The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (48 page)

From the police headquarters at Pearl’s Hill, I went to the Criminal Investigation Department, and then on to Special Branch to meet the newly appointed director, John Linsell. Linsell had spent most of his career as a uniformed police officer and was more at home with riot control than intelligence-gathering. He did not strike me as having that subtlety of mind necessary to understand communist tactics and strategy. I therefore decided to see him together with his senior staff for regular weekly meetings so that I would hear directly from the officers who were experts in security without Linsell filtering out important nuances. This paid dividends. Two officers, Richard Corridon and Ahmad Khan, were to prove most valuable; without their shrewd and perceptive analysis of information on the communists and experienced handling of sensitive situations, the government would have been much worse off.

My visit to Special Branch was worthwhile. On one unforgettable day in October, I was shown a bundle of files with covers printed in bold red type: “Arrest On Sight”. They contained mugshots of important MCP leaders, each accompanied by a short write-up giving essential details of the subject. As I had expected, a photo of Eu Chooi Yip was among them. Very able, completely bilingual in English and Chinese, Eu was a Raffles College graduate, a contemporary of Hon Sui Sen who had visited Sui Sen at my house during the Japanese occupation. He was already a radical left-winger then, and as I later learnt, he was the Plen’s party superior.

A few pages on, my heart missed a beat though I hoped my face did not show it. I was looking at the Plen himself. I did not pause too long, but long enough to take in the key facts. He was Fang Chuang Pi, had been educated at Chinese High School, and worked at
Nan Chiao News
, a pro-communist paper shut down soon after the Emergency began. I realised at once from the name that he must be the elder brother of Fung Yin Ching. Fung (Fang in Mandarin) was 25, an active, innocent-looking, sincere, hardworking Chinese middle school girl we had fielded in the election. She was now the PAP assemblywoman for Stamford.

Within two weeks of my taking office, Yong Pung How arrived unannounced at my home early one morning while I was having my bath. The maid mistook him for a Chinese student and told him he should go to the office. At that moment, Choo saw him on the veranda and invited him to wait in the sitting room. He refused breakfast but talked while I had mine. He had come from Kuala Lumpur to ask whether I could make a statement sympathetic to the MCA about their problems with UMNO, their Malay partner in the ruling Alliance coalition. He had just been elected chairman of the MCA’s publicity committee at a time when there was rising tension in the Federation over the question of Chinese education. The Chinese felt under threat, for the UMNO leaders seemed to have made up their minds to take over and exercise complete power in the country, with only nominal participation of the non-Malay communities. Since Yong knew me well, the MCA president had proposed that he should get me to express support for their cause. They thought that, as the prime minister of Singapore and the leader of the PAP, I had standing and influence among the Chinese in Malaya, whereas the MCA felt itself pathetically weak.

I was greatly upset and troubled that my old friend wanted me to take a position that would antagonise the Tunku and UMNO. I told him that while I had sympathy for the MCA, it was simply out of the question
for me to annoy the Tunku and UMNO in any way, since Singapore’s primary objective was merger with Malaya. Thirty-six years later, Yong remembered the incident clearly. He said that I repeatedly stressed, “I have to think of Singapore first.” He was not too disappointed, because he had anticipated my reaction. He knew that I was direct and open with him. But I should have listened more carefully to him instead of regarding his request as an unwelcome intrusion into my plans. I should have seen the significance of such strong communal attitudes for Singapore if it was to become a part of Malaysia. If I had inquired into the background to the education problem, I would have had early warning of the kind of major concessions we must be prepared to make if we were going to work with the Malay leaders in the Federation.

While the danger of communist penetration of government and administration was ever-present, our main concern during this period was with those who could not join it – the Chinese-educated of Nanyang University.

For years the idea of a Chinese university had been in gestation as the achievements of the People’s Republic of China aroused resurgent pride in its language and culture. The intelligentsia, with the support of the Chinese press, stirred up demand for a university teaching in Chinese. During the colonial era the Chinese disdained the artificial boundaries imposed by its white masters on most of Southeast Asia, and referred to the whole region as Nanyang, or the “South Seas”. Because Singapore was predominantly Chinese, it had become a centre for Chinese education. But there was as yet no Chinese university.

The rubber boom during the Korean War in the early 1950s made our merchants rich. When Tan Lark Sye, a rubber baron and chairman of the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan, the association of the largest Chinese dialect group, in January 1953 proposed the founding of a
Chinese university, there was widespread and spontaneous support. In May that year the Nanyang Company Limited was registered under the Companies Ordinance. The Hokkien Huay Kuan donated 500 acres of poor quality rubber land in Jurong, a rural area in the west of the island. The Chinese-speaking working class, trishaw riders, hawkers, taxi drivers and ordinary workers, contributed one day’s earnings.

In March 1956 Nanyang University was inaugurated with an enrolment of 584 students in three colleges teaching arts, science and commerce in Chinese. This meant more political problems because, without English, the graduates would be unemployable. We also knew it would be only a matter of time before the university, both staff and students, would be captured by the communists, just as the Chinese middle schools had been.

In his last months as chief minister, Lim Yew Hock had appointed a commission with Dr S.L. Prescott of the University of Western Australia as chairman. The commission presented us with a report recommending that the government should not recognise Nanyang University degrees because the standards were too low. This report immediately provoked a furore in the Chinese-speaking community, whose business leaders took it as a slight on their competence – richly deserved, because they had been directing and interfering in the work of the academics, which should have been left to a senate.

In particular, Tan Lark Sye, as chairman of the University Council, was very angry with us. To show his defiance, he appointed Dr Chuang Chu Lin, the pro-communist headmaster of Chung Cheng High School who had been dismissed from his post, to be vice-chancellor of the university, and to cock another snook at the government, he increased the student enrolment for that year. We knew this would give the MCP greater freedom to use the university as a breeding ground, but we were not then in a position to intervene without paying a high political price. I made a mental note to deal with Tan at a later date.

It was my first lesson on the difference between formal constitutional power and the political strength needed to exercise it. Nyuk Lin had submitted a draft bill to the cabinet designed to strip Tan of his ability to meddle with the administration by giving the government the same authority over Nantah (Chinese abbreviation for Nanyang University) as it had over the University of Malaya in Singapore. We roared with laughter in cabinet at the simplicity of this solution. Nyuk Lin had come straight into office after 20 years in the insurance business, and although he proved to be an energetic minister, he had no idea what a hot potato he was handling. I would never forget Sunday, 30 March 1958, when the whole 14-mile route from Nantah down to Bukit Timah Road and the city was one long line of cars inching forward, all heading for the ceremonial opening of the university. I could feel the tremendous emotional commitment of our Chinese-speaking people to this project. Nyuk Lin’s proposed bill would have caused riots in the Chinese middle schools.

So we shelved the problem, and it was not until the late 1960s, after we had separated from Malaysia, that we had the political strength to impose administrative discipline on the university’s financial accounting, staff appointments and student conduct. To reduce the tension in the interim and buy some time, we appointed a second committee of local academics to review the Prescott report, only to find in February 1960 that they came to the same conclusions. But it would have been politically unacceptable to allow the first batch of Nantah graduates to be without hope of government recognition and employment. We discussed this carefully in cabinet and decided that we had to give a few of them a chance to enter the public service, but at a lower level than University of Malaya graduates.

I drove down the then winding Jurong Road to Nantah in October 1959 to speak to its one thousand students. The first batch of 400 wanted jobs, and I said the government would absorb 70 graduates – 50 for the education service, 20 in other departments. The performance of these 70 would determine the future of those that followed. “If the first batch proves your worth as able and disciplined workers, prepared to compete on par with the English-educated and make your contribution to society, then you will get your worth recognised.” We also gave suitable candidates scholarships for postgraduate study in universities abroad, particularly in science and engineering. We believed this would mollify the brighter ones and test their real worth. They were pacified, but only for the time being. The communists continued to burrow away with unremitting energy and they were winning recruits every day.

A 1951 Special Branch poster offering reward for information on Fang Chuang Pi, the “Plen”, then in the communist underground.

While our mass support from the Chinese-educated was threatened by the communists, our meagre support from the English-educated white-collar workers was at an all-time low. As I had feared, the running-in process caused more gears to crash. I had put Chin Chye in charge of the Singapore Polytechnic, as he was particularly interested in technical education. That, however, proved two-edged. On finding its courses irrelevant to our anticipated needs, he denounced the board of governors and the principal; and when he summarily dismissed the governors, the principal resigned. This provoked bewilderment and fear, because the staff had no security of tenure, and the teachers, most of them white expatriates, started to look for jobs elsewhere. So did the staff of the Singapore Improvement Trust, the housing authority under the former government, where Ong Eng Guan behaved in his usual autocratic way. Ong continually harassed and tormented white officers. He had told Keng Swee how to “do in” expatriates who held high positions in the City Council, which was still under his control as minister for national development. From above, they would meet resistance from his own trusted lieutenants, while from below he would instigate the clerks and other subordinates to make life difficult for them. Sooner or later, they would capitulate and leave without compensation.