The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew

by Lee Kuan Yew

This book deals with the early years which ended with our sudden independence in 1965. My next book will describe the long, hard climb over the next 25 years from poverty to prosperity.

The Malay leaders, including the Tunku, feared that if ever they shared real political power with the non-Malays, they would be overwhelmed. That was the crux of the matter.

Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.

Seventy-five per cent of our population of two million were Chinese, a tiny minority in an archipelago of 30,000 islands inhabited by more than 100 million Malay or Indonesian Muslims. We were a Chinese island in a Malay sea. How could we survive in such a hostile environment?

My family history in Singapore began with my paternal great-grandfather, Lee Bok Boon, a Hakka. The Hakkas are Han Chinese from the northern and central plains of China who migrated to Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces in the south some 700 to 1,000 years ago, and as latecomers were only able to squeeze themselves into the less fertile and more hilly areas unoccupied by the local inhabitants.

When I was born, the family consulted a friend knowledgeable in these matters for an auspicious name for me. He suggested “Kuan Yew”, the dialect rendering of the Mandarin guang yao, meaning “light and brightness”. But my grandfather’s admiration for the British made him add “Harry” to my name, so I was Harry Lee Kuan Yew. My two younger brothers, Kim Yew and Thiam Yew, were also given Christian names – Dennis and Freddy respectively.

I was impressed: here was a man who had made his way up in the world, who knew how to live the good life.

One student from Kedah told me in my second year, after we had become friends, “You Chinese are too energetic and too clever for us. In Kedah, we have too many of you. We cannot stand the pressure.” He meant the pressure of competition for jobs, for business, for places in schools and universities. The Malays were the owners of the land, yet seemed to be in danger of being displaced from top positions by recent arrivals, who were smarter, more competitive and more determined. Probably because they did better and were self-confident, the Chinese and the Indians lacked this sense of solidarity. There was no unity among them because they did not feel threatened.

Since 1819, when Raffles founded Singapore as a trading post for the East India Company, the white man’s supremacy had been unquestioned. I did not know how this had come to pass, but by the time I went to school in 1930, I was aware that the Englishman was the big boss, and those who were white like him were also bosses – some big, others not so big, but all bosses. There were not many of them, about eight thousand. They had superior lifestyles and lived separately from the Asiatics, as we were then called. Government officers had larger houses in better districts, cars with drivers and many other servants. They ate superior food with plenty of meat and milk products. Every three years they went “home” to England for three to six months at a time to recuperate from the enervating climate of equatorial Singapore. Their children also went “home” to be educated, not to Singapore schools. They, too, led superior lives.

There was no question of any resentment. The superior status of the British in government and society was simply a fact of life. After all, they were the greatest people in the world. They had the biggest empire that history had ever known, stretching over all time zones, across all four oceans and five continents. We learnt that in history lessons at school. To enforce their rule, they had only a few hundred troops in Singapore, who were regularly rotated. The most visible were stationed near the city centre at Fort Canning. There could not have been more than one to two thousand servicemen in all to maintain colonial rule over the six to seven million Asiatics in the Straits Settlements and the Malay states.

The British built up the myth of their inherent superiority so convincingly that most Asiatics thought it hopeless to challenge them. But now one Asiatic race had dared to defy them and smashed that myth. However, once the Japanese lorded over us as conquerors, they soon demonstrated to their fellow Asiatics that they were more cruel, more brutal, more unjust and more vicious than the British. During the three and a half years of the occupation, whenever I encountered some Japanese tormenting, beating or ill-treating one of our people, I wished the British were still in charge.

I have no doubts about whether the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. Without them, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Malaya and Singapore, and millions in Japan itself, would have perished.

What made them such warriors? The Japanese call it bushido, the code of the samurai, or Nippon seishin, the spirit of Nippon. I believe it was systematic indoctrination in the cult of emperor worship, and in their racial superiority as a chosen people who could conquer all. They were convinced that to die in battle for the emperor meant they would ascend to heaven and become gods, while their ashes were preserved at the Yasukuni Shrine in the suburbs of Tokyo.

The key to survival was improvisation.

The three and a half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life. They gave me vivid insights into the behaviour of human beings and human societies, their motivations and impulses. My appreciation of governments, my understanding of power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this experience. I saw a whole social system crumble suddenly before an occupying army that was absolutely merciless.

Choo asked if I knew she was two and a half years older than I was. I said I knew, and had considered this carefully. I was mature for my age and most of my friends were older than me anyway. Moreover, I wanted someone my equal, not someone who was not really grown up and needed looking after, and I was not likely to find another girl who was my equal and who shared my interests.

Before I sailed, she also did her best to make sure I would leave Singapore committed to some Chinese girl, and therefore be less likely to return with an English one. Several students had come back with British wives, often with unhappy results. Their families were upset, and couples broke up or else went off to settle in England because they could not fit into British colonial society, where they were patronised if not publicly ostracised.

I was too young, too idealistic to realise that the cost to the government would be heavy; worse, that under such an egalitarian system each individual would be more interested in what he could get out of the common pool than in striving to do better for himself, which had been the driving force for progress throughout human evolution. That realisation had to wait until the 1960s, when I was in charge of the government of a tiny Singapore much poorer than Britain, and was confronted with the need to generate revenue and create wealth before I could even think, let alone talk, of redistributing it.

Its leaders were mostly returned students who had read law or medicine in Britain in the thirties and were overawed and overwhelmed by English values. They were like my grandfather – everything English was the acme of perfection. They had no confidence in themselves and even less in their own kind.

He would take me out to lunches and dinners, and drink copiously – black and tan (beer and stout) to wash down oysters at the Kallang airport hotel or T-bone steaks at the Stamford Café or the Adelphi Grill.

Lee Kuan Yew became my public persona, what I stood for and saw myself as – a left-wing nationalist – and that is how I appeared in newspaper reports of my cases in court. But through all these years, my wife and my personal friends still call me Harry. In the 1950s, during my early days in politics, I was mildly annoyed to be sometimes reported as Harry Lee. Politically, it was a minus.

Singapore Hakka Association.

It was often embarrassing because my Chinese was totally inadequate. I felt greatly ashamed of my inability to communicate with them in what should have been my native tongue.

In September 1952 a tall, Indian-looking Malay in his late 40s, with a long, thin, un-Malay nose, arrived at my desk. Speaking English well but in a hesitant manner and with a slight stammer, he introduced himself as Yusof Ishak, owner, editor-in-chief and managing director of the Utusan Melayu.

What is an un Malay nose?

I blithely claimed I could read, write and speak Mandarin, Hakka and Hokkien, and that I also spoke Malay. It was election bravado. I had been advised by some Chinese reporters that it would be best not to admit my lack of command of my own mother tongue. I remembered and bitterly regretted that I had not heeded my maternal grandmother’s wish that I should study Chinese in Choon Guan School. Now I had to exaggerate my linguistic skills. I could write some characters, but had forgotten most of them because I had not been using them since I gave up my job with Shimoda & Company in 1943. My spoken Hakka and Hokkien were pathetic, almost negligible. I vowed to make up for past neglect.

The biggest single theme that galvanised the Chinese-speaking was Chinese culture, and the need to preserve Chinese traditions through the Chinese schools. It was not a proletarian issue; it was plain, simple chauvinism. But the communists knew it was a crowd-winner that pulled at Chinese heartstrings, and they worked on it assiduously. In previous elections for the Legislative Council, the speeches were feeble, tepid, dull, delivered without feeling or conviction, usually in English, otherwise in Malay, and only sometimes translated into the different Chinese dialects. This time, Chinese orators took off. Speaking in their own dialects – Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew – they were superlative crowd-rousers. They could wax eloquent, quote proverbs, use metaphors and allegories or traditional legends to illustrate contemporary situations. They spoke with a passion that filled their listeners with emotion and exhilaration at the prospect of Chinese greatness held out to them. For the Chinese of Singapore, it was never to be the same again.

I had decided to get away from this madhouse and go on my annual vacation. With Choo and Loong, age 3, I drove up to the Cameron Highlands on 1 June and stayed there for three weeks. We left 5-month-old Ling at home as she was too young. I played golf at Tanah Rata every day, morning and afternoon. As I walked on the pleasant and cool nine-hole Cameron Highlands course, 5,000 feet above sea level, I soaked in the significance of the events of the previous few months.

My way of constitutional opposition, working within the law, was in marked contrast to that of the communists, and I got results. But without the communists going beyond the law and using violence, my methods would not have been effective. It was the less unpleasant option I offered that made them acceptable to the British. Just as in Malaya, had there been no terrorism to present the British with the humiliating prospect of surrendering to the communists, the Tunku would never have won independence simply by addressing larger and larger gatherings of Malays in the villages. It was the disagreeable alternative the communists posed that made constitutional methods of gentle erosion of colonial authority effective for the nationalists and acceptable to the colonialists. In pre-war India, where there was no communist threat, constitutional methods of passive resistance took decades to work.

Negotiation tactic: write the opponent's victory speech for them

I decided that, whether or not it was practical, the only politically defendable policy was trilingualism, with Malay as the lingua franca and the future national language of Malaya, English as the language of international commerce and science, Mandarin as the mother tongue of the Chinese, and Tamil, Hindi or Punjabi for the Indians.

The proposal was simple. The English-language schools would also teach the mother tongue – Chinese for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil or some other Indian language for the Indians. The students in Chinese schools would learn either English or Malay in primary school, and both in secondary school. The Malay-language schools would also teach English in primary school, and a third language in secondary school if the students wished it.

One unavoidable problem in a multiracial, multilingual society is how to organise a functioning legislature and government without creating a Tower of Babel. Every old-established community has one main language, and those who migrate into it have to learn that language, whether it be English in the United States and Canada, or French in Quebec. But when Stamford Raffles founded Singapore in 1819, he demarcated in his first town plan different areas in which the different races and even different Chinese dialect groups would live separately. The British then brought in large numbers of Chinese, Indians and Malays, all speaking their own tongues, and left them to their own devices.

The MCP was worried about the discipline the government would impose on the Chinese schools. They feared that it would stop the students from being “misused by political groups to overthrow a lawfully constituted government unconstitutionally”. Worse, the English language would open for them a completely different world through newspapers, magazines, literature and films. They would see the world with two eyes, with binocular vision, instead of with only one eye through a Chinese telescope. I had to take a position that would not allow the communists to denounce me as a deculturalised Chinaman. Had I taken a false step on this issue, I would have lost out. If they could show that I preferred English to Chinese as the more important medium of instruction in the schools, it would be impossible for me to retain the respect and support of the Chinese-speaking ground.

In mid-1955, I had sent Loong at the age of three and a half to Nanyang Kindergarten, which taught in Chinese. When I visited it later with the all-party committee, the Chinese press carried a picture of him in the kindergarten, making it widely known that he was being educated in Chinese. My determination that my three children should be educated in the language and culture of their ancestors gave me credentials that the communists could never impugn.

I did my best before the London conference to make sure that the next constitution would not open the gates for a communist takeover, but would give us enough room to build a non-communist government, not as a stooge of the British, but as protector of the interests of the people. Marshall never understood the need for this fine balance: to have enough power to act in the people’s interest, but to have the British in a fall-back position if the communists should get the upper hand.

I noticed that Asiatics were now referred to as Asians in the papers. I was told that sometime in 1953 the British press had started to use “Asian” because “Asiatic” had a touch of condescension or disrespect, and the change was a concession to the people of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, now independent. I did not understand how this improved their status. When young London children called me a Chinaman or a Chink, it did not trouble me. If they meant it as a term of abuse, my business was to make them think differently one day.

One odd thing about them though, was that when they abandoned communism, as some young Chinese middle school student leaders did, they often became extremely avaricious to make up for lost time. They seemed to feel that they had been robbed of the best years of their lives and had to make up for what they had missed. It was a preview of what I was to see later in China and Vietnam. When the revolution did not deliver utopia and the economy reverted to the free market, cadres, with the power to issue licences or with access to goods and services at official prices, were the first to be corrupt and exploit the masses.

Throughout 1958–59, I had been seeing Devan Nair, Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Woodhull and Puthucheary in their new detention camp, located just outside Changi Prison, once every three or four weeks. I would bring them a large pot of delicious chicken curry that my cook had prepared, freshly baked bread bought from a bakery on the way to Changi and, when permission was granted, some large bottles of Anchor beer.

In a multiracial society, we had one inescapable problem. Some of our candidates might be natural open-air orators, but no one could make a speech at an election rally and move the whole audience to laugh, or sigh, or cry or be angry together. Whatever language he used and however good he was, only one section of the crowd could understand him at any one time, so he had to reach the others through gestures, facial expressions and his tone of voice.

I travelled in style because once we decided in February 1959 to fight to win, Choo had bought a Mercedes Benz 220 to replace the ageing Studebaker. She wanted us to be seen in it so nobody would doubt that I could afford a Mercedes without becoming prime minister, and she would accompany me to meetings, sometimes driving me herself.

To give of their best, the ministers had to have air-conditioned offices. That may sound odd, but without air-conditioning, efficient work in tropical Singapore would not have been feasible.

“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.

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.

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. By sheer practice and repetition over the next few months, speaking without notes, making mistakes and correcting them again and again, I finally mastered the dialect and could make a half-hour speech without groping for words and phrases or anxiously searching for them in my underlined script. The crowd watched all this and I won their respect. When I started, I was fumbling, awkward, almost comic. But here I was in front of them, suddenly able to express myself fluently in their dialect. I may have been unidiomatic, even ungrammatical, but there was no mistaking my meaning, delivered with vigour, ...

People knew I started from zero in 1961 and so had no doubts about my determination and stamina. I am Hakka, and Hakkas as a minority group living among speakers of other dialects are supposed to be great linguists. This added to the myth. They thought it was natural for me to learn languages easily. But Choo knew I sweated blood to master Hokkien.

In my last broadcast, I re-emphasised the point: “Had there been no drought in Johor and water shortage in Singapore over the last three months, the communists might well have switched their line … to independence for Singapore alone. But nature reminded them of the utter absurdity of such a move.” It had been an exceptionally dry year with little rain and none at all since June. At the end of August, the water pressure suddenly dropped, causing many factories to close temporarily and badly affecting big hotels. Our three main reservoirs were almost empty – one of them, Seletar, had elephant grass covering its floor. Water was rationed to six hours a day. There was no need to remind people that Singapore had had to surrender in 1942 because the Japanese had captured the reservoirs in Johor. Water rationing in 1961 could not be lifted until the end of January the following year. The elements had conspired to help convince people that merger was the rational solution to Singapore’s problems.

Strategic importance of water reserves from Johor Malaysia

My main difficulty was not with this, or over complete merger, which the people of Singapore did not want. It was with the question of citizenship. Dr Lee described the Federation as taking on three wives in Borneo, while Singapore was not to be a fourth wife, but only a mistress. The children of the mistress were going to be treated as illegitimate with no right to federal citizenship. It struck home. The suspicion that “Malaysian nationals” would not be the same as “Malaysian citizens” caused great unease, and gave the Barisan an ideal issue over which to intensify their campaign of troublemaking on which they were already bent. As I had explained at a press conference on 15 October, while Singapore-born citizens would automatically become federal citizens under complete merger, others – some 327,000 of them, those born in China, India and even Malaya – would first have to meet federal residence qualifications and would also have to pass a language test in Malay before they could become federal citizens. The difference was that under our agreement with the Tunku, all Singapore citizens would become “federal nationals”.

I learnt later from his old friend from pre-war student days in Cambridge, Dr Chua Sin Kah, that he liked me to stay at the Residency because he wanted to know the kind of person I was, my personal habits and character. And he had reached the conclusion that I was “not a bad fellow”. I sang in my bath and he approved of my songs, like the lilting Indonesian Burung Kakaktua (The Cockatoo), which was then a hit; I played golf and poker; and I drank beer, wine and even took whisky and a little brandy – Three Star Hennessy was the Tunku’s favourite drink. He decided I was not a dangerous communist. Indeed I was very human and an agreeable companion – young, a little too smart for his liking, and always too full of ideas, but otherwise all right. I got on with him.

He had no pretensions about his own abilities and no inhibitions in describing the capabilities of his fellow Malays. He was disarmingly frank in his self-deprecation, confessing that his Malay father, the sultan, was a weak man and that his strength came from his Thai mother. The Malays, he said, were not very clever or demanding, and therefore easy to please. All he needed was to give them a little bit more and they were quite happy. These views were similar to those expressed by Dr Mahathir Mohamad in his book The Malay Dilemma, published in 1971. He wrote, “Whatever the Malays could do the Chinese could do better and more cheaply”, and “they resulted from two entirely different sets of hereditary and environmental influences”.

But in the 1960s, the Tunku would often look around at the officials and ministers in his drawing room before or after dinner and say, “These fellows can’t do business. They have no idea how to make money. The Chinese will do the business. They know how to make money, and from their taxes, we will pay for the government. But because they, the Malays, are not very clever and not good at business, they must be in charge of the government departments, the police and the army.” He had a simple philosophy: the role of the Malays was to control the machinery of the state, to give out the licences and collect the revenue, and most important of all, to ensure that they were not displaced. Unlike the Chinese and Indians who had China and India to return to, they had nowhere else to go. In his soft-spoken, gracious way, he was absolutely open about his determination to maintain the ascendancy of the Malays and ensure that they and their sultans would remain the overlords of the country.

Addressing the Labour conference, I said that the future was inevitably one of change, but that the changes should not be an excuse for Britain to slough off the responsibilities she had inherited with the empire. If they were abandoned, the consequences could be disastrous, threatening small countries like Singapore. Our closest link with an industrial power was with Britain. If we lost that link, we would suffer a severe setback. I added simply but sincerely that Britain and the empire constituted the world that I had known all my life, a world in which the British were central to our survival; whilst we wanted freedom to decide what we should do with our lives, we also wanted and needed our long historical, cultural and economic ties to be maintained.