Singapore

BETWEEN June, 1959, and May of this year, the city-state of Singapore enjoyed its first two years of self-government. Under a Cabinet of six Chinese, a Eurasian, an Indian, and a Malay, with an average age well under forty, it also enjoyed good government.

Having promised to be “as far to the left as it is possible to go within the democratic framework,” thirty-seven-year-old Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the young intellectuals in the ruling People’s Action Party restored political sanity to Singapore with a program of welfare based on free enterprise. Trade unions began to care for labor’s interests instead of inciting labor to anticolonial and anticapitalist violence. Crossing the self-government barrier was a good deal less disturbing, in fact, than many had feared.

Spurned, originally, by Malaya’s Tengku Abdul Rahman, whose initial concern was to see that his tempestuous neighbors behaved themselves, Lee set out to Malayanize Singapore’s cosmopolitan but predominantly Chinese population of 1.7 million and to persuade Kuala Lumpur that Singapore’s people could fit comfortably into the framework of a fully independent Malaya.

Neither Lee nor his government was without critics. Lee, a brilliant graduate in law from Cambridge University, had an intellectual arrogance that won him few friends. Having recovered from their surprise that they were still in business, many British commercial leaders began to complain that mandatory increases in wages and improvements in working conditions were cutting their profits. The extreme left and its apolitical hangers-on were even more pained than the extreme right. To those who believed that the P.A.P. victory meant that the colonial British would be tossed out of their homes, that all businesses would be nationalized, and that master would become coolie and coolie master, the government seemed altogether too moderate.

The real measure of the P.A.P.’s success, however, was Tengku Abdul Rahman’s statement last May that Malaya, Singapore, and the British Borneo territories ought to come closer together, and the immediate effect this had on the extremists, who paid lip service to merger with conservatively ruled Malaya only when it seemed unattainable. While Malaya was rallying enthusiastically to Rahman’s support and the Lee ministry for the first time began to see real hope for overpopulated Singapore as the commercial and industrial center of a new Southeast Asian state, the once monolithic People’s Action Party fell apart.

The people decide

Two by-elections which rejected the People’s Action Party in favor of its opponents were the first real indication of the seriousness of Lee’s troubles. In one by-election, Ong Eng Guan routed the Prime Minister’s political secretary, who was the P.A.P.’s candidate. Guan is a party rebel, whose popular following dates back to the days when, as Singapore’s first elected mayor, he invited the barefooted and shirtless masses to watch him upbraid the colonial British in the City Council.

The second by-election brought back to the political scene the ebullient and embittered David Marshall, a former chief minister, who is even more outspoken than the Communists in demanding full independence and the removal of the British military bases.

Both Ong and Marshall challenged the party’s insistence on merger with Malaya before indedependence and rallied Chinese chauvinist support behind them by their anticolonialism. Lee’s plea that independence without merger with Malaya would be a disaster for an island only sixteen miles long and twenty-four miles wide and beset with economic problems failed to win the electors.

Two years earlier, the party’s forty-three successful candidates had marched through the streets of Singapore to take their seats in the fifty-one member Legislative Assembly. Now, in a bitter thirteenhour debate, many of them rose in the Assembly to denounce Lee and his Cabinet colleagues. A week later, thirteen Assembly defectors broke away to form another left-wing party, the Socialist Front. Instead of the overwhelming support which it had when it took office, the P.A.P. found its influence considerably reduced.

Independence or merger?

With the moderate left fragmented and an election inevitable, all political parties, even against their better judgment, are under pressure to pursue anticolonial policies. Nothing, at this stage, could suit the Communists better. Singapore was viable as a British colony; it could be viable as part of the Malayan Federation, or in the larger confederation embracing British Borneo. It might also be viable as a Chinese colony; it cannot stand alone.

This view is not shared by Ong Eng Guan, David Marshall, or a potentially much more important political leader, Lim Chin Siong, who in 1955, at the age of twentytwo, became a member of the Legislative Assembly and the recognized boss of organized militant labor and the city’s Communist-inclined Chinese school children. Lim asserts that he controls 190,000 of the 200,000 organized union workers. He has also added to his supporters many Chinese businessmen, who see a rich cornucopia in trade with and for mainland China if Singapore becomes a fully independent state.

Non-Communists, like Marshall, believe that merger with Malaya is a myth fostered by Britain in order to keep Singapore as Britain’s Far Eastern military base. Marshall points out that the population of Singapore is larger than that of New Zealand when it became a member of the League of Nations, and that several members of the United Nations have smaller populations.

At the constitutional discussions in London in 1956, he pleaded that Singapore’s annual revenue was larger than that of Ceylon when Britain approved its independence and larger than that of sixteen members of the United Nations. Its educational standards, he said, were higher than those of many UN member states. The standard of living was also higher than that of most independent Asian countries.

All of this the British accepted without demur. Marshall did not destroy his case until Alan LennoxBoyd, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, asked him what chance there was of keeping Singapore out of the hands of the Communists if it was granted full independence. “I have a 30 per cent chance,”said Marshall. It was an honest appraisal, but scarcely calculated to appeal to Britain.

The following year, another Singapore delegation secured approval for self-government, qualified by the creation of the Internal Security Council, on which Britain and Singapore have three members and Malaya one, and leaving external affairs and defense in the hands of the British. This is not the last word, however, and the constitution will come up for review in 1963. This date lends urgency to the current merger negotiations with Malaya.

To the visitor who arrives at Singapore’s excellent airport, set in green and well-tended parklands, and who sees the apparent orderliness of the city, the prosperity (by Asian standards) of the people, and the ship-filled port, some of the misgivings and fears about a Communist take-over, or economic disaster, seem farfetched. Both are real.

The Chinese population

Singapore was conceived by the British because of China and created by Chinese people because of the British. When he set sail from Penang early in 1819, Sir Thomas S. Raffles was looking for a port on the direct India-China sea lane on which to establish a British “settlement-emporium.”Singapore, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, fitted the bill perfectly. Every ship going through the Straits of Malacca to the China Sea came within sight of the island. Inhabited only by a handful of Malay fishermen and pirates, it seemed without value to the Sultan of Johore; Raffles bought it from him for a song.

Quickly the port began to develop. The Treaty of Canton in 1841, under which China ceded Hong Kong to Britain, added to its importance; and the Taiping rebellion of 1848—1864 stimulated the flow of jobless, poverty-stricken Chinese to Singapore, and from it to British and Dutch territories in other parts of Southeast Asia. This flow of migrant Chinese was crucial in the making of Singapore.

On a diet of British capital and Chinese labor, Singapore became a British-owned Chinese city whose people, though dependent on Britain for their prosperity, were tuned to the agonizing changes that led to the overthrow of the Manchus, and later to the struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communists in China.

That Communist China’s growing strength and influence should be reflected sympathetically among considerable sections of the population was therefore inevitable. Unlike Hong Kong, which is flooded with the disenchanted who have fled from Communist rule, Singapore closed its doors to refugees. Distance — and ignorance — have lent enchantment to the China view. Against this background, it is not surprising that the P.A.P.’s bid to convince Singapore’s Chinese that they are not Chinese but Malayans, who ought to speak Malay and to think in terms of a Malayan culture, has been the least successful of its efforts.

How much prosperity?

That is one critical factor in the political crisis. Another is the island’s lack of resources. Ample fresh water and unskilled labor are about all it possesses in addition to its first-class port facilities. The soil is poor. There are no indigenous raw materials. Local capital has strong migratory tendencies, and foreign capital, despite the P.A.P.’s encouragement, is hesitant. The domestic market is too small to support extensive industrialization, and the export market is insecure and faces heavy competition from lowwage areas, such as Hong Kong, where labor works under conditions which the P.A.P. would not tolerate in Singapore.

Meanwhile, the population is growing by more than 60,000 a year. The result is that more than 54 per cent of the population today is under the age of nineteen, and 43 per cent under the age of fifteen. Merely to maintain living standards is an enormous task. The number of children attending school rose from 178,000 in 1954 to 341,000 in 1960 and will rise to nearly half a million by 1964. The government is committed to a slum-clearance program; yet, just to keep pace with new demands for housing will require an annual construction rate of 14,000 homes, of which fewer than one sixth are likely to be built privately.

In 1955, Singapore’s entrepôt trade reached $2.5 billion, and this figure has remained fairly constant ever since. It cannot reasonably be expected to increase much in the predictable future. Despite a great effort by the government to industrialize, the drawing up of a detailed Five Year Plan calling for the investment of $290 million, and the creation of conditions which would prove attractive to foreign investment, there is little sign that the scheme will materialize in a significant way.

Unemployment and crimes of violence are increasing. A major drive against the Chinese secret societies, which are simply organized gangs of hoodlums and racketeers, reduced their number from 334 to fewer than 200 in the first year of P.A.P. administration. Nevertheless, all rich Chinese now employ bodyguards to protect them from kidnapers.

During the P.A.P.’s first two years in office, a truce between the leftwing trade-union leaders and the administration, which pursued a policy designed to prevent exploitation by either capital or labor, eliminated the violent industrial trouble which had plagued Singapore during the mid-fifties. The truce ended with a break between Lim Chin Siong and the government in July.

“We are in for a tough time,” Lee Kuan Yew told the Assembly. How tough depends largely on his success in securing a concrete assurance from Malaya on a merger between Singapore and the Federation. With such an assurance, he might recapture the leadership of the revolution and win the election. Without it, the way seems open for the Socialist Front, with Lim Chin Siong and the Communists in control.