The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (32 page)

I was having fun with Marshall, but there was more serious business on hand. The future of Chinese language, culture and education remained a grave problem, although the seething unrest in the Chinese middle schools had temporarily subsided when the All-Party Committee on Chinese Schools “appealed” to the government not to proceed with the expulsion of the students, or with the notices served on the schools to show cause why they should not be closed down. The committee had
provided a neat way out of an acute problem of face. By accident, the government had stumbled on a process of quiet consultations that enabled a formula to be worked out without the glare of publicity. Otherwise every defect in any solution would have been reported in the Chinese press and made the subject of contention, lobbying and the scoring of propaganda points.

The recommendations of the committee had long-term consequences that were good for Chinese education and good also for harmony in a multiracial society. But they threatened the future of the communists. About 90 per cent of all adult Chinese were Chinese-educated – if educated at all. But the number of Chinese children going to English schools had been growing dramatically since 1948, when the Emergency was declared. In 1950, there were 25,000 more students in Chinese schools than there were in English schools, but by 1955 the ratio had changed, and there were 5,000 more students in English schools than in Chinese schools. Although the communists did not know the exact figures, they were aware of the trend, and since it would dry up their breeding grounds, they had to halt it. So the battle for the preservation of Chinese education became even more crucial for the MCP.

The problem for the government and for the non-communists in the PAP was complicated by the fact that Chinese culture was also dear to the hearts of many parents, who were therefore not enthusiastic about the introduction of English into Chinese schools. All their administrative costs would be paid by the government, but in return the schools would have to comply with government regulations on syllabuses and discipline. And anyway, they wanted the teaching to be completely in Chinese.

True, about half of them wanted to have it both ways. Many clan leaders on the management committees of Chinese schools placed their own children in English schools and gave them Chinese lessons in the afternoons, to make them bilingual. At the same time they exhorted other parents to send their offspring to Chinese schools in order to carry on the tradition of classical Chinese scholarship. There was no way of satisfying everyone. The government therefore needed a report from the committee, on which I represented the PAP, that would commit all parties to its findings, so that we would all be obliged to undertake the task of persuading the Chinese-speaking ground to accept it. This gave me the opportunity to shape it, but it also exposed me to the grave danger of having to fight the MCP over a matter vital to its survival.

In a victory handshake with Chief Minister David Marshall outside the Assembly House in July 1955, after the Legislative Assembly had passed his motion calling for immediate self-government and a new constitution.

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 chairman of the all-party committee was Chew Swee Kee, minister for education, and its other seven members included a Malay, Abdul Hamid bin Haji Jumat, the minister for local government. Over the next nine months I worked on these two, both of whom were comfortable with my views, and together we produced a report that all could embrace. It included a recommendation for rewriting all the textbooks in the Chinese schools, which up to then had been those used in pre-war China under the Kuomintang government.

Meanwhile, Lim Chin Siong and Fong had not been idle. They had been pursuing a typical united front strategy with which I soon became familiar. Lim had made himself chairman of a Chinese education committee representing 16 trade unions and the All-Singapore Chinese School Parents’ Association. But that was only a beginning. He had a far wider list of people and organisations on whom he could call, for the SFSWU was not known in Hokkien as Kok Giap or “every trade” for nothing. The Middle Road group around it now included not only many affiliates with no significant numbers of Chinese-speaking members, and therefore no
interest in Chinese education, like the Naval Base Labour Union and the Singapore Traction Company Union, but also miscellaneous associations like those of barbers, tailors, cinema and entertainment workers, and even wooden house dwellers.

That was only one aspect of the octopus. Lim Chin Siong also wanted to co-opt the extensive traditional clan guilds that were under the wing of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and to this end he sought and obtained the support of its chairman, Tan Lark Sye. Tan was an illiterate multi-millionaire rubber merchant, a great champion of Chinese language and education, and the biggest single donor to a building fund for a university in Singapore for the education of Chinese from all over Southeast Asia. He was a great admirer of the new China and was willing to go along with the communists so long as they did not hurt his interests. He gave Lim his blessing for a joint mass meeting on 6 June 1955, which was to include the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the clans associated with it, as well as Lim’s “education committee”.

The vice-president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Yap Pheng Gek, was an English-educated comprador type with the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation. He did not want to play Lim’s game, and managed to reduce the mass meeting to one for representatives of six educational bodies, including Lee Kong Chian, a rubber magnate who was chairman of the Management and Staff Association of the Chinese High School.

The object of the meeting was to discuss a memorandum to be submitted to the government, calling for equality of treatment for Chinese and English language schools. It was stipulated in advance that there would be no debate and no new resolutions, but only a straight vote on the submissions to be made. Nevertheless, Lim Chin Siong ignored the rulings of the chairman, Yap Pheng Gek, who was afraid to enforce them against the pro-communists. Lim presented his own memorandum, which demanded not only equal status for Chinese schools and English schools, but an allocation of government funds for building Chinese
schools, six years free primary education, and the right to form student self-governing societies (i.e., branches of the militant Chinese Middle School Students’ Union) in every school.

When the chairman feebly tried to enforce the rules of the meeting, Fong asked to speak on behalf of the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union. Permission was refused. Fong then made a direct appeal to the audience, which had been packed with Lim Chin Siong’s supporters. There were tumultuous cheers of approbation to demonstrate solidarity and intimidate the chairman. The chairman duly surrendered. From then on, Lim and Fong controlled the meeting.

In this atmosphere, the hall filled to capacity with representatives of the clan associations and pro-communist trade union activists, the chauvinists took over. Chuang Chu Lin, the principal of Chung Cheng High School and later vice-chancellor of Nanyang University, opposed any revision of Chinese history and geography textbooks, and when he received enthusiastic backing, Lim Chin Siong’s short-lived proposal to have textbooks with a Malayan background was abandoned. Otherwise, only those resolutions that favoured the communists were carried. Lim got what he wanted, supported now by the traditional leaders of the Chinese-speaking establishment.

The all-party committee gave this memorandum from the Chinese Chamber of Commerce pride of place in an appendix to its report, but ignored all its recommendations. When, in February 1956, Chew Swee Kee made a statement on the report in the Legislative Assembly, no questions were asked. The report was the best compromise we could craft, and representatives of all parties had signed it.

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.

Underlying this tussle over language and education was a struggle for power. The Chinese merchant classes, clan leaders and tycoons of the Chamber of Commerce wanted an Assembly in which their elected representatives could speak for the Chinese population in fluent Chinese, not inadequate English, in order to increase their influence and wealth. They had already presented a memorandum for a multilingual legislature to the Rendel Committee (which had been rejected), and we had supported their proposals as early as November 1954, even before the PAP had been formally launched. Now the Chinese Chamber was again recommending that Chinese be one of the official languages.

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.

Under populist pressure, Marshall predictably moved a resolution on 9 February 1956 that “this Assembly is of the opinion that for the purposes of oral debate, the languages of the Assembly should be English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil and that a select committee be appointed to examine the report and make necessary recommendations”. Marshall knew he risked becoming irrelevant by this move. He recounted how a Malayan (sic) had told him, “with multilingualism, you are going to hand us over to the Chinese. They will swamp us.” “Yes, sir,” he had answered, “one must accept the rule of the majority. The Chinese are 76 per cent
of our population. Let us not avoid the issue.” This was typical of Marshall – half idealist and half (or perhaps more than half) an opportunist anxious to prove he was more Chinese than the Chinese, and therefore acceptable as their champion, at least for another term. The enthusiastic cheers for Chinese speakers during the election mass rallies had left no doubt that anyone who voted against multilingualism in order to exclude their representatives from the Assembly would surely lose votes.

In my speech I said, “When we take this step today, we must understand that it is irreversible, unless at the point of the bayonet, and even that would not work for long. We must remember that there are deeper and wider implications …” This was February 1956, and many people expected a flowering of the Chinese and Indonesian languages and their literature as a resurgent China and Indonesia became strong and powerful in 10 to 20 years. It was not possible, politically or psychologically, to persuade the mass of the people, then in an anti-colonial mood, to accept the primacy of the English language.

I was acutely conscious that my lack of comprehension, let alone command of the Chinese language, was a tremendous political disadvantage. I recounted my own personal experience:

“I was sent to an English school to equip me to go to an English university in order that I could then be an educated man – the equal of any Englishman, the model of perfection. Sir, I do not know how far they have succeeded in that. I grew up and I finally graduated. At the end of it, I felt – and it was long before I entered politics … that the whole set of values was fundamentally and radically wrong.”

I then quoted Nehru who had said that he cried because he could not speak his own tongue as well as he spoke the English language.