trishaw riders, and street markets, and the haunts of low life — Bugis Street and Johore Road. Dr Toh waved aside transvestites and the like as human nature for which he could offer little help, but on another problem, he believed that the progress being made in education and employment should mean a reduction in the number of hawkers and trishaw riders. Dr Toh cited figures showing the increase in the number of pupils in primary and secondary schools, and emphasized that education in primary schools was free, and “admission to tertiary institutions was based on merit alone”.70 As a result, many children of hawkers in the constituency had graduated as doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. “However, they have moved away from the constituency

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and left their parents behind to continue hawking,” he said.71 “It would be a good idea for children who have succeeded in life to support their parents and persuade them to retire from hawking.”72 Rochore was full of human interest stories. In some cases, the children were thinking of their own face-saving and not so much the plight of their parents. The children were ashamed of meeting their parents hawking or riding a trishaw.73 But the parents, to their credit, had none of this misplaced sense of ignominy. Rather they had their pride too, and had every reason to feel proud, for out of their humble loins had come these achievers. Besides, they were accustomed to their way of work, which they did not think so demeaning. They had their friends where they were, and the freedom of the streets. They united in associations. In July 1972, Dr Toh was presented with five commemorative banners said to come from the shopkeepers’ associations and hawkers’ associations of Albert Street, Queen Street, Johore Road, and Ophir Road. The nuclear family became the norm. Rapid social mobility was the cause. The result was the pressure on the work of the HDB, the biggest home builder. The HDB annual report of 1975–76 mentioned “the pressure… generated by babies born during the population boom of post-war years who have grown up to form their own family nuclei in the late 1960s and early 1970s”.74 The number of applicants on the waiting list to purchase flats peaked in March 1974 at 80,378. The government worried that this meant the demise of the traditional Asian family where grandparents, parents, and children stayed under one roof. In August 1977, the HDB tried a scheme in Ang Mo Kio whereby parents and their marriageable-age children jointly balloted for flats so that they could be next door neighbours. The snag was that the parents would have to sell the flats they currently owned “at cost” to people on the HDB’s waiting list.75 The difference in price between the flats they had to give up and the new flats they had to buy was a deterrent to many parents. The HDB came back with another scheme in April 1982. It was a followup on a proposal by Prime Minister Lee in his Chinese New Year message in February that year to bring back the three-generation family. The lure in this scheme was that applicants would have their registration with the HDB

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moved forward by three years or so, no small advantage given that the normal waiting period was three-and-a-half to four years. Even so there were relatively few takers.76 The young, rapidly westernising Singaporeans who were the new middle classes, were behaving like their counterparts in the first world, leaving the parental nest to be on their own. There was no arresting this trend which the government itself was, ironically, fostering by educating everybody in English and opening the society to western businesses and influences. The young educated or skilled workers, and professionals moving up to the ranks of the middle classes, were fortunate to have peers and older and wiser men to guide and intercede for them. Dr Goh Keng Swee advised wage earners about life insurance.77 They ought to make sure that their families would continue to be in possession of their HDB flats should they, the breadwinners, die. Anyone who has bought a property on long term mortgage, Dr Goh said, has offered a hostage to fortune. They had a champion in H.E. Cashin, a Singapore-born (in 1920) barrister of standing and seniority. The plight of a mother and wife reported in the press moved Cashin to write to the Straits Times on the subject of estate duty. He stated: The Government is at the moment encouraging the public to buy their own homes, no doubt with the very sound idea of creating a strong middle class who will feel that they will have a stake in modern Singapore. In developed countries where the middle class has existed for several generations, a careful family can plan to meet estate duties well in advance, and the ages of members of such a family are, after two or three generations sufficiently varied for there to be more than one bread winner in the family group… In the case of a new developing country such as Singapore, with an emerging middle class, the situation is very different.78 Cashin continued, hypothetically stating: Should a wage earner buy “a housing unit” and die, leaving behind three or four children (families were big in 1971 when he wrote this), “destitution stares that family in the face”.79

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He asked: “Is it not time for the legislature to review the law so as to give relief in respect of family homes?”80 Dr Augustine Tan, in one of his platitudinous speeches in parliament, exclaimed on 19 February 1981: “People who own private property cannot afford to die.”81 Suppose a person “dies and leaves a semi-detached house worth $500,000”, he said.82 “His heirs are allowed exemption of $200,00 and would have to find cash to pay estate duty on the remaining $300,000.”83 He stated his point vividly. But he had forgotten that as of 1 January 1981, the exemption rate for residential property was raised from $200,000 to $600,000. As a further concession, the exemption limit was extended to “include the full value of one residential property”84 in 1982. This was how much the government cared for middle class family home ownership.85 H.E. Cashin and Dr Augustine Tan had not advocated in vain. The middle income and lower income families lived in separate areas, a fault of HDB planning dateable from 1972, if not earlier, when five-room flats were first built. The government’s planning of Neptune Court and Lagoon View for civil servants in 1973 was later seen as having erroneously created a special enclave. It took a social work lecturer, John Ang, to say that it was desirable to have a mix of socio-economic groups in an HDB estate. But it took Prime Minister Lee’s comment to effect a change. At a Chinese New Year gettogether in his constituency of Tanjong Pagar on 8 February 1981, Lee spoke of the “vast gulf” between his constituents in the three-room flats at Tanjong Pagar Plaza and the five-room flats at Spottiswoode Park, just one or oneand-a-quarter kilometres away.86 The residents at Spottiswoode Park were university graduates and could organize activities at their estate far more smartly than could the residents at Tanjong Pagar Plaza. In his walkabout, Lee noticed that his less educated constituents would come out and meet him. They needed jobs and all sorts of help. But his Spottiswoode constituents were nowhere in sight. He supposed that they would rather stay up in their high-floored homes and watch him on the night’s television news. Lee warned of the perils of a socially divided society, saying to the better-off: “If you are wise you would also take more care of the less able and less well-off neighbours.”87 He was careful not to say that everybody

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should be equal; genetically and economically, they could not be, but there could be empathy. The children from the three-roomers may well be in the ‘A’ class [in the same schools as the children of the five-roomers]. But the chances are, there will be more bright children from the better educated parents who themselves are brighter, and who are found in the five-roomers and in the HUDCs. But, nevertheless, an easy social mix blunts, mutes, and dissolves resentment and gives that feeling of oneness and unity, crucial for social progress.88 Lee also regretted the mentality of the residents at Neptune Court and Laguna Park (an HUDC estate). In a similar vein, Dr Tony Tan, minister for trade and industry, said “senior government servants, taxi drivers, and ordinary workers should all be together in the same HDB estate”.89 It was not only the social classes, but ethnic groups, Chinese, Indians, and Malays, should also be mixed together, he said. Their isolation from each other “would lead to misunderstandings, tensions, and rumours, and may mean the return of the racial riots” of the 1960s.90

Conclusion The PAP was ideological when it came to power in 1959, but it quickly realized that ideology would not pay the bills. The PAP Government grasped that, as in the past, so in the present and future, Singapore’s destiny must be as a cosmopolis open to the world, and that the world in their time was dominated by multinationals looking for a location with connectivity, stability, and ability. The partnership between government, business enterprise, and workers was key to the new republic’s rapid economic success in the age of multinational giants. The National Wages Council was one institution showing this partnership in action. Public housing, in a less obvious way, was another. In building homes for the people for rent and sale at subsidized rates, the government was guaranteeing a more congenial workforce for the multinationals, one that would not press for wage increases.

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Public housing paid off in other ways too — by giving national servicemen a personal asset to defend, by supporting the institution of the family, and by promoting a sense of belonging to the nation. Not the least importantly, the government’s right to rule, its political legitimacy, was enhanced. The economic and housing policies came in time for the war baby and post-war baby boomer generation. Many who belonged to this generation knew poverty as children and adolescents, but got out of it to become civil servants and professionals. New to this status and young in years, they were, perhaps for this reason, even more self-consciously and ostentatiously middle class. This was manifested in a range of behaviour types: the restless upgrader looking to trade up from smaller to bigger flats, and from public to private developments, the houseproud who would break the bank to refurbish his flat, the elitists, embarrassed by the coolie occupations of their parents, the self-centred nitpickers, sharp-eyed on maintenance in their estates, but oblivious to the need to serve the less well off in another estate. The PAP Government aimed to create a home-owning democracy. But where does the democracy come in? It comes in the life-changing experience of Singaporeans as they rose from poverty to affluence. People who worked could see the material transformation of their lives. For those who did not reach the top or near the top, the government had plans to give them smaller rewards, consolation prizes. This was in accordance with the principle of trade-off between economic growth and nation-building that Dr Goh talked about. The prime minister shared this view. In Lee’s Singapore, wealth creation divided people into two “nations”, the best and the rest. And wealth creation had to come first. But sooner than anyone imagined, Lee thought of a viable way to spread the wealth around by acquiring land, Robin Hood style, and asking the HDB to launch the home ownership scheme in 1964. The point which needs emphasizing is the rapidity and certainty with which the middle classes had arisen. D.J. Enright, Professor of English, 1960 to 1970, who returned after twenty-five years for a celebratory reunion arranged by his former students, wrote in his last poem on Singapore: “I knew these people when they were poor, I’m glad to see them prosperous.”91 For a democracy to succeed, there had to be an educated middle class,

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preferably a prosperous one. This, Singapore certainly had, though the middle classes were as yet in a raw state, and needed the refiner’s fire. Finally, an important and enlightening detail, and it comes not from a politician or a sociologist or historian, but from the mouths of property agents. It relates to the question of the difference between the Chineseeducated and the English-educated, which was a recurring theme in this period. The source of this information is the write-up by a journalist, Tan Wang Joo, based on interviews, with no names mentioned. “One peculiarity” which “all housing agents” had noted, Tan wrote, was “the small number of English-stream school teachers compared to Chinese [stream] teachers who own an extra house — usually a semidetached worth $60,000 to $70,000 [early 1970s prices]… for renting out”.92 An estate agent ventured to “generalize that the English-educated spend more freely than the Chinese-schooled, who save everything they can, putting security for the future before the here and now”.93 Another agent described the procedure: “Most of these teachers make a small down payment of $5,000 or $10,000 as required by the developers, and get a loan from a building or finance company to pay off the instalments.”94 They would rent out the better of the two properties they owned, and stay in the other one themselves. The Chinese-educated were overcoming their marginalization in society by adding to their assets as landlords. It was not so long ago that the Chinese-educated were reputed for their revolutionary fervour and the overturning of society. But it was a colonial society that they were rising up against. With independence and a more sympathetic PAP Government, things certainly were changing. Chinese-medium school teachers, receiving a more equitable pay than before, were turning it to good account with frugality and prudence. They invested in property. They did so quietly and in unknown numbers and were as shadowy as in the days of their conspiracy against the colonial society. They were small property investors and rentiers, but then, many of the biggest Chinese property investors and rentiers were, likewise, faceless and anonymous, deliberately avoiding publicity. Hidden in the story of the emergent middle classes is this subplot which tells of the Chinese-educated converting themselves from invisible

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revolutionaries into invisible rentiers. The principle of a home-owning democracy so assiduously adhered to by the PAP Government is all the more meaningful because of it. NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

Ray Tyers, Singapore Then and Now (Singapore: University Education Press, 1976); revised and updated by Siow Jin Hua (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1993), p. 185. Sharon Siddique and Nirmala Puru Shotam, Singapore’s Little India Past, Present and Future (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), p. 129, states: “…the destruction of the old [Kandang Kerbau] market, popularly known as Tekka market, and its replacement by the towering, new multi-storeyed Zhu Jiao Centre, is a seemingly small shift across the road, has had economic repercussions, sorely felt by Serangoon Road enterprises”. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), p. 116. Ibid., p. 117. Republic of Singapore, Official Report, Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 45, 1985, col. 1139. Ibid. Ibid., col. 1139 to 1140. Ibid., col. 1139. Ibid. Ibid. Ameen Ali Talib, “Hadramis in Singapore”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 17, no. 1 (1997): 90–93. The MPs who queried the HDB’s claim to have subsidized flats included Dr Augustine Tan, member for Whampoa, and Chiam See Tong, secretarygeneral of the Singapore Democratic Party, who won a seat in the 1984 general election, and was the member for Potong Pasir. Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), pp. 343–44. Ibid., p. 587. Ibid., pp. 628–29. Ibid., p. 344. Lee said the government’s aim “is to try and get a unique society set up out of extraordinary circumstances, of near despair, to become a 100% property-owning democracy”, Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 45, col. 1140.

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18 Housing and Development Board, Annual Report (Singapore: HDB, 1963), p. 1. 19 Annual Report of the HDB, 1968, p. 16. 20 Ibid. 21 Straits Times, 6 September 1968. 22 Straits Times, 9 April 1969. 23 Yongjin Zhang, China in International Society since 1949: Alienation and Beyond (London: Macmillan and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, 1998), p. 71. 24 Straits Times, 29 June 1971. 25 Straits Times, 30 June 1971. 26 Straits Times, 28 March 1974. 27 Straits Times, 21 August 1973. 28 Straits Times, 11 September 1973. 29 Ibid. 30 Straits Times, 6 October 1976. 31 Straits Times, 1 December 1973. 32 Straits Times, 17 March 1972. 33 Business Times, 30 May 1977. 34 Straits Times, 12 April 1971. 35 Business Times, 6 December 1977. 36 Business Times, 3 March 1982. 37 Ibid. 38 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 40, 1981, col. 775. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Annual Report of the HDB, 1979/1980, p. 8. 42 Ibid. 43 Straits Times, 17 December 1979. 44 Straits Times, 15 April 1980. 45 Ibid. 46 Business Times, 17 April 1980. 47 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 40, 1981, col. 999. 48 Ibid., col. 990–91. 49 Ibid., col. 998. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Straits Times, 15 April 1980. 54 Ibid. 55 Straits Times, 25 May 1981.

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85

Straits Times, 24 January 1980. Straits Times, 6 September 1980. Straits Times, 17 November 1980. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 14 November 1980. Straits Times, 29 November 1980. Ibid. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 39, 1979/1980, col. 1545. Straits Times, 29 November 1980. Ibid. Ibid. Annual Report of the HDB, 1978/1979, p. 5. Straits Times, 3 July 1972. Ibid. Ibid. Ann Wee, senior fellow in social work, kindly informed me. Annual Report of the HDB, 1975/1976, p. 42 Straits Times, 10 March 1978. Straits Times, 12 May 1985. Straits Times, 26 June 1971. The wage earner could buy a policy from the NTUC life insurance cooperative which catered to the class of people — small businessmen, hawkers, and taxi drivers — that the big insurance companies left out. See Goh Keng Swee, The Economics of Modernization (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1972), p. 93. Straits Times, 19 November 1971. Ibid. Ibid. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 40, 1981, col. 198. Ibid. Ibid. The government raised the exemption limit on estate duty from $50,000 to $100,000 from 1 April 1977. It raised the exemption limit again in 1979 from $100,000 to $200,000. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 41, 1981/1982, col. 552. As a further aid to home ownership, the government granted a concession in property tax to citizens who were owner occupants. Non-citizens had to pay “the normal full tax based on the prevailing rate and annual value”. Even better news, the government was going to reduce the property tax rate. On 19 January

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86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

1979, Tan Kim Lee, president of the Singapore Institute of Valuers, said “the institute welcomes the gradual reduction in property tax rate from 36 per cent to 23 per cent by 1983” (Straits Times, 20 January 1979). Straits Times, 9 February 1981. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 25 August 1981. Ibid. D.J. Enright, Play Resumed: A Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 148. Straits Times, 23 April 1972. Ibid. Ibid.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Nation permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.University Individualand articles are• 359 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

F O U R T E E N

University and Nation

S

ingapore had two universities, and their story epitomizes two different worlds of language, culture, and politics. The University of Singapore, opened in 1949, on the basis of pre-war colleges, was colonial-sponsored, and taught in the English medium. The staff consisted of a high proportion of expatriates, mostly British nationals during the colonial era, but more international thereafter. The graduates went on to jobs in the civil service, statutory boards, and the private sector comprising western banks and commercial houses. Nanyang University was the unwanted child of the colonial era. It was born at a time of resurgent Chinese pride in their language and culture, inspired by Maoist China. Operational in 1956, Nanyang University offered monumental proof of how Chinese self-help could overcome British objections, but also of how the university could be turned into a symbol of the anti-colonial revolution. Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock had the first crack at the Nanyang University problem, but his party was soon defeated in the May 1959 election. Then the task fell on Prime Minister Lee. In fact, Lee had two universities to think about, and two different types of problems. Nanyang University needed recognition for its degrees, and job outlets for its graduates. The degrees of the University of Singapore were recognized and jobs were ready-made for its graduates, but it was a colonial university which needed to be made relevant to the post-independent Singapore. This chapter deals with Lee’s ideas and actions on the remaking of the University of Singapore, occasioned by his encounters with the staff and 359

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students of this institution. Lee had often envisioned to himself and his cabinet colleagues the kind of university he would like to have. His envisioning should be understood in relation to the socio-political milieu of the emergent Afro-Asian world to which he belonged. He was at the younger end of the first generation of national leaders which included, in the order in which he named them, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Don Senanayake, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Dr Hastings Banda, Julius Nyerere, and Milton Obote. “They have all been through universities”, he said, setting an example to their people of the efficacy of university education and inspiring them to emulate. The result has been that a university came to mean a great deal, “is indeed a status symbol of immense political magnitude in all the newly independent countries”.1 Sadly, in the post-independence era, according to Lee’s scenario, the degree-holders failed to live up to the promise. In the pre-independence phase, the national leaders did fulfil their promise, as freedom fighters espousing the cause of the dispossessed. But their successors, the second or post-independence generation, were mere job fillers. The popularization of university education had produced only knowledge imbibers and job fillers. Something had gone wrong. The people became disillusioned. The generals staged their coup. The communists seized their chance: They had never stopped representing the dispossessed.

Wanted: Thinkers and Technocrats Lee read through “a great mass of data” on universities in Afro-Asia, and came to certain conclusions and lessons.2 He was amazed that seventy-five per cent of these universities, apart from those in Japan, were established after independence. It struck him too that the faculties that were set up were invariably the easier ones to establish — “the Arts and the Humanities”. In addition, they had the standard medical and law faculties. But, “very few” had science and technology faculties. Singapore was in the same situation as these countries in having produced an educated elite in the traditional sense. Lee elaborated, saying of this elite that they had a certain level of

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literacy, they could perhaps administer the country, they could cure bodily ills, and they could assist in the legal process. But Lee meant to stress that this elite was not a technocracy: “…they can, in fact, increase your population and your capacity to consume, but they are unable to increase the things that the people want to consume. Your men who can produce your modern industrial society — your industrial chemists, your technocrats — are missing.”3 And this was the danger: “…the more you persist in producing men who are educated, but unable to increase your productive capacity, the more you are heading for an unstable situation.”4 Japan was the only one of the countries Lee surveyed to have “emerged as an industrial state”. He looked with particular interest at the student-toteacher ratio at the tertiary level in Japan. In 1964–65, with a student population of about 285,000, the student-to-teacher ratio was 10:2. By contrast, India, with a tertiary student population of 1,107,000 had a student to teacher ratio of 100:3. The secret was in a favourable ratio, but Lee also reminded himself that technocrats were not made by starting at the tertiary level. “You begin in the secondary [school] stage.” This accounts for the emphasis on science and technical subjects noted in Chapter Twelve. Lee considered China relevant to his survey, but could get no figures on the student population. But he discovered that the PRC had fifteen universities for the Arts and Sciences, and 125 engineering, technological, medical, agricultural, and other specialized institutes or colleges. He believed “the key” to China’s rise as an industrial power was in the hands of these 125 schools. More important than technocrats, in Lee’s estimate, were the thinkers. “I think the biggest dearth of talent in the university in a situation such as ours [meaning Afro-Asia] is not just a lack in the skills in the technologies required for a developed society or an industrial community, but even more important and more urgent, the corps of informed thinking to lead, formulate, and guide national thought on constructive lines. It is because this is lacking that military leaders can take over.”5 Who were these thinkers? They were people of learning and scholarship who were honoured especially in a society “like ours”, Lee said, and who

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must in turn give an “informed lead” on important matters. If they failed to do so, their people might begin “to accept xenophobic, obscurantist, absurd policies which are in no way related to their economic problems”.6 Lee defined the purpose of a university as firstly, to produce teachers, administrators, and professionals — accountants, architects, lawyers, and technocrats — “just the people to do jobs in a modern civilised community”.7 The second purpose which the university should serve was, to him, “even more important”: “It is to lead thinking — informed thinking — into the problems which the nation faces.”8 The University of Singapore, he judged, has fulfilled the first purpose: It has produced teachers and administrators, and “some of the people required in the professions and some of the technocrats”. But it has not fulfilled its second role: “Definitive thinking; the definition and exposition of your problems, and the tentative search for solutions.”9 On the eve of the opening of the University of Malaya in 1949, James Puthucheary, Malayan nationalist of the radical left, had expounded on exactly such a social and intellectual role that the new university must serve if it was to justify its existence. Lee learned, from doing the work of prime minister, the practical meaning of what Puthucheary had theorized. Lee said: “Today, unlike what political leaders face in developed situations, I have both to expound the problem and then propound the solution in so many fields. There is no informed coherent thought [to draw on], whether [it] is economics, defence, or problems of nation-building.”10 Lee went on to talk about the lack of a think-tank: When you discuss a subject like British defence, the British Defence Minister and his colleagues have already the problem defined for them by institutes of strategic studies, by men who make it their business to anticipate the role that Britain can play in the next decade, the costs of the various alternative roles that Britain could adopt. This leaves the final decision a much easier one, the problem having been defined, the terms of reference. There is unfortunately for us no such group.11

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Lee conceded that he was not alone, as the other first-generation national leaders were in the same predicament. But he asserted, speaking for himself and his cabinet colleagues: “It is for this reason — to develop this second role, develop the men who could fulfil the second role — that we pay for a university.”12 If the university did no more than produce the needed manpower, Lee asked would it not be cheaper and better to shut it down and send students to established universities abroad? He reasoned: And they will probably come back with more windows [opened] in their minds — which is most important — with a broader perspective after seeing the world, after seeing how other societies live. They will probably come to know that, really, they do not belong there but belong here, and come back the same way as my colleagues and I have come back, saying: “How do I make my society better?”13 Indeed, Lee was to send many batches of bright students abroad. But, at the same time, he realized he could not do without a home university. Like his peers elsewhere, he had “that pride in [a national] self”. More importantly, he wanted “to create an institution” that could generate on its own a constant stream of thinkers “imbued with the values of our society, keenly alive to its problems, and able to respond to [them]”.14

Meaning of National University The prime minister took to reading as “a valuable respite” from affairs of state. The working papers of a seminar on the role of universities in economic and social development, held at the University of Singapore on 7 February 1966, were of interest to him as leader of the government, and elicited strong reactions from him in his keynote opening speech. He was struck by the fact that so many of the contributors were “not our nationals” and that “the better papers” came from expatriates teaching at the university.15 “By their very background”, he said, “they cannot have the same feel [as nationals] for the aspirations on the ground”, but he commended them for

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their clear thinking on objectives.16 He looked for “a [particular] line of thought” from the local staff, but what he read “left [him] gasping at the futility of this university if this, in fact, epitomizes their values”.17 He cited one paper in which the writer took the posture of being “carelessly indifferent to any special local interest which a university in this part of the world should cater for”.18 Lee exclaimed: “If he is indifferent — and carelessly indifferent — to what we are facing, then I say, ‘What am I doing, pouring public funds into this institution?’ ”19 This was likely to have been one of the seminal episodes feeding into Lee’s distrust of, and contempt for, an educated elite incapable of appreciating what their people and their country needed. Lee mulled over this episode for a few days prior to the seminar, and concluded that what was wrong with “the people who set the thinking and teaching in this university” was that they were “thinking and teaching ‘in vacuo’ ”.20 He added that unless this was remedied, “it is unlikely that a national university will ever emerge. You can have your nationals in it, but your nationals will be thinking irrelevantly”.21 Lee elaborated, with examples. He cited the personage of Lord Butler, the then recently appointed (in 1965) Master of Trinity, Cambridge. This was R.A. Butler, who in the course of a long career in politics and government, had been home minister, foreign minister, chancellor of the exchequer, and cruelly missed becoming prime minister, before finally attaining a life peerage and the headship of a college. Next, Lee mentioned the late Sir Ivor Jennings, whose obituaries he had recently read. Jennings, a professor of law and sometime vice-chancellor in Ceylon and at Cambridge, had a hand in drafting the Malayan Constitution. Then, there was J.K. Galbraith, the Harvard professor of economics, with whom Lee was acquainted, who was renowned for making important concepts and issues accessible to lay readers, listeners, and TV viewers. “These were men of the world”, Lee said, in the sense that they engaged with the problems of the world, and were concerned with what they could do to help their countries meet the challenges and responsibilities of the age.22 So what action did Lee have in mind to take? It is inconceivable that having expounded the problem, he would settle back into inaction. He

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certainly wanted local staff to break out of their cocoon, and gain some experience of how the world worked. He said, reiterating a point he made earlier: “I thought to myself that unless we begin this process of educating ourselves, it is unlikely that we will ever have a national university.”23 Referring again to the paper which had so angered him, he said he was convinced that if the then vice-chancellor, Professor Lim Tay Boh, an economist specialized in theories of economic and industrial development, “had also spent ten years” with the Economic Development Board “actually grappling with the problem of how to create 10,000 jobs every year”, he would never have read what he did “anywhere in any contribution”.24 Lee looked forward to the day when the man in charge of the university would have more than their years of learning, thesis-writing, and teaching “as the sum total of their background”. He wondered whether, after a man has had an active life leading economic development or industrial research or planning, he “would not then be able to do an effective job” in the university. Lee believed young lecturers too would benefit “if they were given a dose of the realities, first of this society, then of the outer world”.25 Lee proposed the secondment of academics to government or statutory bodies, and of administrators from the ministries of finance and education to the university. The academics and the administrators (who represented the government and held the purse strings) would benefit from “this broadening of [their] roles and this interchange of experience”.26 Through this method, “we could develop an approach, an ethos, in the university more in keeping with the problems we face”.27 Lee judged the university by the character of its students as well. In his legal and political work, he has had occasion to note the contrast between Chinese Middle School students, self-possessed and confident from knowing they belonged to a community, language, and culture, and English-educated undergraduates, too deracinated to have any such composure and certainty. The male undergraduates had a prank, which was to raid the women’s college and “disappear with their underwear”.28 It was a prank straight out of a western university setting. But, to Lee, the thought that undergraduates in a society “faced with the dire problems of life and death” could have the leisure for such frivolity was simply beyond him.29 It was an indictment, he said, “not just of the students”, but of their teachers and of the political

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leadership too, for failing to bring home to them the urgency, and acuteness of these problems, and to lead them to think with (sombre) inspiration.30 The blame, Lee said, should extend way back to the secondary schools, to those two decades of crash programmes in teacher training, to the mass-produced-learn-on-the-job-teachers, “with result that quality was sacrificed”.31 Lee defined one problem for the academics to crack their heads over and explain to him: How to turn out students who were not just knowledge imbibers for a degree, but “politically complete citizen[s]”.32 With that, Lee made his penultimate statement on the meaning of a national university: When the university is able to creatively pursue the problems of our society, define them, and then set out to attack them and provide solutions, then I say the university has been established, it has become a national university.33 Lee added a caveat “to remind my nationalists that having a national university means more than just having nationals manning” it.34 “It means an organism which responds to the needs and the challenge[s] of our time in this particular part of the world and in this society”.35 Finally, the hallmark of arrival: And when we succeed in producing an unending and self-generating corps of men who can do this with ever-increasing quality in standards, then we have succeeded in establishing civilized standards for a satisfying community in the post-independence phase.36

Creating a National University The University of Singapore had a large number of expatriate staff who stayed on in the post-independence era, and new expatriates who came to fill positions in old and new faculties and departments. This means that the national university has to be created with the help of expatriates, a paradox certainly, but with goodwill and understanding, not a hopeless task. The new expatriates of the 1960s period thought the university had a lot going

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for it. For a start, they liked the government and politics of the country they were teaching in. D.J. Enright, Johore Professor of English Literature and head of department, 1960–70, wrote in his memoirs that he had “a good deal of sympathy for the first indigenous government of an ex-colonial territory”.37 Roland Puccetti, Professor of Philosophy and head of department, 1966–71, was attracted by the university’s “setting in a democratic-socialist country with avowed liberal ideals and a cosmopolitan, multireligious, and multiracial society”. They could not have been more well disposed to the business of creating a national university. Puccetti, who became president of the University of Singapore Academic Staff Association, testified of the expatriate staff that they “were dedicated teachers willing to identify themselves with a national university responsive to community needs”.38 Puccetti had thereby offered a definition not all that dissimilar from Lee’s. But what the expatriate staff, notably some leading figures like Puccetti, were not ready to do was to surrender control of the university to the nation state. The nation state in this context means the government, which sets the agenda for nationbuilding. And this was the rub. The issue was not how to make a national university or what kind of national university, but who rules the national university-to-be. Is it the government, in which case it has the right to call the shots, or is it the academics, who should then have the right to determine their own affairs? It was an issue of great importance not only to the expatriates, but the local staff and the students as well, who were nurtured in the received wisdom believed to have been handed down from the sacred groves of Cambridge and Oxford. This was the notion that the university was an autonomous or free institution, in other words, the notion of academic freedom. The believers would staunchly defend this right or freedom as fundamental to their institutional and intellectual life, and any compromise of it was anathema to them. Yet the concept of academic freedom was conspicuously missing from Lee’s discussion of the role or purpose of a university. But the academics would not let him forget it so easily. Puccetti had come because the university, “though state-supported… still enjoyed a large measure of autonomy”, 39 and he meant to keep it that way. But Lee stressed

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the primacy of national interests and national identity. The failure of the expatriate and local staff too to appreciate this was the source of the tensions and crises in relations between the university and the government. Lee eventually had to appoint a senior cabinet minister, Dr Toh Chin Chye, as vice-chancellor to give the university a national direction. Dr Toh was an academic himself, a reader in physiology, before he entered the government. Even so, his coming as vice-chancellor was viewed by the academics as representing government interference up to the limits. Those who felt particularly strongly about this, writhed in mental agony, pique, and finally ended in resignation (in more than one sense). Puccetti, who was clearly in this company, was to write back in anger: “From a postcolonial institution the university quickly passed, in the space of a few short years, to an extension of an authoritarian government…”40 Was Puccetti’s judgement correct? What new light can be shed by revisiting his judgement? The staff and students were convinced of academic freedom as a universal, immutable truth. Were they right? How did the prime minister seek to enlighten them? What arguments did he use? Lee and the university were on common ground as far as the terms of reference in their arguments go: These were U.K. precedents and examples. This being the case, it is pertinent to ask how the expansion in higher education in the United Kingdom since the 1960s had reopened the issue of who governs the university — the nation state or the dons’ own council — and what implications this has on the positions taken by Lee and the staff of the University of Singapore who disputed with him.

Enright’s Erroneous Entrée People were so anxious and vigilant over academic freedom that they would invoke it even in situations where there was no reason to suppose that it was being threatened. This episode is a case in point. There is a general consensus that this episode was the first skirmish between the university and the government. Professor D.J. Enright was at the centre of it. As was the tradition for newly appointed professors, he gave an inaugural lecture in the evening of 17 November 1960. His topic

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was “Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism”, but he devoted the first fifth of his lecture to a preamble of what culture was about and how it might be acquired. Enright had come just as the government’s cultural initiatives were getting under way, and his lecture would have been highly relevant to these efforts if all had gone well. He clearly meant to contribute to (as he saw it) a continuing debate, and to this end, he handed an advance copy of the entire lecture to a reporter of the Straits Times. He had no idea of the trouble this would cause him. As Enright wrote in his memoirs: “The next morning, I awake, fully inaugurated, to find that the local English-language paper, the Straits Times, had printed a report of the proceedings under banner headlines, ‘HANDS OFF’ CHALLENGE TO ‘CULTURE VULTURES’…”41 The paper had set him up as an insulting, sneering critic of the government’s attempt to create a Malayan culture, “a sarong culture”, he was quoted as saying, “complete with pantun competitions”.42 His remarks on the government’s ban on jukeboxes and pornography in print and film (aspects of the anti-yellow campaign) were also highlighted, with snippets of advice culled from his lecture, such as that all cultures contained a trace of “yellow”. Enright’s liberal, populist view of culture as “something personal”, and his injunction: “Leave the people free to make their own mistakes, to suffer, and to discover” were made to look like an attack on the government’s top-down approach to culture.43 This deliberately provocative reporting caused Enright to be summoned before two cabinet ministers, Ahmad bin Ibrahim, acting minister for labour and law, whose department handled professional visit passes, and S. Rajaratnam, the minister of culture, known for his robustness of speech. They lambasted him orally, and in a warning letter handed to him, which used the epithets “mendicant” professor and “beatnik” professor44 reminded him: The days are gone when birds of passage from Europe or elsewhere used to make it a habit of participating from their superhuman heights of European civilization. If you bear this in mind, your stay in this country may be mutually profitable.45

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Later, it was generally agreed that the whole affair was but a storm in a tea-cup. The prime minister, with whom various parties interceded, thought so too, putting the blame on tendentious journalism.46 Enright wrote to the prime minister on 23 November 1960, explaining: I can, with complete sincerity, assure you that I have no desire to interfere in local politics. For I am not speaking now as only an alien in any politics at all. Politics have been the bane of literature and of the teaching of literature. My own political views are rudimentary in the extreme — merely the instinctive attachment to the left which is almost inevitable in anyone born into the British working class in the early 1920s. You will understand my feelings at the tone of the letter handed to me. I am not offended at being called a beatnik or a medicant. I have never begged, though, of course, this public description of me had made my public position very painful and difficult. But I most strongly resent the implication that I am one of those “birds of passage from Europe or elsewhere who used to make it a habit of participating from superhuman heights of European civiliation”.47 Lee replied, commending Enright “for not allowing this unfortunate breeze to upset your other happier experiences of Singapore”.48 He continued: Most of us, whether of old or young civilizations, have our ultrasensitive emotive areas. And it was your misfortune to have provided the material for a sub-editor to titillate such an emotive area. I am sure both my colleagues, the Acting Minister for Labour and Law, and the Minister for Culture, would have been happy to have left your Inaugural Lecture alone, and castigated the tendentious report. Unfortunately, your sense of propriety did not allow this and all the unpleasantness followed.49 However, there was agreement (if in private) between Enright and the government that the Straits Times was the mischievous party. Enright’s

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memoirs, published in 1969, revealed: “I sought to explain… that the reporting of the Straits Times was so selective [not to say sensational] as to be, in effect, tendentious.”50 Lee’s reply to Enright added cordially, and perhaps, finally: “However, I hope you will let this incident lapse and enjoy your years in the chair of English at the University.”51 Lee, on his part, would have been content to forget the business totally, but for the fact that the university students’ union entered the fray. The students passed a resolution condemning the “Singapore Government’s attempt to strangle free discussion in the University”, which carried with 522 who voted for it, five against, and two who abstained.52 Enright was surprised by this show of support, not necessarily for him, but for a principle. It was “quite a remarkable performance on the part of the [English-educated] students”, he opined, in view of the fact that he had known them at first hand to be “a notoriously apathetic, apolitical, and coddled section of the local youth”.53 Ironically, Enright had hit on the same note as Lee in his characterization of the English-educated undergraduates. Ironically too, the professor and the prime minister, in their different ways, were to grow weary of the mindless and repeated invocation of academic freedom. Enright’s complaint was that the “Enright Affair” came to be lodged irrevocably in the public mind as the generic landmark case, while he himself acquired an unwanted mythological status as the victim in an unequal fight for academic freedom, when in fact, it was not apparent that any such principle was involved in the first place. He was a victim, yes, but of the media, and of some governmental overreaction restricted to two individuals in the cabinet. Lee’s problem was the opening of pandora’s box: The issue of academic freedom simply would not go away. He had to address it at the students’ union ball, and again on other occasions. Such was the manner of Enright’s entry into the department and university, where for the next ten years, he was to make an impact that was as positive as it was inspiring, though, perhaps, not as memorable as the impression left by his botched beginning. Sadly, all the excitement of the inaugural occasion was caused by the entrée he served up, while the remaining four-fifths of the banquet went largely unnoticed. Nobody seemed tempted to savour “Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism”.

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The government’s position on the Enright Affair was that academic freedom was not an issue. Rather, the government stated another principle, which was that university lecturers should keep within the bounds of their work, and not wander into an area which belonged to the politician.54 The university lecturer has his province within which he can, and should, enjoy total freedom. This rule sounds simple enough, but, in fact, is not so. If the university lecturer confined himself strictly to his teaching and research, he would be accused of an ivory tower mentality. Lee wanted academics to be more hands-on, more relevant to, and involved in, society. This means they would have to master the art of knowing what they can and cannot handle, and where they may safely land their feet, as in a minefield. This is a highly elusive art and the risks are incalculable. And does this mean that the government which makes the rules would keep them and observe non-interference in the affairs of the university? This proved an impossibility. The next two skirmishes occurred precisely for this reason.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Stand: Valour or Vacuity? The vice-chancellor concerned in this episode was Dr B.R. Sreenivasan, an alumnus of the King Edward Seventh College of Medicine, which became the university’s medical faculty. He had participated in various stages of change in the university. In 1960, when the university bifurcated into a Singapore and a Kuala Lumpur division, to take cognizance of Malaya’s independence, Sreenivasan was principal of the Singapore division and remained so the following year. In 1962, when the Singapore division was constituted as the University of Singapore (and its counterpart in Kuala Lumpur as the University of Malaya), Sreenivasan was appointed vicechancellor by the Singapore government. In February 1963, Prime Minister Lee spoke with the vice-chancellor about a possible security problem involving an expatriate lecturer. This was the period when Singapore’s merger with Malaya was still in the balance. The Malayan Government was alarmed that one J.S. Gregory of the university’s Education Department was receiving “all kinds of literature”

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from Moscow, and recruiting some Malayan students to attend a youth festival or a study tour in Russia.55 Lee thought it was all quite innocuous (he himself was getting material from Moscow), but as the Malayan Government took a different view, he had to act on it. Lee advised the vicechancellor to have a word with Gregory. The vice-chancellor queried whether the university had anything to do with security matters. The University of Singapore Academic Staff Association came into the picture, sending three deputies, Dr F.A.C. Oehlers (Dentistry), Dr E.B. La’Brooy (Pathology), and Dr K.J. Ratnam (Political Science) to see the prime minister. Afterwards, Lee wrote to them on 15 February 1963 summarizing the main points of their position. One, the Association considered that security was not the concern of any academic institution and staff association. It was only concerned with the academic merits of the staff members. Whether a member of the staff like Mr J.S. Gregory should remain in Malaya or not, should depend entirely on his academic qualities for the job, regardless of whether there was security objection to his continued staying. Two, any security objection was a matter entirely for the government and the responsibility should be that of the government alone. The Association was only concerned with academic freedom.56 Lee went on to express his regret for the pedantic and “unrealistic attitude taken both by the Vice-Chancellor and the Academic Staff Association”.57 They were “being naïve” given “the circumstances in which Singapore and the Federation [of Malaya] were in”.58 He reminded them that “after the 31st of August 1963, security and immigration will be the responsibilities of the Central Government and the University must settle these problems with the Central Government”. In the meantime, Lee said, “It is not my intention to have friction with the Central Government on these matters.”59 The University of Singapore Academic Staff Association (USASA) replied, correcting the first point and confirming the second.

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1.

2.

It is not our view that, whether a member of staff should remain in Malaya or not should depend entirely on his academic qualities for the job, regardless of whether there are security objections to his continued stay. However, in our view, the appointment, confirmation, and promotion of the Academic Staff of the University should be based on academic consideration alone. We agree that any security objection is a matter entirely for the government and the responsibility is that of the government. And if action on security grounds is to be taken, it should be by the government, and the University should not be asked to act on its behalf by terminating or by not renewing the appointment of a member of the Academic Staff.60

Academics have a way with words. But Lee thought that they were way off the mark. He reflected on the situation of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where great research was going on, but also a case of defection by a famous Italian professor of nuclear physics, who was working there, to Russia. Lee could not accept the argument that a man’s political loyalty and inclinations were irrelevant so long as he was academically good. He said: “Now if this purist attitude was persisted in, there was bound to be growing difficulty between the government-in-charge of security and the University giving cover to Communist activities under the banner of academic freedom.”61 He did not know at the time of the consultation with the USASA that security powers would be reverting back to him “very shortly” — by 9 August 1965. There was a sequel to Vice-Chancellor Sreenivasan’s stand on a matter of principle, and this time, things came to a head. The origins of this second episode go back a little to the period after the 1959 election, when the new Prime Minister Lee embarked on a contingent plan to provide a way out for Chinese Middle School students caught in their dead-end education system. Year after year, they graduated with nowhere to go, except back to teach in a Chinese-medium school, enlarging the pool of the unemployable, in whose troubled waters the communists were assured of the best catch. As a short-term solution, Lee meant to breach the hallowed halls of the English-

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medium University of Singapore by admitting the better Chinese Middle School graduates. The then vice-chancellor, Professor Alexander Oppenheim, was horrified, but Sreenivasan, who was the principal in charge of the Singapore campus, was more sympathetic and supportive. The scheme hit a snag after he became vice-chancellor. The university had completed the admission of students for the next academic year, and informed the successful applicants, when the government suddenly presented it with a list of those whose admission should be cancelled on security grounds.62 Sreenivasan refused to do this, and was forced to resign in October 1963, as he faced the certainty that the university’s budget would not get passed by Parliament. The students on the list were admitted in the end. The government then made a law which required applicants to institutions of higher education to obtain a suitability certificate as security clearance. The university needed to worry no more about being asked to screen students. Enright and Ernst de Chickera, the Dean of Arts, wrote a joint-letter to the Straits Times on this incident, which went unpublished. Enright then published a poem in the Encounter on the vice-chancellor’s “obtained resignation”.63 Recalling this incident many years later, Enright described Sreenivasan as “a brave vice-chancellor”.64 Sreenivasan’s stand was that it was for the university to decide whom to admit or not to: This was academic freedom. The prime minister, in narrating this episode to a student audience later, said that if it was just a matter of arguing in abstract terms, he could easily have answered back with another principle — “the supremacy of Parliament or the sovereignty of Parliament”.65 Instead, Lee tried to make the vice-chancellor see the problem in organic and tangible terms. He had spent an evening at dinner with him explaining what they were up against before affirming his appointment as vice-chancellor. Something of what Lee said to Sreenivasan — in word, example, and metaphor — is known from an address Lee gave to a student audience, in which he mentioned their conversation. They talked about the university’s admission of Chinese Middle School graduates. “This was necessary”, Lee told Sreenivasan, “it was the right decision”,

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but it entailed a certain amount of “danger”.66 Lee likened it to transferring virulent elements from one bloodstream into another of possibly lower immunity; alternatively, it was as if some tiger fish and piranhas, hitherto kept in a separate tank, were going to be released into the midst of angel fish, black mollies, and red carps. Lee said that Chinese-educated activists had taken over the Political Science Society at the polytechnic, and found their way into the University of Singapore Socialist Club. Thus Lee could not be too careful. When Lim Chin Siong’s brother, Lim Chin Joo, asked to be allowed to come to the University of Singapore to read Law, Lee rejected his request outright. Lee offered him, instead, a scholarship to the University of Auckland, which he turned down, confirming Lee’s suspicions of his motive for choosing the local/national university. Lim Chin Joo remained incarcerated, and read for an external LLB (London) degree, and was later employed in the Registry of Deeds. Despite Lee’s best efforts at political education, the vice-chancellor was no closer to comprehending the problem of national security. He was carrying out his duties in vacuo. Lee cited the Cavendish Laboratory to make the point that science went hand in hand with nationalism and national security. Likewise, the role and reputation of the vice-chancellor and teaching staff of the university should be tied up and identified with national interests.

Academic Freedom and the National University The skirmishes between the prime minister and the vice-chancellor and academic staff raises an important question about the place of academic freedom in a national university. Was the government applying undue pressure on the university? The vice-chancellor and the academic staff would no doubt say yes, their academic freedom was being violated. But the prime minister could and did ask in return: What was the university’s response to society and nation? Should it wash its hands off a matter of national security? Lee took these skirmishes as evidence of the university’s lack of national identity: “This is a situation when there is no self.”67 This brings us to the main issue: How does academic freedom square with becoming a national university.

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Before we tackle this question, we should look into the related question of the state’s financial support of universities. In recent times, universities had become more dependent than ever on the state for both capital and recurrent grants. The minister in charge of education would have to ensure that universities were relevant to the country’s needs. As Lee said to a student audience: Research, teaching, is big business — the business of Governments. You can produce a University — Ngee Ann College can turn herself into a University even without a Charter. So what? You pass out, B.A. [Ngee Ann]. You can make it ‘M.A.’ — double it. Why not add a Ph.D. to it. So what? Where do you go from there? Does that entitle you to status in your society, to jobs? What is your worth, your value to society? It is determined by your usefulness, isn’t it?68 In support of his argument, Lee cited the soul-searching enquiries then going on (in the 1960s) in Britain on how to modernize university curricula, to liberalize admission of the masses, and to revitalize the study of science and technology in an effort to recapture Britain’s lost lead in this field. How does Lee’s view compare with that of scholars who have written about the evolution of university governance? Sheldon Rothblatt argues: “The historical experience is such that we understand that universities can never be wholly autonomous institutions. Their freedom to make decisions… has never, and can never, be absolute. Their freedom is part of a social contract with society, an implicit promise to exchange knowledge for support.”69 Catherine Bargh, Peter Scott, and David Smith, in their jointly authored book, noted “a slow and gradual erosion” of the professors’ power in their university domain from the 1960s to the 1980s, citing “the increasing size and complexity of institutions and growing constraints on resources” among other reasons.70 This decline in what is called “donnish dominion” in U.K. universities was a long-term effect of the changes induced by the Robbins enquiry, following which new universities, “the red bricks” and upgraded polytechnics, came into being, elitism in higher education gave way to massification, and government funding ballooned enormously. When the U.K. Government pumped in so much money, it is inconceivable

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that it did not seek more control. So, as Leslie Wagner puts it: “The era of pushing a cheque through the letter-box and walking away was over. Governments and their funding agencies wanted increasingly [to come in] to ask questions, then to expect answers, then to suggest changes, and then to change the size of the cheque if the changes did not occur”.71 Thus, the spate of recent studies has proven Lee right, and more than that, he had preceded them. Scholars of university governance in developed countries with long histories, like the United Kingdom, had not found it necessary to factor in national identity. But this is something which cannot be taken for granted in a new society and nation like Singapore. National identity should be key to any discussion about academic freedom. Otherwise people would be thinking and speaking in a vacuum. Lee demonstrated this. He read up various books including the Robbins Report on Higher Education (of 1963), considered by many, including the vice-chancellor, Sreenivasan, as a leading mantra. The members of the Robbins committee visited not only tertiary institutions in the United Kingdom, but also those in France, the Federal German Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and the Soviet Union. They made an enlightening comparison between the United Kingdom and other countries in a chapter devoted to the subject of academic freedom. The passage which Lee highlighted had it that the position of many foreign institutions “is certainly not a position of academic freedom in the sense in which it is understood” in the United Kingdom: “Their syllabuses, their appointments, and their expenditure [are] all subject to immediate, and sometimes detailed, control by the State”.72 Yet, the Robbins Report contended: “It would be absurd to deny the quality of much that is done in such institutions, both in teaching and in the advancement of knowledge. Their contribution to the heritage of western culture is undeniable.” “Nevertheless,” the report qualified, “it is a cardinal feature of academic tradition in this country to distrust these arrangements and to regard them as fraught with real danger to the foundations of free societies”.73 The report endorsed this attitude, declaring its preference for the British system above all others. This enabled Lee to argue his first point about “this peculiarly British concept — that a university is something sacrosant”.74 He told his student

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audience: “So do not believe that you are quoting a universal truth when you say, ‘University autonomy, academic freedom’. It is not. It is a peculiarly British concept and one which has been followed in varying degrees throughout the English-speaking world…”75 To trace this concept to its origins, Lee said, one would have to know how the relations between state and church, and between scholarship and government, had evolved in Britain through the ages. He mentioned Cambridge and Oxford, saying they began as ancient monasteries which later transformed into universities to which the gentry of England sent their sons to be educated and then inducted, into the government, the civil service, and the military services. There was “a whole social system interwoven into these universities. They are not distinct and separate from their society”.76 With certain exceptions, the fellows and professors were “all Englishmen determined to nurture British tradition”.77 They had an innate desire to preserve it. “There is a quiet appreciation [by the dons] of the role [they played] that is not spelt out in a book of words”.78 Lee drew an analogy with lawyers and judges he had observed in Singapore, who went according to the book because they “are not bred in [the] tradition”, with the result that “murderers are acquitted”.79 Those who knew the spirit of the law, he said, as Sir Roland Burrows, the Recorder of Cambridge, did, would be able to ensure that none escaped the gallows. Lee went on to clinch his argument on the University of Singapore’s lack of a national identity. He attributed the rebuff he got from ViceChancellor Sreenivasan and the academic staff to this. He believed that a British prime minister would not have got the same treatment from the vice-chancellor and academic staff of any British university on an issue concerning the political future and security of the nation. He averred: “Because they are Englishmen to their core and their primary responsibility is to their society. They are not searching after truth in vacuo.”80 Lee was convinced the vice-chancellor of Oxford, or Master of Trinity, Cambridge, would know what he had to do for his country without any prompting from the British prime minister. He did not need to be told. He just knew. He believed in academic freedom, but not in vacuo. That is what national identity means.

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In so stating his case, Lee had also demonstrated how far Singapore was from the goal of constructing an identity and tradition of its own. Nor could the University of Singapore be in the van of the progress towards this goal, given the strong expatriate presence and the counter-national influence this had on the locals, from the vice-chancellor to the lecturers and to the students. Yet Prime Minister Lee could not do without the expatriate contribution either, if the nation was to sparkle intellectually as he wanted it to. He said: …you may think that I want to get rid of the 22 heads of department who are not Singapore citizens! Nothing is further from my intentions. I want to attract more people of talent and ability here — even if they only stay 3 to 4 years — to give of themselves and to add to the international, the cosmopolitan, flavour of this society! It is one of the qualities which, we, at the cross-roads and intersection of aerial and maritime sea routes, must exploit.81 However, if the price for this was the national identity of his growing generation attending university, then it was obviously too high. Lee had to think of a solution. He longed to have either Dr Toh Chin Chye or Dr Goh Keng Swee at the helm of the university, but could not spare them from the cabinet. After Sreenivasan went down, the next vice-chancellor was the Professor of Economics, Lim Tay Boh. Professor Lim held the office from late 1963 until his death in sleep in October 1967, while on a two-month visit to universities in the United States, Canada, and Britain. After an interval, Lee announced in early January 1968, the appointment of Dr Toh Chin Chye, then deputy prime minister, as vice-chancellor. At the same time, Dr Toh was also to be a minister in a newly created portfolio, science and technology, and the head of Singapore Polytechnic, the synergy between his three roles being very clear. At last, the prime minister had the vice-chancellor he could trust to lead the university in building a national identity, apart from fulfilling the tangible needs of the nation. In both senses, Dr Toh was to take the university by storm. For an afterword, we may turn to Professor Wang Gungwu, a historian who has given much thought to the role of universities in Asia, and was

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the vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1995. Professor Wang asked why many Asian universities failed to achieve excellence. His question had a different emphasis from Prime Minister Lee’s concern in this chapter, but there was clearly some overlap. Hence, it is not surprising that the answer Professor Wang came to was remarkably like what Lee had expounded. Professor Wang first touched on the more commonly stated reasons for the failure of many Asian universities: Their lack of funds, their onerous undergraduate teaching load, and their late start, “decades, if not hundreds of years, behind the great universities of the world”.82 But to Professor Wang, these reasons offered only a partial explanation. “If we look more closely,” he said, “we would, I believe, recognise that a major factor in this failure has been the aloofness of the universities from their environment.”83 This aloofness had many facets, but it stemmed mainly from a crucial misreading of the nature and functions of those major universities on which many of the Asian universities were modelled. It was noted that those major Western universities prided themselves on their autonomy and claimed to have done their best work by being left alone… What was often not understood was that those universities had begun quite differently. They had initially concentrated on power and influence in their respective communities, they had produced the ruling elites of both Church and State, and had carefully cultivated a rapport with their elites. Ultimately, they were integral parts of the governing structures in their respective countries… They therefore took an active part in providing leaders for the community and these leaders in turn took great pride in the universities which nurtured them. The rapport achieved, and the continuity in that rapport, provided the strong framework in which these universities were given money and resources, and the freedom and power to do their work, apparently undisturbed by the immediate problems around them. It was out of this freedom and power that these universities produced their traditions of scientific inquiry and intellectual leadership.84

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In other words, based on Professor Wang’s statement, academic freedom and power had to be earned, and earned over a long period of time. But many Asian universities were deluded in thinking that having “modelled themselves upon those great universities in their [the latter’s] late mature and elitist form”, the government and community should automatically recognize their autonomy.85 This was the “fatal flaw in many of the universities in Asia”.86 As a result, many have had their “pretentions exposed”.87 However, Professor Wang noted: There have been fresh attempts to find a rapport with government and community leaders, and a recognition that unless they did so, they would be taken over and restructured forcibly from outside. Others were indeed ordered to reform because some governments and communities were no long willing to wait for the universities to do so themselves.88 This would appear to have been the case of the University of Singapore, with the coming of Dr Toh Chin Chye as vice-chancellor. NOTES 1 Lee Kuan Yew, Opening speech at a seminar on “The Role of Universities in Economic and Social Development” at the University of Singapore on 7 February 1966, Prime Minister’s Speeches, 1966. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Lee Kuan Yew, “Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility”, a speech to the Historical Society, University of Singapore on 24 November 1966, Prime Minister’s Speeches, 1966.

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid. Lee, “Role of Universities”. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. D.J. Enright, Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 132. Roland Puccetti “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience: The University of Singapore”, Minerva, A Review of Science, Learning and Policy X, no. 2 (April 1972): 223. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Enright, Memoirs, p. 124. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., pp. 125–26. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 129. Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Enright’s letter to Lee, quoted by Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Lee’s reply to Enright, quoted by Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Ibid.

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78

Enright, Memoirs, p. 127. Lee’s reply to Enright, quoted by Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Enright, Memoirs, p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 138. Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. University of Singapore Academic Staff Association’s reply, quoted by Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Ibid. D.J. Enright, Play Resumed: A Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 90; Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government”, p. 225. D.J. Enright, “On the Obtained Resignation of a Vice-Chancellor (Singapore 1963)”, Encounter XXII, no. 3 (March 1964): 63. Enright, Play Resumed p. 92. Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sheldon Rothblatt, “The University’s Role in Social Development”, in Emerging Patterns of Social Demand and University Reform: Through A Glass Darkly, edited by D.D. Dill and B. Sporn (Oxford: Pergamon and the International Association of Universities Press, 1995), p. 26. Catherine Bargh, Peter Scott and David Smith, Governing Universities: Changing the Culture (Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press, 1966), pp. 6–7. Leslie Wagner, “A Thirty-Year Perspective: From the Sixties to the Nineties”, in The Changing University?, edited by Tom Schuller (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995, reprinted 1996), p. 16. Lord Robbins, Higher Education Report (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963), p. 230. Ibid. Lee, “Academic Freedom”. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Wang Gungwu, “Universities in Transition” in Wang Gungwu, Bind Us in Time: Nation and Civilisation in Asia (Singapore: Times Media Pte. Ltd., 2003), p. 296. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 296–97. Ibid., p. 297 Ibid. Ibid.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Toh’s Nation-Building Thrust • 387 permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

F I F T E E N

Toh’s Nation-Building Thrust

W

hen asked what he thought was his greatest contribution to Singapore, Dr Toh replied: “Nation-building without a doubt. We were not a nation at all.”1 Born in 1921 in Malaya, as it was then called, he attended Englishmedium schools in Taiping and Ipoh, and came to Singapore for further study at Raffles College, which he completed, after wartime interruption, with a diploma in science, ranked first class. He was employed as a demonstrator in the chemistry department of Raffles College in 1947, and in the philosophy department in the following year. In 1949, he went, on a Singapore Colonial Development Scholarship, to pursue a doctorate in physiology in London. There, he became an active member of the political discussion group, the Malayan Forum. Back in Singapore, as a lecturer in the medical school, his political activism continued unabated, and he pushed “the basement group” that met in Lee Kuan Yew’s house to start the PAP.2 He was chosen as the party’s chairman. He was thorough as a leader, and was at his best in a crisis, when his fighting spirit heartened his colleagues — a valuable asset in a party which was seldom without a fight on its hands. He felt strongly about social justice, and hence also about the inequalities of the colonial system which led him to seek independence. He believed democratic socialism had the answer, and not communism, and so with conviction and pugnacity, he faced communist front leaders and operatives in one of the toughest constituencies and he won. Starting out as a Malayan nationalist, like his

387

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colleagues, he worked for a multiracial Malaya, with Singapore in it, but when the merger collapsed, he turned single-mindedly to building the Singapore nation. Dr Toh began his job as vice-chancellor on 16 April 1968.

Creating “A Sense of Singapore” Singapore was an independent nation. Dr Toh believed this should energize the university, give it wings and a purpose. The purpose was twofold. Firstly, it was to train the manpower needed to ensure the success of the industrialization programme on which national survival depended. This caused Dr Toh to focus on developing the engineering, architecture, and business administration faculties, and to scrutinize every research proposal for its practical application. The second purpose of the university was to create a national identity. This put the spotlight on the arts and social sciences for Dr Toh to take a long, hard look. Dr Toh said that “national consciousness is being instilled” in the republic’s schools, through national service, and through various civilian organizations. “But the pity of it,” he continued, “is that the university has been left in the backwater for so long that the mentality and attitude of some staff towards our nation-building effort have been negative, if not antagonistic”.3 He was alluding to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, which, in his view, continued to have the mindset of the colonial era. He cited the comments of an external examiner to support his view. This un-named external examiner, who visited the university in 1970, had also come nineteen years ago, and was surprised still “to find a strong colonial element running through many of the [students’] answers…”4 Dr Toh said: “He further expressed to me the need for the university to divest itself of Eurocentric attitudes and prejudices and look at the problems of emerging countries through their cultures, values, and political attitudes of the peoples concerned.”5 This led Dr Toh to crystallize one of his axioms: “intellectual decolonization is harder to achieve than formal decolonization…”6 He added

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“but academic decolonization is a prerequisite if this university is to contribute meaningfully and purposefully” to the Singapore nation.7 “This problem of a university finding its own identity is not peculiar to Singapore”, he said, citing the example of Canada whose universities had a hard time surviving as Canadian institutions in the face of the economic and intellectual pull exerted by the United States.8 “The purpose of the University of Singapore… must be to establish itself as a distinctive institution consonant with what Singapore stands for as a multiracial and polycultural society which is located in the heart of S. E. Asia”.9 Dr Toh offered more axioms. After the departure of the imperial power, he said, there is a dilution of its cultural influence. Also, “the further one is located from the origins of foreign cultures”, the more “distorted and corrupted” is the version transmitted to one’s country.10 He said, citing a grotesque case: “I shudder when I hear a brass band accompanying a Chinese funeral, playing tunes such as ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ or ‘Wish me luck as you wave me good-bye’.”11 He had a distaste also for streets with English place names. The names are not only “Englishy”, he said, but they do not tell you where in Singapore you are. He did not ask for existing street names to be changed. That would spell chaos. But he would like the streets to be built in future to indicate the place, and be numbered and prefixed with the word “jalan” (Malay for road) or “lorong” (lane) thus: Lorong 1 Toa Payoh. But English place names did not reflect only the nostalgia of the departed colonials. They have entered into the imagination of the propertyowning suburban middle class of the independent republic as the preferred fashion, over which they could become very emotional. To call their street by any other name would not be as sweet, and worse, would lower their property values. Dr Toh, who believed that even a city state needed to have a national identity, had to look for some other way of providing it, as he could not prevail over the power that names exercised in the minds of house owners. He turned to his special domain, the university. Singapore looked to the West in its working life, but in the matter of identity, Dr Toh was convinced, it must look to the East. A speech he gave on the subject was appropriately

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headlined in the Straits Times as “An Asian identity for our university: Toh’s call”.12 Thus the national identity to be created has also to be an Asian identity. He would encourage this through promoting the study of languages. The university already had Malay Studies and Chinese Studies departments. But Dr Toh had in mind the expansion of the Language Centre. He urged the academic staff and the students too to acquire Asian languages. Firstly, this would make them more useful to the polylingual society they lived in. Secondly, it would help the university to find its place in Southeast Asia. He did not want the university to “be regarded as an English university” because this would mean that “its viability in a diverse Southeast Asia must be open to conjecture”.13 Another measure Dr Toh would use was the appointment of more Asian as opposed to Caucasian expatriates, wherever possible, especially for the arts and social sciences, the value-laden subjects. He explained: While expatriate academics can teach us medicine, engineering, and the technologies, in the final analysis, who can teach us better about ourselves than ourselves with our own familiarity of our own social mores, customs, and languages? Our university must therefore encourage a sense of Singapore for only in this way can we develop an institution which can become a catalyst in the development of our society and culture... Singapore …can also develop as an intellectual centre for the SouthEast Asian region. It is this latter prospect which offers us an exciting challenge.14

Broadening the Curriculum Dr Toh categorized disciplines as professional ones, namely, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, architecture, business administration, and accountancy, and as academic ones, namely the arts and social sciences, and the natural sciences. He considered that neither category, by itself, could provide a complete education. Engineers, for example, needed to be “in to be in contact with economists”, and scientists “must have an understanding of the managerial and social sciences”.15 He cited the American system

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whereby a student enters medical school only after he has finished his B.A. degree or B.Sc. degree. In Singapore, with direct entry, a doctor graduates in five years, whereas in America, it takes eight years. “Obviously, as a developing society,” Dr Toh admitted, “we cannot afford this expenditure of time and money.”16 Examining each faculty in turn, the new vice-chancellor expressed satisfaction with the medical school’s progress since it was first founded in 1905. The management of the medical school had “passed into local hands” and these local staff had proven “their competence and ability to maintain high standards and made Singapore a well known medical centre in the region”.17 The Faculty of Arts presented a sad contrast in his eyes. This faculty, although conceived in 1921 as a part of Raffles College (of arts and sciences), in effect, opened only in 1928. Even so, Dr Toh thought there was time enough for it to have been taken over by local staff, as in the case of the medical school. He used the term “nationalized”. He stated that the Arts faculty “would have been nationalized in any independent country, as the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and technologies, are essentially a grass roots faculty”.18 Engineering and Business Administration and Accountancy were new faculties whose rapid development he oversaw as an urgent priority. He commended their staff for bearing with high student enrolment and heavy teaching load, and for recognizing “their vital role in the development of Singapore’s technical manpower in order to sustain the momentum of growth”.19 Dr Toh’s curriculum reform occurred in the arts, social and natural sciences faculties, in other words, the non-professional disciplines. He was concerned about the employment prospects of their graduates. He noted a report in the Statesman of New Delhi on the restlessness and agony of unemployment afflicting Indian university graduates and its conclusion that the state had the responsibility “to see that university courses are geared to meet social and economic needs”.20 Dr Toh was vice-chancellor when the economy was booming prior to the oil crisis of 1973–74. It was the right time, he judged, to make changes.

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He spelled out the rationale for broadening the curriculum: We want men with wider vision, particularly, if we have expectations that graduates of our own university in time to come will lead the country politically as well as in other sectors — in the professions, in commerce, and industry.21 He pointed out what makes for better players in the market place: The most successful people are those who are not specialists, but those who have a general education and are able to cultivate a wider perspective in enterprise and fit into their own environment.22 The arts and social sciences were housed in two separate faculties when Dr Toh arrived as vice-chancellor. He promptly carried out a merger of the two faculties.23 On 1 March 1969, the Faculty of Arts with Professor Oei Jin Bee (Geography) as Dean, and the Faculty of Social Sciences with Professor K.J. Ratnam (Political Science) as Dean, came together as a single Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences under a new dean, Professor You Poh Seng (Economics and Statistics). The merger was accompanied by “strenuous efforts” devoted to revising the degree and curricula of the two faculties, “with a view to providing students with a more liberal and broader-based education”.24 Dr Toh met with resistance from “certain expatriate staff in sociology and political science” who used “the facile argument” (in his view) that their quantitative methods would not sit well with the humanities described as “qualitative” subjects, and thus they saw no basis for a merger between them.25 Dr Toh was surprised to find that “some members of the Philosophy Department supported the objections of the Departments of Political Science and Sociology”.26 But he was convinced that he had done right. Students would have a wider range of subjects to choose from, their outlook would be broadened, and their career prospects enhanced. “The affairs of human beings,” he said, “have never been conducted to fit into [the] preconceptions or the interests of any special academic discipline.”27 The concentration on

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one subject, as practised in the past, “conditioned graduates to cultivate too narrow a view of the world whereas, on the contrary, real life demanded a capacity to look at problems from a multi-disciplinary point of view. In modern society, jobs requiring such an intellectual capacity multiply”.28 Dr Toh’s reform required the Faculty of Science to devise a compulsory course for students in the arts and social sciences, which would give them “a background knowledge of scientific thought and methods to enable them to understand how developments in science and technology are shaping our economic and social lives”.29 The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences reciprocated, offering a course entitled, “Man and Society in Southeast Asia”, which science students must read.30

The Problem of “Value-Prone” Subjects Dr Toh wanted the university to have Asian values, and preferred to hire Asian expatriates for the arts and social sciences as the natural teachers of Asian values. The prime minister did not necessarily share Dr Toh’s preference; an Asian expatriate struck him as someone who had reneged on nation-building in his own country. But Lee would have agreed with the vice-chancellor on the need to watch out for the values that were passed on to students. There was one occasion when he felt he had to intervene, and Dr Toh apparently stepped aside for him. The prime minister was disgusted with encountering a student who, instead of saying he belonged to Singapore, argued that he was a citizen of the world, belonging to an international fraternity rather than to a particular society, the latter deemed too parochial. Lee found out that the Philosophy department had been filling the heads of students with this existentialist idea.31 In May 1969, Lee was the honoured guest at a freshman orientation meeting, when again the Philosophy department attracted his attention for the wrong reason. After he had spoken, a philosophy lecturer, with a complex background as a Singapore Chinese citizen and ex-Roman Catholic priest turned philosopher, got up and “attacked the government’s recentlypassed abortion bill as unethical”.32 Lee followed up this incident with a summons to all first-year students in the arts and social sciences to a

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meeting with him on 2 June 1969. The staff of the Philosophy department and of the Political Science and Sociology departments as well, were requested to attend too. History was not included, signalling that it was in safe hands, with two of its staff serving in the government. Lee’s address from the podium on that day centred on the aspect that the subjects being taught were necessarily value-prone, and that, additionally, the way they were taught was mocking and critical of the government.33 Lee meant to serve a warning. But he also looked on the bright side. After the talk, when he was introduced to Professor Roland Puccetti, the head of the Philosophy department, Lee expressed the hope that under the distinguished professor’s leadership things would improve. But from a comment that Puccetti made at a later time,34 Lee had clearly failed to win him over. Far from appreciating Lee’s gesture, Puccetti, who admitted to having been surprised, distanced himself from it. It was as if any government overture was suspect as being likely to produce academic subservience. An unfortunate attitude that students also shared during that time.

Toh, Theroux and Tarzan Dr Toh Chin Chye, “when a lecturer and, later, reader in physiology in the colonial and immediately post-colonial days of the university”, had, reportedly, formed a bad impression of expatriate teachers as a privileged lot “always going off on leave and letting the locals do the work”.35 Rayson Huang, a contemporary of Dr Toh’s, and a lecturer in chemistry, has this to say of expatriates in those days: “They enjoyed higher salaries, disguised as various allowances, long leave, housing and… tenure.”36 The senate, Huang said, “consisted of deans, heads of department, and professors who, almost by definition, were predominantly expatriate”, and as a group, they “remained largely unmoved” by the clamour to “Malayanize” or get more local citizens for training as future lecturers.37 Dr Toh, who was able to see for himself the games that expatriates played, arrived at the opinion of them as manipulators and bullies. He said:

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… those who are familiar with academic politics know how very easy it is for expatriates, who are more vocal and articulate in the English language, which is the medium of instruction in this University, to group themselves into cliques and act as pressure groups to force their views in faculty, senate, and committees, so that native deans and vice-chancellors are reduced, sometimes, to puppets on a string. So long as the natives were obedient to the expatriate will and naïve to their machinations, the University of Singapore was for the expatriates a haven where they could continue to play Tarzan.38 Dr Toh’s allusion to Tarzan is intriguing, particularly as his note reference was not to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, but to Paul Theroux. Theroux served at the university from the 1968–69 academic year to 1971–72, during Dr Toh’s time as vice-chancellor. In his previous place of employment, Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Theroux had stirred up a controversy with an article entitled “Tarzan is an Expatriate”. Dr Toh cited this article.39 What Theroux wrote, and the fall-out from it, were a part of the dialogue going on in the post-colonial world of the 1960s. The dialogue occurred at two levels. At one level, leaders of newly independent states, like Lee and Dr Toh, meant to send a clear message to expatriates to fit themselves into the system of nation-building, and not try to teach them how to run the country or the university. At another level, the expatriates were engaged in a soul-searching conversation among themselves. Theroux had started one such conversation in his part of the woods. The two sides of the debate were Theroux versus a number of mainly British expatriates working in Uganda and Kenya. Theroux depicted a passive, indolent Tarzan, who exacted tribute simply by showing his muscle, as an allegory of the expatriates he was lampooning. But he thought that in some ways, Tarzan was superior: Tarzan, at least “never buggered his functionaries”.40 Theroux’s point was that the expatriates simply stood by while the African leaders acted out their brutality, whether in butchering an

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opposition party, or driving out the Indian minority, or practising genocide on a rival tribe. The expatriates kept silent to preserve their jobs and pleasant lifestyle. They shrugged their shoulders: “The old order does not alter, the revolution changes nothing, and still to be white is to be right”.41 Theroux simplified the picture the better to drive home his jibe. He ignored one critical fact: The United States and its Western allies looked on Africa as a battleground in the Cold War and, consequently, turned a blind eye to the excesses of African dictators whose support they courted. One Alex Smith was surely right when he replied to Theroux, saying, “Let us, the expatriates, criticize the policies and practices of our own governments…”42 Nor were the work and dreams that the expatriates hoped to protect through their silence and collaboration safe from the caprice of Africa’s own rulers. In a future cycle of violence, the expatriates would see it all swept away. There is another way to read Theroux’s essay, and it is as a statement of the white man’s moral superiority and duty. It was assumed that the white man had some profound, universal truth to impart to the lesser humans in Africa. J. Allen, a historian and Theroux’s colleague at Makerere University, took issue with him. Allen riposted at considerable length, in a mock imitation of Theroux’s allegory, but the main point is: You think you know what justice and culture are. If I had to define them, I’d probably come out with much the same sort of thing that you do. But there is this difference, that I’m much less sure than you seem to be that we would be right … I teach … I teach facts and I like to think I teach how to think too. And I hope that, when enough people know enough facts and have learned how to think, they will come round to our ideas of their own accord, will agree with us about justice and maybe culture too, and will share our values. If they don’t? Well, maybe culture and justice are not universal, but I don’t like to think that. Maybe our ideas of culture and justice are wrong: It’s always possible. Or maybe I’m just a bad teacher. In any case, I don’t anticipate that I’ll immediately start screaming at them …43

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If Dr Toh had followed through the controversy in successive issues of Transition he would certainly have agreed with Allen and some of the other interlocutors of Theroux. Theroux found the Tarzan he invented too passive for his liking, but Dr Toh found the Tarzan he encountered in the university too oppressive. Dr Toh warned the “self-proclaimed Tarzans” that they no longer held the locals in thrall, and that if they believed the university should support the aspirations of the people, then they should share the burden of the elected government in galvanizing the people into becoming a viable nation.44 “Expatriates have their role to play even in Singapore”, he said, “but they become obnoxious” — the adventurous and the brash ones — when they “exploit the politeness of Asians by venturing into the local political arena or offering gratuitous advice on how to run the government or the university”.45 This is rich of them “when theirs is a voice in the wilderness in their own country”.46 Expatriates who like “to play Tarzan [will] thus come in for a rude shock”.47 The expatriates, on their part, thought Dr Toh an autocrat. Professor Roland Puccetti, an American appointed in 1966 to the chair and headship of the Philosophy department, during the tenure as vice-chancellor of Professor Lim Tay Boh (Dr Toh’s immediate predecessor), has recounted his experience of the “Toh regime”, characterizing it as “an extension of an authoritarian government”.48 Professors sat in the university senate, and it was here that Puccetti said Dr Toh’s “personal dominance is particularly striking”.49 Junior staff had their first hand experience of Dr Toh in other venues where he might come across as a strict schoolmaster. Paul Theroux recalled: “The vice-chancellor, Dr Toh Chin-Chye, stopped me outside the library one day and told me my hair was too long”.50

The Expatriates’ Predicament The University of Singapore had a large number of expatriates made up of older Britishers staying on after colonialism, and newcomers recruited for the ongoing expansion of faculties. The long-time Britishers held professorial chairs and senior positions, and the newcomers filled a wider band of

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positions, from professoriates to lectureships. Expatriates enjoyed a special allowance, given as an extra inducement, which amounted to ten to fifteen per cent more than the salary of a local staff member in the same rank. However, Malayan (later Malaysian) citizens were not given this expatriate allowance, but were grouped with Singapore citizens for the purpose of the contract as local staff. Expatriates and local staff alike belonged to a voluntary association, the University of Singapore Academic Staff Association (USASA). In August 1964, several local staff, including Wong Lin Ken, then a lecturer, broke away to form a separate organization, of the same name but rendered in Malay — the Kesatuan Akademis Universiti Singapura (KAUS). Local resentment against expatriate dominance had erupted into the open. KAUS leaders harped on the special allowance for expatriates as discriminatory, and would accept “those expatriate staff who voluntarily renounced their expatriation allowance” as members.51 They were convinced of the perfidy of expatriate professors and departmental heads using their influence and clout to block the recruitment and promotion of worthy local candidates. They were against the idea of permanent tenure for expatriate staff, agreeing only to renewable contracts of three to five years. They held that expatriates, by definition, could not really contribute to the making of a national university. Expatriates were good only for the purpose of cross-fertilization of ideas and avoidance of inbreeding.52 The expatriates were profoundly disturbed by this cleavage in staff ranks on lines of citizenship and nationality. They sensed trouble coming from this group of zealous citizens organized in a rival body. The USASA continued to retain local staff members, though a number went over to KAUS, and a few were members of both associations. But the expatriates feared, correctly, that the bargaining strength of the USASA with the university administration was weakened. Many expatriate staff, senior in rank as well as in age in the 1960s, “will reach 55 (mandatory retirement age) within the next decade”.53 The retirement age of 55 set in the colonial era for the public services, might have served the expatriates well at the time, but the USASA wanted it extended to 60, and was negotiating for it in 1968. Dr Toh rejected it, and the USASA blamed their failure on his divide and rule tactic, saying he passed the proposal to the KAUS, which

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to his gratification, shot it down.54 The KAUS naturally would not want it even though the compulsory retirement age of 55 applied equally to locals as to expatriates. Dr Toh’s refusal to budge on the retirement age was a blow to the expatriates. Nor was this all. He began to modify the terms of employment, and the changes were registered in the 1968 contract which came out within a few months of his taking office. Under the previous vice-chancellor, Professor Lim Tay Boh, the rule had been introduced that new expatriate appointees would no longer have tenure, but would be compensated by a gratuity of two months’ salary for each year of service. The no-tenure rule stayed with Dr Toh, but he cancelled the gratuity payment. The extant contract allowed an expatriate six months home leave in between contracts, with salary and paid passage for him and family. Dr Toh reduced the home leave to three months. The six-week annual holiday leave of expatriates was also cut, to two weeks. There was one more feature, deemed the most draconian of all. In all previous contracts, tenured or temporary staff could be dismissed only “for cause”. The 1968 contract contained a provision for either party, employer or employee, to “terminate the agreement on three to six months’ notice, or pay in lieu of notice, without giving any reason for doing so”.55 This clause was inserted in all new contracts offered to locals as well as expatriates. Puccetti looked on these terms as Dr Toh’s vengeance on expatriates. But actually they were a necessary corrective to the sweet deal which expatriates still had as a carry-over from the colonial era. One wonderful aspect which Dr Toh left unchanged was subsidized housing. The university owned houses and apartments located in the same district as embassy mansions and the botanic gardens, and minutes from the city’s smartest shopping thoroughfare. These were allotted to expatriates on the basis of rank. The locals on new contracts did not get to live in them, and had to fend for themselves in the matter of accommodation. However, Dr Toh gave them sound avuncular advice to buy their own homes, saying “property price will continue to appreciate in Singapore”. He said: “I went out of my way to make reservations for 14 houses [at the] cost price, fully furnished [of] $40,000 each” [this was 1970] for purchase by university staff. “Sad to say, only one house was taken up.”56

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The expatriates in USASA tried to convince the KAUS that they should unite as one since they shared a common plight. Puccetti spearheaded this move. In January 1970, the 140-member USASA, half of them local staff and half expatriate, recognizing the American fighter in Puccetti, elected him chairman. Puccetti led USASA in “repeated attempts” to merge with the KAUS. If the KAUS agreed to a merger, a constitution could be drawn up under which “only Singapore and Malaysian staff were eligible for office in the new, merged association”.57 But the KAUS insisted that it would be wrong to be in the same association with people who could never be as committed as they were in building a national university. More revealingly, Professor Wong Lin Ken told Puccetti that expatriates, “though a minority, and under the proposed condition for merger, unable to hold office, would nonetheless dominate the merged association”.58 This was the kind of mentality ingrained by the experience of expatriate dominance in the colonial era. Neither association was making progress in their separate negotiations with Dr Toh. In December 1970, the USASA suggested to the KAUS that they should unite to form a union, which would give them real bargaining power to the extent of “invoking compulsory arbitration procedures in the event of a deadlock”.59 The attractive feature in this proposal, which the USASA hoped would entice the KAUS, “was that by law, only Singapore citizens could hold office in a trade union”, though all others could be members.60 This tactic was futile. For at this juncture, the KAUS was divided between those who wanted to continue as a staff association, and a younger group who wanted to unionize so as to have more clout. The latter went on to form their union, the University of Singapore Academic Staff Union (USASU), registered on 13 November 1970.61 They excluded the expatriates at first,62 but later decided to have them in only to find that a legal technicality barred expatriates from becoming members. Then the staff association that the expatriates led, the USASA, voted to dissolve itself, convinced that its cause was hopeless.63 As for the local staff association, the KAUS, it faded away, with its key younger officers going over to the local staff union, the USASU.

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Puccetti resigned from the university in a blaze of media publicity, giving vent to various issues. A young American lecturer in sociology, Dr John A. Macdougall, also resorted to the press, but focused on the issue of a national university.64 Both Puccetti and Macdougall could not accept the KAUS argument that expatriates could not play a meaningful role in creating a national university. The KAUS declared in the press that it was prepared to challenge Puccetti’s various issues, but did not do so, evidently preferring discretion to debate. Nor did the KAUS make any move to talk privately with either Puccetti or Macdougall. Macdougall, in yet another letter to the press, accused the KAUS leadership in social psychological terms as being in “withdrawal” and “denial”.65 How did the expatriates adjust to the change from a colonial university to a national university? Surely they could not have failed to see that change was inevitable. One long-resident Englishman, Professor T.H. Elliott, the director of the School of Pharmacy, obtained Singapore citizenship. He was for staying on. Another Englishman, a historian, planned to depart gracefully. Appointed as the first Raffles Professor of History, C.N. Parkinson had arrived in 1950 expecting “to teach and write history until the age of retirement”.66 But, as he put it, “Fate decreed otherwise, … for the politics of Singapore and Malaya made the post untenable.”67 Parkinson used the time he had to identify local graduates who would make good lecturers, and to encourage research on Malayan history. In 1955, he published an essay, Parkinson’s Law, which he expanded into a book with great success when it came out in 1957. He left Singapore in 1958 to greater fame as a speaker and writer, with more witty and enlightening books to come. Professor K.G. Tregonning, an Australian, and Parkinson’s successor, continued building up the department with local staff, Malayan historical research, and the Journal of Southeast Asian History he founded in 1960 (renamed Studies since 1970), which continued to flourish long after him. Tregonning held the Raffles chair until 1967; then one of the most zealous KAUS leaders, the late Professor Wong Lin Ken, occupied it from that year until his demise in 1981. By the mid 1960s, expatriates, whether old or new, recognized that the time had come for the locals to take over administrative control of the

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university. The last expatriate dean in the Faculty of Arts was Mr Ernst de Chickera, a Ceylonese citizen and senior lecturer, who first joined the English department as a lecturer in the 1952–53 academic year. Chickera’s term as dean ended in January 1965, and from that year onwards, no expatriate in this, the largest faculty in the university, offered to stand for election as dean. The same was true of other faculties too. The last expatriate dean of the Faculty of Law, Professor G.W. Bartholomew, an Englishman, served in 1966–67 and 1967–68. He stepped down in 1968 and was succeeded by a thirty-year old lady, Dr Thio Su Mien. An expatriate could still be head of department and serve on staffhiring committees, and if he was a professor, was entitled to sit in the senate, but “it was out of the question that he should be elected dean”.68 This trend had begun before Dr Toh came, and his coming put a seal on it, guaranteeing its continuance. Only in the new faculties, like engineering, was an expatriate dean to be found during Dr Toh’s time as vice-chancellor. The expatriates were caught between two grindstones, the lower one being the KAUS, and the upper one, the vice-chancellory. This relentless attrition and squeeze account for the record resignations of the period. The professors and heads of department who resigned in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences were M.C. Groves, an Australian (Sociology) in 1968, K.J. Ratnam, a Malaysian (Political Science) in 1970, D.J. Enright, an Englishman (English Literature) in January 1970, and Roland Puccetti, an American (Philosophy) in December 1970. Among the lecturers who resigned there was Macdougall, in 1971. The impact was most dramatic in the English department as a senior lecturer and two lecturers also resigned around the same time as Enright. Over at the medical faulty, Professor V.K. Pillay joined the professors who resigned in 1971. Professor Pillay was born in Seremban, Malaysia, and graduated from the medical school in Singapore. He started lecturing in 1958, and was appointed professor and head of department in orthopaedic surgery in February 1968, less than three months before Dr Toh took office as vice-chancellor. Professor Pillay, who became a Singapore citizen, was a past president of USASA, and pointedly stated that he was not a KAUS member. He took

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the side of Puccetti in the dispute with the vice-chancellor, but had little to add to the debate. His resignation was something of a melodrama, a long goodbye played out in the media, with Dr Toh at one stage accusing him of prevarication.69

Toh’s Persona and Principles Dr Toh was undeniably an autocrat. But what kind of autocrat? What were his principles? What was his autocracy for? He was a man of principle and probity who felt strongly for justice. He was a moral autocrat. He had a mission, and was determined to carry it out, no matter what others say. Were he not autocratic, he maintained, “things would never get done and the university would not have been reformed”.70 He answered criticism with, “It seems to have been forgotten why I came here and took this job.”71 A letter to the press, signed “Academic, Singapore 10” portrayed him most knowingly: Toh Chin Chye is a person of intellectual integrity (he says what he means and means what he says) and of occasional witty and illuminating asides. He is Churchillian in his bluffness; in the unquestioning obedience he demands from his entourage, and finally in the warmth of his personal affections and aversions. He can growl when the occasion demands. He does not bark, but might bite. He is held in appropriate awe.72 D.J. Enright, in late years, told an anecdote, which, though he did not name him, fitted so well with Dr Toh’s persona and style. In Singapore, I tried to get a young lecturer’s contract renewed on the grounds that though he hadn’t published — the great stumbling block — he was a first-rate teacher, enthusiastic, and much admired by the students. But the Vice-Chancellor, a shade ruefully, wanted something more objective: “We are all good teachers, aren’t we?”73

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Singapore at the time, like many other new nations, faced a shortage of educated manpower. When it was suddenly independent in 1965, it had a problem with staffing high commissions and embassies. Then, Lee started very early to look for younger men to initiate into the government with the view to their succeeding the nation’s founder generation. This meant that Dr Toh, as vice-chancellor, had people under him who were also his colleagues in the government. Dr Toh was punctilious in keeping the two areas separate. He said: When Dr Augustine Tan and Dr Chiang Hai Ding were elected as MPs (in by-elections in 1970), the first thing I did was to explain to them very clearly that their advancement in the university would depend solely upon their academic performance and not in their government affiliations. Both of them fully concurred that they would not have it otherwise.74 As for Dr Wong Lin Ken, his appointment to the Raffles Professorship had occurred in April 1967, during the vice-chancellorship of Professor Lim Tay Boh, Dr Toh’s predecessor. Professor Wong became an MP in 1968, and the minister for home affairs from September 1970 to September 1972. These promotions to political office were Lee’s decisions.

The Vice-Chancellor and Student Power In the United States in the 1960s, university students, radicalized by the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam war protests, sought empowerment in other areas: University governance, curriculum development, and staff hiring and firing. The phenomenon of student power was swiftly communicated to Singapore. Dr Toh had a taste of it in March 1968, when the University of Singapore Students’ Union (USSU) hit out at his appointment as vice-chancellor, stating “the already faint line between the University and the Government” was now “blurred”.75 The USSU continued: “We would, however, like to believe that the University of Singapore is not an adjunct of the Singapore Government and that the concept of university autonomy is sacrosant.”76

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At an appropriate time, in an address to freshmen, Dr Toh told students to “stop living by the clichés of academic freedom and other slogans, and to stop deluding themselves that they were a special elite …”77 They should stop behaving as they did in 1963–64 when Indonesian marines set off bombs in the city, and people answered the call to join the Vigilante Corps, but the students’ union did nothing. Recalling that perilous time again in a later speech, Dr Toh asked, “Where were the students?”78 They were otherwise engaged, he said, in ragging and pantie-raiding, while their counterparts in Indonesia “were marching through the streets and crying ‘Crush Malaysia’ ”.79 He told the students, “It will, indeed, be a real indictment of us” to “argue so much over academic freedom — your president is so worried over autonomy — when there is no spirit of service”.80 After some eight months in his job, a student delegation asked to see him about the university’s decision not to renew the contracts of two expatriate lecturers. Dr Toh declined to meet the student delegation, but instructed the deputy vice-chancellor, Reginald Quahe, to do so instead. Later, Dr Toh issued a statement: “There are certain matters of principle on which the administration must stand firm. One of these relates to the staffing of the university.”81 He would not allow it to be subject to pressure from the students. In December 1974, near the end of his term, Dr Toh encountered a period of campus unrest. What was behind it? It was a well known fact that English-educated undergraduates of the University of Singapore were little interested in the world outside their campus. But things were changing. The middle class base in Singapore was growing apace, through education and economic progress. By the mid 1970s, the undergraduates, many of whom were from middle class families, were more conscious of the effects of economic change than their predecessors of a decade ago. Moreover, they were presented with a new target, the multinational enterprises, for their political action. Also, more Singaporean and Malaysian students were studying abroad and getting exposed to anti-multinational propaganda spread by leftwing political parties in Britain and Holland. These ideas were easily communicated back home through student networks like the Federation of UK and Eire Malaysian and Singapore Student Organizations (FUEMSSO).

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Tan Wah Piow, soon to gain notoriety, said he came from the same English-educated middle class background as many of the students in his time who were politically apathetic.82 He himself had no interest in student politics when he first entered the architecture department in 1972, but within months, he was sucked into it. The plight of workers losing their jobs in the early 1970s drove him and his USSU colleagues to set up a Retrenchment Research Centre. In October 1974, Tan, then a newly elected USSU president, was charged with rioting and criminal trespass at the premises of the Pioneer Industries Employees Union in the Jurong industrial park. James Minchin offers an alternative, though, also a more familiar, explanation of the background to this trouble. He writes: “For a short period, leadership of the University of Singapore Students Union fell mainly into Singaporean Chinese-educated hands and the Union became vocal on social justice issues …”83 If true, what was the relationship between the Chinese-educated and the English-educated leaders? Minchin does not elaborate. The rumpus on the campus was sparked off by the trial of Tan Wah Piow. Tan, and two workers jointly charged with him, were scheduled to be tried in the First District Court on 11 December 1974. In the predawn hours of the day of the trial, immigration officers and police raided the union house where student leaders were printing the union’s daily bulletin, Awakening, and the Dunearn Road hostel. They took away six students, all ethnic Chinese, five of whom were Malaysians, and one a Hong Kong British subject.84 However, it was later reported that the Hong Kong student, apparently not caught, had gone into hiding. Four were architecture students, like Tan Wah Piow, one, a science student, and one, the Hong Kong man, an engineering student. All were in their final year, as was Tan also. All the six had their student passes cancelled, and five of them were deported while “mystery surrounds the whereabouts” of the Hong Kong man.85 Several hundred students turned up at the trial of Tan and the two workers. Tan was his own defence counsel, guaranteeing no shortage of heroics and bravado, and ultimately no acquittal. After the first day’s proceedings, students returned to the campus to hold a mass rally demanding the reinstatement of the six students. In the next few days, more rallies took

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place at the venues of different faculties. The USSU requested, and the university agreed, not to let the police or the military enter the Bukit Timah campus, the centre of the unrest. But security guards were employed, and they, Dr Toh told a 2000-strong student rally, “will become a permanent feature” on the campus.86 He promised to take no disciplinary action against those who had skipped classes to attend the trial, adding that his concession applied only to the current year (it was already mid December). He was wise to put in this caveat as the trial period lasted forty-six days until late February 1975! Dr Toh gave a further undertaking, namely, to let “the six foreign students … sit for examinations [or supplementary examinations, if need be] if the Immigration authorities allowed them entry into Singapore”.87 He cautioned: Some of you think that I have supernatural powers. I can act as a vice-chancellor only… All of us are subject to common law, even myself. The laws of the land supercede all rules and representation in the university.88 The student leaders were unplacated. In the next week, the USSU called for a forty-eight-hour boycott of classes. The 17 of December was a day full of action. USSU officials went round lecture theatres on the Bukit Timah campus, with megaphones, urging support of the boycott, and sang as they moved along. Instead of attending lectures and tutorials, students gathered at the lower quadrangle, which they called “Solidarity Square” for speeches by their leaders. By about noon, groups of students headed for various housing estates and the city to hand out pamphlets. A small number remained on campus to persuade their lecturers to back their call for the reinstatement of the six students. In the afternoon, a ten-member USSU delegation went to the Ministry of Home Affairs at Pearl’s Hill to see the minister, but succeeded only in submitting a letter to him which they had brought with them. In the evening, about 100 students were at “Solidarity Square” to hear an USSU report of the day’s events. Chua Sian Chin, the minister for health and home affairs, replying to the USSU letter, stated clearly what he thought was afoot. The six foreign

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students and other union officials were “intent on converting the union into a political machine for operation outside the university campus” with the university as their sanctuary.89 They advocated support for “the case of the political detainees” [taking issue with Internal Security] and action, with workers, “to fight the forces of oppression and exploitation in our society”.90 They took part in an Asian students’ seminar held in Hong Kong in March 1974, and were party to a number of resolutions which the minister construed as showing that the USSU “sees itself as the vanguard of ‘total struggle’ against the present political system”.91 They and other Asian students would receive help from the Australian Union of Students, which was elected the coordinator of the seminar. The ban on the six foreign students stayed. The campus returned to normal, a memorial put up at “Solidarity Square” was dismantled. As for Tan Wah Piow, the First Senior District Judge sentenced him to one year in jail, but he was released from Queenstown remand prison after eight months. Tan, a Singapore born and bred citizen, was to go from jail into national service, but he “took advantage of (a three-day) weekend respite” granted him to slip away.92 He laid low for six months and suddenly resurfaced in London. He was thought to have been helped by unknown backers — probably student organizations in the United Kingdom and Eire, and Dutch radicals in Utrecht, as he stopped over in Holland.93 Tan Wah Piow and his USSU colleagues had interfered with the central tenet of the government’s economic strategy represented by multinational enterprises, and the punishment meted out to them was clearly intended to be exemplary. Dr Toh evidently thought it best to sit out the campus unrest, by appearing firm, and at the same time temperate. He succeeded. He used security guards instead of the police.

Conclusion Dr Toh was concerned that the university should have a national self, an identity rooted in Singapore and in the Southeast Asian region. Because the university had been modelled on British higher education ideals, there had developed a tendency to think of it as an image or extension

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of an ideal prototype perceived to exist in Britain. When the local staff and the students thought of their university like this, the expatriates had the leverage to play Tarzan, and browbeat them. Enright has observed how some of his expatriate colleagues in the 1960s would, in any conflict with the government, “ritually, patronizingly”, declare: “We must remember, this isn’t Oxford or Cambridge.”94 It was precisely this attitude, this tendency to be beholden to Oxford and Cambridge, that Dr Toh sought to be root out. He used the term “intellectual decolonization”.95 It meant the moral courage to stand up to the cultural superiority of the West. For example, in the context of the university, it meant querying that old, peculiarly British, concept of academic autonomy: How relevant is it to the intellectual life of newly independent states in an Afro-Asian setting? Dr Toh deprecated the way staff and students automatically accepted academic freedom as an ideal. This was, V.S. Naipaul (though Dr Toh did cite him) would say, mimicry. Dr Toh would have them free their minds from Western dominance and look East for their inspiration and ideals. In this, Dr Toh resembled Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who had been saying the same thing, and most recently, as the speaker in the first Ho Rih Hwa Lecture of the Singapore Management University. Dr Mahathir said: We are all hegemonised. We are not independent. Certainly our minds have already been colonised. And when the minds are colonised, physical colonisation is not necessary.96 As public figures, Dr Mahathir and Dr Toh have accustomed people to expect, when they speak, a certain flair for expressing unconventional, unsettling, and contrarian views. Their polemics were of the same order as the satires of V.S. Naipaul on the mimic men, who acquired concepts from the developed world, which ill-fitted their only partially modernized societies, and remained no more than words, words like “revolution”, “socialism”, “production”, “Black Power”.97 “Academic autonomy”, not an example Naipaul used, may be included in this list of derivative ideology and vocabulary. Naipaul first wrote about “colonial mimicry” as he observed it in the post-colonial societies

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of the Caribbean and South America, but was surprised to find similarities when he travelled to India, Africa, and the Islamic nations of the Middle East and of Southeast Asia. It struck him as evidence of the intellectual failure in all of them. Writers of the polemical genre usually emphasized the economic aspect of domination. They might argue something like this: The rich nations of the West keep the Third World nations down by such means as currency attacks, price controls, cheap labour, mergers and takeovers, and “the debt treadmill” and “the ‘revolving credit’ of aid packages”.98 The rich nations talk of the need to become more competitive and efficient in “a borderless world” with a “level playing field”, but this is really the “double-speak” of capitalism, seeking to dominate the globe.99 The losers are the smaller players in the poorer countries, and the Third World nations, unable to chart their own destinies. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the international media are all stacked against them. This was the stand of Dr Mahathir, the champion of Third World nations and of the East Asia Economic Group, his proposed counterweight to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union. Dr Mahathir’s theory of the hegemony of the mind had a certain cogency and power because he related it to economic factors: the argument about the economic dependency of the Third World. This economic dimension is missing from the polemics of both Naipaul and Dr Toh. Naipaul seemed indifferent to the part that economic power can play in moulding the psychology of mimicry.100 Dr Toh was equally uninterested to connect with questions of economic dependency. Dr Toh lambasted the machinations of expatriate professors, but was silent on the machinations of multinational enterprises. He was on his guard against Eurocentric values in higher education, but did not display the same vigilance towards the American and Eurocentric vision of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as Dr Mahathir had done, so openly and eloquently. Though Dr Toh went on about “intellectual decolonization”, he was concerned, nevertheless, to gear the university to work in tandem with the

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multinationals, by producing the requisite manpower. He could do this with total confidence, unconscious of irony or discrepancy, because he delinked subjects like engineering, architecture, business, administration, medicine, and science from his polemics about “intellectual decolonization”. He did not recognize these subjects for what they really are — an integral part of the culture and creativity of the western hegemons he demonized. Dr Toh slipped into a binary mode of reasoning: These subjects (engineering, etc.) were “value free”. That left the arts and social sciences, which he classified as not “value free”. He would have to treat them differently. This justified his pro-Asian as opposed to Caucasian recruitment policy in the arts and social sciences. Paul Theroux has described the impact of this policy on the English department. He wrote: … I was the last of the Mohicans: All the other expatriates in my department had left. The new policy was to hire only Chinese lecturers. I was asked when I would be leaving; they wanted to replace me with an ethnic Chinese person. ‘I’m staying,’ I said, just to annoy them. Privately I vowed to leave as soon as I could.101 Theroux had intended to leave, anyway, to become a full-time writer. That was his real reason for leaving. His account, written from memory, is somewhat exaggerated. The English department never ceased to attract and hire Englishmen and Americans. How could it? Dr Toh’s pro-Asian recruitment policy must ultimately be self-defeating. The university, by definition, has to be open to all. No university can grow by deliberately limiting itself to one hemisphere. The best universities are the ones most open and receptive to talents, no matter where they originated from. The pro-Asian staff search contradicted the very idea of a university. The same contradiction was found in the now defunct KAUS. KAUS leaders claimed that expatriates were necessary for cross-fertilization, but wished to be organizationally separate from them. The KAUS argument for separatism spoke of mania, an investing in the expatriates of an almost supernatural power to dominate them. It was what colonial rule and a colonial university had done to a generation.

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How was the impasse and division in the university resolved? First, Dr Toh left the vice-chancellory on 14 June 1975. The permanent secretary of the ministry of education served as caretaker vice-chancellor. This went on for five years. Then, on 20 May 1980, Prime Minister Lee addressed an assembly of university staff at which, in a surprise move, he rebuked the USASU (which had taken over from the KAUS), naming some committee members. Lee said: “There is no place for petty xenophobics or empire builders in Singapore. They cannot be allowed to stop us from building a good university quickly, with good teachers from overseas, Asians or Caucasians.”102 He ordered the USASU to disband. Lee’s timing was significant. The university was on the threshold of a new era as the National University of Singapore. Lee had just appointed as the first vice-chancellor of the national university, Dr Tony Tan, successively scholar, banker, and senior minister of state for education. Lee commended Dr Tony Tan to the assembled university staff with: “He knows my thinking.”103 Dr Toh did much more than can be recorded here. (In particular, he chose the site and oversaw the building of a new campus for the NUS at Kent Ridge.) Here the focus has been on some of his ideas. His ideas of a broad-based education, and of a university geared to the brain-power needs of the nation, are now well-entrenched norms in the NUS. Dr Toh was absolutely right to have and to pursue these ideas, though he could not have known how Singapore’s transition from the manufacturing system of his day to the knowledge and innovation driven economy of the present would demand ever greater multidisciplinary collaboration, and remake the university into a centre for knowledge enterprise. Dr Toh’s great concern was that the University of Singapore should identify with the nation in the making. Has this been realized in the NUS, and if so, how? Yes, in a quite predictable way, through the close nexus between the university and the government. It was as Prime Minister Lee and Dr Toh had said: The university and the government must move in unison in nation-building. This close nexus opened the government’s coffers for the university. Government funding made possible the research centres, scholarships, and professoriates that earned the NUS recognition

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by international peers as a great national university with which they want to associate in student exchanges, joint research and conferences. This recognition from the outside helped generate local pride and identity inside the NUS. Government support also made possible the globally competitive salaries of the academic staff, both local and expatriate, despite their having no staff association or union. The government, after Dr Toh’s time in the vicechancellory and in cabinet, arrived at the conviction that good men and women do not come cheap. Critics may not like what they would regard as putting money before commitment, but the plain truth is that money itself has come to be rooted in the national psyche and identity.

NOTES 1 Straits Times, 9 August 2003. 2 Lam Peng Er, “The Organizational Utility Men: Toh Chin Chye and Lim Kim San” in Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard, edited by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Y.L. Tan, p. 5. 3 Toh Chin Chye, “The Role of the University”, Singapore Herald, 2 March 1971; see also Toh Chin Chye, “Intellectual Decolonization of the University of Singapore”, in Towards Tomorrow: Essays on Development and Social Transformation in Singapore (Singapore: NTUC, 1973), pp. 49–53. 4 Toh, “Role of the University”. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Straits Times, 29 November 1968. 13 Ibid. 14 Toh, “Role of the University”. 15 Straits Times, 1 May 1968; 18 September 1968. 16 Straits Times, 1 May 1968. 17 Toh, “Role of the University”. 18 Ibid.

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 1 May 1968. Ibid., 6 October 1968. “Vice-Chancellor’s Report for the Academic Year 1968–69”, Annual Report of the University of Singapore, 1968–69, p. 2. Annual Report of the University of Singapore, 1968–69, p. 13. Toh, “Role of the University”. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Annual Report of the University of Singapore, 1968–69, p. 10. “Vice-Chancellor’s Report”, p. 2. Lee Kuan Yew, “Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility”, a speech to the Historical Society, University of Singapore on 24 November 1966, Prime Minister’s Speeches, 1966, p. 233; Roland Puccetti “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience: The University of Singapore”, Minerva, A Review of Science, Learning and Policy X, no. 2 (April 1972): 223. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 231. See also James Minchin, No Man is an Island: A Portrait of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986, second edition, 1990), p. 264. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 232. Ibid., p. 233, note 29. Ibid., p. 229. Rayson Huang, A Lifetime in Academia: An Autobiography (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000), p. 68. Ibid. Toh, “Intellectual Decolonization” in Towards Tomorrow, p. 53. Ibid., note 2. Paul Theroux, “Tarzan is an Expatriate” Transition 7, no. 32 (August/September 1967): 13. Ibid., p. 19. Transition 7, no. 33 (October/November 1967): 7. See also Curtis A. Keim, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 72–74, 81–83, 116–17, 158–64. Transition 7, no. 34 (December/January 1968): 15. In a reply in Transition 7, no. 35 (February/March 1968), Paul Theroux described the writer as “a man called J. Allen, an historian I am told”. J. Allen was very likely to have been the late James de Verre Allen, who taught at the University of Malaya in the 1960s before going to East Africa. He published The Malayan Union, Monograph

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Series No. 10 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1967). He died in Mombasa in 1990. A book he had been working on was published after his death: Swahili Origins (London: James Curry Ltd., and Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993). Finally, Allen is identifiable as the lecturer named De Groot in V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World: A Sequence (London: Heinemann, 1994), pp. 359–62. Toh, “Intellectual Decolonization” in Towards Tomorrow, p. 53. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 223. Ibid., p. 240. Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), p. 158. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 225, note 7. Straits Times, 6 January 1971. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 231. Ibid. Ibid., p. 230. Sunday Times, 14 February 1971, in which Dr Toh referred to an action in the previous year. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 235. Ibid., note 44. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid. Straits Times, 14 May 1971. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 231. Ibid., pp. 236–37. John A. Madougall, “Criteria for a National University: Expatriate Contribution to Discussion”, Singapore Herald, 5 February 1971. Singapore Herald, 13 February 1968. C.N. Parkinson, “An Autobiographical” note, in World Authors 1950–1970, edited by John Wakeman (New York: Wilson, 1975), p. 1114. Ibid. Puccetti, “Authoritarian Government and Academic Subservience”, p. 237. Sunday Times, 14 February 1971. Lam, “The Organizational Utility Men” in Lee’s Lieutenants, edited by Lam and Tan, p. 10. Sunday Times, 14 February 1971.

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72 Singapore Herald, February 1971. 73 D.J. Enright, Play Resumed: A Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 30–31. 74 Sunday Times, 14 February 1971. 75 Straits Times, 14 March 1968. 76 Ibid. 77 Sunday Times, 19 May 1968. 78 Sunday Times, 22 June 1968. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Straits Times, 21 December 1968. 82 “Whatever Happened to Tan Wah Piow, Singapore’s Student Union Activist” Asia Week 8, no. 1 (8 January 1982): 7. 83 Minchin, No Man is an Island, p. 264. 84 Straits Times, 12 December 1974. 85 Sunday Nation, 22 December 1974. 86 Sunday Times, 15 December 1974. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Straits Times, 24 December 1974. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Minchin, No Man is an Island, p. 264. 93 Straits Times, 21 October 1976, 24 October 1976, 25 November 1976 and 4 December 1976. 94 Enright, Play Resumed, p. 90. 95 Toh, “Role of the University”. 96 Straits Times, 12 October 2004. 97 Rob Nixon, London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Chapter 6; V.S. Naipaul, The Writer and the World, introduced and edited by Pankaj Mishra (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2002), pp. 107–33, 346–437, 461–84. 98 Mahathir Mohamad, Reflections on Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Pelanduk Publications (M) Sdn. Ltd., 2002), pp. 87–90, 96–100; Nixon, London Calling, p. 140. 99 Mahathir, Reflections, pp. 96–98. 100 Nixon, London Calling, pp. 142–43. 101 Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, p. 161. 102 Lee Kuan Yew, Address to University Staff at the Singapore Conference Hall on Tuesday, 20 May 1980, Prime Minister’s Speeches, 1980. 103 Ibid.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Nantah: Community Nation permission of the Institute of Southeast AsianBetween Studies. Individual and articles are • 417 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

S I X T E E N

Nantah: Between Community and Nation

N

anyang University (or Nantah, to use the short form) was founded at a time when British colonial rule was passing, and a new nation was in the making in Malaya. Chinese clan and chamber of commerce leaders recognized this as a crucial time to claim for the Chinese community an equal place with other ethnic communities in the nation-to-be. They believed that the finest expression of this ideal was the freedom as a community to preserve their language, education, and culture, equally with other communities which would do the same.1 With Nantah’s founding, the stakes in Chinese language, education, and culture were raised to a whole new level. The timing of Nantah’s advent was not only critical because of imminent political change in Malaya, but also because the People’s Republic of China had become a closed door to Malayan Chinese seeking tertiary education in Chinese. Singapore was where the idea of Nantah originated and was established in reality, but the community effort to establish it that Singapore Chinese tycoons spearheaded was supported by the Chinese in Malaya as well. The promise of Nantah was never to be fulfilled. British officials and Malay nationalists alike looked on Nantah, and indeed, the whole Chinese education structure, as an obstacle to national integration.2 The British would have nothing to do with Nantah, denying it recognition and financial support. However, Singapore’s elected political leaders had to deal with the Nantah problem. Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock, as we shall see, and some others too, tried to squeeze some electoral mileage from it. When negotiating

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the merger with Malaya, the PAP had to ask for education to be made a state as opposed to federal responsibility, clearly with Nantah in mind. The great irony is that Nantah failed to survive in post-1965 Singapore under a PAP Government committed to giving every ethnic community an equal place, according to its tenet of multiracialism and multilingualism. One reason, and a compound one at that, is Nantah’s involvement with the communist united front, supporting and being supported in return by the Barisan Socialis and the SATU unions; and Nantah’s resistance to reform and the history of disturbances associated with this. Thus Nantah appeared as a threat to the English-educated ruling elite, the PAP Government, and its control over nation-building. Another reason is the PAP Government’s economic transformation of Singapore, which put a premium on learning the English language and, inevitably, undermined the entire edifice of Chinese education. Nothing was harder to handle than a Chinese university in slow decline, in which the Chinese community had invested so much, and believed in with such great Chinese nationalistic pride and passion. Prime Minister Lee had to wait more than a decade for the right moment to administer the final solution.

The Founding of Nantah Chinese people everywhere prized education. In Singapore, businessmen and others in the various Chinese clans and dialect associations established schools, but the Hokkiens, because of their greater numbers and wealth, did more. The great Hokkien leader, Tan Kah Kee, doyen of towkays in his day, took the lead in founding the Chinese High School in Singapore in 1919, a landmark for secondary education in Chinese in the then British Malaya, which set the precedent for the Chung Ling High School in Penang in 1923, and several other high schools in the main towns of Malaya. Tan Kah Kee’s legendary achievement was Amoy (Xiamen) University, which he founded in 1921 in his birthplace in southern Fukien province. Another Hokkien magnate, Tan Lark Sye, who had come from the same province as Tan Kah Kee, and worked for him as a factory foreman, later aspired to his mantle. Tan Lark Sye’s name is synonymous with Nantah, which he moved to establish in January 1953 and saw through to completion and beyond.

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Tan Lark Sye himself gave five million dollars towards the project. The Hokkien Huay Kuan of which he was the president, donated a 500-acre site at Jurong, in the western part of the island. People from all over Malaya, not just Singapore, contributed, and they were from all classes, not just millionaires, but also shopkeepers, cabaret girls, taxi-drivers, trishaw coolies, and hawkers. The colonial government disapproved of the project and turned down the proposers’ application to register Nantah as a university. The proposers resorted to listing it as a limited company — the Nanyang University Company Ltd. This was a dubiously distinctive status. It meant that the government would not recognize the degrees conferred by Nantah. Nor would the government give it financial support, and Nantah needed this, as the public donations, though ample for erecting buildings, were insufficient for meeting recurrent costs.3 On both counts, Nantah compared miserably with its English-medium counterpart in Singapore, the University of Malaya, and the disparity was certain to have political repercussions before long. This created a fertile situation for chauvinists. It was ideal for the communists as well. The cadre and the scholar were natural allies as outsiders to the system. The cadre shared the scholar’s pride in Chinese language and culture, and empathized with his sense of rejection by the colonial state. The cadre’s aim was to recover lost ground. The Chinese middle schools had been his recruiting ground until Lim Yew Hock neutralized it in the mid 1950s. Where did the leading men of Nantah stand? This question is of particular importance with regard to Tan Lark Sye, the chairman of Nantah, and Pan Kuo Chu, the secretary-general (or registrar) for the first five years. Both men were to suffer personally on security grounds, but to have their reputations restored in later years. What was the truth about them? Tan Lark Sye was said to have been no communist, nor could ever have been one. He was too sold on capitalism, and was good and lucky in it. Nor was he by any stretch of the imagination, an educationist. He relied heavily on Pan Kuo Chu, a scholar who came from Fukien province in 1930 to work as a newspaper editor (in the literature section) and then as a school principal. Pan stood out in the Singapore Chinese community, led predominantly by businessmen and merchants, and his knowledge and calligraphy were

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much prized by them. He won fame as the author of a couplet dedicated to the national salvation of China under Japanese assault.4 He clearly relished being the secretary-general of Nantah, and worked very hard to receive the first batch of students on time (in 1956).5 He designed, with the help of his daughter, the university’s crest, with its three interlocking rings, in yellow, blue, and red, representing Chinese, Malays, and Indians in a harmonious relationship, presided over by a yellow star representing the university. This symbolism was again incorporated in his crafting of Chairman Tan Lark Sye’s speech at the inaugural opening in 1958, which called for “cultural interactions among various races”, “interracial friendship”, and “interracial cooperation”, and described Nantah as “open to all brotherly races that have for generations lived here”.6 It would seem that Pan was in a privileged position to shape Tan Lark Sye’s thinking and speaking. He was the trusted mandarin to Tan, the chairman. Again, when Tan Lark Sye spoke of Nantah as “a worthy cradle of our Malayan culture”7 to a conference in 1962, it is fairly certain that Pan Kuo Chu had tutored him to use such metaphors. By their own word, these two leaders meant their institution to do its part for nation-building in Malaya. But it is not immediately clear how a Chinese university could serve this purpose. What is immediately clear is that the two men lay themselves open to the charge of chauvinism, and/or abetting communist subversion. Pan Kuo Chu was the first to be dealt with by the Lim Yew Hock Government, followed by Tan Lark Sye a few years later, by the PAP Government. Interestingly, both men had kith and kin to attest to their innocence in interviews given long after the event. Tan Lark Sye’s nephew said it was unthinkable that his uncle could have been a communist.8 Incidentally, the same thing “definitely not a communist“ was said of Tan Lark Sye by a communist cadre who manipulated him.9 They were right to be so certain because of the multimillionaire’s circumstance, and also action, which showed him to be a maverick, not a Marxist, a chauvinist, not a communist. As for Pan Kuo Chu, his son said that he was a victim of the Lim Yew Hock Government’s jealousy of what he and Nantah had achieved.10 This testimony cannot be dismissed, but neither can the filial piety of the son who offered it.

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Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock looked on Nantah as one more target in the series of attacks he launched against communist networks. He set his sights on Pan Kuo Chu. Pan was not detained, but had his citizenship revoked and his passport confiscated in 1958. Stateless in Singapore, Pan who was no mean poet felt himself turning “from an animal into a small bonsai plant”.11 Lim Yew Hock punished the mandarin who was the pillar of strength for the chairman, but he did not, or dared not, touch the chairman. Instead, Lim revealed a willingness to cooperate with the chairman, Tan Lark Sye, to put Nantah on a better footing.

The Nanyang University Bill Lim obtained Tan’s support to appoint a committee of external assessors for Nantah, whose report, if all went well, would be the basis for the government’s recognition of Nantah. At the same time, Lim was prepared to table in the Legislative Assembly a bill drafted by lawyers retained by Nantah.12 The bill provided for a new university council of twenty-eight members, of which three would be government nominees. The passing of this bill was a virtual recognition of Nantah ahead of the committee of assessment. It would be an understatement to say that the Lim Yew Hock Government was giving a hostage to fortune. But Lim was desperate to win the general election in 1959, and launched the bill in November 1958, in the same month that he cobbled together a new party, the Singapore People’s Alliance, to improve his chances. The other parties and individuals represented in the Legislative Assembly were also mindful of the forthcoming election. The entire spectrum of political affiliation in the house — comprising five parties, independent members and nominated members — were in favour of the Nanyang University Bill. Undoubtedly, it was the anticipation of the power of the overwhelmingly Chinese electorate that had brought legislators to such unanimity. Progressive and Liberal Socialist assemblymen vied with one another to demonstrate support for the bill. They chided the government for not treating Nantah better, but more “like a second son”, after the University of Malaya, the firstborn, and were additionally anxious for the Federation of

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Malaya to recognize the contribution that Nantah could make to national development.13 They pointed out that sixty per cent of the students at Nantah were from Malaya. One speaker, an Independent member who was Indian, disclosed the interesting fact that he had visited Nantah a number of times, and that “quite a few Indians… were among the first to donate to the founding of this institution”.14 Among other speakers, Lee Kuan Yew supported the bill, but regretted that a Malayan national solution to the Nantah problem had not been found. He warned legislators against short term vote catching, and urged them to have the courage to face up to future implications. He said: 60 per cent of the students are from the Federation. But the Federation Government is not going to pay one cent in support of Nanyang University, or the students, let alone pass a statute openly recognizing it as a seat of learning… until they are quite sure that it fits in with the scheme of things which is acceptable to them… In Singapore we have a very good opportunity in a numerically Chinese-dominated city to demonstrate to the Malays, both here, in the Federation, and in South-East Asia, that we are prepared to be part of the Malayan scene and part of the South-East Asia context.15 Lee was able in this debate to beam a message to Malaya on his interest in the merger issue, and to the MCP as well, which was trying to read his mind.

Politics of Reform The team of assessors appointed by the Lim Yew Hock Government was chaired by S.L. Prescott, vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia, and consisted of four other members, three of whom were Chinese from universities in the Netherlands, Taiwan, and the United States. They arrived in February 1959, when the Nanyang University Bill had “passed the Second Reading and Select Committee stage”.16 They stated this in their

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report, critically, as having pre-empted their work. The Prescott Report was submitted on 12 March 1959, by which time the impending general election overshadowed everything else, and it was not released to the public until July, after the new government had been formed. The delay could also have been caused by the fact that the Prescott commission returned a highly unfavourable verdict. The Lim Yew Hock Government was vanquished in the general election on 30 May 1959. For the PAP, this was the historic day, marking the start of its continuous rule achieved by winning every subsequent election. The new PAP Government appointed a committee to review the Prescott Report, made up of local members: a Chinese newspaper editor and academics, one of whom, Dr Gwee Ah Leng, was the chairman. This committee arrived at the same conclusion, “though couched in milder terms”.17 Prime Minister Lee did not wait for the Gwee Ah Leng committee’s report, which did not come until November. He had to act more quickly and imaginatively, uninhibited by conventional academic thinking. The PAP Government took office in June, and in six months’ time, the first batch of four hundred students would be sitting for their finals. Lee discussed his plan “carefully in cabinet”.18 Then, on a late September day, he drove on the long and winding road to Nantah to address its one thousand students. From the first graduating batch of four hundred, he said, the government would take seventy into the public services, mainly education. As well, the government would give suitable candidates scholarships for postgraduate studies abroad, particularly in science and engineering. Beyond these immediate measures, Lee emphasized to his eager audience the importance of achieving recognition for their university in a Malayan national context. The graduates, he said, “must demonstrate by their words and deeds that they were graduates of a Malayan university which used the Chinese language as one of the media of instruction, not graduates of a Chinese university which incidentally also taught the Malay language”.19 He reminded them that Singapore was at the centre of a postcolonial Malay Southeast Asia bent on rooting out, or suppressing, what had made the Chinese in their midst so distinctive in terms of language and culture. “We cannot escape from our environment,”20 Lee said. “If Nanyang

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becomes a symbol of Chinese excellence and of the supremacy of Chinese scholarship and learning then verily we will aggravate the position [of the Chinese in the Southeast Asian diaspora]”.21 What messages are implied here? On the face of it, Lee warned of the Chineseness of Nantah. By extension, he could also be warning of the Chineseness of communism. The subtext would run as follows: The Malays of Malaya and Southeast Asia would not tolerate a Chinese university. They would no more tolerate a Chinese communist party. The students had better get this. Lee’s messages that day would serve a further purpose: help him discuss the merger with Tunku Abdul Rahman. Lee’s immediate concern was to lift the gloom cast by the Prescott Report and buy the government time to fashion Nantah into “a real university”, as official statements put it.22 The first step was to negotiate what to reform, based on the findings of the assessors. Lee Khoon Choy and Jek Yuen Thong, representing the government, sat down with representatives from Nantah in a joint government-university liaison committee (henceforth Nantah liaison committee) formed in 1960. The talks did not go well and were suspended for three years. It was clear that the chairman of Nantah, Tan Lark Sye, was the chief obstacle to the reform desired by the government. He was highly respected as the “father of Nantah”, but his chairmanship, which was misguided, was central to what was wrong with the university. He set aside the Prescott and Gwee Ah Leng reports. The Straits Times commented: “One might as well return a book to the library unread.”23 Out of a deep sense of betrayal and indignities suffered consequent on these reports, he acted even more outrageously. He appointed as vice-chancellor Dr Chuang Chu Lin, a former high school principal who had shown himself to be chauvinist and procommunist, and had been detained in 1957–58. He increased the intake of students, going for quantity only. He proceeded to form a new university council, disregarding the minister for education, Yong Nyuk Lin, who advised him to postpone it for some time.24 The talks in the Nantah liaison committee were held up by the failure to agree on the composition of the new council. The government wanted to work in some kind of check and balance. Tan stated that the

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Nanyang University Bill had provided for a new university council. The fact that the Lim Yew Hock Government had put in a clause suspending the operation of the bill until May 1959, presumably in order to have time to consider the Prescott Report, did not trouble Tan. As far as he was concerned, the bill had come into force,25 the university was now incorporated in law, and he had every right to convene a new university council. He wrote to the eleven regional councils of Nantah in Malaya “inviting them to elect a permanent representative each to the new council”.26 The government chose not to nominate the three members allocated to it, despite Tan’s repeated invitations. Tan then got the delegates attending the university’s tenth Pan-Malayan annual conference in 1962, to declare the new council “properly constituted” and to authorize him to call the first meeting “even without the government’s representatives”.27 He assured the delegates that the university had the sound finances to “go on forever with or without outside aid”.28 Tan was riding high for the moment. The minister for education came round to nominating the three government representatives. In July 1962, the new council held its first meeting and elected Tan as chairman, but with the three government representatives abstaining.29

A Time to Decide Apart from Malay leaders, the MCP, and the students of Nantah, another class of people that Lee directed his messages at were the Chinese businessmen or towkays. Lee understood the towkay tendency to sit on the fence.30 They typically waited to see which side would emerge the winner and were ready then to pay homage to it. He meant to tell them that the waiting was over, they had to decide. He would convince them, as he would all other people, by his strong leadership and his clear, consistent agenda, delivered with great earnestness and passion. On their part, the towkays from long experience of dealing with men and business, could recognize a leader when they saw one. They also had a sense of entering a new era where it was important to make a stand (something Lee encouraged) in the merger period and, especially after Singapore’s separation. In short,

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the advent of the PAP Government compelled the towkays to choose. They could either see it as an enemy or as destiny. If the latter, they should come forward and serve with the government. Many did. The one spectacular and catastrophic exception was Tan Lark Sye. Why? Tan’s case may be better understood by juxtaposition with some positive towkay examples. The towkays were generally a good complement to the PAP. The towkays’ ability to charm and befriend others and create business networks made up for qualities lacking in the stern-faced ruling elite. They were the most natural of ambassadors and high commissioners. This is proven in the following cases: Ko Teck Kin whom Prime Minister Lee chose as senator to the federal parliament,31 and who later became Singapore’s first high commissioner to Malaysia; Lien Ying Chow, high commissioner to Malaysia, 1966–69, who could count among his friends, Tunku Abdul Rahman;32 Ho Rih Hwa, Ambassador to Thailand, 1967–71, and representative at the European Economic Community and ambassador to Belgium and West Germany, 1972–74;33 Wee Mon Cheng, ambassador to Japan, 1973–80.34 The towkays’ munificence in the sponsorship of education and the influence they wielded were appreciated by the PAP Government seeking to reform Nantah. Ko Teck Kin and Lien Ying Chow were two founders of Nantah who were prepared to go along with the government’s programme. Lien Ying Chow had protested [in vain] Tan Lark Sye’s appointment of Dr Chuang Chu Lin as vice-chancellor.35 For one eminent and much-loved towkay, the diplomatic service had come too late, but he was notable as “the best friend of education” and the first Chancellor of the University of Singapore, 1962–65, an office for which “no one could be more fitting”.36 Lee Kong Chian was this person. Possessed of a “calm wisdom” and “unsurpassed generosity”,37 he gave to people of all races for their multifarious projects through his exemplary Lee Foundation. He too was a founder of Nantah, and ended up as its biggest donor, topping ten million, because of his trademark generosity of matching dollar for dollar the contributions of the general public. He gave to the University of Singapore as well, funding the erection of a new library and an art gallery. Below the tertiary level, he contributed to schools in all the four official languages. He did it all quietly. With his characteristic humanity

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and humility, he supported the principle of multracialism, a cornerstone of the nation. Lee Kong Chian hailed from Fukien, the province from which the most numerous, and as history testified, some of the most illustrious of the sons of China migrated to Singapore. No wonder that of all the Chinese dialect groups in Singapore, the Hokkiens had the biggest association, the Hokkien Huay Kuan, the largest local banks, the Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation and the United Overseas Bank, and the highest place in the roll call of educational sponsorship. The Hokkiens have commemorated three of their great men by commissioning busts of them, namely Tan Kah Kee, Lee Kong Chian, and Tan Lark Sye. Tan Kah Kee was totally devoted to education, Lee Kong Chian was even-handed and wise in his support, and Tan Lark Sye showed indomitable will and courage in championing Nantah.38 It is illuminating to know certain other aspects in which the three men were like and unlike each other. Tan Kah Kee and Tan Lark Sye gave speeches and interviews in the Hokkien dialect, and spoke no English. Lee Kong Chian was conversant in English, and in his inaugural address as Chancellor of the University of Singapore, quoted (in English) Cicero, Mencius, and a Malay proverb in equal measure by way of a conclusion.39 On another aspect, Tan Kah Kee loved simple Chinese food, and once spoke out against an extravagant dish, the suckling pig.40 He was censorious on people who painted their faces and nails, and on entertainments like the cabaret.41 His son-in-law, Lee Kong Chian, shared his taste for porridge, and his moral outlook, though without the old man’s outspokenness. But this was not so with Tan Lark Sye, who relished going to the millionaires’ club, and seemed remarkably well informed about happenings in a cabaret.42 However, Tan Lark Sye took after his mentor in his bluntness of speech. Tan Lark Sye would lash out where Lee Kong Chian would have preferred to leave unsaid. An example is Tan Lark Sye’s tirade that English education would only turn out fools.43 Whatever the truth is, many would wish that he was less forthright. Still, there is no denying that without a leader as bold, brash and blinkered as he, Nantah might never have seen the light of day. Tan Lark Sye resembled his mentor Tan Kah Kee in another respect. Both men placed themselves on the frontline of political fire in their time.

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Tan Kah Kee engaged in fierce controversy with the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai Shek, and went over to the side of the upright Chinese Communist Party and Mao Tze Tung. His was an honourable ending, which was not the case for Tan Lark Sye, who chose to take on the PAP. What made Tan Lark Sye do it? He was piqued by the PAP Government’s strongly conditional recognition of Nantah. He viewed the required reforms as an affront to him personally, and a diminution of his control and direction as Nantah’s chairman. He was contemptuous of the English-educated PAP top leadership. His understanding of politics was flawed and naïve. In a speech to Nantah alumni in April 1962, he encouraged them to enter the political arena, which he said was no different from a cabaret. How to become a minister or even a prime minister? Just “move nicely among the voters” come election time, he advised, in the same way that a cabaret girl has to please her clients in order to get elected cabaret queen.44 He was right in his philosophy, however, when he said that “political limelight” was as “flickering” as a moment of fame in a cabaret.45 Tan took the fatal step of going with the Barisan Sosialis, but it is easy to see why. Barisan Sosialis assemblymen who had first won their seats as PAP candidates in 1959 and later broke away, took up the cause of Nantah. Chan Sun Wing, formerly parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, questioned the government’s sincerity in wanting to solve the university’s problems. Ong Chang Sam asked questions showing his solicitude: How many of the second and third batches of graduates would be taken into the education service, and why were Nantah graduates required to do “in service” training?46 He sensed (wrongly) discrimination against them. The education minister explained that graduates from the University of Malaya (in Singapore) had to put up with this requirement too, which was introduced to meet the shortage of teachers in secondary schools owing to the “great expansion in enrolment”.47 Tan had reason to hope for a Barisan victory as the day of recognition for Nantah. Apparently, someone had even “hinted to him that if they won, a Nanyang man might be made Minister of Education”.48 Tan “urged the Hokkien Huay Kuan to vote for the Barisan” in the September 1963 general election.49 He himself gave the candidates cash and

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a ride on his celebrity. The snap timing of this election, which was the PAP Government’s call, was a sign of its uncertainty. This could have entered into Tan’s calculation: power was still up for grabs. After the PAP’s win, with thirty-seven seats to the Barisan’s thirteen, and the United People’s Party’s one, the government immediately began proceedings to strip Tan Lark Sye of his citizenship. Prime Minister Lee had made a mental note to deal with Tan for some time. Tan had been a lesson to him of “the difference between formal constitutional power and the political strength needed to exercise it”.50 When the PAP won the general election a second time, Lee decided to strike. Tan would be made an example to show the government’s zero tolerance of “prominent figures who had acted as front men for the communists, believing that their wealth and standing in the Chinese community gave them immunity”.51 Thus the multi-millionaire was like the mandarin, Pan Kuo Chu, previously (in 1958) rendered stateless. Tan had taken a gamble, nothing new to an entrepreneur, but in this particular case, he had lost out in an uncommon way. He offered to step down as Nantah’s chairman. But the government’s troubles were not over. The vice-chairman of the Nantah university council was Lau Geok Swee, a Penang millionaire, who chaired the university’s regional council in his state. Lau was watchful for the rights of Malayan sponsors of the university and of Malayan students. He queried whether the Singapore Government’s subsidy for Singapore students at Nantah would set a limit on the number of places available to non-subsidized Malayan students.52 He was no more receptive to reform than Tan Lark Sye, and used his position in the Nantah liaison committee to block it when the government reactivated the committee simultaneously with the move to punish Tan.53 Another place where the government encountered opposition was the Nantah university council. The three government representatives there had a hard time. To quote one example, when Tan Lark Sye’s letter of resignation from the chairmanship came up on the agenda of a council meeting, their proposal that it be accepted was defeated by the majority.54 Another example: The three government representatives queried the presence of Chia Thye Poh, Barisan Sosialist assemblyman for Jurong, and one other person in the

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university council. Did they really represent the Guild of Graduates as they claimed? What were their credentials? The council did not come to a definite conclusion on the matter.55

The Big Clean-Up The centre of resistance was the campus. The motives were a mix of gratitude and affection for the man to whom so much was owed by so many, and disaffection for the government. The students protested against the government’s moves to revoke the citizenship of Tan Lark Sye and to reorganize the university. On Thursday, 3 October 1963, the Nanyang University Students’ Union started a three-day boycott of classes, and seven big workers’ unions belonging to the SATU stable pledged support for the students. On the first day, the seven unions, which incidentally faced a government ban, sent workers in a convoy of more than one hundred lorries and buses to join the more than 1,000 students who had barricaded themselves in, in a night-time rally. In the speeches made, Ko Teck Kin, a member of the university council, was reviled as having sold out to the government. Ko Teck Kin was one of the founders of Nantah, had donated $500,000, and served as treasurer on the university council ever since. He resigned, upset by the attack on him for his pro-reform position, and though he was persuaded to come back, the incident caused a setback to the talks on reorganization. On Monday, 7 October, 500 students took their demonstration to the padang, the green field opposite City Hall. They sat, forming a square, as five of their leaders went in to present a petition to Dr Toh Chin Chye, the deputy prime minister. Afterwards, the secretary-general of the students’ union addressed the students: “We have met Dr Toh. We are not satisfied the government is sincere in helping Nantah.”56 Nevertheless, he instructed “them to march back to the buses quietly and to return to afternoon classes”.57 Things simmered down, in part because Tan Lark Sye voiced his displeasure with the students for making a public issue of his trouble, and advised them to concentrate on their studies. He urged patience to await the outcome of the talks in the Nantah liaison committee.58

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These talks which went on in an “on-off-on” fashion finally ended on 5 June 1964 with “satisfaction”.59 The committee agreed on the formation of a new university council, but with the same number of twenty-eight members and not the increase in members and numerical balance sought by the government. Another salient point was the government’s reaffirmation “that the Chinese language should continue to be the medium of instruction” in Nantah.60 However, Nantah should be remade “into a university where students from all Malayan schools can obtain an education”.61 The Straits Times commented that “much ingenuity and tact will be required to reconcile” this objective with the above term regarding the Chinese language.62 Not the least important term agreed on was that “after reorganization, Nanyang University must become a purely academic institution and should not be manipulated or influenced by any political or subversive activities”.63 By this time, Singapore was already merged with Malaysia. It had taken that long to agree on a new deal for Nantah. Dato Dr Ismail bin Abdul Rahman, the Malaysian minister of home affairs could now lend a hand to make the new deal stick. He coordinated a plan with the Singapore Government.64 One half of the student population at Nantah were from Malaya and about one-hundred-and-seventy students were from Sabah and Sarawak, Dr Ismail stated, claiming ownership in the interest of security, just as Lau Geok Swee, the Penang millionaire, did so in the interest of Malayan investment and Malayan student enrolment in Nantah. At a predawn hour on 28 June, about 1,000 policemen from various units, including the Federal Reserve, travelled in a convoy of sixty vehicles to the sleeping campus. Some eighty-five per cent of the students stayed in hostels erected on campus, obviously, since so many were not from Singapore, and the campus was in a remote area dotted with farmers’ huts. The large number of policemen was needed to cordon off the campus. Forty-one students were arrested, four of them girls, and for the latter, policewomen in blue overalls were on hand to escort them away. The number of students detained was later reported as fifty-four. The operation which lasted eight hours was billed as the biggest after Operation Cold Store, carried out at the Tunku’s insistence in the bitter run-up to Malaysia.

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A pro-tem committee in charge of Nantah followed up with more action in July. It sacked one-hundred-and-two students, dissolved the canteen committee, dismissing thirty-five canteen workers (the provision of meals henceforth to be contracted out) and it also dismissed twenty non-academic staff, including six graduates employed in the university (their alma mater) administration. The special branch of the police soon released thirty-three of the fiftyfour arrested students. Dr Ismail would allow those who recanted and were no longer considered a security risk to continue with their studies. After all, the Singapore Government was arranging for a vetting mechanism known as the suitability certificate. The political sterilization of the campus was accompanied by changes at the top in Nantah. Dr Chuang Chu Lin, the controversial vice-chancellor, resigned. As proposed by Ong Pang Boon, the minister for education, a pro-tem committee would look after the university, pending the appointment of a new vice-chancellor. There were movements also in the university council. The vice-chairman, Lau Geok Swee, the Penang millionaire whom the Singapore Government accused of obstructing reform, resigned. Ko Teck Kin was elected chairman of the new university council, and his place as treasurer was filled by Ng Aik Huan, another of the university’s founders.65 The government now had the chairman it could trust. All seemed to augur well as the university moved on to the next stage, the appointment of a curriculum review committee headed by the historian, Professor Wang Gungwu.

The Wang Gungwu Report and the Nantah Revolt The Wang Gungwu report found the courses of study “too broad” in some cases, and in others — at the third and fourth year level — “too elementary”.66 Still others were “too narrow and specialized”.67 The method of instruction consisted almost entirely of formal lectures, and “the personal and intensive contact between staff and students so essential in university teaching” was absent.68 The only mode of assessment was the examination, conducted with such frequency and in such a manner as to stifle all initiative to read widely, and worse, compelled “students to memorize set answers”.69

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The level of proficiency in language expected in these courses was central to the enquiry. The university claimed to be teaching not only in Mandarin, but in other languages too. There was a Department of Modern Languages and Literature which “offers a large variety of courses in English at different levels and in English Literature”.70 Additionally it “offers a few courses in elementary Malay, French, German, and Japanese”.71 The report considered “this arrangement to be unsatisfactory”.72 As the main business of the department was to teach English and English Literature, the other languages, including Malay, the national language, were treated as secondary. Furthermore, the degree course in English Literature which the department offered was not of sufficient merit “in view of the low standard of English among students on entry”.73 The Wang Gungwu report proposed changes to the courses of study and a new degree, structured like that of the University of Singapore. It emphasized the recruitment of the best staff possible by paying competitive salaries. It suggested the abolition of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, and the setting up of a Language Centre, which would work more effectively. It asked that “the National Language be given full recognition by the immediate establishment of a Department of Malay Studies”.74 The overall thrust of the report was devastatingly clear. So far, the university had “catered only for students from the Chinese-medium schools”.75 This role was too limited for a society that was multi-ethnic and multilingual. The university must reflect the society, and the courses of study “must be adapted” to permit students of all language streams of education a chance to benefit from the university’s existence.76 Written with a sense of mission occasioned by “our new nation of Malaysia”, the Wang Gungwu report would have the university produce graduates fit for the public services, commerce, and industry, and able to see the nation through rapid modernization.77 We therefore believe that particular attention must be paid to the problem of necessary language skills. It should be the aim of the University to produce graduates who are at least bi-lingual, if not tri-lingual, in the languages relevant to the development of the country.78

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The report placed its recommendation on language upfront to stress its crucial importance. The issue of bilingualism and trilingualism had featured in public discourse since the all-party agreement on education of the mid1950s. But the focus had been on the schools. The Wang Gungwu report’s recommendation of the principle for Nantah was something new and startling. The Straits Times sensed an anomaly: “The logic of this change [transforming Nantah into a multilingual university] must… be followed through at the secondary and primary school levels”.79 At the time, bilingualism had not yet reached the secondary schools. Ong Pang Boon, the minister for education, introduced it in primary schools in 1960, and allowed a time-lag for students to come up to the secondary stage before he introduced it in secondary schools in 1966. So the first thing to note is the shock of an idea that was new and experimental. But nothing was as hard for Nantah as the fact of being required to change from a Chinese university to one which must make qualitatively greater use of English and Malay. The old suspicion of a plot to anglicize Chinese education resurfaced. It was argued that Nantah should be left alone to provide for the Chineseeducated, just as the University of Singapore provided for the Englisheducated.80 Unfortunately this argument would not wash. The University of Singapore was considered a national institution simply, and ironically, because English was the medium of instruction and served as a common language bonding the different races. English was also the working language of the government, administration, and economy. These two advantages, political and pragmatic, were absent in Nantah as a Chinese university. Consequently, the University of Singapore was not pressured to go bilingual or trilingual, as Nantah was, though it soon became mandatory for applicants to have at least a pass grade in their second language, as a nod to bilingualism. The recommendation on language in the Wang Gungwu report drew the most flak. Once more, the students took to the barricades and the streets. The caretaker pro-tem committee formed after the resignation of the vice-chancellor, Dr Chuang Chu Lin, in July 1964, served for a few months. Then an acting vice-chancellor was appointed, namely Professor Huang Ying Jung of Nantah’s political science department.

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The Wang Gungwu Curriculum Review Committee was appointed when Singapore was merged with Malaysia. Its report, dated 14 May 1965, was written with Singapore in the Malaysian nation in mind. This premise was about to be destroyed by disputes leading to 9 August, when Singapore ceased to be in Malaysia. The inconceivable had happened, Singapore was independent — a Chinese-dominated nation — and suddenly, a Chinese university was not so inconceivable. So the opponents of the Wang Gungwu report might well think and hope. But independent Singapore was fraught with ethnic tensions generated by the failed merger. The PAP Government saw multiracialism, and the playing down of Chinese dominance, as the only salvation. Moreover, previously, Malaysia was there to give added support with the Chinese problem. Now the PAP must face it alone. Its own survival and power were tied to the matter of reforming Nantah. Acting Vice-Chancellor Professor Huang had the tough job of explaining the implications of the Wang Gungwu report to students. He talked first to the arts students on the evening of 6 October, and to science students the following evening. On both evenings, the police had to be summoned, and on the second one, a warning shot was fired to rescue a man from the rioting students. The university then expelled eighty-five students, with the police standing by as their names were posted on the notice board, ordering them to quit their hostels forthwith. The expulsion of these students, on 27 October, added more grievance to the protest, which continued as demonstrations on and off campus, stoning of the police on campus, boycott of classes, vandalizing of university buildings, except the library, and arson at a certain supervisor’s office and a hostel. These incidents may be visualized geographically. The Jurong Police Station was about half a mile from the campus, and the Barisan Sosialis branch office, about a hundred yards from the university’s gate. When the troubles started, the police reserve unit stood by at the Jurong station while radio cars patrolled the campus by day, and kept virgil throughout the night. However, the students managed to slip out, singly or in some groups, to the city. The location where they formed into a mass (Tanjong Pagar, the prime minister’s constituency), the route of their march, and

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the destination (the prime minister’s office at City Hall) were quite predictable. The police set up road blocks, fired tear gas into the crowd of taunting students, and charged at them with batons. Thus, the main body of the demonstration was broken up soon after it started in Chinatown, south of the Singapore River. The police guarded City Hall on the northern side of the river, and another place there, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, to where the students were likely to go. On another day, true enough, the students went to demonstrate at this centre, under the eye of the police. The scene at the campus continued to be one ringed by a police cordon, which, one evening, barred some two hundred Barisan Sosialis people from entering. But the students went out to march with them on the upper Jurong Road to the Barisan Sosialis branch office. On another evening towards mid November, three hundred people representing the Barisan, Chinese Old Boys’ Associations, and trade unions, came in five buses on what they called a “comfort mission”.81 The police allowed them in to join three to four hundred students in holding a variety show and speeches at the hill-top union house. In the third week of November, police manning check-points at the university’s gate and Jurong Road, turned back students who were allegedly planning to assemble in Chinatown for another march to City Hall. The students involved in these incidents of protest numbered about three hundred to five hundred, or one-sixth of the student population at most. The protest went on for week after week, and despite the heavy deployment of police forces and vehicles, no attempt was made to crush it. Instead, the government, in an apparently tactical move, released three political detainees. One was the former vice-chairman of the Nanyang University Students’ Union. Another was the former chairman of the Barisan Sosialis branch at Tanjong Pagar. The third was a Barisan candidate who had fought and lost in Telok Ayer constituency to Ong Pang Boon in the 1963 general election. All three men publicly recanted, offering timely messages to the student protestors. Ko Teck Kin, the new Nantah chairman, in whom the government had confidence, and two other members of the Nantah council, met government

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representatives of the Nantah liaison committee in the prime minister’s office. They were assured of the government’s intention to stand by the agreement reached on 5 June 1964. A later consultation resulted in a reiteration of the agreement and a promise to allow students in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature and two other departments “to continue under the old system”.82 The changes implemented would apply only to new students. The consultations were frequent and fine statements were issued afterwards, which time would show up as unachievable illusions. But perhaps peace on the campus could only come through such illusions. A government statement reaffirmed that Nantah will “always be the Chinese university of independent Singapore, using Chinese as the medium of instruction”.83 Ng Aik Huan, a founder of Nantah, council member and representative on the Nantah liaison committee, stated: “I will see to it that it [the character of Nantah] remains unchanged for as long as I live. I will fight anyone who tries to change this ideal of the founders of the university unless he locks me up in jail.”84 Ng Aik Huan went on to dismiss as “’groundless’ the allegation that the ‘original character’ of Nantah was being changed and the university would eventually become an English university playing second fiddle in the State”.85 A stranger combination of illusion and prophesy cannot be found. Acting Vice-Chancellor Professor Huang repeated the government’s assurances, and the senate of professors stated: “These assurances should be good enough. We believe Nantah will always remain a Chinese-medium institute of higher learning.”86 Ch’ng Jit Koon, the president of the Association of Nanyang University Graduates and a future MP and minister of state, shared the same comfortable illusion. He said: “The repeated assurances by the Government and the Nanyang University Council to perpetuate the original character of Nantah are strong and convincing enough.”87 After more than six weeks, the revolt “fizzled” away.88 The police were still needed on campus to keep outsiders, including newspaper reporters, at bay and to break up student pickets posted at lecture halls, but without violence either on the side of the pickets or the police. The university council allowed the eighty-five expelled students to appeal for reinstatement. A letter from Malaysia representing sixteen parents, asked the vice-chancellor

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for evidence of wrongdoing, threatening lawsuit. The spokesman for the parents, a certain Mr Yan of Batu Pahat, put it inimitably when he explained the students’ behaviour as “an expression of love for Nantah”.89 About half of the eighty-five expelled students were from Malaysia. This suggests another idea. It had always been possible for Singapore to send Malayanborn troublemakers back over there. Now that Malaysia was another country, the rationale of deportation was that much stronger.

No Turning Back Tan Lark Sye’s talk of Nantah’s ability to self-finance was sheer bravado. In truth, Nantah badly needed the government’s financial support, and the way was now clear for this to be given on a regular basis. One of the urgent items of governmental expenditure was a state-of-the-art language centre “equipped with a 6-channel and 74-booth laboratory”.90 Opened in February 1967, it conducted remedial and intensive English courses for students of all departments. The search for a new vice-chancellor, another priority of reform, resulted in the appointment of Professor Rayson Huang Lisung in 1969. He had much local experience and a good international network. Born in Swatow in 1920, he graduated with BSc (Hong Kong) in 1942, did research at the University of Chicago, and obtained his DSc at Oxford before joining the University of Malaya in Singapore in 1951, as a chemistry lecturer. In 1959, he went to the Kuala Lumpur division of the university to be professor, and later dean, as well, and from 1965 to 1966, acting vice-chancellor. Huang was bilingual, an indispensable attribute as Nantah’s vicechancellor. Remarkably, he had been a member of the Gwee Ah Leng committee, and must now seem as coming back to practise what he had prescribed. He began on a bright note, the government having formally recognized Nantah’s degrees in May 1968. He made sure of standards by starting to have external examiners. He managed to get C.N. Yang, a Nobel laureate in physics, and friend from Chicago days, to come for a week. He attempted to give Nantah more exposure to the outside world by hosting conferences

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and participating in associations of universities in the region and in the Commonwealth. Taking stock, he concluded that the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Department of Mathematics were among the few strong departments he had, and with these, he started a graduate school, with help from another friend, Robert C.Y. Lin, a retired professor of phamacology in Hong Kong, who would accept no salary, and was only reimbursed for travelling expenses. Huang was “greatly encouraged” by the sizeable number of Nantah graduates he had on the teaching staff.91 Young and qualified with PhDs from major American and Canadian universities, and, as he observed, keen and dedicated to serving their alma mater, they were, he said, the promise of a future for Nantah. He informed them that they were not only his colleagues, but choosing a gungho term, also his comrades. On the negative side, Huang noted the effects of years of dysfunctional development on the students. When he wrote to alumni to solicit funds in 1971, a number replied, who expressed disillusionment with their alma mater for the type of education they had received, adding that it “had no right to expect any support from them”.92 Huang sensed that they spoke for the silent majority too. “For each of these graduates who wrote in this fashion, there must have been many who felt the same way, but did not bother to write. It was sad reading these letters, but I fully sympathize with the writers.”93 Huang’s greatest challenge was that of making Nantah bilingual. He set what he thought was a reasonable standard of English for students to achieve in the time they have. He wrote in retrospect: I did not entertain the extravagant hope of making them bilingual by the time they graduated. To me, being bilingual means being completely at home in both languages, written and spoken, and is far beyond what a year or so of remedial courses can achieve. My relatively modest goal at that time was to help students reach a standard of proficiency in English, sufficient to cope with life as a teacher, a businessman, or in a profession, in the international centre of commerce and trade that was Singapore. This was, to my

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mind, the minimum attainment in the English language to be expected of any university graduate.94 A related objective that he set out to achieve was the change in the language medium used for teaching science and mathematics from Mandarin to English. It was a necessary change in order that Nantah would be integrated with the national system of schools which was simultaneously doing it. It was appropriate as most science graduates went into teaching. It would be relatively painless since science books written in English had been in use in Nantah from its inception, and many of the graduates on the teaching staff had earned their PhDs abroad, using English. The problem was not so much pedagogical as political. Nantah’s alumni condemned the change. Study and perseverance in adversity made for an unusually close-knit student community, and later, fervent alumni fellowship. The Association of Nanyang University Graduates in Singapore was the largest alumni association of its kind formed in any one city or town in the region. The Liao Yang Pau, its official publication, delivered a blast in 1971 which was retransmitted in one of the national Chinese newspapers. The Liao Yang Pau branded the lecturers who switched to teaching in English as fawning on the “very few” in authority to protect their rice bowl.95 “Although they had taught in Chinese before, they now turned right round as if using English was a fashionable undertaking… their action has unavoidably made many wonder if Nanyang has now become an English university.”96 The Liao Yang Pau warned that such “spineless behaviour can only generate bitter hatred”, adding: What we are concerned about is whether there is a deliberate plot to change the very character of the university which was set up to promote and glorify Chinese culture and education, and whoever thus mutilates the spirit of Nantah is no less [than] a murderer of Chinese education and the worst enemy of the peoples of Singapore and Malaysia.97 It is reasonable to suppose that many in the silent majority shared the Liao Yang Pau’s attitude and view. The consequence was that the lecturers

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who would have liked to use English were afraid to do so. Nantah stayed a resolutely Chinese-speaking campus of greatest benefit only to the American, Russian, and other foreign students who came to learn Mandarin at the Language Centre. The danger of such recalcitrance and stubborn resistance to change is that the rest of the world will bypass you and leave you behind. This was what happened while Nantah held out as a bastion of Chinese exceptionalism. The world of multinationals was coming to Singapore and firing up the ambition of parents and students who now wanted a higher standard of English than what they believed Nantah’s Language Centre was offering. These parents and students dared to “entertain the extravagant hope” that Rayson Huang dared not have in his Nantah wards.98 As a result, the better students from the Chinese high schools sought to enrol themselves in the University of Singapore instead of Nantah, or to go abroad. Enrolment at Nantah went into decline just as it did in many Chinese-medium primary schools. The shadow of eclipse from which there was no escape for the schools was creeping up on Nantah too. What about the students from Malaysia? Could they not help to dispel the gloom? True, they used to constitute sixty per cent of Nantah’s student population. But they, too, had started to give Nantah a miss. So much so that a scenario dreaded by the Singapore Government since Lim Yew Hock’s time, whereby it would have to support a university the bulk of whose students were Malayans/Malaysians, had faded. Time had disclosed another scenario: the earlier batches of Malayan/Malaysian students were the better ones, and an asset contributing to Singapore’s fast-track economic growth, and not as previously feared, aliens stranded in a city state because they had the wrong qualifications for jobs back home in Malaysia. Rayson Huang left in September 1972, after serving three-and-a-half years of his five-year term, to take up a new appointment as vice-chancellor of Hong Kong University. He left feeling that he had done several important things to put Nantah in orbit among the universities of the world. But despite his best efforts, Nantah was curving downwards to earth. The crash, should it occur, would be disastrous for, among others, the government, which was certain to be blamed for doing nothing to prevent it. Prime Minister Lee had to step in to intervene.

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Lee decided to correct Nantah’s trajectory by installing a more powerful rocket of reform. He sent the minister for education, Dr Lee Chiaw Meng, to be the vice-chancellor in 1975. Chinese-educated and trained as an engineer with a PhD (London), Dr Lee combined the new-style technocratic leadership of the PAP with age-old Confucian values. “His task”, as set by the prime minister, “was to convert Nantah into an English-language university”.99 Not surprisingly, the prime minister was to write in his memoirs, “it proved too difficult; the staff were basically Chinese-educated and could not teach in English. Although they had taken their PhDs in American universities, they had reverted to using Chinese and lost their English fluency”.100 An attempt was made to boost Nantah’s position by promoting closer ties between it and the University of Singapore, with the idea of having the stronger help the weaker, until eventually the two universities would be equal partners.101 There was introduced in 1974, the joint-admissions scheme with the registrars of both universities working in unison, clearly meant to ensure a better quality of first-year students for Nantah. This was followed in July 1978 by the joint-campus scheme. This idea came from Lee, who in the course of wrestling with bilingualism, had reached the decision to send Chinese-educated students for immersion in an English-speaking environment.102 Thus Nantah undergraduates would proceed to the University of Singapore, while students of the intended SAP schools, and other Chinese-medium secondary schools, would go to designated Englishmedium schools. Forty-one Nantah staff drawn from arts, science, business administration, and accountancy joined their counterparts in the University of Singapore in teaching first-year courses. Tests done in this period suggest that it would take Chinese-educated students three years from their first year at university to catch up with their English-educated colleagues in English proficiency.103 It was hoped that the joint-campus would prove a success, and after three to four years, Nantah students would return to the Jurong campus.104 But this was not to be. The joint-campus turned out to be a prelude to the merger of the two universities. Nantah and the system of schools were two strands in the story of nation-building through change and integration into a national system,

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based on the principle of multilingualism, in effect, bilingualism. Bilingualism was no easy matter as the experience of the primary schools, and the primary school leaving examination results, would bear out. Both the schools, primary and secondary, and Nantah at the tertiary level, had to embark on bilingualism simultaneously with no precedent to guide them, and no turning back either. In the primary schools, no clear targets were set for a considerable time. At Nantah, Rayson Huang set some kind of target, but no timetable. How long will it take for Nantah to be bilingual in Chinese and English? It is a question worth asking. The pedagogical dimension of bilingualism seems to have taken a backseat, with the political one to the fore. Bilingualism was seen as a problem of will and attitude, or the lack of it, and hence of politics. Thus Prime Minister Lee despatched a minister to Nantah in 1978, and this was the equivalent of his request to another minister, Dr Goh, no less, in the same year, to look into the ministry of education, in effect, an investigation into the failure of bilingualism in the primary schools. The two strands of the narrative finally converged. After Nantah was merged with the English-medium University of Singapore, Lee judged that the time had come for all the Chinese-medium schools (except the SAP schools) to “switch to English as their main language of instruction, with Chinese as the second language”.105 The closure of Nantah as the university the Chinese community intended, and prided in, as the one and only Chinese university outside of China, raises important questions about the imperatives of nation-building. This chapter has dealt with why a Chinese university was in conflict with nation-building. Nantah was a towkay-led Chinese community effort to raise the stakes on Chinese language, culture, and education at a time when the political and constitutional arrangements of the Malayan nation were being argued out. Nantah would, by ensuring a constant flow of teachers for the schools, make Chinese education a self-revitalizing and selfperpetuating process. Nantah was an icon, a keeper of the identity of the Chinese, and a promise of Chinese cultural efflorescence in a Malayan environment.

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But for precisely these reasons, Nantah was unwelcome, indeed unacceptable, to the Malays. This was Lee Kuan Yew’s argument, speaking as one of the Malayan-minded nationalists who emerged in the post-war era. Lee stated that Nantah “represents to them [the Malays] the dynamism, drive, and ability of a very powerful culture and of a very able people” and was practically a reproach to the Malays as “they have not been able to found a Malay university”.106 Lee considered it more important for the different races to agree on a basis for creating a Malayan nation before any venture like Nantah should be advanced. Lee was searching for just such a basis. Nantah threatened to be a spoiler by its untimeliness and its suggestion of a challenge. On the other hand, it may be argued that if the Chinese cared so much for their culture, the right thing to do was to make their bid, and if necessary, fight for it (politically) while nothing had gelled as yet. But Lee preferred negotiation to conflict. It was when he had tested the limits of negotiation, trying to secure a fair and equal nation in Malaysia, that he switched to fighting. Ironically, the towkays had been right to fight after all. Post-Malaysia, tense and on edge from the fight, Lee forbade any expansion of Chinese cultural space in Singapore. He came down heavily on any Chinese leader who played up culture as a political issue. Ethnic sensitivities in Singapore, and in the region where it was set, had lost none of their potentially explosive force. Like it or not, Nantah would have to change its Chinese character and take on more of the character of a multiracial nation. To know “why”, it helps to ask “how?” How did Lee achieve the seemingly politically impossible? His cabinet colleagues, Dr Toh Chin Chye and Eddie Barker, “were set against” his intervention in Nantah “as politically too costly”.107 Dr Goh Keng Swee was distinctly unenthusiastic and Ong Pang Boon feared a “backlash from Nantah donors and supporters in Singapore and Malaysia”.108 But Lee said: “I could not accept the prospect of several hundred students each year wasting their future.”109 Several Nantah MPs shared Lee’s view and urged him on. One of them was Ch’ng Jit Koon, a minister of state, whose judgement Lee had come to trust, and three were parliamentary secretaries, among whom was Ho Kah

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Leong, also proven as dependable. These Nantah graduates in the government assured Lee of greater good coming out of his intervention. There were other factors Lee could have taken into account in calculating the risks. The economic climate was favourable. The PAP had won its fifth consecutive general election in 1976. Lee’s hand had strengthened enormously. In the final act, the merger of the two universities, Lee had to contend with a new chairman of the Nantah university council. Ko Teck Kin, the Singapore senator, and later, first high commissioner to Malaysia, and the Nantah chairman supportive of the government’s reforms, had died in 1966. The new chairman, and the last as it turned out, was Wee Cho Yaw, from 1970 to 1980. Wee was the chairman of the United Overseas Bank, which his father and some friends had founded in a small way under another name in 1935. Of the many hats he wore, two in particular, as chairman of Nantah and as chairman of the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan, marked him out as the successor to the Hokkien “greats”, Tan Lark Sye and Lee Kong Chian. As such, Wee felt honour-bound to keep Nantah going. But he also realized he could not be like these pioneers who came up in the world from nothing, and that in his own time, banking and business could not be what it was without the good governance of the PAP.110 Hence, he (too) had to choose: to keep faith with the Chinese community and the pioneers whose legacy was now under his charge, or to obey the dictates of the master nation-builder? The prime minister initiated and kept up a relentless correspondence with the community leader, missives of struggle, and dilemma publicized in the media. Finally, Wee and the whole Nantah university council agreed to the merger, in typical Chinese fashion, without a single dissenting vote. The highly pressurized affair ended with a ritualized total consensus. Lee discussed the question of whether to have one or two universities in Singapore with British academic administrators in London in June 1979. At a lunch given in his honour by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he met one of them, Sir Frederick Dainton, Chancellor of Sheffield University and formerly chairman of the University Grants Committee. Sitting almost directly opposite the prime minister, Dainton spoke to him in surprisingly

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“blunt terms”.111 Not put off, Lee thought, instead, that this was the man he needed to come to Singapore to assess the proposed merger frankly. In his report of December 1979, Dainton stated that he was “leaving aside political considerations which it is not my place to weigh”.112 The central issue for him was: “Will Singapore be better served by one or two universities over the next twenty years?”113 The argument put up by the Nantah side was that Singapore “in the long term” will need two universities.114 Dainton said it was not clear how long this phrase implied. Based on the data he was given, he said he could not estimate the number of students who will come to university “for more than two decades ahead”.115 Next, he could not credit the Nantah argument about having two universities to foster competition, as the two universities in question were not on a par. It was also obvious to him that for Singapore, national competition was not the way to go forward; “the aim should be to compete at the international level”.116 Dainton addressed other arguments in favour of a merger: cost effectiveness, better spread of subjects offered, greater attractiveness to expatriate staff. He concluded that the case of “a single, strong university at Kent Ridge” (his italics) was “compelling” and recommended it accordingly.117 Despite his disclaimer that politics was not his business, Dainton could not help advising, “it is desirable that the issue be settled as soon as possible” (his italics).118 He went on to talk about the damage caused by uncertainty to staff morale and commitment at Nantah. “Also, the more the uncertainty is prolonged, the more entrenched” will attitudes become, and the greater the reluctance “to accept change”.119 The National University of Singapore (NUS) was established on 8 August 1980. The Nantah campus was refitted as the Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI), linked to the engineering faculty of the NUS. In 1991, about half the time Dainton considered feasible for his projection of higher education in the republic, the NTI attained full university status as Singapore’s second university: the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Rayson Huang was not surprised, but “could not help feeling a sense of loss to see Nantah absorbed”.120 For many towkay patrons, academics,

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alumni, intellectuals, teachers, and artists, it was a “severe blow”.121 For Pan Kuo Chu the pain of failure and loss was to be with him all his life. Pan Kuo Chu’s Chinese sensibility informed his role in Nantah’s creation, and his being ever afterwards Nantah’s vindicator and memorialist. Pan’s Chinese sensibility may be understood by way of an analogy with the aesthetic sensibility of Chinese artists of the Nanyang school. These Nanyang Chinese artists depicted the people, landscape, light, and colour of Southeast Asia, but what informed their art was the Chinese ideal of art as a way of perfecting the human character: hence to be graceful with the brush, you must be righteous. The Nanyang school of painting was an intrinsically Chinese genre. So it was, in another area, with the Nantah that bore the handiwork of Pan Kuo Chu. He meant it to be Malayan. He would start Malay studies and English language and literature courses, which were of the order of Malayan. But for all that, his Nantah was a Chinese university instilling Chinese values. It was a Chinese university that would take into account Malay studies and Malayan courses. This was very different from a Malayan university that would take into account Chinese studies. Pan, whose name mutated to Pan Shou as his stature as a poet and calligrapher grew, was full of years and honours by the 1980s and 1990s. He had his citizenship restored to him. He was awarded the republic’s cultural medallion, and was titled a national treasure. In 1998, when he was eightyseven, the Nanyang Technological University conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters. In his acceptance speech, Pan caused a ripple of consternation by proposing that the name of the university be changed back to Nanyang University. But no matter: it soon passed without incident. A new generation of Singaporean people had no memories, good or bad, of Nantah, and had known no loyalty, save that originating from Singapore’s independence and nationhood. The PAP Government itself had self-renewed with second- and thirdechelon ministers in place. Even so, these younger ministers were carefully selective as to what they wanted from Nantah’s history. They cited the exemplary Nantah spirit and all it stood for — self-reliance, hard work,

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sacrifice for the community, and courage in adversity — to serve the purpose of national education. But the hallowed name “Nanyang University” was not reinstated. NOTES 1 Tan Liok Ee, The Rhetoric of Bangsa and Minzu: Community and Nation in Tension, The Malay Peninsula 1900–1955 (Clayton: Monash University, 1988), pp. 34–41. 2 Tan Liok Ee, The Politics of Chinese Education in Malaya 1945–1961 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 282. 3 Rayson Huang, A Lifetime in Academia: An Autobiography (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000), p. 73. 4 C.F. Yong, Tan Kah-Kee: The Making of an Overseas Chinese Legend (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 215. 5 Pang Cheng Lian, “He was there when Nantah needed a head”, Straits Times, 28 November 1996. 6 Quoted by Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli “The Scripting of Singapore’s National Heroes: Toying with Pandora’s Box”, in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, edited by Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), and (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), p. 236. 7 Straits Times, 1 April 1962. 8 Quoted by Hong and Huang, “National Heroes”, p. 229. 9 Quoted by Dennis Bloodworth, The Tiger and the Trojan Horse (Singapore: Times Books International, 1986), pp. 283 and 285. 10 Quoted by Hong and Huang “National Heroes”, p. 237. 11 Ibid., p. 235. 12 Inche Mohamed Sidik bin Haji Abdul Hamid, Assistant Minister for Education, moving the Report of the Select Committee on the Nanyang University Bill, Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates Official Report, Vol. 9, 1959 (Singapore: Government Printer, 1961), col. 2110. 13 See speeches by Lim Koon Teck, Lim Choon Mong and Goh Tong Liang of the Progressive Party, and by Lim Cher Kheng, William Tan, and Soh Ghee Soon of the Liberal Sosialist Party. Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, 1958, col. 1073, 1074, 1075, 1077, 1091, 1092, 1093, 1094, 1097. 14 R. Jumabhoy, Assemblyman for Telok Ayer, Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, 1958, col. 1076. 15 Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, 1958, col. 1085, 1088. 16 Report of the Nanyang University Commission, 1959 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1959), p. 3. 17 Rayson Huang, Academia, p. 77.

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18 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 333. 19 Straits Times, 29 September 1959. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Yong Nyuk Lin, Minister for Education, wrote in a letter to Tan Lark Sye: “It is the Government’s hope that with the co-operation of all those who wish Nanyang well, Nanyang will become a real University…”, Straits Times, 19 February 1960. The Singapore Government in a statement backing the central government’s sweeping arrests of Nantah students in June 1964, said: “This is probably the last chance to put Nanyang University on a proper basis and build it up as a real university…”, Straits Times, 28 June 1964. 23 Straits Times, 8 July 1960. 24 Straits Times, 11 May 1960. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Straits Times, 1 April 1962. 28 Ibid. 29 Straits Times, 15 July 1962. 30 Lee, Singapore Story, pp. 393, 448–50. 31 Ibid., pp. 414 and 517. 32 Lien Ying Chow, From Chinese Villager to Singapore Tycoon (Singapore: Times Books International, 1992), pp. 101–06. 33 Ho Rih Hwa, Eating Salt: An Autobiography (Singapore: Straits Times Books International, n.d.), pp. 254–57. 34 Wee Mon Cheng, The Chrysanthemum and the Orchid: Observations of a Diplomat (Singapore: Maruzen Asia, 1982), pp. vii–x, xiii. 35 Straits Times, 12 January 1960. 36 Malcolm MacDonald’s tribute to Lee Kong Chian, Straits Times, 13 June 1962. 37 Ibid. 38 Rayson Huang, Academia, p. 78. 39 Lee Kong Chian quoted Cicero: “What greater or better gift can we offer the state than to teach and instruct our youth”; Mencius: “It gives real delight to be able to gather from around us the most talented individuals so as to teach and nourish them”; and a Malay proverb: “Who ever wants to harvest good padi, must also plant good seeds”. 40 This was during the post-war food shortage, and the British wanted wealthy Chinese to abstain from their favourite banquet dish, which involved the wasteful slaughter of piglets. They turned to Tan Chin Tuan, their intermediary with the towkays, and he, in turn, “relied on Tan Kah Kee’s tremendous moral authority”

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

to have the practice temporarily stopped. See Mike Macbeth, Quiet Achiever: The Life and Times of Tan Sri Dr Tan Chin Tuan (Singapore: Times Edition, 2003), pp. 88–89. Yong, Tan Kah-kee, pp. 233–35, 249–50, 258. Straits Times, 2 April 1962. Quoted by Bloodworth, Tiger and Trojan, p. 60. Straits Times, 2 April 1962. Ibid. Ibid., 14 December 1961. Ibid. Bloodworth, Tiger and Trojan, p. 283. Ibid. Lee, Singapore Story, p. 333. Ibid., p. 511. Straits Times, 13 February 1960. Ibid., 21 July 1964. Ibid., 3 October 1963. Ibid. Ibid., 8 October 1963. Ibid. Ibid., 10 October 1963. Ibid., 6 June 1964. Ibid. Quoted by Straits Times editorial, 8 June 1964. Ibid. Ibid., 6 June 1964. Ibid., 28 June 1964. Ibid., 21 July 1964. Report of the Nanyang University Curriculum Review Committee (Wang Gungwu Report) (Singapore: Nanyang University 1965), p. 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid. Ibid., p. 1.

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76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times editorial, 14 September 1965. The position taken by the Association of Nanyang University Graduates, Singapore Straits Times, 22 September 1965. Straits Times, 13 November 1965. Ibid., 18 November 1965. Ibid., 16 November 1965. Ibid., 6 December 1965. Ibid. Ibid., 20 November 1965, 4 December 1965. Ibid., 6 December 1965. Ibid., 8 December 1965. Ibid., 7 December 1965. Nanyang University Calendar, 1968–69, p. 14. Rayson Huang, Academia, p. 95. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid. Ibid., p. 96. Quoted by Rayson Huang, Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 96. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), p. 175. Ibid. Nanyang University Annual Report, 1977–78, p. 6. Straits Times, 11 March 1979. Ibid., 11 January 1980. Nanyang University Annual Report, 1977–78, p. 6. Lee, From Third World to First, pp. 177–78. Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, 1958, col. 1083 and 1085. Lee, From Third World to First, p. 175. Ibid. Ibid. See The Raffles Conversation with Wee Chow Yaw, Business Times, 9 July 1995. Fred Dainton, Doubts and Certainties: A Personal Memoir of the Twentieth Century (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 2001), p. 341.

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112 Sir Frederick Dainton, Report on University Education in Singapore (Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office, 1979), p. 4. 113 Ibid., p. 7. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., p. 5. 117 Ibid., p. 7. 118 Ibid., p. 4. 119 Ibid. 120 Rayson Huang, Academia, p. 103. 121 Lee Guan Kin, “Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Reflections on the Cultural Implications of Modern Education”, in Chinese Migrants Abroad: Cultural, Educational and Social Dimensions of the Chinese Diaspora, edited by Michael W. Charney, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Tong Chee Kiong (Singapore: Singapore University Press and World Scientific, 2003), p. 237.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Self-Renewal: Talents for a Tough permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articlesAct are• 453 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

S E V E N T E E N

Self-Renewal: Talents for a Tough Act

T

he year 1980 marked twenty years of PAP rule and fifteen years since independence. Success measurable in numbers was evident everywhere, in the high-tech, high wage-economy, in public housing with home ownership rising strongly, in education with tremendous expansion of schools and teacher training, and a new formula to address the failure rate in bilingualism, and in national service, with the steady increase in operationally ready NS men (reservists). But material success alone cannot make a nation. Dr Goh Keng Swee could easily cite countries which did not have Singapore’s sparkling economic performance and yet had a much more robust national feeling. The position of Singapore’s two universities in the ’60s and ’70s well exemplify the problem of the time: the lack of national identity and unity. The two universities were pinnacles of the great divide between the Chineseeducated and the English-educated Chinese. There were other pinnacles and other divides in Singapore’s complex multiracial structure to confound the nation builder seeking to create unity and common ground. For this reason, Lee and his colleagues did not expect a nation to be established, other than in name, anytime soon. They knew they were in for the long haul. For a long time still, the nation would exist only in the minds of the nation builders themselves, in their will and passion to create one. “You cannot gel people into a nation in sixteen years,” Lee declared in March 1982.1 “But we can get a core to gel. And that is what the PAP has done. The PAP is at the heart of the nation.”2

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Since the PAP which held the nation together was mortal, Lee faced up to the issue of self-renewal. It was of the utmost importance to him to create a younger team of leaders to continue the nation-building project. He was also convinced that it was never too soon to start. The search and co-option of the younger leaders went on simultaneously with the other programmes on his agenda. In 1980, Lee promoted six of the younger leaders he had been trying out from ministers of state to full ministers. At the same time, he signalled to the stalwarts of his generation whom he was having to retire from the cabinet, and who disagreed with him on the rationale and timing of his succession planning, that self-renewal was at hand and irreversible.3 This is another reason for considering the year 1980 as a significant milestone.

When, Where and Who to Look For The first-generation PAP leaders emerged through a revolution that they remembered as a time to stand up and be counted in the fight with communists. Providence had brought them together from a wide area: places in the then British Malaya, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka (S. Rajaratnam’s birthplace), and China (Teh Cheang Wan’s birthplace). The successor generation had to be found in an orderly, prosperous time, and in a talent pool limited by the size of Singapore’s population. The logical place for Lee to look was the party. But for various reasons, this was not a feasible idea. Firstly, Lee had always been on his guard against disloyalty and threat from within the party. This reason dates from his long bitter struggle with the communists soon after the founding of the PAP. Because of this, he had turned to community centres, opening more of them and placing them under the People’s Association which he made directly answerable to him. This was not proof against communist subversion as he was to discover later. Secondly and more importantly, as PAP ministers worked closely with the civil servants to deliver the goods and benefits of their rule, power concentrated in the ministries, with the higher civil servants exercising much of it,4 and the party activists were even more sidelined. Thirdly, and ironically, the rise of the PAP’s one party dominance caused the party branches to atrophy. In 1966, Dr Lee Siew Choh ordered the Barisan Sosialis to quit their thirteen parliamentary seats and take the

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battle with the hegemonic PAP to the streets. This tactic, copied straight from China’s cultural revolution, could not win in Singapore. Dr Lee’s mistake “gave the PAP unchallenged dominance of Parliament for the next 30 years”.5 So long as the Barisan was a force, the PAP needed good mobilizers and organizers. As the Barisan declined from this time onwards, they became redundant. PAP branch workers came alive only during election time, like frogs in an occasional desert downpour. They scurried about in the standard nine-day electioneering season, and then became dormant again until the next round.6 It is not surprising, therefore, to note a dearth of party activists whom Lee could consider as possible successors in the government. The NTUC was honoured with having a number of its leaders nominated by Lee as new PAP candidates. Why the NTUC and not the party? The party’s day was over once the battle with the communist united front was over. The NTUC was the PAP’s alternative to the omnibus unions which the communists specialized in. The NTUC’s usefulness was just beginning, after the battle, as it was to be a major player in the government’s economic growth strategy. Until it was proven untrue, NTUC leaders believed that the only way to get wage increases and benefits for their member unions was to have some means of hitting back at the employers. They were unhappy with new legislation which aimed to render this impossible. The government had to encourage them to cooperate, and to demonstrate its concern for workers. Lee included the NTUC in his search. In the general election of 1968, the year Lee fielded his first batch of new candidates, he picked six from the NTUC, all of whom were elected, with five returned unopposed.7 The general election of 1972 featured nine NTUC personnel on the PAP ticket. These candidates were intended to help bridge the gap between the NTUC and the government. For this purpose the government also chose MPs who had never been in the trade union movement to serve as affiliates or advisors to various unions. The modernization and self-renewal of the labour movement was another key concern with Lee. Towards this end, as we shall see, he sent men of ministerial calibre to the NTUC as secretary-general.

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Lee’s headhunt for a successor generation in the government covered the universities — University of Singapore and Nantah. This is part of the reason for his attempt to mould them into national institutions. They had to be fit for use as his recruiting ground. The civil service and governmentlinked companies were obviously important: the men in the ministries already held immense power. In addition, Lee scanned the professions of law and medicine. He conspicuously left out the commercial/industrial sector, regarding the social values and habits there as a disqualification. “It requires a strong mind and a strong will to keep high standards of integrity,” he said, “if we bring into the political leadership any of these wheeler dealer attributes then Singapore will be ruined.”8 He was to revise his judgement later. He was also to change his view that the ability to write a PhD thesis or succeed in a professional field would translate into political leadership. Politics, he later admitted, required people “to have qualities other than a disciplined mind”.9 The candidate with the best chances for promotion into the cabinet was a graduate from an English-medium university, with or without a higher degree. He would have been trained in a British university or one modelled on the British system, like the University of Singapore. He might go to an American university for a Master’s degree, and increasingly, the American degree aspired to was an MBA from the Harvard business school or a Master’s in Public Administration from the John Kennedy school at Harvard. The work experience of the candidates who passed the test as ministers included the elite administrative service, the EDB, government-linked companies (in shipping and banking), and private-sector banking and industry, including multinational corporations. With certain exceptions, academia and the professions did not seem to have provided as good a preparation for the cabinet as these other areas. Remember Lee’s wish for a vice-chancellor who had not merely written economics papers, but actually worked in the EDB, creating jobs? By the 1980s, SAF scholar officers were recognized as having the relevant experience that could be put to better use in politics. In order to bring in the new men, Lee had to ease out the older ministers and MPs. Goh Keng Swee and Hon Sui Sen, intending to retire, supported him. However, some of their other colleagues, notably, Dr Toh

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Chin Chye and Ong Pang Boon, thought Lee was proceeding too hastily.10 Clearly, self-renewal could not happen without some pain and resentment. As for the new men inducted, they had to be prepared for the high attrition rate in this calling. Lee obtained help from Hon Sui Sen and Lim Kim San, both of whom he praised for good judgement.11 Hon recommended three men to Lee of ministerial potential, namely Goh Chok Tong, Dr Tony Tan, and S. Dhanabalan. Goh Chok Tong, born in 1941, was a government bursary student through upper secondary school and university, with first class Honours in Economics, University of Singapore, 1964. He served his government bond in the administrative service, which sent him on a fellowship to Williams College, Massachusetts, where he read development economics for a Master’s degree. In August 1969, he was seconded to the government-owned Neptune Orient Lines and became a permanent staff member there, and the managing director by November 1973. He was elected MP for Marine Parade in the general election of 1976, and was senior minister of state in the ministry of finance from September 1977 to March 1979. Dr Tony Tan Keng Yam, born in 1940, was a state scholar at the University of Singapore, graduating with first class Honours in Physics in 1962. He obtained an MSc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide in 1967, after which he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Singapore. In 1969, he left to be a sub-manager in the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, and eventually (in 1978) the general manager. He was elected MP for Sembawang in a by-election in February 1979, and appointed senior minister of state in the ministry of education. S. Dhanabalan, born in 1937, had an Honours degree in Economics from the University of Singapore. He was assistant secretary in the ministry of finance, and seconded to the newly formed EDB in 1961, where he went from senior industrial economist to deputy director (operations and finance). He left to become vice-president of the DBS in its inaugural year, 1968. This was the bank he had a hand in establishing while in the EDB, and he became its executive vice-president in 1971. He was elected MP for Kallang in the general election of 1976. He resigned from the DBS

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in 1978 when he was appointed senior minister of state in the ministry of national development. Two others who were in the running with Goh Chok Tong, Dr Tony Tan, and S. Dhanabalan were the late Ong Teng Cheong and Lim Chee Onn. Ong Teng Cheong, born in 1936, attended Chinese High School, graduated as an architect at the University of Adelaide in 1961, and obtained a Master’s degree in Civic Design at the University of Liverpool in 1967. He worked as an architect in Adelaide and Singapore before joining the Singapore civil service as a town planner, and then left to become an architect again, as well as town planner in the private sector. He was elected MP for Kim Keat in the general election of 1972, and appointed senior minister of state in the ministry of communications in 1975. Lim Chee Onn, born in 1944, was a naval architect with first class Honours in Engineering, University of Glasgow, 1967, and a Master’s degree in Public Administration, Harvard, 1975. He was the deputy secretary at the ministry of communications when he was co-opted to stand as MP for Bukit Merah in a by-election in July 1977. He was appointed deputy secretarygeneral of the NTUC in March 1979, as a step to becoming secretary-general in May that year, and in September 1980, he became minister without portfolio as well. Lee “had brought in a new generation of scholar-technocrats”.12 There were others who were not technocrats, but specialists with exposure in a different realm. The late Wong Lin Ken of the 1968 batch was a historian with first class Honours and MA from the University of Malaya, and PhD from London University. By the time he was appointed minister for home affairs, he had served as ambassador to the United States, and concurrently, permanent representative to the UN, and ambassador to Brazil. S. Jayakumar, born in 1939, graduated with LLB at the University of Singapore in 1963, and LLM at the Yale Law School in 1966. He was a lecturer, and later, dean of the Law Faculty, University of Singapore/National University of Singapore. He was on secondment for a period, 1971 to 1974, as permanent representative to the UN and high commissioner to Canada. He was elected MP for Bedok in the general election of 1980, and appointed minister of state in two ministries, law and home affairs in 1981.

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Dr Ahmad Mattar, born in 1939, obtained a BSc degree in Physics at the University of Singapore in 1963, MA in Applied Acoustics at the University of Sheffield, and PhD in the same specialty at the University of Singapore in 1977. He was a lecturer, first at the Singapore Polytechnic, and later at the University of Singapore. He was a MP for Leng Kee in the general election of 1972 and appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister for education. The search was continuous. Goh Chok Tong of the 1976 batch became the PAP’s election strategist in 1979, and devised a systematic method of recruitment. He personally spotted thirty of the sixty-one candidates fielded in 1980, 1984 and 1988.13 Apart from people of his generation, Goh looked out for younger ones who would make the third-generation leadership. One such candidate, and no ordinary one too, was the prime minister’s elder son, Lee Hsien Loong. Goh asked the prime minister to speak to his son, and later Goh did the talking himself and got him. The young Lee, born in 1952, was a president scholar as well as a SAF scholar who obtained firstclass Honours in Mathematics at Cambridge University in 1974, and a Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard in 1979. He held the rank of Brigadier-General in the SAF, and was known to Goh who was the second minister for defence from 1981 to 1982, and minister for defence from 1982. He was elected MP for Teck Ghee in the general election of 1984, and in January 1985, was appointed minister of state in two ministries, defence, and trade and industry. Another member of the third generation that Goh brought in was also another Brigadier-General and a former president scholar and SAF scholar. George Yeo Yong Boon, born in 1954, obtained double first in Engineering at Cambridge University in 1976, and an MBA with high distinction, as a Baker Scholar, at the Harvard business school. He had to pay the SAF for the remainder of his bond when he came into politics. He was one of a team of three MPs in the Aljunied Group Representation Constituency in the 1988 general election, after which he was appointed minister of state in two ministries, finance and foreign affairs. Goh looked to the multinational corporations and found Dr Yeo Ning Hong. Born in 1943, this state scholar graduated with BSc Honours in Chemistry at the University of Singapore in 1966 and obtained a PhD at

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Cambridge University in 1970. He had been a research associate at Stanford University, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and a lecturer at the University of Singapore before he joined Beecham’s, the pharmaceutical company from where Goh called him. He was elected MP for Kim Seng in the general election of 1980, and was appointed minister of state in the ministry of defence in 1981. Men with the drive to keep improving and performing in different sectors as they moved upwards would naturally merit Goh’s attention. Wong Kan Seng, born in 1946, was a teacher before he went to the University of Singapore and graduated with BA Honours in 1970, after which he joined the administrative service. He continued with his education, turning to business studies and earned a diploma from the local university in 1977, and a Master’s degree from London University. In April 1981, he started a new career as personnel manager at Hewlett Packard in Singapore. It was from this work of “managing people and operations in a multi-national electronics company”14 that Goh persuaded him to be an MP for Kuo Chuan in the general election of December 1984. Wong Kan Seng was appointed minister of state in two ministries, home affairs and community development in February 1985. Bucking the trend of selecting the young and talented was Goh’s acquisition of a former Shell Company chairman. Dr Richard Hu Tsu Tau, born in 1926, obtained his first degree in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952, and his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, England, after which he was a lecturer at the University of Manchester. His career in Shell began in 1960. In 1974, he was the chief executive of Shell (Malaysia) and in 1977, chairman and chief executive of Shell (Singapore). While in Shell, he had done invaluable public service in his area of expertise, finance, and so, on retirement, he was appointed managing director, in 1983, of institutions which determined the monetary policy of Singapore, and the investment of the nation’s reserves. He was elected MP for Kreta Ayer in the general election of December 1984. He made up for the gap in the cabinet caused by the death in 1983 of Hon Sui Sen who was “one of the world’s longest serving finance ministers”,15 and in Lee Kuan Yew’s opinion, irreplaceable.

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After the general election of December 1984, Prime Minister Lee decided that the deputy prime minister should be one of the second-generation ministers. But which one? He asked the “group of seven young Cabinet Ministers [a majority of the 12-member Cabinet]” to choose from among themselves.16 They chose Goh Chok Tong. “The full Cabinet concurred.”17 Goh then became the deputy prime minister and, concurrently, minister for defence. Ong Teng Cheong was chosen as the second deputy prime minister. The cabinet began the new year, 1985, with Goh and his team of younger ministers in charge, deciding and settling policies. Lee continued to chair cabinet meetings, and gave his views, but did not veto any decision that they made. Before we go on to how they worked on key issues in the next lap of nation-building, it is necessary to look at another sector of the state where self-renewal must also be carried out.

The Second-Generation Ministers and the NTUC The omnibus union was a vehicle that the communists designed to take on board as many passengers as possible from the many different types of industries and workplaces in the country. It was the vehicle of the anti-colonial freedom ride, and was brought to a halt and dismantled by the victorious PAP Government, after the ride. It was replaced by the NTUC, a new model federation of trade unions, with a self-reformed communist, C.V. Devan Nair, in the driver’s seat, who would take it on the prosperity road. Devan Nair, as secretary-general, had steered the NTUC towards the tripartite bargaining process between unions, employers, and government which had proven such a success. The “close personal ties” between him and Lee had brought the government and the NTUC closer too.18 It was clearly important for the second-generation ministers to develop as good a relationship with the NTUC as the first generation had enjoyed. Thus Lee sent Lim Chee Onn to the NTUC and he took over as secretarygeneral from Devan Nair on 27 May 1979. Devan Nair became the NTUC president. Soon afterwards, Lee brought Lim Chee Onn into the cabinet as minister without portfolio on 15 September 1980.

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Another significant move was the formation of the NTUC-PAP liaison committee. One half of the members consisted of Goh Chok Tong, Ong Teng Cheong, S. Dhanabalan, and Dr Ahmad Mattar, and the other half of “four NTUC representatives headed by Devan Nair.”19 The government planned to break up the omnibus multiple-industry unions into single-industry unions, and even smaller units based on a single company, described as the house union. Lim Chee Onn led a task force in early 1980 to begin the restructuring of two of the largest omnibus unions, the Singapore Industrial Labour Organization (SILO) and the Pioneer Industries Employees Unions (PIEU). The student leader Tan Wah Piow had been active at the PIEU offices in October 1974. He had to contend with a trade union official and PAP MP Phey Yew Kok. In 1980, Phey Yew Kok fled abroad while facing charges of venality. This lent urgency to Lim’s task. He revamped the SILO and PIEU which had been led by Phey into nine separate unions.20 Lim Chee Onn brought change, and change did not help create good relations. He initiated training programmes to raise the educational and skills level of workers. He had plans to prepare workers for “the challenges of new technology”.21 He introduced young scholar-technocrats into the NTUC to help him with planning, research, and the writing of policy papers. The older NTUC officials believed his “whizz kids” should stay in the office, while they, the “grass roots unionists”, led the unions.22 But Lim held that this attitude had no place in a modern union. He wanted his professionals to “establish their credentials with the rank and file”.23 Lim’s move to create house unions was another source of contention. The new idea being promoted in the house union project was that the wellbeing of workers in future would depend less on the organizational strength of unions than on “a close rapport between union members and their employers”.24 It was not so much the form as the substance that mattered, Lim said, but the unionists were not happy. Lim Chee Onn had a brief from Prime Minister Lee to modernize the trade union movement, which he carried out with speed and professionalism. The older NTUC leaders had enjoyed the camaraderie and participation they had during the long Devan Nair era. They were aggrieved at being left out of the loop by Lim’s technocratic regime, and

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felt threatened by the young leaders he was grooming. The PAP-NTUC symbiotic relationship was not transferring well to the second-generation secretary-general, as had been hoped. The older unionists complained to Devan Nair, who since 1981, was the president of the republic, and feeling somewhat isolated from the unionists. The upshot was Lee’s replacement of Lim as secretary-general with Ong Teng Cheong, with effect from 9 May 1983. Lee put the troubled situation in perspective in his May Day rally with the unionists of that year. At issue was the question: Should the scholars and professionals, since they entered the NTUC at the top, be backroom boys? The older unionists, proud of having worked their way up, said yes. To correct their misconception, Lee took them back to the origins of the PAP when he was no backroom boy, and neither were his colleagues, or “the history of Singapore would have been very different”.25 He referred to “Devan Nair’s integrity and courage and his ability to carry the ground”, and “the trust and confidence” which existed between Devan Nair and himself and other senior cabinet ministers.26 The next prime minister and the next NTUC secretary-general must have the same mutual trust and confidence. “This is the nub of the problem of self-renewal.”27 Lee said that he had encouraged Lim Chee Onn to recruit scholars and professionals. Unless this was done, the NTUC would not be equal to the other partners in the tripartite system. With education and scholarships freely available, Singapore society has changed. Direct recruitment of talent into the unions was possible, and indeed, vital. “Therefore, please understand that the only difference between Ong Teng Cheong and Lim Chee Onn will be in style and personality. The objectives are exactly the same.”28 Lim could well have felt vindicated. He was out of the NTUC, but still in the cabinet; the pity was that he decided to leave politics, stepping down as minister first, but continuing for sometime as MP because Goh Chok Tong, as elections strategist, still needed him. Yet, in hindsight, Lim’s removal from the post of NTUC secretary-general was fortuitous. For just round the corner waiting to happen was an economic recession that would take all the trust and confidence that the government and the unions could give each other, if they were to come out right.

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The First Test: The 1985–86 Recession In 1985, the GDP growth rate plunged to minus 1.8 per cent from the previous year’s positive 8.2 per cent.29 The recession was cyclical: a sharp fall in U.S. demand for computer peripherals, a major Singapore export; low demand and low prices for oil and other raw materials produced in Malaysia and Indonesia, with the result that these countries cut back on tours and consumer spending in Singapore. The domestic economy slackened: in construction, this was because public projects had been completed, and private property developers had overshot (again!) Were the high wage policy and CPF contributions of recent years also to blame? The small and medium businesses certainly thought so. They expressed their lament through the Chinese and Indian chambers of commerce and the Singapore Manufacturers’ Association. Their labour costs at 22 per cent of total costs were significantly higher than that of the multinationals, which were around 14 per cent because of the latter’s use of high technology. The position was that, despite yearly wage increases from June 1979 to June 1984, the demand for workers did not abate, and the government continued to issue work permits to foreigners. The paradox was that companies also retrenched workers. A popular department store chain, China Emporium, culled 500 of its 2,500 workers in 1985. In that year, the total number of jobs lost was 90,000, two thirds of which were held by foreign workers. Yet wages had risen by 3 per cent and salaried workers were thought to “have enjoyed real wage increases of 2.5 per cent”, given the low inflation of 0.5 per cent.30 The self-employed were worse off: hawkers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and professionals. The situation called for wage restraint, but it was not easy to tell this to a workforce which had known only wage increases for an unbroken run of good years. Lee wanted to give an early warning when the NTUC asked him in April 1985 for a May Day message. The labour returns which he had been reading “every month looked bad”.31 But the NTUC requested him “to hold back”. They did not want to hear about “pay reduction and flexibility” until the tripartite negotiations in the National Wages Council (NWC) were concluded. Lee obliged them by sending “a different message”,32 and the NWC recommended yet another increase of 3 to 7 per cent.

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The prevailing view was that the recession would happen anyway. High wages and CPF contributions were not the cause, but they could provide the cure. Lee dismissed as “loose talk” the complaints that if the CPF rates had not been raised so high, there would have been no recession.33 He rejected any suggestion of a cut in CPF rates. In view of job losses registered in the first half of 1985, he asked economists in the ministry of trade and industry if it would have made any difference if the wage cost, including CPF contributions, were 20 per cent less, and if NWC recommendations for 1983 and 1984 had been held back. Their answer was no. The recession threatened one pillar of nation-building: the CPF-linked home ownership. The stakes were so high that Lee put up a stout defence: The CPF has been invaluable in transforming us into a homeowning society. [Without it] we could not have built modern Singapore in the same way. We are now set to become an 80–90 per cent home-owing society in 10 years.34 He was adamant: “The CPF is the last item we should touch… The CPF is the nest egg of last resort.”35 The policy options he favoured were to reduce over-capacity in shipyards, oil refineries, and petrochemical industries, to mechanize and resort to cashless instruments, to go beyond the family in recruiting managers (his advice to small and medium enterprises), and to cut business costs (barring the CPF). The younger ministers on whose shoulders this problem rested held consultations with key players, discussion in the cabinet, and eventually went out to the unions to persuade them to accept the solution arrived at. Goh Chok Tong personally talked to manufacturers, traders, and bankers to get their views on the recession. Brigadier-General (B.G.) Lee Hsien Loong chaired an Economic Committee which included unionists, businessmen, and professionals, to come up with answers. The cabinet debated what to do. One option was to devalue the Singapore dollar. It would help exports. The majority of the young ministers supported it, but Goh Chok Tong was against it. “The cost of living would go up, then

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what?”36 It would mean more than that, Lee interjected.37 A poor man who has only his CPF account will lose out. The person who owns property, stocks, shares, jewels, and works of art will gain. The rich man gets a windfall to make him richer. The poor man gets poorer and blames the government. The Singapore dollar would have to be lowered by 15 to 20 per cent for this policy to work. This would be punishing for savers. The national savings rate, at 43 per cent of the GDP in 1984, was the highest in the world.38 Lee gave his view but did not push it. He watched as Goh Chok Tong argued from a minority position to convince his colleagues that there should be no devaluation. If the value of savings was to be preserved, future savings in the CPF might have to be cut. The B.G. Lee Economic Committee recommended in its report of February 1986 a cut in the employer’s CPF contribution and a number of other cost-cutting measures: cancellation of pay roll taxes, lowering of the skills development levy, reduction of company income tax from 40 to 33 per cent, and a rebate in public utilities charges.39 By now Lee was prepared to accept a cut in the CPF. As of 1 July 1984, the employer paid 25 per cent of his employee’s basic pay into the latter’s CPF account, and the employee himself paid a matching 25 per cent. The employer’s contribution would be reduced to 10 per cent, a 15 per cent cut. The younger ministers considered but decided against cutting the contribution on the employee’s side as well, as a way of stimulating consumption. Lee said: “They didn’t do it. I was just watching. I advised against it… it is a popular thing and it is up to them” to decide.40 Even so, “if they had done it,” Lee said, “I would not have let it pass, and would have at some stage, stepped in and changed direction.”41 The other cost-cutting measures proposed by B.G. Lee as chairman of the Economic Committee were also accepted by the cabinet, with Dr Tony Tan giving his decisive support. The next task was to go out and convince the unions. The younger ministers set a different style to Lee’s. “Their method,” Lee observed, “is to persuade you gradually to agree to unpleasant adjustments.”42 They believed that workers must realize the seriousness of the situation, feel

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the effects of the downturn, before they could appreciate the need for wage restraint or cut backs. This took time: “They spent three months talking to the unions.”43 Lee said: Ong Teng Cheong met them almost daily, branch by branch. Goh Chok Tong must have attended five, six big meetings of many branches. Lee Hsien Loong met them, three, four times. Other ministers fanned out [to various unions connected with them.]44 This was how they implemented the CPF cut and two years of wage restraint. In the process they built trust and rapport with the unions, which Lee considered a “most valuable asset”, one that would “generate investor confidence”.45 He said: Investors know Singapore is in the midst of transition to a secondgeneration leadership, and at the same time, a transition into a more mature economy. The second-generation leaders are proving that they can measure up, that they can make tough decisions and that they can get people to back their policies.46 The facts do support this conclusion. But there were also lessons for the younger ministers. One was the need to move towards a more flexible wage system, paying in accordance with productivity and profits. Another concerned the property market. The CPF cut caused great hardship to those who had bought private property at the peak on monthly instalments deducted from their CPF accounts. Nor were they able to sell, except at a huge loss as property values had crashed. The resale price of Phase One HUDC flats (Lakeview, Braddell View, Farrer Court, Amberville, and Laguna Park) fell 30 to 50 per cent by October 1985 compared with the previous year.47 The private property market was so hard hit as to open a new window of affordability to those who had waited. These dramatic shifts ought to have alerted policy makers to rethink the use of the CPF for property. Sadly, the lessons of the 1985–86 recession receded from the public mind when the good times returned.

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The Second Test: The Marxist Plot and The Hendrickson Affair One strand of this double episode goes back to Tan Wah Piow, the student militant of the Bukit Timah campus who got involved with the industrial unions of Jurong in the mid 1970s. One of Tan’s collaborators at Jurong was a Catholic theological student, Vincent Cheng, who later became a full-time church worker. Tan fled abroad and was not heard of until a decade later when he was named, in 1987, as the Marxist mastermind of a long term plan to overthrow the government of Singapore, and allow him to fulfil his vow of returning from self-exile. A home affairs ministry statement had it that Tan had “established himself as leader of Singapore activists in the Federation of United Kingdom and Eire Malaysian and Singapore Students’ Organizations”, and that a number of these activists had returned to Singapore.48 They joined Vincent Cheng, now aged forty, and located at the centre of a web of organizations ranging from Catholic student societies in tertiary institutions to church media and support groups and a drama group, Third Stage, whose plays dealt with, among other themes, the plight of Filipino maids. Vincent Cheng and the Roman Catholic members with him were inspired by Liberation Theology, not Marxism, but operationally it made no difference. In May and June 1987, the government detained Vincent Cheng and twenty-one others, several of whom had attended the “training” and “social analysis” workshops he ran. This was part one of the Marxist plot.49 Part two began about ten months later. On 18 April 1988, nine of the detainees who had been released, issued a joint statement claiming “that the whole conspiracy had been concocted by the authorities and that they had been tortured into making false confessions”.50 On 19 April, the government rearrested eight of them (one was “absent in Britain”)51 and also detained a thirty-four-year old lawyer, Patrick Seong, who had put them up to it. Seong’s disclosures led to the arrest later, on 6 May, of Francis Seow, who was the former solicitor-general. Seow gave details of even more startling connections. These events marked the return to the use of the Internal Security Act after a long spell,52 remarkable in itself, but even more so in that the second-

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generation ministers were now having to handle this power. Prime Minister Lee gave them his assessment, which was that the Vincent Cheng network posed no immediate danger and would take three to five years “to become fully organized”.53 He was prepared to let it be for the time being. The younger ministers conferred with the director of the Internal Security Department, a former president scholar, and his officers, and decided they would nib it in the bud. Lee supported their decision, and so the arrests of May/June 1987 took place. The rearrests of April 1988 occurred when Lee was away, and travelling from the United States to Italy. The ex-detainees’ joint statement was a bombshell. The younger ministers spent the day it was issued in “long discussions” and ordered the rearrests the day after. Lee thought they could have acted faster.54 “If it were me,” he said, “the moment that statement was issued, there would have been a response immediately.”55 He described his method: press a button for “conference line” and at once, five ministers would be on the “phone to him, faxes sent, and ‘Do we act?’, ‘Yes, move’ ”.56 He added that if the government had arrested Francis Seow on the same day as it did Patrick Seong, and “not waited till the 6 of May — more than two weeks”, it might have been possible, he believed, to obtain documentary evidence.57 These events threatened to foul up relations between the Catholic church and the state. Long before the first arrests, the permanent secretary of the ministry of home affairs and the minister, S. Jayakumar, had spoken to Archbishop Gregory Yong, requesting him to deal with “the problem within the Church”.58 The Papal Nuncio and the Pope himself, when he came in November 1986, were alerted to it. Vincent Cheng admitted that Archbishop Yong did counsel him.59 Following the arrests, which a certain priest reacted to by holding mass for all the detainees, Lee felt he had to step in to avert a collision between church and state. Lee arranged a televised dialogue with Archbishop Yong at the Istana, after which the latter ordered “all his priests not to mix religion and politics in their sermons”.60 Archbishop Yong also suspended four priests from preaching and from their headship of four organizations, and had one of these organizations, the Catholic Centre for Foreign Workers, shut down.

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Under interrogation, Patrick Seong and Francis Seow admitted to an American connection. This was stunning, but as we shall see, the younger ministers turned it to good account, arguing out the meaning of subversion, independence, sovereignty, and identity. They won their spurs as national leaders and defined the kind of nation they wanted and the style of government appropriate to it. Attention rapidly shifted from part one — the Marxist plot — to this hidden layer uncovered in part two. It was found that E. Mason Hendrickson, “Hank”, the first secretary (political section) of the U.S. Embassy, had cultivated Patrick Seong and Francis Seow as possible opposition candidates. A general election was due in 1988. Hendrickson told Seong to gather a group of “like-minded friends” to meet David Lambertson, deputy assistant secretary for Southeast Asia in the State Department, who was “coming to town”.61 At the meeting Hendrickson said “disgruntled lawyers” should contest in elections while Lambertson looked on in silence, “a most eloquent silence”, B.G. Lee jibed.62 Later, Francis Seow met Joseph Snyder, Lambertson’s assistant, during a weekend in Washington D.C. in December 1986.63 Snyder was formerly the director of the Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore section of the State Department. He brought along Colin Helmer, his former Singapore desk officer, to meet Seow, and the three of them went out for a talk. Seong, who did not want to do what Hendrickson instigated, was released after questioning, but Seow got one year, which was, however, shortened for him to contest the election, only to lose. The government suspected, but did not expect to have the evidence so quickly, through Patrick Seong, of a foreign link in the nine ex-detainees’ joint statement. The object of the joint statement was to put the government in a bad light before the general election of 1988. A further complication was that Francis Seow had approached Devan Nair for advice on how to go about contesting the PAP. Devan Nair, the sixty-nine-year old ex-PAP veteran was no longer president owing to alcoholism and scandal, and had fallen out with Lee. He told Seow that in getting American help he was “in the distinguished company of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and the rest of us”, citing Lee’s visits to “capitals like London,

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Sydney, and Wellington to court goodwill and support for the PAP’s goal of a Malaysian Malaysia”.64 Apart from committing a solecism (Sydney is not a capital), Devan Nair also omitted the fact that the Australian and New Zealand high commissioners had cleared with the Tunku before inviting Lee to their countries, and that the purpose was to assure the electorate back home that Malaysia was worth committing troops to defend. Lee’s own refutation of Devan Nair was that the British never tried to use him against the Tunku. Rather, the British wanted him to stop riling the Tunku with his talk of a Malaysian Malaysia.65 This is logical. The British wanted Malaysia to stay united, not to break up while they were defending it with Commonwealth partners. Devan Nair’s motive was apparent to everybody. People were embarrassed and saddened by his ranting in interviews with the Straits Times and the BBC. This included First DPM Goh Chok Tong. People were mature enough to know what was national honour and decency. Another good sign was the public’s magnanimity in recognizing Devan Nair’s previous services to the nation despite his present rancour.66 The arrests and rearrests prompted human rights groups to call for the abolition of the Internal Security Act. The lone opposition MP, Chiam See Tong, denounced its indiscriminate use. Journalists probed the reason for the arrest of Francis Seow. What political wrong did he commit? On what grounds was he detained under the ISA? We need to raise these questions here, plus, to return to basics: What is subversion? How was it defined in this period? What new factors must be taken into account? The new factors were, of course, firstly, Hendrickson, and secondly, a younger team of ministers in charge whose resolve was being tested. On 23 May 1988, B.G. Lee stated on information elicited from Patrick Seong and Francis Seow, that, The central issue in the Internal Security Act detentions [is] no longer the April 18 joint press statement issued by the nine ex-detainees. The central issue has become that of foreign interference in Singapore’s domestic politics.67

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Thus “Singaporeans who allow themselves to be used as proxies by foreign groups, or become agents of foreign powers”, were culpable.68 Subversion “means acting for foreign powers, whether Communist or Western”.69 S. Jayakumar, minister for home affairs, averred that Hendrickson’s interference “strikes at the very base and roots of our independence, sovereignty, and ability to make decisions for ourselves as to the course of our political development…”70 With regard to Francis Seow, Jayakumar cited the basis of his arrest as given in the official press statement: Any citizen who allows himself to be used by representatives of a foreign power or who collaborates or colludes with them in plans to interfere in Singapore’s internal affairs is subverting the independence, integrity, and sovereignty of the Republic and must be dealt with.71 This was not something newly concocted. Jayakumar cited a precedent to show that nothing had changed. Lee had crafted a very comprehensive definition way back in 1958 when the PAP was in the opposition, and the Americans then seemed to have been meddling to prevent it from gaining power. A minister of the Labour Front Government was receiving secret funds from American sources72 to fight the bolshevik PAP in the general election 1959. This was the background to the speech that Lee made in the Legislative Assembly on 8 October 1958: Let this also be made known, that our definition of the word “subversion” is probably different from the British definition of that term, and maybe even different from the Labour Front definition of that term — ‘subversion’. In our definition, ‘subversion’ is any political activity designed to further the aims and interests not of our own people, but of foreign powers; and by foreign powers we mean not just Russia and China, but also America and Formosa, and the Western bloc.73

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Jayakumar quoted this gem in the current debate.74 Typically, in 1988 as in 1958, the Americans were the culprits. First DPM Goh Chok Tong touched on the sovereignty issue: Singapore was not “a client state of the US”.75 Historically, Singapore’s ties were with Britain, never with the United States, which set it apart from states with “an umbilical cord to the US” like Taiwan, South Korea, or the Philippines.76 Hendrickson, Goh said, “did not understand our society. He was ignorant of our philosophy of government.”77 What is this philosophy of government? “The Singapore system, like the British, entrusts the Executive, the Prime Minister, and the Cabinet with a range of wide discretionary powers…,”78 Goh said. Backed by “a majority in Parliament”, it “means strong government”.79 But the PAP had made it moral government as well, the rule of a Jun Zi, a Confucian gentleman. On this [British] constitutional framework, Singaporeans have superimposed the ideal political leader as a Confucian gentleman, a Jun Zi, someone who is upright, morally beyond reproach, someone people can trust. We believe that leaders must be men of ability and integrity, committed to the public good.80 Hendrickson had doubly violated this Singaporean ideal, first by choosing as “the potential leader of the opposition”, Francis Seow, who had been thrice disciplined by the Law Society,81 and second, by seeking to initiate the “politics of contention”.82 Goh continued: Could Hendrickson, no matter how well-meaning he was, foresee the consequences of this politics of contention for a multiracial society like Singapore?83 Goh described the PAP Government as “patiently, slowly, and laboriously” bringing “disparate components together”.84 He said: Now there is a coalition of interests between different racial, linguistic, and religious groups. If this coalition can hold and bind

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itself together, firmly, then in another one or two generations a more integrated society may emerge, one which can begin to divide along socio-economic lines, not along race, language, culture and religion.85 Hendrickson, in this context, was synonymous with havoc. And after Hendrickson, who could put Humpty Dumpty together again? Goh said: If that happens, and I speak here frankly, it is doubtful whether we the second-generation leaders, or any other group, will have the same experience, or get the same degree of trust from the people (as the first-generation leaders), to re-assemble and reglue the various parts and pieces… Thirty years of bonding and building a nation out of disparate groups will come to nought.86 Hendrickson had doubtless judged the transition to the secondgeneration leadership as the right time to push for a more liberal democracy. He ended in doing the opposite. The younger ministers were affronted and reaffirmed their political values in contradistinction to American ones. Goh Chok Tong came to see the importance of having “a vigilant Internal Security Department” to safeguard national integrity.87 He hinted at cutting down the staff strength of the U.S. Embassy. Hendrickson, of course, had already been asked to leave in short order. The younger ministers worked as a team to handle the publicity aspect of these arrests. Goh Chok Tong, S. Jayakumar, and B.G. Lee sat together to face the local press, Straits Times and Lianhe Wanbao, and the world’s media — the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, International Herald Tribune, and the Asian Wall Street Journal. B.G. Lee was made for this arena and medium of communication. He was ready for a verbal battle. He threw out a challenge to Hendrickson, Snyder, Lambertson, Seong, and Seow for a face-to-face debate to be aired over trans-Pacific satellite television. He featured in the BBC television programme, Newsnight, and in a telephone interview with the BBC’s award-winning

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news programme, Today. Tan Wah Piow was interviewed in the same Today programme, and his allegations of torture practised by the Internal Security Department were refuted by B.G. Lee. B.G. Lee’s swiftness and toughness of attack and rebuttal were well balanced by the more moderate positions adopted by S. Dhanabalan, (foreign minister), Dr Tony Tan (education minister), S. Jayakumar, and team leader Goh Chok Tong.

Test Results: PM’s Assessment and First DPM’s Self-Assessment The salient points Prime Minister Lee noted about the younger ministers were that they worked as a team, they shared responsibilities, and they took a longer time than he would have done to arrive at tough decisions. In relation to the 1985–86 recession, he said that particular responsibility rested with Goh Chok Tong as First DPM, and Ong Teng Cheong as NTUC secretary-general. He mentioned the decisive voice of Dr Tony Tan, who together with Goh and Ong, supported the measures proposed by B.G. Lee as acting minister of trade and industry and chairman of the Economic Committee. By the time of the Marxist conspiracy and the Hendrickson affair, Lee had grown somewhat impatient with Goh’s style. “So he makes use of other ministers, Lee Hsien Loong, Jayakumar, Ong Teng Cheong, to do the expounding and the explanation. That means more teamwork, more time spent in discussion…”88 Lee Hsien Loong, a new minister, had to immerse “himself in all the details” and know it (the subject of the second test) as well as the Home Affairs Minister…”89 Around this time, Lee’s doubts about Goh Chok Tong as the next prime minister began to surface. Lee did not award marks for performance, but he had a system of ranking which he had made public in his national day rally speech in August 1988 and in a NUS forum the week after. He revealed that by 1980, he had shortlisted the candidates for the position of prime minister to the following: Dr Tony Tan, Goh Chok Tong, Ong Teng Cheong, and Lim Chee Onn, “in that order”.90 He placed Dr Tony Tan first “because of his

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ability to make decisions swiftly”,91 Goh Chok Tong second, because he liked to listen to too many people. Ong Teng Cheong was a first-class chairman, but was not sufficiently fluent in English. Lim Chee Onn, curiously, needed to make more eye contact with people. After the December 1984 election, the list had to be changed for different reasons. Dr Tony Tan had indicated that “he did not want the job of Prime Minister”.92 Lim Chee Onn’s political career had been exploded by the minefield in the NTUC. The list was reduced to Goh Chok Tong and Ong Teng Cheong, and they became the first and second DPM in the new 1985 cabinet, as previously noted. In September 1988, Michael Richardson, regional editor of the International Herald Tribune, who was interviewing Lee, sensed his misgivings. Richardson commented on Goh’s consultative style as being “more in tune” with the expressed views of some younger Singaporeans.93 Lee was sceptical. He described Goh as very patient and trying “to accommodate even incompatible views”.94 “You’ve got to choose between them. But he tries in an eclectic way to incorporate them.”95 So there was this contrast between Goh’s eclectism and Lee’s fundamentalism. Lee:

If you like good, you’ve got to oppose the bad. If you want men with principles, you must fight and kill corruption. If you want men with principles, you must destroy men without principles. There are no halfway houses.96 Richardson: You seem to have some serious misgivings about Mr Goh?97 Lee: No. But I have not chosen him. He has been chosen by his peers. I believe it’s the right choice.98 Lee felt that Goh’s style was fine so long as there was no crisis. Lee often thought of leadership in the context of a crisis situation. He was also encouraged to do so by questions in forums and interviews displaying widespread fascination with an unknowable issue: how the second generation would react in a crisis. He believed that the chances of their gelling as a team to tackle a major crisis was about 60:40. He recalled that

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“of the original nine men in the 1959 cabinet six did not melt” under the most intense pressure from the communists.99 He could only see two in the team of younger ministers that he was sure of, but did not name them. In a crisis, “the prime minister and at least two others” must be immovable.100 “The prime minister alone is no good.”101 Lee’s preoccupation with the crisis scenario was the chief reason for his impatience and irritation with Goh’s consultative style. Another aspect of leadership that Lee rated highly was the power to galvanize people. This was not Goh’s forte. Lee noted his awkwardness on television and before a mass audience. But this was only at the outset. Anyone who has seen him in the televised marathon national day rally speeches in the nineties would not have failed to be moved by him. In his self-assessment, Goh stressed that the teamwork and consultation that he practised was a strength. He said that he was comfortable with having B.G. Lee speak on behalf of the government. B.G. Lee was “an exceptional communicator” with a command of Chinese, English, and Malay.102 “So why should I be the person who’d articulate a particular policy when a member of my team can do it better? The important thing is that… the policy must be mine.”103 Goh had a “simple philosophy” which he gave as advice to others.104 It was never to be afraid of capable people working for you who could overtake or replace you. Following his own advice, he sought the best people he could find for the PAP and was surrounded by a cabinet of formidable talents. Just before he became prime minister, Goh did away with the ranking first and second DPM and appointed B.G. Lee and Ong Teng Cheong as DPMs. He chose B.G. Lee as the one who would act for him in his absence. Goh was thinking ten to twenty years ahead. His choice of B.G Lee, he said, “was a signal that succession is a continuous exercise… B.G. Lee is a partner in the new leadership, not a rival”.105 Goh has given some account of himself with great frankness. When Hon Sui Sen talent-scouted him, he was utterly surprised. He was totally unpolitical, not to mention monolingual as well. He asked for three days to think it over. He said yes, but it came from his head and not his heart. He reasoned that he should reciprocate for his good education and career

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which was the result of good government. The emotional part, the passion to serve, came later. He revealed this in an interview on 23 August 1988, when he had already been First DPM for three years. The interview was a response to the public assessment of him by Lee. Goh said: Up to a year ago, I did not feel passionately that I want to do the job of leading the country. Since then I feel passionately that I should do it. I have got something to contribute.106 Nor was he derailed by Lee’s criticism, but was more determined for it. He reposited: “Better for the public to know me for what I am than to expect great oratory out of me!.. They [the younger ministers] have faith in me and I have faith in myself… Take me for what I am.”107 Goh appreciated the prime minister’s candour, but rested his case on the decision of the younger ministers. They had chosen him to be the leader and reaffirmed their choice in the stressful period caused by the prime minister’s running commentary on him. Speaking at a rally in the general election of September 1988, Goh said: I do not know what is PM’s ranking of me today in 1988. Maybe I’m still his second choice… But anyway, the choice of the next leader of the party… will not be left to Prime Minister Lee. It’s for the ministers to decide. And they have decided, I’m the first choice.108 Lee decided that the general election of September 1988 would be the last he would contest as prime minister. He joked about stepping down, saying he was waiting to be given the firm elbow. Goh Chok Tong found this handy for parrying off an interviewer: “When the time comes, probably inside two years, I will gently nudge him out.”109 After the general election which took place on 3 September, Goh chose the members of the new cabinet.110 When he announced the new cabinet line-up on 10 September, he explained that he had decided, and his colleagues agreed with him, that Lee should stay on as prime minister for two years

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and that Lee had consented to it. Goh described Lee’s role in relation to his own: “to use an analogy from the world of business, Mr Lee is like the Chairman of a large corporation. I am like its Chief Executive Officer”.111 In case the MPs were mystified by this arrangement and wondered who really was in charge, Goh wrote a clarifying note to the Speaker of Parliament, dated 13 January 1989, which was read out before the house got down to business in the new term. Goh reiterated his business analogy, saying “we [the younger ministers] are in charge of the day-to-day running of the Government, not the Prime Minister”.112 Goh continued: He chairs Cabinet meetings and gives us the benefit of his experience. However, we settle the policies. My colleagues and I are therefore answerable for the performance of the Government, not the Prime Minister. If Members have any questions intended for the Prime Minister on the actions and conduct of this Government, they should address them to me. I will answer them or direct another Minister to do so as appropriate.113 First DPM Goh disclosed the reasons for his wanting Lee to stay on as prime minister for another two years, and the role he envisaged for Lee when the two years were up. He needed Lee to help consolidate good relations with Singapore’s two closest neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia. Lee had an easier time with Indonesia. He got on well with President Suharto, who was keen to rebuild the Indonesian economy and “appreciated that Singapore could assist in this Herculean task”.114 It was fortunate too that Lee’s spoken Malay was good enough for him to meet Suharto one on one, in what was called empat mata, four eyes, consultation. With Malaysia, Lee was engaged in negotiations on the purchase of water and gas.115 In the document on the separation of 1965, Singapore had obtained a guarantee from the Federation of Malaysia on the continued supply of water. But the terms had not been agreed. Lee had another matter to see through. A railway runs through Singapore from the north of island, where a causeway provides the link with Malaysia, to the south where the port of Singapore is located. The railway is one of the

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untidy legacies of British Malaya which Lee sought to clear by moving the terminus to the north, and developing the land along the then disused tracks jointly with Malaysia, to which Lee offered a greater share, 60 per cent, of the development. Dr Mahathir, the Malaysian prime minister, was a tough negotiator and a difficult man to do business with. So Lee was unable to help Goh settle these outstanding issues with Malaysia and present him with enduring agreements, as both of them had hoped for. As to what position Lee would hold after he stepped down as prime minister, Goh spoke about it on the day he announced the new cabinet. One option was for Lee to fill a role much talked about at the time, the office of elected president. Ever since Lee proposed the creation of an elected presidency in his national day rally speech of August 1984, there had been speculation linking his name to it. This office was meant, firstly, to protect the nation’s burgeoning reserves. The idea was to have two keys: the government holds one key, and the elected president holds the other key with which he can prevent the reserves from being raided. The second function of an elected president is to check against corruption in high places and cronyism in the appointment of high offices of state like the chief justice, chief of staff in the army, or commissioner of police. These are powers of veto. The elected president can block the government’s decisions in these areas, but cannot initiate or propose anything. Lee stated in his memoirs that this “high office… would be too passive for my temperament”.116 Goh thought that it would be a waste of Lee’s “vast political acumen and experience”.117 He had a better idea. He would make Lee “Senior Minister in the Prime Minister’s office”.118 Such a post had been created and held by S. Rajaratnam on his retirement from the cabinet after the 1984 general election. This post, Goh said, was ideal for Lee and himself. Lee could contribute as before, he would attend cabinet meetings, and Goh would have “free access to him”.119 So it was agreed between Lee and him for Lee to serve as Senior Minister in two years’ time. When the time came, and as Lee stepped aside for Goh, he reaffirmed the correctness of his decision made five years ago to ask the younger ministers to choose one of their members as leader. This way the chosen leader will have the support of the group. Lee said:

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I have never believed that a leader can appoint his successor and be sure he will succeed… We brought several able and committed men together. They chose Goh Chok Tong as leader. They will support him.120 On 27 November 1990, Goh Chok Tong was sworn in as prime minister. It was fourteen years since he was coopted and more than twenty-two years since Lee’s search for a successor generation began. The process of selfrenewal from the first batch of new candidates fielded in the 1968 general election, to Goh’s inauguration as prime minister in 1990, was almost as long as the history of the nation since independence in 1965. Self-renewal, it has to be recognized, is nation-building, the most difficult challenge for a nation-builder, which is why so few have done it. It is hard to find anyone among the leaders of new nations of the post-war world who has achieved it as smoothly and successfully as had Lee Kuan Yew. Lee made the self-renewal a slow, evolutionary process like nationbuilding itself. Although the older ministries who were being retired thought Lee was going too fast, Lee put his new candidates through a long apprenticeship and did not hand over all the controls to them until 1990. Why did Lee take his time? Firstly, because it was necessary to socialise politically candidates who were untried and new to the game. Secondly, he had to be sure that the experience, values, passion, and convictions of the founder generation were securely absorbed by the successor generation. Thirdly, there was the old guard syndrome: the fear of the successors not measuring up. Fourthly, the doubts Lee had about Goh Chok Tong needed time to be resolved. Perhaps they were never fully resolved, in which case Lee needed time to adjust to living with difference, with a different concept of political leadership to that which he was so wedded to. In style and personality, Goh could not have been more different from Lee. Goh was a good listener: he consulted people. Lee was a great speaker: people listened to him. Goh took time to prepare people, stage by stage, to accept tough decisions. Lee told them straight off. Goh was the conductor of an orchestra of stars. Lee was the star soloist of the orchestra.

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Lee had worked on the successor generation making good use of the time he had. He moulded them as a master potter his clay. But in the end, history would not be denied its say. Lee’s successor as prime minister, though of unquestioned ability, character and strength, surely cannot be said to be a man fashioned in his image.

NOTES 1 Straits Times, 15 March 1982. 2 Ibid. 3 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), pp. 742 and 744. 4 Chan Heng Chee, “The Structuring of the Political System”, in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by K.S. Sandhu and P. Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 81–82. 5 Lee, From Third World To First, p. 132. 6 Lam Peng Er and Kevin Y.L. Tan, Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. xvi. 7 Raj Vasil, “Trade Unions”, in Management of Success, edited by Sandhu and Wheatley, p. 160. 8 Straits Times, 3 October 1978. 9 Lee, From Third World To First, p. 736. 10 Ibid., pp. 739 and 741. 11 Ibid., pp. 739 and 741. 12 Lam and Tan, eds., Lee’s Lieutenants, p. xvii. 13 Straits Times, 24 August 1988. 14 Parliamentary Debates, Republic of Singapore, Official Report, Vol. 52, 1989, col. 435. 15 Robert O. Tilman, “The Political Leadership: Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP Team” in Management of Success, edited by Sandhu and Wheatley, pp. 56–57. 16 Diane K. Mauzy and R.S. Milne, Singapore Politics Under the People’s Action Party (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 114. 17 Ibid. 18 Vasil, “ Trade Unions”, p. 167. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., see also Straits Times, 13 April 1983. 21 Straits Times, 13 April 1983. 22 Ibid. 23 Lim Chee Onn, quoted by Labour correspondent Ivan Lim, Straits Times, 13 April 1983.

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24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58

Vasil, “Trade Unions”, p. 167. Straits Times, 2 May 1983. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. For a discussion on “whether or not the 1985–86 recession could have been avoided”, see Lim Chong Yah, “From High Growth Rates To Recession”, in Management of Success, edited by Sandhu and Wheatley, pp. 201–17. Straits Times, 1 January 1986. Straits Times, 16 August 1985. Ibid. Straits Times, 19 August 1985. Ibid. Ibid Straits Times, 24 August 1988. Ibid. Lim, “From High Growth Rates To Recession”, p. 204. Ibid., p. 213. Straits Times, 18 August 1986. Ibid. Straits Times, 9 August 1985. Straits Times, 24 August 1988. Ibid. Straits Times, 9 August 1986. Ibid. Straits Times, 29 October 1985. Straits Times, 27 May 1987. Business Times, 31 December 1987. Straits Times, 1 June 1988. Parliamentary Debates, Republic of Singapore, Official Report, Vol. 51, 1988, col. 81. Gerry Rodan called it “The spectacular return to the use of the Internal Security Act (ISA) in 1987…” See his “State-society relations and political opposition in Singapore”, in Political Opposition in Industrialising Asia, edited by Gerry Rodan (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 101. Straits Times, 28 May 1988; 13 June 1988. Straits Times, 24 August 1988. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 28 May 1988.

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92

Straits Times, 10 June 1987. Straits Times, 6 June 1987. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 51, 1988, col. 85. Ibid., col. 86. Straits Times, 27 May 1988. Straits Times, 21 May 1988. Straits Times, 13 June 1988. See for example a letter by one M. Teo, Singapore 2159, to the Straits Times, 28 May 1988. Straits Times, 24 May 1988. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 51, 1988, col. 82. Ibid. Ibid., col 159. Ibid., col. 165. In September 1958, K.M. Bryne informed Lee of this fishy business. See John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984), p. 208. Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, Part II, 1958, col. 810. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 51, 1988, col. 166. Ibid., col 295. Ibid., col. 293. Ibid., col. 289. Ibid., col. 296. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., col. 297. Ibid., col. 290. Ibid. Ibid., col. 291. Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., col. 300. Straits Times, 24 August; 26 November 1990. Straits Times, 24 August 1988. Business Times, 15 August 1988; Straits Times, 15 August 1988. Lee said that he excluded S. Dhanabalan from the list because “he felt Singapore was not ready for an Indian Prime Minister”. Straits Times, 15 August 1988. Ibid; see also Business Times, 15 August 1988.

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93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Straits Times, 14 September 1988. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 16 August 1988. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 4 August 1990. Straits Times, 28 November 1990. Business Times, 28 November 1990. Ibid., 19 November 1990. Straits Times, 24 August 1988. Ibid. Straits Times, 2 September 1988. Straits Times, 24 August 1988. The new cabinet members were as follows: Lee Kuan Yew prime minister Goh Chok Tong first deputy prime minister Ong Teng Cheong second deputy prime minister S. Dhanabalan minister for national development Dr Tony Tan minister for education Dr Ahmad Mattar minister for the environment Dr Yeo Ning Hong minister for communications and information, and second minister for defence (policy) S. Jayakumar minister for law and minister for home affairs Dr Richard Hu minister for finance B.G. Lee Hsien Loong minister for trade and industry and second minister for defence (services) Wong Kan Seng minister for foreign affairs and minister for community development Lee Yock Suan minister for labour Yeo Cheow Tong acting minister for health, and senior minister of state Goh chose the members of this cabinet. All the members have been mentioned before in this chapter save two. Lee Yock Suan, born in 1946, studied at Imperial College, London University for a BSc Honours degree in Chemical Engineering from 1966 to 1969, and was

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111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

an associate of the City and Guilds of London Institute. He worked as divisional director (projects) in the EDB from 1969 to 1980, and obtained a diploma in business administration from the University of Singapore in 1974. He was elected MP for Cheng San in the general election of December 1980, and was appointed minister of state in the ministry of national development in September 1981. Yeo Cheow Tong, born in 1947, was a Colombo Plan scholar who obtained a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree at the University of Western Australia. He worked first in the EDB from 1972 to May 1975, and then in LeBlond Makino Asia Pte. where he rose from staff engineer to engineering manager and operations director, and finally in 1981, to managing director of the company and its subsidiary company, Pacific Precision Castings Pte. Ltd. He was returned unopposed as MP for Hong Kah in the general election of December 1984. He resigned from both companies to serve as minister of state in two ministries, health and foreign affairs, in February 1985. Straits Times, 11 September 1988. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 52, 1989, col. 50. Ibid. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 301. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 52, 1989, col. 446. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 197. Straits Times, 11 September 1988. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 26 November 1990.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Consensual Primearticles Minister permission of the Institute of Southeast AsianThe Studies. Individual are• 487 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

E I G H T E E N

The Consensual Prime Minister

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or much of Goh Chok Tong’s time as leader, the sun shone brightly. After a brief recession, when he was deputy prime minister, the sun was back with him again, waxing even more strongly as he went on to become prime minister, its brilliance undimmed until the later years when dark clouds once more threatened. This success created a new, prosperous, educated middle class. The members of this class included the post-war baby boomer generation who had known a city state of stark contrasts between wealth and poverty, elegance and squalor in the colonial era, and the early independence years. Their children would have grown up knowing nothing but the affluence and the seemingly endless boom since that time. Goh’s job was to lead the baby boomer generation and their progeny into the next lap of nation-building. He meant to lead them to qualitative improvement. The next lap must make everything even better: education, employment, health care, housing, culture, and the arts. A younger generation of Singaporeans, Goh said, could transform Singapore all over again. They could make it the best home to be in. This visionary picture of Singapore must be set against the Singaporean reality. The reality was that Singaporeans shared the same home but had different dreams. Behind these different dreams were the old enduring loyalties of race, language, culture, and religion. The upshot was that Singaporeans viewed success not as one people, but as one group of people in comparison with another. The Malays compared themselves with the Chinese. Even among the Chinese, there was comparison as the 487

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Chinese-educated measured themselves against the English-educated: they were of the same race but educated in different languages, schools, and universities in the same country. As Singapore entered a more affluent era, the tendency to compare and keep up with one’s ethnic neighbour or English-educated counterpart hotted up even more, and the sense of frustration and marginalization of those left behind grew more acute. For the more affluent society was also more competitive and meritocratic. Everybody had moved forward, but not at the same pace. The Englisheducated moved fastest. This was true not only of the Chinese, but of the Malays, Indians, and Eurasians too who had acquired an education in English. They had a better chance to rise to the top. The Chinese who were educated in Chinese had far less mobility. The Chinese-educated Chinese thus formed the broad base of this predominantly Chinese society. The Malays were also a part of this broad social base. This was because, as a community, the Malays attained lower educational qualifications in English. But although the Malays and Chinese-educated Chinese were in the same socio-economic class, they had no sense of acting in unison as a class. At this stage of history, race, language, and religion were more real and immediate than class. The PAP Government made meritocracy a key principle of their rule. This again emphasized the importance of an education in English. The majority of MPs and cabinet ministers were English-educated Chinese. Likewise, so also were the permanent secretaries and other key administrative officers with whom the ministers worked closely. Prime Minister Goh stated in 1991: “The dominance of English over Chinese in Singapore has already been settled by history, the market, and force of circumstances.”1 He went on to assert in the same speech: “The English-educated Chinese is the dominant community in Singapore.”2 This was undoubtedly true, but it was also a problem given the kind of multiracial society he had in Singapore. The Malays felt left out of the upper echelons of society. They made their feelings known in a general election. The Chineseeducated Chinese were unhappy with the attention Goh devoted to the English-educated. The Chinese-educated majority, the “silent majority” as

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Deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong called them,3 would also send a strong signal to Goh through the ballot box. Concerned Malay and Muslim professionals looked for an alternative form of communal representation. Goh fended this off, preferring instead to have PAP-led civic organizations run by community leaders for their own community, beginning with the Malays, and then extended to the Chinese and Indians. Fortunately, the economic success and social mobility of the time created a mood of social ease and optimism which enabled difficult and sensitive topics to be discussed publicly. The government itself initiated this discussion. Also, Prime Minister Goh recognized that the more educated and affluent society had to be ruled differently. People, he said, wanted “more choices, more space for expression, and more influence in the way the country and their lives were being run”.4 He made a number of innovations to expand his consultative style of government. His innovations were meant for everybody and not just the English-educated, though this was the group that was likely to participate more in them.

A More Inclusive and Participative Style Goh set up a feedback unit in 1985. Hosted by the ministry of community development, the comments on the topics set for discussion were passed on to the relevant ministries. Participation was mostly by invitation only, and most sessions were conducted in English. However, there was provision for a few sessions in Mandarin, and “usually in the course of a year, one each is held in Malay and Tamil”.5 Another of Goh’s ideas addressed the need to have some non-PAP voices in parliament. One scheme, passed in 1984, allowed up to three best losers among candidates of opposition parties to be offered non-constituency MP seats. Another, in 1990, was about the nominated MP, someone whose name was put up by himself or the public, and approved by a parliamentary selection committee. Beginning with two, the number of nominated MPs was eventually increased to nine. They were people who could contribute from their expertise as businessmen, professionals, or civil society activists,

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but who did not want to go into electoral politics where they would have to look after a constituency. Goh’s intention was “to satisfy a desire for alternative views, to give non-partisan Singaporeans more opportunities for political participation, and to increase the number of MPs from under-represented groups, such as women”.6 Commentators have pointed out the motive as “weakening the sentiment for electing more opposition members”.7 One view stated: “If there is to be ‘opposition’, the aim is to steer it through manageable institutions and keep it within strict limits.”8 Nevertheless, Goh was not looking for yes men or more rubber stampers. He wanted greater involvement and meaningful debate. Towards this end he arranged for the PAP’s elected MPs, in groups of five or six, to form government parliamentary committees (GPCs) in 1987. Each GPC would scrutinize the policy-making of one or two ministries. In 1988, there were ten GPCs looking at foreign affairs and defence, community development, health, environment, finance and trade and industry, housing and national development, communications and information, law and home affairs, labour, and education. Each GPC could appoint a panel of resource persons. The Health GPC, for example, “had members from the NTUC, the pharmaceutical industry, the People’s Association Senior Citizens’ group, employers, academics, a general practitioner, and the matron of an aged persons’ home”.9 GPCs were seldom able to do more than two or three policy issues during their tenure. They examined them “in consultation with grassroots organizations, party branches and their resource panels”.10 Goh encouraged GPCs to be “independent-minded”, and not “simply echo ministers’ views”.11 They would best serve by being critical, offering alternative, creative solutions. He cited the example of the Education GPC whose proposal to allow the use of the CPF for tertiary education was accepted by the government.

Grassroots Organizations Goh’s innovations at this level were again to make for greater inclusiveness and participation, and to give people a sense of ownership and thereby,

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greater responsibility. Another important aim was to get the English-educated elite to touch base with the masses. Grassroots organizations were management committees, since 1964, of community centres, citizens’ consultative committees, first set up in April 1965, and residents’ committees, beginning with the first two in Tanjong Pagar and Marine Parade, and followed by others in public housing estates island-wide.12 In the early years, the government used them to fight communism, to rebuild confidence after race riots, and to rekindle the neighbourhood spirit of residents resettled in high rise apartment blocks. The MPs were advisers to these committees whose members were local worthies working as shopkeepers, taxi drivers, butchers, etc. The challenge of the 1990s, Senior Minister Lee said, was the induction of younger grassroots leaders — English-educated graduates and professionals — into the service of their community.13 These new grassroots leaders must learn to be sensitive in helping the shopkeepers, the small and medium enterprises, and people from the working class who spoke Chinese dialects and Mandarin. The kind of help needed was guidance “through the channels of government departments”.14 Prime Minister Goh liked to have new administrative officers, many of whom were scholarship holders, educated in the best universities abroad, and bonded to serve the government for a number of years, to do a stint in grassroots organizations. This would give then a better feel for the “problems, fears and hopes” of the people.15 But they looked on such postings as unglamorous and unrewarding.16 In the same way, they had reservations about going to the ministry of community development, the NTUC, and the SAF. They were keenest on the EDB, the finance and foreign affairs ministries, believing these were the places where their work would count and their careers would fly. This surely was a sign of the times, a typical image of the era. The next measure to be considered is Goh’s scheme, passed in June 1988, to establish town councils to be chaired by MPs. The town councils took over the management of public housing estates from a central authority, the HDB. The work included the maintenance of buildings, lifts, gardens, drains, and carparks, and the work of cleaning and scavenging. Through this arrangement, the government in the person of the MP would become

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closer to the people. People would realize that their daily life and the wellbeing of their estates were directly linked to their choice of the right MP. Goh’s purpose was to educate people to vote responsibly. They would have got his message.

Close to You: The Community Development Councils In 1997, Goh embarked on a major policy in the devolution of power and responsibility. He envisaged dividing Singapore into zones like the current five: North West, South West, Central, North East, and South East. In each zone he set up a Community Development Council, and the electoral constituencies within the zone were deemed to belong to, and would participate in, it. The MPs were the councillors and one of them would serve as the full-time mayor of the CDC. The North West CDC had thirteen MPs of which three were full ministers, and two, ministers of state. The mayor was MP Dr Teo Ho Pin. The area included the former British naval base, now the Sembawang Shipyard, at the northern end, and was once planted with rubber, fruits, and vegetables. It was then given over to suburban bungalows, semidetached and terraced houses with gardens. The urbanscape on the main road north had the look of provincial towns, emblazoned with the lit-up plastic signs of international oil companies at the petrol pumps, American fast food chains, and various other businesses. The latest development in this district were the new towns comprising high rise, high density apartment blocks laid out in geometric progression, but relieved by different designs, and shades of colours, and greenery. The North West CDC worked with the ministry of community development and sports and with grassroots organizations, voluntary welfare groups, schools, and residents in the area. Some idea of what this work was about is seen in the following: the Muhammadiyah-Mendaki Family Service Centre and (a separate) Student Care Centre run by the same group, the Little Bodhi Student Care Centre set up by the Buddhist Society Alumni of the Nanyang Technological University, and the Lions Befrienders Social Service Centre for the elderly. The CDC collaborated with the Ren Ci

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Hospital on needs like transport, and funds for wheelchairs, walking frames, and hearing aids. Parents, principals, and teachers were invited by the CDC and the ministry of community development and sports to form family life resource centres as part of the schools’ outreach to the community. The CDC helped with training and funds. Beginning with four such centres in 2001, the plan was to have “over 300 by 2004”.17 Students were great helpers. Some 340 students from the Institute of Technical Education volunteered to do simple house repairs for needy families, and follow-up visits “on a quarterly basis”.18 Another service was offered by student volunteers at twenty-four schools: they were the CDC’s young e-ambassadors. They helped adults overcome their fear of the computer. The CDC combined this service with giving refurbished computers to low-income families. The CDC once held a multimedia competition for its students and residents. The entries brought to life stories about the Teochew pioneers of the last century, family history, and places of worship in the North West district. The CDC looked to partner the corporate sector. Projects included a recruitment drive with Sembawang Shipyard, the renovation of the Villa Francis Home for the Aged by Kansai Paints (Asia) Pte. Ltd., and the free distribution of organic fertilizer with Meng Guan Landscape and Construction Pte. Ltd. The fertilizer was given to 1,000 residents and fifty five schools of the North West district with the help of National Junior College, National Environment Agency and the Buona Vista Youth executive committee. North West CDC was noted for its Green Clubs, numbering forty-eight in 2004, and for bringing orchid plant tissue culture into the life science course of a primary school. The people of the North West boasted “the biggest Brisk Walking Club in Singapore”.19 It was actually made up of eighty-nine smaller clubs. This was a district where, as volunteer workers observed, even the elderly were energetic. There was a ninety-three year old Hokkien woman, Siak Eng, who completed a ten-kilometre national big walk sponsored by the New Paper in 2002.

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Each CDC served its people in its own distinctive way. The South West CDC covered the industrial hub of Singapore. Smacked in it was the Jurong industrial estate. Mayor Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, noting the low take-up rate of HDB flats in Jurong, and the special transport allowance that corporations had to give to induce people to work for them, proposed a three- to fiveyear plan in 2002 to “make over” the living environment here. She mooted the idea of a multipurpose complex in 2001, the Jurong Town Council and the HDB chipped in to build it, and it was officially opened in January 2003. The South West CDC, the Jurong Town Council, and the HDB had their service counters there, and residents had only to go to this one place to enquire from all three. The complex had a Councillors’ Lounge for the use of volunteers, grassroots leaders, and participating residents. It had another space, the People’s Hall, after which the whole complex was named, which can accommodate 150 seated at tables, and may be rented for wedding dinners, family gatherings, and the like.20 Another landmark project (in the making) was the Village Place. Here, residents and volunteers would be able to hold sales of their art works, handicrafts, plants, home-made food: it was intended as a venue for the exercise of their creative and entrepreneurial talents. Major donors to charity golf events in aid of the Village Place project were Jurong Town Corporation (not to be confused with Jurong Town Council), Hi-P International Ltd., Prima Ltd., United Overseas Bank Group, and the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple. Among other programmes, the South West CDC had a soccer clinic in cooperation with the Singapore Armed Forces Football Club, and a choir, a first for the CDCs, called the Vocal Consort. In addition to child care, student care and elder care centres, the South West CDC also had centres for the treatment of diabetes and hypertension, and for dialysis, operated in conjunction with welfare and Chinese temple committees. In recent years, owing to layoffs from recession and restructuring, all the CDCs gave priority to jobs search, job matching, and career guidance in partnership with corporations. The South West CDC had a search team going through the Jurong industrial estate to look at banners and posters outside factories for any available jobs, and to interest corporations in job fairs.

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The government started a number of schemes to help retrenched workers and needy families. One of them, effective from January 2004, was Home Ownership Plus Education (HOPE).21 The CDCs enabled people to get help at a Council near them.

The Malay Minority The Malays, like everybody else, have been through a major transformation in their way of life since 1965. They have been resettled from rural kampongs and urban places to apartment blocks in new towns. The HDB, when allocating these apartments, aimed to have a mix of races. Malays preferred the lower floors, while for the Chinese, it was the opposite: the higher, the better. So they might make a switch after allocation, but they were still in the same block, as neighbours of a sort. After many years, the government found that families were resorting to the resale market in HDB flats in order to be with people of their own race in certain favoured areas. Malays liked Changi, Bedok, and Siglap, areas near their former kampongs or by the sea. The Chinese liked Toa Payoh and Ang Mo Kio, which were their former farming areas in the outskirts of the city. Unless the trend was checked, the races would recongregate once again as in the colonial time. So in 1989, the HDB set quotas for each block: twenty-five per cent of the families had to be Malay, thirteen per cent Indian and other minorities, the rest, Chinese. The non-Chinese families have complained because their chances of getting the best price by selling to a Chinese were now restricted, but Lee thought this “a small cost for achieving our larger objective of getting the races to intermingle”.22 When Malays originally resettled in the new towns, the kampong mosque, the surau, had to follow. It was rebuilt as a bigger, modern edifice on land offered by government at below market rate. Additionally, Lee found a way to pay for the new mosques: “a building fund which received S$1 per month from each Muslim worker through our CPF system”.23 Lee explained: “This gave our Malays pride in building their mosques with their own funds.”24 He had hit on an important principle which could be applied to the general social uplift of the Malays.

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In 1980, Lee shared with Malay MPs certain facts and figures concerning the poorer educational performance of Malay students compared with other students. The Malay MPs decided to form the Council on Education for Muslim Children. The Malay acronym for it was Mendaki. The chairman was Dr Ahmad Mattar. Various Malay social, literary, and cultural associations which had been helping Malay children became members of Mendaki, and worked with the Malay MPs on the council. The government provided Mendaki with rent-free premises, and to finance its operations, “deducted 50 cents from each Malay’s monthly CPF contribution”, gradually increasing the amount deducted to $2.50 as incomes rose.25 “The government matched it dollar for dollar.”26 At the inaugural Mendaki congress in May 1982, Lee commented on the council’s quick-fix strategy of opening tuition centres for students sitting for the Primary School Leaving Exams and the ‘A’ Level Exams. “You have to start right from the very beginning… at kindergarten”, he counselled.27 Another task for which “no quick solutions” were available, he said, was that of changing “the basic values” of the parents, as these values “have a profound influence on their children”.28 The parents must accept that “striving for success through scholarship” is a highly desirable goal and virtue.29

New Malay MPs in the PAP’s Self-Renewal Goh Chok Tong, as first deputy prime minister, wondered why Malay professionals were so reluctant to accept his invitation to become MPs. They cited career, marriage, starting a family, which were reasonable excuses for men in their early thirties. Another reason may be discerned in the desire of a number of well qualified Malay professionals to be activists unassociated with the PAP. Why they were intent on this non-partisan approach will be considered later. This section will deal first with the Malays whom Goh succeeded in persuading to become PAP MPs. Yatiman Yusof was born in 1946 in Johore, but lived in Singapore, attended the Sang Nila Utama (Malay-medium) Secondary School, the Teachers’ Training College, and finally the University of Singapore, graduating with BA (1972) in Geography and Malay Studies.

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Things had not been as easy for Yatiman as this linear progression suggests. He had to work day and night as a teacher (night-time in adult education classes) and in between to attend lectures at the university. As a teenager, he witnessed the race riots at Geylang in 1964, and ran home to Lorong Sinaran, off Moulmein Road, where his family was the only Malay one in the Chinese village there. The Chinese village headman ensured his family’s safety, and somebody went to the market for them. As an undergraduate, Yatiman was passionately Malay, and felt that Malay leaders at the time had let their people down. But when he and his friends went to the rural areas to attempt the things they talked about, reality hit them. Many were disheartened and fell away because they had thought “they could move people just by giving lectures”.30 Yatiman learned to redirect their efforts to effect change through the suraus (kampong mosques) and the ustaz (religions teachers). Yatiman left teaching in 1978 to join the Malay daily and weekly, Berita Harian and Berita Minggu. He was approached to be a PAP candidate in the 1980 general election but said no. However, he agreed when Goh asked him in 1984. Goh asked him why it was so hard to get Malay candidates. Yatiman explained for one-and-a-half hours. He felt it was his religions duty, fardu kifayah, to inform Goh, among other things, of the discontent of some Malay intellectuals with what was being done to help the Malays go forward.31 As for Yatiman himself, he had come up the hard way, and had had experiences which made him a multiculturalist and a realist. Zulkifli Mohammed was Singapore-born on 8 August 1948. He graduated with BSc Hons. (Political Science) in 1970 from the University of Singapore, and worked for Shell Eastern Petroleum Pte. Ltd. He was in the Majlis Pusat, Central Council of Malay Cultural Associations (in which Yatiman was also involved) and the Singapore Anti-Narcotics Association’s Muslim Counselling Service. Zulkifli was a PAP candidate in the 1984 general election, after having declined the offer to stand in two previous general elections in 1976 and 1980. Abdullah Tarmugi grew up in an urban area, his home was a rented pre-war shophouse in Crawford Road. He was born in 1944 to a Javanese father and a Chinese mother. His father was a low-salaried surveyor’s

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assistant, and his grandfather ran a provision shop opposite Abdullah’s home. Abdullah went to Raffles Institution where he met his future wife, a Chinese girl, at the pre-university class. At the University of Singapore, he graduated with BSc Hons. (Sociology) in 1970. He then served out his bursary bond in the ministry of national development as an urban sociologist, and later as a statistician and planning analyst. In 1980, he joined the Straits Times. Being in the media himself, Abdullah was easy with journalistic curiosity about his Chinese appearance, and how the Malays took to him and his Chinese wife. Abdullah was frank: people were unsure how to respond to him and his wife. His son, when young, was confused over his identity: “Am I a Malay or a Chinese?”32 Some Malays found it difficult to accept Abdullah’s wife though she became a Muslim. At the mosque, his son was mistaken for a Chinese convert. Abdullah said that he himself was “still very much a Javanese”, and spoke the language to his (Chinese) mother.33 His children, a son and a daughter, spoke good Malay. But the family conversed in English. Their lifestyle was “more international” than was usual for Malays. They went as a family to symphony concerts. Abdullah liked Tchaikovsky. “We see ourselves,” he said, “more as Singaporeans and less as Malay or Chinese.”34 This should have been perfect. This was precisely what S. Rajaratnam, formerly minister of culture, had hoped to see happening. But ironically, it did not work out that way, and was instead an awkward exception rather than the universally accepted rule that might be expected of a multiracial society. Abdullah was the PAP candidate, unopposed, in 1984. In 1987, he was the chairman of the GPC on Community Development, and in 1989, the first deputy speaker of the parliament. In July 1993, he succeeded Dr Ahmad Mattar as minister-in-charge of Muslim affairs. In this latest promotion he was conscious of the talk that he was not close enough to the Malay ground.35 So he worked harder, going out to meet and converse with Malay/ Muslim social, religious and missionary organizations. He had always felt that some Malays distanced themselves from him, and had decided to always make the first move.36 Malays respected status

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and rank, and his effort to reach out to them succeeded in overcoming their reservations about him. Abdullah was trained as an urban sociologist, and had a postgraduate diploma in urban studies from London University in 1971, attained on a Commonwealth scholarship. This was obviously useful to the resolving of serious Malay problems: high divorce rates, drug abuse, dysfunctional families, school dropouts (he was on Mendaki too). Speaking as a Malay MP, he said that he was in “a better position to understand what is bugging them, and what kind of solutions are needed” that would not offend their religion and culture.37 But he stressed that he must also serve his non-Malay constituents. “I see myself as a national leader.”38

The Team MPs: Twinning and Grouping of Constituencies Before the Malays were resettled into new towns, they were concentrated in certain areas, Geylang Serai, Kembangan, Bedok, Siglap, Southern Islands, which evolved naturally into Malay political constituencies. Resettlement dispersed the Malays to live among Chinese, Indians and others. This served the purpose of national integration, but it also meant no more racially guaranteed seats for Malay candidates. Every electoral constituency was now a Chinese majority one. The odds against a Malay candidate winning were very strong. Lee feared this would lead to a parliament without Malay MPs. Electoral constituencies were single-member ones. Lee proposed the twinning of certain constituencies and have the MPs contest as a pair in which one of them must be from the minority race. When this idea was put to the PAP’s MPs, the Malay MPs were hurt by the implication that they were not electable on their own merits, and needed to be paired with a Chinese. The Indian MPs objected strongly, asking to “be left out of any such arrangement”, thus, Lee said, “leaving the focus on the Malays solely”.39 Goh Chok Tong and the younger ministers did not want Malay MPs to lose “confidence and self-respect”.40 They told Lee so in cabinet, and he let his proposal rest. Later, they came round to it, but linked it to the establishment of town councils with the MPs as town councillors. And

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instead of twin constituencies, they suggested groups of three or more constituencies to be known as group representation constituencies (GRCs). Opposition parties accused the government of unfairly changing the electoral rules. The opposition had trouble enough finding suitable candidates for one to one contests with the PAP, let alone a team of three or more. They were also dubious about the town council idea. Would town councils in opposition wards be able to function without bureaucratic obstructionism from elsewhere? Many related these changes to the fact that in the previous general election in 1984, the PAP had suffered “a nearly 13 per cent decline in its share of the popular vote [to 62.9 per cent]”.41 Goh’s introduction of these innovations in January 1988, the year when another general election was due, added more fuel to the controversy. In view of the public furore, the government released cabinet papers to show that Prime Minister Lee had thought about starting twin constituencies in 1981, and had submitted a cabinet paper on it in 1982. Thus, the idea had been kept in view a long time. In January 1988, Lee, at a briefing, was somewhat exasperated that the failure to present the concept as he had intended it to be presented, had led to these “charges about ‘fixing’ the opposition”.42 “The younger ministers had ‘sold’ it instead as a proposal to set up town councils in the belief that this could blur the racial reason for it”.43 Lee cited this as an example of the difference between their idealistic style and his own direct, rational one.

Goh Gets Tough Goh was about to be presented with a reason to speak out plainly like Lee. The GRC was based on an assumption about the likely undesirable outcome of Chinese voting behaviour. The general election of September 1988 was the first election held with GRCs in place. The results drew attention not to the voting behaviour of the Chinese, but of the Malays instead. The Malay voters became the focus of Goh’s post-election analysis. Goh had expected the PAP’s share of the popular vote to improve from the last

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time, in 1984; instead it fell again, although marginally, by 1.1 per cent to 61.8 per cent. He believed that the PAP “lost a significant proportion of Malay votes”.44 He cited straw polls as “consistently” showing “that Malay support for the PAP lagged 5 to 10 per cent behind that of the Chinese”.45 This meant: “If 60 per cent of the Chinese said that they supported the PAP only 50 to 55 per cent of the Malays said that they did.”46 He had come to a tentative conclusion, he said, “the PAP should review its electoral strategy”.47 As to why he was discussing the subject openly, he said: “That [is] me and my open, consultative style.”48 The PAP’s policy of helping everybody, unconditionally, had not worked in 1984, nor in 1988, he said. Should the PAP not differentiate between those who supported it and those who did not, and “extend more help to those who [did]? Otherwise, why should anyone help us?”49 Goh said that he had been pushing for a bigger role for Mendaki beyond its educational one, and had helped to conceive a second Mendaki. He needed a positive signal from the Malay community in return. He would wait for their reactions. He sought a new beginning not only with the Malays, but with the other races too, characterized by “open, unambiguous support for the PAP government”.50 He hoped to start this new phase with the opening of the new parliament in January 1989. Goh’s tough talk was a departure from his usual kind and gentle self. It drew responses from Majlis Pusat, the central council for some forty organizations, and from various individual organizations, namely the Malay Journalists’ Association, Pergas (an association of religious teachers and scholars), Perdaus (an association of adult religious students), Taman Bacaan (a youth library association), the Kesatuan Guru Guru Singapore (Singapore Malay Teachers’ Association), and the Singapore Malays National Organization, this last being a political party. Except for the political party, the others were conciliatory in tone, though expressing shock and unhappiness. The Malay teachers’ association told Goh, in a letter which they released to the press, that they preferred discussing sensitive issues behind closed doors. Goh’s reply, which he handed to the press, reciprocally, said that closed door sessions would not have the effect of jolting people “into

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positive action”.51 Goh cited “one key issue we must resolve in further discussions” namely, Does the Malay community want to merge with the mainstream of national life, and influence the direction of this mainstream by being part of it? Or does it prefer to be a branch on its own, setting its own direction, independently of the rest of society?52 Goh commented on the Malays’ lack of enthusiasm for residents’ committees and other grassroots organizations, calling it “puzzling”.53 This caused ten PAP Malay MPs to reply in a joint statement signed by Dr Ahmad Mattar, minister-in-charge of Muslim affairs. They cautioned against putting too much weight on involvement in grassroots committees, arguing that consideration be given to the “wider context” of Malay acceptance of government policies, and of what was defined as the national mainstream.54 “The only problem was,” they said, the Malays “were not progressing as rapidly as they would like to [in this national mainstream].”55

The Association of Muslim Professionals Goh’s problem with the Malays was rather more difficult than has been noted so far. There was one key group that rejected the Malay MPs and Mendaki. This group consisted of Malay professionals. They were frustrated with the slow progress attained by the Malay community, and with the paucity of Malays who had made it to the top. In a way this group was what the PAP Government could take pride and joy in, and did. Malay professionals coming onstream spoke well for the PAP under whose governance this was happening. These Malay professionals did not turn their backs on their people but were anxious to help them. Again, this was exactly what the PAP Government loved to see. They made inspiring role models. But the less wonderful aspect was the headstrong, independent line that they took. The Malay professionals were of the view that Mendaki was selflimiting the self-help that it was supposed to be doing. They felt that the Malay MPs and minister in Mendaki had their hands tied. Being in the

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PAP, a national government, prevented them from going all out for the Malay community, as they had to think of the effect on the other communities. The Malay professionals had been talking for sometime on the theme of achieving faster results by shedding the connection with the government: depoliticize Mendaki, have no MPs or minister on it. Yet they must have realized that government support, at any rate, resources, were needed in any self-help movement. Not surprisingly, when they held their first national convention in October 1990, First Deputy Prime Minister Goh was the keynote speaker and guest of honour. Goh clearly sensed that they were a potentially serious challenge. He told them that he hoped they did not “intend to raise Malay issues publicly and vociferously with the Government, and press them on a communal basis, purely from the Malay point of view”.56 Significantly, Goh played down the MPs’ role in Mendaki. He said: “Only three out of 15 directors of Mendaki are MPs — Dr Ahmad Mattar, Encik Abdullah Tarmugi, and Encik Zulkifli Mohammed. But Zulkifli is not there as an MP, but as a representative of Majlis Pusat”.57 Goh urged those present at the convention to set up a parallel organization: “call it Mendaki Swasta, Private Sector Mendaki”.58 The government would support it in the same way as it did the first Mendaki. “But,” he added “have no links with political parties or politicians, whether PAP or Opposition.”59 Prime Minister Lee backed Goh’s call to start a Mendaki Swasta. The Malay professionals agreed after some time. They accepted the premises and the financial support from government, but not the proposed name, as they did not want to sound like another Mendaki. Their organization, launched in October 1991, was called the Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP). The Malay professionals represented an alternative leadership that looked confrontational, and might mutate into an opposition political party. Goh had to bring this incipient threat under control, which he did, and to prevent the virus of disaffection from spreading. This permits another interpretation to be put on his switch from nice guy to tough talker in September 1988, following the general election. The

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idea of a private-sector Mendaki had been under discussion since at least May of that year, though Goh only publicly suggested it to the Malay professionals at their convention in October 1990. His tough talk of September 1988, which shocked Malay organizations, was, in all likelihood, meant to rally them on the side of the government to contain the dissident Malay professionals.

Walking Tall: Goh and the Malays in the Next Lap Since 1960, the government had exempted Malays from paying fees in tertiary institutions. In May 1989, Goh proposed a change in this policy. The exemption of fees, which was an educational subsidy for Malays, amounted to S$1.5 million in 1988. Goh planned to hand this annual educational subsidy to Mendaki for it to start a scheme of bursaries, scholarship, and fees waiver. This plan would accomplish three things. Firstly, it would make those who could afford fees to pay them. Family income would be used as the criterion. More than a third of Malay students in tertiary institutions “came from families earning more than S$2,000 per month”, Goh noted.60 Secondly, the money saved because of these students who need not be exempted from fees, could be used by Mendaki to run its highly subsidized tuition classes. Mendaki’s success in persuading as many Malay students as needed it to come for tuition was accompanied by a deepening financial deficit. Besides education, Goh wanted Mendaki to deal with some other serious social problems for which professional researchers had to be hired. He expected the government’s tertiary subventions to grow as more Malays were set to enter the university, polytechnic, and technical institute, and thought it best to channel the money into Mendaki’s projects. Thirdly, by this change of policy, Malays would feel equal to everybody else on bursaries, scholarships, or parental support. The initial Malay reaction was one of shock. Article 152 of the constitution was invoked, but that clause merely recognized the special position of Malays without prescribing any special rights. Free tertiary education was a policy, not a right.

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It is obvious from this change that Goh did not want the Malays to cling to the status quo, but to move ahead. Goh was fond of getting people to state their dreams and visions of the future. He asked Malay leaders to submit in writing to him “Malay aspirations for the 1990s”.61 Ma’mum Suheimi, president of the Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union, wrote: “Malays wanted to ‘stand tall with the other races’ and be regarded as equal members of society.”62 Goh picked on the key words and said: “To stand tall… Malays should voluntarily rely less and less on their ‘special position’ as provided under the Constitution and not insist on the Government extending special privileges all the time.”63 Another idea which Goh took care to emphasize to Malay leaders was meritocracy, and along with it also the virtue of patience. One example is found in his speech to Jamiyah, the Muslim Missionary Society of Singapore in 1990: Our concern is the same as yours, that there are not enough Malays available to hold high positions, or not yet enough… the Government will be most delighted to have a Malay sitting on the High Court Bench, but unless there is a suitable person available, a Malay should not be appointed simply because he is a Malay.64 Goh added that he was pleased that Malays were not asking the government to reserve high-level positions for Malays. “It does not want appointment on the basis of race. It wants it to be done on merit”.65 Malays are polite and gracious of speech and manner. They clearly wanted to see more Malays in high places, but could find no easy way to tell Goh this. Goh knew what was on their mind, and decided to put it into words, associating them with what he said. At the same time, he let it be known that there was no compromise with meritocracy.

Muslim Professionals and Madrasahs The Association of Muslim Professionals, formed in 1991, settled into the work of community self-help. In 1999, Goh introduced the idea of

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compulsory education in national schools which was seen by the madrasahs, Islamic schools, as undermining their very existence. The AMP took this as the cue for political action again. There were in 1999, some 4,000 students enrolled in six madrasahs in Singapore, following a curriculum which was seventy per cent religious study, and thirty per cent secular subjects. A “growing number of professionals” chose to put their children in madrasahs, both for them to be learned in the religion, and to be strong, through the madrasah’s discipline, against social ills such as drug abuse.66 The madrasah’s students were trained to become teachers, clerics, and scholars. When the positions open to them have been filled, and they would soon be in a small nation like Singapore, what would the rest do? Would they have learned English, maths, and science up to a sufficient standard to compete for jobs in a secular society? This was the government’s worry. Pergas, the association of Muslim teachers and scholars, whipped up an emotional storm. Goh gave his assurance that there was no question of closing down the madrasahs. The PAP’s Malay MPs were in a difficult position, having to mediate between the state and their religion. Yatiman Yusof who was now the parliamentary secretary in the ministry of information and the arts, urged his brother Muslims to be less emotional, and to avoid accusing the government of “sinister motives”.67 Abdullah Tarmugi said the compulsory education idea was “not a ploy” directed at the madrasahs.68 Abdullah had been the minister in charge of Muslim affairs since 1993. Some months after taking on the job, he had expressed his concern over parents who were attaching more importance to religious education than “to striving to succeed” in the practical world.69 He believed that Muslims in the professions should provide the lead in achieving the right balance. As minister, Abdullah’s theme was the fulfilment of the spiritual life through social action. He also wanted to pool the talents and resources of Malay religious and non-religious groups. He noticed that cultural groups preferred working in community centres and religious groups in mosques. The religious groups did not want to be tainted by anything like dancing. Abdullah thought they could cooperate with others without prejudice to their faith in certain social services. Perdaus agreed, saying they could help

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with drug abuse, tuition, and childcare. Perdaus itself ran a childcare centre. Pertapis, the Islamic Theological Association of Singapore, ran a halfway house for ex-drug addicts. Different groups were carving out little niches for themselves. They should combine to achieve greater “synergy”, a word Abdullah used, speaking the language of progress.70 In the current controversy, Goh assigned Abdullah to study how madrasah students were faring in life. Abdullah worked with MUIS, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore and Mendaki, on this study. He also set up a steering committee to look into such matters as the curriculum, teacher training, funding, and management of madrasahs. The madrasahs were weak in the instruction of secular subjects. The teachers were paid less than those in national schools. The main reason was the madrasahs’ dependence on donations from the community, with no subventions from the state. Abdullah and other Malay MPs advised Goh of the great importance of the madrasahs to the Malay community. This helped Goh to reach his decision to give the madrasahs eight years from 2000 to work on their secular subjects in which they must achieve at least the minimum standards registered in the national schools. And to show that the government was not against madrasahs, Goh undertook to fund one of them. The Association of Muslim Professionals highlighted the madrasah issue as a sign of the “systemic shortcoming” of the Malay MPs’ “dual role”, serving both state and community.71 The AMP used the opportunity to revive the collective leadership idea. This was to have a body of Malay leaders, picked by their own community, instituted. These leaders would be freer to “tackle issues close to Malay-Muslim hearts”.72 They would also have “the moral weight and legitimacy to balance and complement the role of Malay MPs elected to parliament on the People’s Action Party ticket”.73 The AMP conducted a survey of 3,240 Malays in 1,053 households on the collective leadership idea, and such details as were released seemed to show support for it. The AMP was becoming a political mobilizer. In this role, it issued a report on the ten years of community self-help from 1990 to 2000, stating that Malays still lagged behind other Singaporeans. This is hardly surprising, for as Malays advanced, others did so too, and the gap between them

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remained. The government advised Malays not to compare with others, but with what they themselves were in the past. Then they would see how far they had come. But the AMP set its sights on “national standards set by other Singaporeans” and on Malays making “a national impact”.74 The AMP’s second national convention planned for 4 and 5 November 2000 was anticipated as a decisive moment. On the eve of the convention, eleven PAP Malay MPs led by Abdullah Tarmugi, issued a statement warning against the proposed collective leadership. It would, the MPs said, split the Malay community, and undercut their role “as a bridge between the community and the Government”.75 The convention opened with more than 550 Malay/Muslim professionals and leaders of the community and of organizations in attendance. On the second day, Goh addressed them. He was forthright: “AMP is now straying into the political arena, which, as a non-political community organization, it should not do.”76 It had a “flair for capturing headlines”, unlike the Mendaki which quietly went on with its “unglamorous work”.77 Goh said that “the end game”, if AMP leaders pursued their idea, “must be politics on the basis of race and religion”.78 He likened the four races in Singapore to four overlapping circles: “We must never reduce the common space. If we do, the country will break up into separate, unlinked circles.”79 In a vigorous exchange with Yang Razali Kassim, AMP leader and Business Times journalist, Goh replied: “My signals are very clear where collective leadership is concerned. You can debate it, but to implement it is No Go.”80 Alami Musa, AMP chairman and an engineer by profession, said that his group was strongly committed to the core principles — multiracialism and meritocracy — but added that the way meritocracy worked in Singapore could be “enhanced”.81 Goh understood what Alami was driving at, but did not say. Goh decided to say it for him: “Let’s speak frankly. Your complaint is that we don’t have a Malay permanent secretary. No Malay judge. No Malay general…”82 Goh cautioned patience: the time for these appointments will come when Malays can compete easily against other Singaporeans and then “there will be no more issue about meritocracy”.83 But the waiting time was, understandably, hard for Alami and his AMP colleagues in a society moving forward so fast, and everybody wants what he wants now.

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To sum up, Goh chided the AMP for pushing the envelope. The AMP’s defence was that they were acting in the spirit of “active citizenship”, a catchphrase of the Goh era, and “doing nothing more than promoting a more vibrant civil society”.84 Yang Razali Kassim said that Goh’s prime ministership had fired their imagination and hopes. True, but they had then rammed up against the wall of Goh’s out-of-bounds markers. Despite this, they were of the same mind as Goh in one important respect. Like him, they understood the importance of lifting people beyond the level of the mundane by connecting with their dreams and visions. The AMP aimed to set an agenda for action that would take the Malay community into the twenty-first century. Alami Musa and his associates, to their credit, did not overlook the power of history. They planned a history project, one that would rewrite the history of Singapore. Their hope was clearly that a view of the past, free from the orientalizing lens of colonial rulers, would inspire confidence and courage in the Malay people to be achievers in the present and future.

Challenging Times: Goh and the Malays The AMP raised a number of issues of direct concern to Malays, but had no lien on speaking about them. Malay MPs also lobbied these issues with PAP ministers, but in private. On their part, PAP ministers spent a great deal of time with Malay groups, letting the press in to report on their dialogue sessions. Goh, in 2000, regarded it “a big plus” that he could talk so openly with Malay leaders. “I don’t think I could have spoken so frankly 20 years ago.”85 What had made it possible? No doubt it was the national stability and prosperity which Malays had partaken in, and the greater degree of trust and knowledge built up over the years between government and people. Problems remained to be resolved. Malays complained of job discrimination in government ministries and the private sector. They deplored job advertisements of companies which specified race. They had to put up with a specially wounding racial stereotyping thus: “if a Malay makes it”, Abdullah said, “he is considered ‘different’ from other Malays”.86 Malay youths were not called up for national service until the

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mid-1980s, and then were mostly sent to do police and civil defence duties.87 In February 1987, B.G. Lee’s answer to a “question on Malays in the SAF at a constituency function” signalled the decision of the cabinet “to take the matter into the open”.88 The truth was that the government did not want Malays to handle heavy arms. In September 1999, Senior Minister Lee, also at a constituency function, expressed his qualms on this issue. This caused Majlis Pusat and Taman Bacaan to call for a dialogue with him, which took place in March 2000. It solved nothing. What the dialogue made painfully clear was that the Singaporean Malays’ loyalty was hostage to events in the surrounding Malay world over which they were not accountable. Malays consumed ritually slaughtered (halal) meat, but no pork. HDB markets and food courts had designated areas in recognition of this practice. The seating area at the food courts, however, did not have a separate section for Muslims, and this, plus the fact that Malay food is a favourite with many non-Malays, allowed the races to intermingle. Other places like KFC, Burger King, MacDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Delifrance have gone halal, making for more intermingling at their highly popular venues. But some Muslims wanted a stricter regimen: separate kitchens, separate tables, and endorsement of restaurants by Muis for the halal food they served. It would be a setback if Muslims and non-Muslims could no longer eat together, for there is no better way for them to mix in Singapore, where the pleasures of the palate are scarcely less important than the politics of multiracialism, and indeed can help it along. Muslim girls, upon reaching puberty, wear a headscarf, the tudong, signifying modesty. But, with growing religiousity, some parents wanted their children to start wearing it younger, and to primary school. The Education ministry’s position was that their daughters were in a national school, and should wear the uniform to be at one with other students, without the addition of a headscarf. Goh was worried by a possible progression of demands: after the tudong, the next request might be for separate seating areas for Muslim girls and boys, and then a prayer room for Muslim students.89 Muslim women donning headscarves were said to have been kept off front desks in government departments. Goh would not interfere with the bosses’ decision on this matter, saying that jobs have their requirements.

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Nevertheless, Goh has responded to the change taking place in the Muslim community. In his continuous search for new Malay MPs, he has looked not only for the technocratic type, but also for the role models who meant more to the religiously devout and puristic. The examples given below speak of a balance between technocracy and religion. Dr Yaacob Ibrahim is a structural engineer trained firstly in Singapore, and then at Stanford University, where he obtained a PhD in 1989, after which he was a research fellow at Cornell University for a period, before returning in 1990, to a lectureship at the National University of Singapore. He is the fourth child in a family of eight children born to a lawyer’s clerk and a housewife in a kampong in Bedok. Dr Yaacob exemplified the “New Malay”. This is a term he used in a speech, and which Malaysian leaders have also used.90 It means the Malay who is an achiever and is yet strong in Malay identity, Islamic values, and love of nation. Halimah Yaacob was born in Singapore in 1954 to an Indian Muslim watchman and his Malay wife. Her father died when she was eight, and her widowed mother raised five children by selling nasi padang, without a licence, on a pushcart at Shenton Way. Both mother and the daughter who assisted at the stall, had to keep a sharp eye out for the police.91 Halimah studied law at the University of Singapore on a bursary from Muis, which she supplemented by working in the university library. Upon graduating in 1978, she “grabbed the first job offer” she got, which was as legal officer with the NTUC.92 Not for her the luxury of passing up the NTUC that scholarship holders educated abroad seemed to have. Halimah entered an unglamorous man’s world of cigarette smokefilled meeting rooms. She rose to be the assistant secretary-general of the NTUC in May 1999, and in the next month, she was elected the Asian representative in the International Labour Organization (ILO). She is married to a businessman, and they have five children. Halimah wears a Malay baju which clothes her up to her hands and feet, and tops it with a tudong. But she takes pride also in her identity as a woman and an Asian. She felt great when she was complimented as the ILO’s “first woman, first Asian and the first scarf-wearing Muslim”.93 Ahmad Khalis Abdul Ghani is also a lawyer. He graduated from the National University of Singapore in 1985. He was a founder of the Fellowship

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of Muslim Students’ Association in 1989, and the secretary-general of the Muhammadiyah Association. He helped to establish the Madrasah AlArabiah Al-Islamiah and became its supervisor. September 11 2001 showed Goh to have been most timely and prescient in his choice of these three candidates, which he presented for the general election on 3 November of the same year. The impact of September 11 resounded across the world. In December 2001, the government arrested fifteen people and in August 2002, another twenty-one. In both security operations, most of the men arrested were identified as members of a militant network, the Jemaah Islamiah (JI). After each batch of arrests, Prime Minister Goh held consultations with Malay leaders and organizations. Goh emphasized that JI posed a “very real and very serious” threat, and that it demanded “our response as a nation”.94 He proposed to have grassroots leaders form committees to promote confidence and trust between the races. Muis said that it would try to get every mosque to send a representative to these constituencylevel committees. Another confidence-building move was initiated by Dr Tony Tan, deputy prime minister and minister for defence. This came after the first round of arrests had disclosed that some of the fifteen men taken in were national servicemen in junior positions. Dr Tan said that this “will not change the government’s policy of allowing Muslim Singaporeans to join the Singapore Armed Forces, whether as regulars or national servicemen”.95 He added that the assignment of a soldier to a sensitive position was subject to a background check, but this was “normal practice” and applied to everybody “whatever his race or religion”.96 Dr Tan went on to state what was most important: “Social cohesion in Singapore does not only depend on the Malay/Muslim community. It needs the co-operation and efforts of all communities here.”97 Between the two periods of arrests, the tudong issue heated up as a few parents were determined to send their daughters to school wearing the headscarf. Malay opinion was divided between those who supported the government’s national-integration argument and those who were for wearing the tudong.

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After the JI arrests, Malay university and polytechnic graduates began to fear for their employment prospects. However, in 2002 it was hard to decide whether it was these arrests, or the tudong controversy, or the economic recession, all occurring like an avalanche, that was the cause of their lack of luck in the job market. Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, now minister in charge of Muslim affairs, advised them, in a dialogue session, not to jump to conclusions.98 At a separate event, Halimah Yaacob said that the NTUC was working with the ministry of manpower and the employers on a code of practice to deal with discrimination.99 In another move, some 270 Malay/Muslim union leaders met to make a statement that JI was not representative of mainstream Islam, and urged employers to follow the NTUC’s lead on the best practices code. Malay MPs planned to fan out to employers and business federations to allay their fear of employing Muslims. Most Malays were visibly calm and rational about the arrest of JI members. Many reacted more to the tudong issue. Yang Razali Kassim thought this “strange, yet instructive”.100 As well as strange, this period had much that was uncertain and unknown. But what seems clear is that Goh has taken measures, such as bringing role models of the Islamic faith, into parliament. In addition, he has made Dr Yaacob the new minister in charge of Muslim affairs, moving the previous incumbent, Abdullah, to speaker of parliament. Goh has also promoted a Malay MP and mayor of North East CDC, Zainal Abidin Rasheed, to minister of state in foreign affairs, the first time that a Malay held this office since veteran MP A. Rahim Ishak’s tenure from 1968 to 1980. These were strategic moves to meet the new challenges posed by the rise of political Islam.

Silent Majority: Goh and the Chinese-educated Chinese The highest class of Chinese-educated Chinese were the directors and managers of Chinese banks and finance companies, and of major real estate development companies. Lower down were the small and medium businessmen concerned with imports and exports, restaurants, goldsmithing, and building and construction. Many were shopkeepers, market stallholders,

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taxi drivers, and purveyors of cooked food in food courts. In terms of salaried work, a typical occupation was that of Chinese school teacher or Chinese newspaper reporter. A greater number were factory workers, transport workers, and shop assistants. The more successful ones, who were bilingual, got into multinational companies, or the civil service, or the professions. On the whole, the Chinese-educated Chinese were in the lower middle class to working class strata. They did not play as big a part as the English-educated in feedback and dialogue sessions. They were a silent majority. And silence in their case did not mean consent. Silence, one of them said, was a kind of crisis, a crisis within the soul. They felt sidelined. The Malays were not the only people to feel this way. But there is a key difference. The Malays accepted the use of English more wholeheartedly. They were unhappy with their slow progress compared with the Chinese, but they believed an education in English was the way forward. The Chinese-educated were unhappy precisely because English had become so prevalent. They carried a bigger historical and cultural burden which they could not let go. They would also have felt a resurgence of pride in their civilization because of the new China. Consequently they were to return again and again to the same linguistic battleground. They could not accept in heart and mind that the battle was over, English had triumphed. Some four months after Goh was sworn in as prime minister, the Chinese-educated Chinese were worked up by an issue affecting Chinese language and education. It happened after the ministry of education published, in March 1991, a report on Improving Primary School Education (IPSE). At about the same time that it released the IPSE report, the ministry began sourcing members for a Chinese Language Review Committee (CLRC). There was a linkage between the IPSE report and the CLRC. The former was about, among other things, a new proposal to change the system of streaming students based on what the ministry had learned. The latter was about the teaching and learning of Mandarin in this educational system, which was a bilingual one, and it too was prompted by what had been learned from experience.

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The Chinese-educated Chinese viewed the IPSE report’s proposal to revamp streaming as decidedly biased against the Chinese language.101 It was as if Mandarin was losing yet more ground, reeling from defeat after defeat. (The details of the proposal and the agitation which followed will be treated in another section.) The CLRC turned out to be a high-powered committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong, and included the president of the Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union, Chen Keng Juan, who was himself a school principal. But the CLRC’s terms of reference were somewhat more modest. The committee was to find ways to make the teaching and learning of Mandarin more interesting and effective. It aimed to help children from English-speaking homes who had great difficulty with Mandarin. It could possibly promote Mandarin in other ways, such as boosting its image and usage in the wider community, but this was not its brief. When the CLRC was ready to start work and was formally announced in June 1991, DPM Ong stated that its purpose was to help students weak in the Chinese language gain confidence and interest in the language, and to examine all relevant pedagogical issues.102 Elaborating further, he said that the committee would take “an objective and realistic look” at the place of Chinese language in Singapore.103 Those hoping for Mandarin to be accorded a more important place would have found little cheer in this neutral comment. Amidst this state of discontent over language among the Chineseeducated Chinese, Goh decided to go for an early general election, held in August 1991. As the new prime minister, he sought a strong endorsement of his consultative style of government. The election was an eye-opener for him. The PAP lost in four constituencies, three of them considered Chinese working-class ones, and its share of the popular vote dipped again, slightly, from 61.8 per cent in 1988 to 61 per cent. Senior Minister Lee and DPM Ong read this outcome as a signal from the Chinese-educated masses that the government had neglected them. DPM Ong mentioned the main grievance. The government talked incessantly about the importance of the mother tongue, they said, but “it has not given

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serious attention and care to the use of the Chinese Language and [the] development of Chinese culture”.104 There was resentment too that “because of the dominant role of English in society, and because the English-educated hold all the key appointments, they do not have the opportunity to rise in society”.105 They perceived a communication gap between them and “the elite”, meaning the “cabinet ministers and senior civil servants”, who “are predominantly English-educated technocrats” and who may not empathize with “Chinese-educated Singaporeans” of “lower middle-income” and “ordinary” background.106 They charged that the government was “too eager to please the vocal English-educated”, and gave greater weight to their views, for example, on the matter of the R-rated movies which some Chinese-educated people abhorred.107 DPM Ong cited the high cost of living and high shop rentals as other sources of grievance. Senior Minister Lee took the result in this election to mean that the younger ministers had missed out something. There was a need for parity and even-handedness. It was not wrong for the Government to help MENDAKI, AMP and all other professional Malay groups to increase the educational standards and earning capacity of Malays. But it was wrong not to have given parallel attention to the larger number of low-income Chinese who faced similar problems. Again it was not wrong to meet the aspirations of the mainly English-educated for more liberal policies in culture and the arts, and freer discussion of public policies. But neither the Malays nor the English-educated is the centre of Singapore society. The Chinese mass base has reminded the Government of their weight.108 Given that this was the case, the wonder is that the swing in the voting against the PAP was not greater. So why wasn’t it greater? Firstly, it could have been because, as DPM Ong said, the “older people remain staunch supporters of the PAP”.109 Secondly, the voters had a strong racial affinity

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for the government in spite of everything. Thirdly, the realism of the Chineseeducated voters prevailed. They saw no alternative to the PAP Government. Nor was it likely that they wanted a change of government. But they badly wanted to have the attention of the government.

Goh’s Special Helper with the Chinese-educated After the August 1991 election, Goh nominated a new MP from this election as his special helper. This was Dr Ker Sin Tze, academic, businessman, politician, in that order, who believed that the crossover from business to politics for short stints is beneficial for the nation. Dr Ker was a Teochew, born in 1944 in White Water Village, near Chaozhou city in Guangdong province, China. He was the second child in the family, and at the age of three, came with his parents to Singapore. His parents eventually had up to eight children. His father was a shophand in a sundry goods shop in Beach Road, and his mother was a housewife. Their home was a succession of “leaking huts” in the same Beach Road vicinity. From this childhood poverty he was to come through to be a managing director in an air-conditioned, carpeted office in Liang Court, by the Singapore river, and the owner of a bungalow in the upmarket Merryn Road in Bukit Timah. His life’s journey had taken him through Chinese-medium schools, Nanyang University, and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where he obtained his Phd in Economics in 1971. In his years of study he was supported by bursaries, scholarships, and the sacrifice of his elder sister. (All the Ker siblings graduated through university.) Dr Ker worked as an economist in Canada before he joined the University of Singapore as an Economics lecturer in 1974. In 1980 he started work with Liang Court when it was being built, and thus had a hands-on role in the complex which housed a hotel, shopping mall, offices, and residential apartments. He became an MP in Aljunied GRC in 1991. At Goh’s request, he took two years’ leave from Liang Court, beginning in January 1992, to serve as minister of state in the ministry of education and ministry of information and the arts.110 He brought an improving touch to a number of areas: small

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and medium business enterprises, school textbooks in Mandarin, television news and entertainment programmes in Mandarin, and Chinese newspapers. He handled the “Speak Mandarin and Courtesy” campaigns. He was the adviser in the formation of the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC) which Goh decided to set up after the 1991 election. Dr Ker had expected to take two years to get the CDAC up and running, but actually spent two-and-three-quarter years there. He set up the CDAC’s endowment fund with the support of the Chinese community, and opened CDAC tuition centres in HDB neighbourhoods. He believed that for a businessman in politics, there was an optimum period in which to serve, and then move on. He fulfilled his aim to return to private sector business just before he reached fifty. He relinquished the office of minister of state, but continued as an MP in Aljunied GRC.

The Politics of Education Again In 1978 the ministry of education picked nine Chinese-medium secondary schools and equipped them to receive the top scorers from the Primary School Leaving Exams. These were the elite SAP schools. In 1989, the ministry, acceding to the request of the Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union, announced that ten primary schools would be chosen as “Seed schools”, to help preserve the traditional character of Chinese schools. The Seed schools and SAP schools were given special resources to teach in both English and Mandarin at first-language level. Their students must be able to cope with that. As opposed to these linguistically good students, there were, under the bilingual education system, students who were unable to cope with Mandarin, even at second-language level. A typical example is a student from an English-speaking home who finds Mandarin an absolute nightmare. Help for this type was forthcoming in the previously mentioned IPSE report released in March 1991. The report proposed that streaming should take place at the end of Primary 4 instead of Primary 3, and that there should be three streams, thus:

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EM 1 EM 2 EMO

both English and Mother Tongue at first-language level English at first language level and Mother Tongue at secondlanguage level English at first-language level and Mother Tongue as Oral subject only

This scheme was doubtless helpful to the English-speaking who were hopeless with Mandarin. But was it fair to the Chinese-educated? The injustice was in the detail, as the Chinese-educated realized. The three subjects taken into consideration in the streaming exercise were English, Mother Tongue, and Mathematics. In the case of a Chinese student, the Mother Tongue means Mandarin. English was given greater weightage than Mandarin. Thus, for example, if a student scored zero in Mandarin, but did all right in English and Maths, he could still be in EM 2. On the other hand, if a student was brilliant in Mandarin and Maths, but scored less than 50 per cent in English, he would be pushed down to EMO. “This is because EM 2 students must obtain at least a 50 per cent score in English.”111 In EMO, the student would do Mandarin, in which he excelled, as an oral subject only, but do English, in which he is weak, at first-language level. There is, of course, an educational and economic logic in this. But the Chinese-educated had another way of looking at it, which was also logical. Why should a student who is excellent in Mandarin be made to do only oral Mandarin? The Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations, representing 126 clans, spoke out in criticism. Two other Chinese groups did likewise. One was the Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union chaired by Chen Keng Juan. The other was a sort of committee which a group of Chinese intellectuals were provoked into forming. Tang Liang Hong, a lawyer, led in organizing this co-ordinating committee, as he called it, in September 1991. The other members included Chen Keng Juan, Tan Keong Choon, a past president of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Dr Wu Teh Yao, formerly professor and head of Political Science at the University of Singapore in Dr Toh’s time as vice-chancellor, Dr Wong Meng

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Voon, president of the Singapore Association of Writers, and Dr Gwee Yee Hean, president of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.112 It was a pro-tem committee, and faded away eventually without formally registering itself. Nor did it give itself a name. It was probably the group that Senior Minister Lee, in a speech at this period, dubbed “a committee of Chinese elders who want to promote Chinese culture and education”.113 Lee came into the picture to offer an explanation and a challenge. Singapore ran a system of bilingualism different from that of other countries. In Japan and Germany, students begin to learn a second language only in secondary school. “Here we teach our children two languages from Primary One. We are saying, ‘Do this with your left hand, do that with your right hand.’ It is not easy. Therefore, when we find they cannot cope with two languages, we have to decide which must be the key language, the medium of instruction for mathematics and science.”114 Hence the emphasis on English. In the streaming exercise, Lee said, the teacher and the principal recommend and the parents decide. “The teacher and the principal do not decide. They only recommend to the parents.”115 They know what parents, being parents, want, but they have to recommend “what is practical and possible for their children”.116 The rest is up to the parents. People who criticize the system of streaming should remember this: “we are talking about somebody else’s son or daughter, and we are deciding their earning capacity in 15 years from now”.117 If the clan association leaders, Chinese school teachers, and “concerned Chinese elders” together had a better alternative, they could take over several schools from the ministry of education to run, with the government supporting with funds.118 “Then parents can decide” where they want to send their children.119 “After a few years it will be clear which system is better for the students’ future.”120 Lee said he was “prepared to recommend this approach to Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong”.121 Chen Keng Juan and Tang Liang Hong welcomed Lee’s challenge. But for practical reasons, the clan associations must be involved too. So the man who should really accept the gauntlet was Wee Cho Yaw, the president of the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations. Wee waited until

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the Chinese Language Review Committee headed by DPM Ong had dealt with the streaming controversy before giving his answer. When the Chinese Language Review Committee started work in late July 1991, it found “a high degree of public apprehension” over “the new Improved Primary Education System”.122 It said: Many Chinese intellectuals and community leaders have expressed unhappiness about the perceived over-emphasis on the English Language [EL], and fear that students who pass only their mother tongue [MT] and Mathematics will be streamed into the EM [oral] stream.123 The CLRC decided that it had to attend to this issue, and deliberated on it through the period of the general election of August 1991, which produced the shock result for the government. In October 1991, the CLRC recommended a number of adjustments, and the ministry of education accepted them. EM 2 would now have two sub-streams EM 2 (English) and EM 2 (Mother Tongue). This was in order “to give equal importance to the mother tongue (i.e., Mandarin).”124 A 50 per cent score in English Language would no longer be a prerequisite for streaming into EM 2. EMO would be changed to EM 3 (Mother Tongue at third language level, meaning “more than basic oral skills”) and ME 3 (Mother Tongue at first-language level and English at third-language level).125 These modifications met with a mixed reception from the Chinese community. Wee Cho Yaw was delighted, as with a famous victory. He described the new ME 3 as a “revolutionary move”.126 At this point, Wee openly declined Lee’s challenge to run alternative Chinese-medium schools. Chen Keng Juan and Tang Liang Hong continued to want these schools, but Lee’s challenge was not extended to them, and in any case, without the clan associations agreeing, they could do nothing. The Chinese Language Review Committee returned to its original brief and submitted its report, Chinese Language Teaching and Learning in Singapore, dated 28 March 1992. One comment stands out: “Only a small number of

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pupils have real problems with CL (Chinese Language), compared with a much larger number who have difficulties with EL (English Language), and Mathematics.”127 This much larger number struggling with the English language must have included many from a Mandarin or dialect speaking background. So, why was no committee set up to find ways to make English easier and more fun for these pupils to learn? Such a committee would have been an indication to the Chinese-educated that Mandarin was not the only problem area in the bilingual system, and that it was not only Mandarin that was to blame, but English too! The politics of education could have been tilted the other way. The practical result would have been to help many pupils improve in English and career prospects. It is possible that no committee was established to look into English because English-language teachers were believed to have been better trained. Certainly, there were more training courses for them. This point relates to another matter examined by the CLRC: the low morale of the Chinese-language teachers. The committee requested the ministry of education to provide opportunities for “Chinese-language teachers to upgrade themselves”128 just as the ministry had been doing for Englishlanguage teachers. Finally, the CLRC meant to correct an unfortunate impression given by the use of the terms CL 1 and CL 2. It has led some parents and pupils to think less of CL 2 than they should. The CLRC proposed that CL 1 be renamed Higher Chinese, and CL 2 simply, Chinese Language, in the hope that this resort to euphemism would help.

Challenger: The Redoubtable Mr Tang Tang Liang Hong, the coordinator of the pro-tem committee of Chinese intellectuals, was a man of many parts. His final role on the public stage was compared by Senior Minister Lee to Dr Faustus, the central figure in a sixteenth-century morality play by Christopher Marlowe. The moral of the drama was that men of “forward wits” should take care lest they be enticed “to practise more than heavenly power permits”.129 Tang, a Cantonese, was born in Singapore in 1935. As a boy he listened to tales of Western plundering in China told by workers in his grandfather’s

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laundry shop in Chinatown. He acquired his Anglophobia early from the laundrymen, and school-boyishly stoned his English-language teacher at the Chinese-medium Ai Hwa Primary School he attended.130 He went on to Chinese High School in 1951. He grew interested in Chinese culture, and choreographed a musical play, “Ode to Nantah”, which was performed at the Happy World amusement park in 1956. It was his contribution to fundraising for Nantah, and was a sell-out. He had to repeat a year at Chinese High School for failing in the English paper, and afterwards became a teacher at the Ann Siang Primary School. Around this time, after an illness (tuberculosis), he learned Indian classical dance, and the Malay language, and produced a play on a Singapore theme. Tang enrolled at Nanyang University, but left to read Law at the University of Singapore, graduating with LLB Hons. in 1967.131 He was a beneficiary of the then Prime Minister Lee’s imaginative move to open the University of Singapore to better students from the Chinese-educated sector. Tang set up his own law firm at Clifford Centre in Raffles Place, the prime business district. He eventually bought a house on an 8,000-squarefeet plot in a good residential area in Bukit Timah. Although Tang’s cultural tastes were quite varied, his primary interests were Chinese, and he served on the board of Chinese High School, of Hwa Chong College, and of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. In this last institution, he did much to revive and expand it during his chairmanship from 1979 to 1993. He could not bear to see the decline of Chinese language and education which he blamed on the preponderance of the English-educated in the government and the civil service. He alleged that the cabinet, ministries, and armed services were dominated by English-speaking Christians. Once, at a seminar of the Hwa Chong Alumni, he said that eighty per cent of Singaporeans spoke Chinese. “Why then are we the ones carrying the sedan chair? We should be the ones sitting on the sedan chair.”132 Tang rapidly won a reputation as a controversialist. After his convening of the pro-tem committee of Chinese intellectuals, he was deluged by invitations to speak in schools and public forums. How typical was Tang as a Chinese-educated intellectual? Were his views just those of his generation, i.e., the group of concerned Chinese

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elders that Senior Minister Lee alluded to? Or were these views also shared by the younger generation of Chinese-educated Chinese? The twenty-five people in Tang’s pro-tem committee of Chinese intellectuals were drawn from academics, writers, thinkers, and teachers in the Chinese community. They spoke for the older generation of Chinese who lamented the eclipse of the Chinese language and education as a result of what they saw as the overemphasis on economic objectives. However, there were other older generation Chinese who accepted the inevitability of Singapore’s modern transformation. The most obvious examples were the people who were committed to the PAP way. Among these, First DPM Ong Teng Cheong readily comes to mind, and he, born in 1937, was in the same age group as Tang, born in 1935. Another good example is the veteran Chinese-educated MP Ch’ng Jit Koon, who has testified: “Being one of the Chinese-educated members of PAP, I, together with the other Chineseeducated members, had worked very hard over the last 30 years to bring the Chinese-educated into the mainstream of society.”133 The younger generation of Chinese-educated Chinese who would be cited here for the purpose of comparing with Tang’s generation were again from the PAP camp. They have dismissed the older generation like Tang as “sentimentalists”,134 meaning romantics who were trying vainly to relive the glory days of Chinese education in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr Ker Sin Tze, born in 1944 and educated in Chinese High School and Nanyang University, may be taken as representative of this younger generation. Dr Ker conversed in Mandarin with his wife and their two sons, loving and honouring the Chinese language in this way. But he was happy to work towards creating a progressive, English-speaking, multiracial Singapore nation, and to make his mark in it. The generation below Dr Ker would be even further in thought and spirit from the elderly Tang’s generation. Take, for example, Lim Swee Say, who was born in 1954, and is, incidentally, of the same age group as B.G. Lee, born 1952. Lim Swee Say is a Teochew, and one of the six children of an immigrant odd job worker and a housewife. The family lived in a rented, three-room flat in Jalan Besar. Lim’s educational background included Catholic High School, the Loughborough University of Technology in the

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United Kingdom, on a SAF scholarship, and the graduate school of business at Stanford University. He was an army officer and IT expert who went to the National Computer Board, then the Economic Development Board, and finally, to his great credit, the NTUC. He stood as MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC in the 1997 general election. Lim’s generation would not have known the intellectual angst of Tang’s generation. The older generation kept reopening the old wound — marginalization, disregard for the Chinese Language — but increasingly, the younger generation were unmarked and unaffected by it. The latter were not trapped by the past but obsessed with the present: how to get ahead in the globalized knowledge economy. What part did bilingualism play? This suggests one obvious argument: the younger generation were bilingual and the older generation monolingual — literate in Chinese only — and this had made all the difference between them. However, this argument is not always borne out by the actual facts. Dr Ker and Lim Swee Say were certainly bilingual, and there is no denying that this has let them see beyond to a world of change and limitless possibility. But then Tang and a number of the Chinese intellectuals with him were also bilingual, and what was more, were writers, scholars, and men of standing. They had as many windows on the outside world. Yet they were, for all that, distinguished by their manifestly Chinese pride and passion, and by their anxiety lest the education system turned Singapore into, as Tang put it, “a monolingual English-speaking society”, “an outpost of Western society in the East”.135 Tang said: “The type of knowledge that really matters in life, and which determines the quality of life for Chinese people, can only be expressed in Chinese, not English.”136 He exemplified the pride, passion, and anxiety of the older generation who were seeing their cultural world crumble before the forces of change. The generational difference argument stands, though there were exceptional people who did not fit the pattern, notably, First DPM Ong and MP Ch’ng and others. In 1992, Tang Liang Hong applied to become a nominated MP. Four elected Chinese-educated MPs and one former MP who had known him at Nantah in the 1960s, warned the government in writing against his

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appointment. Their views added up to portray a man who was too insensitive and radical to have in parliament. He was rejected. They had not reckoned with his tenacity and determination. Slightly more than four years after this rejection, he presented himself in the general election of late December 1996 through early January 1997. He stood as a member of the Workers’ Party team in Cheng San GRC. The people here were mainly Chinese, spoke mainly Chinese dialects or Mandarin, worked in factories, and mostly stayed in public housing estates, and of these, forty per cent occupied three-room flats. “Cheng San” means “serene mountain” in Chinese. The bucolic atmosphere of the Chinese name was a world away from the political confrontation and hardball tactics about to take place here. Tang as an opponent was as tough as they come, and he had a pugnacious style and face to match. For this election, he adopted a more inclusive multiracial approach which was hardly less reckless and damaging than his usual “natural” (he said) support of Chinese causes. He referred to mosques, alleging that the government would not build them in opposition wards.137 He spoke about the Malay collective leadership scheme, saying let them have it, why not?138 The PAP team at Cheng San was led by Minister for Education Lee Yock Suan, who was of a soft-spoken scholarly demeanour. On 27 December 1996, four days from the start of the campaign, with five more to polling day, Prime Minister Goh and his younger ministers decided on a new battle order. As Senior Minister Lee explained after the election, they had to raise the stakes in the battle for Cheng San dramatically. Prime Minister Goh and the two deputy prime ministers, B.G. Lee and Dr Tony Tan, joined the PAP campaign at Cheng San. Goh announced that all three “have staked their prestige, their weight, their reputation against [the] Workers’ Party and Tang Liang Hong”.139 Tang retorted: “Why do they keep on upgrading me?”140 The term “upgrading” has a special meaning in local parlance as the renovation of older housing estates, with the greater share of the cost borne by the government in the nature of a largesse, an asset-enhancing one. Goh made it clear to the residents of this GRC that this was “a winner-takes-all situation”, “all” meaning the entire PAP package: upgrading, kindergartens,

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better schools, libraries, a new seafront housing estate, called Punggol 21, and a light rail service linked to a mass rapid transport station. “So you win big or you lose big,” Goh said on the polling eve.141 Straw polls showed considerable support for Tang and his Workers’ Party colleagues from the older, solely Chinese-speaking voters, while younger bilingual voters said they supported the PAP team.142 The PAP’s share of the votes was 54.8 per cent, making it the lowest of all the constituencies, but a victory nonetheless. As for Tang Liang Hong, the matter, unfortunately, did not end there. There was still the last act of the Faustian play. Unlike Dr Faustus, however, his soul was in no danger. His was not a spiritual but a material loss, taking the form of self-exile, and damages from the lawsuits that piled up against him for some of the things he said prior to and during the election. Tang’s challenge struck at the very roots of nation-building in Singapore. The PAP had decided ever since it first took office to use English as an official language. This might seem anomalous — a wouldbe nation perpetuating the language of its colonial master — but in the peculiar circumstance of Singapore, it actually made political sense, not to mention economic sense as well. Although Malay was the national language, a predominantly Chinese society could not be expected to give up its dialects and Mandarin, and start to communicate in Malay in a big way. Neither would the Malay minority agree to a substitution of Malay with Mandarin. Similarly Indians and Eurasians would object if they had to switch to Mandarin. It would be more reasonable to ask that everybody accepted English as a common language. This was exactly what the PAP Government had done in its bilingual education policy, which at the same time also preserved, however imperfectly, the officially designated mother tongues of the respective races. The use of English would give everybody a fair chance to make a living in a multinational driven economy, though at the outset, it would not be quite fair since those who already had an education in English would have the advantage. But, over the decades, as English became the more prominent of the two languages children had to learn, spurred on by the pragmatic instincts of parents, English was becoming the leveller. Prime Minister Goh depicted English as the level playing field for a multiracial

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society. He could not have stated it better. Nor more strongly. At the battle for Cheng San, he said: “If we forgo English, we are going to destroy Singapore, because the Malays and Indians will feel that there is no place for them.”143 A Singapore with Chinese as the dominant language would also face external problems, Goh added, as it was located in Southeast Asia. Senior Minister Lee made this point too: “No regional or world power is going to allow a Chinese state in Singapore.”144 The implications of Tang’s challenge were profound and far-reaching. This was why Prime Minister Goh was compelled to throw in everything to defeat him.

NOTES 1 Goh Chok Tong, “Cultural values and economic performance”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 4 (1991): 9 (a speech to the Singapore Chinese Press Club on 26 July 1991). 2 Ibid., p. 10. 3 Goh Chok Tong, “Administrative Officers and Nation-building”, Speeches: A Bimonthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 4 (1991): 2 (a speech to the third Administrative Service dinner, 5 July 1991) Ministry of Information and the Arts. 4 Ong Teng Cheong, “My Views on the Outcome of the General Elections”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 5 (1991): 35 (a speech to the Singapore Chinese Press Club on 16 September 1991). 5 Diane K. Mauzy and R.S. Milne, Singapore Politics Under the People’s Action Party (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 156. 6 Ibid., pp. 144–45. 7 Ibid., p. 144. 8 Gerry Rodan, ed., Political Opposition in Industrialising Asia (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 105. 9 Ross Worthington, Governance in Singapore (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), p. 31. 10 Ibid. 11 Straits Times, 26 June 1989. 12 For more details see Cheng Lim-Keak, Social Change and the Chinese in Singapore: A Socio-Economic Geography with Special Reference to Bang Structure (Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1985), pp. 131–41.

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13 Lee Kuan Yew, “Touching Base with the Masses”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 5 (1991): 22 (a speech at a National Tribute dinner, 4 October 1991). 14 Ibid. 15 Goh Chok Tong, “Administrative Officers and Nation-building”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 4 (1991): 2. 16 Ibid., p. 3. 17 Cohesion 1, no. 4 (2002) (a magazine of the North West Community Development Council). 18 North West CDC, Bonding From Community To Nation (n.d.), p. 12. 19 Cohesion 1, no. 3 (2002): 4. 20 Bridge (February 2003): 5 (a publication of the South West Community Development Council). 21 Bridge (October 2003): 3. 22 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), p. 237. 23 Ibid., p. 236. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 239. 26 Ibid. 27 Straits Times, 29 May 1982. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Straits Times, 4 October 1984. 31 Ibid. 32 Straits Times, 28 June 1993. 33 Straits Times, 19 March 1989. 34 Straits Times, 28 June 1993. 35 Straits Times, 8 January 1994 36 Straits Times, 6 March 1990, 28 June 1993. 37 Straits Times, 4 March 1984. 38 Straits Times, 19 March 1989. 39 Straits Times, 22 January 1988. 40 Ibid. 41 Mauzy and Milne, Singapore Politics, pp. 145 and 149. 42 Straits Times, 22 January 1988. 43 Ibid. 44 Straits Times, 26 September 1988. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 19 October 1988. Ibid. Straits Times, 18 October 1988. Straits Times, 19 October 1988; Business Times, 19 October 1988. Straits Times, 19 October 1988. Straits Times, 9 October 1990. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 30 October 1989. Straits Times, 6 May 1990. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 15 August 2000. Straits Times, 10 October 2000. Ibid. Straits Times, 8 January 1994. Ibid. Straits Times, 24 September 2000. Straits Times, 21 October 2000. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 4 November 2000. Straits Times, 6 November 2000. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 7 November 2000. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 6 November 2000. Straits Times, 7 November 2000. Straits Times, 6 March 1990.

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87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Mauzy and Milne, Singapore Politics, p. 109. Lee, From Third World To First, p. 280. Straits Times, 6 November 2000. Business Times, 8 May 2002. Straits Times, 19 October 2001. Sunday Times, 25 July 1999. Sunday Times, 1 August 2004. Straits Times, 15 October 2002. Straits Times, 7 January 2002. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 29 September 2002. Ibid. Business Times, 24 April 2002. Straits Times, 19 June 1991. Ibid. Ibid. Ong, “My Views on the Outcome of the General Elections”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 5 (1991): 35. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 35 and 37. Lee, “Touching Base with the Masses”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 5 (1991): 25–26. Ong, “My Views on the Outcome of the General Elections”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 5 (1991): 36. Straits Times, 31 August 1994. Straits Times, 12 October 1991. Straits Times, 12 October 1991; 11 January 1997. Lee Kuan Yew “Getting our Fundamentals Right”, Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 5 (1991): 31 (a speech to the Singapore Port Workers Union on 11 October 1991, and repeated at the Tanjong Pagar Day Celebrations, 13 October 1991). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid. Ibid. See also Straits Times, 14 October 1991. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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122 Chinese Language Teaching and Learning in Singapore, Report of the Chinese Language Review Committee, 28 March 1992, p. 4 and Annex D, p. 1. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., Annex D, p. 2. 125 Ibid. 126 Straits Times, 4 November 1991. 127 Chinese Language Teaching and Learning, pp. 10–11. 128 Ibid., p. 19. 129 John D. Jump, ed., Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (London: Metheun Educational Ltd, 1965; reprinted, 1987), p. 149. 130 Straits Times, 31 December 1996. 131 University of Singapore Gazette 1, no. 6 (1967): 19. 132 Straits Times, 1 January 1997. 133 Straits Times, 21 May 1997. 134 Straits Times, 23 November 1991. 135 Straits Times, 12 October 1991; Sunday Times, 22 December 1996. 136 Sunday Times, 29 December 1996. 137 Straits Times, 1 January 1997. 138 Straits Times, 30 December 1996. 139 Straits Times, 1 January and 2 January 1997. 140 Straits Times, 1 January 1997. 141 Straits Times, 2 January 1997. 142 Yet in the 1991 general election, according to First DPM Ong’s post-election analysis, the older generation of Chinese had staunchly supported the PAP. He did not cite any straw polls though. It would seem that Tang’s contest had won over the older generation, or that some other factor had caused the reversal noted in the straw poll in 1997. 143 Straits Times, 1 January 1997. 144 Ibid.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Confucianism, Christianity, permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. IndividualChineseness articles are• 533 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

N I N E T E E N

Confucianism, Christianity, Chineseness

T

his chapter deals with the consequences of success at the level of philosophy, ethics, and moral values. The gearing of the education system to the objective of rapid economic growth inevitably affected the mind and spirit of Singaporeans. The traditional Chinese-medium schools, were, with certain exceptions, gone. They taught the importance of scholastic achievements and hard work, and of respect for the family and the community. In contrast, in an English-medium school, it was considered “uncool” to be so didactic. The shift in enrolment from Chinese-medium schools to English-medium schools, such that by 1987 all schools were English-medium (i.e., using English as the first language), meant that, increasingly, there was a moral gap in the education of Singaporeans. Add to this the growing affluence, with more and more people able to realize the middle-class dream, and the conditions were ripe for a “cult of materialism” to flourish as it, in fact, did, in all its manifold excesses.1 Another dubious fruit of the dominance of English in the education system, and as a working language, was the incorporation of Singaporeans as readers and viewers of the newspapers, magazines, films, and television shows produced by the West. This, in the sixties and seventies, exposed them to the youth culture of protest, sex, and drugs erupting in the West at a time when Singapore was taking off into prosperity. The PAP Government was faced with a situation which had arisen out of the very success for which it had worked. Normally, an industrial society with an affluent middle class may be expected to be a liberal democracy.

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But the PAP Government believed that Singapore had to be different. It wanted to speed up economic growth with Western technology which it admired unreservedly, but to go slow with adopting Western liberal democracy, which it was sceptical of and distrusted. What it attempted to do was a mix and match of Western technology and East Asian values. Confucian philosophy was held to be a treasury of the desired East Asian values. However, selectivity and discretion were also exercised here. Aspects of Confucianism were drawn on as needed, depending on how the situation shaped up. Religion was also pressed into service. The PAP Government’s attitude and purpose were, of course, neutral and secular. It simply wanted to use the moral code which it thought every religion must have, and leave aside the faith, the supernatural side of the business. Its moral education programme introduced into schools would “teach only the intellectual and ethical content of [the] respective religions [offered in the curriculum] to the virtual exclusion of spiritual and emotional involvement, thereby gutting religion of its core experience”.2 It thought this was possible. Unfortunately, the faith aspect could not be separated away, and kept breaking in, stirring up a spiritual and emotional storm. When that happened, the government quickly and easily reversed its policy. It could do because it was never doctrinaire, never ideological, but guided by what would, or would not, work. That, and the confidence that nothing was so sacred that it could not be taken apart, cherry picked, or discarded at will. “Singapore’s own brand of nationalism,” a Singaporean philosopher commented, “seems to be based very largely on the value of material acquisitions and pecuniary gains — the most ephemeral of human values”.3 Prime Minister Lee and Dr Goh Keng Swee tried to rectify this with a moral revitalization programme promoted in school and society. It went on for several years until greatly altered circumstances forced its termination under the second-generation ministers. On becoming first deputy prime minister, Goh Chok Tong started a public discourse on the need for a national ideology or shared values. Goh spoke metaphorically of a society, drifting aimlessly, and another time, of a society speeding towards the twenty-first century without a set of values to

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give it cohesion and identity.4 As prime minister, he continued to be burdened by the spiritual state of the middle class. “It is not enough just to deliver more material goods. We have to take care of their intangible needs as well,” he said at an administrative officers’ function.5 Goh’s greatest concern was for the English-educated Chinese, the group that “have a bigger window to the West than the East”, and was most at risk of losing their “core Chinese values”.6

Reacting to the Counter Culture of the Sixties c.1958–c.1974 Arthur Marwick researched into the cultural transformation that occurred in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States in the sixties, a period which he placed from c.1958–c.1974, and believed “to have been both unique and of special significance with regard to what came after”.7 A number of developments, ideas, and events came together to make it so. The “wartime and post-war baby booms” resulted in “a great increase in the proportions of teenagers in the population around the beginning of the sixties”.8 America’s economic expansion from the Second World War onwards, and Europe’s post-war economic recovery gave rise to an era of affluent consumerism. Affluence and consumerism in turn generated the “new critiques of society appearing in the fifties”, and a renewal of interest in Marxist theories evident in the sixties.9 Workers in the Western countries studied partook of the growing affluence of their societies, and were not interested in revolution. But the ideologues had the ear of student activists who took up the causes of ethnic minorities at home (Black civil rights in America) and of the oppressed in the Third World and the victims of imperialist wars. America in this period was waging war in Vietnam, and American and European multinationals were setting up factories abroad. (In Singapore, student activists identified factory workers as the people to help.) Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh were the counter-cultural heroes. Technological innovation was an important factor which coincided with the ideas and events that defined this era. Television created a global home audience for the civil rights protest and the horrors of the Vietnam

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war. The contraceptive pill opened the way to a sexual revolution which was joined to the renewed Marxist debate on overthrowing the bourgeois society. The young people of the sixties challenged “all forms of authority” (governmental, parental, sacerdotal) and “most social conventions” (notably marriage and family).10 Many looked to the East for the secret to true living. The novelist, R.K. Narayan, who went as a visiting fellow to an American university, was astounded to find, firstly, that students had the right to decide what was to be taught, and secondly, that what they wanted from him was not his instruction on literature, but on Indian mysticism, of which, he said, he knew nothing.11 The young in this period were the children of affluence. They were the consumers as well as the creators of new trends in music (the Beatles), fashion (the miniskirt), entertainment (discothèques), art (Andy Warhol), food (Ben and Jerry’s ice cream), and much else besides. All these things spoke of a vibrant entrepreneurial culture. As such they should not have been a problem for Singapore had it not been that they were associated with a highly individualistic, permissive, narcissistic lifestyle, and with, especially, a variant of it known as “hippieism”. Also, the entrepreneurial drive extended to the sale of psychedelic drugs and pornographic magazines. These were all part of what has been described as the sixties “mini-renaissance in which the right of individual expression was encouraged, applauded, and nurtured by a generation whose naïve belief was that all we needed was love”.12 In Singapore, Prime Minister Lee and Dr Goh Keng Swee worried over the invasion of this Western cultural ideology. The role of the media in Singapore, especially the English-language newspapers, was critical in this context. They could help in the defence against this cultural invasion, but they could also be enlisted by it as an ally. There was an English-language newspaper that was something of an ally. Launched on 8 July 1970, the Singapore Herald “hopes to serve as a gadfly”, and declared that “the aspirations of the young, their demand to be allowed to experiment and make mistakes will always take precedence” with it.13 The editor, Francis Wong, saw no harm in keeping long hair: it was just fashion “like bellbottomed trousers”.14 The paper made quite an impact, and this may be

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gauged, paradoxically, when it shut down after ten months. There was a rousing rescue campaign, in vain, unfortunately, for the many supporters who took out “Save the Herald” advertisements in the paper, or sent donations. In the Herald case, the rights of a free press was embroiled with the problem of the counter culture from the West. Lee asked what was the responsibility of the press in new nations like Singapore? He argued that it was to explain the problems faced by these countries, and “to reinforce, and not to undermine, the cultural values and social attitudes” that would help in the resolution of these problems”.15 He elaborated: If they are to develop, people in new countries cannot afford to imitate the fads and fetishes of the contemporary West. The strange behaviour of demonstration and violence-prone young men and women in wealthy America, seen on T.V. and the newspapers, are not relevant to the social and economic circumstances of new underdeveloped countries. The importance of education, the need of stability and work discipline, the acquisition of skills and expertise… these are vital… But when the puritan ethics of hard work, thrift, and discipline is at a discount in America, and generally in the West, the mass media reflecting this malaise can, and does, confuse the young in new countries.16 Something of the demonstrations in the West was replicated in Singapore, in campus and city, during Dr Toh’s time as vice-chancellor of the University of Singapore. The students of Nantah also revolted, even more violently, but for a different reason. They were concerned with the place of Chinese language and culture in the new nations of Singapore and Malaya. The Chinese-educated were indifferent to the counter culture of the West, and were even, as Dr Goh observed, contemptuous of it.17 Changes were taking place in the area of family life, which were partly deliberate, and partly unforeseen. The Women’s Charter of 1961, which banned polygamy, and the clearance of old residential districts, worked against the extended or joint family system.18 Unmarried children continued to stay with their parents, but it was common for married ones with financial

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independence to buy their own homes and start their own nuclear families. Dr Goh Keng Swee in the 1960s thought this moving out to a nuclear family to be no bad thing. It provided an incentive to work harder as the married couple could no longer depend on the resources of an extended family.19 They were also now burdened with mortgage payments. The government’s view later changed when certain other trends were noted. The middle-class families were having fewer children while the lower-income ones continued to multiply as before. Too many educated women were not marrying mainly because of the tendency for educated men to marry down, instead of a partner of equal qualifications. This caused the government to start a discreet matchmaking bureau. Another measure was to give married women who were university graduates priority in primary school enrolment for their third child, a much decried geneticist policy which cost the government a dip in the popular vote in the 1984 election, and was afterwards scrapped. The spectre of ageing parents living on their own, and becoming dependent on the state, led to an official policy in the late 1970s and early 80s to arrest the escalating trend towards the nuclear family. The HDB started giving priority to the three-generation family, consisting of grandparents, parents, and children. At a critical time when modernization was sapping family ties, the government turned to promoting values, the chief of which encouraged a belief in strong families.

Promoting Confucianism Japan’s post-war emergence as an economic superpower stimulated enquiry into the social and cultural underpinnings of this phenomenon. Lee Kuan Yew observed that Japanese workers were so good and supportive of each other that they were unbeatable as a group, and Japanese managers so dedicated that they would do anything and go anywhere for their company, and if they had miscalculated, would even take their own lives in the very Japanese manner. At the time Lee was getting to know the Japanese — the 1970s and 1980s — Singapore was experiencing a phase in

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its economic boom in which young executives were job-hopping and complaining of hardship postings. What was in the Japanese mind and soul? People in the West were asking the same question as Lee did. Harvard sociologist Ezra Vogel’s book extolling Japan as Number One, published in 1979, and the writings of other scholars such as Herman Kahn, posited a link between economic success and culture. Japan and the other East Asian societies where spectacular growth was also evident shared a common Confucian-based culture which emphasized hard work and thrift, respect for education and knowledge, respect for the family and the community, and the importance of group effort and cohesion. It was this shared cultural ethos that was said to have had a large part in the making of the East Asian economic miracle.20 These scholars had given a positive spin to Confucian philosophy and identified values that were so like the values which had evolved in the West, and associated with England in the Victorian age. This was important for making the discourse more comprehensible to Lee and Dr Goh Keng Swee, who were more familiar with British culture than with Chinese culture. Both leaders gained a new awareness of an ancient philosophy and its relevance to modern circumstances.21 In Singapore, the Chinese migrants who came in historical times were mostly uneducated. But they were from a society where Confucian moral teachings had been handed down for generations “through the family and ‘little traditions’, if not through formal teaching”.22 So much so that these migrants went on to found schools, and in due course, even a university, Nantah. The virtue of education, to these pioneers and benefactors, was that it transmitted Confucian moral precepts, and the practices seen at work in Chinese clans, community associations, and businesses, which replicated idealistically the respect, trust, and bonding between members in the basic unit of society, the family. But this whole ethos was vanishing because the source which nourished it, the Chinese-medium schools and Nantah, was no more. A new way had to be found to bring back moral values. The government invited Chinese American professors, Harvard historian Tu Wei-ming, and Yü Ying-shih of Yale university, to advise on a Confucian revitalization project. They recommended that it should be carried out at

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the level of the schools as well as the society, with the mass media and the family also involved. The government had in the works a scheme to teach moral values in schools. Moral education became a matter of concern to the government because of the switch in enrolment from Chinese-medium to Englishmedium schools. The plan was to have students imbibe moral values through religious knowledge courses. Confucianism was included as one of the options. Beginning in 1984, it was compulsory for students in secondary schools to do one of these courses: Islamic religious knowledge (in Malay or English), Bible Knowledge (in English), Buddhist studies (in Mandarin or English), Hindu studies (in English). Sikh studies (in English) and Confucian ethics (in Mandarin or English) were later additions. The take-up rate of these courses was revealed in a survey in 1989. It was 17.8 per cent for Confucian ethics as against 44.4 per cent for Buddhist studies and 21.4 per cent for Bible knowledge. These were the three courses that ethnic Chinese students were likely to enroll in, and so it was glaringly obvious that their response to Confucian ethics was disappointing. The other courses registered the expected numbers: Islamic religious knowledge 13.4 per cent, Hindu studies 2.7 per cent and Sikh studies 0.37 per cent. As by now all national schools were using English as the first language, it may be assumed that the English-educated Chinese students were avoiding Confucian ethics. In the society as a whole, the English-educated Chinese were just as unenthusiastic. They readily pointed out “the anti-democratic tendency of Confucian ideology, and were not convinced that this ideology component of Confucianism could be separated from its ethical doctrines”.23 However, Dr Goh Keng Swee, then education minister, and the consultants to the project, did emphasize the difference between the ethical and political doctrines of Confucianism, and disclaimed any intention to use the latter.24 Strong endorsement for the project was given by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations, the Chinese press, and certain academic circles like the South Sea Society and the Association of Asian Studies. They sponsored forums, seminars, and so forth. The government on its part sponsored the Institute of East Asian Philosophy, established in 1983. It would put Singapore

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on the map as a centre for research into Confucianism as applied philosophy suitable for the modern age. The reaction of the minority ethnic groups was, understandably, less than favourable. They were critical of the high profile and disproportionately large resources devoted to this one project compared with what was spared for the religious knowledge courses. They were fearful of a silent conspiracy to sinicize Singapore. It was not easy for the government to defend the project as an internal Chinese matter, which would not lessen the status of the minority races and the commitment to multiracialism. Confucian ethics did not repay the heavy investment of the state in it. But the religious faiths which the state left to private devices achieved impressive results. Affluent Singapore was becoming, as John Clammer aptly called it, “a veritable supermarket of faiths”.25 Various agencies battled it out to win their share of adherents. The Christian charismatic churches and the Buddhist Nichiren Shoshu branch in Singapore registered in 1972, won the most followers in the shortest time, while the neo-Hindu Sai Baba group was a stimulus to the Hindu community. The community of Islam, consisting of Malays and Indian Muslims, was relatively stable in terms of numbers and teachings, but an emergent fundamentalist trend was encouraging greater zeal, discipline, and rigorous observance of dietary rules. A government-commissioned study in 1988 warned of “ the potential danger of interreligious conflict and called for a careful handling of this very sensitive situation”.26 The evangelism and rivalry affected the religious knowledge classes: students and instructors too forgot the teaching that love is the greatest commandment and passed unlovely remarks about another religion. The government reviewed the situation and announced that from 1990, the religious knowledge courses would no longer be compulsory, in effect, phasing them out. Dr Tony Tan, minister for education, explained in parliament: “One fundamental change has taken place. Unlike 1982 (when moral education was decided on), there is today a heightened consciousness of religious differences and a new fervour in the propagation of religious beliefs.”27 The Confucian ethics course also had to go for the

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government must show that it was even-handed with every religion and culture in Singapore. The Institute of East Asian Philosophy suddenly lost its raison d’être, but found a new one, updated by some 2,500 years, as a centre for research on contemporary China.

Christianity and Chinese Identity Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, churches in Singapore were gaining members, whereas in some other parts of the world, churches were emptying. Some Singaporean Chinese congregations took over old-style large cinema halls permanently or part-time. In one instance, Sunday morning worship was followed by the cinema management’s Sunday matinee. Worshippers also used the ballrooms of five-star hotels. From time to time big rallies were held in the nation’s splendidly built open air and indoor stadiums. In 1980, Christians formed 9.9 per cent of the resident population of 2,282,000 people. In 1990, they were 12.7 per cent of the resident population of 2,736,000 people. Another decade later, in 2000, they were 14.6 per cent of the resident population of 3,263,000 people.28 Most of the Christians were Chinese, and bunched at the 20–29 age group, and at the higher end of the educational scale. “In 1990, 41 per cent of the Chinese university graduates were Christians (up from 32 per cent in 1980) as compared with 19 per cent for those with secondary education and 7 per cent for those with primary or no formal education.”29 As a general rule, the higher the educational attainment of a Chinese, the more likely was he to be a Christian, or to profess no religion. This tendency was said to be at the expense of Buddhism and the syncretized hotchpotch of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism of the folk variety. In other words, many young English-educated, upwardly mobile Chinese were switching religion, converting from the traditional beliefs and practices of their parents and forefathers to the Christian faith. As a people and a civilization, the Chinese have no great religion of their own to compete with Christianity, or for that matter, any of the other great world religions. Confucianism is not a religion, but a state and social credo. It appeals to reason and intellect and is indifferent to matters of faith and beliefs, just as the sage himself, the author of hierarchy and harmony in

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this life, had been unbothered with the life hereafter. This does not mean that the Chinese have no need or desire for religious solace. They have Taoism and a plethora of other unConfucian beliefs. It means that the Chinese were free to receive from other civilizations the religions of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity which came to China through avenues of trade, diplomacy, imperial adventure, and missionary endeavour. Nor is the Chinese language an impediment to Christian evangelism. The history of missions is replete with men and women who were adept in Chinese dialects, including Mandarin, which became the national language since the Kuomintang era. In Singapore, whole congregations have grown on the basis of one dialect or another plus Mandarin. They constitute separate churches or are a section in a church whose main body is English speaking. In Singapore, the popular view of Christianity is that it is a Western religion. People in general associate it with colonialism, Western missionaries, and European residents, with English education (giving access to the King James Bible or the New International Version), and with government-aided mission schools. They equate Christianity with Westernization. Parents whose children converted to Christianity tended to see them as coming under Western influence, and showed “an unusual tolerance” of it.30 What happens to his identity when a Singapore Chinese converts? Does he exchange his Chinese for a Western identity? Will he have no more part in Chinese culture and traditions? Like any other people, the Chinese have a number of important festivals, customs, and rituals. The “lunar new year heralds the arrival of spring”.31 The family gathers for a reunion dinner on the eve, cash gifts in red packets (hong bau) are given to the elderly and children, and visits are exchanged between relatives, friends, and neighbours. The Chinese Christian has no qualms about following these practices. The rice dumpling and dragon boat festival honours the patriotic poet, Qu Yuan. Gifts of rice dumplings are exchanged. Another festival, the MidAutumn, is celebrated with mooncakes and lanterns, and tea-drinking under the harvest moon. It is also a time for family reunion. The Winter Solstice celebration is another family reunion, and the food of the season this time is the glutinous rice flour dumpling in a bowl of sweetened soup.

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The Chinese Christian joins in the conviviality of these occasions, minus, however, the rites and worship engaged in by non-Christian Chinese who know and honour the mythological connections. Being Christian, he has to avoid traditional Chinese forms of worship. Heading the list is ancestor worship. This may be seen as a serious dereliction of duty for a Chinese, but it should be remembered that the first giant step in this direction had been taken by his immigrant forefathers who, by the very act of migrating, had reneged on their genealogical fidelity. In Singapore, the dead were traditionally honoured in home altars and surname-clan temples where their soul tablets and portraits were enshrined. Qing Ming Jie, the “Clear and Bright” Festival, which in China precedes the sowing season, is the month for remembering ancestors. This involves visiting their graves, but in Singapore, this is getting rarer because of the reclamation of graveyards for housing and other developments. While the Christian does not worship his ancestors in the old way, he looks for other ways to show respect, if not to worship: flowers at the graves, or before soul tablets, or in the columbarium. Churches will also hold memorial services upon request.32 He could try a hand at biography or family history. “Culture,” it has been well said, “is the medium God has chosen to reveal His truth to man.”33 Therefore, the Chinese Christian should not feel at odds with his culture, but rather seek to understand it with a view to knowing what he can and cannot, in good conscience, do. To cite an example, Christians do attend Buddhist or Taoist style funeral wakes, but they do not offer joss sticks nor burn joss paper for the deceased. Reverences to the spirit world and to household gods abound in Taoism. The Chinese Christian faces this all the time, but he is helped by the measures taken by clan associations and supported by the government to update and simplify Chinese traditions so that the new generation, young and English-educated, but not necessarily Christian, will keep them. The rituals of marriage are pared down considerably, but the allimportant tea ceremony is retained. The nuptial pair offers tea to the elders in the bride’s family, and again to the elders in the bridegroom’s family. Chinese Christians go through these steps too, but they stop short of offering tea to the ancestors as well. “Tea ceremonies are also sometimes conducted

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in church immediately following the wedding ceremony to show that Christians recognise that marriage is a union between families and not just between two individuals.”34 Among other things that the Chinese Christian avoids are Chinese geomancy or “feng shui”, and consultation of the Chinese horoscope on marriage and procreation. In the latter case, he will be seen as an ideal citizen for the government has been persuading the Chinese not to bother with the zodiac signs when they have babies.35 The fall in the birthrate in the year of the snake and the sudden surge in the year of the dragon are impossible to factor into government services like the maternity wards and the schools. Christian leaders in Singapore, particularly Chinese-speaking ones, “have carefully thought through various issues associated with customs and rites”.36 The elders and leaders of Chinese-medium churches have “conscientiously taught” their congregations key tenets of Confucian ethics consonant with Christian teaching, namely “love for one’s parents, respect for one’s ancestors, and care and concern for one’s neighbours, particularly the poor and less fortunate”.37 Church leaders of the various denominations came together to share their views on church and culture in 1988, and published their common stand in February 1989. Significantly, these events within the church occurred at the juncture when religious contestation was on the rise, leading to the cessation of religious knowledge and Confucian ethics courses in secondary schools. It so happened that the lunar new year in 1989 fell in the same month, February, as the church leaders’ common stand. Prime Minister Lee, in an address to the new year celebrations at his Tanjong Pagar constituency, referred to the recent spate of Chinese conversions. What seemed more important to Lee was that these Chinese could change their religion but not their identity, becoming Westerners. Lee explained this, saying that to begin with, “the Chinese have no single, over-powering religion”,38 like Islam to the Malays or Hinduism to the Indians; “therefore their festival days are secular… and their approach to life and its problems pragmatic”.39 The Chinese new year is not a religious occasion comparable to Hari Raya

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Puasa or Deepavali, which derive their significance from Islam and Hinduism respectively. Thus, the Chinese can retain their ethnic identity when they become Christians. If a Malay becomes a Christian he feels he has altered his sense of identity. If an Indian changes his religion, he feels he has ceased to be an Indian. But a Chinese can change religion without in any sense feeling he is less Chinese. He remains Chinese.40 For Lee, “the big festivals… are a litmus test of our cultural attributes”.41 Even if all the Chinese become Christians, he said, “I am fairly confident that Chinese New Year will still be a big occasion because a sense of Chineseness, of a certain cultural tradition, will persist”.42 Lee congratulated the Chinese community organizations for deliberately heightening the Chinese New Year of 1989 with the launch of the “Hong Bau” Festival held ever since then, and complemented with the restored “chingay” procession of former times. Lee observed: “This year, as compared to the last three years, I feel there is a certain resurgence and assertion of cultural identity by making it a point of celebrating Chinese New Year as the main occasion for the Chinese community.”43 Lee said that this was to be encouraged because it reminded the Chinese of their cultural traditions. Lee was happy to see the other races joining in the celebrations, but stressed that the Chineseness of the occasion was unmistakable. This was only right. “We will [each] retain a part of ourselves. We cannot be a melting pot.”44

Confucianism and National Ideology Soon afterwards First Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and the younger ministers started taking charge, they uncovered an American plot: U.S. embassy official E. Mason Hendrickson’s bid to make Singapore a liberal democracy. This plot may be linked, as a causal factor, to Goh’s idea of giving Singapore a national ideology. Goh announced his idea at a dinner of the PAP Youth Wing on 28 October 1988. He stated the familiar arguments about the East Asian

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economic miracle, citing the works of Harvard professors, Ezra Vogel and George Lodge, and the recent pronouncements of Lee Kuan Yew.45 There is a difference between Goh’s present discourse on Confucian values as a common East Asian heritage and that of PAP leaders some years ago. Previously, Dr Goh Keng Swee had differentiated between Confucianism as an ethical system and as a political ideology. Dr Goh had been emphatic that Confucian political doctrine was not relevant to Singapore. But now, thanks to Hendrickson, it had become relevant. First Deputy Prime Minister Goh set B.G. Lee, the Youth Wing chairman, to work on the national ideology. B.G. Lee’s exposition of it signalled that the government’s thinking had changed. … many Confucian ideals are still relevant to us. An example is the concept of government by honourable men (junzi), who have a duty to do right for the people, and who have the trust and respect of the population. This fits us better than the Western concept that a government should be given as limited powers as possible, and always treated with suspicion, unless proved otherwise. … the National Ideology… cannot be completely separated from the politics of Singapore. It must complement, not replace, our system of democracy… However, democracy is not an automatic formula for political success. To make it work, the people need to have the right values, understanding, and sense of responsibility. Our core values should contribute to this. In particular, for the Chinese community, we must reconcile Confucian values with the concepts of democracy.46 In July 1991, Goh Chok Tong, by now prime minister, said, in a talk, that he endorsed “Confucianism minus the traditions which impede innovation”.47 He explained: “It is the good side of Confucianism, and includes values like thrift, perseverance, group cohesion, and the system of hierarchical relationship.”48 This last aspect is often seen as an impediment to progress, but to Goh after Hendrickson’s interference, it was the good side.

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Singapore already has a national pledge and national ideals symbolized on its flag. Why does it need a national ideology? “The five stars on the state flag represent” the ideals to strive for — “democracy, equality, peace, progress, justice”.49 “The National Pledge reiterates these ideals, and reinforces the message that [Singaporeans] should progress as one united nation, regardless of race, language, and religion”.50 The national ideology will define the “personal values Singaporeans must have” to realize the aspirations stated in the national pledge they recite, and symbolized on their country’s flag.51 What are these personal values? After a search, discussion and feedback the government chose: Nation before community and society above self Family as the basic unit of society Community support and respect for the individual Consensus, not conflict Racial and religious harmony52 The minority races feared the national ideology as a subterfuge for imposing Confucian values on them. Not so, B.G. Lee assured them. “The National Ideology is for all communities, while Confucian ethics is not.”53 However, the national ideology, being a set of abstract values, would have to be elaborated by examples and parables, and the Chinese would resort to the analects of Confucius to do so. The Malays and Indian Muslims would use their traditions and Islamic teachings. The Indians who were Hindus would have the Purana. The narratives that will flesh out these abstract values will be different. They are bound to be. “The Muslim idea of a family is not the same as the Confucian idea [of] filial piety.”54 As another example, the Malay concept of “gotong-royong”, cooperation between friends and neighbours to carry out a given task, does not have the same noble, patriotic ring as the Chinese call to “sacrifice the smaller self to achieve the greater self”.55 This will have to be accepted. “It is part of our diversity,” B.G. Lee said.56 But the minority races were not so sure. It was all

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too obvious that the closest fit for the values identified as the national ideology was Confucian ethics. Prime Minister Lee was uneasy too. He explained to an interviewer: “My First Deputy Prime Minister mooted this (national ideology) and he feels that the time has come to try and get some common shared values defined…”57 I personally felt when I read him that he was being very bold, very brave, because it’s very difficult to do. Well, you’re dealing with different peoples and different cultures and different religions, and values are very deep and emotional practice in a person’s life.58 Lee’s view is consistent with his belief that Singapore is not a melting pot. Goh also subscribed to this no melting pot idea, but here, in this instance, in apparent contradiction, he was proposing a set of shared values. Lee said this was like putting the different cultures into “a pressure cooker”.59 “You can quicken the pace, you can also increase the danger. My generation did not try to do that. We were very sensitive about culture and religion.”60 Goh defended the national ideology in parliament. He cited two grounds (1) it was a value system to bind Singaporeans as a people and (2) it would help build the Singapore identity. … on what basis do we build an identity? Not religion, not any culture, not a melting pot because if we adopt the melting pot approach the major ingredient must be Chinese or Chineseness which would be totally unacceptable to the minority races. Certainly not [by] deculturalizing ourselves because if we do we lose our distinctiveness. Therefore the basis must be some shared abstract values which all races can accept.61 This proved no more acceptable. In substance and spirit, and in the perception of the minority races, the shared values were very Chinese. Goh took more time to reflect. Then, during his visit to Indonesia at the end of March 1989, he consulted Suharto who had a national ideology, the Pancasila. Afterwards, Goh said:

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My thinking was reaffirmed by my meeting with President Suharto that we should not rush into it. Let us take our time to evolve a set of shared values… let it be accepted by as many sections of Singaporeans as possible before we announce a formal document.62 Goh admitted that “it would take a long time for people to fully accept any state ideology”.63 Referring to the Pancasila, he added: “It took the Indonesians twenty years… and the process is still continuing to get it accepted by all forces and all sections of society.”64 What Goh did not say, more because of prudence than ignorance, no doubt, was that the Pancasila actually struck terror in some sections of the Indonesian people. It was Suharto’s instrument for enforcing his authoritarian rule. For an Indonesian to show himself as less than enthusiastic for the Pancasila’s institutionalized programme of indoctrination was a serious matter, on a par with being accused as a communist in the early years of Suharto’s regime.65 Singapore’s set of shared values exists as a white paper approved by parliament, but is not accorded a constitutional status. Nor has it any legal force. However, it can claim some visibility as a set of inscriptions on plaques hung in public buildings.

Confucianism, Christianity, Chineseness Whereas Malays identify with Islam, and Indians with Hinduism, the Chinese do not identify with a specific religion. This is a unique feature of Singapore’s multiracial society: “the absence of religion as a core part of Chinese identity”.66 What the Chinese identify with is a culture. This takes the form of the great Confucian intellectual tradition and the “little traditions” in which Confucian ideas intermingle with elements of folk religion. As a people, the ethnic pride of the Chinese is bound up with a distinctive language and culture, and not with a distinctive religion. Decades ago, the Singapore Chinese cultural nationalist, Dr Lim Boon Keng, compared Christianity unfavourably with Confucianism.67 Dr Lim was speaking as a social reformer on causes like the education of women in Singapore, and the reversal of China’s decline under the obscurantist Ch’ing dynasty. He believed in the power of Confucian thought to effect change.

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This power lies in its rationalism, which Dr Lim judged superior to the supernaturalism, the idea of divine intervention in human affairs, that Christianity deals in. Dr Lim’s attack on Christianity will surprise Singapore Chinese Christians today. To them Christianity is rational!68 It is rational because it fits in with living in a modern, dynamic city state. What they regard as “irrational” and “superstitious” are the beliefs associated with the “little traditions”,69 and practices like the sacrifices to ancestors and hungry ghosts, which are additionally a source of pollution to the environment. Christianity also makes sense to them because it has a (Protestant) work ethic which is, again, relevant to modern life. Singapore Chinese study hard and work hard, using science, technology, and mathematics, to achieve the fruits of progress. Christianity will have no appeal to them if it does not support them in this, and it does, most definitely. It is in this respect no different from the positive power of Confucianism. Dr Lim had evidently underrated the pragmatic influence of Christianity. Another important thing is that Christianity has renewed itself in line with modernization and social change. In many Singapore churches today, new songs and a new musical beat have replaced the old hymns and organ. The style of worship is altogether freer. The church is not the only venue people have. Secular places have been turned into sanctuaries. Apart from worshipping as a whole congregation, small groups (cells) meet in homes and offices. There are parachurch organizations, notably the Full Gospel Businessmen Fellowship International, “which has a large following in Singapore”.70 These changes within Christianity, spearheaded by the charismatics, enhanced its attractiveness to the young, Englisheducated Chinese and others who liked a more participatory and overt style of ministry. In Singapore, Christians are not the only people who think they can embrace religion, modernity, and worldly success all without contradiction. Among Muslims, there are leaders who are also saying that it’s all right to be Muslim, and concurrently modern and successful. And Buddhism too is modernizing, sociologists suggest, to keep up with its strong Christian rival. Buddhist organizations are now emphasizing the study of the religion, differentiating it from folk religion, and “highlighting aspects of

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Buddhism that appeal to modern people, such as meditation”.71 But they encounter a problem arising from the very pragmatic and materialistic nature of Singaporeans. A Buddhist newsletter reveals that “meditation is being practised for the ‘wrong’ reasons: relaxation, mental power, or worldly success”.72 Nichiren Buddhism is different in that it has turned Buddhism around from a world renouncing to a world affirming doctrine. The Nichiren Shoshu Singapore is easily the most modern of all Buddhist groups in the republic, and attracts the most young Chinese. It offers a package of “practical activities”, the chief of which is the “high profile participation in [Singapore’s] National Day events”.73 Will a reformed Buddhism overtake Christianity as the religion of the Chinese in Singapore? Tong Chee Kiong’s researches into religious change among Singapore Chinese show the association of Christianity in the perception of Chinese converts with modernity, and of Chinese traditional religion with backwardness.74 But Tong also notes that many (Chinese) Buddhists regard their religion as “systematic, logical, and relevant”,75 in other words, not to be lumped with syncretised folk versions of Chinese religion. John Clammer, who has taught in Singapore, takes the argument a bit further and asks whether a revivified Buddhism will not alter the religious affiliation of the Chinese.76 He has in mind the Nichiren Shoshu Singapore, which, he says, has the advantage of an Asian identity. Clammer and another Western expatriate sociologist, Joseph B. Tamney, subscribe to the popular view of Christianity as a Western religion, “a foreign religion”.77 What this implies is that the “Westernness” of Christianity will cause it to lose out to a rapidly modernizing type of Buddhism which yet retains its aura of “Asianness”. People will see, Clammer says, that “it is possible to be Chinese, Buddhist, and modern at the same time”.78 But will this happen? No, for at least four reasons. The first reason is a linguistic one. English is the dominant language of Singapore, and the dominance of English does help Christianity. English is the main language of worship, of Bible reading, and of evangelism. In this sense, it has become more than it was officially intended, as the language of government and administration and of the workplace.

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Secondly, there is the factor of class. Chinese Christians are in the middle to upper classes: the upper ones being the English-educated elites of society. Therevada Buddhists, though also English-educated, middle-class Chinese, are skewed towards the Straits Chinese (Peranakan or Baba Chinese) group. The Nichiren Shoshu Singapore “is seen either as classless or as a religion open to those of less education and less social status than Christianity”.79 But in an increasingly affluent and class-conscious Singapore, this is not a strength or virtue, and will limit its influence. This does not mean that it has not tried to win over the elite. It has indeed, for example, by sponsoring talks by academics, scholarships, and prizes. However, in Singapore as in its home ground, Japan, it has had little appeal to the elite, a reminder that Chinese and Japanese societies share an intellectual and philosophical tradition sceptical of religious wisdom. Thirdly, Clammer makes much of one particular reason for the remarkable success of the Nichiren Shoshu Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s. This is the prestige and admiration Japan commanded in the eyes of Singaporeans because of its economic prowess. However, this magic spell has gradually evaporated in the course of the prolonged and severe economic downturn from which Japan is only just and fitfully recovering. Fourthly, as Tamney has stated, “religious affiliation [is] not an important part of the identity of Chinese people”.80 The Chinese see religion as a personal affair, and not something for the whole community to share and take pride in. Therefore, although they may see Christianity as a Western religion, this does not put them off. (In a strict sense, it is, of course, neither Eastern nor Western, and originated somewhere in between.) The collective identity of the Chinese is anchored on a culture. This agrees with the Singapore Government’s view of ethnicity as conterminous with culture, saying Confucianism is for the Chinese. However, many Chinese have become Christians. But this should not been seen as a rejection of an East Asian philosophy in favour of a Western religion. It is rather that these Chinese Christians are attracted to the modernism they perceive in Christianity, and also that the Christian culture of hard work and entrepreneurship so resembles the positive reading of Confucianism that advocates of the latter, from Dr Lim Boon Keng to Lee Kuan Yew, have

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expounded. Chinese converts attest to the logic, rationality, and relevance of Christianity to modern culture. The danger with this is that they put the focus on themselves, their worldly business, and not on Christ and seeking the kingdom of God. As modern Confucians, do Singapore Government leaders have reason to fear the resurgence of Christianity and the conversion of masses of Chinese? Tamney views the aggressive evangelism of Chinese Christians as “a potential source of opposition to the PAP”.81 Clammer mentions “government fear of the over-expansion of Christianity”.82 This may be no more than a talking point. Generally, Christians in Singapore “tend to be younger in age, speak English as a dominant home language, and of higher socio-economic status measured in terms of occupation, income, and housing type”.83 This description fits many Chinese Christians. They are the major stakeholders of the nation. It is unimaginable that they will want to derail the government, though they will contest it on specific issues such as abortion and the opening of a casino. Also, Christian theology is supportive of government just like Confucian philosophy, but with divine sanction to boot. At its inception in Roman times, Christianity had faced up to giving to Caesar what was due to Caesar, and to God what was due to God.84 The apostle Paul was a Roman citizen who knew his rights, and in the great legal and spiritual trial of his life was to appeal to Caesar. But Paul also knew his responsibilities and enjoined the newly founded churches of his day, dotted about in the Mediterranean littoral, to give their secular rulers what they owed them: “if taxes pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect then respect; if honour, then honour”.85 He counselled obedience to authority “not only because of possible punishment [rulers do not “bear the sword for nothing”, he said] but also because of conscience”.86 Christians in Singapore today abide by this advice: they interpret the Bible literally, and pray for the government. The government, on its side, expects the church to discipline its members. It referred a case involving liberation theology to the Catholic archbishop and the papal nuncio, and only took security action when this line of approach and its patience were exhausted. In managing the ethnic dynamics of Singapore, the government wisely chose to equate ethnicity with culture and not with religion. Happily, the

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culture of the Chinese, the major part of it which is Confucian, and formally learned or ingrained through the family, goes well with the culture of Christianity.

NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

Ho Wing Ming, “Value Premises Underlying the Transformation of Singapore”, in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by Sandhu and Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 678– 79. Sandhu and Wheatley, “Challenges of Success”, p. 1099. Ho, “Values Premises”, p. 690. Business Times, 29–30 October 1988; Parliamentary Debates, Republic of Singapore, Vol. 52, 1989, Col. 442. Goh Chok Tong, “Administrative Officers and Nation-building”, Speeches: A Bimonthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 4 (1991): 2. Goh Chok Tong, “Cultural Values and Economic Performance”, Speeches: A Bimonthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 15, no. 4 (1991): 10. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; paperback, 1999), p. 16. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 37. Michael D. Barr, Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 21. R.K. Narayan, “Reluctant Guru” in The Writerly Life, edited by S. Krishnan, selected non-fiction (New Delhi: Viking, 2001), pp. 453–55. Quoted by Marwick, The Sixties, p. 6. Singapore Herald, 22 July 1970. Singapore Herald, 30 July 1970. Lee Kuan Yew, “The Mass Media and New Countries”, address to the General Assembly of the Independent Press Institute at Helsinki, 9 June 1971, Prime Minister’s Speeches, 1971. Ibid. Barr, Cultural Politics, p. 33. Chua Beng Huat, “The Business of Living in Singapore”, in Management of Success, edited by Sandhu and Wheatley, pp. 1004–05. Chua Beng Huat and Eddie Kuo, “The Making of a New Nation: Cultural Construction and National Identity in Singapore”, in From Beijing To Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Policies, edited by Virginia

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20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

R. Dominguez and David Y.H. Wu (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1998), p. 54. Barr, Cultural Politics, pp. 28–29. Eddie C.Y. Kuo, “Confucianism as Political Discourse in Singapore: The Case of an Incomplete Revitalization Movement”, in Confucian Traditions In East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four MiniDragons, edited by Tu Wei-ming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966, reprinted 1977), p. 302. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 303. Ibid., p. 305. John Clammer, “The Happiness-Making Machine: Sakka Gakkai and Japanese Cultural Presence in Singapore”, in Japan in Singapore: Cultural Occurrences and Cultural Flows, edited by Eyal Ben-Ari and John Clammer (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), p. 177. This was Eddie C.Y. Kuo, Jon S.T. Quah and Tong Chee Kiong, “Religion and Religious Revivalism in Singapore” (a Report prepared for the Ministry of Community Development, October 1988). Kuo, “Confucianism as Political Discourse”, p. 307. Parliamentary Debates, Republic of Singapore, Vol. 54, 1989–1990, col. 578. Lau Kak En, Superintendent of Census, “Religion, Childcare and Leisure Activities”, in Singapore Census of Population, 1990 (Singapore: Department of Statistics, 1994), pp. xiii, xiv, 2, 3 and 5; Leow Bee Geok, Superintendent of Census, “Education, Language and Religion”, in Singapore Census of Population, 2000 (Singapore: Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, 2001), pp. viii and 11. Lau Kak En, “Religion, Childcare and Leisure Activities”, p. 3. Joseph B. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul: Western Modernization and Asian Culture (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p. 34. Chen Ai Yen, “Chinese Festivals, Customs and Rites”, in Church and Culture: Singapore Context, edited by Bobby E.K. Sng and Choong Chee Pang (Singapore: Graduates’ Christian Fellowship, 1991), p. 29. Ibid., p. 32. Quoted by Chen Ai Yen, ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 37. Straits Times, 17 February 1989; 27 January 1990. Chen, “Chinese Festivals”, p. 28. Ibid. Straits Times, 8 February 1989.

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Business Times, 8 February 1989. Ibid. Goh Chok Tong “Our National Ethic”, Ministerial Speeches 12, no. 5 (1988): 13–14, address to PAP Youth Wing Charity Night, October 28 1988. B.G. Lee Hsien Loong, “The National Identity — A Direction and Identity for Singapore”, Ministerial Speeches 13, no. 1 (1989): 34 and 36, address to the Third Alumni International Singapore, January 11 1989. Goh, “Cultural Values and Economic Performance”, p. 9. Ibid. B.G. Lee, “The National Identity — a direction and identity for Singapore”, p. 31. Ibid. Ibid. The National Symbols Kit (Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts, 2001), p. 27. B.G. Lee, “The National Identity — A Direction and Identity for Singapore”, p. 34. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., pp. 33 and 35. Ibid., p. 36. Straits Times, 11 March 1989. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Parliamentary Debates, Republic of Singapore, Vol. 52, 1989, col. 442. Straits Times, 31 March 1989. Ibid. Ibid. See James Mackie, “Indonesia: Economic Growth and Depoliticization” and Harold Crouch and James W. Morley, “The Dynamics of Political Change”, in Driven By Growth: Political Change in the Asia Pacific Region, edited by James W. Morley (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, and Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), pp. 130–31, 138, and 346–47. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, p. 48.

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67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Edwin Lee, The British As Rulers: Governing Multiracial Singapore 1867–1914 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1991), pp. 210–13. Tong Chee Kiong, “The Rationalization of Religion in Singapore”, in Understanding Singapore Society, edited by Ong Jin Hui, Tong Chee Kiong and Tan Ern Ser (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1997), pp. 199 and 206–07. Ibid., p. 205. John Clammer, “Adaptation and Response: The Christian Charismatic Renewal”, in Understanding Singapore Society, edited by Ong, Tong and Tan, p. 183. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, p. 42. Ibid., pp. 43 and 232. Clammer, “The Happiness-Making Machine”, p. 182. Tong, “The Rationalization of Religion in Singapore”, pp. 199 and 205. Ibid., p. 207. Clammer, “The Happiness-Making Machine”, pp. 189 and 191. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, pp. 43 and 48; Clammer, “The Happiness-Making Machine”, pp. 182 and 189. Clammer notes the dichotomy in the religious scene as traditional Chinese religion and “a ‘non-chinese’ religion [mainly Christianity]”. Clammer, “The Happiness-Making Machine”, p. 189. Ibid., p. 182. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul, p. 34. Ibid., pp. 33–34. Clammer, “The Happiness-Making Machine”, p. 189. Ong, Tong and Tan, eds., Understanding Singapore Society (editorial comment), p. 129. Matthew 22 : 15–22. Romans 13 : 7. Romans 13 : 4–5.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Dreams, Singapore Dilemas permission of the Institute of Southeast Singapore Asian Studies. Individual articles are• 559 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T W E N T Y

Singapore Dreams, Singapore Dilemmas

T

he Singaporean middle class aspired for the 5Cs — career, condominium, car, club, and credit card. To get them, Singaporeans focused on education and hard work. Their attitude to education was utilitarian, to give themselves the requisite qualifications which meant they must score good grades in examinations. Their singlemindedness had paid off. It was well adapted to the kind of economic strategy that the government had been pursuing since independence. It had brought them in less than a lifetime to first-world status. But from this point on they needed to change. They should realize that there is more to education than they had so far had the inclination or time to explore. They must know that they cannot have university education without a learning and research culture, nor technology without entrepreneurship. They must start thinking imaginatively like the middle classes of the first world if they want to keep abreast of them. The culture of the Singaporean middle class was such that they were not the prime mover of change. The government was the prime mover, and had to act like some benevolent but hard-driving latter day Moses, leading a timorous, complaining middle class into the new frontier of global competitiveness. The government launched all the new business ventures, which became established household names. It forced people to save through the CPF system, and encouraged nationwide home ownership through a public housing board, which was to bill itself as the biggest real estate office on earth.

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The government was not short on visions of the future drawn up with the participation mainly of the English-educated middle class. However, it could not foresee that one of its dearest (in more than one sense) schemes, home ownership, could be in conflict with another scheme deemed crucial some twenty years downstream, the nurturing of entrepreneurship. It allowed another massive inflation in property values in the early to mid-1990s. In July 1997, the Asian Financial Crisis struck and, in a flash, revealed to a whole region the danger of moving way out of sync with the forces of globalization. The affected countries which appealed to the International Monetary Fund had to comply with conditions about opening up their home markets and transparency issues. Although Singapore was not badly hit, the PAP Government swung into action to liberalize banking, telecommunications, educational, legal, and health care services. This was where the government showed itself to be most proactive — liberalizing, pressing Singapore’s advantage, and making acquisitions before the dust settled and the neighbourhood emerged stronger and more competitive from the crisis. However, on another matter concerning Singapore itself, the management of land and other business costs needed urgent attention. Here one wonders if something could not have been done before the shipping lines and the factories started to depart these shores…

More Good Years1 The baseline to begin this chapter may be the 1985 recession which highlighted the problem of seniority-based wages and of wages outstripping productivity. But, as the recession was soon over, there was no urgency afterwards to implement the National Wages Council’s (NWC) suggested flexible wage system whereby there should be a variable component as well as the basic service pay, and increases in the basic service pay should be kept as low as possible, with more being allocated to the variable component, a kind of bonus linked to how well an individual and his company fared in a given year.2

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The recovery and tight labour market made it impracticable for employers to observe NWC guidelines strictly. Even the CPF cut, the quickfix of the 1985 recession, was gradually restored. The point to note, however, is that the employers’ contribution was never to go back to the pre-1985 recession rate of 25 per cent, but would stop at 20 per cent.3 Inter-industry poaching of workers was rife. For example, electronics companies enticed the workers of garment manufacturers, offering perks to make up for the difference in pay. The civil service was not spared poaching by private enterprises. As the government felt that it must retain the talent that it needed, it started to pay market rates to civil servants, and similarly to cabinet ministers, judges, and officers of the armed forces. On the manufacturing front, the labour-intensive and low-end companies which would have gone bust in the recession were saved by the CPF cut and the NWC’s wage restraint directive of 1986. Singapore’s restructuring towards high-tech manufacturing was diverted by the presence of these firms still having to compete on the basis of relative unit labour costs.4 They urged the government to let in more foreign workers. The government had a better idea, which was to cooperate with Malaysia and Indonesia to form “the growth triangle” comprising Johore and the Riau Islands with Singapore in between. Companies would be able to redistribute their functions to these adjacent territories which could supply them with people, land, and water in abundance. First mooted in 1989, “the growth triangle” was operational by 1991.5 On Singapore territory itself, the government continued with its hightech objectives, building industry clusters in electronics, petrochemicals, engineering, and the emerging field of biotechnology. The government planned to meet the information age head on, and to make Singapore an Intelligent Island. The 1985 recession underlined the importance of developing an alternative to manufacturing. This consisted of making Singapore a services centre. Singapore had the potential to become a major financial centre. Firstly, Singapore like Hong Kong, which was already one, could fit into a time slot to keep the money world going round the clock. Secondly and

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more importantly, Singapore had a government of integrity, rule of law, and a strong, stable currency. Among those who rated Singapore highly were Indonesian Chinese conglomerates that enjoyed the protection of President Suharto, but could not help seeing him and his regime visibly ageing in the early 1990s.6 They, therefore, deemed it safer to park their capital abroad, in the Singapore Asian Dollar Market.7 This became the market for loans to develop infrastructure in the region. By the early 1990s, the government felt the time had come to develop an external economy, a second wing. The test case was a project in China “brokered at the highest level… between Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping”.8 It was a joint venture, begun in February 1994, involving a Singapore consortium of government-linked companies and private companies and the Suzhou municipal government. It was about the building of an industrial park in Suzhou. Its significance was that Singapore was exporting its software, its know-how, to China. Government-linked companies led in the regional expansion. The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 was an opportune time for them. The government’s purposive liberalization at such a time, which eroded their domestic market share, was the push factor. Thus the Development Bank of Singapore bought the Dao Heng Bank and Kwong On Bank, both in Hong Kong, and the Thai Danu Bank in Bangkok. Singapore Airlines acquired stakes in Virgin Atlantic, Air New Zealand and tried unsuccessfully to buy into Qantas, Taiwan’s China Airlines, and South African Airways. Most spectacularly, Singtel, the telecommunications company (telco) transformed itself “from a local to a regional global telco” with acquisitions in Australia, Philippines, Thailand, India, and Indonesia.9 Singapore Inc.’s forays abroad were not without problems. In Suzhou the Singapore consortium met with a political enigma (a “yes” from Beijing did not mean compliance at the local level) and economic rivalry from an identical development owned by the Suzhou municipality. Singtel failed in two bids in Malaysia and Hong Kong respectively, “for political and not economic or business reasons”.10 Singapore Airlines withdrew from its bid for a stake in Air India again because of politics, and its purchase into Air New Zealand roused the New Zealand Government to arrange a rescue

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package aimed at reducing the control of Singapore Airlines and of another stakeholder, the New Zealand company, Brierley Investments. The regionalization thrust, beginning about 1993–94, was a sign that the Singapore economy was maturing and needed a second wing to boost its growth momentum. It was around this time too that the government launched another initiative, the IT 2000 Masterplan, in 1992. This was the creation of a broadband network called Singapore One that would connect up to every home and office. The government tracked the dramatic changes in communications and information technology, and what other countries and the industry players were doing. It brought forward the full liberalization of telecommunications services not due till 2002, the WTO deadline, to April 2000, declaring this move was “in the national interest”.11 The government looked on IT “both as an enabler and as an independent source of growth”.12 Were Singaporeans ready for the information age? What changes, especially of mindset, would it require of them? First, they would have to realize that what drives this knowledge-based economy is talent, talent, talent. Next, talent commands a premium, and in today’s globalized world, talent is highly mobile and goes wherever circumstances and opportunities are most attractive. This accounts for the headhunting and the astronomical pay of the top chief executive officers of companies. And if chief executive officers are worth so much, what about cabinet ministers, the brains and executors of the Singapore project of wealth creation and nation-building? In 1994, the government sanctioned raising the salaries of cabinet ministers, as well as of judges and senior civil servants, using as benchmark a range of salaries of top professionals, bankers, and business executives. This had the public talking, but the government argued that the old thinking about public service as a noble calling and a reward in itself had to change if the country were to continue to get the best people to serve it. In other words, Singaporeans would have to understand that good government does not come cheap. Another idea that Singaporeans had to grasp was the idea of foreign talent. Singapore, Prime Minister Goh said in his national day rally speech of August 1997, was “desperately short of all sorts of professionals” who

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were needed “to build itself up as a regional business centre”.13 He would have to do more to attract foreign professionals and students, getting the Jurong Town Corporation to arrange their housing, and the universities to offer more places and scholarships. The hope was that the foreign talent would stay on. In recent years, the number of new permanent residents was of the order of 25,000 a year, with an increase to 30,000 in 1996. This number was still not enough. Singaporeans need not fear, Goh said, that their children would be displaced. The “infusion of fresh ideas, skills, and drive will create more opportunities” for them.14 “This is the only way our children can inherit a vibrant, dynamic Singapore.”15 Without foreign talent there can be no Singapore dream. “The Singapore dream will disappear.”16 Singaporeans, the educated and skilled ones, were themselves a part of this internationally fluid talent. Many students enrolled in universities abroad had been recruited by foreign companies, and thus were not contributing to their own country but helping other countries to compete with it. Goh said that it was not his intention to criticize them, but to acknowledge “a new fact of life” brought about by globalization.17 Singaporeans would have to awaken to more changes. They could not count on being in one job forever. They should appreciate the need for lifelong learning, training, and upgrading. They had to become more entrepreneurial and overcome their fear of failure. Many dreaded what may be called Chinese loss of face and the state of bankruptcy — British style, which is a lot more unforgiving than the American style. The education system had to be overhauled too. Singapore schools excelled in international competitions in Science and Mathematics.18 But in the classroom the emphasis was on soaking up knowledge and reproducing it in examinations. In June 1997, Prime Minister Goh launched a plan to promote critical thinking and creativity.19 Another plan, begun in the same year, would incorporate information technology into schools. Getting teachers and students to use the computer was the easier part. Altering the mindset of teaching and learning was another matter altogether. Schools were obsessed with grades as school ranking was determined by examination results. So the well tried methods of drill and practice continued such that

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even “higher-order thinking questions became predictable to a certain extent and less useful in testing the student’s ability to think creatively and/or to apply skills learnt in one context to another”.20 The Singapore economy recovered strongly from the 1985 recession to grow on an average of 8.3 per cent per year until 1997, the year of the Asian Financial Crisis.21 If the period is extended to 2001, which saw the American dot com crash, the average annual growth drops to 7.3 per cent, which is still way above the 4 to 6 per cent per year that economists have expected of this maturing economy.22 Manufacturing and services were the “twin engines” propelling this growth. 23 Manufacturing boasted industries like wafer fabrication, multinational enterprises were the leading manufacturers, and the United States led the countries which invested in manufacturing in Singapore. The goods produced were largely exported to OECD countries, i.e., the developed world. In contrast, the services sectors were oriented towards the Southeast Asian region. Singapore was historically an entrepot for the region, but increasingly the exports were in the form of services, namely, banking and finance, air and sea transportation, tourism, and health care. In financial services, fund management “has grown strongly over the years”, notably between 1991 and 1997, but, says a government-convened committee on Singapore’s competitiveness, “has not taken off thus far”.24 Why? The committee observes that much private money went into buying property while “the huge surpluses residing in the public sector” were “either invested overseas or conservatively managed”.25 Consequently, there was not enough liquidity “to draw in top fund houses”.26 The committee further states that “our tax laws” on estate duty were discriminatory “in favour of property over other types of asset classes”.27 This certainly is true because of the priority given to home ownership as a pillar of nation-building. Among other issues, the committee notes the disparity in the way unit trusts were treated compared with bank deposits. “A withholding tax is levied on the former but not the latter.”28

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Singapore Dreams This section is about property issues, and how property is central to the politics of rising expectations. After a big fall in the 1985 recession, property values rose again, and soon dashed the hopes of many for a dream home. There were a number of reasons involved. The first was the liberalization of rules allowing subsidized flats built by the public housing board, the HDB, to be resold. It was the government’s policy to enable every Singaporean family to own a HDB flat. But Singaporeans loved to upgrade to ever bigger units, and ultimately to private properties. The government obliged them, liberalizing the HDB’s rules in 1991. Subject to certain conditions, HDB flats became tradeable in the open market. The HDB even gave those who sold their first HDB flat a second loan to buy another, usually bigger, unit that it built. What this means is that the distinction between public, subsidized, housing and private property virtually vanished. One market consultant described it as the real estate equivalent of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.29 At once, the resale values of HDB flats started rising and impacted on the private residential sector. The second factor driving the market was the strong growth in the income and savings of Singaporeans and in the number of double-income households. This was coupled with liberal rules regarding the use of CPF savings “which helped make private home financing as ‘painless’ as investing in public housing”.30 Low Thia Khiang, MP, Workers’ Party, asked the government whether Singaporeans had not over-invested in property, and whether the “parameter” of CPF usage should not be reviewed.31 Lim Hng Kiang, the minister for national development, replied that on both counts it was for the individual to decide.32 The third factor was foreign buying which, in the perception of the public, was to blame for the escalation in property values. Low Thia Khiang and PAP backbencher Goh Choon Kang raised this matter in parliament. Minister Lim said that “foreign buyers are not the principal cause”, the public had overblown it.33

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Foreign buying was highly visible because it occurred in the prime districts 9, 10, and 11. Low Thia Khiang wanted to know the number and percentage of foreign buying in these districts. Minister Lim stated that the figure was 34 per cent of all new projects (in 1996).34 He did not say who these foreigners were, but it was well known that Indonesian Chinese favoured these prime districts. Needless to say, these districts were also the apex of the Singapore dream, hence the public furore. Low Thia Khiang had another question: Would the government consider something like the Australian formula whereby foreigners may freely buy property “but could only sell to Australians, not foreigners”?35 Minister Lim replied that foreigners were already restricted (since 1975) to buy in developments of six storeys and above, and that only 7 per cent of the total property stock were open to foreigners. To set any further restriction would go against Singapore’s professed openness to the world for investment and talent. It would give the (wrong) impression that foreigners were not welcome. “This will jeopardise our efforts to attract talent here.”36 The government liked to believe that what was heating up the property market was confidence. To look at the issue “in its entire perspective”, Minister Lim said, “the very reason” for the property market’s advance was the “strong confidence in the Singapore economy [and] in the Singapore Government”.37 The reader cannot help feeling a sense of déjà vu as back in 1981 Goh Chok Tong, then minister of trade and industry, had said the same thing about the property boom of that time. Nevertheless, the government could not ignore the possibility that an asset bubble was forming as residential property prices spiralled upwards by 18 per cent in 1991, 16 per cent in 1992, 36 per cent in 1993 and 42.2 per cent in 1994!38 There was, undoubtedly, a speculative frenzy going on. This in turn fuelled the politics of rising expectations. Many young adults, and some not so young ones too, of middle class and professional background, were becoming frustrated. Their dream of owning a home and a car seemed forever unattainable. A good number were migrating. A good house and a car at affordable prices, a less stressful education experience for their children, and wide open spaces were the usual reasons for their migration.

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Simon Tay, who went on a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard in 1993, returned after eighteen months to find “car and housing prices” risen to levels that “hardly seem possible”.39 Cars were expensive because, to ease road congestion, the government introduced the system of bidding for the right to own and run a car. In boom times, as in 1994, one spectacular bid for a car of over 2,000 c.c. exceeded $100,000! This was before the bidder started to buy the car which came, as all cars did, with heavy import duties, and to pay the road tax. Because of the high demand for cars, speculators, none other than the car dealers themselves, came in to bid until the government stopped the loophole of double transfers of rights. Double transfers were possible before because there was a six-month validity period which the car dealers could use to wait for the most opportune time. As with cars, so properties, at even higher stakes, became the speculators’ casino. And Simon Tay’s generation of peers and friends, though not Simon Tay himself, the generation with much to contribute, were looking to greener pastures. The government was monitoring the property market and had a number of options. In August 1995, it introduced the Executive Condominium scheme, which would give the middle class the lifestyle they aspired to, but at a lower price than privately developed condominiums. Additionally, first-time home buyers would get a grant of $40,000 payable into their CPF accounts. The amount they were eligible to borrow in mortgage loans would not be lowered by this grant. The buyers of Executive Condominiums would have to be contented with their locations further out from the city, in Pasir Ris, Simei, Tampines, Bukit Panjang, Choa Chu Kang, and Jurong East. As well as setting aside areas for the Executive Condominiums the government would increase land sales for private housing development. But these were long-term measures. In the meantime the cabinet had quietly reached a decision to cool the residential property market, and announced it on 14 May 1996. The press conference convened for the announcement was chaired by Acting Prime Minister B.G. Lee, with Finance Minister Richard Hu and Minister for National Development Lim Hng Kiang also present. B.G. Lee said that “private property had become a

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political issue”.40 The government could guarantee everyone a HDB flat, but not a private property. “No government in the world can do that.”41 However, “what the Government could do was to try and enable more Singaporeans to fulfil their aspirations of owning private properties”.42 With immediate effect, the government imposed a hefty tax on gains from property sold within three years of the date of purchase; forbade foreigners who were not permanent residents to make Singapore-dollar loans to purchase private properties; and limited those who were to one Singapore dollar loan each. Prime Minister Goh had occasion to explain this decision, in his national day rally of August 1997, when he came to the segment on expanding the foreign talent pool. The measures taken (as noted above) still left it open for foreigners to buy condominiums of six storeys and above. Goh said that “the Government had made a conscious decision” to keep this option open.43 “To have discriminated against foreigners in the May ’96 measures would have sent a strong signal that they were not really welcome in Singapore or that we wanted to opt out from being part of the global economy. The decision was quietly taken, but it was crucial.”44 Apart from foreign talent, another factor that the government had to take into account was the market itself. The market should not be destabilized. The result was that the measures adopted seem too little, too late. Too late? Senior Minister Lee certainly thought so. Lee, in his memoirs, refers to the government’s accommodation of the “popular pressure” to upgrade as the “mistake of the 1990s”.45 It fed into the price spiral. The government worked through the HDB, which had moved from providing a simple family home for the masses to (in the 1980s and 1990s) facilitating the upgrader’s dream. Lee commented: As property prices rose, everybody wanted to make a profit on the sale of their old flat and then upgrade to a new one, the biggest they could afford. Instead of choking off demand by charging a levy to reduce their windfall profits, I agreed that we accommodate the voters by increasing the number of flats built. That aggravated the

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real estate bubble and made it more painful when the currency crisis struck in 1997. Had we choked off demand earlier, in 1995, we would have been immensely better off.46 In fact the government should have intervened even earlier, say in 1991 or 1992. The May 1996 measures included, as the chief item, the levy that Senior Minister Lee wished the government had imposed in good time. It is noteworthy that MPs were not only concerned to speak for the middle-class dream. Low Thia Khiang asked about the purchase of threeroom flats by low-income households.47 And Prime Minister Goh, in his national day rally speech on 18 August 1996, the year of speculative fever, pledged that “public housing will continue to remain affordable” and that “the Government will do more to help lower-income households to own their flats”.48 After Goh’s speech, the follow-up measures taken by Minister Lim Hng Kiang included the sale of three-room flats purchased by the HDB from the open market.49 The HDB had stopped building three-room flats since 1985, a sign of growing middle-class affluence, but were buying them back from upgraders. These flats, although older, were located in central areas — Queenstown, Bukit Merah, Toa Payoh, and Geylang. The only exception were the flats in Bedok. Another measure adopted was the discount of $50,000 on the sale price. As people were earning more, the household income eligibility ceiling was raised from $1,200 to $1,500 to enable more families to own these threeroom HDB buy-back flats. Thousands of families were benefitted. The government offered Singaporeans another option to grow their CPF nest egg. Since 1986 they could have invested part of their CPF savings in approved shares, unit trusts, and gold. But not everybody did so. Shares ownership was not as nationally encompassing as home ownership, until Prime Minister Goh’s innovation of 1992. Goh was carrying forward the PAP Government’s redistribution policy, periodically devising ways to do so in times of plenty. In 1989, he began using budget surpluses to upgrade older HDB estates. This project was repeated for another lot of HDB estates in 1994, and for more in later years, when upgrading was extended to private landed housing estates as well.

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Over the decades, many thousands of HDB families had their homes and surroundings enhanced. Other items in Goh’s spread-the-wealth-around policy were specifically for shopkeepers, taxidrivers, vendors and hawkers, and for students, and retirees. In 1992, he included everybody in a single gesture. He put money into the CPF accounts of every Singaporean worker. Singaporeans who were not wage earners could open CPF accounts to receive the money. Husbands opened CPF accounts for their wives, parents for their children, adult working children for their retired or homemaker parents. The purpose was for them all to buy and retain the shares of Singtel which was going to be privatized in 1993. One portion of the shares would be sold to citizens at half the market price. Lee had created a nation of home owners. Goh would start them off as a nation of shares owners. The idea was to give Singaporeans a direct stake in their country’s assets. Goh could not make every Singaporean rich. But, he said, “I can promise to make every Singaporean who completes ten to twelve years of education, middle class and asset-owning.”50

The Crisis Years Goh was prime minister from 28 November 1990 to 12 August 2004, some fourteen years in all. The fortunes of this period bring to mind the biblical world of Joseph, whose stewardship of Egypt for the first seven years were blessed with abundance, but were succeeded by seven lean years. In the global world of Goh Chok Tong, the seven good years of his prime ministership were followed by seven critical and challenging ones. The Asian Financial Crisis, erupting in July 1997, caused regional demand for Singapore’s goods and services to fall sharply. The Asian dollar market, established by Singapore, was “hardest hit” as regional projects were held back.51 However, Singapore-based companies whose markets were the United States and the EU (European Union) and whose business was done in U.S. dollars, were “less affected”.52 But they were soon overtaken by another problem, “the sharp downturn in the global electronics industry”53

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in 1996–97 from which Singapore, a leading electronics manufacturing centre, could not escape. Singapore returned to higher growth in the course of 1999 and continued in 2000 with the recovery in the electronics sector and in regional economies. But no sooner had this happened than the U.S. dot com crash in March 2001 dealt Singapore another serious blow. Singaporeans then learned the truth of the adage that troubles come not singles spies but in battalions, as there unfolded the events of 11 September 2001 in the United States, the Bali bombing in October 2002, and the outbreak in February 2003 of an unknown deadly disease, Sars, which came out of China. In 2003, Singapore’s growth plunged to 1.1 per cent as a result of weak world demand for electronics, and of Sars. While it lasted, Sars in Singapore cut down the business of the airport, tour companies, hotels, shopping malls, and restaurants.54 The worst months were from mid-March through April and May 2003. The Asian financial meltdown altered the economic landscape. The fall in regional currencies eroded Singapore’s cost competitiveness. Singapore labour and land costs, already relatively high, stood out even more. Hitachi and Sanyo “closed manufacturing plants here and shifted their operations to China”.55 Western Digital Corporation and Seagate Technology partially transferred production to Malaysia. In 2002, another familiar name, Philips, and an investment management firm, ING, “relocated their Singapore regional head offices to Hong Kong to save costs and be nearer to the biggest Asian market”.56 Their going meant job loss. It meant retrenchment and restructuring as never before. In a state “where unemployment has historically been low”, it was a painful shock when “the rate of unemployment among Singapore citizens and permanent residents [increased] to 6.3 per cent at the end of 2003”.57 The government passed a series of budget and off-budget packages which grew larger as conditions worsened. The rationale was to prevent more companies from leaving and thus save jobs. These packages offered tax relief and rebates from the foreign worker’s levy, rentals, utility charges — all calculated to reduce business costs. They were short-term, emergency, measures.

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For the long run, jobs, wages, CPF contributions and the tax system had to be revamped. The Economic Review Committee, appointed by the government in 2001, observed that the problem of wages had been highlighted in the 1985 recession, but that in the reforms since then, “we have not gone far enough”.58 The wage system was “still largely senioritybased”.59 Companies had also been slow in adopting the monthly variable component in the wage package. Only 4.8 per cent of them had done so by 2001. The Economic Review Committee urged them “to move decisively away from the seniority-based wage system, and link wages more closely to productivity and performance”, and to “expeditiously” implement the monthly variable component.60 Because the wage system remained quite inflexible, the cost-cutting in the current downturn had again to target the CPF contributions. From the peak of 50 per cent before the 1985 recession, CPF contributions had then been reduced to 40 per cent, with 20 per cent each from the employer and the employee. In January 1999, the employer’s contribution was cut to 10 per cent. This was later restored to 16 per cent. The Economic Review Committee recommended that “the Government defer any further restoration of the CPF contribution rate (on the employer’s side) for two years” from 2003.61 The Economic Review Committee proposed a number of other changes to the CPF system. One was that older workers should have their CPF rates reduced to enhance their employability.62 Another suggestion was to lower the salary ceiling, when computing CPF contributions, from $6,000 to $5,000. This meant that any sum in the monthly salary above the $5,000 level would not be counted. The government accepted these and other suggestions in July 2002. The tax regime came under scrutiny too. In 1994, the government had introduced a Goods and Services Tax (GST) of 3 per cent, with the view to raising it to 5 per cent later. The GST allowed corporate income tax to be reduced from 30 per cent in 1993 to 24.5 per cent in 2002. The Economic Review Committee recommended raising the GST to 5 per cent “as soon as possible”, and cutting corporate and personal income taxes to 20 per cent over a two-year period from 2003.63

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Industrial land cost in Singapore was high even if one took into account the quality infrastructure. The first EDB chairman, Hon Sui Sen, had in his time devised a flexible system of land tenure. He charged companies a base rent to start with and revised it every five years in line with general economic conditions. After Hon’s pioneering era, the Land Office took over all unused land, and the Jurong Town Corporation was made to repurchase land at prevailing market rates for leasing out to companies. The market rate was set using the prime business district, Raffles Place, as the benchmark. “The assumption is that every square metre of land in any part of Singapore has the potential to be Raffles Place.”64 The impact on industrial land was serious. The Jurong Town Corporation handed out rental rebates in 1998, which were meant to be temporary. Even so, when it announced, in December 2004, the phasing out of rental rebates by mid-2005, it had to offset this with cuts in factory land rents. These cuts, it opined, “will ensure that Singapore continues to remain an attractive manufacturing location”.65 Singapore has the world’s busiest port. It lost its competitive edge as a result of high land costs. Two major shipping lines, Denmark’s Maersk Sealand and Taiwan’s Evergreen Marine Corporation, went over to Tanjong Pelepas in Johore, Malaysia. In the aftermath, the Marine and Port of Singapore Authority retrenched some 500 workers. In December 2004, it cut port fees in order to stay competitive for containers, tankers, carfreight carriers, and cruise ships, and for bunkering, crew changes, and ship repairs.66

Singapore Dilemmas The Singaporean love affair with property awakened to the harsh reality of a severe economic downturn. From the peak in 1996, private property prices fell by 38 per cent by 2003. A Monetary Authority of Singapore survey of five major banks revealed that as of 30 September 2003, some 14 per cent of private property mortgages amounting to $6.4 billion were in negative equity.67 The Urban Redevelopment Authority, noting the narrowing gap in price between Executive Condominiums and lower-end private property, stopped offering more sites for the former. The HDB had 10,000

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unsold flats, mostly five-room and executive types, on its hands. Whereas previously people were keen to upgrade to bigger units, the trend now was one of downgrading. This was no easy thing as they soon realized. They could not sell off their big flats. Then, they had trouble securing bank loans for the smaller units they wanted. As of April 2004, some 656 families turned down by the banks had appealed to the HDB, which itself had stopped (in January 2003) giving loans. Ong Kian Min, PAP MP for Tampines, observed that “many families have been hit by the double whammy of negative equity and structural unemployment”.68 He felt that the HDB should help such cases “as a once-off exercise”.69 Another sign of the times was the HDB’s resumption of building threeroom flats which it had not done since 1985. This time round, it would “build-to-order” to avoid holding a large stock. Property does not stand alone. When it is down, you can be sure other sectors of the economy are also down. Before it can recover, the other sectors must do so first. But can property be a drag on the recovery of these other sectors? Given the near total homeownership realized in Singapore, this question is all the more pertinent. The Economic Review Committee could not avoid it and did not. The committee was concerned with how to boost Singapore’s competitiveness. One way was to reduce business costs, which meant to change the CPF system, and as the next logical step, to tinker with the withdrawal of CPF savings for housing. The committee would “limit [the amount to be withdrawn] to 150 per cent of the value of the property starting in 2002, and further tighten this Valuation Limit to 120 per cent over 5 years”.70 This was all that the committee could do. The property market depended so much on CPF withdrawals that it was not possible to set a higher limit or to do so more swiftly without crashing it. The government accepted the committee’s recommendation. Heavy investment in residential property could also result in people having little capital and desire for business start-ups. The Economic Review Committee looked into home ownership in relation to three economic contexts, the first of which was “entrepreneurial risk appetite”.71 The second was wages: “Housing costs have a direct impact on the wages that workers demand, which in turn impact economic competitiveness.”72 The third context was “the asset-rich cash-poor phenomenon”.73

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In the light of the above three issues, the committee called for “a fundamental review of the home-ownership policy to examine [how an] optimal mix of home ownership and rental” could contribute to greater competitiveness, and to balance this against other desired ends such as the “Singaporeans’ sense of a tangible stake in the nation’s success”.74 As a corollary to this, the committee said the HDB’s role in public housing should also be reviewed. It believed in creating more space for the private sector and market forces. This would “achieve more effective outcomes”.75 Eventually, “a more robust residential sector will develop”, and the government will feel less compelled to intervene in the market.76 For the present the committee suggested the relaxation of HDB rules on the letting out of flats by their owners so that they could monetize their assets. The government agreed, and the entire HDB flat could be let out. The government also allowed offices and businesses to be set up in the home. Home owners or their lessees could do any business from their domestic base except that of gamblers and undertakers!

A Time for Consistency and Change The crisis years 1997 to 2005 were the most dire that Singapore had known since independence. For Prime Minister Goh and the second-generation ministers like him, this was the toughest period of their political career. The retrenchment and restructuring were going to be painful, but Singapore could not go forward without them. Change was inevitable, if unpleasant. At the same time, policies which the government had in place, notably the high ministerial pay, and the matter of foreign talent, which were already controversial to begin with, would become more so in these crisis years. Prime Minister Goh’s task, therefore, was twofold. The first was to convince people of the need for consistency in governance despite the gathering crises all around. The second was to get people to accept the bitter medicine of change, and to help them without encouraging a culture of dependence on state welfare. The outcome would be a new social compact between government and people. Cabinet ministers and civil servants put up with wage restraint and CPF cuts like everybody else in 1999, but in June 2000, it was announced

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that their salaries would be substantially raised. Although it was statutorily correct that their salaries were reviewable five years after the first hike, many people in the general public were aghast and angry because of the downturn, and the, as yet, only partial restoration of the CPF cuts being borne by workers. But the government had strong convictions about ministerial and civil service salaries. It stuck to its guns. It was determined not to be blown off course by the economic storm. If ever Singapore needed good men at the helm (the reason for paying well), it was now. So the government might have thought. The government felt further justified by the fact that the downturn did not impact all sectors across the board, thanks to the strategy to diversify. Also, this was not a government given to ruling by popular referendum. Instead, its style was to think through an issue, argue for it, consult the people where appropriate, but would ultimately decide and take responsibility for its decision, and hold fast. R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy commented, in view of the angry public reaction, that the government needed to do “damage control” as this (the salary hike) was potentially a political mistake.77 Yet neither this issue nor another controversial one, the courting of foreign talent when Singaporeans were being laidoff, caused the PAP to suffer in the general election of November 2001. Instead, in the constituencies where there was contest, the PAP’s share of the popular vote rose to a combined figure of 75.3 per cent. No doubt, a $11.3-billion stimulus budget (covering HDB rent rebates, shares, and other goodies) announced just before the election had helped. But a more potent factor was the faith of the people in such a dire time in the PAP as the party (to use the description of Milne and Mauzy) “most capable of restoring economic prosperity”.78 This, however, does not detract from the fact that the PAP was vindicated in its belief that it should lead the people and not be led by them.

New Help Schemes Help to cope with economic restructuring. The Report of the Economic Review Committee, dated February 2003, stated:

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Lower-educated, older workers, mostly from the post-war babyboom generation, will bear the brunt of this restructuring… Our workers will experience painful dislocation and structural unemployment which were never serious problems in the past.79 Nor was unemployment the plight of only less-skilled workers. Prime Minister Goh said in August 2003: “Last year, for the first time more professionals, managers, executives, and technicians were laid off, compared to production and related workers”.80 The Family Service Centres of the Community Development Councils were “once considered the poor man’s lifeline”.81 No longer. Tertiary-educated, middle-income people living in larger HDB flats or in condominiums, and previously earning more than $4,000 a month, were coming for aid, “troubled by retrenchments and debts”.82 The government adopted the principle of giving more to the poorer, going by the size of their HDB flats. Householders in five-room flats received less relief from utilities and service/conservancy charges than those in fourroom flats and so on down the line. Those in two-room and one-room flats received rent rebates as well. The utilities rebates were given for ten months, and for two months in the year, householders made full payment. The idea was to get them to save water and electricity. In August 2001, Goh introduced his New Singapore Shares. Again, the principle was “to help especially less well-off Singaporeans”.83 The shares were distributed to all adult citizens with more for those who were older, done national service, and lived in one-room to three-room HDB flats. Economic Restructuring Shares were distributed at the end of 2002, 2003, and 2004 to cushion the increase in the GST from 3 to 5 per cent over a two-year period. The GST increase was another decision that the government took despite public criticism. It is always debatable whether this redistribution policy went far enough. Low Thia Khiang likened the New Singapore Shares and the Economic Restructuring Shares to using “a cup of water to douse a large fire”.84 But then Low was asking for a “proper or systematic social safety net”,85 whereas the government was careful “not to foster a welfare mentality”.86

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An off-budget measure in October 2001 gave $200 per month, for three months, to the unemployed through the Citizens’ Consultative Committees, which oversaw community clubs (formerly called centres). The Community Development Councils launched the Work Assistance Programme in October 2003, under which able-bodied unemployed citizens and permanent residents were given $400 per month “for up to three months in the first instance”.87 Additionally, they received “grants for utilities, service, and conservancy charges” and to keep their children in school.88 In return, they had certain obligations. “Those who do not demonstrate efforts to help themselves and turn down job referrals and fail to turn up for job interviews will be taken off the scheme.”89 The only way forward for workers was to get retrained, reskilled, and upgraded for new jobs. There were schemes to help them, and a billiondollar Lifelong Learning Endowment Fund announced by Prime Minister Goh in August 2000. The NTUC tried to redesign jobs to make them more appealing to Singaporeans. Many of these jobs, such as those in healthcare, hospitality, gardening, and shipyard work, were held by foreign workers, and the NTUC hoped to reclaim them for locals. However, except for the job of cleaners, which with automation rose in productivity and pay, the job redesign effort had mixed results.90 But the NTUC was beginning to see some indication of the recession teaching Singaporeans not to despise socalled low status work.

Foreign Talent This was a highly contentious issue in the crisis years and Opposition parties made much of it during the November 2001 election. Foreigners were not only the chief executive officers, but were in middle management too, the level at which many Singaporeans were losing their jobs — a bitter irony. But the government maintained its consistent stance: the flow of foreign talent could not be turned on and off like a tap. One economic committee after another had stressed the importance of foreign talent to boosting Research and Development, entrepreneurship, fund management,

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education, healthcare, sports, and the creative and performing arts.91 The government argued that there was global competition for such talent: better to have them here than over there. However, as a compromise in hard times, the government raised the minimum salary requirement for employment passes from $2,000 to $2,500, nearer to the entry-level wage of local graduates.

Home and Family: Keeping the Dream Alive The government believed that most homeowners could still cope with mortgage payments despite the CPF changes. The CPF board lowered the targets for saving for retirement and medical expenses for those, a minority, who needed to make up for shortfalls in mortgage payments.92 The CPF board also offered what were called “bridging loans”.93 The HDB allowed people to extend their loan period, pay their arrears by instalments, and even to defer payments temporarily. The Community Development Councils began the Home Ownership Plus Education (HOPE) assistance plan on 1 January 2004, designed for young married couples “with no more than two children” and “a monthly income [of] $1,500 or below”.94 HOPE replaced an earlier scheme introduced in 1994, which provided a housing grant and bursaries for children in school. “HOPE offers a more comprehensive and targetted assistance”, and included a training grant, mentoring and family life education, and the extension of bursaries to cover pre-school and university education.95 HOPE would “encourage low-income couples to keep their family intact and small”, and concentrate on their children’s education, and in that way, “to break out of the poverty trap”.96

Small/Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Retailers These sectors were dominated by the Chinese-educated who have been dubbed “entrepreneurs of circumstance”,97 because they were less privileged than their English-educated Chinese counterparts who got to work in the multinational enterprises and government-linked companies.98 Even in the best of times, this group was not the banks’ favourite clients, so what more

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in a recession? Professor Patrick Turner, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Insead, Singapore, judged that the city state “had one of the more ‘rigid’ banking structures in Asia” as far as financing SMEs was concerned.99 The government was aware of this, and had established a Local Enterprise Finance Scheme of more than twenty-five years’ standing. In November 2001, the scheme was “enhanced” with better interest terms, and with the government bearing eighty per cent of the risks as opposed to fifty per cent formerly.100 The loan package, offered until the end of 2004, helped SMEs, for example, those engaged in manufacturing sauces and condiments, fish balls and fish cakes, and in one instance, electrographic toners, to upgrade their machinery. The government was keen to support SMEs to expand overseas, carrying the Singapore brand name. What is most important to SMEs is cash flow. The government let them carry forward losses to set off against future profits for tax purposes. From year-of-assessment 2006, they could carry losses backwards one year, subject to a cap to $100,000, and get a refund from the taxman. This was a better option as it put cash in their hands.101 Retailers in HDB estates are more than just businesses. They are a part of the community. Shop owners have come out to serve in grassroots committees. But because there were so many of them, and many selling the same thing, the 15,200 HDB shops found throughout the public housing estates, were, in many cases, in trouble. Some 8,600 of the shops had been purchased from the HDB, and 6,600 rented from it. The shop owners who had bought their shops in the mid-1990s, and thus paid very high prices, were in a worse fix. From the early 1990s, the shopping malls springing up at the MRT stations of HDB estates have proved a serious threat to the HDB retailers.102 The government gave the latter rental rebates in the downturn, and in 2001, subsidies to upgrade, hiring consultants, and to relocate. On the part of the HDB retailers, if they thought nothing would work, or if their children, being educated, had other plans than taking over from them, they could retire with an ex-gratia payment of $48,000. The 2001 assistance scheme was superseded by a new one in 2005. Under the new scheme, the government will select a whole cluster of shops to restructure, and conduct a ballot with the shop tenants.103 If more than 50

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per cent voted for retirement, those who did so would be paid $60,000 each, while the rest who wished to continue would receive a relocation allowance of $10,000 each (up from $5,000 in the 2001 scheme). The new scheme will encourage shop tenants to form associations and engage consultants. The HDB will consider letting out shops en bloc to one master tenant, who will ensure a good mix of trades, and create an identity for the place. MPs have urged the government to help the HDB shops, and justifiably so. Though poorly off themselves, these neighbourhood shops contribute to the richness of life through daily face-to-face transactions. They are reference points in the new towns, which are only gradually shaping out into organic communities.

Impact of Globalization and Economic Restructuring on Nation-Building Are Singaporeans ready to take on the world? Can they go global and yet regard Singapore as home? What needs to be done to strengthen the emotional rootedness of Singaporeans? What does it mean to be Singaporean when your country is thrown open to foreign talent? What value is attached to Singapore citizenship? Does society view success too narrowly? How to create a more inclusive and cohesive society in which “every Singaporean matters”?104 Questions from the very heart and mind of a people braving the next wave of globalization. When Prime Minister Goh appointed committees to look into economic competitiveness and restructuring, he matched them with committees to examine related social and political issues. Thus the Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, convened in May 1997, was followed by the launch in August of the same year of the Singapore 21 Committee. And in February 2002, Goh appointed the Remaking Singapore Committee to complement the Economic Review Committee which he had formed earlier in December 2001. In all four committees, the chairmen were Goh’s younger ministers. In the economic committees, the chairmen of sub-committees were a mix of leaders from industry and government. But in the Singapore 21 and

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Remaking Singapore committees, the sub-committee chairmen were exclusively ministers of state and MPs. The economic committees sought inputs from more than 200 to more than 1,000 people. The Singapore 21 committee reached out to some 6,000 people, and the Remaking Singapore Committee, more than 10,000, in one way or another — focus group discussions, seminars, forums, and email. They were the biggest consultative exercises of the Goh Chok Tong era. Singapore experienced the fast-paced economic and social change that we now see taking place in China at even higher speed. It is said of China today that every five years is a generation. Singapore was, and is, nearly like this. The result is a weakening of family ties. The fear is that, if this is unchecked, the state will have to take over the role of the family in caring and providing for the individual, as has happened in the developed firstworld countries. The Singapore Government is determined to avoid this, and so the Singapore 21 and Remaking Singapore committees emphasized the importance of strong families.105 The message is that the family should be the first line of support for an individual in need, with the community and the state chipping in to help out. The state should not be a welfare state. Singapore has to be a family-centred global city and cannot afford to be otherwise. Fortunately, family ties here are not beyond salvaging, and in many cases have remained quite strong. The same cannot be said, however, for the physical landscape which gave the city its visual identity, and on which had been anchored the memories and traditions of generations. “The city continues to dispossess its past,” laments an architect some forty years after independence, as another landmark joins the others long since gone, erased, in the rush, he alleged, to rebuild Singapore in the image of American capitalism.106 But, there are many preserved buildings, and since the mid-1980s, the conservation of significant ethnic districts — Chinatown, Little India, Kampong Glam, Bugis Street — even if the end results suffer from the artificiality of “theme-parking”.107 On another subject, the authorities concerned have belatedly come to realize that the public housing estates need not be so rigidly modernist and uninteresting, and that the use of place names with a geographical or historical point can help give the “heartlanders” who live in them a sense of identity and belonging.

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Both the Singapore 21 and the Remaking Singapore committees recommended saving landmarks and opening museums to display artefacts of shared histories and everyday living. This is happily occurring. If people volunteered for community service, this would draw them closer to the community. Bonding through serving — that’s the idea. The Singapore 21 committee said that the newly formed “Community Development Councils [CDCs] have great potential for spearheading work at the community level”.108 Indeed, this potential is being realized. Younger Singaporeans and professionals who were not in grass-roots organizations have joined in the CDC’s various programmes. The proportion of nongrass-roots members in the CDCs “has jumped from 25 per cent in 1997 to 53 per cent in 2004 [seven years after the CDCs began]”.109 Professionals made up about 30 per cent of all CDC members as of 2004. Even more younger Singaporeans and professionals would join the CDC if it expanded its programme to include the rescue and rehoming of stray animals. Singapore has a commendable number of volunteers devoted to animal welfare, giving of their own time and resources, backed by a very sympathetic public media.110 Compassion for animals is a vital part of being and belonging, but this is not reflected in the report of either the Singapore 21 or the Remaking Singapore committee. How a society looks at success is key to its destiny. “We now have an escalator approach to success,” says a Remaking Singapore sub-committee “Young Singaporeans strive to get on the right track in education, graduate, get on to one of the established career paths, and expect to be set for life.”111 The definition of success must be broadened to include other career paths such as that of sportsmen, artists, musicians and entrepreneurs. Creativity and entrepreneurship do not enjoy much prestige in this risk-averse society, yet these are the qualities that will determine its future. On the principle that everyone matters, society should recognize everyone’s work as worthy. Success should mean to excel in work, whatever that work may be — as bus or taxi driver, cook, tailor, cleaner, postman, nurse, and not only as a professional or civil servant. It should mean to be the best one can be in any job or profession.112 With regard to entrepreneurship, the government has, since the publication of the Economic Review Committee’s report of February 2003, created a

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department to promote it. Also, the government now thinks that it should not take so many top scholars into the civil service or government-linked companies, and should release them to do their own start-ups. This assumes that top scholars make good entrepreneurs. But a market practitioner has cited many instances of Singaporeans who are not scholarly types showing exceptional entrepreneurial flair.113 A number in the electronics sector have been very quick in meeting the requirements of their multinational enterprise clients, and also moved offshore to produce more cheaply. Several firms in construction and engineering now derive an important part of their revenue from overseas operations. These firms did not wait for the government to deliver them from their downturn woes. They struck out on their own in hunger — hunger, the mother of all entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurship programme of the Nanyang Technological University clearly also shares in this thinking: it admits not only top scholars but also students with B minus grade if they have the derring-do. In the downturn, some people who were retrenched and fresh graduates unable to find work, turned entrepreneurs. The businesses they started ranged from the consultancy to the culinary. What mattered was their initiative. They too had broken the habit of dependence on the government, in their case, as the jobs creator. Another subject on which attitudinal change is called for is foreign talent. The Singapore 21 committee argued that attracting foreign talent and nurturing local talent are not incompatible. “Foreign talent is not ‘them’ and locals ‘us’. Instead ‘we’ are the same team competing together against the world.”114 Singaporeans worry about foreigners taking away their jobs, and foreign students doing well in Singapore schools and universities. Students from China come for an education in English, and by sheer will, application, and intelligence, emerge top of the form after a few years. Parents of local students know what this means for the prospects of their own children in the future. Then there is the question of encouraging foreign talents to take up permanent residence. The Remaking Singapore Committee called them “the new Singaporeans”.115 But the born-Singaporeans “feel that it is important to increase the differential between the privileges of citizens and that of Permanent Residents (PRs)”.116 The main difference is:

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(1) Citizens can buy flats directly from the HDB, PRs only in the resale market. (2) Citizens get housing grants; they also pay “a fraction of the HDB upgrading costs while PRs pay the full cost”.117 (3) There are monetary incentives for citizens to have more children, and shares from the government’s redistribution schemes. Their children pay no school fees while PRs pay concessionary rates, and foreigners, the full amount in state and state-aided primary and secondary schools. But Singaporeans feel that these privileges are “insufficient” to set them apart from PRs, especially when weighed against the citizen’s duty to do National Service (NS), which PRs do not do.118 They further claim “that some employers choose PRs over citizens so as not to be inconvenienced by NS liabilities”.119 The Singapore Armed Forces arranged for employers to see reservists going through their training exercises, and honoured employers who showed outstanding support for NS, with awards, annually presented since 1986. Only a relatively tiny number of companies out of the many thousands in Singapore have won the SAF award. In 2004, the number was 102. As expected, the leading companies — the multinationals and the governmentlinked companies — were among them. But so was Apex-Pal, a small/ medium enterprise dealing in food and beverage. This company, which has 50 NS men on its staff, has a system of rewarding them for their performance in NS in-camp training, based on feedback from the ministry of defence, and in NS physical proficiency tests.120 The company also has a keep-fit programme so that their men will go back for military training in good shape. It believes, rightly, that fit and dedicated NS men will repay the company by being good at work. The Public Utilities Board (PUB) which is government-linked, also has a scheme for rewarding its large complement of 437 NS men, using feedback from the ministry of defence. The PUB celebrates its men’s NS achievements, such as rank promotions, in its in-house newsletter.121 If more companies in Singapore follow the example of the two cited here, it will certainly allay fears of the inequity of being a NS man vis-à-vis a foreign talent who is a PR.

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How well will foreign talent integrate into the Singapore community? Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, stated on the basis of a survey of foreigners and locals, that “Singaporean respondents were less assured” than foreign ones “of the positive influence and contribution of international talents towards the sense of community in Singapore”.122 In response to a further question, “the majority agreed with the view [proposed in the question] that foreign talent is here only for the benefits they can derive and will have no commitment to the country in times of crisis”.123 But the outbreak of Sars turned up a case to the contrary. “Almost one in three nurses [or 500 out of 1600 nursing staff] at Tan Tock Seng Hospital [designated for Sars patients] is a foreigner”.124 They came from China, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Philippines. They served alongside their Singaporean counterparts, a splendid example of courage and commitment under severe trial and danger. Yeoh and Huang had a good point when they said: “Clearly, permanent settlement in a host country marked by a change of citizenship is becoming less common in the age of mobility.”125 Talented people will choose “different forms of attachment to, and identification with, the host country” and reserve for themselves “the flexibility to successfully navigate in a globalising world”.126 This new game plan works for Singaporeans pursuing their dreams abroad as it does for foreigners coming to Singapore. The Singapore 21 and Remaking Singapore committees saw this as a challenge. On the one hand, they wanted Singaporeans to venture overseas. “Globalisation demands that the Singapore economy has to internationalise to grow and prosper.”127 The Singapore International Foundation ran projects to help young Singaporeans acquire “global skills”.128 On the other hand, the committees were concerned, lest Singaporeans working overseas, and their children enrolled in international schools, were lost to Singapore. How to ensure they will still have “the Singapore heartbeat”?129 One way is to keep up with the overseas Singapore clubs and business associations of which there are ninety-two around the world, with the Singapore International Foundation encouraging their formation. Towards this end, a corporate network, the Majulah Connection, was launched in October 2002, for specially invited members.

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As Singapore restructures its economy, “workers at all levels may find themselves more frequently without or in between jobs”.130 “This will strain our social compact and sense of social cohesion” built up in the good years.131 It will not be enough for the state to just help the lower-income families. That was all right in the past when there was full employment. Now the state has to refocus its social safety net to include even middleclass families suffering layoffs, and, of course, to do this without weakening their resolve to be self-reliant. The Remaking Singapore Committee recommended this change. Additionally, and in keeping with the selfreliance message, it proposed that people out of work should be allowed to dip into their CPF accounts, and to partially remortgage their HDB flats, if need be. Remortgaging is better than “the forced sale of their flats”.132 “To build a country, you need passion,” Lee Kuan Yew said when he was prime minister.133 This, he added, had motivated him and the other first-generation leaders. “It was an act of conviction.”134 Nation-building needs “passion and conviction”.135 It cannot be done, Lee said, on just “materialistic, rational calculations”.136 Prime Minister Goh gave the same message: “I say to all Singaporeans: You have to feel passionately about Singapore.”137 But passion does not come easily to a society built on pragmatism. The Remaking Singapore Committee recognized this dilemma. The committee sat in 2002–03 when the economic outlook was distinctly bleak, and cashing out “to start life anew elsewhere”, a compelling scenario.138 It asked: How can we increase ownership and belonging over and above material needs and physical requirements. How do we create in Singaporeans a sense of passion for this country, that they would stick it out here because this is their home?139 “One avenue,” the committee suggested, “is to nurture greater political and civic participation.”140 This seems to imply that passion will come from engaging in the political process. The focus group discussions and survey results of the Singapore 21 Committee brought out this point more categorically; younger Singaporeans wanted “a greater say in matters that affected them and their country”; their “notions of participation and stakeholdership included the freedom of expression”.141

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What did the government think? How did it define politics? The government defined politics as forming a political party, contesting in an election, and becoming an MP. Thus the younger Singaporeans who speak out should take the plunge, stake their all in the political arena, if they are serious. But, is this the only way politics is to be understood? Should Singapore not broaden the definition of politics as it should the definition of success? If so, how? The following points have emerged in the deliberations of the Singapore 21 and Remaking Singapore committees: (1) Have more “active civic groups”.142 It is the responsibility of Singaporeans to form them, and of the government to “encourage such civic participation”.143 It should be noted that there is a distinction between civic and civil society groups. (2) Reinvent the feedback unit to make it more open. (3) Appoint as chairmen of consultative committees, leaders who are not ministers or MPs, so as to avoid the impression that “the government controls everything”.144 (4) Clarify the out-of-bounds markers for public discourse. In the Remaking Singapore Committee, certain other proposals were raised on which, however, there was no consensus. These included changing the defamation law, redressing government control of the mass media, and allowing more time for notification and greater transparency in the redrawing of electoral boundaries.145 Political liberalization, if any, will be slow. Currently, all the action is on the economic front, as it has always been. In this arena, the government is prepared to relax its control. Government regulation has been stricter and more complex in the services sector than in manufacturing, “partly because of genuine socio-political concerns”.146 This is now changing. The government gives autonomy to local schools and universities, and allows foreign institutes and universities to operate branches here. Healthcare is also being open to foreign players. The government adopts a lighter regulatory touch over the drama, arts, and entertainment scene which it desires to promote. All this is done to make Singapore a vibrant, regional services hub, replete with the quality services that the exponentially growing new middle classes of China, and, for that matter, of India too, will demand. Public housing is also being liberalized. The HDB is starting a pilot project in Tampines to let private developers design, build, price, and sell

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flats. The HDB’s conditions apply, including the household monthly income ceiling of $8,000. Another notable change is that the CPF contribution rate will not be restored to 40 per cent “because of the new realities of global competition”.147 In fact, after the release of the Economic Review Committee’s report, the employer’s contribution rate was cut back again from 16 to 13 per cent, making the overall contribution rate 33 per cent. The new overall target rate is between 30 and 36 per cent. The CPF-computable salary ceiling will be further reduced to $4,500. Anyone who has read the report of the Economic Review Committee will not be surprised by these changes. Globalization is effecting a change of mindset, not least in officialdom. The government now feels that the private sector is more adept than itself in picking winners in the economic race. The government has conceived of airports and airlines in luxury and high value-added terms, but now it is catching up with budget operations in order to secure Singapore’s air hub status. Yet another change is evident in the proposal for a casino with a resort setting, which was previously unimaginable. But, in the matter of politics, caution prevails. The Singapore 21 Committee found that “the younger generation in particular regarded the present political climate of Singapore as unnecessarily restrictive”.148 Nevertheless, they have a chance, indeed are welcome to play a role in the remaking of Singapore, and should take ownership of the situation, walk the talk, go the distance. “In this regard,” says the golf-playing Prime Minister Goh, “the fairway for political discussion and participation is wide, with little chance of the ball going out-of-bounds unless the player deliberately slices it.”149

NOTES 1 “More Good Years”: this was Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s slogan in the 1988 general election. In the next general election, in 1991, called when he was prime minister, the slogan was quite naturally “Go For More Good Years”. 2 Cheah Hock Beng, “Singapore: Towards Sustained Recovery and the ‘New Capitalism’?”, in Southeast Asian Affairs 1990, edited by Ng Chee Yuen and

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3

4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20

Chandran Jeshurun (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 326–28. The employer’s CPF contribution rate was cut from 25 per cent (in 1984 and 1985) to 10 per cent in 1986 and 1987. Starting in 1988, it was gradually restored to 20 per cent in 1994. There was a corresponding change in staggered fashion, in the employee’s CPF contribution, from 25 per cent (in 1984 and 1985) to 20 per cent in 1994. Cheah, “Singapore: Towards Sustained Recovery and the ‘New Capitalism’?”, p. 330. Sree Kumar, “Singapore 1991: Towards New Horizons”, in Southeast Asian Affairs 1992 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), p. 284. Harold Crouch, “An Ageing President, An Ageing Regime”, in Indonesia Assessment 1992, Political Perspectives on the 1990s, edited by Harold Crouch and Hal Hill (Canberra; ANU, 1992), pp. 43–44. Adam Schwarz, A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1999), pp. 122–23; 463–64, note 69. Linda Low, “Rethinking Singapore Inc. and GLCs”, in Southeast Asian Affairs 2002, edited by Daljit Singh and Anthony L. Smith (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), p. 292. Ibid., p. 295. Ibid., p. 293. Quoted by Arun Mahizhnan, “Singapore: Information Technology for an Intelligent Island”, Southeast Asian Affairs 2000, edited by Daljit Singh (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), p. 278. Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore, Report of the Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness (Singapore: SNP Security Printing Pte. Ltd., 1998), p. 19. Straits Times, 25 August 1997. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Tommy Koh, “Size is not Destiny”, in Singapore Re-engineering Success, edited by Arun Mahizhnan and Lee Tsao Yuan (Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies and Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 177 and 184. Jason Tan, “Education in the Early 21st Century: Challenges and Dilemmas”, in Singapore in the New Millennium: Challenges Facing the City State, edited by Derek da Cunha (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), pp. 157–58. The comment of an External Review Team quoted by Jason Tan, ibid., p. 162.

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21 Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, p. 1. 22 Report of the Economic Review Committee, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore, New Challenges, Fresh Goals: Towards a Dynamic Global City (Singapore: SNP SPrint Pte. Ltd., 2003), p. 21; Wong Poh Kam and Ng Chee Yuen, “Singapore: Coping with a Maturing Economy”, in Southeast Asian Affairs 1993, edited by Daljit Singh (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 314. 23 Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, p. 50. 24 Ibid., pp. 135–36. 25 Ibid., p. 136. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Business Times, 22 July 1994. 30 Ibid. 31 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 66, 1996, col. 13 and 14. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., col. 11. 34 Straits Times, 15 May 1996. 35 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 66, 1996, col. 16. 36 Straits Times, 15 May 1996. 37 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 66, 1996, col. 17. 38 Business Times, 22 July 1994; 24–25 September 1994; 28–29 January 1995. 39 Simon Tay, Alien Asian: A Singaporean in America (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1997 second impression, 1998), p. 270. 40 Straits Times, 15 May 1996. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Straits Times, 25 August 1997. 44 Ibid. 45 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), p. 121. 46 Ibid. 47 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 66, 1996, col. 10 and 401. 48 Ibid., p. 545. 49 Ibid. 50 Quoted by Lulin Reutens and Mary Lee, A People’s Wealth, a Nation’s Health: The CPF Story (Singapore: CPF Board, Public Affairs Branch, c. 2000), p. 40. 51 Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, p. 134.

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52 Ibid., p. 25. 53 Ibid., p. 27. 54 Chua Mui Hoong, Maria Almenoar and Teh Joo Lin, A Defining Moment: How Singapore Beat Sars (Singapore: Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2004), pp. 92–110. 55 New Challenges, Fresh Goals, p. 42. 56 Ibid. 57 Anne Booth, “Southeast Asia’s Economic Performance: Achievements and Challenges”, in Southeast Asian Affairs 2004, edited by Daljit Singh and Chin Kin Wah (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004), p. 28. 58 New Challenges, Fresh Goals, p. 94. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., pp. 94–95. 61 Ibid., p. 99. 62 Ibid., pp. 98 and 102. 63 Ibid., p. 79. 64 Ngiam Tong Dow, formerly permanent secretary, Ministry of Finance, on the consequences of land pricing policy, Straits Times, 17 January 2004 and 28 February 2004. 65 Straits Times, 23 December 2004; Today, 23 December 2004. 66 Straits Times, 22 December 2004. 67 Straits Times, 23 April 2004. 68 Straits Times, 11 April 2004. 69 Ibid. 70 New Challenges, Fresh Goals, p. 101. 71 Ibid., p. 114. 72 Ibid., p. 113. 73 Ibid., p. 114. 74 Ibid., pp. 107 and 114. 75 Ibid., p. 113. 76 Ibid., pp. 108 and 113. 77 R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy, Singapore Politics under the People’s Action Party (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 61–62. 78 Ibid., p. 153. 79 New Challenges, Fresh Goals, p. 37. 80 Bridge (October 2003): 1. 81 Straits Times, 3 January 2005. 82 Ibid. 83 New Singapore Shares (Singapore: CPF Board, October 2001), p. 1.

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84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108

109 110

Straits Times, 19 January 2005. Ibid. Straits Times, 29 January 2005. Cohesion (September/October 2003): 5. Ibid. Ibid. Straits Times, 29 July 2004. Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, pp. 18, 43, 81, 88, 90–91, 140–41, 147– 56; New Challenges, Fresh Goals, pp. 12, 14, 59, 63, 65, 141-148, 154–55. Bridge (October 2003): 3. Ibid. Cohesion (September/October 2003): 4 (This magazine was previously identified by volume and issue numbers.) Bridge (October 2003): 3. Ibid. Straits Times, 8 November 2003. Low, “Rethinking Singapore Inc. and GLCs”, p. 283. Straits Times, 12 January 2005. Straits Times, 16 July 2004. Straits Times, 19 February 2005. Today, 10 January 2005. Straits Times, 5 March 2005; 8 March 2005. Singapore 21: Together We Make the Difference (Singapore: Singapore 21 Committee, c/o Prime Minister’s Office, [Public Service Division] 1999), p. 23. Ibid., p. 26; Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships: The Report of the Remaking Singapore Committee (Singapore: Lancer IMC for the Government of Singapore, 2003), pp. 12 and 66. William S.W. Lim, Architecture, Art, Identity in Singapore: Is there Life after Tabula Rasa? (Singapore: Asia Urban Lab, 2004), pp. 2, 30–31. Ibid., pp. 3 and 34. Summary of the Deliberations of the Subject Committee on “Internationalisation/ Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home” (Singapore: Singapore 21 Committee, 1999), p. 11. Straits Times, 12 July 2004. The Sunday Times, 9 January 2005, featured the following: Mrs Cathy Strong, early 50s, Singaporean Chinese businesswoman; Ms Christina Eng, 37, fulltime volunteer; Miss Ednajoy Ngo, 30, health worker; Ms Lee Siew Ying, 52, clinic billings administrator; Ms Lydia Chong, 30s, housewife; Raymund Wee, 54, former flight steward; Ricky Yeo, 36, software programmer; Ms Sandy Lim,

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111 112 113

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123 124

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50, creative consultant in education services; Ms Teeny Teh, 24, marketing executive in an IT company; Ms Wong Wai Ping, 37, businesswoman, and Xie Shaoguang, 43, MediaCorp actor. Beyond Careers Sub-Committee in Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, p. 97. “Internationalisation/Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home”, p. 13. Lim Say Boon, “Still Waiting for ‘The One’ to Deliver Zion”, in Singapore Perspectives 2004: At the Dawn of a New Era, edited by Arun Mahizhnan (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., 2004), pp. 71–72. Summary of the Deliberations of the Subject Committee on “Attracting Talent vs Looking After Singaporeans” (Singapore: Singapore 21 Committee, 1999), p. 30. Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, pp. 11 and 29. “Internationalisation/Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home”, p. 20. Together We Make the Difference, p. 36. Internationalisation/Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home”, p. 20. Ibid. Today, 2 March 2005. Ibid., 8 March 2005. Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, ” ’Foreign Talent’ in Our Midst: New Challenges to Sense of Community and Ethnic Relations in Singapore”, in Beyond Rituals and Riots: Ethnic Pluralism and Social Cohesion in Singapore, edited by Lai Ah Eng (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press and Marshall Cavendish International (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., 2004), p. 333. Ibid. Chua Mui Hoong, Maria Almenoar, Teh Joo Lin, A Defining Moment: How Singapore Beat Sars (Singapore: Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2004), p. 42; Ng Wan Ching, The Silent War, 1 March–31 May 2003 (Singapore: Tan Tock Seng Hospital Pte. Ltd.), pp. 113 and 116. Yeoh and Huang, “ ‘Foreign Talent’ in Our Midst”, p. 330. Ibid., p. 331. Together We Make the Difference, p. 41. Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, p. 30. Together We Make the Difference, pp. 40 and 58. Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, p. 21. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 55. Straits Times, 21 August 1989. Ibid. Ibid.

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136 Ibid. 137 Straits Times, 19 August 1996. 138 Beyond Condo Sub-Committee in Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, p. 91. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 “Internationalisation/Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home”, pp. 17–18. 142 Summary of the Deliberations of the Subject Committee on “Consultation and Consensus vs Decisiveness and Quick Action” (Singapore: Singapore 21 Committee, 1999), p. 12. 143 Ibid. 144 “Internationalisation/Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home”, p. 19. 145 Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationship, pp. 84–88. 146 New Challenges, Fresh Goals, pp. 154–55. 147 www.cpf.gov.sg. 148 “Internationalisation/Regionalisation vs Singapore As Home”, p. 18. 149 Prime Minister Goh’s letter, dated 23 June 2003, to Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, minister of state for national development and chairman, Remaking Singapore Committee, on receiving the report of the committee, in Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior The Hyphenated Singaporean permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are• 597 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T W E N T Y

-ONE

The Hyphenated Singaporean

W

e are not just another country. We are a very unlikely country,” Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said in 1987, with reference to the danger of politicizing religion in Singapore.1 In 1989, when Lee was asked in a Newsweek interview: “What have been your biggest frustrations?”, he replied: “

First and foremost, the fact that we failed in getting Malaysia to succeed with us as one nation. We didn’t want an independent Singapore — it went against our reason and our logic on how to build a stable long-term future as a multiracial community. We considered Singapore not viable. But we were forced to make it viable.2 The British had also badly wanted Malaysia to succeed. Post-war, the British had tried to broker a multiracial political fusion in Malaya, but had had to grant Malaya independence in 1957 without achieving it. Malaysia seemed to be a second chance for the British to try again. Lord Head, the British high commissioner in Malaysia, the relevant and anxious British Government offices, and Sir Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, all urged the same course: that pressure be put on the Tunku “for a more inclusive national government”,3 one that would have leaders from Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak. But British and Commonwealth pressure could not prevail over the internal pressure the Tunku faced from Malay

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nationalism. The power of Malay nationalism: it was the same story as before, but this time, Lee Kuan Yew shared the melancholy of the British failure. For it prognosticated the expulsion of Singapore, which Lee said he would look back on each time as “a moment of anguish”.4 However, looking on the bright side, he did not have to worry anymore about the Tunku or the ultra Malay nationalists. The threat of being displaced or detained no longer hung over him. He was free from all that now. He had, in fact, come out of Malaysia stronger than when he entered it. Merger, as he had correctly judged, was the perfect issue on which to defeat the communists. Lee said in retrospect: Without Malaysia, those two years, we would not have made it because the place was too fractious, too quarrelsome, the communists were too powerful, too many strikes, too many troubles. Two years in Malaysia taught everybody a real lesson that if we want to survive, we submerge our differences and get going.5 However, these differences persisted. And the real lesson was still to come, and it was about who’d call the shots in post-1965 Singapore. The English-educated, whose hallmark political conviction was to be “Malayan” now adjusted to being “Singaporean”, still retaining their ideal of multiracialism. They had known what it was like to be browbeaten by ultra Malay nationalists. The Chinese-educated, on the other hand, saw Singapore’s independence as an opportune moment for Chinese language and culture to achieve more prominence. Their hopes and expectations on this issue ran contrary to PAP policy. Conflict was thus inevitable between the Chinese-educated majority and the English-educated ruling elite.

Politics of Identity: The Chinese Majority Dick Wilson, an editorial adviser to the Straits Times group, witnessed this conflict unfold: One of the biggest struggles by the PAP government during the 1960s was to steer the new Chinese university [called Nanyang

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University] away from the communist-cum-nationalistic Chinese domination under which it fell shortly after its foundation. Nantah, as this institute of higher learning is familiarly called, now finds itself in the position of teaching partly in English and partly in Chinese, with the objective of producing from the Chinese-language schools a genuinely bilingual elite. But as the 1970s opened, the PAP came under increasing attack from the Chinese press for allowing the Chinese university and schools to become partly anglicized. The possibility of pressure from below for the government to become more Chinese in its attitudes and policies, and to accord the Chinese language a more important status in society, constitutes one of the major sources of political tension in the 1970s.6 Wilson even ventured to predict: “It is likely, in fact, that the post-Lee leadership of the 1980s will come from the Chinese stream.”7 By this he meant the Chinese-educated who will motivate themselves to learn English and become bilingual. “The bilinguals will hold the key to Singapore politics, and they are likely to be more Chinese than western in their values; much more so than the present leadership.”8 Dick Wilson’s scenario did not come true. As Lee Kuan Yew once said, history never happens in the way it is written.9 Yet, what historical explanation may be given in this particular case? It is useful to start by noting that the laisser-faire system of education in British times had produced two different world views. The Englisheducated, like for example, the top PAP leaders who were schooled locally and in U.K. universities, regarded the West as the model of modernity and progress. They took a pragmatic view of the English language as giving access to mathematics, science, and technology which are essential for economic development. They espoused a Malayan nationalism. When the PAP first took office, it conducted a cultural policy with the political merger with Malaya in mind. The cabinet line-up included S. Rajaratnam as minister of culture (1959–65), who attempted to create a Malayan culture. Professor Enright took a dig at this cultural policy and drew fire on himself. Art, Enright

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said, could not be created by fiat. However, Rajaratnam looked beyond art and literature when he defined culture. He referred to the political and economic institutions, values and practices shared by a particular social group. In this sense, “there is a developing cultural environment which influences and shapes the attitudes of Malays, Chinese, and Indians alike”.10 Undeniably, there were also communal cultures to which people were more emotionally attached. But Rajaratnam believed that through education and a common language, the different races could learn to become more consciously Malayan. Rajaratnam identified the common language as Malay, which the PAP made Singapore’s national language, along with a national anthem, Majulah Singapura, sung in Malay. Rajaratnam saw a future for the Malay language as the medium through which a Malayan literature and culture would be developed. This did not signal doom for the other languages, Chinese, Tamil, and English, he assured, adding they could also be “a means of enriching Malayan culture”.11 But the Malay language began to gain public interest and prominence as never before or since. Civil servants studied Malay, teachers in non-Malay medium schools had to pass Standard One Malay, and their students took Malay as a second language. Among the general public, adults flocked to Malay classes. This Malayan culture, and study-Malay phase came to an end with Singapore’s exit from Malaysia in 1965. Post 1965, Rajaratnam was not as keen as he was before to pursue a cultural policy. The reason is pretty obvious. Singapore, being a predominantly Chinese society, if there is to be a cultural policy, Chinese will have a prominent role in it just like Malay previously. The Englisheducated ruling elite would not countenance this, let alone the ethnic minorities, who would be certain to resist it. Rajaratnam was now more anxious to deflect attention away from culture. Nor was he keen to encourage the sense of Singapore nationalism, the first stirrings of which emerged during Singapore’s embattled time in Malaysia. Singapore’s time in Malaysia was short because Malay nationalism would not accept the reality of a multiracial Malaysian nation. Singapore learned a bitter lesson from nationalism turned communalism, as evidenced

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in the communal riots inflicted on it. From this we may infer that Rajaratnam was unsure what nationalism would lead to in independent Singapore, and whether there would not be a recrudescence of Chinese nationalism. The clues to Rajaratnam’s thinking are to be found in his speeches. In 1969, he had no qualms making speeches commemorating the colonial origins of Singapore one-hundred-and-fifty years ago. He said: You’ll have noticed that we have not been very strident about creating a so-called Singaporean. We’re not really particular about Singapore nationalism… Nationalism should become a philosophy of national development.12 What Rajaratnam meant by national development was education, urban renewal, and industrial planning. In undertaking them, the government was investing in the future. So “the orientation of our peoples”, he said, should also be “towards the future”.13 They had their communal languages and cultures, which should be regarded as Singapore’s “cultural capital”.14 But here he seems to have been in two minds. This cultural capital, he said, should be encouraged to grow and flourish. Yet he warned against deriving inspiration from “the cultural achievements of our remote past” and making the past “the core of our identity [and] the touchstone of our sense of community”.15 Choosing to commit to the future is, Rajaratnam went so far as to say, “the only basis on which a multiracial and multicultural society can maintain its unity and coherence”.16 The real sense of unity will come not from an appreciation of traditional cultures imported from distant lands, but from commitment to the modern, technological 21st-century Singapore that the Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians, and others must jointly create.17 They would then be a people loyal to Singapore and “immune to the tugs and pulls of ancestral lands”.18

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The Chinese-educated looked upon the modern world of powerful Western nations and superior Western technology in a different way from their English-educated counterparts. They were influenced by the Chinese version of nationalism which came “after a series of humiliations” and defeats at the hands of the West and Japan, and consequently was “infused with a mixture of despair and strident bitterness”.19 The English-educated Malayan nationalists knew no such turmoil and pain. For them, the modern nation and modern technology were things they simply accepted from the West. The West had already historically fought its way out from the feudal to the modern age. There was no need to refight this battle in Singapore/Malaya.20 The response of the Chinese-educated to the West was more complicated and embattled. They desired to make China strong to stand up to the West. They were caught up in that intellectual and political storm known as the May Fourth movement. This was China’s struggle with the forces of feudalism and imperialism to reach its modern destiny. It spawned a new literary culture written in Mandarin, and raised national pride in Mandarin to its zenith. Because of their May Fourth heritage, the Chinese-educated could not treat language in the same way as the English-educated who gave Malay a symbolic value, and English a material value. Language meant much more to them. Mandarin was critical to their sense of ethnic and national identity. Thus, they could not easily accept the PAP’s policy of running the state, economy, and society using primarily English. They argued that Mandarin was equally capable of delivering the modernization and good life that was the goal of the nation builder.21 The Anglicization of Singapore in colonial times had consigned them to nullity. One of them wrote in an essay in 1954, around the time of Nantah’s founding: If a Chinese has mastery of his own language, and through this linguistic tool, gains other scientific knowledge and philosophic thought, that’s not treated as knowledge. Because of this, the people trained by the Chinese-language education system find their talents neglected by others. This explains why many graduates of Chinese

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universities and Chinese high schools find themselves uncertain, cast down, at a dead end.22 Under PAP rule, Anglicization in education would accelerate. However, as we have noted in this study and shall elaborate further here, the talents of the Chinese-educated were not totally neglected. Lee Kuan Yew was to find more than one way to salvage them. In fact, the salvaging of their talents was one of Lee’s great challenges. It is a subject on which, unfortunately, we know very little because it has not been researched.

Recognizing Merit and Redressing Class Disadvantage Lee realized that the dominance of English in the government and the workplace would be a problem for large numbers of the Chinese-educated and the Malay-educated too. Their talents were being wasted through not knowing English. He would have to try a different method of identifying talent that takes little account of English proficiency. He decided to admit students from the Chinese stream into the English-medium University of Singapore, and requested the university to give them remedial English courses. He gave them scholarships to English-speaking countries. He opened the public service to Nantah graduates. He had to discount their linguistic competence and give higher weightage to their grades in subjects like maths., physics, chemistry, biology (indicating that they were science students). He gauged them on their intelligence. “As a result,” Lee said, “we did not have bright students [boys as well as girls] stuck in lowly jobs”.23 Another reason why this method was tried seems to have been to moderate the advantage of “class”, i.e., “the better home environment” that the English-educated generally enjoyed.24 The PAP understood the revolutionary temper of Singapore in the 1950s, and when they took office in 1959, Lee revealed, “we decided to select students for university scholarships and for jobs on the basis of their ability”, making a concession for “poor command of the English language for those from the Chinese stream and the Malay stream”.25

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These measures bought time for the PAP to carry out the economic and education policies that would transform Singapore. The PAP attracted in multinationals whose language was English. This had profound implications for its education policy. The integration of schools of different language streams, and the bilingual experiment, both of which started in 1960, were increasingly dominated by the imperative of learning English. As parents realized the market value of English, enrolment in schools not teaching in English at first-language level steadily fell. The Chinese chamber of commerce joined other interested organizations in lobbying on behalf of the Chinese-medium schools. Teachers conducted home visits to persuade parents.26 The radio, Rediffusion, and Chinese press carried supporting messages. The government came under fire, and as the criticisms grew more virulent, it meted out exemplary punishment. It had earlier (in 1963) dealt with Tan Lark Sye, president of Nantah’s governing body. In 1971, it imprisoned senior executives of the Nanyang Siang Pau, the leading Chinese newspaper. The historian Wang Gungwu, who has an interest in studying elites, said of the success of the English-educated PAP elite, that it “underlines the importance of actually holding power”.27 Power was certainly crucial. Still, Lee had to wait twenty years (1959 to 1979) for the political explosiveness of the language and education issue to wear out. Explaining these twenty years of waiting, Lee said: We knew that with the administration and commerce in English, the new factories and the banks employing and needing graduates in English, it was a terrible imposition to send 18-year-olds to complete a three-to-four-year university course in Mandarin at Nanyang University and then learn English in government departments, on-the-job, taking five to seven years before they were effective. But if we had been logical and decided to cut out this wastage of human energy and talent, we would have let off violent emotions that would have shattered our fragile society. We had to wait till parents and students came to a realization on their

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own, as a result of their own experience; only then could we begin to move.28 These were also twenty years in which he had borne with incomprehensible sentences in reports emanating from the top echelons of the public services. By 1979, he decided this must not continue. He would reverse the policy of ignoring linguistic competence. One reason was that the government and the public would suffer: “We cannot afford to tolerate slipshod writing without grievous results”.29 Another reason was that Lee was launching a slew of reforms which were interconnected. In 1978, he sent good students from the Chinese stream to selected English-medium schools. This was to prepare the way for the SAP schools. In the same year, he sent Nantah students to a joint campus at the University of Singapore. Both measures were intended to improve English proficiency, and the joint-campus scheme was, additionally, a prelude to absorbing Nantah into an English-medium national university. In 1978, Lee asked Dr Goh Keng Swee to look into education. The schools were bilingual. But bilingualism on such a large scale from primary one up was near impossible, and the failure rate was astounding. Dr Goh’s team of systems engineers arrived at the controversial solution to channel students into separate streams, differentiated by ability. Amidst all this overhaul in the area of language and education, Lee called a meeting with his ministers, ministers of state, and senior civil servants on 27 February 1979. It was to discuss “the importance of simple, clear, written-English”, and how they could help each other improve.30 He informed them that Dr Goh had handed out Gower’s Plain Words (a manual for British civil servants)31 to his officers in the ministry of defence, and arranged for promising officers, in batches of ten, to take lessons. Lee decided that, as of 1979, with “every passing year we shall more and more assess the worth of our officers for their language competence”.32 He added: “It would take ten to twenty years to make up for” the previous twenty of going easy on language.33 At this time, there was, in fact, not one but two language problems that Lee was determined to resolve. English was one, and Mandarin the other. In

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the case of English, Lee addressed the top echelons of the public services. He believed that since they could reach the top, they had no excuse not to improve, and he meant to persuade them to do it. With regard to Mandarin, Lee’s target audience was the whole Chinese community. The Chinese were divided into several dialect speech groups. Lee urged them to change to speaking Mandarin as it would help their children learning Mandarin under the compulsory bilingual school system. To reinforce his message, he would allow only Mandarin programmes to be aired. He coupled this ban on dialects with the “Speak Mandarin Campaign”, which he inaugurated on 7 September 1979, and which has been repeated annually ever since. In the 1981 campaign, he said “without making Mandarin the mother tongue in place of dialects, our policy of bilingualism will not succeed”.34

Chinese Education and Elites in Singapore and Malaysia Compared In the same period, the 1970s, the Chinese in Malaysia were also challenged by changes in the education system there. There was the same problem of falling enrolment in Chinese medium schools as in Singapore. There was, as well, the Malaysian Government’s policy to convert non-Malay-medium secondary schools into national schools teaching in Malay. The Chinesemedium secondary schools faced a tough choice as the Malaysian Government refused to fund or recognize secondary schools which opted out of the national system. At this point “a new breed of leaders” came on the school committees and made a difference.35 They “included [Chinese educated] professionals, lawyers, in particular,” and “middle-level businessmen”.36 They “reinvigorated” the [Malaysian] United Chinese Schools Committees’ Association. The professionals were there “for the first time”.37 They found a more effective way to raise funds to keep the Chinesemedium secondary schools going as Independent Chinese Schools (ICS). They introduced “journalism, computer, and commercial classes”.38 They “obtained recognition for ICS examinations as the basis for entry to the National University of Singapore”, and universities in Taiwan, Australia, Britain, and the United States.39 The recognition by the National University of Singapore is remarkable as one more way in which Singapore gets the

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talents it wants from Malaysia. But it is also ironic in view of the mutation of the republic’s own Chinese university and Chinese high schools. The enterprising ICS initiatives of the Malaysian Chinese elites would not have been possible in Singapore because Singapore citizens had to put their children in national schools, and were not allowed to enrol them in private schools while in Singapore. Except for the odd individual, the Chinese-educated elites of Singapore preferred to work with the PAP Government rather than against it. The clan and business leaders have not behaved like the Malaysian Chinese elites involved in the ICS who would challenge “the political and cultural hegemony” of their government.40 The Singapore Chinese leaders have redirected their ambitions and resources from running Chinese-medium schools to organizing the officially approved Chinese festivals and arts. (More of this later). They seem to have tacitly agreed to a trade-off: the PAP would build the economy that prospered their businesses, and they in turn accepted the PAP’s hegemony. So the PAP, through a combination of beneficial economic management and benevolent autocracy, has ensured that Dick Wilson’s scenario about the Chinese-educated taking over from Lee’s generation had no chance. Lee searched for and tutored an English-educated technocratic elite to succeed. The dominance of the English-educated in Singapore politics continued into the second generation, and has now even passed on to the third one. Again, a comparison with the situation in Malaysia is enlightening. When Tan Siew Sin, the English-educated Baba stepped down as MCA president in 1974, his successor, Lee San Choon, was contrastingly “a president who had risen from the ranks, who was completely fluent in Chinese (though he knew English too), and who had a strong empathy for Chinese aspirations”.41 Lee San Choon resigned in 1983 because, rumour has it, he could not get on with Prime Minister Dr Mahathir.42 There was a period of leadership crisis in the MCA which ended with the election of Tan Koon Swan as president in November 1985. Tan was the managing director of a huge MCA conglomerate, Multi-Purpose Holdings Berhad, whose shares were held by many lower-middle-class Chinese associated with his predecessor, Lee San Choon, and many small Chinese traders and investors.43 The support of the Chinese-educated in the MCA had been decisive in helping Tan win the party’s top post.

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Soon the spotlight was on him again for a different reason. In January 1986, he was arrested in Singapore for wrongdoing in a company, PanElectric Industries, in which he was the majority shareholder. Wang Gungwu, who was visiting Malaysia, witnessed the reaction of different groups of Chinese there. On the whole, they were all shocked by what the Singapore authorities did. The response of the older generation of Englisheducated was mainly one of resignation: if Tan Koon Swan had broken the law, let the law deal with him. But those, including the new elites, for whom Chineseness was a major political issue, were angry and many took to the streets to display that anger at Singapore’s lack of sympathy with their cause. There were threats against Singapore which drew from the Singapore Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, the provocative remark: ‘The MCA is not in charge of Malaysia’. MCA’s fury at him for making that remark, no less than at the remark itself, reveals an interesting new difference between the Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia… It is obvious that the English-educated Chinese of Singapore had achieved dominance over the Chinese-educated. The PAP leadership through Mr Goh Chok Tong was exuding the confidence of the victorious, in contrast to the Chinese-educated elites in Malaysia, who felt nothing less than emotional impotence at their predicament and at the emasculation of their counterparts in Singapore.44

A Political, Not Moral, Victory This was a political victory, but it did not imply any moral or cultural superiority over the vanquished. Indeed, far from it; the English-educated PAP elite had a healthy respect for the dedication and sacrifice of Chineseeducated activists, and attributed it to the moral values taught in Chinesemedium schools. And the PAP wanted these values to be retained in a rapidly modernizing Singapore that lay wide open to the inroads of the

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counterculture of the West. The PAP believed that Singapore could never be more than a superficially Westernized society, and that such a society was not worth having, ironically coming round to thinking as the Chineseeducated did. Therefore, it should intervene to promote Asian values. One example of the superficial understanding of the West was the way the local university regarded academic freedom. Lee told the local and expatriate academic staff contesting the state that they had missed a vital point: the great universities they were emulating were committed to serving their country’s national interests. It was to set a national direction for the local university that Dr Toh Chin Chye came as vice-chancellor. Dr Toh’s hiring of Asians in preference to Caucasians for the arts and social sciences presaged the Asian values debate of the 1980s. The Confucian ethics promotion in schools and society at large under Dr Goh and Lee’s direction, and the search for national values initiated by Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, were landmarks in this debate. A belligerent note was introduced as events sparked off an ideological clash between Singapore and the United States. In 1988, the discovery of an American embassy plot to foster opposition politics in Singapore caused the PAP to assert that Singapore must create its own model of government by grafting Confucian principles onto the Westminster template. The caning of an American teenager in 1994 for vandalism put Singapore on the map for Americans. The battle lines were drawn between the American liberal human rights school and the Singapore school based on Asian values. The next episode concerned the lawsuits in 1994–95 brought against the International Herald Tribune, and Christopher Lingle, an American lecturer at the National University of Singapore, for defaming, the prosecution said, what could only have been the Singapore judiciary.45 Yet another controversy occurred when Williams College, Goh Chok Tong’s alma mater, conferred him an honorary doctorate in 1995, and a dissenting group organized a forum to protest against it. Simon Tay, a Singaporean Chinese, was a Fulbright scholar reading for LL.M. at the Harvard Law School when the caning of the American teenager happened. Tay took a qualified, balanced position on the issue which cut no ice with either his American Harvard peers or the American media.46 An

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article, based on his prize-winning thesis which his thesis supervisor recommended for publication by the Harvard Law School’s journal, ended up instead in the law journal of McGill University. “McGill,” Tay points out, is “tellingly a Canadian university”.47 Tay’s thesis and subsequent article was an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between Eastern and Western perspectives on the issue of human rights.48 The relevance of his article was being fast overtaken by events. Both the American and Singaporean sides, as he was aware, were digging in their heels. Perhaps the differences that he was trying to bridge were unbridgeable anyway. Certainly the PAP Government did not turn to bridge-builders like Simon Tay, but to the people who would erect a bastion of Asian values as a defence against the West. The PAP turned to the Chinese clans.

Chinese Clans Chinese clans and dialect associations have seen their role diminished as people moved to new towns and the government started grass roots committees. More crucially, they no longer ran Chinese-medium schools. But they enjoyed renewed relevance in 1984 amidst the Confucian ethics promotion in which their support was solicited and warmly given. Ong Teng Cheong, second deputy prime minister, with a brief that included “Chinese affairs”, met clan leaders in late 1984, and gave them the government’s endorsement49 for what followed: a national seminar on 2 December 1984 in which a resolution was passed leading to the formation of the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA) on 27 January 1986. Seven leading dialect associations were the founder members. The government’s purpose for the clans was clearly conveyed in Lee Kuan Yew’s message to the Singapore Char Yong Association in 1989: “Clan associations can generate activities which will promote traditional values and prevent their erosion by Western values and customs purveyed through television, magazines, and travel.”50 Following this advice, the SFCCA has, since 1991, organized the Lunar New Year (River Hongbao) Festivals, which have shifted from the Singapore River to Marina Bay. In

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1995, the SFCCA opened the Chinese Heritage Centre at the Nanyang Technological University. Cheng Lim Keak, an authority on Chinese clans, has raised a pertinent question: Can Chinese values be transmitted without the study of Chinese literature (old and modern classics) in schools as in days of yore? The SFCCA faced “an uphill task”, he said, unless the Chinese language was given a higher status in schools and in public administration.51

The Chinese Cultural Shrine For this project, the PAP Government looked to the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The Chinese chamber was the established leader and arbiter of the Chinese community. Before the SFCCA was founded, clans referred their problems to it. Among its many responsibilities was one concerned with looking after a villa that Sun Yat Sen used in his visits to Singapore. It held the title to the villa. At the government’s behest,52 the Chinese chamber refurbished the villa as the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, opened in 2001. Why? George Yeo, whose idea it was, understood ethnicity, history, and culture as valuable resources for Singapore. He was concerned to encourage Singaporeans to play on a bigger stage, to engage the region and the world, undaunted by the tiny size of their island nation. After all, in the past, the towkays had done just this: from a base in Singapore they had led the region in business (creating profitable networks), in politics (rallying the Nanyang to save China in war), and in education (with the Chinese High School and Nanyang University to show for it). The present generation of Singaporeans faced the challenges of globalization and the rise of China. George Yeo motivated them saying: Singaporeans played a significant role in the Chinese revolution of 1911, which was not only a political revolution but also a cultural revolution, which changed the way Chinese all over the world saw themselves. That altered the course of history and we should be proud of the contributions of our forefathers.53

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An unkind critic might see the memorial hall project as an attempt to invent a synthetic historical connection to China and the Chinese diaspora, to replace the real one which had evolved naturally and reached its apogee with Nanyang University. Such a critic might further see the project as having the objective to stake Singapore’s claim as a centre in an economically vibrant new Chinese world order, an objective that Nantah might have served with greater honour had it but existed. But this critic would have forgotten how politicized Nantah had been, and politicized by the communists at that. The memorial hall project was possible only because the government had disempowered the Chinese-educated, particularly the radicals. The memorial hall established a link with China’s modern history, but the PAP Government was careful about what aspects of that history to associate itself with. The new culture using Mandarin and the greater freedom for women promoted by the May Fourth movement were acceptable, but not the radical and communist ideologies, and the cultural iconoclasm (attacks on Confucian and other traditional ideas), which were ignored. However, the PAP was not alone in doing this. As David Kenley observes: Since the close of the New Culture Era, the movement has been subjected to repeated interpretation and reinterpretation by political parties, historians, and ‘Sinologists’ of every sort. Perhaps this should not be a surprise, since the movement was such a mosaic of ideas and individuals.54 Kenley notes that both the Kuomintang Party and the Chinese Communist Party have their official versions of the movement. The PRC “still commemorates May 4 as a national holiday”, and “even today the (PRC) government uses and manipulates” the icons of the movement “in untold ways”.55 With reference to Singapore, Sally Borthwick writes: “their May Fourth heritage is the unique possession of the Chinese educated”.56 Huang Jianli and Hong Lysa have argued what the PAP Government’s selective reading

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and overgeneralizing of modern Chinese history have done to this heritage. Firstly, it has allowed the PAP Government “to make an unproblematic construction of its [own] connection to modern Chinese history”.57 Secondly, it “cuts the ground from under the former PAP Chinese-educated radical faction that saw itself during Singapore’s anti-colonial phase as the rightful heir to the anti-traditionalist May Fourth movement”.58 David Kenley, in the conclusion to his book on the May Fourth new culture in Singapore, states that Singapore leaders and intellectuals have rejected the “Chinese nationalism, cultural iconoclasm, and political liberalism” which were “some of the primary characteristics of the New Cultural Era”.59 Singapore elites have turned, instead, to the New Confucianism. “Even businessmen,” Kenley continues, “who have helped turn Singapore into a ‘little economic dragon’, praise the beneficial effects of Confucianism and other traditional Chinese practices that have helped create the immensely successful ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ found throughout East Asia today.”60 Fittingly, although Kenley does not mention this, the Chinese businessmen of Singapore have sponsored the construction of the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall. But the memorial hall was officially billed as “a cultural shrine”,61 emphasizing the fact that it celebrated ethnicity, history, culture, and we may add, economics too, in a controlled, sanitized, non-political context.

Politics of Identity: The Minority Groups Multiracial and multicultural equality was declared the cornerstone of the Singapore nation in 1965. This was intended to allay the fears of the minority ethnic groups. However, the “Speak Mandarin” Campaigns, the SAP schools, and the Confucian ethics promotion in the 1980s led them to doubt if there was still parity. As they saw it, a disproportionate sum was expended on the programmes for the Chinese. More disquieting still was the thought that the government aimed not just to resinicize the Chinese, but to sinicize everybody else too. As a result, the minority groups began to reassert their ethnic and cultural identities.

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The government had no problems with this, and indeed favoured it. The government had been depicting ethnic groups in broad categories as Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. With the increase in ethnic consciousness caused by its policy in the 1980s it was prepared to recognize ethnic sub-groups as well, such as Sikhs who did not want to be subsumed under the broad category “Indian”, and Eurasians, who disliked being classified under “Others”. The concern of ethnic minorities for recognition was evident when the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) were introduced in 1987. There was a Select Committee to hear submissions from the public before the GRC bills were enacted into law. Indians who constituted 7 per cent of the population accounted for 37 per cent of submissions to the Select Committee, the same number as the Chinese who constituted 76 per cent of the population. The Select Committee acceded to the many Indian requests that the word “Indian” “should be expressly mentioned” in the definition of “minority” in the GRC bills.62 Malays sent in 20 per cent of the submissions received by the Select Committee, a high number for a community that was 15 per cent of the population. Several Malay submissions objected to the definition of the Malay community in the draft GRC bills as it included Arabs and some Malay types (Javanese, Boyanese, Bugis) but left out some others. They further wanted the definition of a Malay to include the condition that “he should also be a Muslim”.63 The Select Committee demurred. It deemed it “neither prudent nor appropriate” to bring in religion as a qualification for political candidacy.64 It acceded, however, to a proposal to have a “Malay Community Committee to certify Malay candidates”.65 There was another committee to complement it known as the “Indian and Other Minority Communities Committee”.66 The GRCs were initiated in consultation with the minority groups. The Select Committee accommodated their views as far as possible, but also insisted on maintaining the principle of separating religion and politics. This principle was fundamental to the Singapore Government’s management of ethnicity. The need for certification entails some administrative work during election time, and this work is anything but routine. In the May 2006

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polls, James Gomez claimed to have submitted his Minority Candidate Certificate when he had, in fact, put it into his bag!

The Malay Community To Malays, being Muslim was a more critical identity marker than even the Malay language or Malay adat (culture). This was the view of Englisheducated Malay professionals. They talked of purging Malay culture of unIslamic elements, mentioning for example, the wayang kulit (shadow play) which depicted Hindu mythological figures.67 They wanted Malays to observe Islamic values in their everyday life, if they were women, to wear the tudung. “Our mothers do not wear tudung,” one of them said, “but now the tudung is a big issue for them.”68 The views of the Malay professionals resonated with the upsurge of religious fervour seen among the believers all over the world in recent decades. “The phenomenon of Islamic resurgence caught many people by surprise,” Yang Razali Kassim said.69 Non-Muslims, and even some Muslims, have oversimplified the issues involved. Tudung-wearing was “misunderstood as a sign of radicalism”.70 The Islamic resurgence has been explained as being at a deeper level, “the Islamic world’s encounter with modernity”.71 In showing greater religiosity, Yang argued, Muslims were not turning their back on modernity. Islam is compatible with modernity. But “because modernity has [come with] a lot of problems… a lot of degradation of moral values… the solution [for Muslims] is to hold on to their religious values…”72 This is the familiar Asian values argument with an Islamic emphasis. The government recognized the importance of Islam to Malays. It established the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS), Singapore Muslim Religious Council, in 1968, to oversee Muslim affairs and advise the government.73 The government also provided land at below market rates, and an agency to collect funds to build “new-generation” mosques in public housing estates. Twenty-two were built between 1975 and 2004. One problem which the government found was that Malays made the mosque their social centre, and did not join grass roots organizations like

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the residents’ committee. In part this was because the “new generation” mosque had everything they needed: conference room, library, multi-purpose hall, funeral parlour, and prayer hall. Another reason was that activities in the community clubs conflicted with their prayer time. Another issue to note is that MUIS “seems to command less allegiance” than “non-governmental Islamic institutions such as Jamiyah” though this is a problem common to secular states which govern Muslim communities.74 The Jamiyah Singapore was a missionary society which seemed to have Arab influence. In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia aggressively proselytized a fundamentalist doctrine and funded mosques, madrasahs, and welfare organizations in Muslim countries.75 King Khalid and other Arab donors contributed to the Jamiyah Singapore’s new building, opened in 1985. Though the Jamiyah is a NGO, nothing has prevented the Singapore Government from cooperating with its welfare department: a children’s home, an old-age home, and a halfway house for ex-drug addicts.76 The Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) which had a cell in Singapore, aspired to set up a Pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia. Like radical Islamists elsewhere, the JI placed religion above the nation, religious solidarity among Muslims above national solidarity.77 They were more ready to fight and die for their religion than to fight and die for their country. They were against the West, in particular, the United States, for pursuing the strategic interests that they considered unjust to the Islamic world, and purveying the kind of values repugnant to Muslim societies.78 The JI members arrested in Singapore included “businessmen [and] professionals, or technical personnel”. “These were not economically deprived individuals without a stake in Singaporean society.”79 Their joining the JI seems to indicate “the limits of economic and social policies in preventing militancy”.80 But, it has to be stressed, they were not representative of the Singapore Malay community whose people were proud of the nation which had included them in its success and prosperity. They certainly felt better off than their coethnics in neighbouring countries. They also lived with a greater degree of interracial harmony which they had helped to create. Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, the minister in charge of Muslim Affairs said:

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During my visits abroad, very often the people I meet would marvel at our strong community life here in Singapore. They often wonder how the different races and religious communities can coexist harmoniously. It is critical that we protect this jealously, and more importantly, find ways to grow it.81 Singapore Muslims had a national pride grounded in economic progress and multiracial goodwill that set them apart from the JI. One commentator said: “Singapore Muslims show little desire to share in a pan-Islamic identity that might involve them in the problems of their neighbours.”82 They tended to see Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia as a threat to their nation, Singapore. They have a minister overseeing Muslim affairs who advised them that they “can be both Muslim and Singaporean”.83 He cautioned them not to be misled “by calls that Muslims can only exist in an Islamic state”.84 Living in a secular state, they can, he said, contribute meaningfully “to nation-building and humanity”.85

The Indian Community Indians have successfully claimed “a distinct role for their languages and their religious and cultural identity” in Singapore’s multiracial society. Tamil schools have closed, but Tamil remains a second language in schools. The ministry of education has opened nine Tamil Language Centres, and completed upgrading one of them, the Umar Pulavar Tamil Language Centre, in 2001, with facilities like a media resource library, an IT laboratory, and seminar rooms.86 Tamils formed 63.9 per cent of the Indian community. Since 1994, other Indian groups have had their languages included among the second languages offered by students as examinable subjects.87 But these other Indians had to organize their own language classes outside normal school hours and bear the costs. The languages concerned were Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and Bengali. But not Malayalam because the Malayalees, though forming the second largest group (8.1 per cent), after the Tamils, were too fragmented by religion (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity of the

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Marthomite, Jacobite, Roman Catholic, and other denominations) for the concerted effort needed.88 The Singapore Kerala Association was regarded as belonging to Hindu-Malayalees by the other Malayalees. This presents a contrast with the Punjabis, the third largest Indian group (7.8 per cent), who have a common religion, Sikhism, the Central Sikh Temple, and the commonly accepted Singapore Khalsa Association.89 Influenced by the identity-driven politics of Sikhs globally, Singapore Sikhs “pushed hard” for the right to list “Sikh” and not “Indian” as their race, and Sikhism as their religion on official documents.90 They had state-licensed channels, the Sikh Advisory Board and Sikh MPs, to present their requests. The Sikh Advisory Board, successfully persuaded the government to include Sikhism (the Sikh Studies option) in the religious study programme in schools. The chances of success were better if there were “‘coinciding interests’ between the state’s agenda and that of the Sikhs”.91 The argument which the Sikhs used that the Punjabi language was needed to transmit Sikh values, a variant of Asian values, was shrewdly customized to fit the state’s requirements. Again, when Sikh professionals identified an underclass in their community to help, they were following a principle that the government favoured, whereby elites help those of their own ethnic group who lag behind. In return for the “gains” the Sikhs obtained, the government imposed “certain costs”, and not only in the material sense, such as paying for the preparation of the Sikh Studies option, the Punjabi classes, and the community self-help services. The price the Sikhs had to pay involved giving up a political cause very close to their hearts. They were not allowed to commemorate the storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar by Indian troops, or to hold requiems for Sikh martyrs in their temples in Singapore.92 Some Sikhs have found this restriction extremely hard to live with.93

The Eurasian Community Eurasians constituted less than one per cent of the population in the 1990 Singapore census. The Eurasian image changed from one of respectability to marginality with the passing of the colonial era. The things that

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distinguished them — Roman Catholicism, command of English, government service, journalism, penchant for sports and music, and middleclass lifestyle — were no longer so exclusively theirs.94 They read the trend of government policies in the 1980s as leading “towards the creation of an increasingly Chinese Singapore, rather than a Singaporean Singapore”; and felt particularly vulnerable as they were a small and dwindling community.95 Many emigrated “from 1985 to 1989 and the flow has not stopped”.96 Eurasians were also uneasy with the official classification of ethnic groups as Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Others, also known as the CIMO model. People, including the Eurasians themselves, began to wonder “who the Eurasians are”. “To fit the context of distinguishable ethnicity, we Eurasians must define ourselves,” advised Myrna Braga-Blake.97 So there was a revival of Eurasian culture in Singapore with the help of older Eurasian settlements like Malacca and Macau. The patois known as Kristang had ceased to be spoken in Singapore whose Eurasian elites had long identified with the English language. Younger Eurasians began to take an interest in Kristang, and in a dance called the Branyo, performed with old Portuguese folk costume. The government supported Eurasian ethnicity in the usual pragmatic fashion. It leased the Eurasian Association (EA) a plot of land for a clubhouse, footed eighty per cent of the construction cost, and tasked it with the responsibility of looking after the Eurasian underclass.98 George Yeo accepted the EA’s request to be the “Minister for Eurasians”. He said: “As a Catholic who grew up in Katong and studied in St Patrick’s School, I feel a particular closeness to the community.”99

The Hyphenated Singaporean The policy, adopted since the late 1970s, of encouraging different ethnic groups to take pride in their culture (for example, Chinese “to manifest Chinese culture, Indians, Indian culture, and so on”100) would clearly impede the growth of a supra Singapore identity.101 It certainly went against the beliefs of S. Rajaratnam. In February 1990, speaking at the inauguration of an

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education trust fund set up to honour him after retirement, Rajaratnam said: “We can create a Singapore where race, religion, and language does not matter.”102 Later, at a forum in June 1990, he said that the concept of race is an illusion as mankind has become so mixed. “So the celebration of ethnicity is not the path towards a Singaporean Singapore.”103 All it would accomplish “is a Singapore made up of emotionally confused Chinese, Malays, and Indians groping for an imaginary ethnic identity”.104 To avoid this, he advised, practise “a collective selective amnesia”: remember only the history from 1819 which marked Raffles’s founding of Singapore and modern immigration to the island.105 “The history before 1819 is that of ancestral ghosts.”106 Rajaratnam “identified himself with that hybrid category — the Babas (Straits Chinese)”.107 But if he supposed that the Babas could be a model for a Singapore identity, he had formed the wrong idea of them. True, the Babas had assimilated certain elements from Malay culture into their home life, as seen in their patois, cuisine, and dress. They were also educated in English, and had acquired some important ideas from the West. This latter aspect won Rajaratnam’s admiration. But for all that, the earlier generations of Babas did not forsake their ancestral culture; they publicly identified themselves as Chinese through affiliations with Chinese temples, clans, dialect associations, and business networks.108 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Babas were respected members of the Chinese community, and the prominent ones were sought after as mediators with the British. It was only after the Second World War that a combination of Chinese nationalist, communist, and anti-colonial sentiments caused the Babas to be derided as “deculturalized”. Today many Babas have difficulty learning Mandarin, a second language requirement for them in school, but this does not mean they are any less authentically Chinese in their own eyes, and self-identity is, after all, very important in determining ethnicity. Rajaratnam cited himself as exemplifying the possibility of becoming Singaporean “in a single lifetime”.109 He had “no difficulty forgetting that he had been, in succession, a Ceylon Tamil, a Sri Lankan, a British subject… a Malayan… a Malaysian”.110 In truth, his memories did not go so far back. His father, a rubber estate labour supervisor in Malaya, sent the wife to deliver their son in Jaffna, Ceylon, as was the custom at the time (circa 1915)

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and brought him to Malaya, an infant of six months.111 Rajaratnam grew up in the estate where his father worked, and went to English-medium schools in Seremban, Malaya, and in Singapore. One of his Singapore friends was a fellow Rafflesian, Lim Hong Bee.112 Lee Kuan Yew believed the making of the Singaporean would take generations. 113 Presently, “there is no such thing as ‘I am just a Singaporean’ ”.114 One is either a Singaporean Chinese or a Singaporean Malay, and so on. In the case of Indians, a double hyphenation is desired nowadays, as in this example: Singaporean-Indian-Malayalee.115 Lee spoke from personal experience too, like his good friend, Rajaratnam, but it was to rebut him. Lee gently said: …everybody knows that we are a long way, very long way from a real, genuine Singaporean Singapore. And even a Singaporean Singapore does not mean what my old friend, Mr S. Rajaratnam, says. It does not mean we are all the same. We will never be the same. I do not want to be like Mr Rajaratnam. I am his friend, I admire him, but I do not accept that I become like him or he becomes like me. Nor do I want to be like my old Malay friends, Othman Wok, or Rahim Ishak, or Yaacob Mohamed. They are they, we are us. But, we can be a Singaporean Singapore in the sense that we have equal rights — you to be yourself, me to be myself, and we sharing common ground, sharing a common destiny… … nobody should be prevented from carrying on with his cultural traditions… you see, with progress, with a relaxed atmosphere, everybody has different dreams. But we are all Singaporeans. One reason why I am now perhaps more Chinese than I was 30 years, 40 years ago, is because, as a result of learning, reading and so on, and growing old, I understand that human nature does not change. And one Chinese aphorism will sum it up: Tong Chuang Yi Meng — ‘Same bed, different dreams”.116

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The Hyphenated Singaporean and Social Scientists E.W. Barker, the minister for law, declared after Singapore became independent: … one of the cornerstones of the policy of Government is a multiracial Singapore. We are a nation comprising peoples of various races who constitute her citizens, and our citizens are equal regardless of differences of race, language, culture, and religion.117 Chew Sock Foon analysed the effects of this policy. “The PAP’s version of multi-racialism… explicitly delimits Singapore society in ‘racial’ terms,” she said. “All Singaporeans must carry identity cards that specify their race.”118 Next, race was brought into conjunction with “nation”. “One is officially a Singaporean Chinese”, with the emphasis on Chinese, as well as a Singaporean Chinese, with the emphasis on Singaporean.119 The same dual identification (ethnic-national) applied to the Singaporean Malay and the Singaporean Indian. People were highly conscious of race but in a nonthreatening, non-defensive manner. People were free to carry on their ethnic way of life as their ancestors had done. “When it is so clearly seen that the state is responsible for creating the climate” for this to be possible, “it is natural that a separate identification with the state will be profound”.120 Chew’s study argued “that high levels of ethnic and national identification could exist concurrently”.121 Chew attempted “a limited comparison” between Singapore and Malaysia, and in her discussion, the PAP’s ideology of multiracialism looked favourable beside the neighbouring country’s “assimilationist state ideology”.122 However, as this chapter has shown, the Chinese-educated in Malaysia have been able to challenge successfully the political and cultural hegemony of the Malay-dominated government, and establish independent Chinese secondary schools. They have also continued to be a force in the political arena, able to influence succession in the MCA, and were free in general elections, to shift their support to opposition parties, which depended on the Chinese vote. The power of the Chinese-educated in Singapore looked much more (self)circumscribed. Such was the paradox of

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multiracialism. They could not defend Chinese education and culture without violating the principle of multiracial equality. Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee give a conditional approval to the dual identification model: if the state “is committed to the objective of one nation, many peoples, and many cultures, the adoption of an hyphenated identity (ethnic-national) is most suitable”.123 It can even be “efficacious”.124 But John Clammer disapproves. This is because, to begin with, he is sceptical as to whether there is such a thing as “race”. The official four-race classification, the CIMO model, is based on a flawed concept of race, he says.125 Clammer goes on: “Even if ‘races’ exist, they are not fixed entities… They mutate, have origins, migrate, intermarry, and often the same ‘race’ has several languages and/or religions present at the same time.”126 Clammer cites the Baba, in his view, “one of the best examples of ethnic change and accommodation”.127 (Rajaratnam is in good company here). Clammer and many others say that the government has “essentialized” race.128 We may try to put this in non-sociological language as follows: the government works on the basis that race does not change. If you are Chinese, it’s because you are of Chinese descent, you should speak Mandarin, follow the traditions of your father and forefathers; and to continue your bloodline, if you are a boy, marry a suitable girl who is Chinese, and if a girl, a suitable boy. Next, Clammer dissects the official cultural policy. The policy relegates “Singapore culture” to “somewhere in the future — as a yet unrealized goal,” and at the same time “works against the emergence of [this] common culture”, by requiring “people to be more conscious of their origins rather than less”.129 “The effect of cultural policy then is to continually reinforce the four-race model.”130 This argument, as Clammer and others have acknowledged, originated with Geoffrey Benjamin who stated: “Singapore’s Multiracialism puts Chinese people under pressure to become more Chinese, Indians, more Indian, and Malays, more Malay, in behaviour.”131 The salience of race could only grow. Sikhs and Eurasians have asked to be recognized as ethnically distinct members in the official race classification. What we must now call the four-race-and-more model, accorded equal rights, in principle, to all its members. This professed equality was critical

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to Singapore’s multiracialism, and by extension to the hyphenated identity. And multiracialism was compatible with and connected with another founding myth of Singapore — meritocracy. The government has reconciled the particularistic four-race model with the “universalistic doctrine of equal opportunities and equal rights”.132 David Brown would agree with this. He stated that national identity in Singapore was not based on a “Singaporean culture, but rather on a ‘philosophy of national development,’” (borrowing the phrase from Rajaratnam).133 The values that would help national development were hard work, discipline, competitiveness and the pursuit of excellence. “These values,” Brown says, “were epitomized in the portrayal of Singaporean national identity in terms of ‘meritocracy’.”134 “The portrayal of Singapore as a meritocracy”, Brown further argues, had significant implications.135 One was that it gave the government the right to rule on the basis of merit and talent. Another was that it prevented ethnic groups from claiming special rights or privileges. Brown suggests that Malays in Singapore could not have failed to notice the affirmative action taken by “their co-ethnics across the Causeway”, and that they themselves might resort to “the ideas of ‘minority rights’ which had gained international currency”.136 In this sense, Brown and others too, argue that the government has depoliticized ethnicity. Brown explains this, saying the government “removed ethnicity from the political arena, and defined its location in the non-political social realm”.137 Thus “Singaporean citizens [were] enjoined… to inhabit two worlds, the non-political ethnic, and the non-ethnic political”.138 Brown further says that Singaporean citizens had to learn two languages [a reference to their bilingual education] and through one of them, the mother tongue, the government advanced another objective: “providing individuals with the ‘cultural ballast’ ”, which it deemed “necessary in order to prevent the alienation [cultural and also potentially political] of the ‘rootless’ individual”.139 The cultural diversity of a multiracial society defied the state’s efforts at national integration. On the other hand, the state could also attempt to convert cultural diversity from being a problem to being “a resource

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conducive to both unity and development”.140 The PAP adopted this positive approach. It chose to recognize and celebrate officially cultural diversity.141 This facilitated the growth of a dual ethnic and national identification, the hyphenated Singaporean. The PAP’s strategy of economic development was coupled with a strong commitment to meritocracy. The values of hard work, competitiveness, and fair play inherent in a meritocracy were totally compatible with the multiracial ideal of equal citizenship.142 Through constant reiteration and consistent practice, the government drummed into the national consciousness that to be Singaporean was to be both meritocratic and multiracial. Brown and others classified this as “the depiction of Singaporean identity in civic nationalist [meritocratic and multiracial] terms”.143 This was apparently not enough as the PAP began to see the danger of excessive individualism and anomie occurring in the economically driven, highly urbanized, environment that its policies had fashioned. Hence, as a supplementary measure, the PAP depicted Singapore “in ethnocultural nationalist terms, as a society united by its distinctive Asian virtues”.144 To sum up, the Singaporean national identity in the more complete portrayal seen by the 1990s, was hyphenated, meritocratized, and Asianized. NOTES 1 Lee’s national day rally speech on 16 August 1987, Straits Times, 18 August 1987. 2 Lee giving an interview to Newsweek columnist, Pranay Gupte, Newsweek, 18 September 1989. 3 Albert Lau, A Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the Politics of Disengagement (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998), p. 193. 4 Ibid., p. 265. 5 Straits Times, 16 August 1988. 6 Dick Wilson, The Future Role of Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1972), p. 20. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ministerial Speeches 3, no. 8 (1980): 3–4. 10 Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq, eds., The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1987), p. 127.

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11 Ibid., p. 119. 12 Singapore Newsletter 1 (31 July 1969) (New York: Permanent Mission of Singapore to the United Nations). 13 The Mirror: A Weekly Almanac of Current Affairs 5, no. 23 (9 June 1969). 14 Ibid. 15 Singapore Government Press Statement, 30 July 1969. 16 Ibid. 17 The Mirror: A Weekly Almanac of Current Affairs 5, no. 23 (9 June 1969). 18 Ibid. 19 Wang Gungwu, Bind Us in Time: Nation and Civilization in Asia (Singapore: Times Media Pte. Ltd., 2003), pp. 98–99. 20 Sally Borthwick, “Chinese Education and Identity in Singapore”, in Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II, edited by Jennifer Cushman and Wang Gungwu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1988), p. 37. 21 Kwok Kian-Woon, “Chinese-Educated Intellectuals in Singapore: Marginality, Memory and Modernity”, Asian Journal of Social Sciences 29, no. 3 (2001): 303–04. 22 Quoted by Borthwick, “Chinese Education”, pp. 45–46. 23 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s address to ministers, ministers of state, and senior civil servants on 27 February 1979, Ministry of Culture release. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Sai Siew Yee, “Post-Independence Educational Change, Identity and Huaxiaosheng Intellectuals in Singapore: A Case Study of Chinese Language Teachers”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25, no. 2 (1997): 98, note 6. 27 Wang Gungwu, Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia and Australia (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin in association with Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1981; new edition 1992), pp. 223–24. 28 Ministerial Speeches 3, no. 8 (1980): 6. 29 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s address to ministers. 30 Ibid. 31 Sir Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words (London: HMSO, 1973). 32 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s address to ministers. 33 Ibid. 34 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew opening the “Speak Mandarin Campaign”, 21 September 1984, Ministry of Culture release. 35 Tan Liok Ee, “Dongjiaozong and the Challenge to Cultural Hegemony 1951– 1987”, in Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia, edited by Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in association with the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1992), p. 185.

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36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid.; see also Tan Liok Ee, “Baggage from the Past, Eyes on the Future: Chinese Education in Malaysia Today”, in Ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity, edited by Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2002), pp. 164–65. Tan, “Donjiaozong”, pp. 194 and 197. Heng Peck Koon, Chinese Politics in Malaysia: A History of the Malaysian Chinese Association (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 267. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., pp. 270–72. Wang, Community and Nation, new edition 1992, p. 223. See R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy, Singapore Politics under the People’s Action Party (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 140. Simon Tay, Alien Asian: A Singaporean in America (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1997 second impression, 1998), pp. 109–12. Ibid., pp. 280–81. Ibid., p. 278; see also Simon S.C. Tay, “Human Rights, Culture, and the Singapore Example”, McGill Law Journal 41, no. 4 (August 1996): 743–80. Cheng Lim Keak, “Reflections on the Changing Roles of Chinese Clan Associations in Singapore”, Asian Culture 4 (April 1980): 61–66 and 70, note 10. Quoted by Cheng, ibid., p. 69. Cheng, “Reflections”, pp. 64 and 69. Huang Jianli and Hong Lysa, “History and the Imaginaries of ‘Big Singapore’: Positioning the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2004): 76. Quoted by Huang and Hong, ibid., pp. 69–70. David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919–32 (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 188. Ibid. Borthwick, “Chinese Education”, p. 37. Huang and Hong, “History and the Imaginaries”, p. 77. Ibid. Kenley, New Culture in a New World, p. 188. Ibid., p. 189. Huang and Hong, “History and the Imaginaries”, p. 74. Group Representation Constituencies: A Summary of the Report of the Select Committee (Singapore: Ministry of Communications and the Arts, n.d.), pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 13.

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64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Parliamentary Elections Act (Chapter 218, Sections 27C(9) and 102) Parliamentary Elections “Indian and Other Minority Communities Committee Regulations” (accessed on 22 July 2006). 67 “Filling the Gaps of Diversity: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue”, Tangent 5 (October 2002): 73. 68 Ibid., p. 69. 69 Ibid., p. 70. 70 Ibid. 71 Angel M. Rabasa, Political Islam in Southeast Asia: Moderates, Radicals and Terrorists (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003), p. 9. 72 “Filling the Gaps of Diversity”, pp. 73–74. 73 W.K. Che Man, The Administration of Islamic Institutions in Non-Muslim States: The Case of Singapore and Thailand (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1991), pp. 1–4. 74 Ibid., pp. 4 and 22. 75 Rabasa, Political Islam in Southeast Asia, p. 10. 76 The Gamut of Jamiyah Singapore’s Activities (Singapore: Jamiyah Singapore 70th Anniversary publication [not dated]), pp. 92–93. 77 Benard Adeney-Risakotta, “The Impact of September 11 on Islam in Southeast Asia”, in Islam in Southeast Asia: Political, Social and Strategic Challenges for the 21st Century, edited by K.S. Nathan and Mohammad Hashim Kamali (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), pp. 327–28. 78 Rabasa, Political Islam in Southeast Asia, p. 9. 79 Ibid., p. 45. 80 Ibid. 81 Speech by Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources and Minister in charge of Muslim Affairs, at the Hari Raya Get-Together at the Istana on 13 November 2004 (accessed 25 July 2006). 82 Adeney-Risakotta, “The Impact of September 11”, p. 328. 83 Speech by Dr Yaacob Ibrahim. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Speech by Professor S. Jayakumar, Minister for Law and Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the official opening of the upgraded premises of Umar Pulavar Tamil

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87

88

89 90

91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

Language Centre, 3 August 2001 (accessed 25 July 2006). S. Gopinathan and V. Saravanan, “Education and Identity Issues in the Internet Age: The Case of Indians in Singapore”, in Asian Migrants and Education: The Tensions of Education in Immigrant Societies and among Migrant Groups, edited by Michael W. Charney, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Tong Chee Kiong (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), p. 42. James Gomez, “Consolidating Indian Identities in Post-Independence Singapore: A Case Study of the Malayalee Community”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25, no. 2 (1997): 46 and 49. Tan Tai Yong, Singapore Khalsa Association (Singapore: Times Books International for the SKA, 1988), pp. 19 and 72. Verne A. Dusenbery, “Diasporic Imagings and the Conditions of Possibility: Sikhs and the State in Southeast Asia”, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 12, no. 2 (1997): 242. Ibid., p. 241. White Paper on Maintenance of Religious Harmony, Cmd. 21 of 1989 (Singapore: Singapore National Printers Ltd.), p. 17. Dusenbery, “Diasporic Imagings”, p. 244. Alexius Pereira, “The Revitalization of Eurasian Identity in Singapore”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25, no. 2 (1997): 11. Valerie Barth, “Belonging: Eurasian Clubs and Associations”, in Singapore Eurasians: Memories and Hopes, edited by Myrna Braga-Blake (Singapore: Times Editions, 1992), p. 101. Ibid. Braga-Blake, Singapore Eurasians, p. 23. Pereira, “Revitalization of Eurasian Identity”, p. 14. George Yeo, Message in Eurasian Heritage Day Souvenir Programme, 3 November 1991, p. 3. John Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965–1990: The Cultural Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998), p. 41. Milne and Mauzy, Singapore Politics, p. 102. Straits Times, 25 February 1990. Straits Times, 15 June 1990. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hong Lysa, “Making the History of Singapore: S. Rajaratnam and C.V. Devan

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108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

129 130 131

132

Nair”, in Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard, edited by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Y.L. Tan (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 106. See Mark Ravinder Frost, “Emporium in Imperio: Nanyang Networks and the Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1819–1914”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 42–43. Quoted by Hong, “Making the History of Singapore”, p. 105. Ibid. Chan and Obaid, The Prophetic and the Political, p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Business Times, 13 March 1990. Straits Times, 27 August 1990. Gomez, “Consolidating Indian Identities”, p. 55. Straits Times, 14 October 1991. Quoted by Philip N. Pillai and Kevin Tan Yew Lee “Constitutional Development”, in Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by K.S. Sandhu and P. Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 657. Chew Sock Foon, Ethnicity and Nationality in Singapore (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1987), p. 140. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 134 and 140–41. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., pp. 133–35. Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee, The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 104. Ibid. Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, p. 17. Ibid. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., pp. 177–78; see also Chua Beng Huat, “Racial Singaporeans: Absence after the Hyphen”, in Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, edited by Joel S. Kahn (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), pp. 34–35. Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, pp. 40–41. Ibid. Geoffrey Benjamin, “The Cultural Logic of Singapore’s ‘Multiracialism’ ”, in Singapore: Society in Transition, edited by Riaz Hassan (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 124. Hill and Lian, The Politics of Nation Building, p. 101.

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133 David Brown, The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 80. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., pp. 81–82. 136 David Brown, Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 99. 137 Brown, The State and Ethnic Politics, p. 83. 138 Ibid., p. 84. 139 Ibid., pp. 83–84. 140 Chew, Ethnicity and Nationality, p. 134; Brown, The State and Ethnic Politics, p. 81. 141 Chew, Ethnicity and Nationality, p. 140. 142 Hill and Lian, The Politics of Nation Building, pp. 31–33, 101, and 246–47. 143 Brown, Contemporary Nationalism, p. 102; see also Raj Vasil, Asianising Singapore: The PAP’s Management of Ethnicity (Singapore: Heinemann Asia and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1995), pp. 110–15. 144 Brown, Contemporary Nationalism, p. 102.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Unexpected Nation permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.The Individual articles are • 633 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

C H A P T E R

T W E N T Y

-T

W O

The Unexpected Nation

Exit from Malaysia

S

ingapore arose as an independent nation from the wreckage of a dream for a greater political union. It was a dream that Lee Kuan Yew held all his young adult life. Lee desperately pursued and Tunku Abdul Rahman reluctantly agreed to the formation of Malaysia. They had a mutual foe: the communist network in Singapore which Lee could not destroy singlehandedly without incurring a heavy political price in his predominantly Chinese, communist-influenced, city state, and which the Tunku, on the other side of the causeway, found too close for comfort. But after Malaysia was formed, and the communist threat neutralized, the differences in the politics of the two prime ministers came irreconciliably to the fore. The Tunku’s politics was encapsulated in what has been called the historic bargain between the ethnic communities prior to merdeka in Malaya in 1957. The Tunku agreed to citizenship on jus soli for the Chinese and Indians (as from the independence date, and not earlier), but would not concede recognizing Chinese as an official language.1 Chinese leaders agreed to special rights for Malays stipulated as land reservations, and quotas in the public services, university admissions, government-awarded scholarships, and trade licences. These Malay special rights, together with Malay dominance in parliament and cabinet, attained, and never relinquished, before more non-Malays received citizenship and hence the vote, assured the Malays absolute control of politics and government in Malaya, and since 1963, in Malaysia.

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“The Tunku’s simple belief,” Lee said, “was that politics was for the Malays and business for the Chinese.”2 What it amounted to was that the Chinese businessman would be in a clientelist relationship with the Malay power-holder. The dispute between Singapore and the central government came to a head when the PAP advocated a Malaysian Malaysia in which everyone, regardless of race, was equal. This resulted in Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia in 1965. Younger Malay nationalists in the UMNO were no more satisfied than Lee was with the Tunku’s politics, though for a completely different reason. They considered the Tunku too conciliatory towards the non-Malays, and did not go all out to implement Malay special rights, especially if doing so conflicted with Chinese and Indian middleman interests.3 Indeed, the Tunku’s priority was national harmony and unity in a newly independent country, and he tried to make non-Malays as well as Malays happy. The Tunku’s political juggling act crashed in the major 13 May 1969 riots, which precipitated his departure from office. The new economic policy implemented by the Tunku’s successor began the affirmative action demanded by younger Malay nationalists.4 The aim was to help Malays become owners and stakeholders, initially, more in the rural than the urban sector of the economy. Later, Tun Datuk Sri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the fourth Malaysian prime minister, in office from 1981 to 2003, emphasized the modern urban sector and created, during his long tenure, a new, confident Malay corporate class.5 Mahathir understood the challenge of globalization. In 1991, he set a goal for Malaysia to be a developed nation by 2020, which envisioned Malays and non-Malays “living in harmony and full and fair partnership”, as one integrated Bangsa Malaysia”.6 Was Mahathir’s Bangsa Malaysia the same as Lee’s “Malaysian Malaysia”? Was the federation at last ready for a “Malaysian Malaysia” without Singapore? Many Malaysian Chinese apparently hoped so. In September 1999, prior to the general election of that year, a widely representative Chinese election lobby urged the Mahathir government to “accord non-Malays equality of status with Malays and end Malay special rights” in order that his much touted Vision 2020 could come

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true.7 Prime Minister Mahathir gave them an “in principle” agreement to do so.8 The election results showed that the Chinese vote was critical in returning the Mahathir government to power and narrowly securing a twothirds majority in the federal parliament.9 The election at the federal level was complemented by state elections, and at this level, the startling outcome was that the opposition Pan Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) not only retained Kelantan, its stronghold, but wrested Terengganu from the UMNO, and gained significant ground in Kedah, Perlis, and Pahang in which UMNO had been sure of strong support.10 With the inclination of the Malay heartland states to switch to PAS so evident, Mahathir could hardly have afforded to ask Malays to forgo their constitutionally protected rights as requested by the Chinese election lobby prior to the polls. The Chinese election lobby’s post-election “reminder” to Mahathir, and an interview given by a Chinese business leader, Datuk David Chua, which raised the issue of Malay special rights, only led to controversy.11 Despite this, Chinese support for the government continued. One reason was the lingering uncertainty from the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Another was the unease the Chinese felt over the declared aim of PAS to make Malaysia an Islamic state. After the Islamist attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, the Chinese were even more afraid of the Islamic state ambitions of PAS. Mahathir stepped down as prime minister on 31 October 2003 for his chosen successor, Datuk Sri Abdullah Badawi. Economically, the country had recovered. Politically, September 11 strengthened the government’s hand in dealing with PAS.12 Personally, the new Prime Minister Abdullah was likeable. Significantly, his “father and grandfather were prominent Islamic preachers”, and he himself graduated in Islamic studies, which was not the same as a theology degree.13 These factors, plus Chinese support, accounted for the sweeping victory, depicted as “Abdullah’s tsunami”, in the March 2004 general election.14 Abdullah’s answer to the PAS Islamic state challenge was Islam Hadhari, a moderate Islamic ideology15 that would embrace globalization, a 21st century take on the rational approach to the faith taught by Muhammad Abduh, the modernist thinker and grand mufti

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(senior judge) of Egypt from 1899 to 1905. The Chinese of Malaysia were comfortable with Abdullah’s moderate approach to religion. Singapore is an unexpected nation in that it did not set out to be independent on its own but had independence thrust upon it. Thereafter, Singapore and Malaysia went on different pathways. But “Singapore’s very existence”, historian Anthony Reid says, “represents something of a challenge to Malaysia’s self-image”.16 Yet the other way round is also true, if you take into account the position of the Chinese. The Malaysian state was a ruling coalition faced with an opposition which was also a coalition of sorts. The Chinese were in both the ruling and opposition coalitions, and had scope to manoeuvre, particularly when the Malays, confident in their dominance and newfound corporate power, started to fight among themselves. The Chinese of Malaysia managed to secure a place for Chinese language, education, and culture in a Malay hegemonic state. Their long battle to have a university of their own succeeded when the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman opened in 2002, with Mahathir doing the honours.17 The Singapore state was a one-party dominance exercised by an Englisheducated Chinese and other ethnic elites. The Chinese-educated majority had been astonished by how much their world had changed before their very eyes. Fighting this change was not an option. This gives another dimension to the meaning of Singapore as an unexpected nation.

Enter the Developmental State Singapore in the early 1960s adopted an import-substitution policy. It assumed that there would be a common market with Malaya, which in the event never materialized. Post 1965, Singapore changed to being a developmental state, definable as one whose strategy was to manufacture for export to the world at large, and who executed this strategy through a technocratic elite. The Economic Development Board (EDB) targeted the multinational enterprises to bring in. The Singapore developmental state was remarkable for the dominance of multinational enterprises. Another special feature about Singapore was that the government itself entered into business. Cabinet ministers oversaw this government business while civil

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service, statutory board, and army technocrats managed it. Hence the term Singapore Inc. has been coined for it. The Government Investment Corporation (GIC) established in 1981 invested the city state’s reserves abroad, while Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd., formed in 1974, handled business in Singapore.18 SingTel, DBS, CapitaLand, Keppel Land, Singapore Technology Engineering, and Singapore Power are some familiar names of businesses under Temasek Holdings. The government and the EDB were pragmatic, focused and yet nimble, open to new ideas. They targeted the multinationals in electronics early in the rising product cycle of this industry in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they went for pharmaceuticals and chemicals.19 They got Glaxo to make a new drug in Singapore in 1982, and realized an EDB-Sumitomo Chemical joint-venture to establish the Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore in 1984. In 1987, a new EDB chairman, Philip Yeo, set up the National Biotech Committee. Yeo perceived a future growth area, one he was to be involved in passionately. He has since built a big research facility, the Biopolis, and brought in leading scientists. It complemented the EDB’s biomedical park at Tuas, which housed major pharmaceutical and medical technology companies. Novartis, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Siemens Medical Instruments were some of the big names there. Philip Yeo’s other “passion” as EDB chairman (1986–2006) was the Jurong Island chemical hub, constructed by filling in the sea around seven rocky outcrops.20 It opened in 2000 and was expected to be fully tenanted by 2010. Another new technology that the EDB pursued was in the magical world of digital visual effects. Presently, Singapore has a Lucas film studio of Star Wars fame, and another company co-founded by Nickson Fong, a young Singaporean who has worked in Hollywood with the team that produced Shrek, Godzilla, and the Matrix sequels. Koei Games, a popular Japanese brand, is also here. The knowledge-based economy needed talent, research, and alliances with institutions doing cutting edge work. Philip Yeo chaired an Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), which funded scholarships and research. A*STAR’s alliance with Johns Hopkins University at the

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Biopolis did not go as well as hoped, but this has to be accepted as part of the high stakes that Yeo and the EDB played. Embracing the global knowledge economy is a highly risky business. But Singapore has budget surpluses to invest, a Confucian bias to invest in education and research, and a pragmatic desire to apply knowledge to manufacturing. Turning to the services sector, in the mid 1980s, multinational enterprises (MNEs) were looking to invest in production in the bigger countries they were selling in, notably China, Indonesia, and India, and needed a hub to work from.21 The 1985 Economic Committee chaired by B.G. Lee decided Singapore should be this hub, providing services in accounting, legal matters, management, and logistics. Sony Corp was the first to be won over by the EDB to establish their operational headquarters here, followed by other Japanese MNEs, and United States and European ones which expanded strongly into the region.22 Soon, the time came for another imaginative strategy. This was pioneered by the cash-rich, government linked companies from 1993 onwards. They invested in building industrial parks in Batam, Suzhou, Vietnam, in the Bintan Beach International Resort, and the International Technology Park in Bangalore. The EDB said, “This reinvention of Singapore knew no bounds. We had moved from the concept of Singapore Inc to Singapore Unlimited.”23 The Asian financial crisis of 1997 exposed the weak economic governance prevailing in developmental states across the Asia Pacific. In the light of this, we should ask whether the self-regulation of Singapore’s governmentlinked companies was adequate? “Though Temasek publishes a directory of GLCs, the data are restricted for use by GLC directors and contain no financial data, and little or no employment data.”24 A great deal thus depended on the government and the public services to appoint from among themselves people of integrity and ability for the GLCs. This was tested by the 1997 financial meltdown. Singapore Inc did not conform to the “fearful symmetry” of the tiger economies, which were marked by crony capitalism, rent seeking, and corruption, and roiled during the Asian crisis by “bad loans, illiquidity, and evolving political fragility and instability”.25 The greater integration of the world economy from the 1980s gave rise to a neoliberal school of economics that advocated “a reduced role for the

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state”.26 Neoliberals took the 1997 Asian meltdown as proof of the failure of the Asian developmental model.27 Foreign investors in the financial and services sectors began to sound more critical of Singapore’s GLCs.28 However, the Singapore Economic Review Committee of 2001 to 2003 showed no intention to scale back the state’s dominance in the economy, but instead advised the GLCs to be more globally competitive. What this means was exemplified on a grand scale by the Port of Singapore Authority’s bid in 2006 for British P and O Ports Group, and PSA’s defeat in this bid by an even richer would-be global player, Dubai Ports World. Neoliberal criticism of Singapore’s GLCs cut no ice. Moreover, it did not stop Singapore from getting the United States–Singapore Free Trade Agreement, signed in early 2003. This was the first bilateral free trade agreement that the United States signed with an Asian state. Political economists Garry Rodan and Kevin Hewison discerned a link between the USSFTA and the United States need for allies in the war on terror in the post-September 11 world.29 The USSFTA was to serve as a precedent for U.S. negotiations with other “can do” Asian nations.30 After securing the USSFTA, Singapore, Rodan observed in another article, made an effort “to improve the image of the GLCs”.31 In February and October 2004, Temasek Holdings broke its thirty-year secrecy by issuing reports that were, however, not “as detailed as those provided by publicly traded Singaporean companies”.32

The Developmental State and the Myth of Democratization Economist Linda Low’s prescription for sustaining the competitiveness of Singapore Inc was to “square the economics of the developmental state with democratization”.33 She continued: The civic society has to progress to a civil society as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) take their cue and place with their international counterparts… More political democratization is inevitable with participation… Perhaps it is best to go with the flow and a wise government would see [this].34

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Is this true? Or is it a case of “simplistic and economically determinist belief in the inexorable emergence of an interdependent, global democratic order”?35 Low is not alone. Many social scientists have also wondered why Singapore was not more proactive in collaborating to realize the democratizing end of history. We shall first consider why Singapore did not become the liberal democracy that social scientists expected it to be. Then we shall see how Singapore’s political culture had nevertheless responded to the demands of the global knowledge-based economy. James W. Morley and Harold Crouch in their book, Driven by Growth, tested the hypothesis that the middle and working classes that emerge from the East Asian economic growth will push for democracy. But the case of Singapore puzzled them. “Growth did produce a complex, differentiated class structure, including a strong middle class and a large working class. Why then has neither pressed harder for liberalization?”36 Some political scientists have challenged this “driven by growth” model, arguing that “there is no basis to claim that the middle classes are the historical bearers of political liberalization in East Asia”.37 Quite the opposite: they contend that “the middle classes in fact may be the prime beneficiaries and supporters of authoritarianism”.38 Elaborating on this argument, David Brown and David Martin Jones say the success of the Asian development states “owes nothing to democracy, but much to the enlightened practice of virtuous rulers” who “mobilized” a disciplined and increasingly educated workforce towards “developmental targets”.39 The kind of middle class produced by such a state must be understood. It was, Brown and Jones state, “a middle class grounded in a culture of dependence and anxiety”.40 This middle class was no “motor of change” but was rather “a managerial problem” for the state elites.41 The state elites’ management “relied to a very large degree upon the Confucian values of consensus and harmony, hierarchy and duty”.42 This worked because, Brown and Jones suggest: “The psychology of the middle class desires the certainty that virtuous rule provides.”43 The revised edition of Driven By Growth has an additional chapter contributed by Lam Peng Er. Lam explains that the driven-by-growth model assumes that society is the motor propelling economic growth that will then

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lead to political liberalization.44 However, in Singapore it is the state that propels economic growth. This accounts for Singapore’s deviance from the model. The “burgeoning middle class” in Singapore is a state-dependent one.45 “A middle class dependent on the state instead of a middle class autonomous from the state is not a conducive factor for democratization.”46 Lam thus endorsed the Brown and Jones thesis on the middle class in Singapore. He also agreed with them on the state elites’ use of “Confucian idioms of leadership” though he was sceptical of the level of public support for such idioms.47 Lam takes into account the large working class in Singapore mentioned in the Morely and Crouch hypothesis. Lam used the term “the Chineseeducated working class”.48 This was the class that the PAP specially appealed to, he said, but later depoliticized along with the activists in the Englisheducated camp. What can be said about civil society given the existence of a statedependent middle class? Prime Minister Goh’s consultative style encouraged some professionals to form a discussion forum, the Roundtable, in December 1993. They accepted a condition given by the Registrar of Societies that they cannot invite the public to their meetings or hold public forums, though they may write to the press. Two members of the Roundtable served as nominated members of parliament. Another one, Raymond Lim, a founding member, became an elected PAP MP and minister of state in charge of entrepreneurship in 2003, and a full cabinet minister with other portfolios in 2005. It speaks volumes for the dependence mentality of the middle class that the government had to appoint a minister to develop entrepreneurship. In April 2004, the Roundtable, now at thirteen strong, disbanded itself.49 The civil society organization called Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) was, for some of the time when Mohammad Alami Bin Musa was president, somewhat confrontational with the government. In 2003, Alami Musa did a surprising change from AMP president to president of Majlis Ugama Islam Singapore (MUIS, Islamic Religious Council of Singapore). He had previously been critical of MUIS and sought to replace it with an Islamic consultative committee. September 11 and the Bali bombings had evidently turned him around: he now saw MUIS as a key rallying point for

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moderate Muslims. As MUIS president, Alami Musa looked for ways to improve confidence-building, such as opening the mosque to non-Muslims. He worked at making a Singapore Muslim identity. What we are trying to do is to put forth certain issues, questions, and some proposed answers for people to think about and discuss, and hopefully, over time, there could be a consensus of sorts on how we can live as good practising Muslims, and as contributors and participants in Singapore society and in a globalised world. If somebody outside Singapore says Muslims must live in a certain way which we know will not work in Singapore… people can put this in perspective and respond as Singaporean Muslims.50 Alami Musa’s concept which situates Islam in a modern multiracial nation is similar to the Islam Hadhari of the Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Badawi. It is evident that, as Lam Peng Er succinctly puts it, “Singapore has a strong state but a weak civil society, a condition that is not very favourable to democratization”.51 The government preferred the method of cooption to democratization. It is always possible that when civil society activists grow older they will see issues from the government’s side as well as their own, and know that there is no one simple answer. They will still exercise their independent, critical mind but from a position inside rather than outside the government. They will feel, as the government likes them to feel, that they can make a difference this way. The young are often critical of the establishment, but if they are rational and amenable to sound advice, they may one day morph from critic to convert. The fiercest critics are known to make the staunchest converts. Dr Vivian Balakrishnan was a very articulate critic of the PAP Government. Born of an Indian father and Chinese mother, he was a President scholar in 1980 who chose to do medicine at NUS, and was president of the student union. He was forty years old when the PAP fielded him in the 2001 general election. He was minister of state in 2002, and acting minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports in 2003. His message to

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the youth of Singapore was: “Speak up even if it jars.”52 Dr Balakrishnan was clearly to project the new style PAP image to the post-1965 generation, the generation that was not steeled by sacrifice, but spoiled by affluence, and whose existential angst had no satisfactory conduit, in their view, for political expression. Another rising newcomer in the PAP, Tharman Shanmugaratnam was the classic middle-class rebel. The third child of a professor in the medical faculty, his imagination as a youth was stirred by the trial of student leader Tan Wah Piow.53 He started to question the PAP’s political and economic model, read up leftist literature, and mixed with student activists. His choice of a university to go to was obvious: the London School of Economics. He and his friends at LSE were delighted their tutors let them customize their syllabus to include socialist economies and the sociology of the third world. He met Tan Wah Piow and they, with other Singaporeans, formed a study group “to discuss Singapore issues and alternative economic models”.54 For the next few years, Shanmugaratnam went “around London’s subway stations and bus stops” and approached “anyone who looked vaguely Singaporean or Malaysian” to chat up, sell, or give “a magazine questioning policies back home”, and invite them to the study group’s next function.55 He was questioned by the Internal Security Department on his return to Singapore in 1982, and again in 1987, when the investigation into the Hendrickson affair revealed a Neomarxist plot directed by Tan Wah Piow from Britain. While working as an economist in the Monetary Authority of Singapore, he had another encounter with the law in 1994, this time involving a breach of official secrecy. The cooption of Shanmugaratnam and also Dr Balakrishnan shows how much the PAP mindset had changed. Globalization has a lot to do with it. Prime Minister Goh asked Singaporeans to start thinking like revolutionaries,56 and Senior Minister Lee expressed the same idea with another term: creative destruction.57 Appointed minister for education, Shanmugaratnam had to do precisely that to a whole established structure of teaching, learning, and streaming. His style was to always challenge the status quo, to dig deep and think hard about how the world could be

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different. He said: “I don’t particularly like people who come in and say how much they agree with me or write very articulate defences of what already exists. I operate by getting alternative views openly and squarely.”58 The PAP has crossed its 50th anniversary as a party in 2004, and has ruled for nearly as many years. It has never ceased renewing itself. More importantly, it has recruited talents that dared to think in contrarian ways. It has been liberal in its cooption policy if not in its politics. This was how the state in Singapore managed to be at once hegemonic and dynamic. Within the government itself there was a lively debate going on. “The challenge,” Shanmugaratnam says, “is to extend that internal debate into the public arena.”59

Viewing Hegemony from the Margin In 1999, a civil society organization, the Tangent, was launched. The founders were journalists with the Lianhe Zaobao, teachers, and PhD students. They were former SAP school alumni, the majority from Hwa Chong Junior College. The majority also went to universities abroad, including Peking, Fudan, National Taiwan, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Essex, and Harvard. They were bilingual but chose to conduct their business in Mandarin, and their business was to discuss topical issues concerning Singapore. They were the younger-generation Chinese, in their twenties and thirties in age, but with a broader mental horizon than the older generation of Chineseeducated. They were conscious of the peculiar onus their position imposed on them. The inescapable factor in their position was that they were the offspring of a generation who felt betrayed by history. Ong Chang Woei, Harvard PhD student in Chinese history, said: I have been haunted by what my father told me. He said that during the colonial era, they were actively involved in anti-colonial campaigns because they had a vision of building a nation belonging to themselves. But after the nation was built, much to their disappointment, they realised that it was not the country that they once envisioned. They were like handicaps in their own country

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because wherever they go, they had to face a harsh reality of having to deal with a language that they were not familiar with.60 Low Yen Yen, BA, Fudan University, Shanghai, 2001, reading the above and other contributions on the Tangent online forum, was reminded of “my father’s despair at my generation’s inability to understand their distressing plight”.61 But Low also made an important point indicating an ability to be objective and detached: “the sacrifices of the Chinese community in the past are not unique” as history goes.62 This point was also stated by another Tangent member, Ng How Wee, BA, Peking University, who said they should beware of the kind of mindset that says, “‘I am the only victim, I am always the one who sacrifices.’ In a society, there can never be an absolute victim of power oppression… We are all controlled by complex [forces]”.63 The perspectives and priorities of the Tangent were different from those of other Chinese organizations. Ng How Wee says: “We are willing and are able to look at issues from different angles.”64 They meant to hold dialogues with the English-educated and with other ethnic communities, notably the Malay and Indian. They would use simultaneous translation wherever possible, or otherwise talk in English, and publish the proceedings in Mandarin and English. The Tangent group were unequivocal about their “national identity”.65 Quah Sy Ren, founder member and secretary, asserts, “That is definitely Singapore(an).”66 However, they had a number of issues with the state. They were unhappy with the way Mandarin was taught in schools, making it into a “rigid and archaic” language, fit only for a “didactic” purpose.67 Texts were concocted to teach morals. Those able to judge found these texts “meaningless”.68 Chinese classics would have done the job better, but they were not used. The Tangent members were also appalled with the Mandarin spoken in television dramas.69 They would promote a higher standard of Mandarin through their discussion forums, as well as show its relevance to modern life. Nor did they like the equating of Mandarin in official campaigns with Chinese tradition and civilization while omitting its connection with “modern China” and the liberating ideas of the May Fourth movement.70

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They were discontented too with the model of multiculturalism which the state elites implemented as it was, in effect, a kind of cultural hegemony which marginalized the languages and cultures of the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities. The state had a policy to groom Chinese bicultural elites. The Tangent group would qualify as such. But they thought the concept was not free from the crass pragmatism (in this instance doing business with China) that was only too pervasive in the Singaporean psyche.71 For all the above reasons, they chose to position the Tangent, not among the elites, but as a marginalized community. And they meant to reach out and ally with other communities which they perceived to be viewing “hegemony” from “the social margin” like themselves.72 Quah Sy Ren, BA, National Taiwan University, PhD, Cambridge, said the Tangent were, in a sense, no different from the older generation of Chinese-educated. They faced “a similar dilemma”.73 Quah appeared to draw inspiration for a truer multiculturalism from his research into the performing arts in Singapore in the 1950s and 60s. This was a time, he said, when there was much crosscultural exchange between Chinese, Malays, and Indians in drama and dance.74 Although Quah did not mention it, it was a time when Tan Liang Hong was showing his fluency in Malay and learning Indian dance. Quah developed the conviction that reaching out to other communities was key to realizing the Singaporean multicultural identity. The mentor he acknowledged in his quest for multiculturalism was the late Singaporean Chinese playwright and cultural medallion winner, Kuo Pau Kun. Quah Sy Ren’s romanticism and idealism met with hard reality when the Tangent invited Malay professionals of the AMP to a dialogue session. One interesting fact which the Malay activists learned was that the Tangent members did not regard Chinese clans and Chinese-speaking MPs as their representatives, but were, instead, dismissive of them. This surprised Yang Razali Kassim, B Soc Sci Hons (Sing.) and Regional Editor of Business Times, who remarked: “Why is that so? That is interesting to me. It’s new[s] to me.”75 Another thing they found out was that the Chinese media did not comment on the tudung issue, regarding it as sensitive and unwise to interfere in.76

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On their side, the Tangent members learned that it was not that simple to bridge the gap between the communities. It would take more than idealism and candour. Dzukarnian Kamaron, BA (NUS) and regional businessman, told them at some point during the dialogue: “I have been getting very nice signals from you all, but somehow I don’t believe.”77 However, on the whole, the session was a useful and open exchange of ideas and views. Yang Razali Kassim, who was senior in years and authoritativeness, fell into the role of tutor, pertinacious in the way he questioned, but encouraging in his manner towards his younger interlocutors. He persisted in asking them that, on the assumption that the communities they were talking about were on a common Singapore platform, shouldn’t one community have the right to comment on controversies thrown up in another community? He put it to them that the exercise of this right was the test of whether a Singapore identity existed. The Tangent’s assertion of their Singaporean-ness and openness, especially their openness, perturbed certain sections of the Chinese community. For it seemed to imply a certain distancing and aloofness from the community. The Tangent bent over backwards to profess empathy with the Malay community, eliciting a comment from NTU professor, Dr Lee Guan Kin, in her dinner conversation with them.78 In their online forum the Tangent showed an awareness of the ripples they were causing, and did some soul-searching over it. Ong Chang Woei said they had “a responsibility towards the Chinese community”.79 He urged them to bear this in mind even as they were “reaching out to other communities”.80 “If we are too eager to disengage ourselves from the socalled ‘Chinese community’, would we not create an impression that the Chinese-speaking elite of the younger generation is indifferent to the ‘old Chinese-educated’?”81 Ong posted another note reminding his colleagues: “Our generation can confront the question of being Chinese without any hard feelings, but not Dr Lee’s generation.”82 Lee Huay Leng, BA, (NUS), MA, (London SOAS), sighed: “I wonder how many would still see ourselves as a Singaporean with a Chinese background.”83 It is fair to say that the Tangent has not gone unnoticed by the PAP Government, and that there has been a response. This is evident in the

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featuring of Hwa Chong alumni among the new candidates presented for the general election of May 2006. There was Grace Fu, aged 42, whose father had been detained for four months in 1963 for his involvement with the communists, and later became Prime Minister Lee’s long serving press secretary.84 There was Lee Yi Shyan, aged 44, the chief executive officer who believed, as the Chinese do, that the highest vocation for a learned man is to be an official, a mandarin.85 There was Baey Yam Keng, who, at aged 35, was one of the youngest of the new candidates, and came closest to the Tangent profile. Baey joined the drama society at Hwa Chong, from where he went on to co-found a theatre group, The ETCetras, in 1991, while doing national service. His co-founder, Hai Yen, was the girl who became his wife, with whom he had three children. One of their plays critiqued the Speak Mandarin Campaign, and the method of teaching Mandarin in schools. “Our students are just memorising cheng yu [idioms] by rote, without really understanding the meaning,” Baey says. 86 He thought the government’s approach to Chinese language and culture was too geared to economic [business with China] and political-cultural [Asian values] ends. He believed in taking a “more holistic” position: see Chinese culture whole, literature included, and make it “a part of our life”.87 Spoken like the Tangent group, except that Baey Yam Keng was with the PAP, for people through action by party, as the slogan goes.

Nation Building and Globalization The challenge for Singapore was how to go from a developmental state to a nation. The developmental state requires its citizens to be rational and calculating. It demands passion too, but of a business, workaholic, nature which translates into cash, career, car, condo, credit card, club. The nation demands passion of a higher order. It is passion for a country and a people, the desire to belong, to identify, to pay back in loyalty, in sacrifice, in life itself. How will globalization affect the process of becoming a nation? David Brown’s essay, “Globalisation and Nationalism: the case of Singapore” states that “globalisation is not just an external force impacting

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upon nation-states, it is also a process which the policies of nation-states can promote and guide”.88 This was famously the case in Singapore. The state elites, Brown says, had created “a distinct ‘Singaporean national economy’” in which “all Singaporeans are active participants” (through the CPF, tripartite NWC, GST, home loans, education) and this “provides a basis for national identity”.89 This was the economic response of the state to globalization. Next, Brown considers the state’s ideological response. This comprised two parts. The first part was the fostering of “patriotic pride” in “a series of technological achievements (such as the port, the airport, military hardware, the MRT — mass rapid transit — train)”, which served as “symbols of national identity”.90 The second part was the promotion of Asian values. As a result of globalization, Singaporeans read the Western media, interacted with expatriates, and travelled overseas for education, work, and leisure. To counteract these “threatening aspects of globalization” the state elites inculcated in their citizens values focussed on family and community, and achieving consensus and harmony.91 “In the Singapore case,” Brown argues, “globalisation has promoted the development of both its economy and its national cohesion”, and this has depended “primarily on the state’s capacities for ideological management, rather than simply on its strategies of economic management”.92 One major drawback with globalization is seen in the widening gap between the rich and the poor, creating a social divide. “Significant economic disparities have persisted,” Brown observes, “and might even have increased during some phases of growth.”93 Although Brown does not say it, this was the result of economic restructuring, skills mismatch, laying off, and retraining of workers. Globalization came with another social cost. It made possible the emigration of large numbers of Singaporeans, and necessitated the influx of foreign talent, partly to compensate for the loss of the former. However, this would lead to a divide between citizens and foreigners in Singapore, in addition to the divide between the rich and the poor. Brown’s theory omitted this issue. The stage of history that a country is at is also important to an assessment of the impact of globalization. Globalization affects all parts of the world,

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but obviously not all countries are at the same stage of historical evolution. In the case of Singapore globalization had taken by storm a country that was not yet a nation, or a country with only a short history of nationbuilding to date. In Brown’s theory, state elites were supposed to have used the country’s glossy amenities as a means of ideological indoctrination to create national unity, but he was not certain whether they succeeded. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew actually did the exact opposite of what Brown said. In a speech in July 1988, Lee warned Singaporeans: “Never delude ourselves that the outward trappings of our modern society have already made us a nation”, citing the Mass Rapid Transit system.94 In May 1990, when interviewed in Bonn by a German newspaper, Lee spoke again of “the trick technology plays on us”.95 He added “that after all this time he still could not say that Singapore was a nation”.96 What would make Singaporeans a nation? Lee answered: “You need passion.”97 Lee recalled his own generation’s struggle for Singapore. It was an act of conviction. This is my country. This is my life. These are my people. You will trample over us over our dead bodies. We dug our toes in, we built a nation, not quite, one-third of the way; how long will the whole way take? Another 30, 40, 50 years? My generation won’t see it through…98 The passion and conviction of the founding fathers could not, of course, be replicated. But they could be commemorated for later generations. This was not done. Even this short history has remained untold. Save for the second-generation PAP leaders, it is rare indeed to find Singaporeans who are inspired by the deeds of the founding fathers of their nation, and thereby, feel passionate for their country. In Singapore where history has but a short run so far and where national unity and national identity have grown for a relatively short time, the force of globalization is all the more magnified. Thanks to globalization Singapore rose from a third-world to first-world economy in one generation, market values were paramount, success was conceived in monetary terms and no

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other way, people were extremely stressed, anxious, and unsmiling. Somewhat belatedly, the government initiated communitarian values. But the government’s depiction of the Asian virtue of community before self was a construct that had no real basis in the nation’s short history. It “turns out in fact to be characterized by precisely the opposite ‘virtue’ which prioritises the neurotic self over the ambiguously manufactured community”.99 Singaporeans were the very demanding, spoilt children of the developmental state. This applies to the generation after Lee’s founding generation and the third or post-1965 generation. The government attended to their education, employment, housing, general material well-being, and prosperity. In August 2002, Prime Minister Goh said, “the more the Government provides for [them], the higher their expectations of what the Government should do”.100 He quoted a “thoughtful” article in the Lianhe Zaobao written by the Tangent’s Lee Huay Leng.101 “Huay Leng,” Prime Minister Goh said, noted that Singaporeans were now used to living in a comfortable, somewhat surreal world disconnected from the harsh realities of our regional neighbourhood. She wondered therefore if the current generation of Singaporeans could bear hardship. She noted too, that Singaporeans now measured a government by whether it met their infinite material wants, and that the Government had to deal with voters who were prepared to migrate. If the Government failed to meet the material expectations of Singaporeans, would they stay around?102 Prime Minister Goh zoomed in on the issue of emigration. He lamented: The more we educate Singaporeans, and the more opportunities we create for them, the more internationally mobile they will become. The more they gain from subsidised HDB housing the more money they have to buy cheaper houses in Australia. Will Singaporeans be rooted in Singapore? Will enough Singaporeans stay here, to ensure our country’s long-term survival?103

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Prime Minister Goh stated, in August 2002, that at any one time, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 Singaporeans overseas, about 31,000 in Australia, 20,000 in Britain, and about 10,000 in the United States.104 Presumably, they included those who had emigrated as well as those serving the external wing of the Singapore economy. He did not mention the PRC, but no doubt, there was also a minor exodus there, to Shanghai. The second- and third-generation Singaporeans had a strong propensity to emigrate. The Straits Times’ take on this is insightful. They [the third generation, in the 30s and early 40s age group], are fond of a new buzz-phrase: global citizens. It sounds like a disclaimer, a cop-out. The Government has a part in this ideological turn, ironically, because under its able stewardship, Singapore became rich too quickly. Success was framed only in terms of economic utility. Their parents came to judge personal success exclusively by income and possessions. Notions of societal inclusiveness, compassion for the disadvantage, considerateness, community involvement, and patriotism [except in a superficial way] do not cloud their universe. Why should the political leadership be surprised their offspring is not any different in their attitudes? Well-educated middle-class parents have themselves sharpened the migratory instincts of their smart children, studying abroad. Hands up those who have never given this parting advice: ‘If you land a job as soon as you graduate, make your future there’.105 David Brown’s theory argues that the state elites’ ideological management strategy was key to understanding how Singapore encountered the impact of globalization and won. But the instilling of Asian values, in particular, family values, had done nothing to stop emigration. Ironically, it was the parents, the “well-educated middle-class parents”, who were abetting the emigration of “their smart children”.106 Just as Singaporeans wanted to make the world their home, the government wanted to make Singapore home to the world. The government promoted its immigration policy aggressively overseas. It was competing

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with governments elsewhere which were also looking for foreign talent. It was helped by the reputation that Singapore had built up in the world. Many Indian professionals in IT, finance, and banking have migrated here. Since the early 1990s, PRC Chinese who were engineers, scientists, and businessmen had been coming. On the principle that one should get them young, the government offered scholarships with stipends leading to the presence in tertiary institutions of students from India, Asean countries and, most visibly, the PRC. What is the likely impact of the new immigrants on Singapore society? How will they fit into the official four-races model, Chinese-Malay-IndianOthers? In the Indian case there was clearly a misfit. The Indian expatriates belonged to high castes and high cultural-linguistic traditions as well as high-income professions. They tended to keep to themselves.107 Mutual acrimony has occurred between them and the local Indian community.108 The difference in political culture could also obstruct their integration. Indian expatriates who came from the United States were dismayed that Singaporean Indians were educationally unprogressive, and that the community lacked leadership for resolving their “persistent problems”, and “appeared to be a ‘silenced minority’ ”.109 The PRC Chinese elites blended in with less difficulty. They were, in terms of age, from the mid-30s to early-40s. Their lives had been affected by the Cultural Revolution, and they were glad of the sanity, laws, openness, and fairness they found in Singapore.110 They formed an association, the Hua Yuan, in 2001 to help new arrivals settle in, and to contribute culturally to their host country. A subcommittee of the Hua Yuan started an Entrepreneurs’ Club in March 2002 to share their business and government contacts in China, and share this network with Singaporeans too.111 An academic exercise has been written of PRC scholarship holders at the NUS.112 Singaporean students at the NUS conceded that PRC students scored higher grades, but thought they lacked social graces, befriended them but not as buddies.113 Some disagreed with the government’s policy of funding foreign students.114 On their side, the PRC students’ closest friends were other PRC students. They regularly called or emailed family and friends back home, and preferred returning there during the holidays.115 The great majority did not like

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watching the drama serials and sitcoms offered on the television in Singapore. Clearly they were as turned off as the Tangent members. Nearly half of the sample of 214 PRC students considered Singapore “a stepping-stone to other places in the world”.116 Some 65.9 per cent thought about becoming permanent residents. Only 10.7 per cent were in favour of taking up Singapore citizenship.117 One respondent frankly observed: “Singapore PRs enjoy almost the same privileges as Singaporeans.”118 This study on the PRC students complements another study on foreign talents in general.119 The latter study found that “there is integration of foreign talent” in the workplace, i.e., “at the level of economic functionality”, but “integration in the form of social ties — whether informal or formal settings — tends to be rather uneven”.120 Another finding is that decisions regarding staying in Singapore followed the pattern observed in the study of PRC students. The first choice was to have a period of sojourn in Singapore to work, the second choice was to become permanent resident, and the last option was to take up citizenship.121 This shows that we are dealing with transnational migrants, thrown up by globalization, who have “multiple identities”, and not easily tied down to citizenship and nationality in one place.122 This is clear from the order of preference indicated by PRC students and foreign talents in general. Since there are “more sojourners than settlers”, the impact on Singapore’s national identity is “highly provisional” and tentative.123 But one thing is certain: “the politics of sameness and difference within each ‘race’ [will] become more complex than it currently already is”.124 The category “Indian” now included northern as well as southern Indians. Likewise the category “Chinese” now took in PRC Chinese from as far away as Xinjiang, Shaanxi, and Sichuan, and not only the southern maritime provinces from whence immigrants traditionally came. Singapore has experienced three eras of globalization. The first was when Singapore was a colonial entrepot of trade. The second began with independence when Singapore industrialized. The third came with the knowledge-based economy. Of this third era, Prime Minister Goh said, in May 2001, “We are living in a very dangerous period, and I don’t think Singaporeans understand that.”125 This “dangerous period” provided the

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backdrop to a much speculated event: the change of prime ministers from Goh Chok Tong to Lee Hsien Loong on 12 August 2004. Lee, at 52, was Singapore’s third prime minister. He had his job cut out for him by the third era of globalization with its twin problems of structural unemployment and a widening wealth gap. China was rapidly integrating into the global market economy, followed by India. The two Asian giants produced, between themselves, 1.2 million engineers and science graduates each year who were willing to work for a fraction of the pay of their Singapore counterparts.126 Multinationals based in Singapore were relocating, notably to Shanghai. The bio-medical sciences coming in now generated fewer jobs than the now departing electronics firms, and had fewer linkages to local supporting industries which could add more jobs.127 Another problem was that the jobs created were those that Singaporeans were not yet equipped for. It takes doctoral and post-doctoral research experience to work in the bio-medical field. Many young Singaporeans who flocked to do a first degree in the life sciences had to put in more years of study. In another area, the government’s liberalization of the financial sector had only brought foreigners as CEOs to make local banks world-class, and Singapore an international wealth-management centre. Again, this was because of skills mismatch. This problem would be ameliorated by the casino-integrated resorts which were expected to create many thousands of jobs. As regards the widening wealth gap, Dr Goh Keng Swee had foreseen it at the start of Singapore’s industrialization. It had worsened with the shift to a knowledge-based economy. “For top talents are limited in supply and coveted everywhere”, and hence command high salaries set by international benchmarks,128 while at the other end of the spectrum, the low-skilled workers lose their jobs through restructuring. Even middle-income professionals are not spared because of outsourcing. The economy was recovering as Lee Hsien Loong took office. But globalization would not let Singapore stay the same. Prime Minister Lee said in April 2006: “The sun is shining again but you’re looking at a new landscape.”129 He meant the expanding frontier of opportunities that was opening up, and that Singaporeans were venturing out to China, India, the

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Middle East, Russia, Eastern Europe. He meant the landmark attractions coming up in Singapore under his watch, namely, the integrated resorts that “the world’s biggest casino operators” were competing to build at Marina Bay and Sentosa.130 The government was also making Singapore a pleasure island for the rising middle class and rich of Asia. Singapore’s property developers were collaborating in this plan by building luxury houses in marina settings and luxury apartments in choice districts. In this aspiring Dubai-style playground for the rich, the poor would not be forgotten. In his first parliamentary speech after leading the PAP to win strongly in the May 2006 general election, Prime Minister Lee announced his plan for them. He would improve the social safety net, and in order to do this, he would have to raise more revenue. Firstly, he would raise the Goods and Services Tax from the current 5 to 7 per cent. Secondly, he planned to use “more of the returns from investing the nation’s reserves”.131 Currently, the government could only spend the net investment income, meaning dividends and interest earned. “The definition (of net investment income) will be broadened to include realised capital gains.”132 This is a very significant move “requiring an amendment to the Constitution, and ‘working out’ of details with the elected President”.133 “It is essential for us to tilt the balance [of public expenditure] in favour of lower-income Singaporeans because globalisation is going to strain our social compact.”134 Lee gave his pledge for a more inclusive society on taking office. He was now giving substance to it. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong presided over a Singapore that was on the cusp of a generational change to the generation that was too young to know what Singapore was like before independence transformed it. Lee said: For the future, we have to focus on the post-independence generation. They are different from their parents, they’ve grown up in different circumstances, they have different points of reference, different expectations, different values, much more exposed to the outside world.135

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What plans had he for them? What issues would they present him? His plans carried forward the recommendations of the Singapore 21 Committee (1997–99) and the Remaking Singapore Committee (1999–2002) appointed by his predecessor. Both committees noted that Singaporeans viewed success too narrowly, in academic/economic terms exclusively. They advised redefining success to acknowledge the fact that it “can take many paths and forms”.136 Lee endorsed this, saying “We are offering people more choice in education.137 He cited the Sports school, currently up and running, the Arts school, currently being built, other art academies which were doing well, and the maths and science schools. He gave more support by renaming one ministry the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, and appointing Dr Vivian Balakrishnan the minister. However, Singapore must have a bicultural elite good in English and Mandarin, who was knowledgeable about China today. Lee intended to groom them in the SAP schools with scholarships, providing for a period in China. These scholars were the top tier of their cohorts. As for the other students, Mandarin would be taught “as a living language”, using the modular approach which would offer the basics and reinforcement or enrichment, and advanced courses, depending on ability and interest.138 What Lee did for Mandarin, he would also do for the other mother tongue languages, Malay and Tamil, subject to demand, as Singapore must also have elites who could understand and deal with India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The government encouraged Singaporeans to work abroad for the experience and contacts, but hoped “that they don’t spend all their life there”.139 For some years now, the government had recognized the importance of connecting with the Singaporean diaspora, “our global family”.140 To do this in a more systematic way Lee set up an Overseas Singaporean Unit in the Prime Minister’s Office, and planned to launch an online portal in Shanghai where about 7,000 Singaporeans were based. The idea was to keep overseas Singaporeans updated on events back home, and help them when they were ready to return, to get into jobs, and their children, to get into schools.

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Lee’s plans should also include a history portal for the post-65ers, informing them about the founding fathers of the Republic of Singapore. This is essential because, to use a biblical analogy, here there arose a generation “which knew not Joseph”.141 The issues Lee would face were, firstly, the continuing one of emigration, and on the flip side, the matter of foreign talent. The post-65ers had to be convinced that their jobs were not under threat from foreigners, and that citizens would always come first in the government’s mind. Another issue was the discontent of the post-65ers with politics of the one-party-state genre. They expected an acceptance of pluralism and openness, and did not think this would shake the economy. It is noteworthy that two new PAP MPs of the post-65 generation reflected this position too. Baey Yam Keng said that the legislation restricting the media should be changed.142 Fellow MP Michael Palmer, a Eurasian lawyer, said: “young people are asking for more freedom of speech and openness.”143 Their criticism, Palmer added, might be hard on the government’s ears, but “is a demonstration of their sense of passion and sense of ownership”. The older generation emphasized the importance of ethnic identity and Asian values.144 The post-65ers were more keen on democracy and universalistic liberal values. Turning to another issue, a sudden sharp rise in property prices would dash the hope of the post-65ers for a dream home. The price of luxury homes rebounded in 2005–06 from foreigner buying. This was interpreted as heralding the advent of the two casino-integrated resorts. However, some rich property investors contended that “the property recovery can’t be sustained by foreigner buying and by just the high-end segment”.145 The Straits Times advised Singaporeans not to mistake “the take-off in high-end values” as a yardstick for the broader property market.146 The Sunday Times reminded them of “the wild buying binge of about a decade ago”, adding that many of the panicked buyers “are still saddled with losing propositions”.147 The paper warned that some developers and property analysts “have the questionable habit of talking up the market”.148 Should these responsible media’s advice, given for the public good, be unheeded and speculative fever started up again, the new prime minister would have yet another problem on his hands.

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“Singapore,” in the words of Manuel Castells, “is the quintessential developmental state.”149 But Singapore is also a nation in the making. And unlike a developmental state, a nation cannot be fashioned by economic strategy and technology. Singapore’s leaders acknowledged this truth when they pondered the question of why Singaporeans emigrated. You need passion and conviction, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said in August 1989. Dr Hong Hai, MP for Bedok GRC, asked Singaporeans who had emigrated what they missed about Singapore. He said (in June 1990): They did not miss the Shenton Way skyline. They did not miss the shops of Orchard Road. Or our super-efficient MRT and beautiful airport. They missed the seemingly little things in life [like the hawker food char kway teow].150 Dr Hong concluded: “gleaming towers…do not a nation make”.151 A nation is a work of time, but to Singapore’s leaders, it was time to work on it. In August 2002, Prime Minister Goh, faced with the unremitting tide of emigration, recited what Singapore means to him, and he hoped, will mean to all Singaporeans too. For me, this is home because my family, my friends, my people are here. My memories are here. My hopes are here. This is home because we built it. Every Singaporean has given a part of himself, big or small, to the country. Singapore is the sum of our dreams, our fears, our sweat. It reflects who we are, and what we want to be. When we proclaim that we are Singaporeans, we are expressing our belief in the Singapore way of life and in our shared values — a multi-racial and multi-religious society, meritocracy, compassion, justice, equality, hard work, determination, and excellence in whatever we do.152 The first part of Goh’s statement was an emotional one, the second cerebral. Goh appealed to both our heart and mind in an attempt to turn our footloose individualism into the rootedness of nationhood. To note another

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point couched in another dualism, Goh mentioned “meritocracy” followed by “compassion” suggesting the need to find the right balance between these two opposing principles, between yin and yang. The Remaking Singapore Committee (2002–2003), commissioned by Goh, also attempted to define “what being ‘Singaporean’ means”.153 They included the following items in their definition: “passion and pride”, “the will of the people”, “self-reliance”, “equal opportunity to be the best [one] can be”, “justice and fairness”, “shared experiences”, “a society that values diversity”, and “mutual appreciation and trust”.154 These exercises to define the Singaporean will go on as will the ceaseless transnational journeys of globalization. Even as Singaporeans go out into the world to pursue their dreams, people come to Singapore to pursue theirs. The in-coming people — the rich, the professionals, the research scientists and others — help to flesh out the PAP Government’s strategic vision to create a global city of excellence. But what are the chances that they will plant their roots here, as the government hopes? A small but growing number are choosing to do so. They are usually the ones from the immediate region, and from China and India, for whom Singapore has the added attraction of being an Asian First World city, paved with the conviviality of new-money and new possibility. This is not to say they will have no problems. They have to live with Singaporeans who fear losing out to foreigners. On this matter, the government has had to emphasize repeatedly that the foreign influx actually spins off more jobs, more wealth, all around. As to the matter of integration, the onus is not just on the host society. The foreigners themselves have their unhelpful social baggage. All this means more work for the government, and more power for the government whose job it is to mould this ever growing, more complex, nation. Globalization will not weaken the concept of Singaporean if the government is as determined as the PAP is to continue working on it. One thing is certain and should not be missed. The foreign denizens and those who become new citizens or New Singaporeans have trust and confidence in the government: that’s why they’re here. So do the local-born Singaporeans: that’s why they’ve so consistently voted it back to dominance. Trust and confidence are the bedrock on which the Singapore nation stands,

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and wins global capital and global talent. And wins Singaporeans to feel they belong. Trust and confidence are the moral mainstay of our nationbuilding. We would appreciate this even more if we look at the dark side of globalization as revealed by the eruption of the American subprime mortgage crisis, with its global ramifications, in which we are seeing a meltdown of trust and confidence of the first magnitude. NOTES 1 Cheah Boon Kheng, Malaysia: The Making of a Nation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), pp. 36–39; T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, paperback, 2001), pp. 351–52. 2 Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998), p. 426. 3 Cheah, Malaysia, pp. 84–85. 4 Ibid., pp. 137–38; Cheah Boon Kheng, eds., “Ethnicity and Contesting Nationalisms in Malaysia”, in The Challenge of Ethnicity: Building a Nation in Malaysia (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2004), pp. 48–49. 5 Lee Kam Hing, “Differing Perspectives on Integration and Nation-Building in Malaysia”, in Ethnic Relations and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia, edited by Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004), p. 85. 6 Cheah, Malaysia, pp. 65–66; Lee, “Differing Perspectives”, pp. 83–84. 7 Cheah, Malaysia, p. 66; Lee, “Differing Perspectives”, pp. 94–95. 8 Cheah, Malaysia, pp. 67, 69–70. 9 Lee, “Differing Perspectives”, pp. 89–90. 10 Ibid. 11 Cheah, Malaysia, pp. 67–69; Lee, “Differing Perspectives”, pp. 93–97. 12 A number of pro-Islamist activists who were arrested and publicized by the government-controlled media were former or present members of PAS, the UMNO’s rival. See Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, “The UMNO-PAS Struggle: Analysis of PAS’s Defeat in 2004”, in Malaysia Recent Trends and Challenges, edited by Saw Swee-Hock and K. Kesavapany (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), pp. 173–74; and Zainal Kling, “UMNO and BN in the 2004 Election: The Political Culture of Complex Identities”, in the same volume, p. 174. 13 John Funston, “The Malay Electorate in 2004: Reversing the 1999 Result?”, in Malaysia, edited by Saw and Kesavapany, p. 143. 14 Zainal, “UMNO and BN”, p. 158.

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15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

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38

Ibid., pp. 180–81. Sunday Times, 1 November 1998. . Linda Low, “Sustaining the Competitiveness of Singapore Inc. in the Knowledgebased Global Economy”, in Sustaining Competitiveness in the New Global Economy: The Experience of Singapore, edited by Ramkishen S. Rajan (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003), p. 135. Chan Chin Bock, Heart Work (Singapore: Singapore Economic Development Board and EDB Society, 2002), pp. 173, 178 and 205. Ibid., pp. 298–300. Ibid., pp. 214–15. Ibid., pp. 215, 261. Ibid., pp. 196–97; Low, “Sustaining Singapore Inc”, pp. 136–37. Low, “Sustaining Singapore Inc”, p. 140. David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, Asean and East Asian International Relations: Regime Delusion (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), p. 117. Garry Rodan and Kevin Hewison, eds., “Globalization, Conflict and Political Regimes in East and Southeast Asia”, in Neoliberalism and Conflict in Asia after 9/11 (London, Routledge, 2006), pp. 1 and 6. Ibid., p. 9. Garry Rodan, “Singapore: Globalisation, the State, and Politics”, in The Political Economy of South-East Asia: Markets, Power and Contestation, edited by Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison and Richard Robison, third edition (Melbourne: OUP, 2006), p. 153. Garry Rodan and Kevin Hewison, “Neoliberal Globalization, Conflict and Security: New Life for Authoritarianism in Asia?”, in Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia, edited by Vedi R. Hadiz (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 109–10. Rodan and Hewison, “Globalization, Conflict and Political Regimes”, pp. 14– 15. Rodan, “Singapore: Globalisation, the State, and Politics”, p. 155. Ibid. Low, “Sustaining Singapore Inc”, p. 147. Ibid. Jones and Smith, Asean and East Asian International Relations, p. 141. James W. Morley, ed., Driven By Growth: Political Change in the Asia-Pacific Region, revised edition (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe 1999), p. 348. Daniel A. Bell and Kanishka Jayasuriya, “Understanding Illiberal Democracy: Towards A Framework”, in Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia, edited by Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, Kaniska Jayasuriya and David Martin Jones (London: Macmillan in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1995), p. 13. Ibid.

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39 David Brown and David Martin Jones, “Democratization and the Myth of the Liberalizing Middle Classes”, in Towards Illiberal Democracy, edited by Bell, Brown, Jayasuriya and Jones, p. 81. 40 Bell and Jayasuriya, “Understanding Illiberal Democracy”, p. 13; Brown and Jones, “Democratization”, p. 95. 41 Brown and Jones, “Democratization”, p. 80. 42 Ibid., p. 81. 43 Ibid., p. 105. 44 Lam Peng Er, “Singapore: Rich State, Illiberal Regime” in Driven By Growth: Political Change in the Asia Pacific Region, edited by James W. Morley (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, and Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), p. 255. 45 Ibid., pp. 255 and 273. 46 Ibid., p. 274. 47 Ibid., pp. 259 and 274. 48 Ibid., pp. 262–63. 49 “On the Closing Down of the Roundtable: An Email Dialogue with Kevin Tan”, coordinated by Chiu Wei Li, Tangent 4, no. 2 (2004): 89–93. 50 Straits Times, 18 August 2006. 51 Lam, “Singapore”, p. 256. 52 Straits Times, 5 January 2005. 53 Susan Long, Difference Makers: Stories of those Who Dared (Singapore: D.L. Publications, 2005), p. 86. 54 Ibid., p. 87. 55 Ibid. 56 Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s national day rally speech, 20 August 2000 (Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts, 2000), p. 5. 57 Straits Times, 2 April 2000. 58 Long, Difference Makers, p. 85. 59 Ibid., p. 88. 60 “Multiculturalism in Singapore: The Tangent Virtual Forum”, Tangent 5 (October 2002): 172. 61 Ibid., p. 177. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., p. 173. 64 Ibid. 65 Straits Times, 14 September 2000. 66 Ibid. 67 “Passion and Idealism: The Spirit of Education A Dialogue Between Su Guaning and the Tangent”, transcribed by Chan Cheow Thia, translated by Teng Qian Xi, Tangent 7 (October 2000): 55. 68 Ibid., pp. 51–52, 57–58.

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69 70 71 72 73 74

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Straits Times, 14 September 2000. “Passion and Idealism”, p. 67. Ibid., pp. 80–82, 88–91. “Multiculturalism in Singapore”, pp. 160–61 and 174. Ibid. “Filling the Gaps of Diversity a Cross-Cultural Dialogue”, transcribed by Ho Sheo Be, Tangent 5 (October 2002): 43 and 45; See also “Progressing or Retrogressing? A Dialogue on the Context of Singapore’s Multiculturalism”, transcribed by Low Yen Yen, Tangent 5 (October 2002): 105–09. “Filling the Gaps of Diversity”, pp. 55–56. Ibid., pp. 62–63, 192. Ibid., pp. 64–65. “Multiculturalism in Singapore”, p. 172. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 172–73. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 177. Straits Times, 21 April 2006. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. David Brown, Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 89. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., pp. 100–01. Ibid., pp. 93 and 106. Ibid., p. 96. Straits Times, 3 July 1988. Straits Times, 1 June 1990. Ibid. Straits Times, 21 August 1989. Video Tape of Prime Minister Lee’s national day rally speech on 25 August 1989, in the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library. The line “How long will the whole way take?” is my edited version of what is on the tape. All other lines are transcribed verbatim. Brown and Jones, “Democratization”, p. 95. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s national day rally speech on 18 August 2002 (Singapore: Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2002), p. 36. Ibid. Ibid.

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103 104 105 106 107

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Ibid., pp. 36–37. Sunday Times, 25 August 2002. Straits Times, 22 August 1989. Ibid. S. Gopinathan and V. Saravanan, “Education and Identity Issues in the Internet Age: the Case of Indians in Singapore”, in Asian Migrants and Education: The Tensions of Education in Immigrant Societies and among Migrant Groups, edited by Michael W. Charney, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Tong Chee Kiong (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003) p. 49. Rajesh Rai, “Singapore”, in The Encyclopaedia of the Indian Diaspora, edited by Brij V. Lal (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet and NUS, 2006), p. 187. Gopinathan and Saravanan, “Education and Identity Issues”, p. 49. Straits Times, 8 September 2001. Straits Times, 6 May 2002. Yeow Su Shen, “The Question of PRC Students as Future Stakeholders of Singapore” (BSocSc Hons thesis Department of Geography, NUS, 2003–04). Ibid., pp. 29–33. Ibid., pp. 39–40. Ibid., pp. 46–48 and 51–52. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., pp. 55–57. Ibid., p. 54. Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang “Foreign Talent in our Midst: New Challenges to Sense of Community and Ethnic Relations in Singapore”, in Beyond Rituals and Riots: Ethnic Pluralism and Social Cohesion in Singapore, edited by Lai Ah Eng (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2004). Ibid., p. 331. Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., pp. 330–31; see also Gopinathan and Saravanan, “Education and Identity Issues”, p. 50. Yeoh and Huang, “‘Foreign Talent’ in our Midst”, p. 334. Ibid., p. 336. Business Times, 10 May 2001. Winston T.H. Koh, “Singapore’s Economic Growth Experience”, in The Economic Prospects of Singapore, edited by Winston T.H. Koh and Robert S. Mariano (Singapore: Addison-Wesley Pearson Education, 2006), p. 15. Augustine H.H. Tan, “The Economic Challenges Facing Singapore”, in Economic Prospects, edited by Koh and Mariano, p. 30. Straits Times, 10 November 2006. Straits Times, 25 April 2006. Straits Times, 14 November 2006; Today, 14 November 2006. Ibid. Ibid.

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133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., clearly, the consequences of globalization were here to stay. Lee Yi Shyan, the new minister of state for trade and industry, perceived a need “to study the structural unemployment problem”. MPs called for a rethink of the social safety net, and for a bigger budget for retraining workers. Seah Kiang Peng (Marine Parade GRC) observed that the qualifying criteria in the Home Ownership Plus Education (HOPE) scheme was too restrictive. The ministry concerned “is targeting only 1,000 (families)… an astonishingly modest target”. Ms Ellen Lee (Sembawang GRC) expressed her bewilderment by the array of 36 help schemes and the different conditions which applied. See Straits Times, 10 November 2006. 135 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s national day rally speech on 22 August 2004 (Singapore: Ministry of Information, Communications, and the Arts, 2004), p. 36. 136 Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships: The Report of the Remaking Singapore Committee (Singapore: Lancer IMC for the Government of Singapore, 2003), p. 33 137 Prime Minister Lee’s national day rally speech on 22 August 2004, p. 42. 138 Ibid., p. 51. 139 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s national day rally speech on 20 August 2006 (Singapore: Ministry of Information, Communications, and the Arts, 2006), p. 53. 140 Ibid., p. 54. 141 Exodus 1:8, The Holy Bible, King James version. 142 Straits Times, 10 November 2006. 143 Ibid. 144 Ngiam Tong Dow, A Mandarin and the Making of Public Policy: Reflections by Ngiam Tong Dow, introduced and edited by Simon S.C. Tay (NUS Press, 2006). Ngiam cited and concurred with the view of Robert Kuok, “one of the richest men in Asia”, on the importance of retaining “our Chinese-ness, our Malayness, and Indian-ness”. See pp. 74, 121–22. 145 Straits Times, 9 November 2006. 146 Straits Times, 7 July 2006. 147 Sunday Times, 12 November 2006. 148 Ibid. 149 Manuel Castells, “The Developmental City-State in an Open World Economy”, BRIE Working Paper (Berkeley, 1988), p. 4. 150 Straits Times, 15 June 1990. 151 Ibid. 152 Prime Minister Goh’s national day rally speech on 18 August 2002, p. 54. 153 Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, p. 24. 154 Ibid.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Bibliographical Note permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are• 667 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

Bibliographical Note

The standard general history is C.M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819– 1988 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989). A rounded study of Singapore in the nineteenth century, rich in detail, is the same author’s The Straits Settlements 1826–67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony (London: Athlone Press, 1972). John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Low Mei Gek, eds., Early Singapore 1300s–1879: Evidences in Maps, Texts and Artefacts (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2004) unearths fresh material for reconstructing the Temasek era. On economic history in the colonial era, the most important study is W.G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The bases of politics and culture in Singapore before the Second World War were ethnic and religious, as they were to be after the war also, with heightened ethno-nationalist fervour. On the Chinese community, useful studies are C.F. Yong, Tan Kah-kee: The Making of an Overseas Chinese Legend (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987); Yen Ching-Hwang, “Hokkien Immigrant Society and Modern Chinese Tradition in British Malaya” in Michael W. Charney, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Tong Chee Kiong, eds., Chinese Migrants Abroad: Cultural, Educational and Social Dimensions of the Chinese Diaspora (Singapore: Singapore University Press and World Scientific, 2003); and David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919–1932 (London: Routledge, 2003). On the Malay and Muslim community, see W.R. Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Ulrike Freitag, “Arab Merchants in Singapore: Attempt of

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a Collective Biography”, and Mohammad Redzuan Othman, “Conflicting Loyalties of the Arabs in Malaya before World War II”, both articles in Huube De Jonge and Nico Kaptien, eds., Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade and Islam in Southeast Asia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002). The Indian community is treated in S. Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia and Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), and R. Ampalavanar, The Indian Minority and Political Change in Malaya 1945–1957 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1981). On the Eurasian community, see Myrna Braga-Blake, ed., Singapore Eurasians: Memories and Hopes (Singapore: Times Editions, 1992). Political change after the Second World War is treated in L.A. Mills, Malaya A Political and Economic Appraisal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), and very thoroughly studied in Yeo Kim Wah, Political Development in Singapore 1945–55 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1973). There is an important new book: T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; paperback, 2001), which introduces the theme of late imperial nation building and the collapse of this scheme. Although Harper does not say so, the collapse had far reaching consequences for Singapore. For it meant that the advocates of Malayan unity there, who believed the destinies of Singapore and Malaya to be inextricably intertwined, were chasing an impossible dream. On the English-educated activists involved in the Communist movement, see Cheah Boon Kheng, The Masked Comrades: A Study of the United Front in Malaya, 1945–48 (Singapore: Times Books International, 1979), Yeo Kim Wah, “Student Politics in the University of Malaya, 1949– 51”, in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (September 1992), and the same author’s “Joining the Communist Underground: The Conversion of English-educated Radicals to Communism in Singapore, June 1948–January 1951”, in Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 67, Pt. 1, no. 266 (1994); and Dominic J. Puthucheary and K.S. Jomo, eds., No Cowardly Past: James Puthucheary Writings, Poems, Commentaries (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 1998). Tan Jing Quee and K.S. Jomo, eds., Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History (Kuala Lumpur: Insan, 2001) is about the most prominent activist, who was, however, Chinese-educated.

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Bibliographical Note • 669

The dilemmas of Singapore’s first Chief Minister are described by himself in David Marshall, “Singapore’s Struggle for Nationhood, 1945– 1959”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (September 1970), by his colleague, Francis Thomas, Memoirs of a Migrant (Singapore: University Education Press, 1972); by his biographer, Chan Heng Chee, A Sensation of Independence: A Political Biography of David Marshall (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984); and by Albert Lau, “The Colonial Office and the Singapore Merdeka Mission, 23 April to 15 May 1956”, Journal of the South Seas Society 49 (1994); and James Low, “Kept in Position: The Labour FrontAlliance Government of Chief Minister David Marshall in Singapore, April 1955–June 1956” (based on the same author’s MA thesis), Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (February 2004). The inside story of the PAP’s collaboration and competition with the communists, and the linkage to the conflict over merger in Malaysia, is told in John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984); Dennis Bloodworth, The Tiger and the Trojan Horse (Singapore: Times Books International, 1986); and above all in Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998). But there is also a lesser known important work by a historian who was given access to the archives of the Internal Security Department, Ministry of Home Affairs, Singapore. (Drysdale and Bloodworth also had access to security documents). This is Lee Ting Hui’s The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore 1954–1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996), a monograph based on his PhD thesis. Two more historical monographs appeared around the time The Singapore Story was published. Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) paralleled Lee Kuan Yew’s account of the troubled internal and external dimensions of the merger process. Albert Lau, A Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the Politics of Disengagement (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998), furnishes a wealth of archival evidence on the fateful decisions and consequences in The Singapore Story. The well-documented studies by Lee Ting Hui, Matthew Jones, and Albert Lau offer the welcome chance to see the extent to which they corroborate

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the account given in Lee’s memoirs. Additionally, it is possible to see in the Jones study whether there was a British viewpoint which differed from that embodied in The Singapore Story. The Malaysian viewpoint is clearly discernible in Cheah Boon Kheng, Malaysia: The Making of a Nation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), and the same author’s “Ethnicity and Contesting Nationalisms in Malaysia” in his edited book The Challenge of Ethnicity: Building a Nation in Malaysia (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2004). The first-generation PAP leaders who stood with Lee are depicted in Lam Peng Er and Kevin Y.L. Tan, eds., Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1999). Coming in from the cold are Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), and C.C. Chin and Karl Hack, eds., Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004). These volumes tackle the issues that historians have puzzled over for a long time, but do not dispel all mystery, and in any case, have little to say about the communist network in Singapore, though this in itself may be a significant revelation. The PAP started nation building from the moment it took office in June 1959, and simply went on at a more fervid pace, under greater pressure and urgency, when Singapore was suddenly independent in August 1965. Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiographical sequel From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), conveys the grit and the will of the Prime Minister to make independence stick, and to build a nation by (in his words) “getting the basics right”. Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq, eds., The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1987, reprinted, Graham Brash and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), includes his expositions on communal versus national culture. The speeches of the Prime Minister and other Ministers are obviously very important. I have turned to them frequently. I have also used the Straits Times, Singapore Herald, and Business Times, and where necessary, the Hansard. All the above sources have been my mainstay, particularly in the chapters on the merger 1961–63, national service, education, the universities, home ownership, political succession, and the Goh Chok Tong Administration.

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Bibliographical Note • 671

The economy is central to Singapore’s nation building. The architect of the Singapore economy himself has put his thoughts in writing: Goh Keng Swee, The Economics of Modernization (Singapore: Federation Publications, 1972), The Practice of Economic Growth (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1977), and Wealth of East Asian Nations: Speeches and Writings, arranged and edited by Linda Low (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1995). The administrators who carried out the economic policies are studied in E.H. Schein, Strategic Pragmatism: The Culture of Singapore’s Economic Development Board (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1996), and have told their own stories in Chan Chin Bock, Heart Work (Singapore: Singapore Economic Development Board and EDB Society, 2002). The impact of globalization is dealt with in Linda Low, “Sustaining the Competitiveness of Singapore Inc. in the Knowledge-based Global Economy” in Ramkishen S. Rajan, ed., Sustaining Competitiveness in the New Global Economy: The Experience of Singapore (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003); Winston T.H. Koh, “Singapore’s Economic Growth Experience”; and Augustine H.H. Tan, “The Economic Challenges Facing Singapore”, both articles in The Economic Prospects of Singapore, edited by Winston T.H. Koh and Robert S. Mariano (Singapore: Addison-Wesley Pearson Education, 2006). The key official documents concerned with globalization are Report of the Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore (Singapore: SNP Security Printing Pte. Ltd., 1998), and New Challenges, Fresh Goals: Towards a Dynamic Global City Report of the Economic Review Committee, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore (Singapore: SNP SPrint Pte. Ltd., 2003). The economic scenario after the Islamist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 has been the focus of study by certain political economists who published essentially the same account in different works. The best account as regards Singapore is Garry Rodan and Kevin Hewison, “Neoliberal Globalization, Conflict and Security: New Life for Authoritarianism in Asia?” in Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia, edited by Vedi R. Hadiz (London: Routledge, 2006). Nation building under the PAP is, as the title of Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley’s monumental edited tome suggests, Management of

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Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989). This is an all-encompassing reference work topped by the editors’ magisterial summation. The politics of culture, ethnicity, and identity have assumed vital prominence everywhere in the contemporary world, modernization and globalization notwithstanding. What more in a place like Singapore? The books discussing this question include Chew Sock Foon, Ethnicity and Nationality in Singapore (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1987); David Brown, The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 1994); Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee, The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1995); Raj Vasil, Asianising Singapore: The PAP’s Management of Ethnicity (Singapore: Heinmann Asia and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1995); and John Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965–1990: The Cultural Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998). The articles to note are Geoffrey Benjamin, “The Cultural Logic of Singapore’s ‘Multiculturalism’ ” in Riaz Hassan, ed., Singapore Society in Transition (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1976); Sally Borthwick, “Chinese Education and Identity in Singapore” in Jennifer Cushman and Wang Gungwu, eds., Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1988); Sai Siew Yee, “Post-Independence Educational Change, Identity and Huaxiaosheng Intellectuals in Singapore: A Case Study of Chinese Language Teachers”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25, no. 2 (1997); James Gomez, “Consolidating Indian Identities in Post-Independence Singapore: A Case Study of the Malayalee Community”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25, no. 2 (1997); Verne A. Dusenbery, “Diasporic Imagings and the Conditions of Possibility: Sikhs and the State in Southeast Asia”, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 12, no. 2 (1997): 226–60; Alexius Pereira, “The Revitalization of Eurasian Identity in Singapore”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25, no. 2 (1997); and Chua Beng Huat, “Racial Singaporeans: Absence after the Hyphen”, in Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, edited by Joel S. Kahn (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998).

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Bibliographical Note • 673

Singapore and Malaysia mirror each other very compellingly in the matter of language, culture, education, and identity. It struck me that what the mirror showed was asymmetrical when I began reading Wang Gungwu, “Reflections on Malaysian Elites” in the same author’s Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia and Australia (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin [new edition] 1992); Tan Liok Ee, “Dongjiaozong and the Challenge to Cultural Hegemony 1951–1987”, in Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia, edited by Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992); and Tan Liok Ee, “Baggage from the Past, Eyes on the Future: Chinese Education in Malaysia Today”, in Ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia: A Dialogue Between Tradition and Modernity, edited by Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2002). Politics in post-independence Singapore has been described as an anomaly. Some political scientists explain it with reference to a middle-class culture and values system of a distinctively East Asian character. See David Brown and David Martin Jones, “Democratization and the Myth of the Liberalizing Middle Classes”, in Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia, edited by Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, Kaniska Jayasuriya, and David Martin Jones (London: Macmillan, 1995); and Lam Peng Er, “Singapore: Rich State, Illiberal Regime”, in Driven By Growth: Political Change in the Asia Pacific Region, edited by James W. Morley (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe and Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999). Diane K. Mauzy and R.S. Milne, Singapore Politics under the People’s Action Party (London: Routledge, 2002), is the sterling standard work. The emigration and foreign talent issues challenging the Singapore nation are discussed in the reports of consultative committees, Singapore 21 Together We Make the Difference, Singapore 21 Committee c/o Prime Minister’s Office [Public Service Division] 1999, and Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships: The Report of the Remaking Singapore Committee (Singapore: Lancer IMC for the Government of Singapore, 2003). See also S. Gopinathan and V. Saravanan, “Education and Identity Issues in the Internet Age: The Case of Indians in Singapore”, in Asian Migrants and Education: The Tensions of Education in Immigrant Societies and among Migrant Groups, edited by Michael W. Charney, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Tong Chee Kiong (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); and Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang,

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“Foreign Talent in our Midst: New Challenges to Sense of Community and Ethnic Relations in Singapore”, in Beyond Rituals and Riots: Ethnic Pluralism and Social Cohesion in Singapore, edited by Lai Ah Eng (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2004). The emergence of national identity is essayed in Wang Gungwu, Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia and Australia (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin [new edition] 1992); the same author’s Bind Us in Time: Nation and Civilisation in Asia (Singapore: Times Media Pte Ltd, 2003); and David Brown, Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics (London: Routledge, 2000). The use of history to undergird national identity and national values is examined in Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli, “The Scripting of Singapore’s National Heroes: Toying with Pandora’s Box”, in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, edited by Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), and the same authors’ “History and the Imaginaries of ‘Big Singapore’: Positioning the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (February 2004). The official histories presented have not gone uncontested, in particular, by Chineseeducated and post-65 generation bilingual intellectuals, as Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli observe. Albert Lau, “Nation-Building and the Singapore Story: Some Issues in the Study of Contemporary Singapore History”, in Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories, edited by Wang Gungwu (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), notes the controversy generated by the Singapore Story and national education objectives, viz. the rebuttals from former opposition politicians and the general public in Singapore, and from Malaysian leaders, angry with the PAP for reopening old wounds. Albert Lau’s own stand is that while total objectivity is unattainable, the importance of sticking to the archival evidence and of being honest should be emphasized. Wang Gungwu, the editor and contributor to the volume, and the other authors who are country/region specialists like Wang, reflect on the concerns and approaches that the nationals in their respective Southeast Asian countries of specialization bring to the writing of nationbuilding history.

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior Index permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are• 675 available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

Index

All-Party Committee Report on Chinese education, 295 Alliance Government, 120 Alliance Party, 74, 99 coalition with Labour Front, 106 dispute with PAP, 255 Allied Ordnance of Singapore manufacture of Bofors cannons, 291 Alsagoff, 24 America, see also United States favouring Asian solution to Malaysia dispute, 225 ancestral worship position of Christians on, 544 Ang, John, 351 Anglicization, 602 animals compassion for, 584 Anti-British League, 60 Anti-Federation Campaign, 55 AR 15 rifle, 291 Arab wakafs fate of, 327 Arabs, 24 Asian Development Bank, 273 Asian dollar market, 571 Asian identity and local university, 390 Asian Financial Crisis, 560, 562, 565, 571–74, 638 changes in CPF, 573

A A. Rahim Ishak, 513 A. Samad Ismail, 61, 71 Abdul Hamid bin Haji Jumat, 110, 111, 119 Abdul Razak, 66 Abdullah Badawi, 635 Abdullah Tarmugi, 506 background, 497 academic freedom, 367, 368, 371, 373, 375 University of Singapore, 376–82 Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), 637 Ahmad Boestaman, 222 Ahmad bin Ibrahim, 369 Ahmad Khalis Abdul Ghani, 511 Ahmad Mattar, 314, 459, 498, 502 Chairman of Mendaki, 496 Ai Tong School, 31 Air New Zealand, 562 Al-Imam editors, 26 Al-Azhar University, 25 alcohol revenue earner, 18 Aljunied, 24, 25 Aljunied school, 25 Alkaff, 24 All-Party Committee, 111

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676 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

job losses, 572 Singapore’s way of dealing, 576 Associated Chambers of Commerce Singapore and Malaya, 80 Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce, 56 Association of Asian Studies, 540 associations of minority groups reception of National Conference, 75 Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP), 502–04, 505, 507, 641 proposal for collective leadership, 502–03, 507, 508 issues raised, 509 Association of Nanyang University Graduates, 437, 440 automation move towards high tech industries, 275 Aw Boon Haw, 80 Azahari mass rally in support of, 221 B Baey Yam Keng, 658 Baker, Maurice, 66 Balakrishnan, Vivian, 642 Bali bombing, 572 Baling talks, 101, 102 timing, 119 unity of Malaya and Singapore, 104 Bangkok talks, 249, 250, 252 Bangsa Malaysia, 634 Barisan Sosialis Singapura (Socialist Front of Singapore), 184, 192 leaders arrested during Operation Cold Store, 222 opposition, 189 opposition to merger, 192, 189, 190

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

676

Tunku’s view on, 207 view on merger, 193 Barker, E.W., 39, 334 Bartholomew, G.W., 402 Barwick, Garfield, 248 Bell, James, 248 Benjamin, Geoffrey, 623 B.G. Lee Economic Committee, 465– 66, 638 Bible Knowledge, 540 bilingual education system students’ difficulty in coping, 518 bilingualism, 299–302 economic and social costs, 303–04, 310 implementation, 299, 300 on-going impact, 304 principle of education in Singapore, 111 problem faced by Chinese dialect speaking students, 301 review, 310–12 Bintan, 4 Bintan Beach International Resort, 638 Biopolis, 638 Black, Robert, 114, 143 Boat Quay, 11 Borthwick, Sally, 612 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 38 legacy, 39 brain-power call up, 281, 292 Brierley Investments, 563 Briggs plan, 99 British accommodation of claims from various races, 85 Arabs, relations with, 24 dislike of Sukarno, 229 response to U.S. position on Malaysia dispute, 231, 232 British civil service tradition, 269

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Index • 677

British general election (1970), 284 British military provider of housing, 332 British policy, 27 post-war Malaya, 76 British protectors, 31 British withdrawal, 261 assets handed over to Singapore, 268 blow to Singapore, 265 Brunei revolt, 220 pretext for security action, 221 Brown, David, 624, 640, 648, 649, 650 theory, 652 Buddhism, 543 modernizing, 551–52 Buddhist studies, 540 Buma, Michael, 257 Bugis, 5, 7, 23 Burhanuddin Al-Hemy, Dr, 53 Burrows, Roland, 379 Byrne, K.M. first generation PAP minister and nation builder, 39, 66 Minister for Labour and Law, 160 C Caine, Sydney, 92 Cairnhill, 142 Cantonese, 12 capital gains tax proposal for, 334 CapitaLand, 637 Cashin, H.E., 350 caste system Indians, 35 Castellas, Manuel, 659 Catholic Centre for Foreign Workers shut down of, 469

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677

Central Provident Fund, 16, 268, 276 calls for use to purchase private property, 338, 339, 344, 345, 346, 347 cut in contributions rates, 466, 576 deductions for contributions to Mendaki, 496 employer’s contribution, 591 investments, use for, 570 purchase of HDB flats, 331 purchase of private property, 338, 344, 345, 346 restoration of cut, 561 Chan Chin Bok, 270 Chan Heng Chee, 118 Chan Sun Wing, 162, 428 Chang Yuen Tong, 145 Changkat Changi Secondary School, 297 Chartered Industries of Singapore, 291 Cheah Boon Kheng, 245 Chen Keng Juan, 515, 519, 521 Cheng, Vincent, 468, 469 Cheng San election (1997), 526 Cheng Yuet Tong, 147 Chew Sock Foon, 622 Chew Swee Kee, 110, 111, 153 Chia Thye Poh, 429 Chiang Hai Ding, 404 Chiang Kai Shek, 81 Chiang, Mickey official narrator of SAF, 293 Chin Peng, 41, 42, 43, 56, 99 Baling talks, 101–02 negotiating tactic, 102, 103 request for talks, 99–101 China consulate in Singapore, 30, 31

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678 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Lee Kuan Yew’s survey on universities, 361 Nationalist Party see Kuomintang (KMT) rise of new, 134 China Democratic League Malayan branches, 97 China Emporium, 464 China-born, 84 holding on to Chinese nationality, 81 Chinese, 22, 28, 29 attendance at English medium schools, 44 boycott of Japan, 13 Chinese-educated, 151, see also Chinese-educated dilemma over language, 312 estates and smallholdings, 11 immigration, 11 important festivals, 543 Malaya, 42 Malayan consciousness, 169 polarization during wartime, 42 productive indebtedness, 29 Chinese bicultural elites, 64, Chinese businessmen fear of loss of citizenship, 211 Chinese Chamber of Commerce, 73, 79 concern of employers over duration of National Service, 282 minting of NS medallions, 289 Singapore, 82, see also Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce support for merger, 211 Chinese Christians practice of religion, 544 Chinese clans, 610–11 defence against Western culture, 610

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

678

Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 32, 33, 81 Chinese cultural shrine, 611–13 Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 611 Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC), 518 Chinese diaspora, 33, 134 Chinese education, 30, 606–08 Malaysia and Singapore compared, 606–08 interest groups, 304 Chinese election lobby, 634, 635 Chinese entrepreneur psychology of, 29 Chinese festivals celebration by Chinese Christians, 543, 544 Chinese Heritage Centre Nanyang Techonological University, 611 Chinese High School, 32, 45, 93, 108, 418 student unrest, 137 Chinese high school students, 108, 110 Chinese immigration, 28 Chinese junks, 9 Chinese Language Review Committee (CLRC), 514, 521 study on low morale of Chineselanguage teachers, 522 terms of reference, 515 Chinese marriage rituals Chinese Christians, and, 544–45 Chinese Middle Schools restructuring, 296 Secondary Four examination, 296 Chinese market 17th century, 6 Chinese nationalism, 45

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Index • 679

Chinese-school students’ protests, 92, 172 Chinese schools appeal to parents, 306, 604 communist subversion, 85 decline in enrolment, 302, 604 examination boycott, 174, 185 extensive backing from Chinese community, 93 fear of change in character, 172–74 funding, 85 support from government lacking, 172 towkay sponsors, 85 treatment of, 84 underfunding, 134 Chinese Secondary Four Examination, 300 Chinese traders, 3 Chinese university proposal for, 86 Chinese-educated, 644 Chinese, 151, 488 domination of SMEs, 580, 581 indifference to counter culture of West, 537 lower middle class to working class, 14 marginalization of, 602, 644 motivation to learn English, 599 overcoming marginalization, 354 ownership of assets, 354–55 relations with Goh Chok Tong, 513– 17 show of discontent in election, 515–16 silent majority, 514 support of, 170 unhappiness over changes in education, 519–21 view of IPSE report, 515 view of Western technology, 602

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

679

Chinese-educated intellectuals generational similarities and differences, 523–24 Chinese-educated majority, 167 silent majority, 488 Chinese-educated workers, 135 Chinese-medium schools, 533 lobbying for, 604 Ch’ing dynasty, 30, 550 Ch’ng Jit Koon, 437, 524 agreement with Lee on handling of Nantah, 444 Chong Fu Girls’ School, 31 Christianity, 542–46 comparison with Confucianism, 550–51 reasons for its continued prevalence, 552 relevance in modern Singapore, 550–51 Christians population, 542 Chua, David, 35 Chua Hoe Ann, 218 Chua Sian Chin, 407 Chuang Chu Lin, 424, 426, 432, 434 Chung Cheng High School, 93, 108 riots, 137 Chung Ling High School, 32, 418 citizenship, 84 China-born Chinese, 84 definition of, 202 problem, 201 question of merger, 86 Singapore, 117 citizenship bill, 118, 125 Marshall, 117 civil servants attendance at political study centre, 167

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680 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

civil service pay hike, 577 poaching by private sector, 561 Clammer, John, 541, 552, 553, 623 Clarke, Hilda Selwyn, 66 class disadvantage redressing, 603–06 coal bunkering centre, 10 Cobbold, 204 Cobbold Report, 206 colonial era residential districts according to race, 323 Committee on Singapore’s Competitiveness, 565, 582 Commonwealth Relations Office, 229 Communist Insurgency, 56 communist revolution’s roots, 134 communists defeat of, 45 Lim Yew Hock’s offensive, 137–39 selection of cadres, 135 united front strategy, 45 Communities Liaison Committee, 72 Community Centres NS send-off dinners, 289 Community Development Councils (CDCs), 492 Family Service Centres, 578 HOPE assistance plan, 580 Work Assistance Programme, 579 competitiveness committee on Singapore’s, 565 compulsory education, 506 Conference of Malay Rulers, 75 Confucian culture, 29 Confucian ethics, 540, 541, 609 Christian teaching, and, 545

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

680

Confucian values, 269, 270 Confucianism promotion of, 538–42 Confrontation British commitment of troops, 247 infiltration into Sarawak border, 246 Malaysia fights back, 246–50 Corridon, Richard, 91 Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB), 267 corruption policy against, 266 Council on Education for Muslim Children (MENDAKI), 496 counter culture 1960s, 535–38 Western, 609 Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Bill effect on communists, 113 Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) (Amendment) Bill, 267 Critchley, T.K., 245 Crouch, Harold, 640 Crown Colony, 8, 16 currency stable, 562 curriculum broadening of, 390–93

D Dainton, Frederick, 445 Dao Heng Bank purchase by DBS, 562 DBS Realty, 337 de Chikera, Ernst, 402 de Cruz, Gerald, 55

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Index • 681

defence importance of, 281 Defence and Internal Security Council, 124, 125, 126 defence industry, 291 Democratic Party, 84, 105 democratization myth of, 639–44 detainees release of, 159 Devaser, K.L., 77 Development Bank of Singapore purchase of Dao Heng Bank, 562 purchase of Kwong On Bank, 562 developmental state, 636, 636–39, 651 Dhanabalan, S., 314, 457 background, 457 dialect associations, 73 diaspora, 36 Singapore, 22 Dillingham Corporation, 337 Diosado Macapagal allying with Sukarno during Confrontation, 224 discrimination Eurasians, 36 D.N. Aidit, 220 dominion status, 122 Douglas-Home, Alec, 249, 255 succeeding Macmillan, 247 Dragon’s Tooth Strait, 1, 2 Duke University, 289 Dutch Calvinistic background, 269 Dzukarnian Kamaron, 647 E Earl of Stockton, 179 East India Company, 7 Eber, John, 36, 39, 59, 60, 70, 71

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

681

Eber, Richard, 36 Economic Committee chaired by Lee Hsien Loong, 465– 66, 638 Economic Development Board (EDB), 268, 365 import substitution phase, 271 launch of new industrial policy, 276 targets multinational enterprises, 636 economic growth nation-building, 276 strategy, 266 economic recession drop in property prices, 467 Economic Restructuring Shares, 578 Economic Review Committee, 573, 577, 582, 584, 590, 639 boosting Singapore’s competitiveness, 565 limits on CPF withdrawal for property purchases, 575 review of home ownership policy, call for, 576 education, 295–321 emphasis on science, mathematics and technical subjects, 317 equal treatment to all school streams, 295 policy of streaming, 315, 316 proposal for alternative national school system, 307–09 question of merger, 86 rapid building of schools, 278 Singapore, 111 streaming, 520 Education for Living, 300 education policies future of madrasahs, 505–07 Lee Kuan Yew, 172–76

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682 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

election (1991) straw polls, 532 electorate federal election (1955), 77 elites, 44 residence during colonial era, 323 Elliott, T.H., 401 emergency one-room flats, 329, 330, 336 Emergency Regulations repeal of, 113 emigration issue of, 651, 652, 6569 large number of Singaporeans, 649 Employment Act, 267 engineers shortage of, 274 English language dominance in education, 533 role of, 302–04, 527 English-educated Christianity, 542 fastest movers, 488 political conviction of, 598 radicals, 53, 59–65, 67, 71, 92 regard for West, 599 ruling elite, 600 white collar workers, 168 English-educated class weak support for PAP, 166 English-educated radicals, 53, 59–65, 67, 71, 92 English-medium schools, 44, 299 choice of parents, 303, 306, 604 gain in importance, 303 pivotal importance, 303 Enlistment Act, 282 Enright Affair, 369–72 Enright, D.J., 353, 367, 369, 369–72 anecdote on Toh Chin Chye, 403 resignation, 402

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

682

estate duties planning for, 350, 351 entrepot trade, 8, 9, 16, 28 entrepreneurs Chinese, 29 Hokkien, 30 entrepreneurship promotion of, 584, 585 ethnic variety Singapore, 22 Eu Chooi Yip, 59, 60, 63, 67, 71 Eurasian Association (EA), 619 Eurasian Community, 618–19 Eurasians, 22, 36, 37, 44 aspirations, 36 recognition as ethnically distinct, 623 executive apartments, 329 executive condominiums, 568, 574 expatriate academic staff terms of employment amended, 399 expatriates in University of Singapore, 397–403 extended family scheme for parent-children joint balloting for HDB flats, 349 F Fajar, 92 family income ceiling purchase of HDB flats, 333, 334, 341 Family Service Centres, 578 Fang Chuang Pi The Plen, 179 Federal Election Bill, 234 federal election (1955), 77, 100 federal election PAP’s decision to contest, 250 Federation of Malaya, 52 Federation of Malaya Constitution reaction to, 87

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 683

Federation of UK and Eire Malaysian and Singapore Student Organizations (FUEMSSO), 405, 468 feedback unit, 489 Fellowship of Muslim Students’ Association, 512 financial services, 565 flexible wage system, 560 Fong, Nickson, 637 Fong Swee Suan, 93, 94, 107, 138, 150, 159, 160, 162, 182 arrest during Operation Cold Store, 222 Barisan Sosialis Singapura, 184 Foreign Correspondents’ Association, 181 foreign ministers meeting in Manila, 225 foreign talent, 569, 579, 580 influx of, 649 integration, 587 need for, 563 founding fathers passion and conviction, 650 free trade, 8, 10 meaning of, 9, 10 Fukien, 28 Full Gospel Businessmen Fellowship International, 551 fund management, 565 G Gateway design by I.M. Pei, 324 General Certificate of Education “Ordinary” Level Examination, 297, 300 general election (1955), 105 general election (1959), 151

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

683

nomination day, 151 PAP candidates, 152 victory of PAP, 154 general election (1988), 478 generational change, 656 geomancy avoidance by Chinese Christians, 545 Ghadr Party, 35 Ghazali bin Shafie, 234 Gimson, Franklin, 80 globalization, 564, 654, 655 challenges of, 582, 611, 648–49 changing mindsets, 590 effect on Singapore, 582 Goh Chok Tong, 340, 346, 457, 459, 461, 487–532, 546, 608 assertion of Confucian values, 473 background, 457 campaigning in Cheng San GRC, 526–28 choice of peers as DPM, 461, 478 concern over Malay support, 500–02 consultative style of government, 465, 489 dealings with Chinese-educated Chinese, 513–17 disagreement with AMP’s proposal, 508 distribution of wealth policy, 570–71 emphasis on critical thinking, 564 endorsement of Confucianism, 547 explains SM Lee’s role, 480 governing style, 481 Lee’s views on working style, 475 moves re: political Islam, 513 national ideology, case for, 549 need for Lim Chee Onn, 463 passion in nation-building, 588 plans for Malay self-help, 504, 505

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

684 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

self-appraisal, 477–79 sovereignty of Singapore, 473 stress on teamwork and consultation, 477 swearing in as Prime Minister, 481 visit to Indonesia, 549 Goh Choon Kang, 566 Goh Keng Swee, 66, 90, 142, 189, 251, 277, 331 architect of SAF, 284 comment on school system, 301 concern over Western cultural ideology, 536 consultation with Tun Razak, 254 Finance Minister, 266 intention to retire, 456 invitation to UN industrial survey team, 269 launch of Peoples’ Association, 161 need for referendum on merger, 195, 196 on trade-off between growth and nation-building, 277, 278, 453 study on education, 605 view on Confucianism, 547 view on Lee’s handling of Nantah, 444 Goh Report on Ministry of Education, 314–16 streaming policy, 315–16 Goode, William, 159, 165, 177, 178 Goods and Services Tax, 573, 656 government as entrepreneur, 272 integrity, 562 under leadership of Goh Chok Tong, 477 Government Investment Corporation (GIC), 637

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

684

government parliamentary committees (GPCs) formation of, 490 government-linked companies regional expansion, 562 grassroots organizations, 490–92 Great Depression, 13 Greenwood, Anthony, 255 Gregory, J.S., 372, 373 Gross Domestic Product huge foreign component, 274 Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), 614 proposal for, 500 Groves, M.C., 402 growth triangle Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore, 561 Gujaratis, 12 Gurney, Henry, 71 Gwee Ah Leng, 423 Gwee Yee Hean, 520 H Halimah Yaacob, 511, 513 Han Suyin, 94 Hang Tuah, 65 Head, Anthony, 247, 254, 597 call for more inclusive government, 254 help schemes, 577–82 Hendrickson, E. Mason, 470, 473, 546 Hewison, Kevin, 39 high tech industries move towards, 275 high technology leap to, 271–76 Hill, Michael, 623 Hindu studies, 540

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 685

hippiesm, 536 Ho Chi Minh, 32 Ho Kah Leong, 305, 307 agreement with Lee on handling of Nantah, 445 Ho Rih Hwa, 426 Hock Lee Bus Company, 107 Hock Lee episode, 109 Hoe Puay Choo, 205 Hokkien prominent members of community, 82, 83 Hokkien Association support for Chinese High School students, 137 Hokkien Huay Kuan, 31, 419, 428, 445 Hokkien dialect group, 79 Home Ownership for the People scheme, 331 Home Ownership Plus Education (HOPE), 495, 580 Home Ownership Scheme CPF funds, 338 home-ownership government promoted, 326 priority, 325 trade-off between economic growth and nation-building, 353 trend in downgrading, 575 use of CPF funds, 330 Hon Sui Sen, 268, 574 assistance to Lee in search for successor generation in government, 457 intention to retire, 456 Hong Hai, 659 Hong Lim, 163 PAP’s defeat in, 164 Hong Lysa, 612

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

685

Horsburgh Lighthouse, 9 housing British military as provider, 332 HDB as provider, 327–32 Housing and Development Board (HDB) annual cash grants, 327 change in rules to permit resale, 566 establishment of, 326 ethnic quota, 495 executive apartments, 329 family income ceiling, 341 five-room flats, 330, 334 four-room flats, 330 income ceiling for purchasers, 334 liberalization of rules, 566 one-room flats, 329, 330 parent-and-children joint balloting scheme, 349–50 price hike, 336 purchase of land from government, 327 requests for larger space for oneroom flats, 336 subsidized loans, 347 three-room flats, 343, 570, 575 Housing and Urban Development Company (HUDC) building of flats, 336 drop in prices of flats, 467 Hu Tsu Tau, Richard, 460, 568 Hua Yuan, 653 Huang Jianli, 612 Huang Lisung, Rayson, 438, 439 Huang, Shirlena, 567 Huang Ying Jung, 434, 435 Huff, William, 271 Hwa Chong Alumni, 648 hyphenated Singaporean, 619–21

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

686 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

I Ibrahim Yaacob, 27, 37 immigrants, 22 likely impact, 653 immigration, 28 policy, 652 import-substitution phase, 271, 636 Improving Primary School Education report, 514 income tax ordinance, 16 independence through merger with Malaya, 46 Malaya, 103 Independence of Malaya Party (IMP), 73 independent statehood, 22 Indian community, 617, 618 distinct identity and language, 617 Indian diaspora, 34 Indian Independence League, 38 Indian Muslims, 35 Indian National Army, 38 Indians, 34, 35 attendance at English medium schools, 44 middle class, 36 Indonesia call to end guerilla activities, 246 Dutch ruled, 10 Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act, 267 industries rapid growth, 274 Institute of Education training of teachers, 278 Integration of schools factors militating against, 298–99 intellectual decolonization, 388 Institute of East Asian Philosophy, 540, 542

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

686

internal security issue of, 124 Internal Security Act, 468 calls for abolition, 164, 471 Internal Security Council, 139, 177, 221, 222 call for abolition of, 180, 181 emergency meeting, 221 meeting at Cameron Highlands, 189 International Monetary Fund, 273, 560 American and Eurocentric vision, 410 International Rubber Restriction Scheme, 13 International Technology Park, 638 Islam, 543 importance to Malays, 615 Islam Hadhari, 635, 642 Islamic religious knowledge, 540 Islamic resurgence, 615 Islamic Theological Association of Singapore see Pertapis Ismail bin Dato Abdul Rahman, Dr, 27, 177, 431 Israeli officers advisers of MINDEF, 282 IT 2000 Masterplan, 563 J Jambi, 4, 5 Jamiyah Singapore missionary society, 616 Japan attack on Manchuria, 13 Lee Kuan Yew’s survey on universities, 361 rubber exports, 14 shipping, 14 Japanese surrender, 40

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 687

Japanese Commercial Museum, 12 Japanese Occupation, 37, 38 Malay volunteer force, 37 separate policy for Malays, 38 Japanese textiles centre for, 12, 13 Jayakumar, S., 458, 469 on arrest of Francis Seow, 472 Jek Yeun Thong, 164, 170, 424 background, 170 Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), 512, 616 Jennings, Ivor and drafting of Malayan Constitution, 364 Johns Hopkins University, 637 Johnson, Lyndon, 248 Johore, 4, 5, 6, 7 Johore empire, 23 Jones, David Brown, 640 Jones, Stanley, 79 Josey, Alex, 94 Jurong Island chemical hub, 637 Jurong Town Corporation, 564, 574 K Kahn, Herman, 439 Kandasamy, G., 160, 161 Kenley, David, 612, 613 Kennedy, John F. hope on success of Manila Summit, 231 Kennedy, Edward visit to Singapore, 261 Kennedy, Robert visit to Malaysia, 248 Keppel Land, 637 Ker Sin Tze, 524 Goh’s special helper, 517, 518 Kesatuan Akademis Universiti Singapore (KAUS), 398, 402

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

687

Kesatuan Melayu Muda (Young Malays’ Association), 27, 39, 41 Khir Johari, 254 knowledge-based economy, 563, 660 KMT military college, 42 Ko Teck Kin, 426, 430, 432 death of, 445 Koei Games presence in Singapore, 637 konfrontasi, 15, 223–26 Kuo Pau Kun, 646 Kuok Hock Leng, William, 62 Kuomintang (KMT), 32, 33 branches in Singapore and Malaya, 97 recognition of overseas Chinese, 80 Kuomintang activists Malaya, in, 73 Kwangtung, 28 Kwong On Bank purchase by DBS, 562 L La’Brooy, E.B., 373 Labour Code, 131 Labour Front, 93, 105, 121, 146 coalition with Alliance Party, 106 dissolution, 153 Labour Front-Alliance, 123, 139 Labour Party Singapore, 89 labour unions, 57 Lai Te, 40, 41, 54 Lai Tha Chai, 342 Lam Peng Er, 640, 641, 642 Lambertson, David, 470 land acquisition by government, 327 Language Exposure Time (LET), 315 language issues question of merger, 86

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

688 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Latif Taris, 313, 300 Lau, Albert, 245 Lau Geok Swee, 429, 431, 432 law of acquisition, 327 Laycock, John, 79, 90 Lee Chiaw Meng, 442 Lee Guan Kin, 647 Lee Hsien Loong, 288, 459, 655 assurance to minority races in relation to National Ideology, 548 chair of Economic Committee, 465, 466 Lee Huay Leng, 647, 651 Lee Khoon Choy, 424 Lee Kong Chian, 16, 56, 80, 82, 426, 427, 445, 449 proposal for Chinese University, 86 Lee Koon Choy, 170 background, 171 Lee Kuan Yew, 45, 66, 67, 106, 110, 111, 142 address to Malayan Forum, 67–70 ambition, views on his, 245 and Confucianism, 553 appointment as Prime Minister, 154 belief in equality of races in Malaysia, 239 call for vote of confidence, 182, 183, 184 call to English-educated, 169 campaign in all constituencies, 234 compatibility of being Singaporean and Chinese, 621 consultation with Lim Yew Hock, 140 coping with communists, 159–64 countering communist control of PAP, 152 creating national unity, 165–70

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

688

declaration of Singapore’s independence, 235 defeat of communists, 45 defence of Samad Ismail, 91 definition of multiracial society, 69, 240 dialects, end of use in media, 312 discovery of the Plen’s identity, 179 doubts over Goh’s national ideology initiative, 549 early days in politics, 91 education policies, 172–76 English proficiency, policy on, 605– 06 essentials of nation-building, on, 265–66 fear of Tunku’s intentions, 219 open fight with communists, 178 forcing moment of truth in Parliament, 182–84 formation of PAP, 94 good relations with Suharto, 479 home-ownership, priority for, 325, 326 identification of problems in Malaya, 68 importance of language, 169 intention to pursue merger, 148–49, 164, 176–85, 633 Japanese workers, views on, 548, 539 land acquisitions law, 326–27 launch of People’s Association, 161 Malayan Forum, 91, 660 meeting with The Plen, 146, 180 mistaken upgrading policy, comment on, 569, 570 moulding second generation leaders, 482 need for technocratic elite, 361–63

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 689

negotiations with Malaysia for water and gas, 479 observations of Japanese workers, 538 offer of resignation, 182 on nation building, 266 passion and conviction in nationbuilding, 588, 650 position after stepping down, 480 proposal for immersion classes, 313 proposal for SAP schools, 312–13, 318 public service access for Nantah graduates, 423 radio addresses regarding merger, 200 reluctance to put away proCommunists, 183 resolution after failure of merger, 597–98 respect for Dr Ismail, 177 return from England, 90 rivalry with Tunku, 217, 218–19, 222, 227, 235–37, 240–42, 245– 46, 250 scholarships for Chinese-educated for studies in English-speaking countries, 176, 603 search for successor generation in government, 456 serial account of communist united front, 200 Speak Mandarin campaign, on, 605– 06 speech in Malaysian parliament, 259 strategy relating to pro-communists, 218 support for Nanyang University Bill, 422 televised forum on bilingual education, 311–12

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

689

three lieutenants, 170, 171 think-tanks, views on, 362 Tunku’s philosophy, on, 634 ultimatum to Tunku, 236 unilateral declaration of independence, 235 use of merger as issue to break with pro-communists, 177, 178 views on the press, 537 views on universities, 360, 363–66 visit to U.S., 262 warning to The Plen, 243 worry over invasion of Western cultural ideology, 536 Lee San Choon, 607 Lee Siew Choh, 180, 195, 221 chairman of Barisan Sosialis Singapura, 185 debate during vote of confidence motion, 184 debate on merger, 204 defeat by Toh Chin Chye, 240 opposition to merger, 190, 191 referendum on merger, 205 statements in support of Lim Chin Siong, 182 Lee Yi Shyan, 648, 665 Lee Yock Suan, 485, 526 Legislative Council appointment of Muslim representative, 25 debate on merger, 203 Lennox-Boyd, Alan, 100, 107, 115, 122 London Talks, 140 on authority to make emergency regulations, 125 view on citizenship bill, 118 Leong Choon Cheong, 290, 292 Liao Yang Pau, 440 Lian Kwen Fee, 623

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

690 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Liberal Socialists, 121, 153 Liberation Theology, 468 Lien Ying Chow, 426 Lifelong Learning Endowment Fund, 579 Lim Bo Seng, 42, 43 Lim Boon Keng, 550, 553 Lim Chan Yong, 63, 64, 65, 71 Lim Chee Onn, 458, 461, 463 background, 458 restructuring unions, 462–63 Lim Chin Joo, 138, 140–41, 143, 376 Lim Chin Siong, 93, 108, 127, 138, 141, 149, 151, 159, 162, 170, 182, 184, 194, 201, 220 arrest during Operation Cold Store, 222 background, 214 Barisan Sosialis Singapura, 184 call for protest votes in referendum, 205 letter to Tunku, 207 Malayan socialist speech, 194 opposition to merger, 211 request for abolition of Internal Security Act, 164 resumption of work with unions, 160 Lim Chong Eu, 219, 220, 257 Lim Chong Yah, 334 Lim Hng Kiang, 289, 566, 568 property boom, on reason for, 567 Lim Hong Bee, 59 Lim Kean Chye, 59, 60, 66 Lim Kean Siew, 221, 222 Lim Kim San chairman of HDB, 328 good judgment, 457 support of a capable team, 329 Lim Swee Say, 524 Lim Tay Boh, 365, 397

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

690

Lim Yew Hock, 89, 110, 120, 131–57, 201, 234, 359, 417 approachability, 132 closure of Chinese Middle School Students’ Union, 173 debate on merger, 204 detention of pro-communist cadres, 149 distaste for disorder, 133 donation from unnamed American source, 153 friendship with Tunku, 139, 153 general election (1959), 147–54 idea of small unions, 160 London Conference, 121–27 Nanyang University, 417–21 offensive against pro-communists, 137–39 security sweep, 145 strategy for general election (1959), 152, 153 Lin, Robert C.Y., 439 Lingle, Christopher, 609 linguistic competence importance of, 605 Literary, Debating and Dramatic Society, 298 Local Enterprise Finance Scheme, 581 Lodge, George, 547 London (Malaysia) Agreement, 228 ratification of terms, 236 London Talks, 139–42 constitutional advance, 139 internal security issue, 141 Low, Linda, 639 Low Thia Khiang, 567, 578 concern over low-income households, 570 issue of over-investment in property, 566

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 691

Low Yen Yen, 645 lower-income groups housing issues, 342 Lucas film studio, 637 Lung-ya-men, 1 Lyttleton, Oliver, 77 M MacDonald, Malcolm, 58, 115 Macdougall, John A., 401 MacGillivray, Donald, 75, 100 Macmillan, Harold, 179, 208 madrasahs, 505–09 study on madrasah graduates, 507 Mahathir Mohamad, 89, 259, 409, 410 Bangsa Malaysia concept, 634 Vision 2020, 634 Majlis Pusat, 501, 510 Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS), 615, 641 Majulah Connection, 587 Majulah Singapura, 165 Malacca, 2, 3 Malay adoption as national language, 165, 170, 308 Malay Annals, 7 Malay community, 615–17 Malay elites, 27 Malay graduates fear over job prospects, 513 Malay intellectuals discontent, 497, 502, 503, 506 Malay issues as raised by Mohammed Eunos, 26 Malay Journalists’ Association, 501 Malay minority, 495–96 Malay MPs, 498–99 difficulties, 506–09 setting up of Mendaki, 496

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

691

Malay nationalism, 43, 600 power of, 598 Malay Nationalist Party (MNP), 53, 55 Malay radicals, 27 Malay rights Federation of Malaya Constitution, 87 Malay sovereignty, 23 Malay voters focus of Goh, 500 Malay-medium schools falling enrolment, 302 Malaya Chinese, 42 “historic bargain” between Alliance partners, 633 modern educated elite, 44 post-war British policy, 76 ties with Singapore, 21 Malay Society of Great Britain, 76 Malayalees, 617 Malayan, 21 bonding as, 44 objection to use of term, 52 Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Tunku, 219 majority party representing Chinese, 84 members, 73 rally Chinese against MCP, 73 Malayan Communist Party (MCP), 32, 33, 35, 39, 82, 134, 162 Anti-Enemy Backing Society, 42 attitude to Malayan Union, 54 cadres to demand concessions from Lee, 164 call for vote against Progressives and Democrats, 105 general election (1959), 152 guerilla warfare, 99

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

692 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

merger issues, 210 substitutes for cadres, 138 support for Brunei revolt, 220 support for PAP, 152 view on Alliance Party, 99 Malayan consciousness, 169–70 Malayan culture, 171, 599 Malayan Democratic Union (MDU), 53, 59, 60 intellectuals, 67 Malayan Forum, 45, 67, 69, 91, 171, 240, 258 Malayan identity, 45, 51, 171 Malayan Indian Congress (MIC), 39, 77 Malayan Malay, 46 Malayan Malaya importance of, 240 Malayan nation definition, 65 Malayan nationalism, 44, 599 Malayan nationalists, 70 Malayan Orchid, 65 Malayan outlook, 85 Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), 37 Malayan Undergrad, 64 Malayan Union, 43, 51, 58 Malayanization, 65 Malays, 22, 23, 24 attendance at English medium schools, 44 exemption from tertiary fees, 504 in Singapore Armed Forces, 510 Japanese Occupation, 37 more dispersed, 499 professionals’ reluctance to become MPs, 496 special rights, 52 Malaysia Chinese election lobby, 634, 635

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

692

regional opposition to formation, 217, 223, 224, 225, 226, 236, 246 Singapore’s expulsion from, 633–36 Malaysia Certificate of Education Examination, 296 Malaysia Day, 240 Malaysia Solidarity Convention, 258 Malaysian citizenship assurance, 211 Malaysian Malaysia principle, 634 update on the Malayan Malaya principle, 258 Malaysian Solidarity Convention, 257 Mallal, N.A., 79 Ma’mun Suheimi, 505 manpower training by universities, 388 Mandarin, 31, 33 Manila Accord, 225 endorsement, 226 Manila Agreement, 232 Manila Summit, 228–34, 262 British anxieties, 229, 230 manufacturing propelling growth, 565 Mao Tse Tung, 34, 81 Maoism, 134 Maphilindo concept, 225 Marine Parade HDB estate on prime land, 327 Marshall, David, 89, 94, 100, 112 all-party delegation to London, 118– 26 appointment of Malay ministers, 119 attendance at Baling talks, 100–04, 119 belief in freedom of individual, 109 challenge to Lee Kuan Yew, 142 Chief Minister, 106

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 693

citizenship bill, 117–19, 125 distribution of political office, 106, 114 draft Independence Bill, 123 failure of London Talks, 126, 127 fight for democracy, 108, 109 formation of new party, 143, 145 formation of All-Party Committee, 172 issue of merger, 116–21 Legislative Assembly, 139 provoking constitutional crisis, 115, 116 pursuit of merger, 116, 118–21 rally to call for independence, 122 referendum on merger, 205 regard for Chinese, 108, 117 relations with communists, 106, 109–10, 127, 138–40, 142, 147, 181, 241 relations with Sir John Nicoll, 109, 111–14, 197 relations with Sir Robert Black, 114, 115 repeal of Emergency Regulations, 113 stepping down, 126 threat to resign, 115 win in by-election, 182 Workers’ Party, 191 marriage rituals Chinese, see Chinese marriage rituals Marwick, Arthur, 535 Maudling, Reginald, 206 May Fourth Movement, 33, 602, 612, 613, 645 MCA-UMNO crisis, 219 MCP-MPAJA involvement in racial clashes, 40

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

693

Melayu national, 53 Mendaki, 496 administration of financial help to students, 504 directors, 503 extending role, 501 Mendaki congress, 496 Menzies, Robert, 597 merger, 189–216 agreement in principle, 189, 190 Barisan Sosialis, 193 British enquiry team, 204 call for intervention by United Nations, 206 call for protest against referendum, 205 citizenship issue, 201, 202, 203, 206, 209, 210, 211 concession by Tunku, 210 conflict of wills, 222 crisis talks in London, 226–28, 236 date of referendum, 211 debate, 202–04 final negotiations, 217, 226 Legislative Assembly debate, 203, 204 London Agreement, 228 Marshall’s views on, 116–21 opposition stakeholders, 191–94, 199, 200 opposition’s call for debate, 203 PAP Government as stakeholder, 197–201 PAP’s strategy, 198 radio forum, 195–96 referendum, 204, 205, 209, 210, 211, 212 radio talks by Lee Kuan Yew, 200 support from Tunku, 189 Tunku’s compensating act, 201, 202

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

694 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

ultimatum, 226–28 votes for alternative “A”, 212 Workers’ Party, 193 meritocracy, 488, 505, 625, 659 operating principle, 660 significant implications, 624 Meyer, E.J., 270 middle class, 350, 487, 538, 559 middle-income groups housing issues, 342 middlemen, 11 Minangkabau, 5 Minchin, James, 406 Ming dynasty mission to open relations, 2 minister-in-charge of Muslim affairs, 498 Minister of Labour Lim Yew Hock, 131 Ministers pay hike, 577 second generation, 461–63 Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, 657 Ministry of Defence (MINDEF), 281 formation of Hokkien-speaking platoons, 304 Ministry of Education failure of bilingual policy, 315 first Secondary Four Examination, 174 minority ethnic groups associations, 75 identity, 613–19 suspicion of sinicizing move, 541, 613 Mohamed Sopiee, 66 Mohammad Alami bin Musa, 508, 509, 641, 642 Mohammed Eunos bin Abdullah, 26

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

694

introducing modern concept of state and nation, 26 Mohamed Sidek bin Haji Abdul Hamid, 119 Monetary Authority of Singapore measures to help banks, 338 Moore, Philip, 177, 209, 245 moral education programme, 534 Morley, James W., 640 mortgages private property, 574 mosques building fund, 495 social centres of Malays, 615 multiracial Malayan national identity British post-war policy, 76 multiracial society definition of, 69 multinational enterprises, 271, 272, 276 relocation of, 655 target of EDB, 636 vanguard of move to high-tech industries, 276 Muslim reformists, 26 Muslim women wearing of headscarves, 510, 512 Muslims national pride, 617 N Nair, C.V. Devan, 61, 71, 91, 94, 138, 150, 159, 160, 461, 471 fallen from grace, 92 Nair, M.P.D., 89, 110 Nan Chiao News, 179 Nanking capital of KMT Government, 81 Nantah, see Nanyang University Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 520

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 695

Nanyang Siang Pau, 87, 304, 305 arrest of executives, 305, 604 Nanyang Technological University (NTU), 446, 585 Nanyang University, 134, 135, 174, 296, 359, 417–52, 612 challenge of biligualism, 439, 443 “clean up”, 430–32 degrees formally recognized by government, 438 founding of, 418–21 graduates, 175 graduates as Barisan candidates, 243 Huang Lisung, Rayson, 438–41 involvement with communist united front, 418, 419 joint-campus scheme, 442 Lee Chiaw Meng, 442 merger with University of Singapore, 443, 445 political parties supported, 421–22 refitting as Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI), 446 reforms, 422–32 significance, 417 student protests, 434–38 view of British official and Malay nationalists, 417 Wang Gungwu report, 432–38 Nanyang University Bill, 421–22 Nanyang University Executive Council, 243 Nanyang University Students’ Union, 135, 138, 430 Narayan, R.K., 536 nation-building, 58 ingredients of, 588 next lap, 487 with wealth creation, 563

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

695

National Anthem in Malay, 165 National Day government declaration of, 165 national identity creation with help of universities, 388 National Ideology, 534, 546–49 assurance for minority races, 548 Confucian values in, 547 difference from National Pledge, 348 SM Lee’s doubts over national ideology initiative, 549 National Language Malay, 170 National Loyalty Week, 165 National Pioneer, 286 national pledge, 548 National Service, 278, 281–94 attitudes towards, 282, 283, 286 classes of persons exempted, 284 community support, 289–90 complaints in press, 286 deferment for certain students, 283 draft dodgers, 285–86 English as language of instruction, 287 exceptions in recruitment, 285 first three years, 286 implementation, 283 Malays in, 509–10, 512 origins, 281, 282 overseas scholarship incentives, 288 policy change, 284, 285 role in nation-building, 291–93 National Servicemen first batches, 281 National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), 161, 185

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

696 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

leaders nominated as PAP candidates, 455 redesigning of jobs, 579 second generation ministers, 461–63 National University of Singapore, 606 establishment, 412, 446 National Wages Council (NWC), 267, 276, 352, 560 economy in recession, 464 national identity, 625 nationalism, 23, 41 based on materialistic values, 534 leaders, 239 post-war, 14 Singapore brand of, 534 negative equity private property, 574 neo-Hindu Sai Baba group, 541 nepotism policy against, 266 Netherlands Indian Crisis Import Ordinance, 13 Netherlands India see Indonesia, Dutch ruled New Singapore Shares, 578 new towns establishment of, 325 Ng Aik Huan, 432, 437 proposal for Chinese university, 86 Ng How Wee, 645 Nichiren Shoshu Singapore, 552, 553 Nicoll, John, 84, 86, 107, 109, 112 Nixon, Richard visit to Singapore, 261 nominated MP, 489 non-constituency MP seats, 489 North West CDC, 492, 493 NS men retrospect, 290, 291 reward for, 586

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

696

NS officers full time service lengthened, 282 nuclear family, 348–49 nurses foreign, 587 O Oehlers, F.A.C., 373 off-budget measures, 579 officers’ course at Duke, 289 oil refining industry, 15 oil crisis, 272 Ong Chang Sam, 428 Ong Chang Woei, 644 Ong Eng Guan, 162, 170, 195, 199, 204, 221, 191, 193, 244, 329 bid for premiership, 163 referendum on merger, 205 view on merger, 194, 195 Ong Kee Hui, 257 Ong Kian Min, 575 Ong Pang Boon, 140, 170, 251, 336, 344, 345, 346, 432 background, 170 fear of Nantah backlash, 444 view on Lee’s search for successor generation in government, 457 Ong Teng Cheong, 458, 461, 463, 489, 610 background, 458 Ong Yoke Lin, 246 Ongkili, James, 245 Onn bin Jaafar, 51, 71, 72, 74, 76 Operation Cold Store, 220–23 arrest of Barisan leaders, 222 Operationally Ready NSman, 290 opium, 10 Orang Laut, 1, 2, 5, 22 Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation, 79

7/4/08, 9:56 AM

Index • 697

P Palmer, Michael, 658 Pan Kuo Chu, 45, 419, 420, 429 author of patriotic verse, 34 closure of Nanyang University, 447 honoured as national treasure, 447 intellectual resource for Tan Lark Sye, 420 revocation of citizenship, 421 see also Pan Shou Pan Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), 635 Pan Shou, 447 Pancasila, 549, 550 Panglima Datuk Bukit Gantang, 75 PAP Government as stakeholder in issue of merger, 197–201 changes in labour laws, 267 establishment of CPIB, 266, 267 home-ownership, 326, 329 self-renewal, 453–86 test for second generation leaders, 468–75 third generation leaders, 459, 460 welfarism, avoidance of, 326 PAP-NTUC symbiotic relationship, 463 Parkinson, C.N., 401 Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), 220 Parti Machinda, 257, 285 Party Negara, 76 Pedra Branca, 9 Peking Drama Circle of Shanghai, 83 People’s Action Party (PAP), 16, 94 and cabinet ministers, 21 and communists, 152 and detainees, 150 defeat in Anson, 182 dispute with Alliance, 255

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

697

federal election, 251–51 first generation leaders, 454 interventionism, 17 intra-party struggle with procommunists, 181 Malay candidates’ performance, 241 merger strategy, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200 method of electing central executive committee, 149 party for the masses, 144 right to pursue merger, 195, 198 search for new leaders, 454 support of MCP for, 106 team up with Singapore UMNO, 146 third central executive committee, 140 voted against by English-educated class, 166 win in snap election, 240 People’s Association, 454 and pro-communist staff, 185 People’s Park Complex, 324 People’s Progressive Party, 257 People’s Liberation Army, 81 People’s Republic of China (PRC) inauguration of, 82 per capita income progress measured by, 273 Perdaus, 501, 507 Pergas, 501, 506 Pertapis halfway house for ex-drug addicts, 507 Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore, 637 Pillay, V.K. resignation from University of Singapore, 402

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698 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Pioneer Industries Employees Unions (PIEU), 406, 462 political liberalization slow pace, 589 Political Science Society of Nanyang University gallop polls on merger, 210 political study centre civil servants, 167 population control, 266 population number of Christians, 542 Portuguese empire, 3 post-65ers, 658 post-war baby boomers, 335, 487 rapid change, 348 postmen’s strike, 90 PRC students, 653, 654 pre-primary schools, 314 Prescott Report, 423, 425 committee to review, 423 Prescott, S.L., 422 Primary School Leaving Examination, 296 Pritt, D.N., 92, 93 private developers, 332 price hikes following HDB price increases, 344 pro-communists breaking up of People’s Association, 185 meeting with Selkirk, 182, 183 offensive against, 137–39 PAP’s break with, 177 Lee’s value to, 143 pro-KMT faction, 97 pro-Islamist activists arrests, 661 progress per capita income, 273

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

698

Progressive Party, 105 English as language of legislature, 86 proposal for a confederation, 87 representing privileged minority, 88 progressives, 78–88 Project Wrangler, 289 property restriction on foreign ownership, 334, 338 property boom Goh Chok Tong’s view on, 340–41 second, 339–42 speculators, 333, 340 property investors, 332, 333 property prices factors responsible for steep rise, 566, 567 upswing, 332 property slump, 337–39 property speculators, 333 re-entry into market, 340 property tax concession to owner occupants, 357 Protestant values, 269 public housing liberalization, 589 advantages, 353 public service chance for Nantah graduates, 175 Public Utilitites Board (PUB), 586 Puccetti, Roland, 367, 397, 400 resignation, 402 Pulau Brani, 15 Punjabis, 618 Purcell, Victor, 37 Pusat Tenaga Ra’ayat (PUTERA), 55 Puthucheary, James, 36, 62, 64, 138, 150, 151, 159, 200, 362 after release from detention, 223

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Index • 699

arrest during Operation Cold Store, 222 meeting with Selkirk, 182, 183 return to University of Malaya Socialist Club, 162 role of Malayan University, 64 University of Malaya Socialist Club, 92 Q Qing Ming Jie, 544 Quah Sy Ren, 645, 646 R radical tradition, 33 radicals English educated, 59 Radio and Wireless Technicians’ Union, 145 RAF airfields handed over to Singapore, 268 Raffles Lighthouse, 9 Raffles, T.S., 6, 7, 8, 23 town planning, 22 Rajah, A.P., 195, 199 view on merger, 196 Rajaratnam, Sinnathamby, 90, 251, 369, 498, 599, 619, 620 becoming Singaporean, on, 620–21 belief in education, 600 formation of PAP, 94 future as basis of identity, on, 601, 620 hybrid culture, on, 620 Malayan culture, on, 599–600 Ratnam, K.J., 373 recession 1985 to 1986, 464 reformists, 25 Reid, Anthony, 636

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

699

religious knowledge courses, 540, 541 Remaking Singapore Committee, 582, 657, 659 emphasis on strong families, 583 encouraging permanent residence, 585 Rendel Constitution, 89, 104 assumptions, 112, 113 concept of power-sharing, 114 general election, 105 Report of the Economic Review Committee, 577, 578 residential districts, 323 restructuring result of Asian Financial crisis, 576 returned students future of Singapore, 70, 89 retrenchment result of Asian Financial crisis, 576 Retrenchment Research Centre, 406 revenue permissible means, 10 Riau-Lingga Archipelago, 4, 7 Richardson, Michael, 476 Robbins Report on Higher Education, 378 Rochore area, 349 Rodan, Garry, 639 Rothblatt, Sheldon, 377 Roundtable, 641 Royal navy dockyard, 268 rubber, 10, 11 rule of law, 562 Rusk, Dean, 246 S SAF Enterprises, 291 SAF overseas scholarships, 288 SARS, 572 role of nurses, 587

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700 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Sahora bin Ahmat PAP Malay assemblywoman, 183 Samad Ismail, 91, 94 release of, 92 Sambanthan, V.T., 77 Sandys, Duncan, 179, 198, 206 clash with Tunku, 233 Sang Nila Utama Secondary School Malay secondary school, 296 shutting down of, 313 Sarawak United People’s Party, 257 Sarma, P.V., 59, 60, 71 Save China movement, 33, 37 scholars disdain for careers in community development, 491 scholarships postgraduate studies abroad, 176 schools excelling in international competitions, 564 integration, 297–99 medium of instruction, 31 modern system, 31 streamlining of systems, 172 Sea People, 1 Seah Kiang Peng, 665 second industrial revolution, 339–42 second language compulsory in all primary schools, 300 Secondary Four Examination boycott of, 185 Secretary for Chinese Affairs in Singapore, 81 Seenivasagam, D.R., 257 Selkirk, 178, 221 chairman of Internal Security Council, 183

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

700

meeting with Puthucheary, 182, 183 relationship with Lee, 177 Seong, Patrick, 468 and American machinations, 470 Seow, Francis and American machinations, 470 Seow Peck Leng, 333 debate on merger, 204 Seow, Timothy, 333, 337 September 11 incident, 572 services propelling growth, 656 services centre, 561 services sector, 638 shared values need for, 534 Sharkey, Lawrence, 56, 57 shipping Japanese, 14 Sia Kah Hui, 347 announcement regarding use of CPF for private housing, 346 Sihanouk, Prince, 249 Sikh Advisory Board, 618 Sikh studies, 540 Sikhs, 12, 35, 614 recognition as ethnically distinct, 623 Sindhis, 12 Singapore China-born Chinese, 117 Chinese city, 11 Chinese identity, 168 Chinese students in, 33 conflict with central government, 239 conflict with Kuala Lumpur, 251, 254–59 declaration of independence, 234–37

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Index • 701

defence after British withdrawal, 261 difference between citizens and PRs, 585, 586 expulsion from Malaysia, 260 free port status, 87 general election (1955), 105 high wages, 276 location of, 271 Malaya, ties with, 21 move to high-tech industries, 275, 276 population, 266 principles of education, 111 racial riots, 253, 254 rapid economic growth, 273, 274 reclassification as developed country, 273 security clean-up, 209 separate crown colony, 51 separation from Malaysia, 260 snap election, 240 start of nation-building, 265 strategic location, 21 Tunku’s disappointment, 241 unemployment, 133 visit by Tunku, 244 Singapore 21 Committee, 582, 657 attracting foreign talent, 585 emphasis on strong families, 583 focus group discussions, 588 view of younger generation, 590 Singapore Aerospace Maintenance, 291 Singapore Airlines, 563 acquisitions of stake in other air carriers, 562 Singapore Alliance failure to win seats, 241

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

701

Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), 586 meritocracy, 292 Singapore Asian Dollar Market, 562 Singapore Association of Trade Unions (SATU), 161, 185, 243 Singapore Association of Writers, 520 Singapore Bus Workers’ Union, 93 Singapore Char Yong Association, 610 Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 540 Singapore Chinese Chamber Commerce, 82, 106 education sub-committee, 307 minting of NS medallions, 289 Singapore Chinese Middle School Students’ Union, 110, 137, 138 Singapore Chinese Middle School Teachers’ Union, 305, 306, 307 Singapore Chinese Schools’ Conference, 307 Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Association support for merger, 211 Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union, 307, 515, 518, 519 Singapore diaspora, 22 Singapore dreams, 566–71 Singapore Electronic and Engineering, 291 Singapore elites, 78 Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union, 93 notice of deregistration, 138 support for Chinese High School students, 137 Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA), 519, 520, 540, 610 Singapore Food Industries, 291

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702 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Singapore General Employees’ Union, 138, 162 Singapore Government preparedness to enter into business, 272 Singapore Herald, 536 Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan, 82, 83 Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), 326 Singapore Inc., 562, 638 Singapore Industrial Labour Organization (SILO), 462 Singapore International Foundation, 587 Singapore Kerala Association, 618 Singapore Khalsa Association, 618 Singapore Labour Party formation, 89 see also Labour Party Singapore Land and Housing Developers’ Association, 338 Singapore Malay Union, 26, 117, 118 Singapore Malay Teachers’ Association, 501 Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union, 309, 313, 505 petition regarding language exposure time, 308 Singapore Malays National Organization, 501 Singapore Manufacturer’s Association, 464 Singapore nationalism, 600 Singapore People’s Alliance (SPA), 19, 153, 192, 234 debate on merger, 204 receipt of secret fund, 153 Singapore Power, 637 Singapore Progressive Party, 16, 79, 85 popularity, 79 see also Progressive Party

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

702

Singapore revolution, 133–36 Singapore Secondary School Principals’ Association, 307 Singapore Shipbuilding and Engineering, 291 Singapore Standard, 90 Singapore Teachers’ Union, 61, 92 Singapore Trade Union Congress (STUC), 131, 145 Singapore-KL relations strained, 244 worsening, 250–56 Singaporean meaning of, 659–60 younger, wish of, 588, 590, 658 Singaporean culture, 171 Singaporean diaspora, 657 Singapura, 2 Singtel acquisitions in Asia-Pacific region, 562 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 580, 581 Snyder, Joseph, 470 Social Darwinism, 26 social mobility rapid, 329 social safety net, 656 Socialist Club of University of Singapore gallop polls on merger, 210 Socialist Front of Singapore see Barisan Sosialis Singapura South Sea Society, 540 South West CDC, 494 Speak Mandarin Campaign, 606 Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools, 310, 312–14, 518, 657 S.T. Bani, 244 staple port, 10

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Index • 703

state intervention, 16, 17 state and nation concept, 26 statehood, 123 steamships port of call, 10 Straits Chinese, 28 Straits of Malacca, 3 Straits produce, 6 Straits Settlements, 8, 9 strikes, 57 Subandrio, 233 Bangkok talks, 249 Suez Canal opening of, 10 Sukarno, 15, 223 agreement to ceasefire in Borneo, 248 alliance with Macapagal, 224 Sultan of Brunei, 228 Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, 611, 613 suraus, 495 Suzhou industrial park, 562 Syed Ja’afar bin Albar, 251–53 T Taman Bacaan, 501, 510 Tamil Language Centres, 617 Tamils Reform Association, 35 Tamil schools restructuring, 296 Tamil-medium schools falling enrolment, 302 Tamils majority of Indian community, 617 Tamney, Joseph B., 552, 553 Tan, Augustine, 336, 351, 404 Tan, C.C., 79

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

703

Tan Cheng Lock, 53, 55, 59, 73, 74, 78, 83, 95, 219 Tan Chin Tuan, 16, 79, 88, 82 Tan Kah Kee, 29, 30, 34, 37, 42, 78, 81, 418, 427 admiration of Yenan spirit, 34 criticism of KMT Government, 81 Tan Keong Choon, 519 Tan Koon Swan, 607, 608 Tan Kwang Meng, Joseph, 63 Tan Lark Sye, 30, 83, 134, 175, 242, 243, 418, 419, 420, 424, 426, 427, 445 comparison with Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian, 426–28 Hokkien Association, 137 proposal for Chinese university, 86 revocation of citizenship, 242–43, 430 support for PAP opponents, 428–29 Tang Liang Hong, 519, 521, 522–28 application to be nominated MP, 525, 526 becoming member of Workers’ Party, 526 contest in Cheng San GRC, as, 526– 28 law firm, 523 Tan Siew Sin, 219, 220, 607 introduction of turnover tax, 256 Tan, Tony, 412, 457, 512 religious knowledge courses, 541 background, 457 Tan Wah Piow, 406, 408, 462, 468, 475, 643 Tangent, 645 civil society organization, 644 dialogue session with AMP, 646 effort at bridging gap between communities, 647

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704 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

Tao Nan School, 31 Taoism, 43, 543, 544 Tay, Simon, 568, 609 Teachers’ Training College, 295 technocrats education, 361 Teh Cheang Wan, 329, 336, 343 announcement of price hikes, 343 warning of price increase of HDB flats, 341, 343, 344 Telok Ayer Market national monument, 324 Temasek, 1, 2, 23 Temasek Holdings, 637, 639 Templer, Gerald, 71 plan B, 75 Teo Chee Hian, 289 Teo Ho Pin Mayor of North West CDC, 492 Teochews, 12 textiles importance, 15 Thai Danu Bank purchase by DBS, 562 Thanat Khomen, 249 Tharman Shanmugaratnam, 643, 644 The Plen, 146, 147, 149, 173 all-out assault, 185 formation of new proxy political party, 184 identity, 179 Lee’s warning to, 243 letter to Lee Kuan Yew, 164 meeting with Lee Kuan Yew, 179, 180 Theroux, Paul, 395, 396, 397, 411 controversy over essay, 395–97, 414– 15 three-generation family priority for, 538

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

704

Thio Chan Bee, 16, 19, 80 debate on merger, 204 Singapore People’s Alliance, 192 Thio Siu Mien, 402 Thomas, Francis, 89, 109, 114, 121, 122, 131 Thuraisingham, EEC, 72, 74 Toh Chin Chye, 66, 94, 142, 182, 191, 251, 348, 368, 380, 387–416 background, 387 belief in looking East for identity, 389 broadening curriculum of university, 391–93 citing Theroux, 395 comparison with Mahathir’s polemics, 409–11 criticism of arts and social sciences, 388, 391 dealing with campus unrest, 404–08, 405 dislike for English place names, 389 establishment of PAP, 387 opinion of expatriate professors, 394 PAP Chairman, 140 persona and principles, 403–04 presented with petition from Nantah students, 430 pro-Asian recruitment policy, 390, 411 reciprocal offer of courses, 393 student power, 404–08 technocratic manpower development, 388, 391 university and national identity, 388, 390, 393, 412–13 vice-chancellor of University of Singapore, 382 view on intervention in Nantah, 444

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Index • 705

view on Lee’s search for successor generation in government, 457 win in snap election, 240 Tong Chee Kiong, 552 Tory, Geofroy, 179, 208, 247 towkays, 78–88 sponsoring of Chinese schools, 85 town councils establishment of, 491, 499, 500 town planning, 22 trade 1950s, 15 trade unionism, 135 Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill, 267 Tregonning, K.G., 401 trained personnel demand for, 274 triads, 30 trilingualism principle of education in Singapore, 111 Tu Wei-ming, 539 tudung, 512, 615 Tun Abdul Razak, 179, 189, 234, see also Abdul Razak Bangkok talks, 249 Tunku Abdul Rahman, 27, 73 amnesty offer to communists, 100 announcement of independence date, 103 background, 76 Baling talks with Chin Peng, 119–21 building up of UMNO’s base, 74 Chief Minister, 100 clash with Sandys, 233 demand for security action in Singapore, 207–09 diplomatic triumph in Washington, 252, 253 displeasure with Lee Kuan Yew, 246, 260

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

705

imposition of will on MCA, 219–20 leading Alliance Party to victory, 116 London Talks, 102–04, 109–20, 123 meeting with Lee regarding merger, 189 objective of mission to London, 207 objectives in security action, 221, 222 political juggling, 634 push for political change, 75–78, 100, 116, 117 rebuff of merger proposals, 178, 179, 201 rebuilding Alliance’s position in Singapore, 219 rejection of “Malayan” concept, 73, 76 rivalry with Lee Kuan Yew, 217 secret meeting with MacGillivray, 75 visit to America, 252 volte-face on merger, 181, 189, 201– 02 The Battle for Merger, 200 Turner, Patrick, 581 U U Thant, 230, 236 Umar Pulavar Tamil High School, 296 Umar Pulavar Tamil Language Centre, 617 UN Secretary-General, release of report on UN survey findings, 236 unemployment structural, 655 unit trusts disparity in treatment, 565 United Democratic Party of Penang, 257

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706 • Singapore: The Unexpected Nation

united front, 142–47 United Malays National Organization (UMNO), 51 compared to IMP, 77 Singapore branch, 117 UMNO General Assembly demand for independence, 101 United Nations survey mission to Borneo territories, 232, 233 United People’s Party, 191, 221 view on merger, 193 United States and Vietnam War, 252 interference in Singapore’s internal affairs, 468–74 position in Malaysia dispute, 225, 228, 229, 230, 231, 246, 248, 252 view on British interference, 230 United States-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, 639 universities Afro-Asia, 360 creation of national identity, 388 university governance, 377 University of Malaya, 21, 58, 86, 419 opening of, 362 University of Malaya Socialist Club, 92, 162 University of Malaya Students’ Union, 63, 135 University of Singapore, 42 academic freedom, 376–82 creation of, 366–68 establishment of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, 392 merger with Nanyang University, 445 problem of “value-prone” subjects, 393 significance of, 363–66

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

706

University of Singapore Academic Staff Association (USASA), 367, 373, 398, 400 self-closure, 400 University of Singapore Academic Staff Union (USASU), 400 order to shut down, 412 University of Singapore Students’ Union (USSU), 404 University Tunku Abdul Rahman, 636 Urban Redevelopment Authority, 332, 574 Utusan Melayu, 91

V value-prone subjects, 393–94 Virgin Atlantic, 562 Vision 2020, 634 Vogel, Ezra, 539, 547

W wakafs, 24 wage reform, 340 wage restraint, 576 Wagner, Leslie, 378 Wang Gungwu, 17, 380, 381, 382, 432, 604, 608 Asian universities, 380–82 report, 432–38 Wang Gungwu Report student protests, 435–37 wealth gap widening, 655 Webb, G.W., 81 Wee Cho Yaw, 445, 520 Wee Mon Cheng, 426 white collar workers English-educated, 168

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Index • 707

Wijeyasingha, Eugene, 297, 298 Williams, P.M., 89 Wilson, Dick surmises Chinese-educated leadership after Lee, 598 Wilson, Harold, 255 Winsemius, Albert, 269 Women’s Charter, 537 Wong Kan Seng, 460 Wong Lin Ken, 398, 400, 401, 404, 458 Wong Meng Voon, 520 Wong Soon Fong, 162 Woodhull, Sandrasegeram, 92, 95, 138, 150, 151, 159, 182, 184 arrest during Operation Cold Store, 222 Work Assistance Programme, 579 workers inter-industry poaching, 561 Workers’ Party, 143, 145, 147, 153 support of merger, 193 workers’ strikes abundance of, 185 Works Brigade, 161, 162 World Bank, 273 American and Eurocentric vision, 410 Wu Teh Yao, 519 Y Yaacob bin Mohamed, 242 Yaacob Ibrahim, 511, 513, 616

24 SIN_UnEx_Nation Index

707

Yang Di-Pertuan Negara last, 165 Yang, C.N., 438 Yang Razali Kassim, 508, 509, 513, 615, 646 Yap Pheng Geck, 79 Yatiman Yusof, 506 background, 496, 497 Yeo Boon Yong, George, 289, 459, 611 Yeo Cheow Tong, 486 Yeo Ning Hong, 342, 459 Yeo, Philip, 637 Yeoh, Brenda, 567 Yong, Archbishop Gregory, 469 Yong Nyuk Lin, 424, 449 Yong Pung How, 220 Yong, Stephen, 257 Yoshichika Tokugawa, 37 Yu Ying-shih, 539 Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, Mayor of South West CDC, 494 Yuan court tribute sent, 1 Yusof Ishak, 91 Z Zainal Abidin Rasheed, 513 Zulkifli Mohammed background, 497 Zheng He, 3 Zhu Jiao Centre, 324

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Reproduced from Singapore: The Unexpected Nation by Edwin Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

THE AUTHOR Edwin Lee is formerly Associate Professor, and Head of the Department of History, National University of Singapore.

25 SIN_UnEx_Nation Author

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