The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (51 page)

Ismail did not understand this approach. He explained how a firm line in the Federation had kept down communist subversion. I said Malaya was different from Singapore. The Malayan government could use a heavy hand against the communists and not lose their mass support because it was mainly Malay. However, the Singapore government must try to win over its mass base – the uncommitted Chinese, especially the intellectuals who could influence the uncommitted. Goode was familiar with our thinking, but had brought it out for Ismail’s benefit.

We needed steady nerves to stick to our position. At the end of the first six months, the build-up of the communist united front was still continuing. Lim Chin Siong and his comrades were attracting more unions towards the communist camp, and once they were the majority, the Trade Union Congress (TUC), to which both pro- and non-communist unions belonged, broke off from the Western-sponsored International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). As the ICFTU had been created to counter the World Federation of Trade Unions run from
Moscow, the pro-communists used the pretext that the ICFTU was engaged in power politics.

Meanwhile, they had worked assiduously on Fong Swee Suan and won him back into the fold. Devan Nair was dismayed at the ease with which they undid his three years of work on Fong in Changi. Unlike Nair, Fong was Chinese-educated, a prisoner of the legends of the revolutionary movement in China and without a framework of values that could accommodate the concept of revolutionary social and economic change by peaceful means. To the Chinese-educated like Fong, revolution required violence. Without violence, it was, in Marxist dialectics, “mere reformism”. In any case, he could not resist the emotional pulls of old friendships and traditional loyalties. Woodhull and Puthucheary soon drifted along with the more powerful and apparently unbeatable side. They isolated Nair who, with my agreement, resigned his post as political secretary in February to engage in serious study and writing designed “to contribute to the consolidation of the ideological and theoretical foundations of the PAP”.

Lim Chin Siong and Fong went from strength to strength, winning over to the pro-communist camp in the TUC not only English-educated union leaders but quite a few of the Malay-educated. Emboldened by success, they issued several statements critical of the government’s position on detainees and the trade unions, so that in August I had to warn in the Assembly that if they challenged authority, they would meet with a serious rebuff. After that, three of the political secretaries – Lim Chin Siong, Fong and Woodhull – declared formally that their stand was the same as it had been at the time of their release from detention in June 1959: to support the PAP and its policy that independence should be achieved through merger with the Federation.

At that time, they thought merger was in the indefinite future – so did I – but they had nevertheless been stirring up demands for an independent Singapore without merger.

21. Trounced in Hong Lim

I had known that a frustrated Ong Eng Guan was plotting with some of the assemblymen, but paid little heed because I was confident he could never get a majority to support him. But he had become reckless. If he could not be in power, he would ruin us even if the MCP benefited. At a party conference in June 1960, his Hong Lim branch introduced 16 resolutions, four of them designed to win him communist support.

In order to dispel my suspicions, Lim Chin Siong and his comrades had earlier protested that they would have no truck with Ong. The Trade Union Congress had issued a statement that although the PAP had made mistakes, they would not support him. But I believed it was not beyond them to have got hold of his close friends to put him up to this. The resolutions called for a more anti-colonial policy, the immediate release of all detainees, and immediate constitutional revision. In other words, internal self-government was not good enough. So Ong, too, wanted independence. We were set for a showdown. He was isolated in the party, and after two days of argument, the conference suspended him and two assemblymen who backed him – S.V. Lingam and Ng Teng Kian, a Chinese-speaking Hokkien like Ong. All three men then crossed the floor of the Assembly to sit with the opposition.

Ong was restive. He had lost his star status and was not making the headlines. He therefore set out to attract attention by doing the unexpected and the eye-catching. In September, he tabled a motion calling on the prime minister to fight in the Internal Security Council for the unconditional release of all political detainees. This could not help him. Once again, it would only help the communists although they distrusted
and despised him. But it would embarrass the government. I was away in Sarawak, so Chin Chye moved an amendment to point out that it was unlikely that the Federation government, which had the deciding vote in the Internal Security Council, would agree to release persons who it was convinced were promoting the cause of the MCP. And since it was the government’s business to advance the welfare of the people of Singapore through merger with the Federation, it had no intention of going against the Federation’s stand.

Ong’s strategy had been to show us up as lackeys of the imperialists, and he now took this a step further. In October, he said George Thomson, director of Information Services, was now my guide and philosopher; I was “a ventriloquist’s dummy and George Thomson the ventriloquist”. He wanted to diminish my standing with the Chinese-speaking by portraying me as the mouthpiece of a colonial speechwriter and mentor. He alleged that Val Meadows, whose office he had demolished, and Alan Blades, the commissioner of police, were similarly manipulating me. When I challenged him to repeat these statements outside the Assembly, he kept silent.

Instead, at the next Assembly meeting in December, he accused me of nepotism, claiming that I had appointed Kwa Soon Chuan as deputy commissioner of the Inland Revenue Department because he was my brother-in-law. Again, I asked him to repeat what he had said outside Parliament. When he did not do so, Chin Chye, as leader of the House, introduced a motion to condemn him for his dishonourable conduct and to suspend him until such time as he apologised to the Assembly. Ong tabled a motion to claim that the Assembly had no power to condemn a Member. He challenged me to resign with him and stand in by-elections in our respective constituencies, renewed his charges against the PAP, and said that the Public Service Commission was packed with PAP supporters. He agreed to an investigation of these charges by a committee of the whole House, but before the Assembly met on the day
fixed for it, he resigned his seat. We announced that a commission of inquiry would be formed with a high court judge as chairman to investigate his allegations, and that after the report had been placed before the House and debated, a by-election would be held in Hong Lim.

On 3 January 1961, Mr Justice F.A. Chua was appointed to head the commission, which held ten sittings between 17 January and 1 February. My main objective in the inquiry was to press him to substantiate all the charges he had made against me. Chua’s report, submitted in February, found that there was no truth at all in any of the allegations, that they were groundless and reckless, and that Ong was “not a person to be believed”. We debated it for two days in the Assembly and condemned Ong for his dishonourable conduct. I had exposed him as a liar and a petty, vicious person. I hoped that this would shake his hold on the Chinese-speaking in Hong Lim. I could not have been more wrong.

We had a long election campaign of nine weeks from 11 March to 29 April. We fielded Jek Yeun Thong, the newspaper reporter who had written my first speech in Mandarin.

After the first two street meetings in Hong Lim, however, we knew that the ground was cold. Ong’s personal popularity had not been dented. He had done the people too many favours by giving whole streets away to hawkers. He had put up standpipes and street lamps and talked about distributing taxi licences freely. The people were willing to overlook his lies and many other failings. They were resentful because we had not given immigration permits to their relatives in China, which he now raised as an issue, although he had never done this when he was a minister. He knew that if we had agreed to do so, it would have caused enormous trouble with the other races, even with the English-educated Chinese, and would certainly have antagonised the leaders in Malaya. The voters were not interested in his four pro-communist resolutions. We discovered all this as we slogged it out. I went around Hong Lim, an
overcrowded constituency in the heart of Chinatown, up and down the rickety wooden stairs of dilapidated shophouses to canvass in almost all of them, sometimes visiting the same premises twice or even three times. The people were polite but not responsive. We tried hard, but we knew that they were too committed to Ong. And we had to reckon with Lim Chin Siong, who had been unhappy because we had been changing the law to give the government better control over the pro-communist unions and cultural associations.

Lim Chin Siong wanted to eliminate the Internal Security Council because he knew that if he went beyond certain limits, it would act, and if it ordered the arrest and detention of the communist leaders, the Singapore government could not be held responsible and be stigmatised a colonial stooge. For, this time, the Malayan government representative with the casting vote, not a British governor, would be pulling the trigger. When we refused to budge on the issue, Lim addressed a meeting of a thousand trade unionists at the Victoria Memorial Hall during the campaign along these lines and quietly passed the word around in Hong Lim not to support the PAP. When the votes were counted, Ong had defeated our candidate by 7,747 to 2,820.

This was a stinging defeat, but I was determined to fight on. “The results,” I said, “make it imperative that we clearly establish our position of confidence.”

One consolation from this gruelling experience was that I gained in confidence as a Hokkien speaker. With the suspension of Ong in June 1960, we had lost our only effective Hokkien speaker to match Lim Chin Siong. Keng Swee suggested that I myself should make the effort to replace him, rather than groom another man who might again give us trouble. So I started to learn the dialect, snatching an hour either at lunchtime or in the evening, three, often five times a week. I had two good tutors, both from our radio station, who first had to teach me a whole new Romanised script to capture the Hokkien pronunciation of
Chinese characters. Hokkien is not at all like Mandarin; it has seven tones instead of four, and uses different word combinations for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. But they are both forms of Chinese, and fortunately my Mandarin had reached a sufficiently advanced level for me to go into it, not from the basement but from the second or third floor of a 25-storey building. Nevertheless, the first time I made a Hokkien speech in Hong Lim, the children in the crowd laughed at my mistakes – wrong sounds, wrong tones, wrong sentence structure, wrong almost everything. But I could not afford to be shy or embarrassed. It was a matter of life and death. It was not just a question of fighting Ong. I was preparing for the inevitable showdown with Lim Chin Siong and the communists. I would lose by default if I could not speak the dialect well enough to get my views across to the uneducated and poorly educated Chinese who were then the majority but whom I could not reach with Mandarin. By the end of the campaign and after innumerable speeches, I spoke understandable Hokkien.

To learn a new language in my late 30s, while snowed under by papers stamped Immediate, Urgent, Secret, Top Secret, and by files with huge red crosses printed on their covers and marked Cicero (for addressee’s eyes only), required almost superhuman concentration and effort. I could not have done it without some compelling motivation. When I started, it was, as the Chinese proverb goes, as difficult as lifting the tripod brass urn in front of a temple. Even while I was being driven to meetings, I mumbled to myself in the car, rehearsing new phrases. Sometimes, my teacher would be at my side to correct my mistakes immediately after my first speech and before I made my next. Every spare moment, I spent revising to get the sounds right, memorising new words to get them embedded in my mind so that I could roll them off my tongue without looking at the script. I had to learn quickly.