Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  (Speech given at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus on December 11, 1965)

  He explained later to the authors why his speech in Kuala Lumpur caused such a stir there.

  “Their leaders reacted with horror and alarm because it was so radical, it was so disturbing. It broke all the taboos, you know, that you should not make an appeal to the Malays and so on, making a direct appeal to help … For instance, in my last speech in Parliament, I spoke in Malay. And my Malay was very fluent then because I had been campaigning in Malay. I had made a very simple point. I am speaking to you in Malay. In 20 years, all the non-Malays would be able to speak in Malay to you. How does that change the price of your rubber or your palm oil?

  “The taxes you pay, turnover tax, which Tan Siew Sin [the finance minister] had implemented, you pay as much as the others. Surely what is more important to you is what policies are being implemented, whether they would help you and your children to progress or they will not help you to progress. I think it had an electric effect because it was a demonstration of what was going to come. But of course, having seen that, they had established very clear rules in Malaya. You can’t make that appeal to the Malays. It’s off-limits. Every time you do that, there’s a riot.”

  For Lee, the need to improve the living standards of all in Malaysia meant taking hardheaded decisions which – and this was perhaps at the heart of the problem – meant changing the old way of doing things. The PAP was a revolutionary party, determined to alter the existing social and political structure of Singapore and to create a democratic socialist state. Having merged to form Malaysia, it saw its mission encompassing the wider hinterland. That inevitably brought it into open conflict with the Kuala Lumpur government, which he saw as being much too conservative and protective of the existing vested interests.

  “It was unenlightened. It does not build for the future. For a country which wants to go far, which wants to remove poverty, ignorance, you have to invest heavily in education, in health, increase your infrastructure, get investments, get growth.

  “And if I could choose one example, it would sort of encapsulate the problem. Everywhere I went with the Tunku, I was seeing new mosques being put up to consolidate Malayism. One day, I said to him, we were quite friendly so I said, ‘Tunku, why not build polyclinics? There are enough mosques, but they need doctors for little ailments, coughs, whooping coughs, inoculation and so on.’ He told me, ‘Kuan Yew, you don’t understand. The Malays are a very different people, they are a very simple people. Their demands are very small. Just give them what they want and they’ll be happy. Don’t disturb their way of life.’

  “So he saw the future as a continuation of what he knew in his youth: the Malays as rice farmers, the Chinese as traders and the Sultans as rulers and the Indians as rubber tappers. That was not possible.”

  Malaysian Malaysia

  The PAP thought it possible to mobilise a coalition of like-minded parties which could in time become an alternative political force to the Alliance. The Malaysian Solidarity Convention (MSC) provided the ideal political vehicle to launch that process. Convened in May 1965, it drew together five opposition parties: Singapore’s PAP, the People’s Progressive Party and the United Democratic Party from Malaya, the Sarawak United People’s Party and Machinda, also from Sarawak. Eschewing communal politics, it aimed instead to work towards a “democratic Malaysian Malaysia” by making common political ideologies and common social and economic aspirations, rather than race, the basis for political affiliations. Rallies would be held throughout Malaysia to propagate the idea.

  “Over time, our ideas would prevail. We may or may not be able to expand as the PAP in Malaya. We may have to join forces with the PPP in Perak, with SUPP in Sarawak and the United Democratic Party in Penang, because they were already formed. They had groups in various states. The leaders were Lim Chong Eu in Penang, Seenivasagam in Perak, Ong Kee Hui in Kuching. So we will have to join up with them and find a common ground, we’ll all start recruiting afresh, which should take a very long time. So the Malaysian Solidarity Convention came about in response to the very strong Malay policies which upset everybody.

  “Supposing we had been allowed to continue constitutionally. I think, within two to three years, there would have been a very solid bloc. The PAP would have to modify its programme. It would not be the PAP programme as it was in Singapore, because we had to adjust to the needs of rural constituents, particularly in the Borneo states.”

  But it was not to be.

  The MSC held only two meetings before Singapore was expelled from Malaysia. Already in June, following Lee’s speech in the Malaysian Parliament, the Tunku had been urged by UMNO extremists to take constitutional measures to evict Singapore or “put Lee Kuan Yew away to sober him up”. But the Tunku held his hand, partly to avoid incurring the displeasure of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had warned him that if his government arrested or detained Lee, he would not be welcome at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London the following month. Talk of plans to arrest Lee surfaced again during the Tunku’s absence when he was away in London, and the war of words between the two sides intensified, with Alliance leaders accusing Singapore leaders of challenging the position of Malays and the rulers.

  To add to the animosity, the two sides engaged in a fresh round of disputes over Singapore’s contribution to the central coffers and quarrelled over its financial commitment towards Sabah and Sarawak. And in an extremely unpopular move, the central government also ordered the closure of the Bank of China in Singapore, which hurt the island’s small businessmen.

  In July, Tun Razak met Lee and held discussions with Singapore’s ministers, in particular Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee, to resolve their differences, but no compromise was reached. Later that month, Tun Razak wrote to the Tunku, who was then recovering from a bout of shingles in London, to say that senior cabinet members in the central government were all agreed that Singapore should go its own way. The Tunku’s reply, which came a few days later, gave them the go-ahead to prepare the necessary constitutional and legal documents. Singapore was out on August 9, 1965.

  Lee tried up to the bitter end to avoid separation.

  “I met the Tunku on Saturday the 7th at half past 12. I remember it distinctly. The appointment was supposed to be at 12 o’clock. I arrived. I waited for him for half an hour. Some of his ministers were there. We talked little nothings. He came and we went to a separate room. I said, ‘Tunku, is there no other way? Why not loosen it into a confederation? Give me common market. We will run all our activities ourselves. We will go slow in the rest of Malaysia. Give me common market; give me the right to take initiative in security matters so that the communalists cannot start riots in Singapore, and we carry on in Malaysia slowly: take it in 20, 30 years. And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘My colleagues will not believe this.’ I said, ‘Will you see my colleagues … Dr Toh?’ Dr Toh was born and bred in Taiping; his family is there. Every year, he does a biannual pilgrimage. You know, Chinese families have reunions: Chinese New Year and some other moon festival. Dr Toh is not going to say ‘Yes’.

  “For two million people moving forward faster and quicker, we abandoned eight million; abandoned them and left them in a slow and sluggish situation. And the Tunku did not want to see Dr Toh.”

  (Extracts of interview with the press on page 305)

  He would recall to the authors the moment of anguish.

  “Having spent so much time bringing about Malaysia, I felt very strongly that we should not leave Malaysia under the pressures of strong emotions on both sides. That the rational thing was to disengage, get a looser federation, then we leave them alone for the time being, they leave us alone. We carry on as a kind of confederation. But don’t leave it. Don’t leave, don’t break it up. Then when things have cooled down, we can re-engage. I put that to the Tunku. He didn’t want it. He knew what he wanted. And what he wanted was quiet and peace and none of this multiracialism running around
disturbing his peace of mind.”

  The waste of it

  For Lee, the failure of merger was not just a personal and political setback. There was for him a profound sense of having let down those who had rallied behind the cause.

  “My thoughts were, the waste of it, the waste of all the effort put in. And secondly, letting down so many people in that Malaysian Solidarity Convention, so many parties, so many groups. Because without us, they may not have had the cutting edge, the willingness to define the issues and to expound effectively, not just within the country but internationally. And it was very painful to do. Because by ourselves, we could be no threat. But with them, we became a Pan-Malaysian problem – and the sense of betrayal of fellow warriors for a common destiny. You abandon them, it’s very bad. I felt very bad about it.

  “In fact, Rajaratnam and Dr Toh Chin Chye felt so strongly about it that they almost did not sign that separation agreement because they had organised this Malaysian Solidarity Convention more than I did. They were Malaysians, you see. One came from Taiping, Perak, the other came from Seremban. They drew on all their friends and the people they knew and they had organised this. How could they just abandon them? They felt very strongly that we were just letting them down the drain.”

  The people of Singapore received the news about separation with mixed emotions. There was foreboding about what the future held, whether Singapore could really go it alone. But the acrimonious years in Malaysia, the bitter quarrels with their heavy communal overtones, the threat of radical action by the Kuala Lumpur government against the PAP leadership – all these had made the general population weary and uneasy about the relationship. Indeed there might even have been some relief over the clean break and the opportunity to start afresh. Whatever the individual sentiments over separation, there can be no doubts that the experience was a cathartic one for all.

  It had one other side effect, perhaps not known to the anxious population at the time. According to Lee the separation had tremendous educational value as well.

  “I think it is not possible for all of us, for any of us who have been through that period, not to have been tempered by bruising battles. We got to know people in the raw … what they were fighting over, why they wanted power, how they exercised power on behalf of ethnic groups. Race, language, religion became dominant themes in all these issues. So all our lives since then we have been extremely conscious that we’ve got to make sure that this does not take place in Singapore. We must never allow race, language, religion to dominate our politics because it will bring disaster upon us.

  “So Chinese chauvinism was just not on. We made a decision to move away from any such tendency. Deciding on English as the working language was the first decision we had to make. We left Malay as the national language. We left the national anthem alone. We allowed the [military] commands to carry on in Malay, but we moved over to English as the working language. It was the first move, one of the first fundamental decisions we made within a few weeks of separation because we’ve got to have a working language. Before that, we were working on Malay as the national language. After that, we had to link up with the outside world and we decided on English.

  “For that generation [of Singaporeans], they had no doubts at all that communalism is a dangerous business and will ruin the country. So when we took strong measures against Chinese-language chauvinists and arrested them, newspaper editors and so on, the people were solidly behind us. You would not have today’s Singapore [if we had allowed Chinese chauvinism to grow unchecked]. I could not have got on with Indonesian President Suharto. … He understood me and he knew exactly what was at the back of all our plans, that we cannot give up Chinese as the second language. But we will not be a Chinese community, we will be a Southeast Asian community. We are ethnically Chinese, we cannot change nor can we give up our cultural habits which is our strength. But our thinking and our political objectives are different. And I think he understood that. And that’s how we were able to build up the kind of relations with him.

  “I am absolutely convinced that without the experience, the two years in Malaysia – first fighting the communists ’61, ’63 and then fighting the communalists ’63, ’65 – Singapore would not have made it. If you had given Singapore independence in ’61, we would have been ruined, it could not have been done. That experience, it’s like Moses going out in the wilderness before he went to Judea. You have to go through that. Then the people became realistic, a sober appraisal of a difficult future and they made the effort. And no more quarrels about foolish things like language, culture and so on. We just sat down and pushed the economy forward and live and let live. Without that, we would not have succeeded.”

  This will be a metropolis. Never fear!

  From mud swamp to metropolis: Singapore’s dramatic transformation can be seen in its changing skyline.

  It has been 32 years since separation, and the old angst has largely dissipated. But the years immediately following Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia were not problem-free: fresh wounds take time to heal. For Singapore, they would be years of a strong and overpowering determination to prove that it could go alone, and that its policies would triumph. Lee was most determined, for obvious reasons.

  “I was sad not because Singapore was going to suffer: no. I was sad because by this separation, we could not help millions, several millions of our own people, our own countrymen – in Malaya, in Sabah and Sarawak – to progress with us. That was why I was sad. We could not help them any more. They have now got to help themselves. They have got to throw up their own leaders and they have got to take a stand. We cannot interfere.

  “Here in Singapore, in ten years, Geylang Serai will be another and better Queenstown – all the shacks will be demolished. I say that for Singapore because I do not think Singapore is boasting when it says it can do it. It will do it. But do you think in ten years the kampongs in Malaya will have Queenstowns? I do not think so. If you want that, then you must have the thrust, the ideas, the dynamism, the push, the tolerance of each other. That is why I was sad for them who are our people. Not just Chinese and Chinese, Indians and Indians. There are many Malays here.

  “Half of our police force comes from Malaya. Their families are left behind there. They will be quartered; they will live in modern civilised conditions. Their families will come down here and they will want to stay with them, and we will have to say ‘No’ because there is a limit to what we can absorb. We have only got 224 square miles. It is a cruel thing to do this, but it has to be done. Some people wanted it this way. We could have helped them emerge, but it was not to be.

  “But I say to you: here we make the model multiracial society. This is not a country that belongs to any single community: it belongs to all of us. You helped build it; your fathers, your grandfathers helped build this. There was no naval base here, and it is not the British who built it. It was your labour, your father’s labour which built that. My great grandfather came here and built. Yes, he came here looking for his fortune, but he stayed – my grandfather was born here.

  “Over 100 years ago, this was a mudflat, swamp. Today, this is a modern city. Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis. Never fear!”

  (Speech, September 12, 1965; text on page 310)

  The history books would record that the story of modern, independent Singapore began on August 9, 1965 with Lee as its founding father. If those books could speak, the chapters preceding that date would shout with riotous voices, many angry and impatient but mostly earnest and impassioned. They would resonate with the tumultuous events of that era: the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, the subsequent surrender, the trials and tribulations of the PAP in its formative years when it was almost captured by the communists, the battle for the hearts and minds of the people over merger with Malaysia, the querulous years inside it, the racial riots and the eventual separation. These events made Singapore, they caused it to come into being. They were years of intense politics and of political ideas. Af
ter August 9, 1965, the chapters would become considerably quieter. But the pace of development would quicken, so fast in fact that within 30 years the country would make the leap from Third World to First.

  One man dominated this period. Lee Kuan Yew was even more determined, after the experience in Malaysia, to make Singapore succeed. His ideas would prevail, and they would shape the country in a way which very few modern politicians have been able to do for their own countries. The story of modern, independent Singapore, of its transformation to the ninth richest country in the world in 1996 (in per capita terms) cannot be told without telling the story of Lee, and of his ideas and how those ideas changed the nation. It is to these ideas that we turn in the next eight chapters.

  IDEAS THAT MADE A NATION

  The three Apollo 13 astronauts (from left: Fred W. Haise, James A. Lovell and John L. Swigert Jr), emerging from the recovery helicopter onto the deck of the carrier Iwo Jima on April 18, 1970, following their successful return from a near-fatal expedition.

  4

  The Secret of Good Government

  It was 1970 and the American spaceship Apollo 13 was in desperate trouble 328,000 kilometres out in space. A mysterious explosion had knocked out all the key controls on board, wrecking the lunar landing mission and threatening to maroon the three astronauts. The world held its breath as the three intrepid spacemen tried one manoeuvre after another to regain control. The do-or-die trick: to set the spaceship on a looping trajectory round the moon and back to earth. One error, one mistimed firing of a rocket engine, and Apollo 13 would be catapulted into unreachable space forever.