Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “Then in Junior Cambridge, there was a scholarship going – awarded on standard seven results, about two or three hundred dollars a year for the first student and the second student. … So I put in an effort and I got the scholarship and I bought myself a Meister bicycle – German bicycle, sold by a shop in Victoria Street … So that was my first purchase in life. I earned it. I bought it.

  “Then the next year, based on Junior Cambridge results, I came first, so I got another big scholarship, the Tan Jiak Kim scholarship. This time, $350, vast sum at that time, and I bought myself a Raleigh bicycle. I upgraded from a Meister to a Raleigh. By that time, I was hoping to go up to the special class and sit for the Queen’s scholarship. Because I came top in the School Certificate … the John Anderson scholarship was open that year, tenable in Raffles College, so I got this scholarship to Raffles College. It was the best-going scholarship then, roughly $900 a year, which paid for all my fees and my stay at the hostel too and left me with a bit extra.”

  The Depression took its toll and both Lee’s grandfathers’ wealth declined considerably. Lee’s father worked first as a storekeeper at Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant, and was later put in charge of various depots in Johor Bahru, Stulang and Batu Pahat. But it was his mother Jim Neo to whom Lee attributes much of the family’s success in overcoming the financial difficulties. By then the family had a house in Telok Kurau. For Lee and his three brothers and a sister, these were carefree days. But even though, by his own admission, he did not work very hard in school, he was always there at the top of the class.

  The pace quickened somewhat after he enrolled at Raffles Institution; Lee emerged top Malayan boy in the Senior Cambridge examinations. His decision to become a lawyer, which would have a profound effect on his political activities later, came about from purely pragmatic considerations.

  “My father and mother had friends from their wealthier days who after the slump were still wealthy because they had professions, either doctors or lawyers. The doctors were people like Dr Loh Poon Lip, the father of Robert Loh. The lawyer was Richard Lim Chuan Ho, who was the father of Arthur Lim, the eye surgeon. And then there was a chap called Philip Hoalim Senior. They did not become poor because they had professions. My father didn’t have a profession, so he became poor and he became a storekeeper. Their message, or their moral for me, was, I’d better take a profession or I’d run the risk of a very precarious life.

  “There were three choices for a profession – medicine, law, engineering. We had a medical school; we had no law school or engineering. I didn’t like medicine. Engineering, if you take, you’ve got to work for a company. Law, you can be on your own, you’re self-employed. So I decided, all right, in that case, I would be a lawyer.”

  Raw power

  Those plans were shattered when Japanese forces landed at Kota Bharu on the northeast coast of Malaya in the early hours of December 8, 1941. But the political education which followed would leave a lasting impression and change Lee’s life forever.

  “They [the Japanese] were the masters. They swaggered around with big swords, they occupied all the big offices and the houses and the big cars and they gave the orders. So that determines who is the authority. Then because they had the authority, they printed the money, they controlled the wealth of the country, the banks, they made the Chinese pay a $50 million tribute. You need a job, you need a permit, you need to import and distribute rice – they controlled everything.

  “So people adjusted and they bowed, they ingratiated themselves, they had to live. Quietly, they cursed away behind the backs of the Japanese. But in the face of the Japanese, you submit, you appear docile, you’re obedient and you try to be ingratiating. I understood how power operated on people.

  I thought the Kempeitai was on to me

  Cathay Building, which used to house the British Malaya Broadcasting Corporation before the Japanese converted it during the war into their propaganda headquarters, where Lee worked during the Japanese Occupation.

  “I was well informed about the progress of the war because for a year and a half, from … I think from the beginning, either the end of 1943 to the beginning of 1945 or late ’44, I was working in the propaganda department at Cathay Building, on the top floor.

  “I was a cable editor in English. What the job was – it was just like a crossword puzzle. They had radio reception, Morse code, so they hired; for one session, there would be about eight or ten radio operators. And they intercepted allied news agencies – Reuters, UP, AP, Tass, Central News Agency. But except for the very middle of the night, one, two, three o’clock in the morning, reception was always bad, interference, so missing words and it was like filling up a crossword puzzle, so I filled it up. And then from my floor, 12th floor, it will go down to the 11th floor where they cooked it, they turned the news around for propaganda. So I knew, I read, I can check the date, because I had endless reports from Tass and Reuters and AP on the battle of Stalingrad, I think Stalingrad was ’43. Then D-Day in Europe, June ’44.

  “And at the same time, the British were mounting an offensive in Burma, Arakan Coast, and they were going into Mandalay. So I told my family, I said, ‘Better get out of Singapore! Those Japanese are going to fight every inch of the way and they will come down to the Peninsula and this will be a final sort of showdown. We’ll all be dead.’ So I resigned from the Hodobu. I had done a recce and looked at a possible farm, a piece of land to hire and grow vegetables and tapioca, sweet potatoes in Cameron Highlands.

  “But when I resigned, the liftboy at the Cathay Building told me, ‘Your file has been taken out.’ You see, everybody who works at Hodobu is security checked. And they’ve got a Kempeitai office there. Because you are leaking news, you see. So when they took out my file, this liftboy – I didn’t know how he knew it but he was friendly to me – he said, ‘Your file has been taken. Please be careful.’ I felt a cold chill. I think I made the right decision not to go. I told my mother and father, ‘Cannot go. I’ll be in trouble. They will think that I’m running away, I’ve got something to hide. Better stay here.’

  “So I was followed around for about three months, everywhere I went. They found nothing wrong so they left me alone. I knew that they had no chance. By the time I resigned, I already knew that they had lost and that they were going to get it in the neck and we would also die with them.”

  “As time went on, food became short and medicine became short. Whisky, brandy, all the luxuries which could be kept in either bottles or tins – cigarettes, 555s in tins – became valuables. The people who traded with the Japanese, who pandered to their wishes, provided them with supplies, clothes, uniforms, whatever, bought these things and gave them to the officers. And some ran gambling farms in the New World and Great World. And millions of Japanese dollars were won and lost each night. They collected the money, shared it with, I suppose, whoever were in charge: the Japanese Kempeitai and the government or generals or whatever. Then they bought properties. In that way they became very wealthy at the end of the war because the property transactions were recognised. But the notes were not.

  “Because people had to live, you’ve got to submit. I started off hating them and not wanting to learn Japanese. I spent my time learning Chinese to read their notices. After six months, I learnt how to read Chinese, but I couldn’t read Japanese. I couldn’t read the Katakana and the Hiragana. Finally, I registered at a Japanese school in Queen Street. Three months passed. I got a job with my grandfather’s old friend … a textile importer and exporter called Shimoda. He came, opened his office … Before that, it was in Middle Road. Now it’s a big office in Raffles Place. I worked there as a clerk, copy typist, copied the Japanese Kanji and so on, it’s clerical work.

  “But you saw how people had to live, they had to get rice, food, they had to feed their children, therefore they had to submit. So it was my first lesson on power and government and system and how human beings reacted.

  “Some were heroic, maybe misguided. They listened to th
e radio, against the Japanese, they spread news, got captured by the Kempeitai, tortured. Some were just collaborators, did everything the Japanese wanted. And it was an education on human beings, human nature and human systems of government.”

  Lee met his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, at Raffles College. He is in the last row, sixth from the right, while his wife-to-be sits in the front row, third from the left.

  Thanks to a sympathetic censor of Fitzwilliam House, W.S. Thatcher (middle), Lee got himself out of the London School of Economics and moved to Cambridge University. Kwa Geok Choo is on the right.

  Student life at Cambridge became more pleasant and orderly as Lee settled in, going from lecture halls to the hostel to the dining hall on his bicycle. “Suddenly, life became more in proportion,” he recalled later, of his move to Cambridge.

  The scales fell

  When the war ended Lee had to decide between returning to Raffles College to work for the scholarship which would fund his law studies in England or going there on his own steam. Britain, land of his colonial masters and the epicentre of the vast if fast declining Empire, might have elicited from a subservient subject of a distant outpost, 11,000 kilometres away, the reverence it once undoubtedly deserved. But war-torn England of 1946 was a different proposition altogether. For Lee, the first few months were disorienting, hectic and miserable. Arriving in October, he was already late for college admission. But being first boy in the Senior Cambridge examinations for all Malaya helped. The dean of the law faculty at the London School of Economics was suitably impressed and Lee found himself thrown into the rough and tumble of undergraduate life in the imperial capital, an experience he found thoroughly unpleasant. With the help of some friends in Cambridge and a sympathetic censor of Fitzwilliam House, he got himself admitted and moved to the university town.

  Lee went on to distinguish himself in Cambridge, obtaining a rare double first. But though his top priority was his studies, something else much more intense was stirring in him. It was in England that he began to seriously question the continued right of the British to govern Singapore. The Japanese Occupation had demonstrated in a way nothing else could have done that the English were not a superior people with a God-given right to govern. What he saw of them during those four years in England convinced him even more of this. They were in it for their own benefit, and he read all about this in their own newspapers.

  “Why should they run this place for your benefit? And when it comes tumbling down, I’m the chap who suffers. That, I think, was the start of it all. At that time, it was also the year following my stay in England and insurgency had started (in Malaya) and I had also seen the communist Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) marching on the streets.

  “I would say Japanese Occupation, one year here seeing MPAJA and seeing the British trying to re-establish their administration, not very adept … I mean the old mechanisms had gone and the old habits of obedience and respect had also gone because people had seen them run away. They packed up. Women and children, those who could get away. We were supposed, the local population was supposed to panic when the bombs fell, but we found they panicked more than we did. So it was no longer the old relationship.

  “I saw Britain and I saw the British people as they were. And whilst I met nothing but consideration and a certain benevolence from people at the top, at the bottom, when I had to deal with landladies and the shopkeepers and so on, it was pretty rough. They treated you as colonials and I resented that. Here in Singapore, you didn’t come across the white man so much. He was in a superior position. But there you are in a superior position meeting white men and white women in an inferior position, socially, I mean. They have to serve you and so on in the shops. And I saw no reason why they should be governing me; they’re not superior. I decided, when I got back, I was going to put an end to this.”

  Lee the Chinaman campaigns for Labour in Devon

  “If I were an Englishman, I would not have to explain my presence on this platform for it is the right and indeed the duty of every Englishman to take sides in a general election. You may well wonder what a Chinaman should be doing here. You have important domestic issues to discuss that should not concern any foreigner. Let me say at once that I am not a foreigner. I am a British subject from British Malaya. And I am here because your vote on February 23 will affect me and 7 million other Malayans some 8,000 miles away. It is your Colonial Office here which decides our fate. It may be that some of you could not care less what happens to a lot of ignorant and illiterate natives. But, unfortunately, what happens to my ignorant fellow countrymen, and what they do, is going to affect you in England.”

  So began Lee Kuan Yew in a campaign speech on behalf of his Labour Party friend, David Widdicombe, during the British general election of 1950. Lee had moved to Cornwall because he disliked living in London. When he heard that Widdicombe was contesting a seat at Totnes in Devon, he wrote to wish him luck. Back came the reply: “Come and help me.” In no time, Lee was driving Widdicombe in a lorry, making the rounds in the constituency, stopping by the gates of factories and delivering speeches from the back of the vehicle.

  This speech focused on the difference between a Tory and a Labour government regarding their policies on the colonies. Lee argued that the Conservatives were only interested in extracting the utmost out of the colonies without any regard for the welfare of the people there. He argued that, in the case of Malaya, a Tory government would drive more people into the communist camp which, if it came to power, would mean the end of Britain’s links with Malaya. That would be a severe setback for the British economy which, at that time, benefited more from Malaya in dollar terms than it did from the American Marshall Aid.

  How was Lee’s speech received by the English working class? He recalled, in an interview with the authors, “I suppose it created interest because here is a Chinaman and he speaks English and he speaks educated English and he’s able to make an intelligent coherent presentation. So it did attract some attention, caused some amusement, I uppose. I’m not sure I convinced anybody.

  “But the communist candidate came up to me at the counting station. There was a communist campaign in Totnes. And he came up with his election agent, and he said, ‘Well, you should not be talking for this Labour Party man. You should be talking for us. We are the chaps who would give you freedom.’

  “So I looked at him and I said, ‘I don’t think you will. You will never get into power. They may. They are in power, they may do it. But you will never get into power.’”

  (Text of campaign speech at Totnes on page 253)

  His own political inclinations then were naturally left-wing and sympathetic to the British Labour Party, mainly because of its position on the future of the Empire. The Conservatives, as Lee saw it, were mainly interested in retaining power and furthering British interests in their colonies. He even campaigned for a Labour Party friend, David Widdicombe, in Totnes, Devon, driving him in a lorry and making a dozen campaign speeches on his behalf.

  “One particular Union Society debate I remember, one young Tory student standing up for King and the Empire and so on – it was still King George VI, I think, before he died. And I said, ‘Oh, we’ll have trouble with this chap, we’re going to have a tough time.’ So when I went to the toilet, I was standing up against the wall. Two Africans were also standing up against the wall, peeing. And one African said to the other, he said, ‘When we get back, we’ll show them what we mean by Empire, the Imperial Raj and so on, we’ll show them.’ So I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is big trouble for the whites.’”

  Trouble for the British was also brewing in Malaya, which had its own particular set of problems because of the special position of the main Malay population vis-à-vis the Chinese. After the war ended, in 1946, the Colonial Office announced a plan to create, under the Malayan Union scheme, a unitary state consisting of the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States and the Straits Settlements excluding Singapore. The plan would confer
fairly liberal citizenship based on the principle of jus soli (by birth) and equal rights for all citizens. This broke with the past practice of preserving Malay political rights and provoked a spontaneous and widespread protest by the Malay community, which resulted in a Malay nationalist movement under the auspices of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).

  In an effort to appease the Malay ground, secret talks between the British and Malay leaders were held, which resulted in the Malayan Union scheme being revoked and replaced by the Federation of Malaya Agreement in 1948. Sovereignty of the sultans and the special position of the Malays were preserved, and citizenship criteria were tightened.

  As news of the secret talks leaked that Malay objections would prevail, a hastily convened coalition of non-Malay interests was galvanised into action, a coalition of the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU), the first political party formed in Singapore by English-educated intellectuals fighting for an independent Malaya, and the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), which had its roots in the anti-Japanese struggle. This front, calling itself the Pan-Malayan Council for Joint Action (PMCJA), produced a People’s Constitution which represented the first attempt to create a Malayan nationality beyond the traditional Malay/non-Malay divide. The effort collapsed for lack of support and interest within the Chinese community, especially from businessmen and traders who feared that agitation would jeopardise their interests. More importantly, the British refused to negotiate with an organisation so obviously anti-colonial and supported by the CPM. In 1948, the CPM gave up the constitutional struggle and took up armed insurrection against the British. The MDU was voluntarily dissolved soon after.