by Ian Buruma
Lee’s version of this Chinese spirit is at the very core of the nation’s foundation myth, promoted in theme-park panoramas, television soap operas, National Day speeches, school textbooks, and history museums. In the middle of the old colonial center of town, now an area of carefully preserved museums and churches, is the National History Museum, a handsome, classical building, in the colonial style, with a white dome, colonnades, and verandas. Its “mission,” so the museum pamphlet informs us, is to “explore and enhance the national identity. . . .”
On the ground floor is a series of dioramas showing Singapore’s history until 1951. We see the early settlements of Malay fishermen, the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, the growth of Chinese trade under the British, the first rubber plantations, and the wartime Japanese occupation. All this is done sketchily; the real foundation myth is yet to come. For that you go to the top floor, to an exhibition called “From Colony to Nation.”
It is the story of a nation that became prosperous, clean, orderly, and almost perfectly governed after a succession of enemies had been cleared away. The enemies outside are the Malays, in Indonesia and Malaysia, the teeming millions, poor, brown-skinned, backward, barely civilized, but always liable to run amok and cross the borders. The enemies within are the Communists and the pro-Communists. Old black-and-white photographs are shown of rioting Malays in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and of students and trade-union activists in Singapore being pursued by policemen brandishing sticks. The message is clear: Dissent means violence and disorder. The rooms in which these pictures are displayed are cluttered and murky. After that come the lighter rooms, celebrating in full color the achievements of the PAP, which brought order, security, and prosperity. The message is emblazoned on the wall: Singapore’s economy developed “in leaps and bounds” under “political stability” and “strong leadership.”
Here it is, then: a rich and orderly society protected by strong and benevolent rulers from the ever-threatening chaos of barbarians and domestic rebels. The ancient paranoiac notion of China surrounded by barbarians has been transplanted to a tiny Chinese enclave in the swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia. There is no room for critics or dissidents here, for they are, at best, misguided losers, too stupid to understand the necessity for “strong leadership,” or, at worst, dangerous “Communists” who would plunge the land into chaos and darkness. The fact that dissidents are called Communists in Singapore and counterrevolutionaries in China is incidental; the underlying sentiments of the rulers are the same.
Chia Thye Poh speaks very softly, almost in a whisper. Like Wei Jingsheng, Chia has spent most of his adult life in prison, with no one to talk to but interrogators trained to break his spirit. Until a few years ago he was one of the longest serving political prisoners in the world. What makes Chia’s story so remarkable is that he was a prisoner in the richest, technically most advanced, and socially most efficient part of the Chinese-speaking world.
We faced each other in the winter of 1999 at a Formica table in the clean, warm, but rather institutional canteen of a research institute in the Netherlands. Chia had received a scholarship to study the politics of economic development, a safe enough topic, in a safe enough country. He was, he said, “the oldest student in the building.”
A slim, frail-looking man in his early sixties, with large black-rimmed glasses and brown sun spots on his sallow face, he smiled politely whenever a fellow student greeted him. Often he would get up to shake hands. A hearty Japanese clapped him on the back and said: “My friend.” Chia just smiled. He worried whether I had had enough coffee or that it had gone cold. Even though I protested that I was fine, he would rush to the coffee machine to fill up another Styrofoam cup, and return with a packet of cookies or a bar of chocolate.
Chia had endured twenty-three years in a Singapore prison, mostly alone in his cell, merely because of his politics. He never cracked. I looked for hints of steeliness, something that might reveal a clue to Chia’s mental resilience beneath his whispering, solicitous manner, and could surmise only that soft-spoken courtesy can be as effective a shield against continuous mental aggression as a more swaggering posture. Or perhaps Chia was just behaving like someone who had learned the hard way to value discretion. In this respect, he could not have been less like Wei Jingsheng.
Although he was now a free man living in Holland, he did not want me to quote his views, which were unfailingly moderate. He was afraid the Singaporean government would make it impossible for him to go back and find a job. They might accuse him of being a “Communist,” as they did a few years ago, when he criticized an old colonial law that allows the government to detain people indefinitely without trial. He was in no hurry to go home. He had been robbed of an active life. His health was ruined. There was talk of another scholarship, in Germany perhaps. But he thought he eventually might go back. It was, after all, his country.
Then he told me his story—a very Singaporean but also very Chinese story. Chia was born in Singapore. His paternal grandparents had come from Hokkien (Fujian) province, in China, as had his mother, who was illiterate. His father worked in an ice factory before the war and later as a vegetable salesman. The colonial Chinese community made up about 75 percent of the population; the rest were mostly Malays and Indians. Some were educated in English, therefore closer to the British masters, and thus part of a colonial elite. Most, however, spoke Hokkien, the dialect of Fujian province. Chia attended Chinese primary and secondary schools. And since he was keen on science, he chose to study physics at the Chinese-language Nanyang University. Like all Chinese institutions for higher education, Nanyang was influenced by the May Fourth Movement, and Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy were both much in evidence. The founder of the university was a famous tycoon named Tan Lark Sye. Far from being the stereotypical Chinese businessman, “only interested in money,” Tan encouraged students to take an interest in politics and society. He saw political activity as the mark of good citizenship. Politics in Singapore in the 1950s meant the struggle for independence. Democracy, it was hoped, would follow from that.
Many Chinese speakers in Singapore were inspired by the “liberation” of China in 1949. This was partly a matter of ethnic pride, but also a victory for anti-imperialism. The British were accused of running Singapore as a police state. The British colonial administration responded by closing down some Chinese high schools, which were mostly financed by tycoons but also from donations by taxi drivers and even patriotic nightclub hostesses. This caused increasing agitation against the preferential treatment of English education.
One of the early fighters for independence and democracy was a young lawyer, then still called Harry Lee, who, despite his ethnic origin, did not yet speak Chinese. He was, in his own words, a typical “Anglicized Chinaman.” Later, after he had studied Chinese to appeal to Chinese-speaking voters, he became better known as Lee Kuan Yew. As prime minister of Singapore, he would advance the British policy of Anglicization by abolishing Chinese higher education altogether. But that is getting ahead of the story.
Chia Thye Poh returned to Nanyang University as a graduate assistant after teaching science and mathematics at a Chinese high school. He was not an activist. His main interest was science, and he was planning to study abroad. But then came 1963. It was a tense time: Singapore was about to merge with Malaysia, and the Indonesian government, under Sukarno, was trying to intimidate Malaysia through aggressive “confrontation.” Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP) was running for election against the only serious opposition party, the Socialist Front, or Barisan Sosialis. Lee was also a socialist at this time, but he had convinced the British that only he could stop a Communist revolution. Some of Lee’s opponents, mostly trade-union members, Nanyang University faculty, and members of various Chinese civic associations, were accused of having pro-Communist sympathies. Lee did everything to stoke such suspicions, and just before the elections, in an early morning sweep called Operation Cold Store, all of Lee’s main political ri
vals found themselves in jail, without charge, as national security risks. This was easily done under the so-called Internal Security Act, instituted by the British in case of Communist insurgencies; Lee gratefully inherited the law to eliminate his political rivals. His word for this was “fixing.” He fixed the Communists, the Chinese-speaking schools, the opposition parties, the independent Law Society, the churches, all in good time, until only the PAP was left in charge.
Inspired by Tan Lark Sye’s views on good citizenship, Chia decided to run as a Barisan candidate. It wasn’t easy. Everything was done to make it impossible for Barisan to put on an effective campaign: printing plants were closed suddenly; permits to hold rallies failed to come through; radio time was denied. And so on. Chia won his seat nonetheless, together with twelve other opposition members. But thirteen opposition members in Parliament were too many for Lee to stomach, so three were arrested immediately; two, who were about to be taken in, just managed to escape overseas. To make sure that even an emasculated assembly would not cause him any trouble, Lee kept it in almost permanent recess. And as punishment for financing Barisan candidates, Tan Lark Sye was denied Singaporean citizenship.
This might strike one as odd behavior in a Cambridge-educated, socialist prime minister who had made his name as a fighter for freedom and democracy, but times had changed. Lee was in power now, and the specter of communism continued to justify his tightening grip. He explained his position in 1960, when he said that “all this talk of democratic rights, laissez-faire liberalism, freedom and human rights, in the face of the stark realities of an underground struggle for power, can only confuse the English-educated world.”2 The implication, which would be regarded as racist if it had been uttered by a white man, was that Chinese speakers were unsuited to democracy and should be treated ruthlessly. And Lee’s own “English-speaking world” should not be confused by half-baked Western ideals.
Under these trying circumstances, then, Chia began his life as a member of Parliament. There is no evidence that he was ever a dangerous radical, let alone a Communist. But he did believe in parliamentary procedures, so when Lee chose to ignore the legislative assembly, even on such a vital issue as Singapore’s merger with Malaysia, Chia resigned in protest with his fellow Barisan MPs. A few weeks later, in October 1963, he was in jail. The pretext for his arrest was a protest demonstration against a planned visit to Singapore by the U.S. president, Lyndon B. Johnson. Like most people on the left, Chia was opposed to the Vietnam War. But he was not officially charged with anything. Nothing was ever announced. Chia simply disappeared from sight. He was only twenty-five years old.
Chia was locked up in a narrow cell, about the size of a toilet cubicle, in a nineteenth-century brick building called Moon Crescent Detention Center. Without light and with a very high ceiling, it was like being buried in a tomb. The only sound that penetrated Chia’s chamber was the stamping of military boots and the muffled screaming of a prisoner in another cell. Chia was told that after a few days in this dark dungeon most men went mad.
Chia was lucky in a way. Unlike some political prisoners, he was not badly beaten or half drowned in a toilet bowl or tortured by electrodes clipped onto his genitals. To have a chance to get out, all he had to do was sign a confession that he was a Communist infiltrator. This would serve to confirm Lee Kuan Yew’s propaganda about a Communist conspiracy. Others had done it, usually after they had been deprived of sleep and beaten into submission. The Barisan leader, Lim Chin Siong, a highly popular figure among the Chinese speakers and by all accounts a rousing public speaker in Hokkien, agreed to sign in 1967, after he had failed to hang himself in his cell, but begged Lee to be spared the humiliation of a televised confession. Lee refused. After two more years in prison, Lim was a broken man.
Pressure was put on Chia’s parents to convince their son to sign. His mother, frantic with fear, had several strokes. Chia was interrogated day and night, while being forced to stand naked in a freezing room with the air-conditioning going full blast—a peculiarly Singaporean method of torture: a modern luxury turned into a torment. For the first few weeks in his dark cell, Chia really did think he was going insane. But somehow he held on, and was taken to the Whitley Road Detention Center, a bunkerlike prison built especially for political prisoners, hidden behind the palm fronds in a plush, green suburb not far from the beautiful main road to Singapore International Airport.
Alone in his cell, often without anything to read, even a censored newspaper, Chia had to wait until 1985 before a charge against him was made public: membership in the Communist Party of Malaya, a party that was all but defunct. By then he was forty-four. Again Chia was pressed to confess and promised his freedom in exchange. And again he refused. He sent a letter to the authorities saying that the charge was entirely fictitious.
I asked him why he had persisted. What had given him the strength to resist for so long? He gazed at me through his glasses with an expression of surprise. He was much too polite to say so, but it was clear my question had baffled him. I wished I hadn’t asked. “How could I have signed?” he said, very softly. “It wasn’t true.”
Chia did not boast of his defiance. It was for him the natural thing to have done. Any other course would have broken his spirit. He would have ended up like Lim Chin Siong, an embittered man staring into space. He did not talk about his life in prison as though it were of any particular significance. On the contrary, he apologized for telling me an old story and worried that it would be of no help to me.
I was struck by the way he referred to Lee Kuan Yew by his first name, Kuan Yew, as though they were close friends. It said something about the smallness of Singapore, a city-state of barely 3 million people, where everyone knows everyone else. Or perhaps a sense of intimacy builds up between a prisoner and his chief jailer, especially when the prisoner refuses to give in. Wei Jingsheng, too, spoke about Deng Xiaoping as though they were intimates, two stubborn adversaries worthy of each other. But perhaps Chia used Lee’s first name only to show that unlike most Singaporeans, he did not fear him.
After Amnesty International began to pay serious attention and his case received publicity in 1985, Chia’s continued incarceration became an embarrassment. One day in the late 1980s, Chia asked to see a doctor. Having spent so much time in the dim light of his cell, his eyesight was failing. He was taken to see an eye doctor in town. On the way back, his jailers decided to give him a little tour. They drove him downtown, where the new high-rise buildings stood, in shining chrome and gold, with logos of Japanese corporations and international banks winking in the neon sky. They pointed at the fine new Sheratons, Hyatts, and Hiltons, and the flashy new department stores on Orchard Road, where thousands of young people, dressed in the latest fashions, bought the world’s most desirable products. And they drove him to his old constituency in Jurong, with its new supermarkets and government-subsidized public housing, all perfectly organized, with civic organizations, sports clubs, schools, cultural associations, and excellent public transport facilities—everything, in short, that a person might need from cradle to grave, all controlled by Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party. And Chia’s jailers said to him that all his years in prison had been for nothing. Nobody even knew his name anymore. Singaporeans were prosperous and content, thanks to the PAP. That is why they voted every five years to keep the PAP in power. Chia had fought for a lost cause. He was irrelevant now. Why resist any longer? Why not just sign and be done with it? Then he, too, might be able to enjoy his remaining years as an obedient citizen of the Garden City.
Chia didn’t sign, and in 1989 he was finally released from jail. Even then, his punishment was not quite over. He was put on the ferry to a small island called Sentosa, meaning Isle of Tranquillity. Before Singapore was founded, the island was known by the Malays as Pulau Blakang Mati—Isle Beyond the Dead. In World War II the Japanese used it as a POW camp. Now Sentosa is best known as a theme park called Discovery Island, with rides and pools, a musical fountain, a golf cou
rse, and an “Asian Village,” with fast-food restaurants, one for each ethnic group—Malay, Chinese, and Tamil—panoramas showing colorful “Images of Singapore,” and, especially for Japanese tourists, a museum of waxworks showing the British surrender of Singapore in 1941: a bull-necked General Yamashita sitting opposite General Percival, whose spindly legs stick out awkwardly from a pair of faded khaki shorts. This was to be Chia’s permanent home. He was the only resident on Sentosa, confined to a one-room guardhouse. For two years he was not allowed to leave the island without permission. It was the final, exquisite cruelty: the man who had dared to resist Lee Kuan Yew reduced to a lone shadow among the attractions of a theme park.
Singapore has been called Disneyland with capital punishment. A cliché, but not a bad description. I have often wondered about the taste for theme parks that have sprung up like bamboo shoots in the last twenty years, especially in Japan, the south coast of China, and Singapore, even as the few remaining historic buildings were being bulldozed, as though they were leftover rubbish to be disposed of in the quest for more prosperity. Perhaps the two phenomena are linked, the bulldozing and the re-creation. The theme parks—miniatures of historic Chinese cities and “traditional” Japanese towns, as well as imagined foreign locales, with a profusion of Eiffel Towers and small-scale Bavarian castles—compensate for the loss of visible history.
Or maybe people prefer it that way: a sanitized version of the past (or of destinations abroad), safe and clean, with fun rides for the kids, instead of the actual clutter of history or the hazards of foreign travel. Chinese have built, destroyed, and rebuilt their cities for thousands of years. What matters is not the actual age of a building but the location. A new concrete temple on an ancient site is considered “old,” or at least historical. It is the association, the genius loci, that counts.