At that moment, my emotions overwhelmed me. It was only after another 20 minutes that I was able to regain my composure and resume the press conference.
It was not a live telecast. I asked Rama to cut the footage of my breakdown. He strongly advised against it. The press, he said, was bound to report it, and if he edited it out, the descriptions of the scene would make it appear worse. And so, many people in Singapore and abroad saw me lose control of my emotions. Among Chinese, it is unbecoming to exhibit such a lack of manliness. But It could not help myself.
I was emotionally overstretched, having gone through three days and nights of a wrenching experience. With little sleep since Friday night in KL, I was close to physical exhaustion. I was weighed down by a heavy sense of guilt. I felt I had let down several million people in Malaysia; immigrant Chinese and Indians, Eurasians, and even some Malays. I had aroused their hopes, and they had joined people in Singapore in resisting Malay hegemony, the root cause of our dispute. I was ashamed that I had left our allies and supporters to fend for themselves.
I was also filled with remorse and guilt for having had to deceive the prime ministers of Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In the last three weeks, while they had been giving me and Singapore their quiet and powerful support for a peaceful solution to Malaysia’s communal problems, I had been secretly discussing this separation.
All these thoughts preyed on me during the three weeks of our negotiations with Razak, the Tunku’s deputy. As long as the battle of wills was on, I kept my cool. But once the deed was done, my feelings got the better of me.
But despite the presence of some 63,000 British servicemen, two aircraft carriers, 80 warships and 20 squadrons of aircraft in Southeast Asia to defend the Federation, he could not prevail against the force of Malay communalism. The Malay leaders, including the Tunku, feared that if ever they shared real political power with the non-Malays, they would be overwhelmed.
We faced a bleak future. Singapore and Malaya, joined by a causeway across the Straits of Johor, had always been governed as one territory by the British. Malaya was Singapore’s hinterland, as were the Borneo territories of Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah. They were all part of the British Empire in Southeast Asia, which had Singapore as its administrative and commercial hub. Now we were on our own, and the Malaysian government was out to teach us a lesson for being difficult, and for not complying with their norms and practices and fitting into their set-up. We could expect them to cut us off from our role as the traditional outlet for imports and exports and as the provider of many other services. In a world of new nation states, all pursuing nationalistic economic policies, all wanting to do everything themselves and to deal directly with their principal buyers and sellers in Europe, America or Japan, how was Singapore going to survive without its hinterland? Indeed, how were we to live? Even our water came from the neighbouring Malaysian state of Johor.
But for the moment, I was grateful and relieved that we had got through the day without disturbances. I went to bed well past midnight, weary but not sleepy. It was not until two or three int he morning that I finally dropped off exhausted, still disturbed from to time as my subconscious wrestled with our problems. How could I overcome them? Why had we come to this sorry pass? Was this to be the end result after 40 years of study, work and struggle? What did the future hold for Singapore? I would spend the next 40 years finding answers to these difficult questions.
The Hakkas are Han Chinese from the northern and central plains of China who migrated to Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces in the south some 700 to 1,000 years ago, and as latecomers were only able to squeeze themselves into the less fertile and more hilly areas unoccupied by the local inhabitants.
It was a simpler world altogether. We played with fighting kites, tops, marbles and even fighting fish. These games nurtured a fighting spirit and the will to win. I do not know whether they prepared me for the fights I was to have later in politics. We were not soft, nor were we spoilt. As a young boy, I had no fancy clothes or shoes like those my grandchildren wear today.
She devoted her life to raising her children to be well-educated and independent professionals, and she stood up to my father to safeguard their future. My brothers, my sister and I were very conscious of her sacrifices; we felt we could not let her down and did our best to be worthy of her and to live up to her expectations. As I grew older, she began consulting me as the eldest son on all important family matters, so that while still in my teens, I became de facto head of the family. This taught me how to take decisions.
I had set my heart on distinguishing myself in the Senior Cambridge examinations, and I was happy when the results in early 1940 showed I had come first in school, and first among all the students in Singapore and Malaysia.
Nevertheless, in the examinations at the end of the academic year, I did creditably, and came in first in pure mathematics. But Miss Kwa Geok Choo was the top student in English and economics, and probably in history. I knew I would face stiff competition for the Queen’s scholarship.
There was a strong sense of solidarity among the Malays, which I was to learn grew from a feeling of being threatened, a fear of being overwhelmed by the more energetic and hardworking Chinese and Indian immigrants. One Malay in my year was to become prime minister of Malaysia. Abdul Razak bin Hussain attended the same classes in English and economics as I did, but we were not close friends. He was a member of the Malay aristocracy of Pahang, and was therefore somewhat distant from the other Malay students, who looked up to him.
“You Chinese are too energetic and too clever for us. In Kedah, we have too many of you. We cannot stand the pressure.” He meant the pressure of competition for jobs, for business, for places in schools and universities. The Malays were the owners of the land, yet seemed to be in danger of being displaced from top positions by recent arrivals, who were smarter, more competitive and more determined. Probably because they did better and were self-confident, the Chinese and the Indians lacked this sense of solidarity. There was no unity among them because they did not feel threatened.
But if it was a time of rivalry, it was also a time for forming lasting friendships. Many of those I first met in Raffles College were to become close political colleagues.
When I started my career as a lawyer in the 1950s, therefore, I already had a network of friends and acquaintances in important positions in government and the professions in Singapore and Malaya. Even if one did not know someone personally, just sharing the same background made for easy acceptance, and the old school tie worked well in Singapore and Malaysia.
It was the easy old-boy network of an elite at the every top of the English-educated group nurtured by the British colonial education system. We went through similar schools, read the same textbooks and shared certain common attitudes and characteristics. The British public school was not the only system that encouraged networking through manner of speech, style and dress and a way of doing things.
There was no fear. Indeed there was barely suppressed excitement, the thrill of being at war and involved in real battles.
Amid these darkening horizons I went to the cinema several times when off duty. It helped me to escape the grim future for a couple of hours.
For the past two months Singapore had experienced the devastating power of their bombs and their shells, yet here I was watching this film making fun of the Japanese — they were supposed to be bow-legged, cross-eyed, incapable of shooting straight or building ships that would stay afloat in a storm, able to make only dud weapons. The unhappy truth was that in the two months since 8 December they had proved they had the daring, the power and the military skills to stage the most spectacular successes against British forces.
In the two hours I saw a Singapore with law and order in suspended animation. The British army had surrendered. The local police — Chinese and Indian junior officers and Malay rank and file — had disappeared, fearing that the Japanese would treat them as part of the British military set-up. The Japanese soldiers had not yet imposed their presence on the city. Each man was a law unto himself.
The looting of the big houses and warehouses of our British masters symbolized the end of an era. It is difficult for those born after 1945 to appreciate the full implications of the British defeat, as they have no memory of the colonial system that the Japanese brought crashing down. Since 1819, when Raffles founded Singapore as a trading post for the East India Company, the white man’s supremacy had been unquestioned. I did not know how this had come to pass, but by the time I went to school in 1930, I was aware that the Englishman was the big boss, and those who were white like him were also bosses — some big, others not so big, but all bosses. There were not many of them, about eight thousand. They had superior lifestyles and lived separately from the Asiatics, as we were then called. Government officers had larger houses in better districts, cars with drivers and many other servants. They ate superior food with plenty of meat and milk products. Every three years they went “home” to England for three to six months at a time to recuperate from the enervating climate of equatorial Singapore. Their children also went “home” to be educated, not to Singapore schools. They, too, led superior lives.
There was no question of any resentment. The superior status of the British in government and society was simply a fact of life. After all, they were the greatest people in the world. They had the biggest empire that history had ever known, stretching over all time zones, across all four oceans and five continents. We learnt that history lessons at school. To enforce their rule, they had only a few hundred troops in Singapore, who were regularly rotated. The most visible were stationed near the city centre at Fort Canning. There could not have been more than one to two thousand servicemen in all to maintain colonial rule over the six to seven million Asiatics in the Straits Settlements and the Malay states.
A few were knighted, and others hoped that after giving long and faithful service they, too, would be honoured. They were patronised by the white officials, but accepted their inferior status with aplomb, for they considered themselves superior to their fellow Asiatics. Conversely, any British, European or American who misbehaved or looked like a tramp was immediately packed off because he would demean the whole white race, whose superiority must never be thrown into doubt.
I was brought up by my parents and grandparents to accept that this was the natural order of things. I do not remember any local who by word or deed questioned all this. I did not then know that there were many Chinese, educated in Chinese-language schools, who were not integrated into the colonial system. Their teachers had come from China, and they did not recognise the supremacy of the whites, for they had not been educated or indoctrinated into accepting the virtues and the mission of the British Empire.
In 70 days of surprises, upsets and stupidities, British colonial society was shattered, and with it all the assumptions of the Englishman’s superiority. The Asiatics were supposed to panic when the firing started, yet they were the stoical ones who took the casualties and died without hysteria. It was the white civilian bosses who ducked under tables when the bombs and shells fell.
Stories of their scramble to save their skins led the Asiatics to see them as selfish and cowardly. The whites had proved as frightened and at a loss as to what to do as the Asiatics, if not more so. The Asiatics had looked to them for leadership, and they had failed them.
I will never understand how decisions affecting life and death could be taken so capriciously and casually. I had had a narrow escape from an exercise called Sook Ching, meaning to “wipe ouf” rebels, to punish the Chinese in Singapore for collecting funds to support China’s war effort against the Japanese, and for their boycott of Japanese goods.
I heard from nearby residents that inside there were Japanese and Korean women who followed the army to service the soldiers before and after battle. It was an amazing sight, one or two hundred men queuing up, waiting for their turn. Such comfort houses had been set up in China. Now they had come to Singapore.
I thought then that the Japanese army had a practical and realistic approach to such problems, totally different from that of the British army. I remembered the prostitutes along Waterloo Street soliciting British soldiers stationed at Fort Canning. The Japanese high command recognised the sexual needs of the men and provided for them. As a consequence, rape was not frequent.
Those of my generation who saw the Japanese soldiers in the flesh cannot forget their almost inhuman attitude to death in battle. They were not afraid to die. They made fearsome enemies and needed so little to keep going — the tin containers on their belts carried only rice, some soya beans and salted fish. Throughout the occupation, a common sight was of Japanese soldiers at bayonet practice on open fields. Their war cries as they stabbed their gunny-sack dummies were bloodcurdling. Had the British reinvaded and fought their way down Malaya into Singapore, there would have been immense devastation.
After seeing them at close quarters, I was sure that for sheer fighting spirit, they were among the world’s finest. But they also showed a meanness and viciousness towards their enemies equal to the Huns’s. Genghis Khan and his hordes could not have been more merciless. I have no doubts about whether the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. Without them, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Malaya and Singapore, and millions in Japan itself, would have perished.
What made them such warriors? The Japanese call it bushido, the code of the samurai, or Nippon seishin, the spirit of Nippon. I believe it was systematic indoctrination in the cult of emperor worship, and in their racial superiority as a chosen people who could conquer it all. They were convinced that to die in battle for the emperor meant they would ascend to heaven and become gods, while their ashes were preserved at the Yasukuni Shrine in the suburbs of Tokyo.
The man had been beheaded because he had been caught looting, and anybody who disobeyed the law would be dealt with in the same way. I left with a feeling of dread of the Japanese, but at the same time I thought what a marvellous photograph this would make for Life magazine. The American weekly would pay handsomely for such a vivid picture of the contrast: Singapore’s most modern building with this spectacle of medieval punishment in front of it. But then the photographer might well end up in the same situation as the beheaded looter.
In the face of these difficulties, my resistance to the Japanese language lessened over the months. If the Japanese were to be in Singapore as my lords and masters for the next few years, and I had not only to avoid trouble but make a living, I would have to learn their language. I found Japanese much easier than Mandarin because it was not tonal, but more complicated in its inflexions and grammar.
I felt very sad for him. I was not just that he was sick, but that he had lived to see his world crash: the British and all they had stood for had been humiliated and defeated. The British navy, the British ships’ captains, their discipline, their excellence, their supremacy at sea — these had all been demolished by the strange-looking Japanese. He could not understand how such a slovenly people could defeat straight-backed British officers. How could they have sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, scattered the British fleet, shot down the Royal Air Force, and captured 130,000 troops with only 60,000 of their own after laying siege to Singapore for only two weeks? As I watched him sinking into a coma, I thought it would have been kinder if he had died before it all happened.
Reduced to eating old, mouldy, worm-eaten stocks mixed with Malayan-grown rice, we had to find substitutes. My mother, like many others, stretched what little we could get with maize and millet and strange vegetables we would not normally have touched. They could be quite palatable, but they had bulk without much nutrition. It was amazing how hungry my brothers and I became one hour after each meal. Meat was a luxury. There was little beef or mutton. Pork was easier to buy and we could raise chickens ourselves, but there were no leftovers to feed them.
All imported goods had become precious. Liquor kept well and was much sought after by wealthy black marketeers and Japanese officers.
I felt certain that the British would soon push their way down the Malayan peninsula in the same way, and feared that, with the Japanese fighting to the last man, the recapture of Singapore would mean street-to-street and house-to-house fighting to the bitter end, with enormous civilian casualties. It was only a matter of time before it happened — one to two years.
I decided it would be better to get out of Singapore while things were still calm, and I could resign from the Hodobu without arousing suspicion over my motives. I applied for leave and went up to Malaya to reconnoitre Penang and the Cameron Highlands, to find out which was the safer place.
It was a scary ride. To save petrol, the driver switched off the engine and free-wheeled for the better part of 2.5 hours down the steep, winding road.
I paid for my whole trip by selling at an enormous profit half a dozen steel hoes purchased in Singapore. The farmers needed them badly. On my return journey, I bough a basket of beautiful vegetables unobtainable in Singapore, and spent a day and a half guarding them on the train.
As I took the lift down in Cathay Building the day before I stopped work, the lift attendant, whom I had befriended, told me to be careful; my file in the Kempeitai office had been taken out for attention. I felt a deep chill. I wondered what could have provoked this, and braced myself fo the coming interrogation. From that moment, I sensed that I was being followed. Day and night, a team tailed me.
I endured this cat-and-mouse game for some eight weeks.
People living nearby reported hearing their victims’ howls of pain, sounds calculated to fill their hearts with dread, and their fears were spread by word of mouth. It as a deliberate method to terrorise the locals; a cowed population was easier to control.
I continued to operate on the black market, acting as a broker for anything and everything tradeable. It was a no-lose situation. Every item was in short supply and getting scarcer. Hyperinflation meant nothing ever went down in price. I knew that the moment I had cash, the important thing was to change it into something of more permanent value or it would melt away in my hands.
For three weeks after the emperor’s broadcast, there were no signs of the British arriving. It was an unnatural situation. It was different from what had happened three and a half years earlier, when the British had surrendered and the Japanese had not yet taken effective control. Unlike the British, the Japanese troops had not been defeated and demoralised in battle. They were despondent and confused, but still very much in charge, and still had the power to hurt us. When locals who could not contain the elation celebrated their defeat, Japanese soldiers passing by would gate-crash their parties and slap the merrymakers. The Japanese army expected to be called to account by the British and punished for its misdeeds, but it was also resentful and apprehensive that the population would turn on its officers when they arrived. Shots were reported to have been heard from Japanese officers’ messes, for several could not accept the surrender and preferred to commit harakiri. But the locals were fortunate. The Japanese did not kill civilians, as far as I know, nor were there ugly or brutal incidents. They left the population alone until the British took over. Their military discipline held.
The 3.5 years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life. They gave me vivid insights into the behaviour of human beings and human societies, their motivations and impulses. My appreciation of governments, my understanding of power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this experience. I saw a whole social system crumble suddenly before an occupying army that was absolutely merciless. The Japanese demanded total obedience and got it from nearly all. They were hated by almost everyone but everyone knew their power to do harm and so everyone adjusted. Those who were slow or reluctant to change and to accept the new masters suffered. They lived on the margins of the new society, their fortunes stagnated or declined and they lost their status. Those who were quick off the mark in assessing the new situation, and swift to take advantage of the new opportunities by making themselves useful to the new masters, made fortunes out of the terrible misfortune that had befallen all in Singapore.
The Japanese Military Administration governed by spreading fear. It put up to pretence of civilised behaviour. Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare. In the midst of deprivation after the second half of 1944, where the people half-starved, it was amazing how low the crime rate remained. People could leave their front doors open at night. As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. That was not my experience in Singapore before the war, during the Japanese occupation or subsequently.
Young locals learnt enough Japanese to be employable, but beyond that most people were decent. They did not want to cooperate or collaborate with the enemy. They just wanted to coast along, to give the minimum to the new masters. Only a few dared to oppose them, even secretly.
There were others, the smart and the opportunistic, who went out of their way to ingratiate themselves and make themselves useful to the Japanese. They provided them with labour, materials, information, women, liquor, good food, and they made fortunes. The lucky ones were contractors whom the Japanese needed to obtain basic supplies, or who were in building construction.
The luckiest and most prosperous of all were those like the Shaw brothers who were given the license or franchise to run gambling farms in the amusement parks, the Great World and the New World. For a deprived, depressed population facing the prospect of mass destruction and death in one, two or three years when the British returned, gambling was a wonderful opiate. As existence was uncertain, all games of chance were favoured. Life itself had become a game of chance.
I learnt more from the 3.5 years of Japanese occupation than any university could have taught me. I had not yet read Mao’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, but I knew that Japanese brutality, Japanese guns, Japanese bayonets and swords, and Japanese terror and torture settled the argument as to who was in charge, and could make people change their behavior, even their loyalties. The Japanese not only demanded and got their obedience; they forced them to adjust to a longterm prospect of Japanese rule, so that they had their children educated to fit the new system, its language, its habits and its values, in order to be useful and make a living.
The third and final state, which they would have achieved if they had been given time, was to get us to accept them as our new masters as part of the natural order of things. Morality and fairness were irrelevant. They had won. They were on top and in command. We had to praise their gods, extol their culture and emulate their behavior. But it did not always work. In Korea, the Japanese met resistance from the moment they attempted to govern the country. They tried to suppress the instincts and habits of a people of an old culture, people with a strong sense of pride in their history and a determination to oppose their new barbaric oppressors. They killed many Koreans but never broke their spirit.
But that was one exception. In Taiwan — ruled by the Chinese, the Portuguese and the Dutch before the Japanese came — there was no hatred. Had the Japanese stayed on in Singapore and Malaya, they would, within 50 years, have forged a coterie of loyal supporters as they had successfully done in Taiwan.
In the confused interregnum between the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945 and the establishment of effective British control of the island, anti-Japanese groups took the law into their own hands. They lynched, murdered, tortured or beat up informers, torturers, tormentors and accomplices — or suspected accomplices — of the Japanese. I remember the thudding of feet as people were chased in broad daylight down the backlanes around our two homes in Victoria Street and China Building. I heard the sound of blows and screams as they were knifed and killed.
The liberation did not bring what everybody wanted: punishment for the wicked and reward for the virtuous. There could be no complete squaring of accounts. Fairness and justice demanded documentation and elaborate investigations. It was not possible to muster the resources to bring every culprit to book. There were too many of them, both Japanese and locals. Justice was meted out to a few, but most went free.
When I argued that it did not make sense that a capitalist was also pro-communist, I was flogged with a rope, kicked and manhandled.
I regained consciousness when water was splashed on my face. I found myself imprisoned in a room about 15 feet by 10 feet, shared by about 30 people, male and female.
There was a lavatory at one corner of the room, a squatting type with the cistern high above our heads. Repeated flushing made the water “clean” and it was then collected from the gushing outlets in the toilet bowl. It was the water you drank and washed with. If you became sick you would be taken away to God knows where. I was disgusted by the sight of flowing blood from a woman menstruating.
We were fed with rice gruel mixed with discarded vegetables from an old kerosene tin. I could not stomach it and retched every time I tried to eat. It reminded me of the way we fed our ducks.
All of us were made to sit on our haunches and we were not allowed to change position without permission from the guards, local boys who were recruited and trained to be cruel.
He was dead and yet was left hanging for some time before all of us, as a warning to the gunpo and to us.
I have seen the true nature of the Japanese, in and out of prison. The civility and the bowings are a thin veneer under which lurks the beast. The Allied victory saved Asia.
To give an accurate description of the misdeeds of these men it will be necessary for me to describe actions which plumb the very depths of human depravity and degradation. The keynote of the whole of this case can be epitomised by two words — unspeakable horror.
Horror, stark and naked, permeates every corner and angle of the case from beginning to end, devoid of relief or palliation. I have searched, I have searched diligently, amongst a vast mass of evidence, to discover some redeeming feature, some mitigating factor in the conduct of these men which would elevate the story from the level of pure horror and bestiality, and ennoble it, at least, upon the plane of tragedy. I confess that I have failed.
Yet, throughout the 50 years since the end of the war, successive Japanese Liberal Democratic Party governments, the majority of leaders of all Japanese political parties, most of their academics and nearly all their media have chosen not to talk about these evil deeds. Unlike the Germans, they hope that with the passing of the generations these deeds will be forgotten, and the accounts of what they did buried in dusty records. When they refuse to admit them to their neighbours, people cannot but fear that it is possible for them to repeat these horrors.
Unlike so many Japanese officers, they did not shuffle; they walked properly. The crowd hooted, whistled and jeered but the Japanese were impassive and dignified, looking straight ahead. They had come to sign the formal surrender in obedience to their emperor’s orders. Many officers were later seen at various locations laying down their long samurai swords in a pile. They were acknowledging defeat, were disarmed, and became prisoners of war. But the seven generals who now walked up the steps of City Hall represented an army that had not been routed in battle. They would have fought to the death, and they left the people of Singapore who hated them in no doubt that they would have preferred to go down in flames, bringing everyone else down with them, rather than surrender.
My education in the unfairness and absurdities of human existence was completed by what I saw happening in the immediate aftermath of the war. If three and a half years of Japanese occupation had earned me my degree in the realities of life, the first year in liberated Singapore was my postgraduate course. It was very different from my memory of the colonial thirties. Those British civl servants who survived internment had been sent home for medical treatment and recuperation, and temporary officers of the British Military Administration controlled what were improvised departments.
They were out of touch with the changes that had taken place. The men now in charge — majors, colonels, brigadiers — knew they would be in power only until they were demobilized, when their wartime commissions would vanish like Cinderella’s coach. The pumpkin of civilian life to which they would then be reduced was at the back of their minds, and many made the most of their temporary authority. Their needs, alas, were similar to those of Japanese officers - something small, valuable and easy to secrete on the person to take home to England when their time was up. But they were not bullies and oppressors like the Japanese.
Choo asked if I knew she was 2.5 years older than I was. I said I knew, and had considered this carefully. I was mature for my age and most of my friends were older than me anyway. Moreover, I wanted someone my equal, not someone who was not really grown up and needed looking after, and I was not likely to find another girl who was my equal and who shared my interests. She said she would wait. We did not tell our parents. It would have been too difficult to get them to agree to such a long commitment.
We were young and in love, anxious to record this moment of our lives, to have something to remember each other by during the three years that I would be away ing England. We did not know when we would meet again once I left. We both hoped she would go back to Raffles College, win the Queen’s scholarship to read law, and join me wherever I might be. She was totally committed. I sensed it. I was equally determined to keep my commitment to her.
I was suffering from culture shock before the phrase was coined. The climate, the clothes, the food, the people, the habits, the manner, the streets, the geography, the travel arrangements — everything was different. I was totally unprepared except for the English language, a smattering of English literature, and previous interaction with British colonials.
I was thoroughly unhappy with over the little things I had always taken for granted in Singapore. My family provided everything I needed. My shoes were polished, my clothes were washed and ironed, my food was prepared. All I had to do was to express my preferences. Now I had to do everything for myself. It was a physically exhausting life, moreover, with much time spent on the move from place to place. I was fatigued from walking, and traveling on buses and tubes left me without the energy for quiet study and contemplation.
I received an angry reply. “I would remind you that I went out of my way to persuade the authorities of this school to accept you when we had turned others away. Your conduct shows that I was wrong in my estimate of you and that I should not have been so ready to help.”
The two or three of Laski’s lectures that I attended were my first introduction to the general theory of socialism, and I was immediately attracted to it. It struck me as manifestly fair that everybody in this world should be given an equal chance in life, that in a just and well-ordered society there should not be a great disparity of wealth between persons because of their position or status, or that of their parents. I made no distinction between different races and peoples. We were part of the British Empire, and I believed the British lived well at the expense of all their subjects. The ideas that Laski represented at that time were therefore attractive to students from the colonies. We all wanted our independence so that we could keep our wealth for ourselves.
I thought then that wealth depended mainly on the possession of territory and natural resources, whether fertile land with abundant rainfall for agriculture or forestry, or valuable minerals, or oil and gas. It was only after I had been in office for some years that I recognized that performance varied substantially between the different races in Singapore, and among different categories within the same race. After trying out a number of ways to reduce inequalities and failing, I was gradually forced to conclude that the decisive factors were the people, their natural abilities, education and training. Knowledge and the possession of technology were vital for the creation of wealth.
My aversion to the communists sprang from their Leninist methods, not their Marxist ideals. I had seen how ruthless the MPAJA had been in Singapore after the Japanese surrendered, taking summary revenge on all those whom they suspected of having worked for the enemy or otherwise betrayed their cause without any attempt to establish their guilt. They had been repulsive down to their very uniforms, their floppy cloth caps, their body language and their arrogant, aggressive attitudes. Among the student communists at the LSE, I found the same zealous hard sell, that over-eagerness to convert people to their cause.
But the idea of an equal, just and fair society appealed to all colonial students, and the British Fabians recommended a step-by-step approach to this ideal state that would make it unnecessary to behead the rich and expropriate their riches. By stages, and without disrupting the economy or creating a social upheaval, the rich would be deprived of their wealth through taxation in their lifetime, and through heavy estate duties when they died. Their children would then have to start out in the world on the same basis as those of poorer parents. I could see no flaw in that. I was too young to know how ingenious British lawyers were in constructing trust deeds that made it difficult for the government to get too much out of estate duty.
By the early 1970s, I was despairing of their unworldliness. It was about education. Two headmasters had written a serious article to argue that British comprehensive schools were failing, not because they were wrong, but because the best teachers were still teaching the best students. The best teachers should be teaching the weakest students, who needed them in order to become equal. The good students would do well anyway. This Procrustean approach was too much for me. I stopped subcribing.
“Lee, when you come up to Cambridge, you are joining something special, like joining the Life Guards and not just joining the army. You have to stand that extra inch taller.” When I replied that I would try to get a First Class, he looked gravely at me and said, “Lee, don’t be disappointed if you don’t. In Oxford and Cambridge, you need that divine spark, that something extra before you get a First.” I was relieved that my Cambridge examiners had decided I had that something extra.
She was amused at this young Chinese boy talking on glowing terms fo his lady friend being a better student than he was, and intrigued by the idea that perhaps the girl was exceptional.
After a few weeks of hectic adjustments, she told me she found me a changed man. I was no longer the cheerful, optimistic go-getter, the anything-can-be-done fellow, bubbling with joie de vivre. Despite the favour I had been shown, particularly the kindness of Billy Thatcher, and my happy mood during the glorious summer of 1947, I appeared to have become deeply anti-British, particularly of the colonial regime in Malaya and Singapore, which I was determined to end. One year in London and Cambridge had crystallized in me changes that had started with the Japanese capture of Singapore in 1942. I had now seen the British in their own country and I questioned their ability to govern these territories for the good of the locals. Those on the spot were not interested in the advancement of their colonies, but only in the top jobs and the high pay these could give them; at the national level they were primarily concerned with acquiring the foreign exchange that the exports of Malayan rubber and tin could earn in US dollars, to support an ailing pound sterling.
After Choo’s revelation, I began to examine myself to see how it had happened. It may have begun with my experience of the colour prejudice of the British working classes, the bus conductors, the salesgirls and waitresses in the shops and restaurants, and the landladies in Hampstead I encountered in my search for digs.
The British people I met at the upper end of the social scale — the professors and teachers, the secretaries and librarians — were cultured, polite and helpful, if a little reserved. The British students were by and large well-mannered, even friendly, but always correct. But of course there was colour prejudice when it came to competition for places on sport teams, for college colours or university “blues” and “half blues”.
The discrimination may not have been due entirely to colour prejudice. It was the class system — another strange phenomenon for someone from a young, mobile society of migrants.
He patted Choos’s hand and, looking at me, said, “He is too impatient. Don’t let him be in such hurry.” He had read my character well, but he also knew that I had a serious purpose in life and was determined to achieve it.
Soused with beer, we talked of the great things we would do on our return. Later, I was to discover that very few would stay the course. Many wives would object to their husbands jeopardizing their careers by opposing British colonial authority, and quite a number of the men themselves, faced with cold reality and hard choices, lost the stomach for the fight.
We ran into a football crowd that weekend, and they banged the doors of the hotel where we stayed day and night, distracting us from our studies. But it would not have made much difference: we were to pay the price for being out of London and failing to listen to the lecturers who were the also the examiners in the major studies. I got a Second Class and was listed in third place. Choo got a Third. But all was well. Life was about to enter a new phase.
I had seen a Britain scarred by war, yet whose people were not defeatist about the losses they had suffered, nor arrogant about the victory they had scored. Every bomb site in the City of London was neatly tended, with bricks and rubble piled to one side, and often flowers and shrubs planted to soften the ruins. It was part of their understated pride and discipline.
It was not the Cambridge of youngsters who wanted to have a good time and to impress each other with their arty-crafty ways. Yes, there were a few of those, fresh from peacetime national service or exempted from it, but they were a minority and they did not set the pace. It was the ex-service students, some carrying the ugly marks of war, who made post-war Cambridge a place for learning and coping with the war’s aftermath. I was privileged to have been up with that generation of Britons.
Their system of parliamentary democracy seemed to work so well. A tremendous revolution — economic, social, and political — was taking place peacefully before my eyes. The voters had thrown out Churchill and his Conservatives in May 1945, although Churchill had won the war fro Britain. They had put Clement Attlee and the Labour Party in power on the strength of their promise to bring about the most profound changes in British history. The Attlee government was implementing programmes designed to create a welfare state that would look after Britons of all classes from cradle to grave. Yet there was no violence protest from its opponents, no blood on in the streets. Only strong words from Conservatives in parliament and in the constituencies urging moderation and common sense on the question of what was affordable. I was most impressed.
I was too young, too idealistic to realize that the cost to the government would be heavy; worse, that under such an egalitarian system each individual would be more interested in what he could get out of the common pool than in striving to do better for himself, which had been the driving force for progress throughout human evolution. That realization had to wait until the 1960s, when I was in charge of the government of a tiny Singapore much poorer than Britain, and was confronted with the need to generate revenue and create wealth before I could even think, let alone talk, of redistributing it.
These minimum needs looked like luxury compared to what I remembered of conditions in Singapore even before the Japanese impoverished us. It was a remarkable lesson in how to go about creating social justice.
We compared what we saw in Britain with Singapore and Malaya, with our largely uneducated peoples and a feeble press that ignored all the basic issues but reported the comings and goings of important people, mostly white bosses and the locals who hovered around them. The situation looked backward and unpromising.
He restored my faith in the pride of a colonial subject people, and I had a high regard for him. But it was to be some time before I realized that a country needed more than a few dignified and able men at the top to get it moving. The people as a whole must have self-respect and the will to strive to make a nation of themselves. The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.
Its leaders were mostly returned students who had read law or medicine in Britain in the thirties and were overawed and overwhelmed by English values. They were like my grandfather — everything English was the acme of perfection. They had no confidence in themselves and even less in their own kind.
Patrick described the older generation of returned Asian students as emotionally and psychologically incapable of fighting for freedom. Their starting point was that they could not take over immediately and run an independent country, and would require many more years of experience before they could do so. I saw them as unable to stand up for themselves, let alone stand up against the British.
These politicians made supine speeches that never challenged British supremacy. They were inordinately proud whenever they said anything critical of colonial officials. My friend Kenny Byrne described them as “bred in servility.”
I felt that this world of colonial make-believe was surreal. Officials catered only to their own interests and those of the English-educated, who could bring some pressure to bear on them through the English-language newspaper. But they were not the economic dynamo of Singapore society. I had a great sense of unease. I discussed these thoughts only with Kenny. I had to get on with my career in law, and had yet to see how the law would help me in politics.
In the 1950s, during my early days in politics, I was mildly annoyed to be sometimes reported as Harry Lee. Politically, it was a minus. However, by the middle 1960s, after I had been through the mill and survived, I got over any sense of discomfort. It was not a reflection on me and my values. I did not name myself. I have not given any of my children a Western first name, nor have they in turn given their children Western names.
I had no faith in a system that allowed the superstition, ignorance, biases, prejudices and fears of seven jurymen to determine guilt or innocence. They were by definition the ordinary man in the street with no special qualifications other than an ability to understand English and follow the proceedings. I had seen juries in British courts. I did not think they deserved the reverence that lawyers and jurists ritually accorded to their collective wisdom.
British colonial officers had not been accustomed either to presenting their case in order to win public backing, or to dealing with local men who politely showed up their contradictions, weaknesses and cavalier attitudes.
It was the first strike since the Emergency Regulations were introduced in June 1948, and it was conducted completely within the law, with no threats or violence or even disorderly picketing. The fight had been for public support and the union won. After this demonstration of the incompetence of the British colonial officers, the people saw that the government was vulnerable when subjected to scrutiny.
The press exposure and publicity enhanced my professional reputation. I was no longer just a brash young lawyer back from Cambridge with academic honours. I had led striking workers, spoken up for them and was trusted by them. I had delivered without much broken crockery. I gained enormously in the estimation of thousands of workers in Singapore and Malaya without frightening the English-educated intelligentsia.
It was often embarrassing because my Chinese was totally inadequate. I felt greatly ashamed of my inability to communicate with them in what should have been my native tongue. Once again, I started to make an effort to learn Mandarin. I got myself a teacher and a small tape-recorder. But progress was painfully slow. I had little time and, worse, few opportunities to practise the language.
He said “The most brilliant communist I know.” This did not sound promising until he added, “But people grow up and their minds change with experience. Work on him. He is worth saving.”
This was my first face-to-face meeting with a detained member of a communist organization. I was ignorant of their psychology, the mental make-up and motivation that made them determined to prove to themselves and the world that they were men of conviction and strength, able to endure great privations and hardships for a cause, worthy to be comrades of the other warriors dedicated to the Marxist millennium.
“Under detention,” he said, “you soon learn to differentiate between the weaklings and the strong men.”
Our small group — Keng Swee, Chin Chye, Raja, Kenny and I — had meanwhile been meeting on Saturday afternoons in my basement dining room at Oxley Road to consider the feasibility of forming a political party. We were determined that we would be completely different from the supine, feeble, self-serving, opportunistic parties and individuals in the existing Legislative Council and City Council.
They felt dispossessed, and their lack of economic opportunity turned their schools into breeding grounds for the communists.
I did not understand the background of the problem at the time, though I knew something was simmering and bubbling away in this completely different world. The students were well-organized, disciplined and cohesive. They had remarkable self-control and were capable of mass action, of collective demonstrations of defiance that made it difficult for the government to isolate and pick out the leaders for punishment. After the arrests, they set out to blow up other issues that would enable them to engineer clashes with the police, to produce martyrs and so arouse public feeling against the government. I understood their motivations and methods only much later. Many of the English-educated were equally ill-informed and naive. On 18 May, they came out in support of the Chinese demonstrators by calling for an inquiry into the rioting because the police had used improper force. They were as simple-minded as I was.
I was ignorant, gullible and stupid. I did not know how efficient the communists were, how their tentacles reached out and controlled every single organization that was bubbling up against the government.
It was a world full of vitality, of so many activists, all like jumping beans, of so many young idealists, unselfish, ready to sacrifice everything for a better society. I was deeply impressed by their seemingly total dedication to the cause of revolution, their single-minded determination to overturn the colonial government in order to establish a new world of equality and fairness. And I was to grow increasingly fearful of the direction in which their leaders were taking them.
But I was also convinced that if I could not harness some of these dynamic young people to our cause, to what my friends and I stood for, we would never succeed. So far, we had links only with the English-educated and the Malays, who did not have the convictions or the energies to match, never mind the will to resist the Chinese-educated communists.
They were not well-educated, and did not look to me like revolutionary material.
I never turned them away, however inconvenient the hour. I wanted to poach in this pond where the fish had been fed and nurtured by the communists, to use hook and line to catch as many as I could. I was innocent — it was like recruiting police cadets in mafia territory, a hazardous business. I believed then that the discipline of the students and the energy and dedication of their leaders were natural and spontaneous, born of youthful enthusiasm and idealism. It took me two years to fathom their methods, to get glimpses of their intrigues and deviousness and to understand the dynamics of the communist united front.
The communists had a secret network of disciplined cadres grouped in cells of about four, each with a leader who gave the orders (dressed up as the outcome of democratic discussion), who in turn took orders from a leader in another cell of a higher rank.
These orders were disobeyed at the risk of isolation and marginalization for those on the fringes, of rustication and punishment for those who were members of the MCP, and of death by assassination if a party member had committed an act of betrayal. It was a ruthless system in which a past record of sacrifice could count for nothing, and therefore not one to be defied lightly.
But in 1954, I was still blind to the true nature of the communist adversary, and was not deterred. I believed I could win over some of the non-committed who had open minds and would see that Mao-inspired communism could never succeed in Malaya. I had much to learn.
We ate, drank, exchanged pleasantries, thanked the maid, and left. After the third meeting, we decided it would be ruinous to be in any way associated with these people. What we were looking for were serious-minded men for a long-term enterprise, men who would take with equanimity the ups and downs of politics in pursuit of our objectives.
But I was satisfied. With Fong in, I felt the new party would have a reasonably broad working-class base. We had the English-educated, the Malay blue- and white-collar workers, and we now had the Chinese clan associations, trade guilds and blue-collar workers as well. We did not want the middle school students to be in any way associated with us. Any political party in Singapore’s segmented society had to balance its appeal to one section of the community against the fears or resistance it would arouse in another, and for that reason they would not be an asset. They would frighten off the English- and Malay-educated, who were about 40 percent of the population.
Now I had to exaggerate my linguistic skills. I could write some characters, but had forgotten most of them because I had not been using them since I gave up my job with Shimoda & Company in 1943. My spoken Hakka and Hokkien were pathetic, almost negligible. I vowed to make up for past neglect.
We were a united front of convenience. They wanted their own two men in, and I was only useful as cover for them. I never allowed myself to forget that. I had to speak at one rally for Lim and another for Nair, but my heart was not in it.
The biggest single theme that galvanised the Chinese-speaking was Chinese culture, and the need to preserve Chinese traditions through the Chinese schools. It was not a proletarian issue; it was plain, simple chauvinism. But the communists knew it was a crowd-winner that pulled at Chinese heartstrings, and they worked on it assiduously.
They could wax eloquent, quote proverbs, use metaphors and allegories or traditional legends to illustrate contemporary situations. They spoke with a passion that filled their listeners with emotion and exhilaration at the prospect of Chinese greatness held out to them. For the Chinese of Singapore, it was never to be the same again.
Mandarin could reach only those under 35 who had been to Chinese schools; I was frantically learning it, but after these election meetings, I knew that even if I mastered it, it would not be enough. Yet I balked at the idea of learning Hokkien as well. The other language that could reach a big audience was bazaar Malay. This Melayu Pasar was a pidgin with little grammar, but it was understood by all races, and was the only means of trading with the Malays and Indians. However, because it was limited, it was difficult to move crowds in it. There could be no flights of rhetoric.
One big logistic problem that we had was to find transport to carry voters to the polling stations, where they would then feel obliged to cast their ballots for our candidate. This practice, introduced by the British, favoured the wealthy parties whose supporters had cars.
Its members were Chinese who made a good living as importers and exporters, retailers, merchants and shopkeepers, bankers, and rubber or tin magnates. They were the leaders of the Chinese-speaking traditional guilds; they were in charge of the Chinese schools, which they paid for and ran through their boards of management; and they funded and administered charitable Chinese clan hospitals and other welfare organizations. They saw this election as their chance to get at the levers of power that would increase their business prospects. They further believed that they could harness the energies of the Chinese middle school students to their party because the students were their children, and they had been sympathetic to their cause of defending Chinese education.
Once they knew they had lost, they sneaked out of the counting centre at the Victoria Memorial Hall and vanished into the night. They did not understand that when you lose, you have to be defiant, to keep up the morale of your supporters, to live and fight another day. The communists knew this and we, the non-communists in the PAP, quickly learnt it from them.
As far as I can see, apart from those over 40, all the Chinese are immensely proud of the achievement of the Mao Tse-tung government. A government that in five years can change a corrupt and decadent administration into one that can withstand the armed might of the Americans in Korea deserves full praise.
Earlier, in January, Raja had drafted a PAP statement, which I then issued, proposing a general amnesty fo the MCP. It was reasonable and logical, but in retrospect, naive and unworkable. “The past six and a half years have made clear that the Emergency in this country is essentially a political and not a military problem,” it said. The sooner it was ended, the sooner could the people avail themselves of the democratic rights that it had curtailed, and without which effective democratic parties could not properly function. The Malayan government should give firm guarantees that if the MCP abandoned its armed insurrection, there would be no reprisals, and if it accepted constitutional methods of political struggle, it should be permitted to operate as a legitimate party.
Raja and I were Western-educated radicals who had no idea of the dynamics of guerrilla insurgency and revolution by violence. Only later did we realize that the communists would never give up their capacity to use armed force whenever democratic methods failed to win them power. But while in part our misguided demands could be put down to innocence, in large measure they could be traced to adroit manipulation of the mass rallies by the pro-communists.
Later, I learnt that if any speaker broke the party line, the claques would suddenly go cold on him, however striking his oratory, hissing, booing and making disconcerting noises to distract the crowd. The communists had developed these techniques in mass psychology to a fine art and used them to great effect among the Chinese-educated. So far as I could see, they did not work with the English-educated.
I said many things then that were imprudent, so it was perhaps fortunate that the PAP had not set out to form a government and therefore would not be implementing our proposals. But meanwhile, we had aroused expectations of great changes. We had got the people interested enough to come and listen to our speeches, and then tossed them stirring ideas, instilling in them a spirit of defiance. The campaigning during the five weeks of that election decisively changed the mood of Singapore. But while tea party politics might be a thing of the past, the aftermath of all that rhetoric would soon be bloody violence.
If the five years since my return from England, I had built up something of a law practice and also a base for political support in the trade unions. But I now had two tasks ahead of me: to start my own law firm and to create a party organization for the PAP.
I knew from my five years of practice at the Bar that Goode was stating hard facts. However, I could not support the extension of the Emergency Regulations because we had attacked them as part of our election platform. We had done so as a matter of principle, believing that if we had independence we could do away with them. By April, I was beginning to have some doubts about this, but it was to be another year and a half before my doubts turned into a conviction that Raja, Keng Swee, Chin Chye, Kenny and I were all wrong.
People assumed there was always some latent animosity in the Chinese-speaking population for the white bosses, but I never realized it was so intense. Raised to fever pitch by the middle school students and the communist cadres in the unions, it exploded. It was probable that even Lim and Fong were not prepared for what was now to take place. But I was to learn again and again that their purpose was never to argue, reason and settle. It was to engineer a collision, to generate more popular hatred of the colonial enemy. They wanted to establish the Leninist preconditions for a revolution: first, a government that no longer commanded the confidence of the people, and second, a government that had lost faith in its ability to solve its problems as growing lawlessness, misery and violence overwhelmed it.
Instead of taking him straight to the hospital, however, the other students put in on a lorry and paraded him around the town for three hours, so that by the time he was brought there he was dead from a wound in the lung. But what was one life if another martyr could stoke up the fire of revolution?
Marshall did not know that by his speeches and, worse, by his eagerness to settle and avoid conflict, he had opened Pandora’s box. Every worker in Singapore, every leader and every communist cadre knew they had a government they could use for their own purposes, to corner the employers, win benefits, and take over management’s prerogatives.
My way of constitutional opposition, working within the law, was in marked contrast to that of the communists, and I got results. But without the communists going beyond the law and using violence, my methods would not have been effective. It was the less unpleasant option I offered that made them acceptable to the British. Just as in Malaya, had there been no terrorism to present the British with the humiliating prospect of surrendering to the communists, the Tunku would never have won independence simply by addressing larger and larger gatherings of Malays in the villages. It was the disagreeable alternative the communists posed that made constitutional methods of gentle erosion of colonial authority effective for the nationalists and acceptable to the colonialists. In pre-war India, where there was no communist threat, constitutional methods of passive resistance took decades to work.
One unavoidable problem in a multiracial, multilingual society is how to organize a functioning legislature and government without creating a Tower of Babel. Every old-established community has one main language, and those who migrate into it have to learn that language. But the British in Singapore brought in large number of Chinese, Indians and Malays, all speaking their own tongues, and left them to their own devices.
“Without multilingualism, you are going to hand us over to the Chinese. They will swamp us.” “Yes, sir. One must accept the rule of the majority.”
I was acutely conscious that my lack of comprehension, let alone command of the Chinese language, was a tremendous political disadvantage. I recounted my own personal experience:
“I was sent to an English school to equip me to go to an English university in order that I could then be an educated man — the equal of any Englishman, the model of perfection. Sir, I do not know how far they have succeeded in that. I grew up and I finally graduated. At the end of it, I felt — and it was long before I entered politics… that the whole set of values was fundamentally and radically wrong.”
“I am a less emotional man, sir. I do not usually cry or tear my hair, or tear paper or tear my shirt off, but this does not mean that I feel any the less strongly about it. My son is not going to an English school. He will not be a model Englishman. I hope, of course, that he will know enough English to converse with his father on matters other than the weather.”
I had to take a position that would not allow the communists to denounce me as a deculturalized China-man. Had I taken a false step on this issue, I would have lost out. If they could show that I preferred English to Chinese as the more important medium of instruction in the schools, it would be impossible for me to retain the respect and support of the Chinese-speaking ground.
Tunku Abdul Rahman, the leader of the Malay party, UMNO, in the Federation of Malaya, was the opposite of David Marshall. He was completely consistent and reliable. He did not pretend to be clever but was shrewd judge of people. Most important of all, he understood power. His father had been Sultan of Kedah, and from the shadow of his father’s throne he had learnt how to wield it to get men to do what he wanted of them. As a royal prince himself, he had the unqualified support of the rulers of the nine Malay states of the Federation who had opposed the British’ government’s proposal for a Malayan Union in 1946. Best of all, he was genuinely pro-British and anti-communist. He had spent nine years of his youth in England as a student, three years reading law at Cambridge, where he was quite literally given a degree, and six more trying — but never very hard — to pass his Bar examination. He enjoyed life and often told me about the wonderful times he had had in England. In him, the British found a leader who commanded solid backing from the Malays and good support from the Chinese and Indians.
There was also a new racial equation. I saw quite a few West Indian blacks working as conductors on the busses, and some black dustmen, and I noticed that Asiatics were now referred to as Asians in the papers. I was told that sometime in 1953, the British press had started to us “Asian” because “Asiatic” had a touch of condescension or disrespect, and the change was a concession to the people of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, now independent. I did not understand how this improved their status. When young London children called me a Chinaman or a Chink, it did not trouble me. If they meant it as a term of abuse, my business was to make them think differently one day.
He was modest, humble and well-behaved, with a dedication to his cause that won my reluctant admiration and respect. I wished I had cadres like him. He was like a Gurkha warrant officer in the British army — totally loyal, absolutely dependable, always ready to execute orders to the best of his ability.
But he rejected it outright — he was not one for cool, quiet calculations when in a tight corner into which he had backed himself.
The new chief minister had put himself in a no-win position. I had believed from the start that the government had been making a strategic mistake in focusing on action on the middle schools, especially the Chinese High School and Chung Cheng High School. These two were the Eton and Harrow of the Chinese-speaking world in Singapore and Malaya, and parents throughout Southeast Asia aspired to send their children to them as boarders if they could afford it. Why had Special Branch acted as they did? By concentrating their preliminary actions and therefore the limelight on the students, they had led people to believe that Lim Yew Hock was attacking the entire Chinese education system. That perception was disastrous for him.
I resolved that if ever a PAP government were faced with this problem, I would never make the same mistakes. I would think of a way of obliging the parents themselves to grab their children from the schools and take them home. Special Branch could pick up the leaders after the students had dispersed.
Marshall had taught me how not to be soft and weak when dealing with the communists. Lim Yew Hock taught me how not to be tough and flat-footed. It was not enough to use administrative and legal powers to confine and cripple them. Lim did not understand that the communist game was to make him lose the support of the masses, the Chinese-speaking people, to destroy his credibility as a leader who was acting in their interests. There were thus able to portray him as an opportunistic and a puppet acting at the behest of the “colonialist imperialists.” Of the two, the more valuable lesson was Lim Yew Hock’s — how not to let the communists exact a heavy price for putting them down.
But I had no doubt that as long as the Chinese middle schools were churning out bright and ambitious graduates whom the political system excluded from good jobs in the public and private sectors, the MCP would have a steady flow of recruits. This was the nub of the problem — the frustration of the able and talented among the Chinese-educated who had no outlets for their energy and idealism, and who were at the same time inspired by the example of the young communist cadres in China. It was only after news of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution percolated through in the 1970s that the communist hold on them weakened.
Meanwhile, an ostentatious display of self-sacrifice by their leading cadres added to the myth. After working the whole day running around making speeches and negotiating with wicked employers, Lim and Fong would sleep on top of the desks at union headquarters. Their spartan lifestyle had a tremendous impact on their followers, who tried to emulate them, infecting each other with the same spirit of self-denial.
It was a competitive display of selflessness that swept a whole generation; the more selfless you were, the more you impressed the masses, and the more likely you were to be promoted within the organization. With such supporters, the communists could run elections on a shoestring — there was no shortage of workers co canvassers, and cloth for banners were donated by enthusiastic supporters. There was also no shortage of girls amid all this puritanical zeal, for in the back rooms of Middle Road, supposedly revolutionary young women gave themselves up to illicit love, only too happy to have such star performers as Lim and Fong as their partners. The less attractive girls settled for the branch leaders of the various unions.
In contrast, when we had to find workers, it was a real problem. We recruited volunteers from the unions and from among friends, but they all wanted to go home in time for dinner, for some function or other, or for a private appointment. There was no total commitment, no dedication as on the other side — one of their devotees would do the work of three or four of our volunteers. I used to be quite depressed by the long-term implication of all this. I failed to realize then that hey could not keep it up for long. Revolutionary zeal could only carry them thus far. In the end, they had to live and bring up families, and families required money, housing, health care, recreation and the other good things of life.
One odd thing about them though, was that when they abandoned communism, as some young Chinese middle school student leaders did, they often became extremely avaricious to make up for lost time. They seemed to feel that hey had been robbed of the best years of their lives and had to make up for what they had missed. It was a preview of what I was to see later in China and Vietnam. When the revolution did no deliver utopia and the economy reverted to the free market, cadres, with the power to issue licences or with access to goods and services at official prices, were the first to be corrupt and exploit the masses.
Chin Chye, Pang Boon and I had concluded that the Chinese-speaking ground would distrust us as tricksters if we ditched our former comrades in gaol and took office without them. The accounts had first to be squared; only then could we break with them and stand a chance in the fight for hearts and minds. It was not a political gimmick. We had no choice. We understood the values and social norms of our people and we had to be seen to have acted honourably.
To my astonishment, he began to show signs of megalomania. The resounding cheers that had greeted his Hokkien speeches at election rallies had gone to his head. Becoming mayor added to his delusion of power.
The English-educated were terrified, but Ong’s antics delighted the Chinese-speaking. All their lives they had felt excluded from power; now they had a Hokkien speaking their own language and giving vent to their frustrations. He was like a man possessed, intoxicated with power and mass adulation. He wanted to create newspaper headline every day. He went on raising expectations with dramatic gestures, as if there were no tomorrow when the bills would have to be paid.
I believe the experience taught me more than it taught them. Their mental terms of reference were Chinese history, Chinese parables and proverbs, the legendary success of the Chinese communist revolution as against their own frustrating life in Singapore. None of this helped them to understand what I was propounding to them — a parliamentary, democratic, socialist, non-communist society in a multiracial Singapore and Malaya established through peaceful, non-violent and constitutional means. Their whole background led them to believe that a communist society should be brought about both by open persuasion and by clandestine subversion and revolutionary force. I later discovered to my dismay that there were quite a few converted hardcore communists even in the group I had picked. There was no way to filter them out. They were like radioactive dust.
These were not men to be trifled with. So many were with them because people expected them to win and therefore climbed on the bandwagon. Since “history was on their side”, why by so stupid as to fight them? Yet here I was, with my few English-educated friends, ignorant enough to have the temerity to take on a movement that had established its credentials with successful revolutions in Russia and China.
It reminded me that all empires wax and wane, that the British Empire was on the wane, like the Roman Empire before it.
After my experience with communist rallies I instinctively looked for the cheerleaders. I found them above me, choirboys on circular balconies up the pillars. The Roman Catholic Church had used such methods of mass mobilization long before the communists. The Church must have got many things right to have survived for nearly two thousand years. I remembered reading about a new Pope being elected by some one hundred cardinals who themselves had been appointed by earlier pope. That recollection was to serve the PAP well.
The amended constitution established two classes of party membership: ordinary members, who could join either directly through PAP headquarters or through the branches, and cadre members, a selected few hundred who could be approved by the central executive committee. Only cadres who had been chosen by the CEC could in turn vote for candidates to the CEC, just as only cardinals nominated by a Pope could elect another Pope. This closed circuit, and since the CEC controlled the core of the party, the party could not now be captured.
He was not playing tiddlywinks. He was playing the Chinese game of wei qi (the Japanese call it go) in which two players place seeds on a square board until one of them has surrounded the seeds of the other, a chess game of encirclement. For the time being I was the better placed, but he was patiently trying to encircle me with his superior ground forces. If I did not want to lose, I had to take up strong positions that would give me the advantage in defense, even though he had greater numbers with which to launch his attacks. But if he made a false move through overconfidence, the tables would be turned, and I would have a chance to encircle him.
If locally owned newspapers criticize us we know that their criticism, however wrong or right, is bona fide criticism, because they must stay and take the consequences of any foolish policies or causes they may have advocated. Not so the birds of passage who run the Straits Times. They have to run to the Federation, from whose safety they boldly proclaim they will die for the freedom of Singapore.
Any newspaper that tries to sour up or strain relations between the Federation of Malaya and Singapore after May 30 will go in for subversion. Any editor, leader writer, subeditor or reporter who goes along this line will be taken in under the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance. We will put him in and keep him in.
In a multiracial society, we had one inescapable problem. Some of our candidates might be natural open-air orators, but no one could make a speech at an election rally and move the whole audience to laugh, or sigh, or cry or be angry together. Whatever language he used and however good he was, only one section of the crowd could understand him at any one time, so he had to reach the others through gestures, facial expressions and his tone of voice.
I knew from experience that enthusiasm was not enough. To give of their best, the ministers had to have air-conditioned offices. That may sound odd, but without air-conditioning, efficient work in tropical Singapore would not have been feasible. The heat, humidity and noise were hellish, especially in the afternoons. My energy was sapped, the clerks would work at only half the normal pace, typists would make mistakes, and lawyers more errors in correcting them, as well as dictation.
One problem I had anticipated was getting used to power. I had seen what happened with Ong Eng Guan in the City Council, how the underdogs had misused it when he became the top dog. I warned my ministers, parliamentary secretaries and assemblymen who were assigned to help ministers deal with public complaints not to get drunk on power and not to abuse it. It was easier said than done, and on many occasions we still antagonised civil servants.
We were determined to strike while the iron was hot and exploit our post-election popularity. We mounted a series of well-publicized campaigns to clean the streets of the city, clear the beaches of debris and cut the weeds on unkempt vacant land. It was a copycat exercise borrowed from the communists — ostentatious mobilization of everyone including ministers to toil with their hands and soil their clothes in order to serve the people.
On the other hand, we shared the view of the communists that one reason for the backwardness of China and the rest of Asia, except Japan, was that women had not been emancipated.
I was uneasy about taking power at the age of 35. I had no experience of administration — not even of my law office, which I left to Choo and Dennis. I decided to acquaint myself with the structure of the government and obtain an overview of the ministries. I wanted to get the feel of the senior staff, the nature of their work, their attitudes and work style, so that I would know how much had to be changed if we were to solve our political, economic and social problems. I also wanted to assess the resources of each ministry and redeploy them so as to strengthen the most important.
Linsell had spent most of his career as a uniformed police officer and was more at home with riot control than intelligence-gathering. He did not strike me as having that subtlety of mind necessary to understand communist tactics and strategy. I therefore decided to see him together with his senior staff for regular weekly meetings so that I would hear directly from the officers who were experts in security without Linsell filtering out important nuances.
The MCP are unlikely for some time to challenge a government which undoubtedly commands the enthusiastic support of the Chinese-speaking mass of the population. Mr Lee Kuan Yew himself estimates this period of grace as being probably a year or more.
They have made mistakes, as was to be expected, and with the exception of the PM I doubt they are as able as they first appeared to be. They are finding it much more difficult to run a government than to organize a successful political party.
Things were so bad that when a local manufacturer planned to expand his cotton-spinning textile mill to include weaving and finishing, it was big news because it would increase the labour force by 300. We were desperate for jobs.
To the Chinese-educated like Fong, revolution required violence. Without violence, it was, in Marxist dialectics, “mere reformism.”
After the first two street meetings in Hong Lim, however, we knew that the ground was cold. Ong’s personal popularity had not been dented. He had done the people too many favours by giving whole streets away to hawkers. He had put up standpipes and street lamps and talked about distributing taxi licences freely. The people were willling to overlook his lies and many other failings. They were resentful because he had not given immigration permits to their relatives in China, which he now raised as an issue, although he had never done this when he was a minister.
To learn a new language in my late 30s, while snowed under by papers stamped Immediate, Urgent, Secret, Top Secret, and by files with huge red crosses printed on their covers and marked Cicero (for addressee’s eyes only), required almost superhuman concentration and effort. I could not have done it without some compelling motivation. Even while I was being driven to meetings, I mumbled to myself in the car, rehearsing new phrases. Every spare moment, I spent revising to get the sounds right, memorizing new words to get them embedded in my mind so that I could roll them off my tongue without looking at the script. I had to learn quickly.
That same evening, I spoke in my own constituency. It was familiar ground, a neighbourhood friendly to me, and I felt reasonably safe. But there were other public meetings in less friendly neighbourhoods. I did feel twinges of discomfort, but accepted it as part of political life in the terrorist-plagued conditions of Malaya and Singapore of those days.
I was inclined to believe that the communists wanted to inject some fear into me and see how I reacted. I calculated that in fact it would be against their interests to assassinate me when my standing with the public was high.
Broadset for a Chinese, he had physical energy and a loud voice that was overconfident and a little boastful. Keng Swee, who had frequently played chess with him, found him bold to the point of recklessness. He was always initiating some spectacular manoeuvre to break his opponent and crash through, forgetting that an experienced adversary would never be tempted to take risks when he could make a steady, relentless advance against an adventurer. This time he was embarked on his biggest gamble — prime minister or nothing.
But I was convinced they had been tricked. Selkirk was no inexperienced politician. He knew the meaning of protocol. For the senior representative of Her Majesty’s Government in Singapore to receive Lim and Fong personally during a crisis in which the future of the government was at stake was to signal something significant.
The Plen evidently thought we would be fearful of the strength of the pro-communists, which was true. He thought that we were soft, bourgeois, English-educated, pleasure-loving middle-class types, beer-swilling, golf-playing, working and sleeping in air-conditioned rooms and travelling in air-conditioned cars. He did not see that there was enough steel inside this bourgeois English-educated group to withstand the heat he could put on us.
Freed from the minutiae of administration, I had time to take the pulse of the community, to reflect and work out a plan of action of the next phase. I had learnt that when confronted with furious attacks, it was best to ward off the blows, stay calm and rethink the fundamentals.
And the winner would take all. The Chinese-speaking in Singapore, like the Chinese-speaking everywhere in Southeast Asia, traditionally preferred to sit on the fence until they saw clearly which way the wind was blowing.
To think all this out, I needed peace and quiet, which I could not get in Singapore. The Camerons were cool, quiet and remote, a blissful respite from the political hothouse of Singapore. At that time there were no fax machines, not even direct dialing, and as the line was not clear, I had left instructions that I should not be disturbed unless it was extremely urgent. So I was left in peace for nearly a fortnight, playing many rounds of golf on the pleasant nine-hole course. By the time I left I had completed eight speeches but hat to write the last four in Singapore in between recording the earlier ones.
It is a strange business working in this world. When you meet a union leader you will quickly have to decide which side he is on and whether or not he is a communist. You can find out by the language he uses and his behaviour whether or not he is in the inner circle which makes the decisions.
There was as yet no television in Singapore, and these radio broadcasts reached a wide audience. By the end of the series, I had convinced most people that I had told the truth about the past — the infighting, the betrayals, the Plen — and that I was realistic about the future. I had held their interest. I had told a story that was part of their own recent experience — of riots, strikes, boycotts, all of them fresh reference points in their minds — and I had given them the explanation for mysteries that had puzzled them.
The broadcasts were a real eye-opener to a schoolboy in his Senior Cambridge year, anxious for a job after his exams to relieve his poor parents. The radio talks laid out the future in stark, real-life terms. I was struck by their candour, the power of the simple, vivid language, most of all, by the inside story of the struggle within the united front against the British colonialists.
The saw that the move towards Malaysia was gathering speed and appeared unstoppable, so they tried to delay proceedings by filibustering, Dr Lee Siew Choh speaking for seven an a half hours over two days. After the first half hour, he spoke gibberish. He had a team of hack writers in the opposition Members’ room churning out reams of repetitious drivel that Barisan assemblymen brought to him in the chamber. Often he could not even read what had been written for him.
I learnt later from his old friend from pre-war student days in Cambridge, Dr Chua Sin Kah, that he liked me to stay at the Residency because he wanted to know the kind of person I was, my personal habits and characters. And he had reached the conclusion that I was “not a bad fellow”. I sang in my bath and he approved of my songs. He decided I was not a dangerous communist.
To negotiate with the Tunku required a special temperament. He did not like to sit down and join issue face-to-face after having read his files. He preferred to leave all tedious details to his deputy, Razak — a capable, hardworking and meticulous man — and to confine himself to making the big decisions and settling the direction of events. Every time we ran into a roadblock with Malaysian officials over some matter and could not get the relevant minister or Razak to overrule them, I had to go to the Tunku. This meant getting a word in between long sessions of desultory talk about the world, social gossip and lunches for which he often personally cooked the roast mutton or roasted beef. After lunch, he would invariably take a nap. At about 4:30 we would play nine holes of golf, and in between shots or before dinner, when he was in the right mood, I would put the question to him. In this way, one item might involve four days of eating, drinking, golfing, and going with him to dinner parties or weddings.
He possessed an equable temperament, and almost always appeared serene and tranquil; but he could become quite agitated when he sensed danger. He told me that he would never allow anyone to hustle him into a decision, because when he was not calm and relaxed he could make bad mistakes. If he were pressed, he would postpone making up his mind. But I soon learnt that once he had done son, he never looked back.
He was a nice man. But he was a prince who understood power and knew how to use it. He did not carry a big stick, but he had many hatchet-bearers who would do the job for him while he looked the other way and appeared as benign as ever. If he distrusted a man, that man was finished with him. But if he trusted you and you did not let him down, he would — in the royal tradition — always find some way of helping a loyal follower.
The Barisan’s potential for stirring up trouble had not decreased. I was therefore eager to get things moving, and through my impatience and my very different temperament made the Tunku angry with me. I had not been sensitive enough to realize that once he decided to take Singapore into the Federation, his attitude towards me would undergo a subtle change. He was a prince of the royal house of Kedah. Hierarchy was part of his nature. As long as Singapore was outside his domain, he treated me as the leader of a friendly neighbouring country, a lesser leader to whom he was willing to be courteous. But now, I was going to be part of his Federation, and he was accustomed to having courtiers and retainers around him, followers who were faithful and humble.
When Maudling asked about my difficulties with the Tunku, I said “The Tunku thinks I am clever but wrong and he, though not clever, is right. I win the argument, which embarrasses him, but he feels that my conclusion is wrong though he does not know why.”
Keng Swee and I were exhausted after flying eastwards into the sun all the way from Singapore via New York, but there was no time to rest. After a quick wash at the Hyde Park Hotel, where we were staying, we went down to the dining room in time to have lunch with Selkirk. He briefed us on the progress of the talks with the Tunku on the Borneo territories, and by 3pm we were seeing Duncan Sandys at the Commonwealth Relations Office. However tired we were, we had to carry on.
They had totally different personalities. Razak was always filled with doubts and hesitations, always having second thoughts. He would agree on some item after long debate and discussions, only to ring me up the next day or the day after to revise his decision. He fretted and worried over details, and was a good deputy for the Tunku, who never bothered about them. He was a hard worker, and had finished his Bar examinations, both intermediate and the finals, in a record time of 18 months. He spent time building a network of friends and supporters among the Malay students in England, including the sons of the nine Malay sultans. But although he himself came from a family of traditional chieftains, he did not have the Tunku’s naturally gracious ways, and dealing with him was always more of a strain.
The Tunku was altogether a most agreeable dinner companion, full of little stories, often told at his own expense in a most charming manner. His object in life was happiness, and the yardstick by which he measured any situation was whether it made him happy or unhappy. When everything was going fine, he would proudly say, “I am the happiest prime minister in the world.” He would add that his aim for Malaya was not wealth, greatest or grandeur, but happiness in a land without hatreds or troubles, and when seeking to reassure the Borneo peoples of their position in the Federation, he told the press that the aim would now be extended to the whole of Malaysia. But it did not go down well with the people of Borneo and Singapore, who were not used to measuring their well-being in that way.
He had no pretensions about his own abilities and no inhibitions in describing the capabilities of his fellow Malays. He was disarmingly frank in his self-deprecation, confessing that his Malay father, the sultan, was a weak man and that his strength came from his Thai mother. The Malays, he said, were not very clever or demanding, and therefore easy to please. All he needed was to give them a little bit more and they were quite happy. These views were similar to those expressed by Dr Mahathir, “Whatever the Malays could do the Chinese could do better and more cheaply”, and “they resulted from two entirely different sets of hereditary and environmental influences.” Years later, in 1997, when he was Malaysian PM, Dr Mahathir said he had reversed his stand and no longer believed what he wrote in The Malay Dilemma.
He had a simple philosophy: the role of the Malays was to control the machinery of the state, to give out the licences and collect the revenue, and most important of all, to ensure that they were not displaced. Unlike the Chinese and Indians who had China and India to return to, they had nowhere else to go. In his soft-spoken, gracious way, he was absolutely open about his determination to maintain the ascendancy of the Malays and ensure that they and their sultans would remain the overlords of the country.
Razak would giggle uneasily whenever the Tunku trotted out his oft-repeated and candid views of his Malays. It made Razak uncomfortable. He thought these views underrated his ability and would not be acceptable to the younger generation — after all, he himself had finished his Bar exams in half the time many Chinese students took to do. The Tunku might have taken umpteen years to complete his finals, but that was because — as he himself so often said — he had spent much of his time in England on slow horses and fast women.
I had dealt amicably enough with Sandys, Maudling and Lennox-Boyd (with whom I got on best), but they were Tories and represented monied interests; they never sympathized with the colonial students who aggressively sought independence. The Labour Party shared our aspirations. They had a similar basic philosophy of support for the underdog and moral principles of equality between men of all nations and races, underpinned by a belief in socialist brotherhood. I had not been in office long enough to understand that when Labour got back into power, their responsibilities would be to the British people and not to the brotherhood of men, that although it might hurt their conscience to abdicate or downgrade their principles, they would nevertheless do so.
He spoke with passion, conviction and authority. He brushed aside Macmillan’s assurances of continuing close ties with the Commonwealth countries after Britain had joined the common market. “I run a federation. I know how federation work,” he said. They were either centripetal, in which case the states came closer and closer together as in Australia, or they were centrifugal, with the states moving further and further apart until they eventually broke away. They were never static. There was no other dynamic at work in such groupings. If Britain joined the EEC, the ties with the Commonwealth would weaken and atrophy.
Looking back over the past 30 years to see how both the old and new Commonwealth have drifted away from Britain as her interests have become more and more enmeshed with Europe’s, I have often been reminded how prophetic Menzies was. He knew where Australia’s interests lay, and he did not doubt that they were being sacrificed after Australians had shed blood in two world wars for Britain.
On the Monday, an urbane Macmillan gave a polished performance. He was filled with sadness that Britain had to take this path, but the course of history had changed. Wealth was created best in large continents, like America and Europe, where good communications facilitated trade and other exchanges. An overseas empire like the one Britain had built was no longer the way to wealth. For a person of his age and generation, who had been born and bred in it, it would have been so much easier to have carried on with the old ties. But the future had to be faced, and it was his task, however unpleasant, to link Britain to this engine of growth and progress on the continent of Europe. It was a masterly performance, noncombative, even melancholic, with hints of nostalgia for the old Commonwealth. It soothed all the leaders present but left them in little doubt that the PM of Britain had a duty to do, and that duty meant responding to a beckoning Europe.
My stand was like that of Prince Sihanouk and President Nasser. We would defend our territorial integrity, our ideas and our way of life. We would be neutral in any conflict between big power blocs. But we were not neutral where our interests were concerned. It was only through intelligent appraisal and understanding of what was happening and why it was happening that we could chart our way forward. For instance, we could see that no single nation, not even one as powerful as Britain, could pretend that a big combination in Europe would not affect it. It would therefore have been utterly ludicrous for Singapore with 1.8M people to have tried to go it alone.
It had been exhausting trip, but an invaluable part of my political education. I had learnt at first hand about the Arabs and the Africans, and understood what obstacles the new African countries must overcome to educate their tribal peoples and develop their often one-commodity economies.
Throughout my tour, I was helped by the professionalism of the British embassies. Their diplomats were well-informed, well adapted to their host governments, prominent or unobtrusive as the situation required. At each stop, I was given a short brief of the situation in the country, thumbnail sketches of the ministers I was likely to meet, and a description of the power structure. Their briefs were invariably good. The quality of British diplomats was high. Whether they brought Britain economic benefits was another matter.
I had received an unforgettable lesson in decolonisation, on how crucial it was to have social cohesion and capable, effective government to take power from the colonial authority, especially in Africa. When the leader did not preserve the unity of the country by sharing power with the chiefs of the minority tribes, but excluded them, the system soon broke down. Worse, when misguided policies based on half-digested theories of socialism and redistribution of wealth were compounded by less than competent government, societies formerly held together by colonial power splintered, with appalling consequences.
With the Tunku behind him, Tan retaliated in strong terms. The PAP was capable of stabbing one in the back; principle and honour counted for little with its leaders, and Lee himself was like a chameleon whose idea of democracy itself was in doubt, judging by the lack of democracy in the PAP.
I toured the badly affected areas to show that the Singapore government was present, and tried to give people the impression that we could still get things done and restore peace although we were no longer in charge of the police and army. Deep inside, I felt frustrated for I had lost control of the instruments of law and order and could not deal with these blatant racists. Methodically and meticulously, however, we assembled all the data available to expose beyond any doubt their systematic exploitation of the media to work up communal feelings through lies and malicious distortions.
It was terribly disheartening, a negation of everything we had believed in and worked for — gradual integration and the blurring of the racial divide. It was impossible to dispel or overcome the deep-seated distrust evoked once irrational killing had been prompted simply by the mere appearance, whether Malay or Chinese, of the victim. At one rural community centre I visited, a terrified Malay woman of 35 clutched my arm as she recounted how several Chinese men had wanted to rape her, while a Chinese man outside the local police station came up to complain that he had been abused by Malay policemen and ordered to masturbate because some Chinese men had raped a Malay woman in the vicinity. People did foolish things to each other when the enemy was identified only by race, as if it were a uniform.
Again, this is a matter of political judgment — getting the feel of the situation — which I had not.
Should I rush back to deal with the situation? I decided against it. Dashing back would not make the slightest difference to how events unfolded. Once a riot had started, there was a certain dynamic and momentum to it and one needed strong police action to suppress it. So I stayed on in Brussels.
For example, the Straits Times was printing views that its editors knew to be unacceptable to the Singapore government, and this could only mean that they had the full backing of the Tunku. It was a declaration of war on their part, and I would retaliate at an appropriate moment.
They might find LKY extremely awkward as a colleague; most people do; but they would find him far more dangerous as an opponent.
“We take the side of the people who are struggling,” and in a live broadcast from Jakarta a few days later, he called on Indonesians to support the rebellion. Those who did not do so were traitors to their souls, he said. The Indonesian people were born in fire and had suffered for the independence. It was right for them to sympathize with those fighting for freedom. They were not like other nations (meaning Malaya) that had obtained their independence as a gift from the imperialists.
Finally, Sandys had us sit around a table for a marathon meeting that went on throughout the night. It was his method of dealing with stubborn parties, wringing concessions from both sides until they finally reached agreement. He had done this before to the Singapore delegation, providing strong drinks but little food to wear us down. It was not unlike what the communists did to us at committee meetings, which they would drag out until enough of the communists had gone home before the vote was taken.
Since the Tunku’s memory was elastic, I scribbled these points on the back of a used envelope I found on a side table in his hotel sitting-room, and got him to sign it.
The British were really on my side. They had many cards. I had none. I could not do much myself except to threaten to throw in my hand and let the communists take over.
I had to mobilize support for the next election, which I decided could not be delayed beyond merger. The communists had broken up our party branches they split away from us, and smashed the People’s Association and the Works Brigade. To rebuild a strong PAP organization would take at least two years, so Keng Swee and I decided on a simple strategy that we thought could make for a quick revival of our grassroots support.
The tours were physically exhausting and a drain on my nervous energy. I would start off at eight on a Sunday morning or shortly after lunch on a weekday. The afternoons were always hot, and during one tour I would make short speeches of 10 to 15 minutes at every stop, which could add up to between 30 minutes and an hour because I had to speak in two or three languages. Sometimes I made as many as teen speeches in a day. I would sweat profusely. I brought three or four singlets and shirts with me and would nip quietly into somebody’s toilet or behind the partition inside a shop from time to time to change into dry clothes, and I carried a small towel to wipe the sweat off my face. I would come hom with my right hand bruised and painful from hundreds if not thousands of handshakes, and every now and again a real power squeeze. My back, too, was bruised and blue from bumping against the metal crossbar of the Land Rover. I learnt to offer my left hand to relieve my right, and also to push my thumb and forefinger right up against the other person’s to prevent my fingers from being squeezed, and I had a thick pad of towels wound around the crossbar to act as a shock absorber.
One memorable gift was an exquisite old ivory carving of an imperial Chinese sailing ship resting on a dark lacquered base under a glass case. It was the owner’s most precious objet d’art. He was a shopkeeper, about 50 years old, greying at the temples, and he wished me happiness and long life at Hokkien. It stills sit proudly in my sitting-room, a gift I treasure, reminding me of that great moment when I could feel the people warming to me and accepting me as their leader. The faith that these small shopkeepers placed in me inspired me to fight on.
His main advice: “Be natural, be direct, be yourself.” I was reassured. Television was introduced in Singapore in February 1963 and proved a powerful weapon, particularly when turned against the communists. Their techniques were those of the mass rally, where the speaker bellowed, grimaced and exaggerated his gestures in order to be seen by those at the back of the crowd. Captured on the screen with a zoom lens, the speakers looked ugly and menacing. They did not have Hugh Burnett to advise them and did themselves a great deal of harm.
The Tunku was relieved. But Sukarno must have sensed that the Tunku was afraid of him. I myself noted the fear in the Tunku’s body language and in his voice when he described the encounter.
The Tunku was never comfortable with his Indonesian neighbours. Sukarno was an orator, the Tunku was not. Sukarno was a dominating personality, the Tunku was quiet and charming. Sukarno represented 100M Indonesians, the Tunku only 4M Malays and fewer than 4M Chinese, Indians, and others. The Malays generally acknowledge Javanese culture to be superior. But I had never seen the Tunku so fearful. Sukarno must have sensed this and was exploiting his fears to the maximum. It did not augur well.
I added that one of the sad things about Malaya was its naive approach in believing that power was handed over on a silver platter with red ribbons by British royalty in uniform. This was insubordinate language, which the Tunku did not approve of, but it was most necessary for me as a Singapore leader not to allow myself to be seen as someone who would only do what pleased the Tunku. He replied by saying that I had hurt the feelings of the people of Malaya.
We have always said in Singapore that LKY is the only man who can run this city and that the Malaysian government would either have to do business with him or put him in jail. The latter is now unthinkable and we must hope that enough moderation will be shown on both sides to make a working partnership possible.
But my most important backroom player was Keng Swee, with his clear mind and sharp pen. He helped me refine the tactics that defeated the communists. For every clever move they make, we worked out a counter-move. Throughout this fight and for the next 21 years until he retired as DPM in 1984, he was my alter ego, always the sceptic, always turning a proposition on its head to reveal its flaws and help me reshape it. He was my resident intellectual par excellence and a doughty fighter.
Addressing the congress, I stressed that democratic socialists in Asia could meet the challenge posed by the organizational and propaganda techniques of the communists only if they could achieve two conditions: first, reasonable living standards, and second, effective administration. Otherwise they would not survive in newly independent countries.
Soon we had a youth orchestra. I believed music was a necessary part of nation-building. It uplifted the spirits of a people.
I complimented Britain for having the wisdom to know when it faced an irresistible revolution mounted by communists and by nationalists. Instead of trying to stamp out both, Britain had allowed the nationalists to provide the non-communist leadership. On the other hand, when trying to stamp out communism in South Vietnam, the US had relied on people like Ngo Dinh Diem, and in 11 years had failed to find a group who could lead the nation. So South Vietnam was going through its death throes and the Americans were in an unenviable position.
I drew a distinction between political equality and the special rights for the economic and social uplift of the Malays. I accepted the special rights, but if the other peoples of Malaysia were denied political equality with the Malays, we would not need Sukarno and Confrontation to crush us.
“He (LKY) would think himself as legitimate as I was to be the leader of Malaya because he speaks Malay better than I do.” I did not speak Malay better than the Tunku. Even if I did, I was still not a Malay and could not be the leader of Malaysia. But when he heard me that day in parliament, he realized that I was getting my message through to his own backbenchers. That was unacceptable.
But from his body language, I knew the Tunku had made up his mind. He said, “No. I am past that. There is no other way now. I have made up my mind; you go your way, we go our own way. So long as you are in any way connected with us, we will find it difficult to be friends because we are involved in our affairs and you will be involved in ours. Tomorrow, when you are no longer in Malaysia and we are no longer quarrelling either in parliament or in the constituencies, we’ll be friends again, and we’ll need each other, and we’ll cooperate.
Finally, all I had to do was to sleep. This was difficult because I was fretting; had I overlooked any important item that needed to be buttoned up? I did not look forward to facing our supporters in Malaysia who would feel we had let them down; we had aroused many people’s hopes, and they would think that we had made use of them to get Singapore out of a nasty mess. And I was not proud of repaying with this separation the staunch support given me by Harold Wilson and his ministers. Most of all, I hoped that nothing would go awry before 10 o’clock the next day.
The Tunku said no, he was determined never again to try and treat with LKY, who he did not trust a yard and about whom he was completely disillusioned. I said how was all this going to end, to which the Tunku replied, “I know my duty and I shall not hesitate to do it.”