The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (25 page)

The students attached this letter as an exhibit to their affidavit, stating, “We then felt that it was no use briefing Mr Marshall. We also felt that if Mr Marshall, the lawyer who had hitherto appeared most sympathetic to our political aims, could be so hostile as to write such an uncalled for letter, the other local lawyers in Singapore would not be less hostile.”

Pritt’s petition for admission was opposed by the Bar Committee and – unexpectedly – by the attorney-general. The chief justice, who heard the petition with Pritt appearing in person, recognised the furore that would follow if his application was denied, and admitted him.

The hearing started on 23 August and went on for three days. It was, for me, a lesson in advocacy in political trials – instructive, entertaining, even hilarious. Pritt took full advantage of his position as a renowned rebel QC to bludgeon and browbeat his opponents on every imaginable issue, however remotely relevant to the case. Wherever he had the chance, he took a swipe at authority with a big cosh. To begin with, he made great play of the “duplicity of the charges”. In essence, the students were all accused equally of publishing with the intention to “libel the Queen or
libel the government or to incite the people of Singapore or to promote ill-will”. He wanted to know which particular “intent” the prosecution attributed to each individual defendant. He argued that a charge that concealed within itself so many different alternative charges must be bad. He asked the court to strike it out and instruct the prosecutor to frame one that was less ambiguous.

I had already protested along the same lines, but I did not have Pritt’s standing as a senior QC, nor his powers of invective. Although the judge ruled against him and found that the charges as framed were not bad, he had scored with the public both in court and in the newspapers.

Mr Justice F.A. (Freddy) Chua was a man with a practical turn of mind and a good sense of the realities outside the court. At the end of the submissions by Pritt and the DPP, and without going into any legal argument, he simply said that the articles in
Fajar
were not seditious. The eight students were all acquitted. For the press, this was an anticlimax. They had expected him to explain why they were or were not seditious, but Chua was a cautious judge who did not want to commit himself more than he had to.

The students and their supporters were jubilant. This had been an unnecessary prosecution; it damaged the government and encouraged rebelliousness among people who enjoyed the spectacle of a colonial attorney-general resisting unsuccessfully the admission to the Singapore Bar of an eminent if troublemaking English QC, and of a colonial deputy public prosecutor getting the worst of the exchanges in court.

Immediately after the case, and while Pritt was still in Singapore, the Chinese middle school students approached me to act for them and brief him to represent them in their appeal against conviction for rioting on 13 May near King George V Park, where they had gathered to protest against the National Service Ordinance. This case would lead me into a totally different world, one teeming with raw energy and idealism.

9. The World of the Chinese-educated

My introduction into the world of the Chinese-educated came after what was called the 5-1-3 incident, named after the riots of 13 May 1954. Five students turned up at my home one evening in 1954, soon after the
Fajar
trial: Robert Soon Loh Boon, a small young man with a crew cut and a front tooth missing, who acted as their interpreter and spokesman, Louis Hwa, who was also competent in English, and three pigtailed Chinese girls. The boys were in shorts, the girls in skirts, their school uniforms. Seven of their fellow students had been convicted for obstructing the police during the riots in which 500 Chinese middle school students, mainly from Chung Cheng High School, clashed with the police. They were marching in support of a delegation on its way to Government House to present a petition against registration for national service when they were stopped and asked to disperse. Instead they threw stones at the police, six of whom were also stabbed. The police charged with batons and hit some students on the head. Twenty-six people were injured; 48 students, including two girls, were arrested.

The trial was held on 28 June. Of the 41 students accused of disobeying police orders to disperse, 26 were found guilty and given a six-month suspended sentence. Seven were tried on the more serious charge of obstructing the police. They asked for their case to be transferred to another court because the judge had shown prejudice in the way he had treated and convicted their fellow students the day before. They refused to say anything in their defence and were sentenced to three months, the maximum for the charge. Their appeal would be heard in October. Would I ask Pritt to take up their appeal?

Their defiance of the law was the immediate concern of the court. But the underlying issues were deep and fundamental. The Chinese-educated had no place or role to play in the official life of the colony, which employed only English-educated locals as subordinates. The government provided primary schools teaching in English and in Malay, and secondary schools teaching only in English.

But immigrant communities were left to fend for themselves. The Chinese collected donations and built their own schools. Completely self-supporting, they used textbooks published in China and employed teachers recruited in China who taught in Mandarin just as if they were in Guangdong or Fujian province. Culturally, they lived in a world apart. Graduates could either continue their studies by switching over to an English school and so make their way up the English-educated ladder, or look for jobs in firms that used the Chinese language – Chinese shops, restaurants and business houses, and the few Chinese-owned banks.

They felt dispossessed, and their lack of economic opportunity turned their schools into breeding grounds for the communists, who had been burrowing away in Malaya and Singapore since 1923, when the Comintern (Communist International) first sent agents from Shanghai to the island. After the war, the record of its resistance to the Japanese gave the MCP a prestige that made it a powerful force among the impressionable young, and it proceeded to build up a network of cells in the classrooms. Many teachers became communist cadres or sympathisers; many overaged students whose education had been interrupted by the Japanese occupation were indoctrinated and co-opted; and the school management committees of merchants and shopkeepers were either sympathetic towards them or fearful of opposing them.

Once the Emergency was declared, the communists in Singapore were superficially dormant, but in fact they were recruiting and expanding. In 1952, the British introduced national service bills in Singapore and Malaya, making all males between the ages of 18 and 55 liable for callup
into the armed services, police, or civil defence forces, and in April 1954, the government started registering them. It needed only 800 for the Singapore Military Forces and 1,200 for the Civil Defence Corps, and was going to choose them by ballot. But registration in the schools was slow, and on 12 May, the closing date, Chinese High School students presented a petition to the acting colonial secretary asking for mass exemption. In response, Acting Governor W.A.C. Goode issued a statement saying that exemptions could be granted only on a case-by-case basis. This led to the demonstration by 500 students, whose leaders the governor had refused to see until they had all first registered.

I did not understand the background of the problem at the time, though I knew something was simmering and bubbling away in this completely different world. The students were well-organised, disciplined and cohesive. They had remarkable self-control and were capable of mass action, of collective demonstrations of defiance that made it difficult for the government to isolate and pick out the leaders for punishment. After the arrests, they set out to blow up other issues that would enable them to engineer clashes with the police, to produce martyrs and so arouse public feeling against the government. I understood their motivations and methods only much later. Many of the English-educated, including the University of Malaya Students’ Union, were equally ill-informed and naive. On 18 May, they came out in support of the Chinese demonstrators by calling for an inquiry into the rioting because the police had used improper force. They were as simple-minded as I was.

The communists immediately commemorated the clash on 13 May with the numbers “5-1-3”, 5 for May and 13, a Chinese shorthand for famous or infamous incidents – the Tiananmen episode on 4 June 1989 is “6-4”, 6 for June. The students mounted camp-ins and protests, and formed a 55-man exemption delegation, which organised different sections to collect information on injured students, provide them with medical treatment and drum up public sympathy.

They fanned out across Singapore to enlist the support of other students, parents, shopkeepers, local Chinese leaders – indeed the entire Chinese-speaking community. Theirs were tried and tested methods of mass agitation that the communists had worked out in China. At the first sign of trouble from the police, they shut themselves up in schools or factories to form a critical mass, attract attention, win sympathy, defy authority and provoke the government into “victimising” them.

So on 14 May, the day after the 5-1-3 incident, they barricaded themselves in Chung Cheng High School, but dispersed after one day when a 12-man committee formed by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce asked them to do so. They had become important, and the elders of the Chinese community had come down to plead with them, promising to intercede with the authorities. In response to pressure from a government faced with growing indiscipline, the chamber brought forward the mid-year holidays by two weeks and closed the school. But its representatives had first to accept a list of six demands from the students for submission to the colonial administration. These called for total exemption from national service, unconditional discharge of the 48 accused awaiting trial, a public inquiry into the incident, and several other concessions. The students had skilfully involved the elders of the Chinese community in their cause, and on 22–23 May, 2,500 of them locked themselves up in Chung Cheng High School again, refusing to leave until all were exempted from national service. They dispersed three days later, but only after the police stopped their food supplies and irate parents forced them to.

And so it went on. The Chung Cheng students demanded that schools be reopened, the Chinese High School students threatened to go on a hunger strike, and on 2 June, a thousand students drawn from various middle schools assembled at the Chinese High School to begin a camp-in during the enforced holidays. It was an act of defiance. They held their own lessons in the classrooms and in the open fields, with
senior pupils teaching their juniors mathematics, English, Chinese and geography. Parents brought them food, but it was otherwise a self-organised mid-year holiday refresher camp.

The students also sent more petitions to the governor, but none were answered. When seven schools reopened on 24 June, new disciplinary measures were imposed: among others, teachers would be screened and pupils would be forbidden to use the school premises for extramural activities not approved by the principal. But these orders read well only in the newspapers. They could not be enforced because the management committees and the principals were afraid of the organised underground among the teachers and students.

Then, on 13 September, the government announced that it intended to give itself powers to close down any school that did not comply with the Schools Ordinance. Its supervisor could henceforth be asked to show cause if in the preceding six months it had been used for political propaganda detrimental to Singapore. This was a ghastly mistake. The committees of the Chinese schools had been divided among the anti-communists, the fence-sitters, and the fellow travellers. But once the government proposed to control their schools, they were all united against it, and were supported even by the nationalist Kuomintang press.

Governor Sir John Nicoll was taken aback. Speaking to the Legislative Council on 21 September, he deplored suggestions that the government was adopting an anti-Chinese policy. It did not intend to assimilate the Chinese schools into the colonial system of education. The communists knew that the governor’s plan was to stifle their subversive activities, but he had in fact given them a chance to rally all Chinese-educated groups around a patriotic cause, and they cleverly twisted the issue into a threat to anglicise Chinese schools and destroy Chinese culture, language and education. These were a sacred heritage dear to the hearts of all Chinese, especially the poorly educated merchant millionaires and shopkeepers of Singapore. They had been mesmerised by glowing reports from
Communist China, depicting its transformation into a great nation. And now, just when this rejuvenated China should be a source of new pride and dignity to Chinese everywhere, the British seemed out to strip them of their birthright. The colonial government had stumbled into a cultural minefield. If Special Branch had had Chinese-educated officers who could feel the pulse of the chauvinistic communities in Singapore and Malaya, they would have warned the governor to move with greater sensitivity and circumspection.