By Wilson Lee Flores
When I asked the nation's top business leaders from John Gokongwei, Jr., Lucio Tan, Enrique Zobel to young tycoon Luis Miguel Aboitiz as to who they admire the most for enlightened leadership, they unanimously mentioned the name of 77-year-old Lee Kuan Yew, founding father of Singapore and now Senior Minister.
Zobel says, "Lee is very straightforward, superhonest and he always knew what he was talking about. Lee Kuan Yew is a great leader whom I admire the most."
Lucio Tan explains: "Lee Kuan Yew has strong political will and selflessness as a leader." In fact, Gokongwei goes a step further, describing Lee as "the world's greatest businessman." He adds: "Lee Kuan Yew is the greatest businessman, because he efficiently managed the Republic of Singapore like a successful giant corporation." Lee is an exceptional Asian leader who personifies excellent management, integrity and discipline.
Even John Chambers, boss of global giant Cisco Systems, says: "There are two equalizers in life: the Internet and education. Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew is a world leader who understands this and is using the power of the Internet to position Singapore for survival and success in the Internet economy."
Billionaire media tycoon Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. says, "More than 40 years ago, Lee Kuan Yew transformed what was a poor, decrepit colony into a shining, rich and modern metropolis ?all the time surrounded by hostile powers. With his brilliant, incisive intellect, he is one of the world's most outspoken and respected statesmen."
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher says: "In office, I read and analyzed his every speech. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda and expressing with unique clarity the issues of our times and the way we tackle them. He was never wrong." Success In Stamping Out Corruption
One of the remarkable successes of Lee Kuan Yew's management of Singapore is his making his nation the least corrupt in Asia, by institutionalizing "clean, no-money elections" and recruiting the best people into government. He says: "They must be paid a wage commensurate with what men of their ability and integrity are earning for managing a big corporation or successful legal or other professional practice. They have to manage a big corporation or successful legal or other professional practice. They have to manage a Singapore economy that yielded an annual growth rate of eight to nine percent in the last two decades, giving its citizens a per capita income that the World Bank rated in 1995 as ninth highest in the world." He debunked what Western liberals claimed about a free unfettered press exposing corruption, pointing out that the freewheeling press of India, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Japan have not stopped pervasive corruption.
One way Lee Kuan Yew cleaned up Singapore was by shaming corrupt officials. In fact, one of his cabinet ministers took his own life due to "loss of face" from corruption charges. "We had established a climate of opinion which looked upon corruption in public office as a threat to society." Lee laments that in much of Asia, corruption has become a way of life for government officials. He said: "The higher they are, the bigger their homes and more numerous their wives or mistresses, all bedecked in jewelry appropriate to the power and position of their men." Another method Lee used to stamp out corruption ?in 1960, his government allowed the courts to treat proof that an accused was living beyond his means or had property his income could not explain as corroborating evidence that the accused had accepted or obtained a bribe," Lee explains. Surviving Malaysian Expulsion, Accounts Of World Leaders
On a recent visit to Singapore, I called the office of Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew who was then in America. I had requested the statesman to autograph my copy of his latest 778-page memoir entitled From Third Word to First, The Singapore Story: 1965-2000. His secretary explained that Lee's autograph is worth 10,000 Singapore dollars for each signed book, and that the proceeds would be donated to charities. Even in such a seemingly minor detail as the cost of an autographed book, Lee had a specific plan which reflected his pragmatic business-like ways, his efficiency and his public service.
The memoir is an eloquent chronicle of Lee Kuan Yew's extensive experiences in statecraft, politics and international diplomacy. In 1965, when the Muslim majority Malaysia expelled Singapore and forced it to exist as a city-state with no natural resources or army, few people gave it much chance of survival. The world has many tiny states which have languished in obscurity, with even resource-rich small stakes like Nauru mired in problems. In 1965, the Sydney Morning Herald said: "An independent Singapore was not regarded as viable three years ago. Nothing in the current situation suggests that it is more viable today." The Sunday Times of Britain said in 1965 also predicted the eventual collapse of Singapore without British aid. Today, after decades of good governance and struggle, Singapore is a thriving nation with the world's fourth highest per capita income.
In this latest book, Lee fearlessly expresses his ideas, seeking "to be correct, not politically correct." He is unapologetic for his aggressive responses to his political opponents, his often unorthodox views on Western-style democratic systems, the Western concepts of human rights. Lee also recounts his impressions of nations, leaders and historic events as diverse as Indonesia from Suharto to President Wahid, Thailand, the Sultan of Brunei, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, British leaders, Japan, America to Taiwan, Hong Kong and others. He advised Wahid: "I said if he expected his ministers to be honest, they had to be paid so that they could live up to their status without corruption." In acerbic Lee Kuan Yew style, he describes Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, China's poetry-quoting Jiang Zemin, the late Mao Zedong (whom he likened to first Chinese emperor Qinshihuang), the incorruptible Zhu Rongji to the bold reformer Deng Xiaoping (whom he remembers as "a five-footer but a giant among men"). Impressions Of Marcos, Cory And Philippine Problems
Among the most interesting parts of the book were Lee Kuan Yew's references to the Philippines and his sadness that our talented nation could suffer so many socio-political and economic troubles. An anecdote recounts the 1985 official trip to Washington, DC where State Secretary George Shultz asked Lee to convince President Ronald Reagan that his old friend Ferdinand Marcos was then the problem of the Philippines, not the solution. During the EDSA uprising the following year 1986, when the US government asked Lee's opinions, he said America should not accept a fraudulent election, and put pressure on Marcos to call new elections. In those days, Lee feared a prolonged crisis might cause bloodshed and chaos, he worried that Marcos might fight it out if he had no place to go, so he invited Marcos to take political asylum in Singapore. Instead of accepting Lee's offer, Marcos accepted Reagan's offer of asylum in Hawaii, where he later encountered many lawsuits. When Marcos sent a message to Lee wanting to flee to Singapore, it was already too late and President Aquino objected.
Lee Kuan Yew is blunt and honest in his assessments of our leaders. He says that Imelda "had a penchant for luxury and opulence. When they (Marcos and Imelda) visited Singapore... they came in style in two DC-8s, his and hers." On Corazon C. Aquino, Lee says: "I had hopes that this honest, god-fearing woman would help regain confidence for the Philippines and get the country back on track... She was a sincere, devout Catholic." He had the impression that President Aquino believed that democracy would solve the country's economic and social problems. The Aquino government created a Constitution that was once again inspired by the American model. Lee asked the rhetorical question: Is there no incompatibility between the American-type separation of powers with the culture and habits of the Filipino people that had caused so much problems for all past presidents? Lee got the impression from our leaders that there was none.
There are three things which Lee believes have hampered Philippine progress. First, the traditional power elite who have a detached attitude towards the sufferings of the masses, similar to the mestizo hacienderos of other former Spanish colonies in Latin America. Another obstacle to progress is overpopulation due to the Catholic Church opposition to birth control, which aggravates the poverty crisis. A third obstacle to progress is what Lee describes as "a soft, forgiving culture." His example of this is the case of the Marcoses, who had been accused of pillaging the nation for 20 years, but they are now back. Lee is even puzzled that the late General Fabian Ver was given by the Estrada government military honors at his burial.
This Singaporean statesman laments that many political and other troubles have hampered Philippine economic progress. He writes: "This was a pity because they had so many able people, educated in the Philippines and the US. Their workers were English-speaking, at least in Manila. There was no reason why the Philippines should not have been one of the more successful ASEAN countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the most developed, because America had been generous in rehabilitating the country after the war... Some Filipinos write and speak with passion. If they could get their elite to share their sentiments, what could they not have achieved?"
Friday, September 28, 2007
Sunday, September 23, 2007
The Singapore Story 1998 Times Asia - Part 5
ASIA
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
One day, after a tutorial on constitutional law [at the London School of Economics], I approached the lecturer, Glanville L. Williams. I had seen from the lse calendar that he was from St. John's College, Cambridge, where he had taken a Ph.D. I asked him about Cambridge and the life there. He said it was a small town whose existence centered on the university, very different from London. The pace of life was more leisurely. Students and dons moved around on bicycles. It sounded attractive, and I decided to visit it.
I went up in late November 1946 and met a Raffles College student, Cecil Wong, who had got into Fitzwilliam House, a non-collegiate body for poorer students where the fees were much lower. Cecil took me to see the censor of Fitzwilliam, W.S. Thatcher, who was the equivalent of the master of a college. He took a liking to me and offered to take me in that same academic year when the Lent term started in early January 1947.
Cambridge was a great relief after London. In the immediate post-war years it was a blissfully quiet provincial market town. There was little traffic--many bicycles, but only a few private cars and some buses and trucks. Most of the dons, the fellows of colleges, tutors, lecturers and professors, and even the censor of Fitzwilliam rode bicycles. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle for £8 and cycled everywhere, even in the rain.
For exercise, I decided to join the Boat Club. I had first to practice, not by going out on the boat, but by "tubbing" on the river bank: sitting in a stationary tub and being instructed how to hold the oar, how to stretch myself and pull it back, where to put my feet. After two practices a week for three weeks, I made it to a boat. On the afternoon of my second scheduled outing , a snowstorm broke and I assumed the practice was cancelled. I was severely reproached. Seven others and the cox had turned up but could not take the rowing eight out because I was missing. I decided that the English were mad and left the Boat Club.
At the end of June, Choo wrote that she had taken a Class I diploma. Toward the end of July came the best news of all, a cable from Choo that she had been awarded the Queen's scholarship [for study in England]. But the Colonial Office could find no place for her in any university for the academic year beginning October 1947. She would have to wait until 1948. Stirred to action, I puzzled over how to get her into Cambridge.
I wrote and asked to see Miss Butler, the mistress of Girton [a Cambridge women's college]. She was willing to see me, and I turned up at the appointed time. I told her that my friend, Miss Kwa, was a very bright girl, brighter than I was, and that she had come top of the list, ahead of me in Raffles College on many occasions. Miss Butler was amused at this young Chinese boy talking in glowing terms of his lady friend being a better student than he was, and intrigued by the idea that perhaps the girl was exceptional. That same day I cabled Choo: "Girton accepts. Official correspondence following. Get cracking."
She boarded a troopship in Singapore in late August. I was waiting impatiently at the docks when she finally arrived in Liverpool in early October and was overjoyed to see her after a long year of separation. We went off at once to London by train, and after five days there we went on to Cambridge.
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. 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.
Meanwhile, Choo and I discussed our life in Britain with an eye to the future. We decided that it would be best if we got married quietly in December during the Christmas vacation and kept it a secret. Choo's parents would have been most upset had they been asked; Girton College might not have approved; and the Queen's scholarship authorities might have raised difficulties. We were already mature, in our mid-20s, and we had made up our minds. Unaware of our true motive, a friend recommended an inn at Stratford-on-Avon as a place to spend Christmas and to visit the renowned Shakespeare theater. Once we arrived, we notified the local Registrar of Marriages of our intention, and after two weeks of residence were duly married. On the way to Stratford-on-Avon we had stopped in London, where I bought Choo a platinum wedding ring from a jeweler in Regent Street. But when we went back to Cambridge, she wore the ring on a chain around her neck.
We took our final law examinations in May 1949, and when the results came out in June, I was satisfied. I had made a First and won the only star for Distinction on the final Law Tripos II honors list. Choo also made a First, and we cabled the good news to our parents. It was a good cachet for the next stage of my life.
I was happy at the prospect of going home, but looked back on my four years in England with satisfaction and some pleasure. 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.
Choo and I sailed home on a Dutch liner, the Willem Ruys. It was the best ship plying between Southampton and Singapore--new, air-conditioned, with excellent Indonesian and Dutch food, and wonderful service provided by literally hundreds of djongos, or Javanese waiters, dressed in native costume. It was a farewell fling. We traveled first class in adjoining cabins, and had a wonderful time--except when I got seasick in the Bay of Biscay and again on the Arabian Sea, and was reduced to a diet of dry toast and dried beef. Otherwise, it was a memorable journey.
We reached Singapore on 1 August. It was good to be home. I knew I was entering a different phase of my life. I was quickly reminded of its hazards. Although we were traveling first class, the immigration officer, a Mr. Fox who came on board wearing a natty bow tie, made sure that I knew my place. He kept Choo and me waiting to the very last. Then he looked through Choo's passport and mine and said enigmatically, "I suppose we will hear more about you, Mr. Lee." I glared at him and ignored his remark. He intended to intimidate, and I was not going to be intimidated.
While Mr. Fox kept me waiting in the first class lounge of the Willem Ruys, I popped out on deck to wave to my family--Father, Mother, Fred, Monica and Suan--on the quay with some friends. Choo's family was also waiting for her, but when we disembarked, we parted company. She went back with her parents to Pasir Panjang, I to Oxley Road. We parted as friends, not giving away the secret of our marriage in Britain.
Excerpted from The Singapore Story by Lee Kuan Yew, published by Times Editions, Singapore (680 pages). 1998 Lee Kuan Yew
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
One day, after a tutorial on constitutional law [at the London School of Economics], I approached the lecturer, Glanville L. Williams. I had seen from the lse calendar that he was from St. John's College, Cambridge, where he had taken a Ph.D. I asked him about Cambridge and the life there. He said it was a small town whose existence centered on the university, very different from London. The pace of life was more leisurely. Students and dons moved around on bicycles. It sounded attractive, and I decided to visit it.
I went up in late November 1946 and met a Raffles College student, Cecil Wong, who had got into Fitzwilliam House, a non-collegiate body for poorer students where the fees were much lower. Cecil took me to see the censor of Fitzwilliam, W.S. Thatcher, who was the equivalent of the master of a college. He took a liking to me and offered to take me in that same academic year when the Lent term started in early January 1947.
Cambridge was a great relief after London. In the immediate post-war years it was a blissfully quiet provincial market town. There was little traffic--many bicycles, but only a few private cars and some buses and trucks. Most of the dons, the fellows of colleges, tutors, lecturers and professors, and even the censor of Fitzwilliam rode bicycles. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle for £8 and cycled everywhere, even in the rain.
For exercise, I decided to join the Boat Club. I had first to practice, not by going out on the boat, but by "tubbing" on the river bank: sitting in a stationary tub and being instructed how to hold the oar, how to stretch myself and pull it back, where to put my feet. After two practices a week for three weeks, I made it to a boat. On the afternoon of my second scheduled outing , a snowstorm broke and I assumed the practice was cancelled. I was severely reproached. Seven others and the cox had turned up but could not take the rowing eight out because I was missing. I decided that the English were mad and left the Boat Club.
At the end of June, Choo wrote that she had taken a Class I diploma. Toward the end of July came the best news of all, a cable from Choo that she had been awarded the Queen's scholarship [for study in England]. But the Colonial Office could find no place for her in any university for the academic year beginning October 1947. She would have to wait until 1948. Stirred to action, I puzzled over how to get her into Cambridge.
I wrote and asked to see Miss Butler, the mistress of Girton [a Cambridge women's college]. She was willing to see me, and I turned up at the appointed time. I told her that my friend, Miss Kwa, was a very bright girl, brighter than I was, and that she had come top of the list, ahead of me in Raffles College on many occasions. Miss Butler was amused at this young Chinese boy talking in glowing terms of his lady friend being a better student than he was, and intrigued by the idea that perhaps the girl was exceptional. That same day I cabled Choo: "Girton accepts. Official correspondence following. Get cracking."
She boarded a troopship in Singapore in late August. I was waiting impatiently at the docks when she finally arrived in Liverpool in early October and was overjoyed to see her after a long year of separation. We went off at once to London by train, and after five days there we went on to Cambridge.
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. 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.
Meanwhile, Choo and I discussed our life in Britain with an eye to the future. We decided that it would be best if we got married quietly in December during the Christmas vacation and kept it a secret. Choo's parents would have been most upset had they been asked; Girton College might not have approved; and the Queen's scholarship authorities might have raised difficulties. We were already mature, in our mid-20s, and we had made up our minds. Unaware of our true motive, a friend recommended an inn at Stratford-on-Avon as a place to spend Christmas and to visit the renowned Shakespeare theater. Once we arrived, we notified the local Registrar of Marriages of our intention, and after two weeks of residence were duly married. On the way to Stratford-on-Avon we had stopped in London, where I bought Choo a platinum wedding ring from a jeweler in Regent Street. But when we went back to Cambridge, she wore the ring on a chain around her neck.
We took our final law examinations in May 1949, and when the results came out in June, I was satisfied. I had made a First and won the only star for Distinction on the final Law Tripos II honors list. Choo also made a First, and we cabled the good news to our parents. It was a good cachet for the next stage of my life.
I was happy at the prospect of going home, but looked back on my four years in England with satisfaction and some pleasure. 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.
Choo and I sailed home on a Dutch liner, the Willem Ruys. It was the best ship plying between Southampton and Singapore--new, air-conditioned, with excellent Indonesian and Dutch food, and wonderful service provided by literally hundreds of djongos, or Javanese waiters, dressed in native costume. It was a farewell fling. We traveled first class in adjoining cabins, and had a wonderful time--except when I got seasick in the Bay of Biscay and again on the Arabian Sea, and was reduced to a diet of dry toast and dried beef. Otherwise, it was a memorable journey.
We reached Singapore on 1 August. It was good to be home. I knew I was entering a different phase of my life. I was quickly reminded of its hazards. Although we were traveling first class, the immigration officer, a Mr. Fox who came on board wearing a natty bow tie, made sure that I knew my place. He kept Choo and me waiting to the very last. Then he looked through Choo's passport and mine and said enigmatically, "I suppose we will hear more about you, Mr. Lee." I glared at him and ignored his remark. He intended to intimidate, and I was not going to be intimidated.
While Mr. Fox kept me waiting in the first class lounge of the Willem Ruys, I popped out on deck to wave to my family--Father, Mother, Fred, Monica and Suan--on the quay with some friends. Choo's family was also waiting for her, but when we disembarked, we parted company. She went back with her parents to Pasir Panjang, I to Oxley Road. We parted as friends, not giving away the secret of our marriage in Britain.
Excerpted from The Singapore Story by Lee Kuan Yew, published by Times Editions, Singapore (680 pages). 1998 Lee Kuan Yew
The Singapore Story 1998 Times Asia - Part 4
ASIA
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
On 15 August, the Japanese Emperor broadcast to his subjects and announced the surrender. We heard this almost immediately, because people had become bold and many were listening to Allied radio broadcasts, especially the BBC. For three weeks after the Emperor's broadcast, there were no signs of the British arriving. It was an unnatural situation. Unlike the British, the Japanese troops had not been defeated and demoralized 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 their 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 officer's messes, for several could not accept the surrender and preferred to commit hara-kiri, either Japanese-style with a dagger or, less painfully, with a revolver. 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 three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life. They gave me vivid insights into the behavior of human beings and human societies. My appreciation of governments, my understanding of power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this experience. 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.
Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare. People could leave their front doors open at night. Every household had a head, and every group of 10 households had its head, and they were supposed to patrol their area from dusk till sunrise. But it was a mere formality. They carried only sticks and there were no offenses to report--the penalties were too heavy. As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime.
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 long-term 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.
In the confused interregnum between the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945 and the establishment of effective British control of the island toward the end of September, 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 back lanes around our two homes in Victoria Street and China Building. I heard the sound of blows and screams as they were knifed and killed.
On Wednesday, 12 September 1945, at about 10:30 in the morning, I walked to City Hall, where the surrender ceremony would take place. I saw a group of seven high-ranking Japanese officers arrive from High Street, accompanied by British military police wearing their red caps and armbands. The crowd hooted, whistled and jeered but the Japanese were impassive and dignified, looking straight ahead. Some 45 minutes later, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British commander-in-chief, South East Asia Command, appeared, wearing his white naval uniform. He raised his naval cap high with his right hand and gave three cheers to the troops that formed the cordon in front of the steps. He loved uniforms, parades and ceremonies.
These were moments of great exhilaration. The Japanese occupation nightmare was over and people thought the good times were about to return. The signs were favorable. The troops were generous with their cigarettes--Players Navy Cut in paper packets, unobtainable for the last three years. Good quality beer, Johnnie Walker whisky and Gordon's dry gin found their way into the market, and we believed that soon there would be plenty of rice, fruit, vegetables, meat and canned foods.
By early 1946, however, people realized that there was to be no return to the old peaceful, stable, free-and-easy Singapore. The city was packed with troops in uniform. They filled the newly opened cafes, bars and cabarets. The pre-war colonial business houses could not restart immediately, for their British employees had died or were recuperating from internment. Ship arrivals were infrequent, and goods were scarce in Britain itself. It looked as if would be many years before the pre-war flow of commodities resumed. It was a world in turmoil where the hucksters flourished. Much of the day-to-day business was still done on the black--now the free--market.
All this while, I had also been preoccupied over what I was to do about my uncompleted education and my growing attachment to Choo. I discussed the matter with my mother. We decided that, with her savings and jewelry, my earnings from the black market and my contract work, the family could pay for my law studies in Britain.
On New Year's Eve, I took Choo to a party for young people at Mandalay Villa in Amber Road. Just before the party broke up, I led her out into the garden facing the sea. I told her that I no longer planned to return to Raffles College but would go to England to read law. I asked her whether she would wait for me until I came back three years later after being called to the Bar. Choo asked if I knew she was two-and-a-half 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 my parents. It would have been too difficult to get them to agree to such a long commitment.
The Britannic was a 65,000-ton cunard liner that sailed across the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York before the war. No ship as large or as fast did the Southampton to Singapore run. It was packed with troops on their way home for demobilization. There were some 40 Asiatics on board, most of them Chinese, sleeping twice as many to a cabin as would have been normal for paying passengers. I was glad to be one of them.
I had no law textbooks with me to prepare myself for my studies, so I spent my time playing poker with some of the Hong Kong students. It was a relatively innocent pastime. I was shocked to see the unabashed promiscuity of some 40 or 50 servicewomen, non-commissioned officers and other ranks, who flirted with the officers. One night, a Hong Kong student, his eyes popping out of his head, told me they were unashamedly making love on the lifeboat deck. I was curious and went up to see for myself. What a sight it was! The deck was a hive of activity, with couples locked in passionate embraces scattered all over it. Some were a little less indelicate. They untied the canvas covers of the lifeboats to get inside them for a little privacy. But to see dozens of men and women openly engaging in sex contrasted sharply with my memory of the Japanese soldiers queuing up outside the "comfort house" at Cairnhill Road. "French letters," now called condoms, littered the deck.
[In London] I was suffering from culture shock before the phrase was coined. The climate, the clothes, the food, the people, the habits, the manners, 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.
For a large bedsitter, I paid the princely sum of £6 a week, a big amount for someone who had stopped earning. Fortunately, it included breakfast. There was a gas fire and a retractable gas ring in the room, and I had to put shillings into a meter to light the fire and cook for myself. I was desperately unhappy about food. It was rationed, and the restaurants where I could eat without coupons were expensive. I had disastrous experiences with boiling milk, which spilt over, and frying bacon and steaks that filled the room with powerful smells. The odors refused to go away for hours even though, in spite of the cold, I opened the sash window and the door to create a through draft. They clung to the bedclothes and the curtains. It was awful.
I was thoroughly unhappy 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.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
On 15 August, the Japanese Emperor broadcast to his subjects and announced the surrender. We heard this almost immediately, because people had become bold and many were listening to Allied radio broadcasts, especially the BBC. For three weeks after the Emperor's broadcast, there were no signs of the British arriving. It was an unnatural situation. Unlike the British, the Japanese troops had not been defeated and demoralized 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 their 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 officer's messes, for several could not accept the surrender and preferred to commit hara-kiri, either Japanese-style with a dagger or, less painfully, with a revolver. 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 three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life. They gave me vivid insights into the behavior of human beings and human societies. My appreciation of governments, my understanding of power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this experience. 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.
Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare. People could leave their front doors open at night. Every household had a head, and every group of 10 households had its head, and they were supposed to patrol their area from dusk till sunrise. But it was a mere formality. They carried only sticks and there were no offenses to report--the penalties were too heavy. As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime.
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 long-term 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.
In the confused interregnum between the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945 and the establishment of effective British control of the island toward the end of September, 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 back lanes around our two homes in Victoria Street and China Building. I heard the sound of blows and screams as they were knifed and killed.
On Wednesday, 12 September 1945, at about 10:30 in the morning, I walked to City Hall, where the surrender ceremony would take place. I saw a group of seven high-ranking Japanese officers arrive from High Street, accompanied by British military police wearing their red caps and armbands. The crowd hooted, whistled and jeered but the Japanese were impassive and dignified, looking straight ahead. Some 45 minutes later, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British commander-in-chief, South East Asia Command, appeared, wearing his white naval uniform. He raised his naval cap high with his right hand and gave three cheers to the troops that formed the cordon in front of the steps. He loved uniforms, parades and ceremonies.
These were moments of great exhilaration. The Japanese occupation nightmare was over and people thought the good times were about to return. The signs were favorable. The troops were generous with their cigarettes--Players Navy Cut in paper packets, unobtainable for the last three years. Good quality beer, Johnnie Walker whisky and Gordon's dry gin found their way into the market, and we believed that soon there would be plenty of rice, fruit, vegetables, meat and canned foods.
By early 1946, however, people realized that there was to be no return to the old peaceful, stable, free-and-easy Singapore. The city was packed with troops in uniform. They filled the newly opened cafes, bars and cabarets. The pre-war colonial business houses could not restart immediately, for their British employees had died or were recuperating from internment. Ship arrivals were infrequent, and goods were scarce in Britain itself. It looked as if would be many years before the pre-war flow of commodities resumed. It was a world in turmoil where the hucksters flourished. Much of the day-to-day business was still done on the black--now the free--market.
All this while, I had also been preoccupied over what I was to do about my uncompleted education and my growing attachment to Choo. I discussed the matter with my mother. We decided that, with her savings and jewelry, my earnings from the black market and my contract work, the family could pay for my law studies in Britain.
On New Year's Eve, I took Choo to a party for young people at Mandalay Villa in Amber Road. Just before the party broke up, I led her out into the garden facing the sea. I told her that I no longer planned to return to Raffles College but would go to England to read law. I asked her whether she would wait for me until I came back three years later after being called to the Bar. Choo asked if I knew she was two-and-a-half 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 my parents. It would have been too difficult to get them to agree to such a long commitment.
The Britannic was a 65,000-ton cunard liner that sailed across the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York before the war. No ship as large or as fast did the Southampton to Singapore run. It was packed with troops on their way home for demobilization. There were some 40 Asiatics on board, most of them Chinese, sleeping twice as many to a cabin as would have been normal for paying passengers. I was glad to be one of them.
I had no law textbooks with me to prepare myself for my studies, so I spent my time playing poker with some of the Hong Kong students. It was a relatively innocent pastime. I was shocked to see the unabashed promiscuity of some 40 or 50 servicewomen, non-commissioned officers and other ranks, who flirted with the officers. One night, a Hong Kong student, his eyes popping out of his head, told me they were unashamedly making love on the lifeboat deck. I was curious and went up to see for myself. What a sight it was! The deck was a hive of activity, with couples locked in passionate embraces scattered all over it. Some were a little less indelicate. They untied the canvas covers of the lifeboats to get inside them for a little privacy. But to see dozens of men and women openly engaging in sex contrasted sharply with my memory of the Japanese soldiers queuing up outside the "comfort house" at Cairnhill Road. "French letters," now called condoms, littered the deck.
[In London] I was suffering from culture shock before the phrase was coined. The climate, the clothes, the food, the people, the habits, the manners, 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.
For a large bedsitter, I paid the princely sum of £6 a week, a big amount for someone who had stopped earning. Fortunately, it included breakfast. There was a gas fire and a retractable gas ring in the room, and I had to put shillings into a meter to light the fire and cook for myself. I was desperately unhappy about food. It was rationed, and the restaurants where I could eat without coupons were expensive. I had disastrous experiences with boiling milk, which spilt over, and frying bacon and steaks that filled the room with powerful smells. The odors refused to go away for hours even though, in spite of the cold, I opened the sash window and the door to create a through draft. They clung to the bedclothes and the curtains. It was awful.
I was thoroughly unhappy 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.
The Singapore Story 1998 Times Asia - Part 3
ASIA
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
Day-to-day life had to go on under the Japanese occupation. At first everybody felt lost. My father had no work, I had no college, my three brothers and sister had no school. There was little social activity. We felt danger all around us. Knowing somebody in authority, whether a Japanese or a Taiwanese interpreter with links to the Japanese, was very important and could be a life-saver. His note with his signature and seal on it certified that you were a decent citizen and that he vouched for your good character. This was supposed to be valuable when you were stopped and checked by sentries. But it was safest to stay at home and avoid contact and conflict with authority.
One of my first outings was into town. I walked two miles to the second-hand bookshops in Bras Basah Road that specialized in school textbooks. On the way, I saw a crowd near the main entrance to Cathay cinema. Joining the crowd, I saw the head of a Chinese man placed on a small board stuck on a pole, on the side of which was a notice in Chinese characters. 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.
Late in 1943 I read an advertisement in the Syonan Shimbun inserted by the Japanese information or propaganda department called the Hodobu, which was located in Cathay Building. It wanted English-language editors. I turned up to be interviewed by an American-born Japanese, George Takemura, a tall, lean, fair-skinned man who spoke English with an American accent.
My job was to run through the cables of Allied news agencies: Reuters, UP, AP, Central News Agency of China and TASS. These cables, sent out in Morse code, had been intercepted by Malay radio operators. Radio signals were not clear in the later afternoons and early evenings, and because reception was poor, many words were garbled or lost. I had to decipher them and fill in the missing bits, guided by the context, as in a word puzzle. The cables then had to be collated under the various battle fronts and sent from the top floor of Cathay Building to the floor below, where they would be revamped for broadcasting.
It was a strange life. My work would begin at 7 p.m. Tokyo time, which was 5:30 p.m. Singapore time and still daylight. Radio reception was poor until about midnight Tokyo time. So the first shift from 7 p.m. to 12 a.m. was hard work, but one got home early to sleep. The period 12 a.m. to 9 am was broken into two shifts, with a two- to three-hour break in between. Reception was better, and there was less puzzling over missing words or parts of words, but it meant sleeping at awkward hours.
From the end of 1943, food became scarcer and scarcer. Reduced to eating old, moldy, 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, like young shoots of sweet potato and tapioca plants cooked in coconut milk. 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.
Meanwhile, inflation had been increasing month by month, and by mid-1944 it was no longer possible to live on my salary. But there were better and easier pickings to be had as a broker on the black market. The brokers operated mainly in High Street or Chulia Street, off Raffles Place. I joined them in 1944, and learned how to hoard items, especially small pieces of jewelry going cheap. I would buy them, hold them for a few weeks, and then sell them as prices inevitably went up. It was easy to make money if one had the right connections.
The key to survival was improvisation. One business I started changed the course of my life. While brokering on the black market, I met Yong Nyuk Lin, a Raffles College science graduate. I had been asked by Basrai Brothers, Indian stationers in Chulia Street, if I could get them stationery gum, which was in short supply--there was little left from pre-war stock. Could I perhaps make some myself? I asked Nyuk Lin whether he could make gum. He said he could, using tapioca flour and carbolic acid. So I financed his experiments.
Nyuk Lin's method was to take a big cylindrical pot, fill it with tapioca flour, and place the pot in a big wok of boiling oil. He used palm oil, which was freely available and cheap. He kept the oil at a constant high temperature to heat the tapioca flour, which needed to be stirred all the while until it became a deep golden brown dextrine. It looked and smelled like beautiful caramel. He added water to the "caramel," which dissolved it into mucilage or gum, and finally carbolic acid as preservative to prevent mold from setting in. The gum was poured into empty Scotts Emulsion bottles, which I discovered were plentiful and cheap. I marketed the gum under the name "Stikfas" and had an attractive label designed by an artistic friend with the word in light brown brushwork against a white background.
The gum turned a decent profit, and we made it in two centers. One was my home, with my mother and sister helping; the other was Nyuk Lin's home, where he was helped by his wife and his wife's younger sister, Kwa Geok Choo, the only person who had done better than me at Raffles College. She was at home, at a loose end, doing domestic chores as there were no maids. Making gum was one chore that gave her pin money, and my visits to check on production led to a friendship that developed over the months.
The gum-making lasted for some six to seven months until late 1944. By then, the war was going badly for the Japanese. Few merchant ships came through, and trade was at a standstill; business dwindled, and offices did not need gum. I discontinued gum-making, but continued to visit Choo at her Tiong Bahru home to chat and keep up the friendship.
I felt certain the British would soon push their way down the Malayan peninsula and feared that the recapture of Singapore would mean street-to-street and house-to-house fighting to the bitter end, with enormous civilian casualties. 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 reconnoiter Penang and the Cameron Highlands, to find out which was the safer place.
Although I saw little military activity as I wandered around Penang, I ruled it out. It would be a logical stepping stone for the British forces on their way down to Singapore. There would be street fighting, building by building. So I went on to the Cameron Highlands where Maurice Baker, my friend at Raffles College, had his home in Ringlet village at 3,200 feet. He and some friends were living off their savings, planting vegetables and root crops. 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 bought a basket of beautiful vegetables unobtainable in Singapore, and spent a day-and-a-half guarding them on the train. Once back, I discussed the next move with my mother. We decided it would be best to move to the Cameron Highlands. I gave one month's notice to the Hodobu.
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 for the coming interrogation. From that moment, I sensed that I was being followed. Day and night, a team tailed me. I went through all the possible reasons in my mind and could only conclude that someone had told the Kempeitai I was pro-British and had been leaking news that the war was going badly for the Japanese, and that was why I was leaving. At least two men at any one time would be outside the shophouse in Victoria Street where we stayed after moving from Norfolk Road.
I endured this cat-and-mouse game for some eight weeks. At times, in the quiet of the early morning, at 2 or 3 a.m., a car would pass by on Victoria Street and stop near its junction with Bras Basah Road. It is difficult to describe the cold fear that seized me at the thought that they had come for me. Like most, I had heard of the horrors of the torture inflicted by the Kempeitai. But one day, two months after it began, the surveillance ceased. It was an unnerving experience.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
Day-to-day life had to go on under the Japanese occupation. At first everybody felt lost. My father had no work, I had no college, my three brothers and sister had no school. There was little social activity. We felt danger all around us. Knowing somebody in authority, whether a Japanese or a Taiwanese interpreter with links to the Japanese, was very important and could be a life-saver. His note with his signature and seal on it certified that you were a decent citizen and that he vouched for your good character. This was supposed to be valuable when you were stopped and checked by sentries. But it was safest to stay at home and avoid contact and conflict with authority.
One of my first outings was into town. I walked two miles to the second-hand bookshops in Bras Basah Road that specialized in school textbooks. On the way, I saw a crowd near the main entrance to Cathay cinema. Joining the crowd, I saw the head of a Chinese man placed on a small board stuck on a pole, on the side of which was a notice in Chinese characters. 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.
Late in 1943 I read an advertisement in the Syonan Shimbun inserted by the Japanese information or propaganda department called the Hodobu, which was located in Cathay Building. It wanted English-language editors. I turned up to be interviewed by an American-born Japanese, George Takemura, a tall, lean, fair-skinned man who spoke English with an American accent.
My job was to run through the cables of Allied news agencies: Reuters, UP, AP, Central News Agency of China and TASS. These cables, sent out in Morse code, had been intercepted by Malay radio operators. Radio signals were not clear in the later afternoons and early evenings, and because reception was poor, many words were garbled or lost. I had to decipher them and fill in the missing bits, guided by the context, as in a word puzzle. The cables then had to be collated under the various battle fronts and sent from the top floor of Cathay Building to the floor below, where they would be revamped for broadcasting.
It was a strange life. My work would begin at 7 p.m. Tokyo time, which was 5:30 p.m. Singapore time and still daylight. Radio reception was poor until about midnight Tokyo time. So the first shift from 7 p.m. to 12 a.m. was hard work, but one got home early to sleep. The period 12 a.m. to 9 am was broken into two shifts, with a two- to three-hour break in between. Reception was better, and there was less puzzling over missing words or parts of words, but it meant sleeping at awkward hours.
From the end of 1943, food became scarcer and scarcer. Reduced to eating old, moldy, 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, like young shoots of sweet potato and tapioca plants cooked in coconut milk. 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.
Meanwhile, inflation had been increasing month by month, and by mid-1944 it was no longer possible to live on my salary. But there were better and easier pickings to be had as a broker on the black market. The brokers operated mainly in High Street or Chulia Street, off Raffles Place. I joined them in 1944, and learned how to hoard items, especially small pieces of jewelry going cheap. I would buy them, hold them for a few weeks, and then sell them as prices inevitably went up. It was easy to make money if one had the right connections.
The key to survival was improvisation. One business I started changed the course of my life. While brokering on the black market, I met Yong Nyuk Lin, a Raffles College science graduate. I had been asked by Basrai Brothers, Indian stationers in Chulia Street, if I could get them stationery gum, which was in short supply--there was little left from pre-war stock. Could I perhaps make some myself? I asked Nyuk Lin whether he could make gum. He said he could, using tapioca flour and carbolic acid. So I financed his experiments.
Nyuk Lin's method was to take a big cylindrical pot, fill it with tapioca flour, and place the pot in a big wok of boiling oil. He used palm oil, which was freely available and cheap. He kept the oil at a constant high temperature to heat the tapioca flour, which needed to be stirred all the while until it became a deep golden brown dextrine. It looked and smelled like beautiful caramel. He added water to the "caramel," which dissolved it into mucilage or gum, and finally carbolic acid as preservative to prevent mold from setting in. The gum was poured into empty Scotts Emulsion bottles, which I discovered were plentiful and cheap. I marketed the gum under the name "Stikfas" and had an attractive label designed by an artistic friend with the word in light brown brushwork against a white background.
The gum turned a decent profit, and we made it in two centers. One was my home, with my mother and sister helping; the other was Nyuk Lin's home, where he was helped by his wife and his wife's younger sister, Kwa Geok Choo, the only person who had done better than me at Raffles College. She was at home, at a loose end, doing domestic chores as there were no maids. Making gum was one chore that gave her pin money, and my visits to check on production led to a friendship that developed over the months.
The gum-making lasted for some six to seven months until late 1944. By then, the war was going badly for the Japanese. Few merchant ships came through, and trade was at a standstill; business dwindled, and offices did not need gum. I discontinued gum-making, but continued to visit Choo at her Tiong Bahru home to chat and keep up the friendship.
I felt certain the British would soon push their way down the Malayan peninsula and feared that the recapture of Singapore would mean street-to-street and house-to-house fighting to the bitter end, with enormous civilian casualties. 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 reconnoiter Penang and the Cameron Highlands, to find out which was the safer place.
Although I saw little military activity as I wandered around Penang, I ruled it out. It would be a logical stepping stone for the British forces on their way down to Singapore. There would be street fighting, building by building. So I went on to the Cameron Highlands where Maurice Baker, my friend at Raffles College, had his home in Ringlet village at 3,200 feet. He and some friends were living off their savings, planting vegetables and root crops. 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 bought a basket of beautiful vegetables unobtainable in Singapore, and spent a day-and-a-half guarding them on the train. Once back, I discussed the next move with my mother. We decided it would be best to move to the Cameron Highlands. I gave one month's notice to the Hodobu.
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 for the coming interrogation. From that moment, I sensed that I was being followed. Day and night, a team tailed me. I went through all the possible reasons in my mind and could only conclude that someone had told the Kempeitai I was pro-British and had been leaking news that the war was going badly for the Japanese, and that was why I was leaving. At least two men at any one time would be outside the shophouse in Victoria Street where we stayed after moving from Norfolk Road.
I endured this cat-and-mouse game for some eight weeks. At times, in the quiet of the early morning, at 2 or 3 a.m., a car would pass by on Victoria Street and stop near its junction with Bras Basah Road. It is difficult to describe the cold fear that seized me at the thought that they had come for me. Like most, I had heard of the horrors of the torture inflicted by the Kempeitai. But one day, two months after it began, the surveillance ceased. It was an unnerving experience.
The Singapore Story 1998 Times Asia - Part 2
ASIA
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
But the war did not go well. Soon stories came down from Malaya of the rout on the war front, the ease with which the Japanese were cutting through British lines and cycling through rubber estates down the peninsula, landing behind enemy lines by boat and sampan, forcing more retreats. By January the Japanese forces were nearing Johor, and their planes started to bomb Singapore in earnest, day and night. I picked up my first casualties one afternoon at a village in Bukit Timah. Several MAS units went there in Singapore Traction Company buses converted into ambulances. A bomb had fallen near the police station and there were several victims. It was a frightening sight, my first experience of the bleeding, the injured and the dead.
That same morning all British forces withdrew to the island from Johor. Next day, the papers carried photos of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the last to march across the Causeway, to the sound of Highland Laddie played on their bagpipes, although there were only two pipers remaining. It left me with a life-long impression of British coolness in the face of impending defeat. The Royal Engineers then blew open a gap in the Causeway on the Johor side. But they also blew up the pipeline carrying water from Johor to the island. The siege of Singapore had begun.
In the middle of January, the schools were closed. As the shelling got nearer to the city, my mother proposed that the whole family move to her father's house, which was farther out and so less likely to be hit. I supported the move but told her I would stay and look after the house in Norfolk Road while continuing to report for duty at the Raffles College MAS station. I would not be alone as Koh Teong Koo, our gardener, would stay at Norfolk Road to guard the house while I was on duty at the college. He was also the rickshaw puller who had taken my brothers and sister to and from school every day since 1937. We had built an air-raid shelter, a wooden structure dug into the ground and covered with earth, which my mother had stocked up with rice, salt, pepper, soya bean sauces, salt fish, tinned foods, condensed milk and all the things we might need for a long time. Money was not a problem because the Shell Co. had generously paid my father several months' salary when he was ordered to evacuate the oil depot at Batu Pahat.
The military took over the entire college on 10 February as British forces withdrew, and two days later the MAS unit had to disband. At first I stayed at home, but as the shelling got closer I joined my family at Telok Kurau. The following day we heard distant rifle shots, then some more, closer to us. There had been no sound of big guns, shells or bombs. Curious, I went out by the back gate to the lane abutting the kampong where I used to play with my friends, the fishermen's children. Before I had walked more than 20 yards along the earth track, I saw two figures in dun-colored uniforms, different from the greens and browns of the British forces. They were outlandish figures, small, squat men carrying long rifles with long bayonets. They exuded an awful stink, a smell I will never forget. It was the odor from the great unwashed after two months of fighting along jungle tracks and estate roads from Kota Bharu to Singapore.
A few seconds passed before I realized who they were. Japanese! An immense fear crept over me. But they were looking for enemy soldiers. Clearly I was not one, so they ignored me and pressed on. I dashed back to the house and told my family what I had seen. We closed all the doors and windows, though God knows what protection that could have given us. Rape and rapine were high among the fears that the Japanese forces inspired after their atrocities in China since 1937. But nothing of note happened the rest of that day and night. The British forces were retreating rapidly to the city center and not putting up much of a fight.
The news soon spread that the British had surrendered. The next day, some friends returning from the city reported that looting had broken out. British and other European houses were being stripped by their Malay drivers and gardeners. This aroused great anxiety in my family. What about 28 Norfolk Road, with all our food and other provisions that would now have to see us through for a very long time? With my mother's agreement, I took Teong Koo, the gardener, with me and walked back some eight miles from Telok Kurau to Norfolk Road. We made it in just over two hours. I saw Malays carrying furniture and other items out of the bigger houses along the way. The Chinese looters went for the goods in warehouses, less bulky and more valuable.
The Japanese conquerors also went for loot. In the first few days, anyone in the street with a fountain pen or a wristwatch would soon be relieved of it. Soldiers would go into houses either officially to search, or pretending to do so, but in fact to appropriate any small items that they could keep on their person. At first they also took the best of the bicycles, but they stopped that after a few weeks. They were in Singapore for only a short time before leaving for Java or some other island in the archipelago to do battle and to capture more territories. They could not take their beautiful bicycles with them.
My first encounter with a Japanese soldier took place when I tried to visit an aunt, my mother's younger sister, in Kampong Java Road, just across the Red Bridge over the Bukit Timah canal. As I approached the bridge, I saw a sentry pacing up and down it. Nearby was a group of four or five Japanese soldiers sitting around, probably the other members of his detail. I was sporting a broad-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Australian soldiers, many of which had been discarded in the days before the surrender. I had picked one up, thinking it would be useful during the hard times ahead to protect me from the sun.
As I passed this group of soldiers, I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. But they were not to be denied attention. One soldier barked "Kore, kore!" and beckoned to me. When I reached him, he thrust the bayonet on his rifle through the brim of my hat, knocking it off, slapped me roundly and motioned me to kneel. He then shoved his right boot against my chest and sent me sprawling on the road. As I got up, he signaled that I was to go back the way I had come. I had got off lightly. Many others who did not know the new rules of etiquette and did not bow to Japanese sentries at crossroads or bridges were made to kneel for hours in the sun, holding a heavy boulder over their heads until their arms gave way.
Later that same day a Japanese non-commissioned officer and several soldiers came into the house. They looked it over and, finding only Teong Koo and me, decided it would a suitable billet for a platoon. It was the beginning of a nightmare. I had been treated by Japanese dentists and their nurses at Bras Basah Road who were immaculately clean and tidy. So, too, were the Japanese salesmen and saleswomen at the 10-cent stores in Middle Road. I was unprepared for the nauseating stench of the unwashed clothes and bodies of these Japanese soldiers. They roamed all over the house and the compound. They looked for food, found the provisions my mother had stored, and consumed whatever they fancied, cooking in the compound over open fires. I had no language in which to communicate with them. They made their wishes known with signs and guttural noises. When I was slow in understanding what they wanted, I was cursed and frequently slapped. They were strange beings, unshaven and unkempt, speaking an ugly, aggressive language. They filled me with fear, and I slept fitfully. They left after three days of hell.
While this platoon was camping in the house, British, Indian and Australian forces were marched to captivity. The march started on 17 February 1942, and for two days and one night they tramped past the house and over the Red Bridge on their way to Changi. I sat on my veranda for hours at a time watching these men, my heart heavy as lead. Many looked dejected and despondent, perplexed that they had been beaten so decisively and so easily. The surrendered army was a mournful sight.
There were some who won my respect and admiration. Among them were the Highlanders whom I recognized by their Scottish caps. Even in defeat they held themselves erect and marched in time--"Left Right, Left Right, Left, Left!" shouted the sergeant major. And the Gurkhas were like the Highlanders. They too marched erect, unbroken and doughty in defeat. I secretly cheered them. They left a life-long impression on me. As a result, the Singapore government has employed a Gurkha company for its anti-riot police squad from the 1960s to this day.
Soon after the Japanese soldiers left my house, word went around that all Chinese had to go to a registration center at the Jalan Besar stadium for examination. I saw my neighbor and his family leave and decided it would be wiser for me to go also, for if I were later caught at home the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, would punish me. So I headed for Jalan Besar with Teong Koo. As it turned out, his cubicle in his coolie-keng, the dormitory he shared with other rickshaw pullers, was within the perimeter enclosed by barbed wire. Tens of thousands of Chinese families were packed into this small area. All exit points were manned by the Kempeitai.
After spending a night in Teong Koo's cubicle, I decided to check out through the exit point, but instead of allowing me to pass, the soldier on duty signaled me to join a group of young Chinese. I felt instinctively that this was ominous, so I asked for permission to return to the cubicle to collect my belongings. He gave it. I went back and lay low in Teong Koo's cubicle for another day and a half. Then I tried the same exit again. This time, for some inexplicable reason, I got through the checkpoint. I was given a "chop" on my left upper arm and on the front of my shirt with a rubber stamp. The kanji or Chinese character jian, meaning "examined," printed on me in indelible ink, was proof that I was cleared. I walked home with Teong Koo, greatly relieved.
I discovered later that those picked out at random at the checkpoint I had passed were taken to the grounds of Victoria School and detained until 22 February, when 40 to 50 lorries arrived to collect them. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were transported to a beach at Tanah Merah Besar, some 10 miles away on the east coast, near Changi Prison. There they were made to disembark, tied together and forced to walk toward the sea. As they did so, Japanese machine-gunners massacred them. Later, to make sure they were dead, each corpse was kicked, bayoneted and abused in other ways. There was no attempt to bury the bodies, which decomposed as they were washed up and down the shore.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
But the war did not go well. Soon stories came down from Malaya of the rout on the war front, the ease with which the Japanese were cutting through British lines and cycling through rubber estates down the peninsula, landing behind enemy lines by boat and sampan, forcing more retreats. By January the Japanese forces were nearing Johor, and their planes started to bomb Singapore in earnest, day and night. I picked up my first casualties one afternoon at a village in Bukit Timah. Several MAS units went there in Singapore Traction Company buses converted into ambulances. A bomb had fallen near the police station and there were several victims. It was a frightening sight, my first experience of the bleeding, the injured and the dead.
That same morning all British forces withdrew to the island from Johor. Next day, the papers carried photos of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the last to march across the Causeway, to the sound of Highland Laddie played on their bagpipes, although there were only two pipers remaining. It left me with a life-long impression of British coolness in the face of impending defeat. The Royal Engineers then blew open a gap in the Causeway on the Johor side. But they also blew up the pipeline carrying water from Johor to the island. The siege of Singapore had begun.
In the middle of January, the schools were closed. As the shelling got nearer to the city, my mother proposed that the whole family move to her father's house, which was farther out and so less likely to be hit. I supported the move but told her I would stay and look after the house in Norfolk Road while continuing to report for duty at the Raffles College MAS station. I would not be alone as Koh Teong Koo, our gardener, would stay at Norfolk Road to guard the house while I was on duty at the college. He was also the rickshaw puller who had taken my brothers and sister to and from school every day since 1937. We had built an air-raid shelter, a wooden structure dug into the ground and covered with earth, which my mother had stocked up with rice, salt, pepper, soya bean sauces, salt fish, tinned foods, condensed milk and all the things we might need for a long time. Money was not a problem because the Shell Co. had generously paid my father several months' salary when he was ordered to evacuate the oil depot at Batu Pahat.
The military took over the entire college on 10 February as British forces withdrew, and two days later the MAS unit had to disband. At first I stayed at home, but as the shelling got closer I joined my family at Telok Kurau. The following day we heard distant rifle shots, then some more, closer to us. There had been no sound of big guns, shells or bombs. Curious, I went out by the back gate to the lane abutting the kampong where I used to play with my friends, the fishermen's children. Before I had walked more than 20 yards along the earth track, I saw two figures in dun-colored uniforms, different from the greens and browns of the British forces. They were outlandish figures, small, squat men carrying long rifles with long bayonets. They exuded an awful stink, a smell I will never forget. It was the odor from the great unwashed after two months of fighting along jungle tracks and estate roads from Kota Bharu to Singapore.
A few seconds passed before I realized who they were. Japanese! An immense fear crept over me. But they were looking for enemy soldiers. Clearly I was not one, so they ignored me and pressed on. I dashed back to the house and told my family what I had seen. We closed all the doors and windows, though God knows what protection that could have given us. Rape and rapine were high among the fears that the Japanese forces inspired after their atrocities in China since 1937. But nothing of note happened the rest of that day and night. The British forces were retreating rapidly to the city center and not putting up much of a fight.
The news soon spread that the British had surrendered. The next day, some friends returning from the city reported that looting had broken out. British and other European houses were being stripped by their Malay drivers and gardeners. This aroused great anxiety in my family. What about 28 Norfolk Road, with all our food and other provisions that would now have to see us through for a very long time? With my mother's agreement, I took Teong Koo, the gardener, with me and walked back some eight miles from Telok Kurau to Norfolk Road. We made it in just over two hours. I saw Malays carrying furniture and other items out of the bigger houses along the way. The Chinese looters went for the goods in warehouses, less bulky and more valuable.
The Japanese conquerors also went for loot. In the first few days, anyone in the street with a fountain pen or a wristwatch would soon be relieved of it. Soldiers would go into houses either officially to search, or pretending to do so, but in fact to appropriate any small items that they could keep on their person. At first they also took the best of the bicycles, but they stopped that after a few weeks. They were in Singapore for only a short time before leaving for Java or some other island in the archipelago to do battle and to capture more territories. They could not take their beautiful bicycles with them.
My first encounter with a Japanese soldier took place when I tried to visit an aunt, my mother's younger sister, in Kampong Java Road, just across the Red Bridge over the Bukit Timah canal. As I approached the bridge, I saw a sentry pacing up and down it. Nearby was a group of four or five Japanese soldiers sitting around, probably the other members of his detail. I was sporting a broad-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Australian soldiers, many of which had been discarded in the days before the surrender. I had picked one up, thinking it would be useful during the hard times ahead to protect me from the sun.
As I passed this group of soldiers, I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. But they were not to be denied attention. One soldier barked "Kore, kore!" and beckoned to me. When I reached him, he thrust the bayonet on his rifle through the brim of my hat, knocking it off, slapped me roundly and motioned me to kneel. He then shoved his right boot against my chest and sent me sprawling on the road. As I got up, he signaled that I was to go back the way I had come. I had got off lightly. Many others who did not know the new rules of etiquette and did not bow to Japanese sentries at crossroads or bridges were made to kneel for hours in the sun, holding a heavy boulder over their heads until their arms gave way.
Later that same day a Japanese non-commissioned officer and several soldiers came into the house. They looked it over and, finding only Teong Koo and me, decided it would a suitable billet for a platoon. It was the beginning of a nightmare. I had been treated by Japanese dentists and their nurses at Bras Basah Road who were immaculately clean and tidy. So, too, were the Japanese salesmen and saleswomen at the 10-cent stores in Middle Road. I was unprepared for the nauseating stench of the unwashed clothes and bodies of these Japanese soldiers. They roamed all over the house and the compound. They looked for food, found the provisions my mother had stored, and consumed whatever they fancied, cooking in the compound over open fires. I had no language in which to communicate with them. They made their wishes known with signs and guttural noises. When I was slow in understanding what they wanted, I was cursed and frequently slapped. They were strange beings, unshaven and unkempt, speaking an ugly, aggressive language. They filled me with fear, and I slept fitfully. They left after three days of hell.
While this platoon was camping in the house, British, Indian and Australian forces were marched to captivity. The march started on 17 February 1942, and for two days and one night they tramped past the house and over the Red Bridge on their way to Changi. I sat on my veranda for hours at a time watching these men, my heart heavy as lead. Many looked dejected and despondent, perplexed that they had been beaten so decisively and so easily. The surrendered army was a mournful sight.
There were some who won my respect and admiration. Among them were the Highlanders whom I recognized by their Scottish caps. Even in defeat they held themselves erect and marched in time--"Left Right, Left Right, Left, Left!" shouted the sergeant major. And the Gurkhas were like the Highlanders. They too marched erect, unbroken and doughty in defeat. I secretly cheered them. They left a life-long impression on me. As a result, the Singapore government has employed a Gurkha company for its anti-riot police squad from the 1960s to this day.
Soon after the Japanese soldiers left my house, word went around that all Chinese had to go to a registration center at the Jalan Besar stadium for examination. I saw my neighbor and his family leave and decided it would be wiser for me to go also, for if I were later caught at home the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, would punish me. So I headed for Jalan Besar with Teong Koo. As it turned out, his cubicle in his coolie-keng, the dormitory he shared with other rickshaw pullers, was within the perimeter enclosed by barbed wire. Tens of thousands of Chinese families were packed into this small area. All exit points were manned by the Kempeitai.
After spending a night in Teong Koo's cubicle, I decided to check out through the exit point, but instead of allowing me to pass, the soldier on duty signaled me to join a group of young Chinese. I felt instinctively that this was ominous, so I asked for permission to return to the cubicle to collect my belongings. He gave it. I went back and lay low in Teong Koo's cubicle for another day and a half. Then I tried the same exit again. This time, for some inexplicable reason, I got through the checkpoint. I was given a "chop" on my left upper arm and on the front of my shirt with a rubber stamp. The kanji or Chinese character jian, meaning "examined," printed on me in indelible ink, was proof that I was cleared. I walked home with Teong Koo, greatly relieved.
I discovered later that those picked out at random at the checkpoint I had passed were taken to the grounds of Victoria School and detained until 22 February, when 40 to 50 lorries arrived to collect them. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were transported to a beach at Tanah Merah Besar, some 10 miles away on the east coast, near Changi Prison. There they were made to disembark, tied together and forced to walk toward the sea. As they did so, Japanese machine-gunners massacred them. Later, to make sure they were dead, each corpse was kicked, bayoneted and abused in other ways. There was no attempt to bury the bodies, which decomposed as they were washed up and down the shore.
The Singapore Story 1998 Times Asia - Part 1
ASIA
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
The Singapore Story
In the first volume of his new memoir, the city-state's Senior Minister writes about a boyhood caning, war with Japan and other career-shaping events
By LEE KUAN YEW
My earliest and most vivid recollection is of being held by my ears over a well in the compound of a house where my family was then living, at what is now Tembeling Road in Singapore. I was about four years old.
I had been mischievous and had messed up an expensive jar of my father's 4711 pale-green scented brilliantine. My father had a violent temper, but that evening his rage went through the roof. He took me by the scruff of the neck from the house to this well and held me over it. How could my ears have been so tough that they were not ripped off, dropping me into that well? Fifty years later, in the 1970s, I read in Scientific American an article explaining how pain and shock release neuropeptides in the brain, stamping the new experience into the brain cells and thus ensuring that the experience would be remembered for a long time afterwards.
I was born in Singapore on 16 September 1923 in a large two-story bungalow at 92 Kampong Java Road. My mother, Chua Jim Neo, was then 16 years old. My father, Lee Chin Koon, was 20. Their parents had arranged the marriage a year previously. Both families must have thought it an excellent match, for they later married my father's younger sister to my mother's younger brother.
My father had been brought up a rich man's son. He used to boast to us that, when he was young, his father allowed him a limitless account at Robinsons and John Little, the two top department stores in Raffles Place, where he could charge to this account any suit or other items he fancied. He was educated in English at St. Joseph's Institution, a Catholic mission school. He said he completed his Junior School Certificate, after which he ended his formal education--to his and my mother's eternal regret. Being without a profession, he could only get a job as a storekeeper with the Shell Oil Company when the fortunes of both families were destroyed in the Great Depression.
I grew up with my three brothers, one sister and seven cousins in the same house. But because they were all younger than I was, I often played with the children of the Chinese fishermen and of the Malays living in a nearby kampong, a cluster of some 20 or 30 attap- or zinc-roofed wooden huts in a lane opposite my grandfather's house. 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 spoiled. As a young boy, I had no fancy clothes or shoes like those my grandchildren wear today.
We were not poor, but we had no great abundance of toys, and there was no television. So we had to be resourceful, to use our imagination. We read, and this was good for our literacy, but there were few illustrated books for young children then, and these were expensive. I bought the usual penny dreadfuls and followed the adventures of the boys at Greyfriars--Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter and company. I waited eagerly for the mail boat from Britain, which arrived at Tanjong Pagar wharf every Friday, bringing British magazines and pictorials. But they too were not cheap. When I was a little older, I used the Raffles Library, where books could be borrowed for two weeks at a time. I read eclectically but preferred westerns to detective thrillers.
Life was not all simple pleasures, however. Every now and again my father would come home in a foul mood after losing at blackjack and other card games at the Chinese Swimming Club in Amber Road and demand some of my mother's jewelry to pawn so that he could go back to try his luck again. There would be fearful quarrels, and he was sometimes violent. But my mother was a courageous woman who was determined to hang on to the jewelry, wedding gifts from her parents. A strong character with great energy and resourcefulness, she had been married off too early. In her day, a woman was expected to be a good wife, bear many children and bring them up to be good husbands or wives in turn. Had she been born one generation later and continued her education beyond secondary school, she could easily have become an effective business executive.
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.
My maternal grandmother had strong views on my education. In 1929, before I was six, she insisted that I join the fishermen's children attending school nearby, in a little wood and attap hut with a compacted clay floor. The hut had only one classroom with hard benches and plank desktops, and one other room, which was the home of our scrawny middle-aged Chinese teacher. He made us recite words after him without any comprehension of their meaning--if he did explain, I did not understand him.
After two to three months of this, I pleaded with my mother to be transferred to an English-language school. She won my grandmother's consent, and in January 1930 I joined Telok Kurau English School. Now I understood what the teachers were saying and made progress with little effort. In my final year, 1935, I came first in school and won a place in Raffles Institution, which took in only the top students.
I enjoyed my years in Raffles Institution. I coped with the work comfortably, was active in the Scout movement, played cricket and some tennis, swam and took part in many debates. But I never became a prefect, let alone head prefect. There was a mischievous, playful streak in me. Too often, I was caught not paying attention in class, scribbling notes to fellow students or mimicking some teacher's strange mannerisms. In the case of a rather ponderous Indian science teacher, I was caught in the laboratory drawing the back of his head with its bald patch.
Once I was caned by the principal. D.W. McLeod was a fair but strict disciplinarian who enforced rules impartially, and one rule was that a boy who was late for school three times during one term would get three strokes of the cane. I was always a late riser, an owl more than a lark, and when I was late for school the third time in a term in 1938, the form master sent me to see McLeod. The principal knew me from the number of prizes I had been collecting on prize-giving days and the scholarships I had won. But I was not let off with an admonition. I bent over a chair and was given three of the best with my trousers on. I did not think he lightened his strokes. I have never understood why Western educationists are so much against corporal punishment. It did my fellow students and me no harm.
I was asleep in the "E" block of raffles college at 4 o'clock in the early morning of 8 December 1941, when I was awakened by the dull thud of exploding bombs. The war with Japan had begun. It was a complete surprise. The street lights had been on, and the air-raid sirens did not sound until those Japanese planes dropped their bombs, killing 60 people and wounding 130. But the raid was played down. Censors suppressed the news that the Keppel Harbor docks, the naval base at Sembawang, and the Tengah and Seletar air bases had also been attacked.
The students at Raffles College were agog with excitement. Those from upcountry immediately prepared to leave by train for home. Nearby everyone believed Singapore would be the main target of the attack, and it would therefore be prudent to return to the countryside of Malaya, which offered more safety from Japanese bombers. The college authorities were as confused as the students. Nobody had been prepared for this. Two days later we heard that on the same morning the Japanese had landed at Kota Bharu in Kelantan. Malaya was not to be spared after all.
Within days, the hostels were nearly empty. Lectures were suspended, and students asked to volunteer for a Raffles College unit of the Medical Auxiliary Services (MAS). I volunteered for the MAS, and cycled daily from my home (in Norfolk Road since 1935) to my post in the college three miles away. We were not provided with uniforms--there was no time for that--but we were each given a tin helmet and an armband with a red cross on it and paid a small allowance of about $60 a month, for which we worked on a roster round the clock. We were organized into units of six. There was no fear. Indeed there was barely suppressed excitement, the thrill of being at war and involved in real battles.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 11
The Singapore Story
In the first volume of his new memoir, the city-state's Senior Minister writes about a boyhood caning, war with Japan and other career-shaping events
By LEE KUAN YEW
My earliest and most vivid recollection is of being held by my ears over a well in the compound of a house where my family was then living, at what is now Tembeling Road in Singapore. I was about four years old.
I had been mischievous and had messed up an expensive jar of my father's 4711 pale-green scented brilliantine. My father had a violent temper, but that evening his rage went through the roof. He took me by the scruff of the neck from the house to this well and held me over it. How could my ears have been so tough that they were not ripped off, dropping me into that well? Fifty years later, in the 1970s, I read in Scientific American an article explaining how pain and shock release neuropeptides in the brain, stamping the new experience into the brain cells and thus ensuring that the experience would be remembered for a long time afterwards.
I was born in Singapore on 16 September 1923 in a large two-story bungalow at 92 Kampong Java Road. My mother, Chua Jim Neo, was then 16 years old. My father, Lee Chin Koon, was 20. Their parents had arranged the marriage a year previously. Both families must have thought it an excellent match, for they later married my father's younger sister to my mother's younger brother.
My father had been brought up a rich man's son. He used to boast to us that, when he was young, his father allowed him a limitless account at Robinsons and John Little, the two top department stores in Raffles Place, where he could charge to this account any suit or other items he fancied. He was educated in English at St. Joseph's Institution, a Catholic mission school. He said he completed his Junior School Certificate, after which he ended his formal education--to his and my mother's eternal regret. Being without a profession, he could only get a job as a storekeeper with the Shell Oil Company when the fortunes of both families were destroyed in the Great Depression.
I grew up with my three brothers, one sister and seven cousins in the same house. But because they were all younger than I was, I often played with the children of the Chinese fishermen and of the Malays living in a nearby kampong, a cluster of some 20 or 30 attap- or zinc-roofed wooden huts in a lane opposite my grandfather's house. 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 spoiled. As a young boy, I had no fancy clothes or shoes like those my grandchildren wear today.
We were not poor, but we had no great abundance of toys, and there was no television. So we had to be resourceful, to use our imagination. We read, and this was good for our literacy, but there were few illustrated books for young children then, and these were expensive. I bought the usual penny dreadfuls and followed the adventures of the boys at Greyfriars--Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter and company. I waited eagerly for the mail boat from Britain, which arrived at Tanjong Pagar wharf every Friday, bringing British magazines and pictorials. But they too were not cheap. When I was a little older, I used the Raffles Library, where books could be borrowed for two weeks at a time. I read eclectically but preferred westerns to detective thrillers.
Life was not all simple pleasures, however. Every now and again my father would come home in a foul mood after losing at blackjack and other card games at the Chinese Swimming Club in Amber Road and demand some of my mother's jewelry to pawn so that he could go back to try his luck again. There would be fearful quarrels, and he was sometimes violent. But my mother was a courageous woman who was determined to hang on to the jewelry, wedding gifts from her parents. A strong character with great energy and resourcefulness, she had been married off too early. In her day, a woman was expected to be a good wife, bear many children and bring them up to be good husbands or wives in turn. Had she been born one generation later and continued her education beyond secondary school, she could easily have become an effective business executive.
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.
My maternal grandmother had strong views on my education. In 1929, before I was six, she insisted that I join the fishermen's children attending school nearby, in a little wood and attap hut with a compacted clay floor. The hut had only one classroom with hard benches and plank desktops, and one other room, which was the home of our scrawny middle-aged Chinese teacher. He made us recite words after him without any comprehension of their meaning--if he did explain, I did not understand him.
After two to three months of this, I pleaded with my mother to be transferred to an English-language school. She won my grandmother's consent, and in January 1930 I joined Telok Kurau English School. Now I understood what the teachers were saying and made progress with little effort. In my final year, 1935, I came first in school and won a place in Raffles Institution, which took in only the top students.
I enjoyed my years in Raffles Institution. I coped with the work comfortably, was active in the Scout movement, played cricket and some tennis, swam and took part in many debates. But I never became a prefect, let alone head prefect. There was a mischievous, playful streak in me. Too often, I was caught not paying attention in class, scribbling notes to fellow students or mimicking some teacher's strange mannerisms. In the case of a rather ponderous Indian science teacher, I was caught in the laboratory drawing the back of his head with its bald patch.
Once I was caned by the principal. D.W. McLeod was a fair but strict disciplinarian who enforced rules impartially, and one rule was that a boy who was late for school three times during one term would get three strokes of the cane. I was always a late riser, an owl more than a lark, and when I was late for school the third time in a term in 1938, the form master sent me to see McLeod. The principal knew me from the number of prizes I had been collecting on prize-giving days and the scholarships I had won. But I was not let off with an admonition. I bent over a chair and was given three of the best with my trousers on. I did not think he lightened his strokes. I have never understood why Western educationists are so much against corporal punishment. It did my fellow students and me no harm.
I was asleep in the "E" block of raffles college at 4 o'clock in the early morning of 8 December 1941, when I was awakened by the dull thud of exploding bombs. The war with Japan had begun. It was a complete surprise. The street lights had been on, and the air-raid sirens did not sound until those Japanese planes dropped their bombs, killing 60 people and wounding 130. But the raid was played down. Censors suppressed the news that the Keppel Harbor docks, the naval base at Sembawang, and the Tengah and Seletar air bases had also been attacked.
The students at Raffles College were agog with excitement. Those from upcountry immediately prepared to leave by train for home. Nearby everyone believed Singapore would be the main target of the attack, and it would therefore be prudent to return to the countryside of Malaya, which offered more safety from Japanese bombers. The college authorities were as confused as the students. Nobody had been prepared for this. Two days later we heard that on the same morning the Japanese had landed at Kota Bharu in Kelantan. Malaya was not to be spared after all.
Within days, the hostels were nearly empty. Lectures were suspended, and students asked to volunteer for a Raffles College unit of the Medical Auxiliary Services (MAS). I volunteered for the MAS, and cycled daily from my home (in Norfolk Road since 1935) to my post in the college three miles away. We were not provided with uniforms--there was no time for that--but we were each given a tin helmet and an armband with a red cross on it and paid a small allowance of about $60 a month, for which we worked on a roster round the clock. We were organized into units of six. There was no fear. Indeed there was barely suppressed excitement, the thrill of being at war and involved in real battles.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Freedom in Singapore and Ministerial Salaries
The Straits Times, Singapore
5th April 2007
Following up on protests at the Australian National University (ANU). In the context of the global contest for talent, how much does it matter that some people see Singapore as a place that restricts individual freedoms?
MM Lee: Let me first challenge the assumption that people see Singapore as a place that restricts individual freedom. This is the stereotype that the Western media purveys of Singapore. But businessmen and talented people who work for these companies are better informed; otherwise we wouldn’t have attracted the talent we have.
The ANU knew they would get flak from the human-rights people for offering me an honorary degree. So too the Imperial College London for making me a Fellow just a few years ago; so too Melbourne University.
So what does it prove? These are people who understand what’s happening in the real world and understand the real Singapore.
The press works up a storyline that Warwick University finds Singapore’s academic freedom restricted, so they don’t come.
I think the real reason is they worked out their sums and they found it was not economical.
You’ve got some of the top names from America, and even Australia has got the University of New South Wales setting up a campus.
So let’s not ourselves be drawn in to purvey this line.
What is the individual freedom that you are deprived of? Are you prevented from saying what you want? Are you prevented from exercising your rights as a citizen?
Since we are trying to attract talent, does it matter that they see us in this light?
No. The people that have the talent will have the wit to investigate, to know what they are in for.
You know the number of unsolicited mails that I get and PM gets from people completely without motive? They’ve come, they know the old Singapore.
And what they are saying is, it’s a very good place - safe, wholesome, everything works - and they wish they could have the basics we have established.
And if you allow this to be degraded, you’ll never put the present Singapore together again.
If we didn’t have more self-confidence in what we are doing and we listened to what is prescribed for us, we wouldn’t be here.
You cannot bring Singapore from where it was to where it now is without long periods of stable government and experienced ministers.
You watch the development of Taiwan or South Korea.
The period of transformation took place when they had governments that stayed for a long time, ministers and civil servants who acquired experience and expertise and improved the system and got it to a high state.
And once they liberalised, like they did in Taiwan, you look at the growth rates. You look at their stability, you look at what their future promises.
I meet their journalists; they come to Singapore. If you read Tian Xia and several other very reputable papers, they are full of admiration for what we have achieved.
Now how does Taiwan get back to stability and growth and sanity?
It’s facing a very difficult future in which China is growing bigger and bigger year by year, stronger and stronger.
And they are not in a position to go independent because the Americans will not support them because it means war.
So what is the rational thing to do? Is the rational thing to say ‘I change the Constitution’ and provoke the Chinese into a clash?
That’s what the present President is attempting to do because then he thinks he will be able to rally votes. I mean, you are now into mass manipulation of attitudes in order to win votes by deceiving people that this is a way forward, when there is, in fact, no way forward.
You look at South Korea. They are now with a generation that voted in a new government completely at variance with US policies.
Without the US, South Korea is in dire difficulties with the North. But you have a younger generation that says, out with the Americans.
So does it make sense?
I want to ask about ministerial salaries. Your view on how well the system has worked to bring in talent?
Every time there is a pay revision to catch up with benchmarks, this debate will come up again.
But you ask yourself: Do you want the present system where it’s completely above board?
And while we are not recruiting all of the very best, we are recruiting some of the very best, because quite a few of the very best do not want to give up their private lifestyle and their family life.
Yes, you can get a person to give up and make a sacrifice for one term.
But will you get a man or woman to serve successive terms, gain experience, become a really competent person, a very competent minister and sacrifice his family, their welfare, their comforts and their children’s future and education, going abroad etc? It’s not possible.
They’re at the top of their cohort. We talent spot. We headhunt for people who not only have just academic qualifications but track records of performance.
How did I learn this? Because in the early days, looking for talent, I put in bright PhDs. Didn’t work. We even had a Rhodes scholar.
We found that we needed other qualities: character, motivation, judgment, stability, temperament, ability to connect with people.
So, finally, we worked out a system where we looked at a person in totality: How does he perform in real life, whether as a businessman, as a CEO, as a doctor, as a lawyer, whatever?
Supposing I had served just one term. Would I have known this? No. Because I’ve served since 1959, and successive elections we fine-tuned and learned in the process.
You go back to a revolving-door government: the first two years you learn how to do your job; next two, three years, you begin to do the job. Before you know where you are, you’re out. Next government comes in.
And that’s what’s happening in many parts of the world.
Carefully consider.
You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government.
You get that alternative and you’ll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again… and your asset values will disappear, your apartment will be worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk and our women will become maids in other people’s countries, foreign workers.
Just think. We have a population of three-point-something (million) and we are carrying and able to give jobs to another 1.3 million people.
How does that happen? Why can’t the 1.3 million people get jobs in their own countries?
It must be something that we’re doing which is right, that creates economic prosperity, that creates growth, that requires talented people to join us, to help us produce all these extra goods and services.
You know the absurdity of all this?
The total cost of ministers’ salaries, of all office holders, the present cost is 0.13 per cent of government expenditure (and 0.022 per cent of GDP).
It amounts to $46 million. We are quarrelling about whether we should pay them $46 million or $36 million, or better still $26 million. So you save $20 million and jeopardise an economy of $210 billion? (This was the size of Singapore’s GDP in 2006.)
What are we talking about?
You know fund managers? I’m chairman of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and we put $5 billion, $10 billion with top fund managers, just to benchmark how we are performing against the best in the market.
We have about three or four top US investors and we track what they do and we compare what we are doing.
And you have to pay them not 0.13 per cent. Win or lose, whether the stocks go up or down, they take their cut. You ask GIC employees; I’m the chairman of GIC. I’m being paid as Minister Mentor, the Senior Minister before that, and even as Prime Minister before that, a fraction of what the top managers in GIC earn.
But they are handling over US$100 billion (S$151 billion). They make a mistake, we lose $10, $20, $30 billion overnight when the stock market collapses.
So for the average family earning $1,500, $3,000, we are talking of astronomical figures.
But for people in government like me, having to deal with these sums of money which we have accumulated through the sweat of our brow over the last 40 years, you have to pay the market rate or the man will up stakes and join Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs. And then you’ve got an incompetent man and you’ve lost money, by the billions.
So get a sense of proportion.
Would you like to share how much you are paid?
It’s in the Budget. I’m paid $2.7 million. A top lawyer, which I could easily have become, today earns $4 million. And he doesn’t have to carry this responsibility. All he’s got to do is advise his client. Win or lose, that’s the client’s loss or gain.
But there are top people in other countries who don’t get paid as much but who are also corruption-free, who have also done a good job.
Let me put the American system and then you will understand why if we ran that system, we’re in trouble.
If you become President of the United States like Bill Clinton was, or George W. Bush, you earn about less than a million dollars. But you have the White House, you have Airforce One…When you leave office, you write your memoirs, you’re paid by the tens of millions. And Bill Clinton, for every speech he makes, it’s at least a million or half a million or he doesn’t go. And he starts a foundation. They all do this.
You take Alan Greenspan. He sacrificed his earnings as a very expert financial specialist and he took on as a job as chairman of the Federal Reserve, at a pittance. As Paul Volker did.
But he’s already got a huge sum of money and when he leaves, he can increase the huge sum of money because of the standing that he has.
He makes a statement and says there could be a recession in the second half of this year and the world stock market goes down.
Can we afford a revolving-door government? Suppose after five years, I go out and say ‘OK, I write my memoirs, I become a lobbyist’. How does that get the country going?
I say this is a system we worked out. It’s above board, it’s working. And if you’re going to quarrel about $46 million, up or down another $10 or $20 million, I say you have no sense of proportion; you don’t know what life is about. And just think, what would your apartment be worth with a poor government and the economy down?
We talk about the Government as fu mu guan (a Chinese phrase that refers to public officials as parents who care for their children). So people hope that leaders are not there for the money, that they are willing to make that extra sacrifice.
Those are admirable sentiments, but we live in the real world. It took a lot of persuasion to get Ng Eng Hen, Vivian Balakrishnan, Balaji Sadasivan to give up their lucrative practices and become ministers and ministers of state, and no guarantee they would succeed.
Ng Eng Hen six years ago, when he first entered politics, was making $4.5 million and he came in and took a job that paid him about $600,000.
Balaji was earning also in the same category. He was a top brain surgeon with very high skills. He took a chance. When he was not made a minister in the selection process, Goh Chok Tong, then Prime Minister, said ‘Would you like to go back to your private practice?’
He says ‘No, I’m going to do this as a senior minister of state’. But he’s made sufficient to look after his family and children, and his wife is a doctor. So I think that’s a sacrifice.
I started off as a socialist, believing that all men should be given equal opportunities and equal rewards. I know that doesn’t work.
You have competition and reward the winner.
You look at golf, tennis, swimming, badminton, anything you like. The first prize is an enormous sum. And to get that first prize, you start spending your life, sweating your guts out to master a certain skill which (is) admired and supported by hundreds, if not thousands of millions of people watching you.
It is a competitive world in which we live and if we can’t compete, we’re not going to live well.
5th April 2007
Following up on protests at the Australian National University (ANU). In the context of the global contest for talent, how much does it matter that some people see Singapore as a place that restricts individual freedoms?
MM Lee: Let me first challenge the assumption that people see Singapore as a place that restricts individual freedom. This is the stereotype that the Western media purveys of Singapore. But businessmen and talented people who work for these companies are better informed; otherwise we wouldn’t have attracted the talent we have.
The ANU knew they would get flak from the human-rights people for offering me an honorary degree. So too the Imperial College London for making me a Fellow just a few years ago; so too Melbourne University.
So what does it prove? These are people who understand what’s happening in the real world and understand the real Singapore.
The press works up a storyline that Warwick University finds Singapore’s academic freedom restricted, so they don’t come.
I think the real reason is they worked out their sums and they found it was not economical.
You’ve got some of the top names from America, and even Australia has got the University of New South Wales setting up a campus.
So let’s not ourselves be drawn in to purvey this line.
What is the individual freedom that you are deprived of? Are you prevented from saying what you want? Are you prevented from exercising your rights as a citizen?
Since we are trying to attract talent, does it matter that they see us in this light?
No. The people that have the talent will have the wit to investigate, to know what they are in for.
You know the number of unsolicited mails that I get and PM gets from people completely without motive? They’ve come, they know the old Singapore.
And what they are saying is, it’s a very good place - safe, wholesome, everything works - and they wish they could have the basics we have established.
And if you allow this to be degraded, you’ll never put the present Singapore together again.
If we didn’t have more self-confidence in what we are doing and we listened to what is prescribed for us, we wouldn’t be here.
You cannot bring Singapore from where it was to where it now is without long periods of stable government and experienced ministers.
You watch the development of Taiwan or South Korea.
The period of transformation took place when they had governments that stayed for a long time, ministers and civil servants who acquired experience and expertise and improved the system and got it to a high state.
And once they liberalised, like they did in Taiwan, you look at the growth rates. You look at their stability, you look at what their future promises.
I meet their journalists; they come to Singapore. If you read Tian Xia and several other very reputable papers, they are full of admiration for what we have achieved.
Now how does Taiwan get back to stability and growth and sanity?
It’s facing a very difficult future in which China is growing bigger and bigger year by year, stronger and stronger.
And they are not in a position to go independent because the Americans will not support them because it means war.
So what is the rational thing to do? Is the rational thing to say ‘I change the Constitution’ and provoke the Chinese into a clash?
That’s what the present President is attempting to do because then he thinks he will be able to rally votes. I mean, you are now into mass manipulation of attitudes in order to win votes by deceiving people that this is a way forward, when there is, in fact, no way forward.
You look at South Korea. They are now with a generation that voted in a new government completely at variance with US policies.
Without the US, South Korea is in dire difficulties with the North. But you have a younger generation that says, out with the Americans.
So does it make sense?
I want to ask about ministerial salaries. Your view on how well the system has worked to bring in talent?
Every time there is a pay revision to catch up with benchmarks, this debate will come up again.
But you ask yourself: Do you want the present system where it’s completely above board?
And while we are not recruiting all of the very best, we are recruiting some of the very best, because quite a few of the very best do not want to give up their private lifestyle and their family life.
Yes, you can get a person to give up and make a sacrifice for one term.
But will you get a man or woman to serve successive terms, gain experience, become a really competent person, a very competent minister and sacrifice his family, their welfare, their comforts and their children’s future and education, going abroad etc? It’s not possible.
They’re at the top of their cohort. We talent spot. We headhunt for people who not only have just academic qualifications but track records of performance.
How did I learn this? Because in the early days, looking for talent, I put in bright PhDs. Didn’t work. We even had a Rhodes scholar.
We found that we needed other qualities: character, motivation, judgment, stability, temperament, ability to connect with people.
So, finally, we worked out a system where we looked at a person in totality: How does he perform in real life, whether as a businessman, as a CEO, as a doctor, as a lawyer, whatever?
Supposing I had served just one term. Would I have known this? No. Because I’ve served since 1959, and successive elections we fine-tuned and learned in the process.
You go back to a revolving-door government: the first two years you learn how to do your job; next two, three years, you begin to do the job. Before you know where you are, you’re out. Next government comes in.
And that’s what’s happening in many parts of the world.
Carefully consider.
You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government.
You get that alternative and you’ll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again… and your asset values will disappear, your apartment will be worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk and our women will become maids in other people’s countries, foreign workers.
Just think. We have a population of three-point-something (million) and we are carrying and able to give jobs to another 1.3 million people.
How does that happen? Why can’t the 1.3 million people get jobs in their own countries?
It must be something that we’re doing which is right, that creates economic prosperity, that creates growth, that requires talented people to join us, to help us produce all these extra goods and services.
You know the absurdity of all this?
The total cost of ministers’ salaries, of all office holders, the present cost is 0.13 per cent of government expenditure (and 0.022 per cent of GDP).
It amounts to $46 million. We are quarrelling about whether we should pay them $46 million or $36 million, or better still $26 million. So you save $20 million and jeopardise an economy of $210 billion? (This was the size of Singapore’s GDP in 2006.)
What are we talking about?
You know fund managers? I’m chairman of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and we put $5 billion, $10 billion with top fund managers, just to benchmark how we are performing against the best in the market.
We have about three or four top US investors and we track what they do and we compare what we are doing.
And you have to pay them not 0.13 per cent. Win or lose, whether the stocks go up or down, they take their cut. You ask GIC employees; I’m the chairman of GIC. I’m being paid as Minister Mentor, the Senior Minister before that, and even as Prime Minister before that, a fraction of what the top managers in GIC earn.
But they are handling over US$100 billion (S$151 billion). They make a mistake, we lose $10, $20, $30 billion overnight when the stock market collapses.
So for the average family earning $1,500, $3,000, we are talking of astronomical figures.
But for people in government like me, having to deal with these sums of money which we have accumulated through the sweat of our brow over the last 40 years, you have to pay the market rate or the man will up stakes and join Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs. And then you’ve got an incompetent man and you’ve lost money, by the billions.
So get a sense of proportion.
Would you like to share how much you are paid?
It’s in the Budget. I’m paid $2.7 million. A top lawyer, which I could easily have become, today earns $4 million. And he doesn’t have to carry this responsibility. All he’s got to do is advise his client. Win or lose, that’s the client’s loss or gain.
But there are top people in other countries who don’t get paid as much but who are also corruption-free, who have also done a good job.
Let me put the American system and then you will understand why if we ran that system, we’re in trouble.
If you become President of the United States like Bill Clinton was, or George W. Bush, you earn about less than a million dollars. But you have the White House, you have Airforce One…When you leave office, you write your memoirs, you’re paid by the tens of millions. And Bill Clinton, for every speech he makes, it’s at least a million or half a million or he doesn’t go. And he starts a foundation. They all do this.
You take Alan Greenspan. He sacrificed his earnings as a very expert financial specialist and he took on as a job as chairman of the Federal Reserve, at a pittance. As Paul Volker did.
But he’s already got a huge sum of money and when he leaves, he can increase the huge sum of money because of the standing that he has.
He makes a statement and says there could be a recession in the second half of this year and the world stock market goes down.
Can we afford a revolving-door government? Suppose after five years, I go out and say ‘OK, I write my memoirs, I become a lobbyist’. How does that get the country going?
I say this is a system we worked out. It’s above board, it’s working. And if you’re going to quarrel about $46 million, up or down another $10 or $20 million, I say you have no sense of proportion; you don’t know what life is about. And just think, what would your apartment be worth with a poor government and the economy down?
We talk about the Government as fu mu guan (a Chinese phrase that refers to public officials as parents who care for their children). So people hope that leaders are not there for the money, that they are willing to make that extra sacrifice.
Those are admirable sentiments, but we live in the real world. It took a lot of persuasion to get Ng Eng Hen, Vivian Balakrishnan, Balaji Sadasivan to give up their lucrative practices and become ministers and ministers of state, and no guarantee they would succeed.
Ng Eng Hen six years ago, when he first entered politics, was making $4.5 million and he came in and took a job that paid him about $600,000.
Balaji was earning also in the same category. He was a top brain surgeon with very high skills. He took a chance. When he was not made a minister in the selection process, Goh Chok Tong, then Prime Minister, said ‘Would you like to go back to your private practice?’
He says ‘No, I’m going to do this as a senior minister of state’. But he’s made sufficient to look after his family and children, and his wife is a doctor. So I think that’s a sacrifice.
I started off as a socialist, believing that all men should be given equal opportunities and equal rewards. I know that doesn’t work.
You have competition and reward the winner.
You look at golf, tennis, swimming, badminton, anything you like. The first prize is an enormous sum. And to get that first prize, you start spending your life, sweating your guts out to master a certain skill which (is) admired and supported by hundreds, if not thousands of millions of people watching you.
It is a competitive world in which we live and if we can’t compete, we’re not going to live well.
Friday, September 14, 2007
The Man Who Saw It All - Times (2005)
Lee Kuan Yew and his ideas helped to make Asia what it is today. Now, in a candid, wide-ranging conversation with TIME, he shares his hopes and fears for the region's future
By Simon Elegant and Michael Elliott | Singapore
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION AND THE ARTS / NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SINGAPORE
Lee Kuan Yew transformed Singapore, and his influence still resonates around Asia
Posted Monday, December 5, 2005; 20:00 HKT
In years past, Lee Kuan Yew's office was famous among visitors for its arctic air conditioning and Spartan furnishing. A few Chinese scrolls apart, there was little decoration and sometimes barely a sheet of paper to be seen. Singapore's founding father first moved into the office on the second floor of the former British governor-general's residence in 1971, having already served six years as Prime Minister. He retired in 1990 to become Senior Minister and later Minister Mentor, but still works out of the same rooms.
The L-shaped office may have changed little over the years, but at a recent meeting there were small but telling signs that the formidable 82-year-old leader has mellowed—a little. For one thing, the temperature has crept up noticeably. And while most surfaces are still bare, the table behind Lee's computer is covered with untidy piles of books. Lee says that his current favorite isn't one of the stacked tomes on terrorism or economics but the sprawling 17th-century Spanish novel Don Quixote. "A new translation," he enthuses. "Very good." It's something of a shock that the man best known for his cold-eyed pragmatism is reveling in a book whose hero spent his time tilting at windmills and gave his name to an English adjective meaning impractical and idealistic.
Still, despite his more relaxed demeanor, when Time spoke to him for nearly five hours over two days this fall, it was clear that neither age nor heart surgery 10 years ago have changed Lee's basic personality: sharp intelligence allied with an unsentimental, almost clinical rationality and supreme confidence in his own judgment. But there is another side to Lee that has been blossoming in recent years—that of the geopolitical thinker and analyst, a role he clearly relishes. The man who once concerned himself with every aspect of Singaporeans' lives—right down to who they should marry and how many children they should have—now seems to be less obsessed with the fate of the island state, and more concerned with China's "peaceful rise" and the threat of militant Islam. Asked about Singapore's future development over the next 10 years, Lee shrugs. "My son will do what he wants to do with his team," he says, referring to Singapore's current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong. "Let him decide," the elder Lee adds later. "It's his call."
Lee can be forgiven for lifting his eyes to the horizon. Once the subject of withering criticism from human-rights groups for his authoritarian ways and intolerance of dissent, he is now widely acknowledged as Asia's most respected senior statesman. Others may pen lengthy memoirs and seek to use their years on the world stage to tout their punditry and powers of prediction. Some can even lay claim to having guided far larger countries or served as leaders for longer than Lee. But Lee is unique. It is not just that his cold-eyed, totally nonideological analysis has set him apart from other observers of Asia. There is another factor that is just as important an explanation of Lee's influence. From his days as a clerk and a black-market broker during the brutal Japanese occupation of Singapore—which he was lucky to survive—through his years as an agitator for independence from Britain, from his time spent talking to the Americans during the Vietnam years to his role as a confidant of China's leadership, Lee has seen it all. He has been a participant observer of the most significant historical shift of our times—the steady ascent of Asia, home to 60% of the world's population, from the twin shames of Western colonialism and poverty to its coming economic and political dominance. Everyone who lives in Asia today thinks they are watching history being made; Lee Kuan Yew is one of those who can say, without fear of contradiction, that he helped make it.
Now, with his own son and a hand-picked team of technocrats in place in Singapore, Lee has time to turn his thoughts outward, to Asia—and beyond—while trying to divine the forces that will confront a new generation of leaders. It is an opportune time for such musings, a moment of balance when the critical observer can look back and forward and see the region on the cusp of profound change. Symbolic of a new order has been a string of summits and conferences in Asia. The parade of presidents, prime ministers, princes and their attendant ministers began with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit held in mid-November at South Korea's seaside city of Pusan. And it will end with the opening on Dec. 14 of the first East Asia summit in Kuala Lumpur.
The summit may not live up to its hype; few such gatherings do. But it is not unreasonable to see the meeting in Kuala Lumpur as a punctuation mark in the 60-year-long progress of Asia. The leaders of the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will meet together with those of Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand—and China. The U.S will not be present. Some of the more breathless commentary on the summit sees parallels to the meeting of European leaders in Messina in 1955, which laid the foundations for what has become the European Union. Lee, characteristically, takes a view which is more hardheaded yet fully aware of the historical significance of the meeting. "I see the first stage as an ever-enlarged series of free-trade areas, [leading to] one big free-trade area within 10 to 15 years," Lee told Time. "The next step would be a kind of low-key European economic community, 20 to 30 years down the road, because [Asia is] at very different stages of economic development." Lee recognizes that bringing India and China into the fold marks a moment of profound significance. The revival of these "two ancient civilizations," he says, is a double-edged sword. "It would mean great prosperity for the region, but could also mean a tussle for power."
For nearly five hours over two days this fall, Singapore's Minister Mentor LEE KUAN YEW spoke with TIME's Michael Elliott, Zoher Abdoolcarim and Simon Elegant on everything from China's rise to radical Islam, from American values to Singapore's first family. Lee was thoughtful, animated, defiant, playful, even emotional—and always provocative
By Simon Elegant and Michael Elliott | Singapore
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION AND THE ARTS / NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SINGAPORE
Lee Kuan Yew transformed Singapore, and his influence still resonates around Asia
Posted Monday, December 5, 2005; 20:00 HKT
In years past, Lee Kuan Yew's office was famous among visitors for its arctic air conditioning and Spartan furnishing. A few Chinese scrolls apart, there was little decoration and sometimes barely a sheet of paper to be seen. Singapore's founding father first moved into the office on the second floor of the former British governor-general's residence in 1971, having already served six years as Prime Minister. He retired in 1990 to become Senior Minister and later Minister Mentor, but still works out of the same rooms.
The L-shaped office may have changed little over the years, but at a recent meeting there were small but telling signs that the formidable 82-year-old leader has mellowed—a little. For one thing, the temperature has crept up noticeably. And while most surfaces are still bare, the table behind Lee's computer is covered with untidy piles of books. Lee says that his current favorite isn't one of the stacked tomes on terrorism or economics but the sprawling 17th-century Spanish novel Don Quixote. "A new translation," he enthuses. "Very good." It's something of a shock that the man best known for his cold-eyed pragmatism is reveling in a book whose hero spent his time tilting at windmills and gave his name to an English adjective meaning impractical and idealistic.
Still, despite his more relaxed demeanor, when Time spoke to him for nearly five hours over two days this fall, it was clear that neither age nor heart surgery 10 years ago have changed Lee's basic personality: sharp intelligence allied with an unsentimental, almost clinical rationality and supreme confidence in his own judgment. But there is another side to Lee that has been blossoming in recent years—that of the geopolitical thinker and analyst, a role he clearly relishes. The man who once concerned himself with every aspect of Singaporeans' lives—right down to who they should marry and how many children they should have—now seems to be less obsessed with the fate of the island state, and more concerned with China's "peaceful rise" and the threat of militant Islam. Asked about Singapore's future development over the next 10 years, Lee shrugs. "My son will do what he wants to do with his team," he says, referring to Singapore's current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong. "Let him decide," the elder Lee adds later. "It's his call."
Lee can be forgiven for lifting his eyes to the horizon. Once the subject of withering criticism from human-rights groups for his authoritarian ways and intolerance of dissent, he is now widely acknowledged as Asia's most respected senior statesman. Others may pen lengthy memoirs and seek to use their years on the world stage to tout their punditry and powers of prediction. Some can even lay claim to having guided far larger countries or served as leaders for longer than Lee. But Lee is unique. It is not just that his cold-eyed, totally nonideological analysis has set him apart from other observers of Asia. There is another factor that is just as important an explanation of Lee's influence. From his days as a clerk and a black-market broker during the brutal Japanese occupation of Singapore—which he was lucky to survive—through his years as an agitator for independence from Britain, from his time spent talking to the Americans during the Vietnam years to his role as a confidant of China's leadership, Lee has seen it all. He has been a participant observer of the most significant historical shift of our times—the steady ascent of Asia, home to 60% of the world's population, from the twin shames of Western colonialism and poverty to its coming economic and political dominance. Everyone who lives in Asia today thinks they are watching history being made; Lee Kuan Yew is one of those who can say, without fear of contradiction, that he helped make it.
Now, with his own son and a hand-picked team of technocrats in place in Singapore, Lee has time to turn his thoughts outward, to Asia—and beyond—while trying to divine the forces that will confront a new generation of leaders. It is an opportune time for such musings, a moment of balance when the critical observer can look back and forward and see the region on the cusp of profound change. Symbolic of a new order has been a string of summits and conferences in Asia. The parade of presidents, prime ministers, princes and their attendant ministers began with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit held in mid-November at South Korea's seaside city of Pusan. And it will end with the opening on Dec. 14 of the first East Asia summit in Kuala Lumpur.
The summit may not live up to its hype; few such gatherings do. But it is not unreasonable to see the meeting in Kuala Lumpur as a punctuation mark in the 60-year-long progress of Asia. The leaders of the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will meet together with those of Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand—and China. The U.S will not be present. Some of the more breathless commentary on the summit sees parallels to the meeting of European leaders in Messina in 1955, which laid the foundations for what has become the European Union. Lee, characteristically, takes a view which is more hardheaded yet fully aware of the historical significance of the meeting. "I see the first stage as an ever-enlarged series of free-trade areas, [leading to] one big free-trade area within 10 to 15 years," Lee told Time. "The next step would be a kind of low-key European economic community, 20 to 30 years down the road, because [Asia is] at very different stages of economic development." Lee recognizes that bringing India and China into the fold marks a moment of profound significance. The revival of these "two ancient civilizations," he says, is a double-edged sword. "It would mean great prosperity for the region, but could also mean a tussle for power."
For nearly five hours over two days this fall, Singapore's Minister Mentor LEE KUAN YEW spoke with TIME's Michael Elliott, Zoher Abdoolcarim and Simon Elegant on everything from China's rise to radical Islam, from American values to Singapore's first family. Lee was thoughtful, animated, defiant, playful, even emotional—and always provocative
Lee Kuan Yew hit back at Australians (2007)
Australians may no longer be the white trash of Asia, but their style of governance would run Singapore into the ground, the city-state's outspoken former prime minister said on Wednesday.
Lee Kuan Yew made the remark after receiving an honorary doctorate of law from Australian National University (ANU), partly for his friendship to Australia.
About 50 students held up banners with wording like "no doctorates for dictators" and chanted slogans outside the venue at the ANU's Canberra campus where Mr Lee received the award.
The 83-year-old, Singapore's first prime minister and now a minister mentor in its government, said he was no stranger to hostile receptions.
Having praised Australia's "exceptional growth" of the past 15 years during his acceptance speech, Mr Lee later told reporters that Australian-style governance would not work in the city-state.
"It's not going to change me and I'm not going to change you," he said of Australian criticism of his autocratic style.
"We're going to prosper, you're going to prosper.
"But if I allowed you to run my country it will spiral downwards and hit rock bottom," he said.
Asked about a remark he made in the 1980s that Australians were destined to become the "poor white trash of Asia", Mr Lee said it was apt for that era.
"There are some words sometime said in the heat of an argument which perhaps at that time was warranted."
The award citation said ANU conferred the doctorate on the grounds of Mr Lee's service to developing Singapore, international statesmanship and friendship to Australia.
Mr Lee led Singapore for more than 30 years until 1990 under a regime which placed prosperity and racial harmony ahead of human rights and Western-style democracy.
He has since served as a senior adviser to his successors.
ANU arts-law student Ben Lyons said it was deeply offensive that the university was giving a doctorate of law to someone who used the justice system to repress dissent.
"There are a lot of students as well as academics who are quite angry about both the fact that we're giving Lee Kuan Yew a doctorate and the way it was conducted," Mr Lyons said.
"It seems to have been done with a great deal of secrecy."
He thought the honour had been conferred for ANU's financial benefit through strengthened ties with the National University of Singapore.
Some law students argue the award may be invalid because it was not discussed by the honorary degree committee before approval by the ANU Council.
Defending the move, ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb said: "Ultimately, whatever process you follow, it's a decision of the council anyway."
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said earlier in the week that while there had been international concern about human rights issues in Singapore, Mr Lee was a "great regional leader".
"The fact is in the overall sense, Singapore has been a spectacular success," Mr Downer said.
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown on Wednesday said ANU had crassly used its degree system to honour an undeserving figure.
"(Mr Lee's someone) who's not a democrat, who's a traitor to democratic ideals and who has eliminated opposition effectively, including having people jailed and held in jail without sentence," Senator Brown told reporters.
"He eliminated opposition as effectively as he eliminated chewing gum."
Lee Kuan Yew made the remark after receiving an honorary doctorate of law from Australian National University (ANU), partly for his friendship to Australia.
About 50 students held up banners with wording like "no doctorates for dictators" and chanted slogans outside the venue at the ANU's Canberra campus where Mr Lee received the award.
The 83-year-old, Singapore's first prime minister and now a minister mentor in its government, said he was no stranger to hostile receptions.
Having praised Australia's "exceptional growth" of the past 15 years during his acceptance speech, Mr Lee later told reporters that Australian-style governance would not work in the city-state.
"It's not going to change me and I'm not going to change you," he said of Australian criticism of his autocratic style.
"We're going to prosper, you're going to prosper.
"But if I allowed you to run my country it will spiral downwards and hit rock bottom," he said.
Asked about a remark he made in the 1980s that Australians were destined to become the "poor white trash of Asia", Mr Lee said it was apt for that era.
"There are some words sometime said in the heat of an argument which perhaps at that time was warranted."
The award citation said ANU conferred the doctorate on the grounds of Mr Lee's service to developing Singapore, international statesmanship and friendship to Australia.
Mr Lee led Singapore for more than 30 years until 1990 under a regime which placed prosperity and racial harmony ahead of human rights and Western-style democracy.
He has since served as a senior adviser to his successors.
ANU arts-law student Ben Lyons said it was deeply offensive that the university was giving a doctorate of law to someone who used the justice system to repress dissent.
"There are a lot of students as well as academics who are quite angry about both the fact that we're giving Lee Kuan Yew a doctorate and the way it was conducted," Mr Lyons said.
"It seems to have been done with a great deal of secrecy."
He thought the honour had been conferred for ANU's financial benefit through strengthened ties with the National University of Singapore.
Some law students argue the award may be invalid because it was not discussed by the honorary degree committee before approval by the ANU Council.
Defending the move, ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb said: "Ultimately, whatever process you follow, it's a decision of the council anyway."
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said earlier in the week that while there had been international concern about human rights issues in Singapore, Mr Lee was a "great regional leader".
"The fact is in the overall sense, Singapore has been a spectacular success," Mr Downer said.
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown on Wednesday said ANU had crassly used its degree system to honour an undeserving figure.
"(Mr Lee's someone) who's not a democrat, who's a traitor to democratic ideals and who has eliminated opposition effectively, including having people jailed and held in jail without sentence," Senator Brown told reporters.
"He eliminated opposition as effectively as he eliminated chewing gum."
Lee Kuan Yew visits to Indonesia (2007)
July 27, 2007
Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has brushed aside allegations that the Defence Cooperation Agreement with Indonesia would allow Singapore to infringe on Indonesia's sovereignty.
He said this during his five day visit to Jakarta which ended today. Shereena Sajeed with this report.
Singapore and Indonesia negotiated the Defence Cooperation Agreement and Extradition treaty as a package.
They were signed in April this year but the DCA has run into problems.
Some Indonesian legislators have said they'd reject it.
One legislator recently said it was akin to selling off the state to foreigners.
On this point, Mr Lee said that Singapore has been training in Indonesia for years.
"We were here by your leave and licence. In fact your president at that time, Pak Harto, told me don't be afraid to us because he knew that we're a small country. Here a big country and we afraid that we're be eaten up he said. Don't be afraid to us."
Mr Lee also stressed that the agreements must be honoured.
"We reach an agreement and I think we should stick to agreements. Otherwise, everytime you want something from us you said ‘if you don’t do this we do that’. At the end of the day you’re the very big country and we’re a little red dot. But please, give a red dot a certain breathing space. We need to have our obligation honoured.
On the Extradition Treaty, Mr Lee said Singapore's fund industry would not go into steep decline if Indonesia were to pull out the money allegedly being hidden in Singapore.
He clarified that only about 30 billion of the 890 billion dollars in foreign funds managed in Singapore is from Indonesia.
Earlier in the week, Minister Mentor Lee also met Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla.
The region's economy and in particular the economy of Indonesia topped discussions during the meeting
Mr Lee told reporters that he sees Indonesia having good economic growth in the next two years.
But he added that its also important for Indonesia to make good use of the five years after that in the next presidential election.
He said Jakarta should go at the same speed as Vietnam when it comes to economic policies.
Mr Lee said the Vietnamese can push ahead very fast as they have younger leaders who have abandoned old policies and welcomed investments.
MM Lee: So Indonesia can grow as fast because it’s got a huge population underemployed, and therefore wants the labour conditions, industrial conditions put in order. I think investments can flow in. Indonesia can recover its buoyancy as before the financial crisis in 1997.
Touching on Singapore-Indonesia ties, Mr Lee described the relationship between the two economies as complementary .
MM Lee: I think nothing basically has changed. If anything the complementary nature of the two economies and the two countries is probably as strong as it ever was before. I mean we are small but we are nimble. We move swiftly and change much faster than they can change because we are a smaller craft to handle and we are connected with high-credit ratings around the world, in all the major banks in Singapore. The assessments of the Singapore fund-managers and the security agencies, I mean financial security houses is a factor in how the international financial community sees Indonesia’s growth. So we play a complementary relationship with Indonesia’s economic growth. I mean otherwise why should they say come and invest. I mean they tell us frankly if you come and invest, others will come and invest but we came and invested when they were down and out and they said sell back. We got to go in accordance with the law.
MM Lee also spoke about the importance of minimizing wastage
MM Lee: We turned around what was a loss-making into breakeven and made profits because we put financial controllers in charge which cut down wastage. That’s how it turned around. You know the Singapore model. First thing we do is to cut waste. So that’s why the Gulf States employ Singapore professionals as their financial officers. I mean you can go to any of the Gulf States, Abu Dhabi Qatar Dubai any number of CFOs are Singaporeans. One, integrity. Two, good governance. Three, cost-cutting. So we cut down a lot of wastage in the purchasing and other leakage of funds and turn it around.
Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has brushed aside allegations that the Defence Cooperation Agreement with Indonesia would allow Singapore to infringe on Indonesia's sovereignty.
He said this during his five day visit to Jakarta which ended today. Shereena Sajeed with this report.
Singapore and Indonesia negotiated the Defence Cooperation Agreement and Extradition treaty as a package.
They were signed in April this year but the DCA has run into problems.
Some Indonesian legislators have said they'd reject it.
One legislator recently said it was akin to selling off the state to foreigners.
On this point, Mr Lee said that Singapore has been training in Indonesia for years.
"We were here by your leave and licence. In fact your president at that time, Pak Harto, told me don't be afraid to us because he knew that we're a small country. Here a big country and we afraid that we're be eaten up he said. Don't be afraid to us."
Mr Lee also stressed that the agreements must be honoured.
"We reach an agreement and I think we should stick to agreements. Otherwise, everytime you want something from us you said ‘if you don’t do this we do that’. At the end of the day you’re the very big country and we’re a little red dot. But please, give a red dot a certain breathing space. We need to have our obligation honoured.
On the Extradition Treaty, Mr Lee said Singapore's fund industry would not go into steep decline if Indonesia were to pull out the money allegedly being hidden in Singapore.
He clarified that only about 30 billion of the 890 billion dollars in foreign funds managed in Singapore is from Indonesia.
Earlier in the week, Minister Mentor Lee also met Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla.
The region's economy and in particular the economy of Indonesia topped discussions during the meeting
Mr Lee told reporters that he sees Indonesia having good economic growth in the next two years.
But he added that its also important for Indonesia to make good use of the five years after that in the next presidential election.
He said Jakarta should go at the same speed as Vietnam when it comes to economic policies.
Mr Lee said the Vietnamese can push ahead very fast as they have younger leaders who have abandoned old policies and welcomed investments.
MM Lee: So Indonesia can grow as fast because it’s got a huge population underemployed, and therefore wants the labour conditions, industrial conditions put in order. I think investments can flow in. Indonesia can recover its buoyancy as before the financial crisis in 1997.
Touching on Singapore-Indonesia ties, Mr Lee described the relationship between the two economies as complementary .
MM Lee: I think nothing basically has changed. If anything the complementary nature of the two economies and the two countries is probably as strong as it ever was before. I mean we are small but we are nimble. We move swiftly and change much faster than they can change because we are a smaller craft to handle and we are connected with high-credit ratings around the world, in all the major banks in Singapore. The assessments of the Singapore fund-managers and the security agencies, I mean financial security houses is a factor in how the international financial community sees Indonesia’s growth. So we play a complementary relationship with Indonesia’s economic growth. I mean otherwise why should they say come and invest. I mean they tell us frankly if you come and invest, others will come and invest but we came and invested when they were down and out and they said sell back. We got to go in accordance with the law.
MM Lee also spoke about the importance of minimizing wastage
MM Lee: We turned around what was a loss-making into breakeven and made profits because we put financial controllers in charge which cut down wastage. That’s how it turned around. You know the Singapore model. First thing we do is to cut waste. So that’s why the Gulf States employ Singapore professionals as their financial officers. I mean you can go to any of the Gulf States, Abu Dhabi Qatar Dubai any number of CFOs are Singaporeans. One, integrity. Two, good governance. Three, cost-cutting. So we cut down a lot of wastage in the purchasing and other leakage of funds and turn it around.
Did Lee Kuan Yew want Singapore ejected from Malaysia? (2005)
uesday, November 01, 2005
Did Lee Kuan Yew want Singapore ejected from Malaysia?
M.G.G.Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com
IT IS FORTY YEARS SINCE Singapore was ejected from Malaysia, on 9 August 1965, less than two years after it was formed on 16 September 1963; though in Malaysia the date is August 31, and the publication two months ago of the late Patrick Keith's book, Ousted.
We have different opinions on the affair. We are told, officially and in the history books, that it was a cordial affair. The Star repeats that canard. It was anything but cordial. The two prime ministers - Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore - though both from Cambridge, did not get along. The Tunku, 62 at the time, believed in nature and Mr Lee, then 43, in nurture. Mr Lee upped the ante throughout, let people who were opposed to separation lead the negotiations, did not read the signals from Kuala Lumpur as he would now at 80.
The talks were bound to fail. The Peoples' Action Party saw itself as replacing the Malaysian Chinese Association in the Alliance, as the National Front was known at that time. The main Singapore negotiators, which included the then culture minister and later deputy prime minister, Mr S. Rajaratnam, did not want to leave Malaysia. Neither did Mr Devan Nair, the PAP MP for Bangsar, later President of Singapore and now living in exile in Canada. Whatever the history books might say, the fact is the Tunku took the decision while recuperating for shingles in a London clinic.
It took Mr Lee and his cabinet by surprise when Tun Razak, then Malaysian deputy prime minister, informed Mr Lee about it. There were furious negotiations between Malaysia and Singapore in the run up to the negotiations. The then Singapore deputy prime minister, Dr Toh Chin Chye, wrote to the Tunku and saw him, but he was told Singapore could stay if Mr Lee was out of the picture. Dr Toh's decline in Singapore politics began then in independent Singapore.
Mr Lee was brash then. He saw the PAP as the premier Chinese party in Malaysia and Singapore, which of course the Tunku did not agree. Mr Lee was emboldened by the 1964 general elections, when crowds from what is now Suleiman Court to the area surrounding Selangor Club turned up to hear him although PAP was returned in only one constituency, Bangsar. But there was the implied understanding that the PAP would remain in Singapore. The PAP broke that. It was downhill after that, which culminated in Singapore's expulsion two years later.
Mr Lee's message was not acceptable to UMNO at that time, nor is it now though it is much modified, and the assistant minister for information, Syed Jaafar Albar, the father of the Malaysian foreign minister and who did not want Singapore out although he resisted Singapore in Malaysia. On Singapore's independence, the PAP became the DAP and Mr Lim Kit Siang, Mr Devan Nair's assistant at that time, tool over. Mr Nair returned to Singapore in the 1969 general elections. Mr Lee did not want Singapore ejected from Malaysia, but when that was inevitable, he brought Singapore to what it is today: an efficient island republic but its people are brash, arrogant.
But this will last only so long as it gets its water from Johore. I happen to think Singapore will eventually have to merge with Malaysia, but as an adjunct of Johore. Patrick Keith's book is correct from his perspective as a senior information official of the Malaysian foreign ministry, but he wrote it from an official point of view. He knew the Tunku well, but he did not know what transpired behind his back. But it is important for an official point of view that contradicts the official history. There are other official accounts waiting to be written from the perspective of officials.
The history of Singapore's ejection from Malaysia is not as simple as it is made out in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; as it should be. But we are not interested in the past but the UMNO version of the day. We are now worrying over an UMNO MP's description of the Indian as "keling". But more than 30 years ago, the man who was to become Malaysia's deputy prime minister was convicted for using that word. Much of Malaysia's written history, particularly the Tunku's papers in government (which is how I know of the details, recovered from the wastepaper basket at a time when the Tunku was to be decried at any cost, and is now in the National Archives). We have to read the politician's account to find out what happened. Mr Lee's account, in the first part of his autobiography, is the first politician's account of the ejection, but it is from his perspective.
No Malaysian politician has written his story (in English). Most are restrained by the official history, and I hear personal stories about the time, some important and some self-serving but nevertheless important. But they are a dying breed. The Malaysian politician who was one at the time of ejection is now in his late seventies or older. But he has not written his memoirs, although he has much to say. Once retired, the politician is forgotten and consigned to the political dustbin. Tun Mahathir does not see it that way. He is active in politics, though he resigned from office two years ago. But he has no plans yet to write his memoirs, which he should. He was elected in 1964, was against Singapore coming into Malaysia, was regarded as an ultra in Singapore, and against Singapore leaving, one of whom Mr Lee called the "ultras".
So we are left with the official history written with UMNO help and with no official papers of retired politicians. This is so with the history of Singapore's ejection from Malaysia. The University Kebangsan Malaysia has a "Scholar in Residence" programme, by which prominent Malaysians are invited to write their history of the country, or aspects of it. Tun Ghazali Shafie has written his memoirs on the formation of Malaysia in Malay, which is now being translated into English. This scheme allows aging Malays in Malaysia and Singapore to write their memoirs.
But the money is why they write it. A Singapore journalist told me, when I asked him why he had not written his memoirs, that it is a matter of economics: he would get more writing his journalistic pieces than he would writing his memoirs. The same rationale holds in Malaysia. But it enables the future historian to write sensibly of the events of the present time. Now we know of only different accounts by foreign historians and political scientists. It is also true that the foreigner gets an interview easier than the local. It is depicted in the ads. There is in "Deeparaya" until there is a Caucasian present if we believe the advertisements we see on television by government agencies or companies.
The non-Malay perception in Malaysia is different from the Malay. The Malay is the ruling power and non-Malay not. The perceptions therefore differ, for each carry with them his respective historical baggage. That is changing now. The country is divided between the rulers and the ruled. Many Malaysians - me, for instance, and I am 66 though I can remember Malay ruled by the British - know only the coalition controlled by UMNO, first the Alliance and then the National Front, and the history they learnt in school is what UMNO tells them the history of Malaysia.
With the press controlled by the National Front, the Star has whitewashed the ejection of Singapore by Malaysia. They have not explained why Singapore was ejected; only it was peaceful. But it was anything but. I was reporter with Reuters in Singapore though at the time of its ejection, I was in Trivandrum and it was my cousin, a professor of history then at the University of Kerala, who told me of it. I had seen it coming and could talk intelligently of the break. My view then and today is that the ejection of Singapore was preceded by often vociferous exchange of words and Mr Lee did not want the break. But history in Singapore and Malaysia says otherwise.
Did Lee Kuan Yew want Singapore ejected from Malaysia?
M.G.G.Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com
IT IS FORTY YEARS SINCE Singapore was ejected from Malaysia, on 9 August 1965, less than two years after it was formed on 16 September 1963; though in Malaysia the date is August 31, and the publication two months ago of the late Patrick Keith's book, Ousted.
We have different opinions on the affair. We are told, officially and in the history books, that it was a cordial affair. The Star repeats that canard. It was anything but cordial. The two prime ministers - Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore - though both from Cambridge, did not get along. The Tunku, 62 at the time, believed in nature and Mr Lee, then 43, in nurture. Mr Lee upped the ante throughout, let people who were opposed to separation lead the negotiations, did not read the signals from Kuala Lumpur as he would now at 80.
The talks were bound to fail. The Peoples' Action Party saw itself as replacing the Malaysian Chinese Association in the Alliance, as the National Front was known at that time. The main Singapore negotiators, which included the then culture minister and later deputy prime minister, Mr S. Rajaratnam, did not want to leave Malaysia. Neither did Mr Devan Nair, the PAP MP for Bangsar, later President of Singapore and now living in exile in Canada. Whatever the history books might say, the fact is the Tunku took the decision while recuperating for shingles in a London clinic.
It took Mr Lee and his cabinet by surprise when Tun Razak, then Malaysian deputy prime minister, informed Mr Lee about it. There were furious negotiations between Malaysia and Singapore in the run up to the negotiations. The then Singapore deputy prime minister, Dr Toh Chin Chye, wrote to the Tunku and saw him, but he was told Singapore could stay if Mr Lee was out of the picture. Dr Toh's decline in Singapore politics began then in independent Singapore.
Mr Lee was brash then. He saw the PAP as the premier Chinese party in Malaysia and Singapore, which of course the Tunku did not agree. Mr Lee was emboldened by the 1964 general elections, when crowds from what is now Suleiman Court to the area surrounding Selangor Club turned up to hear him although PAP was returned in only one constituency, Bangsar. But there was the implied understanding that the PAP would remain in Singapore. The PAP broke that. It was downhill after that, which culminated in Singapore's expulsion two years later.
Mr Lee's message was not acceptable to UMNO at that time, nor is it now though it is much modified, and the assistant minister for information, Syed Jaafar Albar, the father of the Malaysian foreign minister and who did not want Singapore out although he resisted Singapore in Malaysia. On Singapore's independence, the PAP became the DAP and Mr Lim Kit Siang, Mr Devan Nair's assistant at that time, tool over. Mr Nair returned to Singapore in the 1969 general elections. Mr Lee did not want Singapore ejected from Malaysia, but when that was inevitable, he brought Singapore to what it is today: an efficient island republic but its people are brash, arrogant.
But this will last only so long as it gets its water from Johore. I happen to think Singapore will eventually have to merge with Malaysia, but as an adjunct of Johore. Patrick Keith's book is correct from his perspective as a senior information official of the Malaysian foreign ministry, but he wrote it from an official point of view. He knew the Tunku well, but he did not know what transpired behind his back. But it is important for an official point of view that contradicts the official history. There are other official accounts waiting to be written from the perspective of officials.
The history of Singapore's ejection from Malaysia is not as simple as it is made out in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; as it should be. But we are not interested in the past but the UMNO version of the day. We are now worrying over an UMNO MP's description of the Indian as "keling". But more than 30 years ago, the man who was to become Malaysia's deputy prime minister was convicted for using that word. Much of Malaysia's written history, particularly the Tunku's papers in government (which is how I know of the details, recovered from the wastepaper basket at a time when the Tunku was to be decried at any cost, and is now in the National Archives). We have to read the politician's account to find out what happened. Mr Lee's account, in the first part of his autobiography, is the first politician's account of the ejection, but it is from his perspective.
No Malaysian politician has written his story (in English). Most are restrained by the official history, and I hear personal stories about the time, some important and some self-serving but nevertheless important. But they are a dying breed. The Malaysian politician who was one at the time of ejection is now in his late seventies or older. But he has not written his memoirs, although he has much to say. Once retired, the politician is forgotten and consigned to the political dustbin. Tun Mahathir does not see it that way. He is active in politics, though he resigned from office two years ago. But he has no plans yet to write his memoirs, which he should. He was elected in 1964, was against Singapore coming into Malaysia, was regarded as an ultra in Singapore, and against Singapore leaving, one of whom Mr Lee called the "ultras".
So we are left with the official history written with UMNO help and with no official papers of retired politicians. This is so with the history of Singapore's ejection from Malaysia. The University Kebangsan Malaysia has a "Scholar in Residence" programme, by which prominent Malaysians are invited to write their history of the country, or aspects of it. Tun Ghazali Shafie has written his memoirs on the formation of Malaysia in Malay, which is now being translated into English. This scheme allows aging Malays in Malaysia and Singapore to write their memoirs.
But the money is why they write it. A Singapore journalist told me, when I asked him why he had not written his memoirs, that it is a matter of economics: he would get more writing his journalistic pieces than he would writing his memoirs. The same rationale holds in Malaysia. But it enables the future historian to write sensibly of the events of the present time. Now we know of only different accounts by foreign historians and political scientists. It is also true that the foreigner gets an interview easier than the local. It is depicted in the ads. There is in "Deeparaya" until there is a Caucasian present if we believe the advertisements we see on television by government agencies or companies.
The non-Malay perception in Malaysia is different from the Malay. The Malay is the ruling power and non-Malay not. The perceptions therefore differ, for each carry with them his respective historical baggage. That is changing now. The country is divided between the rulers and the ruled. Many Malaysians - me, for instance, and I am 66 though I can remember Malay ruled by the British - know only the coalition controlled by UMNO, first the Alliance and then the National Front, and the history they learnt in school is what UMNO tells them the history of Malaysia.
With the press controlled by the National Front, the Star has whitewashed the ejection of Singapore by Malaysia. They have not explained why Singapore was ejected; only it was peaceful. But it was anything but. I was reporter with Reuters in Singapore though at the time of its ejection, I was in Trivandrum and it was my cousin, a professor of history then at the University of Kerala, who told me of it. I had seen it coming and could talk intelligently of the break. My view then and today is that the ejection of Singapore was preceded by often vociferous exchange of words and Mr Lee did not want the break. But history in Singapore and Malaysia says otherwise.
Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew Part 8
DIVORCE BY STEALTH
Keng Swee urged that the separation be presented to the British as a fait accompli when parliament reassembled on August 9. The necessary constitutional amendments must first be made granting Singapore independence, with all three readings taking place on that day. Ismail readily agreed to this. Razak was greatly amused and said that perhaps PAP tactics were the best.
Ismail said two documents needed to be drawn up: an amendment to the constitution making the secession of Singapore possible, and an act giving Singapore independence under that amendment. In the interests of security, civil servants should not be brought in to prepare these, and he asked if we could do the work. Ismail and Razak must have thought through the necessary constitutional procedures. Keng Swee said Eddie [Barker] (Singapore's minister for law) would try to produce a draft for them in a week to 10 days, and that was agreed. Keng Swee impressed upon both of them the imperative need for secrecy.
On the morning of Friday, August 6, I traveled by car to Kuala Lumpur. Choo and the children stayed behind in the Camerons until Saturday so people would see them and think I was still there.
Neither Keng Swee nor Eddie was sure that the Tunku, who was now back [from London], had not changed his mind, in which case everything was off. But when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur that afternoon, they were there with the documents. After I had studied and approved them, they went to see Razak, Ismail and Kadir Yusof, the attorney general. The meeting went on for hours and hours as I waited impatiently and alone at Singapore House.
Late in the evening, Eddie phoned to say that Tan Siew Sin wanted amendments included whereby we would take over the guarantees that the central government had given the IMF and the World Bank for loans granted to Singapore, a niggling detail. I agreed to that, and Eddie and Kadir Yusof started work on the drafts.
But it took them until well after midnight. When he returned to Singapore House with Keng Swee, Eddie said they had all got drunk while waiting, and when the documents were finally ready, he was the only one sober enough to want to read them before he signed. Razak, who liked Eddie from their hockey-playing days in Raffles College, said, "Eddie, it's your draft. It's your chap who typed the final document, so what are you reading it for?" So Eddie, too, signed without further ado - "sign buta" (signing blindly), as he told me in Malay.
Keng Swee was so soused that he had gone straight to bed. But Eddie went through the documents, was greatly relieved to find no mistakes, then handed them to me. After I had quickly scanned the amendments myself, I looked at Eddie and said, "Thanks, Eddie, we've pulled off a "bloodless coup.'"
With the documents signed, even if the British persuaded the Tunku and his colleagues not to take it through Parliament, once I had published the agreements and the proclamation of independence in the government gazette, Singapore's relationship with Malaysia would change irrevocably.
SUDDENLY, INDEPENDENCE
It was like any other Monday morning in Singapore until the music stopped. At 10 a.m., the pop tunes on the radio were cut off abruptly. Stunned listeners heard the announcer solemnly read out a proclamation - 90 words that changed the lives of the people of Singapore and Malaysia:
"Whereas it is the inalienable right of a people to be free and independent, I, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, do hereby proclaim and declare on behalf of the people and the government of Singapore that as from today, the ninth day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five, Singapore shall be forever a sovereign, democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society."
Separation! What I had fought so hard to achieve was now being dissolved. Why? And why so suddenly? It was only two years since the island of Singapore had become part of the new Federation of Malaysia.
At 10 a.m. the same day, in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, the Tunku explained to Parliament: "In the end we find that there are only two courses open to us: to take repressive measures against the Singapore government or their leaders for the behavior of some of their leaders, and the course of action we are taking now, to sever with the state government of Singapore that has ceased to give a measure of loyalty to the central government."
The House listened in utter silence. The Tunku was speaking at the first reading of a resolution moved by deputy prime minister Tun Razak, to pass the Constitution of Malaysia (Singapore Amendment) Bill, 1965, immediately.
Under Malay-Muslim custom, a husband, but not the wife, can declare "Talak" (I divorce thee) and the woman is divorced. They can reconcile and he can remarry her, but not after he has said "Talak" three times. The three readings in the two chambers of parliament were the three talaks with which Malaysia divorced Singapore. The partners - predominantly Malay in Malaya, predominantly Chinese in Singapore - had not been compatible. Their union had been marred by increasing conjugal strife over whether the new Federation should be a truly multiracial society, or one dominated by the Malays.
DIFFICULT TO FIX
What were the real reasons for the Tunku, Razak and lsmail to want Singapore out of Malaysia? They must have concluded that if they allowed us to exercise our constitutional rights, they were bound to lose in the long run. The Malaysian Solidarity Convention would have rallied the non-Malays and, most dangerous of all, eventually made inroads into the Malay ground on the peninsula. The attitudes and policies of the PAP had already won the unswerving loyalty of our Malay leaders in Singapore; they never wavered even under the stress of the race riots in 1964, nor did they respond to appeals to race, religion or culture, or to the usual blandishments offered to draw them back into the UMNO fold.
This was the nub of the matter. The PAP leaders were not like the politicians in Malaya. Singapore ministers were not pleasure-loving nor did they seek to enrich themselves. UMNO had developed to a fine art the practice of accommodating Chinese or Indian ministers in Malaya who proved troublesome, and had, within a few years, extended its practice to Sabah and Sarawak. Razak once offered Keng Swee 5,000 acres of the best quality rubber land, to be planted with seedlings of the best high-yielding strains from the Rubber Research Institute. With an embarrassed laugh, Keng Swee protested that he would not know what to do with it and ducked the inducement.
Nor was it easy to compromise us. Keng Swee and I once accompanied the Tunku and Tan Siew Sin to a "mess" in Kuala Lumpur run by wealthy Chinese merchants. These "messes" were men's clubs where excellent food was provided by the best restaurants, where members and their friends could gamble at mahjong or poker, and where attractive call girls and even starlets were available. We had a good meal and when they played poker afterwards, I joined in. But as soon as the girls arrived, Keng Swee and I pleaded pressing engagements and made ourselves scarce. We could not afford to give hostages to fortune. If we had stayed, we would thereafter have been open to pressure from the Malaysian leaders. They considered us difficult, almost as dangerous and elusive to handle as the communists, and much too ideological. Worse, we always acted constitutionally and hence were difficult to fix.
NO MORE BULLYING
There were other considerations. If we had remained in Malaysia, the commission of inquiry into the 1964 race riots would continue to hear damaging evidence against Jaafar Albar and UMNO, which would receive widespread publicity. Then there would be the hearing of my libel action against Albar and the editor of the Utusan Melayu, who would be thoroughly cross-examined in court on all the incendiary passages they had published about me. That would mean a devastating exposure of key UMNO leaders' methods of incitement to racism and bloody riots.
The Tunku's solution to these problems was Separation. Singapore would be out of Malaysia and he would control Singapore through the supply of water from Johor and other levers of pressure. He told Head [Britain's high commissioner] on August 9, "If Singapore's foreign policy is prejudicial to Malaysia's interests, we could always bring pressure to bear on them by threatening to turn off the water in Johor."
The Tunku and Razak thought they could station troops in Singapore, squat on us and if necessary close the Causeway and cut off our water supply. They believed, not without foundation, that Singapore could not exist on its own - what better authority than the speeches of the PAP leaders themselves, myself included, and the reasons we had given for it? As Ghazali bin Shafie, the permanent secretary, external affairs ministry, said soon after separation: After a few years out on a limb, Singapore would be in severe straits and would come crawling back - this time on Malaysia's terms.
No, not if I could help it. People in Singapore were in no mood to crawl back after what they had been through for two years in Malaysia, the communal bullying and intimidation. Certainly Keng Swee and I, the two directly responsible for accepting this separation from our hinterland, were not about to give up. The people shared our feelings and were prepared to do whatever was needed to make an independent Singapore work.
Keng Swee urged that the separation be presented to the British as a fait accompli when parliament reassembled on August 9. The necessary constitutional amendments must first be made granting Singapore independence, with all three readings taking place on that day. Ismail readily agreed to this. Razak was greatly amused and said that perhaps PAP tactics were the best.
Ismail said two documents needed to be drawn up: an amendment to the constitution making the secession of Singapore possible, and an act giving Singapore independence under that amendment. In the interests of security, civil servants should not be brought in to prepare these, and he asked if we could do the work. Ismail and Razak must have thought through the necessary constitutional procedures. Keng Swee said Eddie [Barker] (Singapore's minister for law) would try to produce a draft for them in a week to 10 days, and that was agreed. Keng Swee impressed upon both of them the imperative need for secrecy.
On the morning of Friday, August 6, I traveled by car to Kuala Lumpur. Choo and the children stayed behind in the Camerons until Saturday so people would see them and think I was still there.
Neither Keng Swee nor Eddie was sure that the Tunku, who was now back [from London], had not changed his mind, in which case everything was off. But when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur that afternoon, they were there with the documents. After I had studied and approved them, they went to see Razak, Ismail and Kadir Yusof, the attorney general. The meeting went on for hours and hours as I waited impatiently and alone at Singapore House.
Late in the evening, Eddie phoned to say that Tan Siew Sin wanted amendments included whereby we would take over the guarantees that the central government had given the IMF and the World Bank for loans granted to Singapore, a niggling detail. I agreed to that, and Eddie and Kadir Yusof started work on the drafts.
But it took them until well after midnight. When he returned to Singapore House with Keng Swee, Eddie said they had all got drunk while waiting, and when the documents were finally ready, he was the only one sober enough to want to read them before he signed. Razak, who liked Eddie from their hockey-playing days in Raffles College, said, "Eddie, it's your draft. It's your chap who typed the final document, so what are you reading it for?" So Eddie, too, signed without further ado - "sign buta" (signing blindly), as he told me in Malay.
Keng Swee was so soused that he had gone straight to bed. But Eddie went through the documents, was greatly relieved to find no mistakes, then handed them to me. After I had quickly scanned the amendments myself, I looked at Eddie and said, "Thanks, Eddie, we've pulled off a "bloodless coup.'"
With the documents signed, even if the British persuaded the Tunku and his colleagues not to take it through Parliament, once I had published the agreements and the proclamation of independence in the government gazette, Singapore's relationship with Malaysia would change irrevocably.
SUDDENLY, INDEPENDENCE
It was like any other Monday morning in Singapore until the music stopped. At 10 a.m., the pop tunes on the radio were cut off abruptly. Stunned listeners heard the announcer solemnly read out a proclamation - 90 words that changed the lives of the people of Singapore and Malaysia:
"Whereas it is the inalienable right of a people to be free and independent, I, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, do hereby proclaim and declare on behalf of the people and the government of Singapore that as from today, the ninth day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five, Singapore shall be forever a sovereign, democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society."
Separation! What I had fought so hard to achieve was now being dissolved. Why? And why so suddenly? It was only two years since the island of Singapore had become part of the new Federation of Malaysia.
At 10 a.m. the same day, in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, the Tunku explained to Parliament: "In the end we find that there are only two courses open to us: to take repressive measures against the Singapore government or their leaders for the behavior of some of their leaders, and the course of action we are taking now, to sever with the state government of Singapore that has ceased to give a measure of loyalty to the central government."
The House listened in utter silence. The Tunku was speaking at the first reading of a resolution moved by deputy prime minister Tun Razak, to pass the Constitution of Malaysia (Singapore Amendment) Bill, 1965, immediately.
Under Malay-Muslim custom, a husband, but not the wife, can declare "Talak" (I divorce thee) and the woman is divorced. They can reconcile and he can remarry her, but not after he has said "Talak" three times. The three readings in the two chambers of parliament were the three talaks with which Malaysia divorced Singapore. The partners - predominantly Malay in Malaya, predominantly Chinese in Singapore - had not been compatible. Their union had been marred by increasing conjugal strife over whether the new Federation should be a truly multiracial society, or one dominated by the Malays.
DIFFICULT TO FIX
What were the real reasons for the Tunku, Razak and lsmail to want Singapore out of Malaysia? They must have concluded that if they allowed us to exercise our constitutional rights, they were bound to lose in the long run. The Malaysian Solidarity Convention would have rallied the non-Malays and, most dangerous of all, eventually made inroads into the Malay ground on the peninsula. The attitudes and policies of the PAP had already won the unswerving loyalty of our Malay leaders in Singapore; they never wavered even under the stress of the race riots in 1964, nor did they respond to appeals to race, religion or culture, or to the usual blandishments offered to draw them back into the UMNO fold.
This was the nub of the matter. The PAP leaders were not like the politicians in Malaya. Singapore ministers were not pleasure-loving nor did they seek to enrich themselves. UMNO had developed to a fine art the practice of accommodating Chinese or Indian ministers in Malaya who proved troublesome, and had, within a few years, extended its practice to Sabah and Sarawak. Razak once offered Keng Swee 5,000 acres of the best quality rubber land, to be planted with seedlings of the best high-yielding strains from the Rubber Research Institute. With an embarrassed laugh, Keng Swee protested that he would not know what to do with it and ducked the inducement.
Nor was it easy to compromise us. Keng Swee and I once accompanied the Tunku and Tan Siew Sin to a "mess" in Kuala Lumpur run by wealthy Chinese merchants. These "messes" were men's clubs where excellent food was provided by the best restaurants, where members and their friends could gamble at mahjong or poker, and where attractive call girls and even starlets were available. We had a good meal and when they played poker afterwards, I joined in. But as soon as the girls arrived, Keng Swee and I pleaded pressing engagements and made ourselves scarce. We could not afford to give hostages to fortune. If we had stayed, we would thereafter have been open to pressure from the Malaysian leaders. They considered us difficult, almost as dangerous and elusive to handle as the communists, and much too ideological. Worse, we always acted constitutionally and hence were difficult to fix.
NO MORE BULLYING
There were other considerations. If we had remained in Malaysia, the commission of inquiry into the 1964 race riots would continue to hear damaging evidence against Jaafar Albar and UMNO, which would receive widespread publicity. Then there would be the hearing of my libel action against Albar and the editor of the Utusan Melayu, who would be thoroughly cross-examined in court on all the incendiary passages they had published about me. That would mean a devastating exposure of key UMNO leaders' methods of incitement to racism and bloody riots.
The Tunku's solution to these problems was Separation. Singapore would be out of Malaysia and he would control Singapore through the supply of water from Johor and other levers of pressure. He told Head [Britain's high commissioner] on August 9, "If Singapore's foreign policy is prejudicial to Malaysia's interests, we could always bring pressure to bear on them by threatening to turn off the water in Johor."
The Tunku and Razak thought they could station troops in Singapore, squat on us and if necessary close the Causeway and cut off our water supply. They believed, not without foundation, that Singapore could not exist on its own - what better authority than the speeches of the PAP leaders themselves, myself included, and the reasons we had given for it? As Ghazali bin Shafie, the permanent secretary, external affairs ministry, said soon after separation: After a few years out on a limb, Singapore would be in severe straits and would come crawling back - this time on Malaysia's terms.
No, not if I could help it. People in Singapore were in no mood to crawl back after what they had been through for two years in Malaysia, the communal bullying and intimidation. Certainly Keng Swee and I, the two directly responsible for accepting this separation from our hinterland, were not about to give up. The people shared our feelings and were prepared to do whatever was needed to make an independent Singapore work.
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