The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (47 page)

Some of my ministers and I came to the centre to give it a practical approach by discussing real situations we had to wrestle with immediately. At first the civil servants were sceptical, but the lecturers were obviously
not communists, and they quickly got over their initial suspicion that this was an exercise in Marxist indoctrination. Because the teachers were of a similar cast of mind as their own, they accepted that the government was on the level, that the problems were real and seemingly intractable, and that we wanted them to work with us to find and implement solutions. Thomson did a good job and over the next four to five years educated the senior echelons of the civil service in the theory of communism, the possible democratic answers to the social ills that fostered its growth, and the practice of guerrilla insurgency. They came to understand what was happening in the wider world, the causes of revolution in Southeast Asia, and the need for a fundamental shift in attitudes and policies to meet the challenges. But for a long time, our relations with them remained uneasy.

One problem I had anticipated was getting used to power. I had seen what happened with Ong Eng Guan in the City Council, how the underdog had misused it when he became the top dog. I warned my ministers, parliamentary secretaries and assemblymen who were assigned to help ministers deal with public complaints not to get drunk on power and not to abuse it. It was easier said than done, and on many occasions we still antagonised civil servants.

We were determined to strike while the iron was hot and exploit our post-election popularity. We mounted a series of well-publicised campaigns to clean the streets of the city, clear the beaches of debris and cut the weeds on unkempt vacant land. It was a copycat exercise borrowed from the communists – ostentatious mobilisation of everyone including ministers to toil with their hands and soil their clothes in order to serve the people. We saw no reason why the MCP should have the monopoly of such techniques and organised drives to enthuse the people and involve them in setting higher standards in civic consciousness, general cleanliness and the preservation of public property. One Sunday, Ong Eng Guan would muster government servants to clean up Changi beach. On another, I would take a broom to sweep the city streets with the community leaders.

Setting an example to keep Singapore clean soon after the PAP took office.

There were other things we wanted to do. Keng Swee and I planned and formed the People’s Association, a statutory board that would embrace all the important voluntary social organisations, clubs and associations for sports, music, ballet, drawing and cooking. We built over one hundred community centres – big ones in the city, small wooden huts in the rural areas – places for education and recreation. Table tennis, basketball, badminton, Chinese chess, lessons in repairing radios and refrigerators and courses in technical trades were some of the activities. We wanted to give people something positive to do, and get them lined up on the side of law and order. Each centre would have a full-time organising secretary to administer it and cater to the needs of those who lived around it. To supervise the centres, the Social Welfare Department would be transformed into a community development department.

We organised a Works Brigade to take in unemployed young men and women, put them in semi-military uniforms, house them in wooden barracks and teach them farming, road building, bricklaying and construction work – generally to put some discipline into them and, most important, to get them off the streets.

But we also had to discipline those already in work, for we badly needed to establish a grip on the unions under communist control to stop their political strikes. We therefore set up an arbitration court. In the 1950s, the Australians had good industrial relations, largely thanks to compulsory arbitration procedures that kept tempers in check. At our request, they sent the permanent secretary of their ministry of labour, Harry Bland, to help us. After the court was set up, the minister could order any major strike, especially one in essential services like public transport or public utilities, to be referred to arbitration. Once referred,
it was illegal for a union to continue the stoppage pending the outcome, and if it persisted, it would face deregistration. Before a strike, moreover, there had to be a secret ballot, not just the show of hands at the end of a rabble-rousing speech, which I had too often seen.

On the other hand, we shared the view of the communists that one reason for the backwardness of China and the rest of Asia, except Japan, was that women had not been emancipated. They had to be put on a par with the men, given the same education and enabled to make their full contribution to society. During the election campaign, we had used one of our allotted party broadcasts in four languages – English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil – to put over our policy on women’s rights. But we could not find a PAP woman member who was a good enough speaker to take on the programme in English. After Choo had auditioned the wives of two candidates in Lee & Lee’s office, she came into my room, where I was in discussion with Keng Swee and Raja, to tell me that they sounded too soft, not tough enough. When she left us, my two friends suggested that she should do it. I asked her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she agreed. Raja wrote the first draft, which she amended so that it would sound like her. It was cleared by the central executive committee and translated into the other languages, and she delivered it in English over Radio Malaya. One paragraph was crucial:

“Our society is still built on the assumption that women are the social, political and economic inferiors of men. This myth has been made the excuse for the exploitation of female labour. Many women do the same kind of work as men but do not get the same pay. … We are fielding five women candidates in the election. … Let us show them (the other parties) that Singapore women are tired of their pantomime and buffoonery. I appeal to women to vote for PAP. It is the only party with the idealism, the honesty and ability to carry out its election programme.”

This was a serious commitment, or I would not have agreed to my wife making it in a broadcast. I wanted to implement it early, although it meant urgent work for the legal draftsmen in the attorney-general’s chambers. They searched for precedents in the legislation of other countries, and drew up the Women’s Charter, which we passed into law within a year. It established monogamy as the only legal marital condition and made polygamy, hitherto an accepted practice, a crime – except among Muslims, whose religion allowed a man to have four wives. The charter was comprehensive and altered the status of women. But it did not change the cultural bias of parents against daughters in favour of sons. That has still not been achieved.

There were, in addition, several easy, popular points to be scored that required no planning, including a series of “anti-yellow culture” prohibitions imposed by Pang Boon as minister for home affairs. “Yellow culture” was a literal translation of the Mandarin phrase for the decadent and degenerate behaviour that had brought China to its knees in the 19th century: gambling, opium-smoking, pornography, multiple wives and concubines, the selling of daughters into prostitution, corruption and nepotism. This aversion to “yellow culture” had been imported by schoolteachers from China, who infused into our students and their parents the spirit of national revival that was evident in every chapter of the textbooks they brought with them, whether on literature, history or geography. And it was reinforced by articles of left-wing Chinese newspaper journalists enthralled by the glowing reports of a clean, honest, dynamic, revolutionary China.

Pang Boon moved quickly, outflanking the communists with puritanical zeal. He ordered a clean-up of Chinese secret society gangsters, and outlawed pornography, striptease shows, pin-table saloons, even decadent songs. It did no harm apart from adding somewhat to unemployment and making Singapore less attractive to tourists. But the seamen who had always been a part of Singapore’s transient population soon
found their way to the amenities still offered in the more obscure corners of the island to which we turned a blind eye. Prostitution continued discreetly; we left it alone because we could not ban it without taking silly and ineffective action.

Our most significant programme was to give every child a place in school within a year. My gum-making brother-in-law, Yong Nyuk Lin, now minister for education, did us proud: in 12 months, he doubled the intake of students, converting each school into two by splitting it to provide a morning and an afternoon session. He ran a crash programme to train the teachers needed, and promoted many of the seniors to be principals, headmasters and headmistresses. He also started adult education classes to teach Malay, now the national language, and launched a Chinese literacy drive, using Mandarin as the common language of all Chinese dialect groups. People wanted to feel they were improving themselves and their prospects, and we gave them the means. We adopted the proven methods of our communist adversaries. As with the mass campaigns, we saw no reason why we should give the MCP a monopoly of such techniques.

20. Glimpses of Troubles Ahead

I was uneasy about taking power at the age of 35. I had no experience of administration – not even of my law office, which I left to Choo and Dennis. I decided to acquaint myself with the structure of the government and obtain an overview of the ministries. I wanted to get the feel of the senior staff, the nature of their work, their attitudes and work style, so that I would know how much had to be changed if we were to solve our political, economic and social problems. I also wanted to assess the resources of each ministry and redeploy them so as to strengthen the most important.

The first I visited was finance, for without financial resources, nothing could be implemented, and the next was home affairs. We needed to have good intelligence on the communists, to be sensitive and effective in dealing with them, and, if possible, to pre-empt their moves. I wanted to know if we had competent men in charge who could help us with the information, the analysis, the thinking and planning necessary to work out a counter-strategy to foil them. And at street level, I wanted the police to be disciplined, but also firm, decisive and robust once we decided to break up a demonstration or an incipient riot. I was determined that they should not act in the dumb, blunt way they had under Lim Yew Hock, when they were simply trained men doing an unpleasant duty and allowed the communists to score all the points with the Chinese-speaking.

I visited the home affairs ministry in October, some four months after taking office, and spoke first to the senior police officers to boost their morale. I told them that I expected trouble from the communists in about a year, after they had regrouped. I wanted them to be well prepared to meet it. The commissioner of police, Alan Blades, was a tall,
taciturn man with a white goatee and glasses. A former director of Special Branch who had not done much work as a uniformed police officer, he was well aware of the danger the communists posed, and probably thought I was too close to them for my own good – a view shared by several of his senior officers. I do not know how long it was before he concluded that I knew what I was about, and that I was deadly serious when I said we had to counter them without losing out massively with the Chinese-speaking.