Singapore

LEE KUAN YEW is very clever but not very wise,” said James Wong, deputy chief minister of Sarawak in a thoughtful analysis of the causes that led to Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia on August 7. “If he had been more patient, he could have persuaded the Tenku to make him his foreign minister. Later, he might have become deputy prime minister of Malaysia and perhaps one day prime minister.”

There was more to Singapore’s secession, of course, than the impatience of the brilliant, incorruptible, industrious, but demonstrably unwise Lee, a young man always in a hurry who has suddenly found himself with no place else to go. His drive, his energy, and his wholly unexpected political success in turning Singapore from a hothed of revolutionary Communism into the bestgoverned state in Southeast Asia won his island city its place in Malaysia: but the characteristics that made him acceptable to Kuala Lumpur in 1963 made him repugnant in 1965. Lee is a tiger, and no group or association can make him change his stripes. It is not in his makeup to compromise, to go slow.

He returned to Singapore from Cambridge a decade and a half ago with more academic honors than anyone in Southeast Asia had ever won before. A fruitful career awaited him as a barrister. But while he practiced law, Lee also prepared himself for the day when he would by his own strength and capacity establish himself as a major Asian political leader. He turned his back on his European-acquired interests and friends and plunged into the study of Chinese, teaching himself the characters and trying out his Cantonese and Hokkien on his newfound friends of the far left. He studied Malay and is now a more proficient public speaker in this tongue than Tenku Abdul Rahman himself.

In an orderly, evolutionary way the British colonial authorities looked toward young, promising, conservative English-educated Chinese to whom one day they could turn over political power. Lee spurned them all. Instead, he formed the People’s Action Party, relying for support not on the English-educated but on the heavily Peking-infiltrated Chinese-speaking masses. In its earliest days, the People’s Action Party was a Communist front. Lee’s closest political associate was an even younger man, a brilliant trade-union organizer named Lim Chin Siong, who marshaled all his inadequate English resources to make his maiden speech in the legislative assembly: most of it was not even paraphrased Mao Tse-tung.

A duck is a duck

Lim and 117 other political detainees, many of them Lee’s close supporters less than a decade ago, are now held in detention, and there they are going to stay. “Do you think I am mad?" Lee answered when he was asked if he intended to release Lim and others. “Do you think I want to die? I haven’t used just points in nailing these people as traitors. I’ve used half points and quarter points. Let them out and they’d kill me.”

Lee’s quarrel with the United States dates from his early years in politics. In common with many other observers, officials at the U.S. consulate general in Singapore viewed Lee and his activities with suspicion and concern. “He looks like a duck, he quacks like a duck, and he keeps company with ducks,”said an American official at the time. “What reason is there to think that he isn’t a duck?”

Intent on using the Communists for his own ends, Lee did nothing to change the impression. In the course of the 1959 election, in which he swept into office at the head of the People’s Action Party, winning forty-three out of the fifty-one seats, he charged the Central Intelligence Agency with having sent funds from Taiwan to Singapore to support the right-wing opposition to him. It was a small factor in the election, but it has loomed significantly in Lee’s mind ever since.

The following year a CIA agent was caught attempting to bribe a Singapore intelligence agency officer. Lee’s version, made public only after the split with Malaysia this summer, was that he had offered to keep quiet about the affair if the United States would contribute a hundred million Malaysian dollars (33.3 million American dollars) to Singapore’s economic development. The United States, he said, made a counteroffer of ten million Malaysian dollars, which Lee refused.

This long-delayed bomb might have detonated quietly if State Department and CIA wires had not been crossed. In such public instances, it is standard CIA practice not to tell State the whole truth. When the State Department spokesman categorically denied Lee’s charges, however, Lee produced a letter from Dean Rusk apologizing for what he called “this unfortunate incident.”Subsequent retractions by the State Department, new threats by Lee to spill all the beans, and then the suggestion that Lee had been personally offended by dilatory official American reaction to requests for medical help for his wife — these all helped anew to scar relations. Lee has not improved matters by promising to give Russia a base in Singapore if the United States assumes Britain’s commitments in Malaya.

That Lee should have chosen to reveal details of the sordid incident is a reflection more of the agonizing dilemma that now confronts him than of basic anti-Americanism. He staked his political future on merger with Malaya. All his hopes and promises were committed to this venture. Having backed a loser, he is torn now by the contradictions in what he needs and what he wants, by his anxiety to move into the company of AfroAsian nonaligned and non-Communist (but not anti-Communist) nations untainted by any charge of neocolonialism, and by his fear of the consequences if Britain should decide to remove its military base.

In a speech delivered last February he set out why Singapore had wanted Malaysia. “We wanted Malaysia because the alternative was a state of constant instability in Southeast Asia, in which the end result could have been something not very different from what has happened in Cuba, but with very different results,” he said. “For if Singapore were left isolated in Malaysia, economically confined and conscribed, then there was only one way out for it to reach for freedom, and fulfillment, and that was to play a Cuban role.”

Rough times ahead

Singapore is now isolated in Malaysia, and economically confined and conscribed. Whether that isolation can be effectively broken down, or broken down sufficiently to invalidate the reasons that lay behind Lee’s argument, is doubtful. The political trend in Kuala Lumpur, the continuing hostility between principal figures in the federal government and Lee himself, the inhibition of foreign capital to invest in Singapore, which lacks the much broader base that Malaysia afforded, the Indonesian confrontation, the reorientation of regional trade, the nature and size of Singapore’s population, the total lack of indigenous resources other than labor, Lee’s own uncertainties coupled with the long-range British uncertainty over the military base all suggest that difficult and dangerous times are ahead.

The independent, sovereign state of Singapore is twenty-six miles long and fourteen miles wide. Its population is 1,800,000, of whom three quarters are Chinese. The natural rate of increase, despite the officially promoted distribution of advice on birth control, is roughly 3.5 percent. This means that the potential labor force is increasing by some 65,000 a year — 65,000 new mouths to feed, bodies to house, minds to educate, and skills to employ. How?

As Western experts in Singapore evaluate the situation, there are four possibilities: a return to pre-Malaysian free trade with its Malaysian neighbors; a serious effort to make Singapore industrially attractive to international investors; the setting up of some sort of marketing relationship, or a customs union, which could take the place of the Malaysian common market; the reopening of trade with Indonesia.

The first proposition is totally unacceptable to Kuala Lumpur. The second proposition, in a Western context, seems utopian, since Singapore has a built-in market of its own of only 1,800,000 people, its labor force is relatively highly paid, and it lacks the know-how of Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and the indigenous raw materials of its other competitors.

The third proposition runs into the problems that bedeviled the Singapore-Kuala Lumpur relationship and were never resolved during the Malaysian honeymoon. Even the most sanguine and hopeful of observers do not believe that Kuala Lumpur will now extend to Singapore, which has ceased its contributions to the federal exchequer, the common market facilities it was singularly reluctant to concede when Singapore was a member of the federation.

Singapore hopefully explored the fourth possibility, the resumption of trade with Indonesia, at least as a lever to force common market concessions out of Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately for Singapore, Indonesia’s trade is either reduced or satisfactorily diverted elsewhere. Even if Indonesia were willing to resume trade relations, Kuala Lumpur possesses an even greater bargaining instrument. In 1961, the port of Singapore handled 27.6 percent of Malaya’s gross exports and 39.8 percent of its gross imports. For Malaya to divert this trade through its own ports and to cut itself off from Singapore’s banking, insurance, and port facilities would be slow and costly, but it would kill Singapore.

Benefits from the British base

Unemployment is not yet a major problem in Singapore. The government’s development of the Jurong industrial site under a four-year plan gained impetus with the creation of Malaysia. This helped, in turn, to provide extra and alternative jobs and to compensate for the losses incurred in the collapse of the entrepôt trade with Indonesia. The official unemployment figure just before secession was 55,000. This certainly includes a substantial number of destitute persons and unemployables, but it takes no note of the even larger number of underemployed.

By far the biggest single employer of labor in Singapore is the British government. To service and maintain its naval base and dockyard, two airfields, and other military installations, including a substantial supply depot, Britain directly employs 35,000 local workers. The cost to the British taxpayer is $280 million a year. Not all of this is net profit to Singapore, but in addition to obvious direct gains from the base, on which an estimated 200,000 people are dependent for their livelihood, there are clear fringe benefits associated with the maintenance of Britain’s 53,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who are there in the defense of Malaysia, plus their 50,000 dependents.

The base is very big business for Singapore. Economically and militarily, Lee cannot do without it. Yet politically, it inhibits his trading relationships with Indonesia and with Communist China, and may yet brand him as a neocolonialist.

For the present, Lee is striving to pursue some sort of middle course, to eat his cake, as it were, without seeming to have had it. While assuring Whitehall privately that he wants the base retained and is willing to renegotiate the relevant agreements originally entered into by Malaysia, he has warned publicly that the base may be used only for the defense of Singapore and Malaysia, that he must retain the right of veto over its use, and that it cannot be used for SEATO operations or for initiating attacks against China or Indonesia. To re-ensure against its removal he also warns that if Britain abandons the installations, there are three or four unstated potential clients bidding to take over. This is pure blackmail. But an elementary rule of business is that the amount of a take-over bid is directly related to the size and success of the company involved.

Whatever government is in power in Singapore in the future, the West will do well to remember the composition of Singapore’s population, and, by relevant standards, how little it would cost by way of investment for Peking to capitalize on the Chinese population and make the island its own industrial center in the South Seas.