The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (28 page)

One man emerged from this election as a powerful public speaker. He was young, slim, of medium height, with a soft baby face but a ringing voice that flowed beautifully in his native Hokkien. The girls adored him, especially those in the trade unions. Apart from Chinese culture, his themes were the downtrodden workers, the wicked imperialists, the Emergency Regulations that suppressed the rights of the masses, free speech and free association. Once he had got going after a cold start at the first two meetings, there was tremendous applause every time he spoke. By the end of the campaign, Lim Chin Siong was seen as a charismatic figure and a person to be reckoned with in Singapore politics and, what was of more immediate concern, within the PAP.

Fong Swee Suan also addressed these mass rallies but he did not have Lim’s hypnotic effect. He was at a disadvantage. He had to speak in Hokkien to reach the widest audience, for the Hokkiens formed the largest single Chinese community in Singapore, and as a result their dialect was understood by the other groups – but Fong was a Hakka, like myself. Mandarin could reach only those under 35 who had been to Chinese schools; I was frantically learning it, but after these election
meetings, I knew that even if I mastered it, it would not be enough. Yet I balked at the idea of learning Hokkien as well. The other language that could reach a big audience was bazaar Malay. This
Melayu Pasar
was a pidgin with little grammar, but it was understood by all races, and was the only means of trading with the Malays and Indians. However, because it was limited, it was difficult to move crowds in it. There could be no flights of rhetoric.

It was amazing how much personal loyalties counted for in that campaign. Those who came forward to help did so because they already thought well of me and wanted me to win. Under their union leaders, about 20 postal clerks sat for several consecutive days on my front veranda at Oxley Road (which was election headquarters for all four constituencies the PAP was contesting) to address my election manifestos for distribution to voters. Postmen also canvassed on my behalf in Tanjong Pagar and delivered my pamphlets house-to-house. Groups like the Itinerant Hawkers and Stallholders’ Association helped us. Some of their members who sold live chickens and ducks in the markets had been charged with packing too many fowls into the baskets strapped to their bicycles at Chinese New Year, and I had got them off lightly by appealing to the magistrate to have a heart – it was, after all, the biggest festival in the lunar calendar.

But the most enthusiastic organisations were the main Hakka Clan Association and its subsidiaries, like the association for my clansmen from our ancestral prefecture of Dapu in China. Total strangers came to Oxley Road to offer their services. They were Dapu Hakkas (one of whom called me “uncle” although he was older than I was), and they expected nothing in return except to share in my glory. Chong Mong Sang, the president of the Singapore Hakka Association, mobilised the clan’s resources and helped me with cars. He owned a successful chain of pawnshops in Malaya and Singapore (many pawnshops were run by Hakkas) and was my neighbour in Oxley Road. I was the association’s
honorary legal adviser, and as a close-knit minority, the Hakkas loyally rooted for me. The Singapore Chinese Liquor Retail Association allowed me to use its premises in Bernam Street as my second election headquarters. Many anonymous people came there to give money, while others turned up with bales of white cloth for banners. They asked for no favours or rewards. I had none to give. In contrast, of the English-educated left wing, only two of the
Fajar
students assisted by writing addresses on election manifestos.

One big logistic problem that we had was to find transport to carry voters to the polling stations, where they would then feel obliged to cast their ballots for our candidate. This practice, introduced by the British, favoured the wealthy parties whose supporters had cars. I depended on miscellaneous personal contacts – my brothers and sister and my aunts, my Hakka neighbour, and friends like Hon Sui Sen and his brother. I put Dennis in charge of transport arrangements on polling day. It was not an enviable task. He had first to establish order and some sort of system out of the bedlam of vehicles that converged on Oxley Road from all over Singapore, then go on to my Bernam Street headquarters, and run around Tanjong Pagar picking up voters at the behest of my canvassers. He also persuaded some petrol stations to honour his signature and that of my clerical assistant at Laycock & Ong, for my friends had lent their cars with full tanks and we had to return them with full tanks, the petrol paid for out of election funds.

Nor was this all done just for me. Election agents for Lim Chin Siong and Devan Nair made demands on me for cars – an unpleasant man called Kam Siew Yee of the Teachers’ Union insisted that I produce 30 for Nair alone. On 21 April, some three weeks after the election, Choo wrote a letter to Keng Swee in England, which was intercepted by Special Branch and thus survived in their files. It vividly illustrates whom the unions and the Chinese students were really campaigning for through their biased behaviour over canvassing and cars:

“Harry’s helpers, canvassers, speakers, were honest to goodness straightforward workers – the postmen – clerks, shop assistants – a man who runs a food stall in Chinatown, Printers Union chairman, etc. Towards the last week about 20 brats came to help canvassing between 2 and 5 pm when all the men were still at work and not home, so their canvassing was not of much effect and you can compare that with the hundred and more Louis rustled up for Farrer Park right through the whole month. On polling day, there were a few more kids helping in Tanjong Pagar – pulling chaps out to vote. But if ever you have any doubts as to whether the kids are coming your way – this election will clear those doubts.

“… On morning of polling day Devan made the mistake of sending Kam here to 38 Oxley Road to collect cars destined for Farrer Park. Our transport committee had had a hell of a time finding cars (out of the 100 over lent to Harry) that could be sent to Bukit Timah and Farrer Park, because most people (like our Hakka neighbours opposite) lent cars to Lee Kuan Yew personally and not to PAP and had strong objections to cars going off elsewhere than to Tanjong Pagar. Cars were therefore carefully allotted – those who had no objection being sent away. When cars allocated to Farrer Park were late in turning up – Kam, the lout, had the effrontery to throw a scene and demand cars. Who the hell does he think he is.”

Polling day, 2 April 1955: I collected 6,029 votes against 908 and 780 respectively for my two opponents, both of whom lost their deposits. I had won by the largest number of ballots cast for any candidate, and by the widest margin. Lim Chin Siong, Ahmad Ibrahim and Goh Chew Chua were also returned. Devan Nair lost, and I was greatly relieved, for without Nair, Lim would not be able to operate effectively in an exclusively English-speaking Legislative Assembly. He was not fluent in the language, and Nair would have been his crutch. Now he had to depend on me.

The big shock of the election was the rout of the Progressive Party, which had been expected to emerge the largest in the Assembly. The Labour Front won 10 out of the 17 seats it contested, and, to his own
astonishment, David Marshall became the chief minister. The PAP won three out of four, and the smaller parties and independents, eight of the remainder. But the Progressives won only four out of the 22 they contested, and the Democrats only two out of 20. Yet their two parties had the most resources in money and election workers. What had happened?

The Progressive Party had been formed as early as 1947, but consisted only of a small coterie of English-educated professionals and Englishmen like John Laycock. But Laycock lost out in his ward like many others because they were now heavily outnumbered by the Chinese-educated – the “Chinese Chinese”.

The Democratic Party was formed only in March 1955, after the Chinese Chamber of Commerce realised that automatic registration under the Rendel constitution would bring many Chinese-speaking voters onto the rolls. Broadly speaking, both parties represented the middle and upper middle classes, but while one was part of the British colonial establishment, the other was outside the magic circle. Its members were Chinese who made a good living as importers and exporters, retailers, merchants and shopkeepers, bankers, and rubber or tin magnates. They were the leaders of the Chinese-speaking traditional guilds; they were in charge of the Chinese schools, which they paid for and ran through their boards of management; and they funded and administered charitable Chinese clan hospitals and other welfare organisations. They saw this election as their chance to get at the levers of power that would increase their business prospects. They further believed that they could harness the energies of the Chinese middle school students to their party because the students were their children, and they had been sympathetic to their cause of defending Chinese education.

The cultural divide between the Progressives and Democrats was thus very deep and could not be bridged. In many constituencies, therefore, they split the right-wing ballot, with the English-speaking and Malay votes going to the Progressives and the Chinese-speaking to the
Democrats. If they had worked together, they would have won half of the 160,000 votes polled (seven times the number in the 1951 election).

Once they knew they had lost, they sneaked out of the counting centre at the Victoria Memorial Hall and vanished into the night. They did not understand that when you lose, you have to be defiant, to keep up the morale of your supporters, to live and fight another day. The communists knew this and we, the non-communists in the PAP, quickly learnt it from them. But the two parties had been totally demoralised by our hard-hitting campaign, which introduced a note of stridency into the hustings. We had attacked the Progressives as stooges of the colonial power, and the Democrats as capitalists and exploiters of the people. Our main target, however, had been our white overlords, of whom I wrote in my manifesto, “The colonial rule of the British over Malaya is the basic cause of a great number of social and economic evils of this country.”

Marshall, a political greenhorn, criticised the PAP for going a little too far in demanding immediate self-government. “They seem to have been centred on antagonism and attack on the British. Their utterances seem to be unnecessarily anti-British.” That might have been the feeling of the English-speaking middle class; it was different with the mass of the Chinese-educated.

Phoenix Park, the British commissioner-general’s office, had its own intelligence assessment of the election. It quoted some passages of a speech I made at an election rally:

“As far as I can see, apart from those over 40, all the Chinese are immensely proud of the achievement of the Mao Tse-tung government. A government that in five years can change a corrupt and decadent administration into one that can withstand the armed might of the Americans in Korea deserves full praise. General Chiang and Kuomintang are finished – except to some stray supporters who talk of the reconquest of the Chinese mainland.

“But I believe there is growing in Malaya a generation of Chinese born and bred here, educated in the Chinese language and
traditions, but nevertheless Malayans in their outlook. They consider Malaya to be their only home. They are proud of China as a Frenchman in Quebec would be proud of France. Of course, there are those who feel that the task of building up a Malayan nation is not worthwhile. These are the young students who go back to China to be re-absorbed into the Chinese stream of life. Those who remain behind are Malayans and will be more and more as the years go by.”

British intelligence thought my words worth reporting to fathom my real position.

Earlier, in January, Raja had drafted a PAP statement, which I then issued, proposing a general amnesty for the MCP. It was reasonable and logical, but in retrospect, naive and unworkable. “The past six and a half years have made clear that the Emergency in this country is essentially a political and not a military problem,” it said. The sooner it was ended, the sooner could the people avail themselves of the democratic rights that it had curtailed, and without which effective democratic parties could not properly function. The Malayan government should give firm guarantees that if the MCP abandoned its armed insurrection, there would be no reprisals, and if it accepted constitutional methods of political struggle, it should be permitted to operate as a legitimate party.

Raja and I were Western-educated radicals who had no idea of the dynamics of guerrilla insurgency and revolution by violence. Only later did we realise that the communists would never give up their capacity to use armed force whenever democratic methods failed to win them power. But while in part our misguided demands could be put down to innocence, in large measure they could be traced to adroit manipulation of the mass rallies by the pro-communists. They were superb stage managers, and their cheerleaders had orchestrated prolonged applause for all speakers who attacked the Emergency Regulations and made them appear to be a major issue, since they had to be abolished first if the MCP were to break out into the open and be free to organise the ground.

Initially I did not understand this, and was duly impressed because it all appeared to be so spontaneous. But as I attended rally after rally over the next two years, I gradually became aware that these cheerleaders were always scattered among the audience. Furthermore, they would be led by a master cheerleader, from whom they took their cue, and each in turn would have his own claque of 30–40 who would begin to applaud when he did, triggering off a response from the audience around him. It was well-rehearsed. I was to see them play a game of “spot the leader” at their picnics at which 20 to 30 students would sit in a circle, each touching his nose or pulling his ear or tugging his shirt sleeve, the object being to identify the one who changed signals and almost instantly prompted all the others to change with him. With a good team, it was not always easy. But it was the combination of this stage management and his own oratory that made the reputation of Lim Chin Siong during those weeks of electioneering.