Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “I assumed, and I think I assumed rightly, that the Special Branch knew there was this tussle going on inside. And the reason why they allowed us to carry on instead of locking us up and saying, ‘Look, you’re infiltrated, you’re under the control of the communists and you’re a Trojan horse to the communists’ was that they, the Special Branch, thought it was worthwhile giving us a chance to fight the communists our way and see whether we cannot capture part of the communist base. It was for the Special Branch a calculated risk and for the British government too, the colonial government.

  “On the one side, you have the outright anti-communists in there – Progressive Party, C.C. Tan or David Marshall and Lim Yew Hock. But as against their anti-communism was also their inability to get any support. They could not reach out to the Chinese-educated world. We could. Not as strong as the communists, but we could … They were hoping that we would increase our strength as time went on, so they allowed us this grey area …

  “The Special Branch reported to the Governor and the Chief Secretary. And they had to make up their minds whether they thought we’re a hopeless cause and will be captured and used by the communists, or whether we would stay our ground and in the end hold our position against the communists. And as it turned out, we were able to do that.”

  Emboldened by the British overtures, the communists made plans to overrun the party. They saw an opportunity in the Anson by-election of July 1961. Two days before the poll, eight PAP members of the Legislative Assembly declared their support for pro-communist trade union leaders. The PAP, not surprisingly, lost the by-election.

  On July 20, 1961, 13 other PAP assemblymen defected to the opposition. One group of eight was led by Dr Lee Siew Choh, and another group of five was headed by Dr Sheng Nam Chin. They were not themselves communists, Lee said then, but Dr Lee thought there was no harm espousing the communist cause, while Dr Sheng felt the communists would win in the long run and he was not prepared to resist them. The 13 defectors, having decided to join hands with the pro-communist trade unions, were expelled on July 26 from the PAP. They formed a new political party, the Barisan Sosialis, which four years later, in December 1965, boycotted Parliament.

  In the meantime, however, the pro-communist trade union leaders were applying pressure on the industrial sector to cause the maximum economic disruption. By then, it was clear to Special Branch that the communists were linked up with the Indonesians, who were embarking on Confrontation with Singapore and Malaya.

  On February 3, 1963, the Internal Security Council sanctioned Operation Cold Store. All in, 113 communists, including Lim Chin Siong, were detained. A document entitled “The Communist Conspiracy” was released by Special Branch, detailing the methods employed by the communists to secure a mass base for the establishment of a “workers-peasant alliance”.

  “The Tunku and the British decided that we should move now, not wait for them to create more trouble. From our point of view, the easier thing would be to wait until merger, and then the Tunku would be in charge of security, he has to take action. We knew that he has to take action, so we could have waited until ’63.

  “But we decided, well, if we wait, the Tunku will really be angry with us, saddling him with a bigger burden. And we had also already established in the minds of the people that we were not doing this for the sake of the British, we are doing this for nationalist Malaya and we had to take action. And we did and we succeeded without losing the government. But don’t forget that in the elections, the communists still got 33 or 34 per cent of the votes, you know. That was considerable in September ’63.”

  Lee has no doubt to this day that it was necessary to use extra legal means to neutralise the communist threat, that while he was prepared to counter them with the open argument and to put the matter before the people in a referendum and through the ballot box, force had to be met by force in the end.

  Piong! And a man was killed.

  A guerilla of the Malayan Communist Party, a group “out to seize power by force,” said Lee.

  Lee had no illusions about the communists using violence to achieve their aim. He himself had a close shave once. As he told the authors:

  “They (the communists) had been working since 1923; they sent a group from Shanghai. The Comintern sent them here, I suppose, financed by the Soviet Union. Then their chance came during the war, when the British were desperate, just before the surrender. They armed this group that were in prison, communists, a few hundreds, probably about 600, and a few others outside also joined them, to fight the Japanese.

  “It was a last-minute, last-ditch effort. They were ferocious fighters because of their firm belief. They gave the Japanese a hard time, and inflicted casualties in a desperate, no-win position, and a few escaped into Malaya. And then, of course, they grew as a guerilla force. The British supplied them with arms, Force 136, Spencer Chapman and so on came in, and they grew into the communist movement with an armed wing.

  “We were innocents, we were learning about how to form a political party. These people had been working since 1923 at methods, Leninist methods, highly organised, tightly controlled, secretive, with an armed force to create a chaotic situation in which they were the one organised group that could capture power. So they were formidable, they had their acolytes and their supporters in the schools, in the old boys’ associations, in their cultural groups. You name them, they’d got them. And the success of China was, of course, a tremendous example. So do you want to be on the winning side or the losing side? That is really how they won those cadres.

  “In 1959, just after I’d won my seat, the Char Yong Huay Kuan, which is a Hakka association, gave me a tea party, at Cairnhill Road. And next door was an old boys’, some musical association. And piong! A rifle shot and this chap was killed. Police never found the killer. They had an elimination squad here, they had bombs, they had arson. Oh, this is a group organised to seize power by force, to create turmoil …

  “You know the Leninist theory of how you seize power? As society becomes unjust and unequal, there’s chaos and confusion. And you are a well-organised group responding to secret signals which nobody else understands and knows about. Then you seize, put yourself in the key position, and at the right moment, in the midst of total confusion, you seize power. And to seize power, you must have also armed strength to eliminate people.

  “Their job was to seize power, and if the PAP is in power they must knock out the PAP. It must be, it is inevitable. If you are too strong, like UMNO was, because they could not penetrate the Malay race, then their approach would be, first, united front until they are strong enough to push you over. Part of the plan was to capture the PAP, capture power.”

  “If you just take Singapore alone and you had no extra legal powers to deal with them and you allowed them to use the combination of persuasion and force, they would have won. I would go one step further and say that if the population of Malaya were the same as the population of Singapore, 70, 80 per cent dialect-speaking and/or Mandarin-speaking, enthralled by what is happening in China, and they had the same freedom to organise, to persuade and use force, surreptitious force if necessary, by assassination, fear and terror – I think they would also have won.

  “You had to use extra legal means to cripple the organisation because behind it all is terror. Anybody who opposes them in the Chinese schools is eliminated. So you are either with them or neutral. You cannot compete with them on a purely canvassing or open debate position. That is an organisation that has been accustomed to … using force when it is prevented from achieving its aims. It is ingrained in the methods of the organisation.”

  Lee would be the first to acknowledge that beneath the terror and violence he knew the communists were capable of inflicting – all of Singapore knew it – were commitment and dedication to a higher cause. Though he disagreed profoundly with the ideology, he had nothing but admiration for the courage with which the believers pursued their objectives.

  “For years since the begi
nning of the Emergency in 1948, communism has been painted in terms of violence, terror, brutality and evil. There was violence, there was terror, there was brutality, and there were evil men. But that is not the whole story. For if it was as simple as that, the communists would have died and perished with the collapse of their armed revolt. It is because, together with these weaknesses, they have some strong qualities that they have been able to survive in spite of the collapse of their armed revolt … they have been able to continue the struggle for the communist cause through new methods.

  “Many of their old supporters in the jungle have died or been banished. Some have drifted back anonymously into the towns. Only a hard core remains on the Malayan-Thai border. But new recruits have been found. These are the idealistic young men and women, largely from the Chinese middle schools of Malaya, both the Federation and Singapore. These are new men fighting under different conditions, with different methods and tactics to create a communist Malaya. Partly by persuasion, mainly by fanaticism and faith that the future belongs to the communists, these new recruits are continuing the struggle. They press on, capturing the leadership of trade unions, cultural organisations and old boys’ associations. Most important of all, they try to capture the power to manipulate the lawful political parties.”

  (Speech broadcast on September 15, 1961; text on page 266)

  These students were energised by the communist victory in China, believing that the revolutionary fervour sweeping that country then could be transplanted in Singapore and Malaya.

  “China had been transformed since 1949 into a great power. The Chinese communist army fought the US army to a standstill in Korea. That was not a laughing matter. With relatively poor equipment or low-tech equipment, they fought the American army to a standstill until there was a ceasefire in the 38th parallel. China was supposed to be a leader in vast, major industries – this, that and the other. The inevitability of it all, the surge of optimism that theirs was the future, that history was on their side.”

  At the intellectual level, what he could not subscribe to was their belief that it was possible to construct a perfect society from a set of arguments derived from first principles. He explained this to the authors:

  “I wasn’t at all sure that you could analyse life and society in a scientific way. I mean, everything was about scientific socialism … The word itself, the phrase itself, repels me because there’s no scientific possibilities in managing people’s lives. I did not believe that. But they believed it, they thought that all this would work out like a mathematical formula. Whereas we believed that so long as we had equal opportunities, each must be given a free play of his own life. You don’t want to order people’s lives around. If you want to be an artist, well, go ahead and be an artist. And if you want to be a Muslim, so be it. But they will not allow that. They say, ‘Belief in God is nonsense, we must destroy it, we must debunk this superstition.’ That is a certain thoroughness because they believed they had the answer to everything – which makes it suspect to me.

  “I’m not sure whether there’s a God or there’s no God, I’m not sure whether the world was created by God or by an accident. But don’t go around knocking other people’s gods and other people’s culture. Even if there is no God, this group of people have been held together and sustained through all their tragedies and all their sorrows by a belief, by a certain belief that they are all together under one God … therefore they share certain things in common. Why should you go and demolish that? I disagreed with that profoundly.”

  The PAP’s defeat of the communists by a combination of force and the use of the open argument ranks as one of Lee’s finest political achievements. After the Barisan Sosialis’ ill-conceived boycott of Parliament in 1965, it faded away from the scene and no longer posed a serious threat. There were occasional incidents such as the arrest of a group of English-educated Marxist Catholics in 1987, but they were novices compared to the communists of the 1950s and 1960s.

  What were the reasons behind a PAP victory in the end? Lee put it down to the communists’ Chinese chauvinism, their lack of understanding of the non-Chinese world, and an unfamiliarity with the constitution.

  “I would say the fundamental factor was their appeal was really based on Chinese chauvinism, pride in the Chinese Communist Party’s success, and in the China the Chinese Communist Party had created. So that narrowed them down to only Chinese chauvinists and a few idealists and ideologues like Devan Nair, Woodhull, James Puthucheary, that sprinkling of them, right? That’s limitation number one. They were not geared for a Malayan revolution, they were geared for Chinese revolution.

  “Second, their leaders lacked an understanding of the non-Chinese world. They saw the world through Chinese eyes and with communist spectacles. They could not see the wider world and that led them to make many serious mistakes.

  “And one serious mistake was that they believed – and this is how they lost the referendum and they lost the elections – they believed that they could break away from the PAP and capture enough votes either in the Assembly or later on in the elections to form the government and use limited, not full power of an independent state, but self-governing power of a Singapore still under British military forces, with British troops on the island, to help the communists in Malaya. They were one party. They were not two parties. So the communists here were part of the communists in Malaya. And the communists here, when they fled to Malaya, they took positions there and they fought. So there was no distinction for them between Singapore and Malaya. I think that was the second mistake.

  “And the third weakness was complete ignorance of constitutional practices. They did not understand the rules of the game, so to speak, which we did. We played the game according to British rules, so we played within those rules and the British understood us. But they didn’t understand those rules at all, so they got tripped up by the rules.”

  With the demise of the communist organisation in Singapore, Lee’s political strength grew manifold. He and his colleagues could claim the moral and political authority to govern independent Singapore, not unlike Mao’s long marchers claiming their right to rule China after defeating the Kuomintang, but with an important difference: the PAP’s mandate would be reconfirmed many more times through the ballot box. How Lee and the PAP defeated the communists and became political giants in the eyes of Singaporeans is hence of immense importance in understanding the history of modern Singapore and how it was able to make the transition from a political hot spot to one of the world’s most peaceful and stable countries.

  “I believe they underestimated our determination. They believed we were English-educated, bourgeois and very soft, not prepared to die. And therefore, in a real showdown, we may panic and beat a retreat. I think they were unprepared for our resolution and our determination to lose and lose everything but continue to fight them. That must have been a surprise to them.

  “They thought we would be so intimidated by this that we would not dare take them on. I mean, everywhere they had cadres. The overwhelming strength they had was the sense of inevitability that they would win because of China. They had won in China, this was part of a whole revolution.

  “And the Chinese-educated were completely enthralled. And those who were against them were scared. If you are against, do you really want to take them on? You know, the KMT had already lost, finished. So why not be neutral? And then they will leave you alone, maybe you can join the united front and so on.

  The hardcore supporters never switched sides

  Hundreds of people, including Lim Chin Siong’s former comrades, turned up at Mount Vernon Crematorium in February 1996.

  When Lim Chin Siong suffered a heart attack on February 5, 1996, his death attracted considerable interest from his former comrades-in-arms. Several hundred attended the wake and the funeral service, and there were emotional speeches by former detainees Said Zahari and Lim Hock Siew about Lim’s contributions to the country. During a memorial service in Kuala Lumpur a
few days later, attended by about 500 people, eulogies were read by some of his closest colleagues in the political battles of the ’50s and ’60s, including Samad Ismail, Dominic Puthucheary and Fong Swee Suan.

  Lee Kuan Yew believes that they came not so much to honour Lim as to honour themselves, to show the world that they had not weakened, that they were still strong at heart, and in a fighting mood – that they were, in fact, brandishing their clenched fists. It was the latest example, to Lee, that while the communist threat might have disappeared, the hardcore left-wingers are still around, ever ready to strike if they had a chance.

  “They fought back in many ways and they kept on fighting … With diminishing resources, the old chaps continued to put up a tremendous fight to find some way, to find some new recruits to carry on the battle. They never gave up. The hard core was on the border. Then there were pockets in Pahang. There was total cooperation between Malaysian Special Branch and our Internal Security Department. So we knew, for instance, which groups had moved where and so on, as information arrived. The border plus pockets in Pahang, in Perak and so on and there was another pocket in Changsha. We did not know it was Changsha, we thought it was Yunnan where they were broadcasting things down south.

  “And even when we dried up their recruiting ground, as the schools became more and more English-educated or as the students went to English schools and Chinese became a second language, they still did not give up; they were trying to win them over … It becomes a way of life. They know no other battle, no other issue. That is what they will do and they will continue to do. And given a chance, they will start again.

  “… The adults of the ’50s and ’60s had no doubts that it was a battle of life and death. And those who were on their side will remain on their side. Very few switched sides. I could follow the voting pattern for years afterwards. Even as we resettled them from Nee Soon or from Bukit Timah or from Jurong, there were pockets of opposition in the old estate, in the new estates that we moved them to. Although their lives had improved, their sympathies stayed with them. Their hardcore supporters never switched.