The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew

by Lee Kuan Yew

When I saw Lansdowne on 27 November, I spoke frankly of my problems over merger. On the collection of taxes, Singapore had fully accepted that finance was a federal responsibility, but we could not agree that Kuala Lumpur would collect the taxes and then hand over Singapore’s share to us. Singapore must do the collecting and hand over the federal contribution to Kuala Lumpur, otherwise we would find ourselves out in the cold. As for control of information and broadcasting, that was essential for any government if it was to communicate with its citizens. In federal hands, the approach to Chinese problems would be insensitive, go hopelessly wrong, and be politically costly.

2 problems merging with Malaysia, 1) tax collecting should be done by Singapore and then contributed to KL, not the other way around, and 2) control of info and broadcasting should be retained by Sg

The tours were physically exhausting and a drain on my nervous energy. I would start off at eight on a Sunday morning or shortly after lunch on a weekday. The afternoons were always hot, and during one tour I would make short speeches of 10 to 15 minutes at every stop, which could add up to between 30 minutes and an hour because I had to speak in two or three languages. Sometimes I made as many as ten speeches in a day, each in Malay, English, and Hokkien or Mandarin. I would sweat profusely. I brought three or four singlets and shirts with me and would nip quietly into somebody’s toilet or behind the partition inside a shop from time to time to change into dry clothes, and I carried a small towel to wipe the sweat off my face. I would come home with my right hand bruised and painful from hundreds if not thousands of handshakes, and every now and again a real power squeeze. My back, too, was bruised and blue from bumping against the metal crossbar of the Land Rover. I learnt to offer my left hand to relieve my right, and also to push my thumb and forefinger right up against the other person’s to prevent my fingers from being squeezed, and I had a thick pad of towels wound around the crossbar to act as a shock absorber. But I was young, under 40. My adrenaline was flowing, and I was inspired by the warm response of the crowd. Speaking in Hokkien and Mandarin, I had convinced the Chinese that I was not a stooge of the British, that I was fighting for their future. The Malays...

Took a leader like LKY to cut across racial lines

I would often get hoarse through the sheer physical strain of having to talk so much, and when I was rasping one night at Tiong Bahru, he handed me a packet of neatly sliced ginseng in the paper wrapping of a nearby Chinese medicine shop. I stopped sucking lozenges and, on his advice, put a slice between my cheek and gums and kept it there. It worked like magic. There was something in it that stimulated the flow of saliva and soothed my throat. Thereafter, I never went out on a tour without a packet of ginseng in my pocket.

It was fortunate for me that the British prime minister had decided to send a top-ranking politician from the establishment to Kuala Lumpur instead of a professional diplomat like Tory. The history of Malaysia and Singapore would have been very different otherwise. Head brought to bear his varied experience, including what he had seen of the problems in Nigeria. He knew too well the difficulties in the evolution from colonial rule to self-government and nationhood. In the two years before August 1965, I would have much to do with him. His assessments and reports to London made an enormous difference to the outcome of the tussle between the Tunku and his Ultras on one side, and my colleagues and me on the other. The Ultras pressed for a completely Malay-dominated Malaysia. We in Singapore – especially those born in or deeply attached to Malaya like Chin Chye, Pang Boon and Raja – were determined to establish a multiracial Malaysian Malaysia. This was the heart of the matter.

I told the Tunku that if we were to pay towards defence then we must be in parliament. There could not be taxation without representation. But he was emphatic; as I wrote to my cabinet colleagues, “his desire to get us out is implacable”. When I added that I might not be able to persuade them to accept my views, the Tunku burst out with considerable heat, “You tell them that I will not have Singapore, that is all. I do not want Singapore in parliament and they can do nothing about it.”

When I returned to Singapore on 3 April, I found the Alliance leaders angry, alleging that I had been critical of the federal government and the Tunku. Even while I was still in Australia, V.T. Sambanthan, the MIC leader and the Tunku’s minister for posts, works and telecommunications, hit out at me “for speaking indifferently” about the Alliance. He said I had got what I wanted, namely Malaysia, and now spoke of the government as being ignorant of politics and run by princes, sultans and chiefs. But I had not said this in any of my speeches. As the attacks on me continued in the Malaysian papers, several Australians and New Zealanders wrote to the Straits Times to defend me. An Australian journalist protested that he had heard me speak several times to university audiences, and at no time had he heard me say anything disparaging about the Malaysian leaders. The president of the Asian Studies Society of Victoria University in Wellington also wrote in to say he was surprised to hear reports from Malaysia that I had been criticised for making “irresponsible statements attacking leaders of the central government”. Nothing he had heard supported these allegations.

next day, the Utusan carried a story quoting the Menteri Besar of Selangor, headlined “Lee Kuan Yew is the enemy of the people of Malaya”, and another Malay paper, the Berita Harian, reported that the Menteri Besar of Perak had labelled me “the most dangerous threat to the security of the country.” They were working things up to fever pitch. The attacks reached a climax when Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, an UMNO MP (later, prime minister of Malaysia), denounced the PAP in the federal parliament as “pro-Chinese, communist-oriented and positively anti-Malay”, saying Singapore had retained multilingualism while paying only lip-service to the national language, and that “In some police stations, Chinese is the official language, and statements are taken in Chinese.” The national language schools, he said, were the worst-treated on the island, and until very recently had been given only the most primitive facilities.

“How does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoes, open their motorcar doors? … Of course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses. Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and big houses? How does telling a Malay bus driver that he should support the party of his Malay director (UMNO) and the Chinese bus conductor to join another party of his Chinese director (MCA) – how does that improve the standards of the Malay bus driver and the Chinese bus conductor who are both workers in the same company? “If we delude people into believing that they are poor because there are no Malay rights or because opposition members oppose Malay rights, where are we going to end up? You let people in the kampongs believe that they are poor because we don’t speak Malay, because the government does not write in Malay, so he expects a miracle to take place in 1967 (the year Malay would become the national and sole official language). The moment we all start speaking Malay, he is going to have an uplift in the standard of living, and if it doesn’t happen, what happens then? … Meanwhile, whenever there is a failure of economic, social and educational policies, you come back and say, oh, these wicked Chinese, Indians and others opposing Malay rights. They don’t oppose Malay rights. They, the Malays, have the right as Malay...

My Malay cabinet colleague, Othman Wok, was in the chamber. He recalled: “The chamber was very quiet and nobody stirred. The ministers of the central government sunk down so low in their seats that only their foreheads could be seen over the desk in front of them. The backbenchers were spellbound. They could understand every word. That was the turning point. They perceived Lee as a dangerous man who could one day be the prime minister of Malaysia.” I had no such illusions. Malaysia would not have a Chinese prime minister for a very, very long time. The Malays present did not expect me, the supposed anti-Malay Chinese chauvinist out to destroy the Malay race, to speak in Malay with no trace of a Chinese dialect accent that most Chinese would have. I had been born and bred in Singapore, speaking the language from childhood. I could trace my ancestors for three generations in Singapore. They had made as big a contribution to the country as any Malay in the chamber. And I was on their side, not against them. I wanted to improve their lot.

To give heart to the non-Malays, I tabulated the population figures from the last census: 39 per cent Malays, 42 per cent Chinese, about 10 per cent Indians and Pakistanis, 7 per cent Ibans, Kadazans, Kayans, Kelabits and others in North Borneo, and the rest Eurasians, Ceylonese, etc. Whoever played a communal line would be confined to his own racial group, whether it was Chinese or Malay or another. But those who appealed to the people on a non-racial basis stood a fair chance of winning over the 20 per cent minority. I reduced it to a simple formula: 40–40–20. If the Chinese appealed to 40 per cent, using Chinese slogans, they must lose. I left UMNO to conclude what would happen in the long run if they appealed only to the Malays.

At about noon on 7 August, I went to the Residency to see the Tunku. I waited for some 30 to 40 minutes in the sitting room while he was conferring with some of his officials in the dining room – I could see them in deep conversation through the glass door. Then he came out and sat with me alone for about 40 minutes. I began, “We have spent years to bring about Malaysia. The best part of my adult life was to work towards Malaysia, from 1954 to 1963. We have had only less than two years of Malaysia. Do you really want to break it up? Don’t you think it wiser to go back to our original plan, which the British stopped, a looser federation or a confederation?” But from his body language, I knew the Tunku had made up his mind. He said, “No. I am past that. There is no other way now. I have made up my mind; you go your way, we go our own way. So long as you are in any way connected with us, we will find it difficult to be friends because we are involved in your affairs and you will be involved in ours. Tomorrow, when you are no longer in Malaysia and we are no longer quarrelling either in parliament or in the constituencies, we’ll be friends again, and we’ll need each other, and we’ll cooperate.”

As I was leaving, I met Tan Siew Sin. I was angry and bitter at his short-sightedness and stupidity. He had thwarted our industrialisation and brought about the separation almost as much as had the Malay Ultras. He had been determined to frustrate us at every turn. Apart from his personal dislike of Keng Swee and me, he believed that any concession to Singapore would help the PAP to win over the Chinese in Malaysia. He could not see that without Singapore, the position of the Chinese in Malaysia must weaken. I could not help telling him that day, “Today is the day of your victory, the day of my defeat; but in five to ten years, you will certainly feel sad about it.”

For those left behind in Malaysia, separation was a disaster because it changed the racial arithmetic. With Singapore out, it was no longer 40 per cent Malay, 40 per cent Chinese, 20 per cent others. The Malays were again in the majority, and there was now little hope of any multiracial party winning power constitutionally even in the very long term.

The Tunku was blunt and to the point. There were only two courses of action open to him: to take repressive action or to sever all connections with the Singapore state government, which had “ceased to give a measure of loyalty to the central government”. Repressive action against the few, he said, would not solve the problem, because the seeds of contempt, fear and hatred had been sown in Singapore.

I had let down many people in Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak. They had responded to our call of a Malaysian Malaysia. Had they not done so and there was no danger of widespread racial collisions if the Malaysian government arrested us, Singapore would not have been expelled. Because they rallied round and felt as passionately as we did about a Malaysian Malaysia, we were expelled. By accepting separation, I had failed them. That sense of guilt made me break down. It was my moment of anguish. The deed was done, but I was overwrought at the thought of all the shattered hopes of the millions we had aroused.

Then on 17 August, Indonesia’s Independence Day, Sukarno made a powerful and virulent speech in which he told the United States and Britain to get out of Southeast Asia and warned them that the axis of Jakarta, Phnom Penh, Hanoi, Beijing and Pyongyang would defeat imperialism in the region. Next, he ordered the seizure of all American capital in Indonesia. He was living dangerously – as he put it, “Viva perilissimo”. The Indonesian economy was unravelling by the day, with hyperinflation making the people’s lives impossible.

What were the real reasons for the Tunku, Razak and Ismail to want Singapore out of Malaysia? They must have concluded that if they allowed us to exercise our constitutional rights, they were bound to lose in the long run. The Malaysian Solidarity Convention would have rallied the non-Malays and, most dangerous of all, eventually made inroads into the Malay ground on the peninsula.

This was the nub of the matter. The PAP leaders were not like the politicians in Malaya. Singapore ministers were not pleasure-loving, nor did they seek to enrich themselves. UMNO had developed to a fine art the practice of accommodating Chinese or Indian ministers in Malaya who proved troublesome, and had, within a few years, extended its practice to Sabah and Sarawak. Razak once offered Keng Swee 5,000 acres of the best quality rubber land, to be planted with seedlings of the best high-yielding strains from the Rubber Research Institute. With an embarrassed laugh, Keng Swee protested that he would not know what to do with it and ducked the inducement. Nor was it easy to compromise us. Keng Swee and I once accompanied the Tunku and Tan Siew Sin to a “mess” in Kuala Lumpur run by wealthy Chinese merchants. These “messes” were men’s clubs where excellent food was provided by the best restaurants, where members and their friends could gamble at mahjong or poker, and where attractive call girls and even starlets were available. We had a good meal, and when they played poker afterwards, I joined in. But as soon as the girls arrived, Keng Swee and I pleaded pressing engagements and made ourselves scarce. We could not afford to give hostages to fortune. If we had stayed, we would thereafter have been open to pressure from the Malaysian leaders. They considered us difficult, almost as dangerous and elusive to handle as the communists, and much too ideological. Worse, we always ac...

Thomson, a Scotsman, did not understand the Malay mind. Neither did I at first, even though I had lived with them all my life. I did not realise how deep were their suspicions of the immigrant races, especially the Chinese, and their fears of being overwhelmed. They had to be totally in charge of the powers of the state, especially the police and the army. Any compromise must be on their terms.

If we had remained in Malaysia, the commission of inquiry into the 1964 race riots would continue to hear damaging evidence against Ja’afar Albar and UMNO, which would receive widespread publicity. Then there would be the hearing of my libel action against Albar and the editors of the Utusan Melayu, who would be thoroughly cross-examined in court on all the incendiary passages they had published about me. That would mean a devastating exposure of key UMNO leaders’ methods of incitement to racism and bloody riots.

Also on 9 August itself, the Tunku told Tom Critchley, the Australian high commissioner, “We hold the upper hand and Singapore will have to consult with us in dealing with foreign governments.” The Tunku and Razak thought they could station troops in Singapore, squat on us and if necessary close the Causeway and cut off our water supply. They believed, not without foundation, that Singapore could not exist on its own – what better authority than the speeches of the PAP leaders themselves, myself included, and the reasons we had given for it? As Ghazali bin Shafie, the permanent secretary, external affairs ministry, said soon after separation, after a few years out on a limb, Singapore would be in severe straits and would come crawling back – this time on Malaysia’s terms. No, not if I could help it. People in Singapore were in no mood to crawl back after what they had been through for two years in Malaysia, the communal bullying and intimidation. Certainly Keng Swee and I, the two directly responsible for accepting this separation from our hinterland, were not about to give up. The people shared our feelings and were prepared to do whatever was needed to make an independent Singapore work. I did not know I was to spend the rest of my life getting Singapore not just to work but to prosper and flourish.