The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (26 page)

The Chinese-educated were nothing like the English-educated students who had published
Fajar
. They were resourceful fund raisers. When I approached Pritt on their behalf I told him they could mobilise the financial resources of the merchant community in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He suggested a fee of $30,000. I put it to the students. They did not bat an eyelid. Long before Pritt flew to Singapore on 7 October for the hearing of their appeal, which was to begin five days later, they brought the money in cash to my home. (They seemed to feel uncomfortable about going to Laycock & Ong, where an Englishman was the senior partner.)

Having read the record of the appeal, Pritt must have known there was no chance of it succeeding, so with the practised vehemence of years of experience he again made as much noise and propaganda for the students as he could to damage the government. The students gave him a tea party at the Badminton Hall the day after his arrival. Pritt made a speech in English, and his hosts made several in Mandarin, but none of this was translated to him. Not surprisingly, for this was an opportunity for the backroom leaders to mobilise support, work up enthusiasm, and generate more steam for mass action, utilising a perfectly legitimate cause. The proceedings left so deep an impression on him that in his autobiography published 12 years later, Pritt remembered the organisation and logistics that had produced 5,000 students neatly seated in a hall, each one provided with a box of cakes, buns, peanuts and bananas, the
leftovers of which were placed back in the same box and carried away by ushers along the aisles, so that the hall was left neat and tidy when they marched off to their buses to go home. And all this in response to crisp orders given over the loudspeakers with great aplomb and self-confidence by boys and girls of only 15 or so who were instantly obeyed. It was a performance that would have gladdened the heart of any staff officer in the army, and I was as impressed as Pritt. That was the first of several such meetings I was to attend. I had never seen anything like it among English-educated students, who spoke diffidently, lacked self-confidence, and were psychologically hobbled when they used a language that was not their mother tongue.

The appeal itself, I knew, would be an anticlimax. But the students saw it as an occasion to organise demonstrations against the government. On 12 October, a large crowd of them gathered on the Padang outside the Supreme Court, and according to the
Singapore Standard
, “a storm of applause” broke out from them when Pritt arrived. The English judge, Mr Justice Knight, asked, “Why has a trivial appeal like this been listed for three days?” Pritt said he was responsible, as he estimated it would not be safe to say that it would be concluded in less. He then ploughed through his grounds for appeal, putting up a stout performance that lasted two days (I would have been hard pressed to keep it going beyond one morning), but with no effect. After submissions were completed at the end of the second day, the judge said that he upheld the conviction. However, he would set aside the prison sentences if the young students would sign bonds of good behaviour for 18 months.

Each student was asked in turn if he or she would sign a bond. Each signified refusal by a shake of the head. The judge was determined to uphold the rule of law, and the students were determined to be martyrs. The judge had no alternative but to send them to prison, although in doing so he had given them another issue with which to work up anti-government feelings among the Chinese-speaking masses.

Knowing now how the communists would exploit it, I would have released them on a bond of good behaviour signed by their parents, whom I could have called to court and dealt with directly before the communist backroom boys could get at them. The government would have scored a moral victory and the parents would have been relieved that their children had been let off with a warning. But at that time I, too, got carried away by the wave of sympathy for them, and on 20 September, the
Nanyang Siang Pau
quoted me as saying, “Until now the authorities have no evidence of any communist activity in the Chinese schools; but they regard opposition to the government’s refusal to allow the students postponement of service as communist activity, and under this pretext, they seek to exercise better control over the Chinese schools.” I was ignorant, gullible and stupid. I did not know just how efficient the communists were, how their tentacles reached out and controlled every single organisation that was bubbling up against the government.

The appeal to the Privy Council was heard on 15 February 1955 and was dismissed. The case was over, but my initiation into the world of the Chinese-educated had just begun. It was a world full of vitality, of so many activists, all like jumping beans, of so many young idealists, unselfish, ready to sacrifice everything for a better society. I was deeply impressed by their seemingly total dedication to the cause of revolution, their single-minded determination to overturn the colonial government in order to establish a new world of equality and fairness. And I was to grow increasingly fearful of the direction in which their leaders were taking them.

But I was also convinced that if I could not harness some of these dynamic young people to our cause, to what my friends and I stood for, we would never succeed. So far, we had links only with the English-educated and the Malays, who did not have the convictions or the energies to match, never mind the will to resist the Chinese-educated communists. The only “Chinese-speaking Chinese” in our network were
small groups in the Naval Base and the Harbour Board, largely Cantonese skilled labourers, and some daily-rated City Council workers. The one union whose members were all Chinese-speaking was that of the night-soil workers in the Municipal Council, who every morning collected human waste in two metal buckets, one at each end of a pole. They were not well-educated, and did not look to me like revolutionary material.

The students must have been instructed to use me as their lawyer, after having employed others who were not very political nor as willing to stand up to the government as I was. They started turning up at Oxley Road looking for advice on a hundred and one problems they encountered whenever they came into conflict with or were obstructed by authority, from schoolboys scalded during their camp-ins to permits for public meetings. They usually arrived in a bright pink Chevrolet with the number plate 1066. (Choo recognised and remembered it: the year of the Battle of Hastings.) One of these pigtailed schoolgirls was evidently using her father’s car; he was probably a wealthy shopkeeper or merchant.

I never turned them away, however inconvenient the hour. I wanted to poach in this pond where the fish had been fed and nurtured by the communists, to use hook and line to catch as many as I could. After all, they had fished in our English-speaking pond, poaching John Eber, Sharma, Devan Nair, Samad and others. I was innocent – it was like recruiting police cadets in mafia territory, a hazardous business. I believed then that the discipline of the students and the energy and dedication of their leaders were natural and spontaneous, born of youthful enthusiasm and idealism. It took me two years from 1954 to 1956 to fathom their methods, to get glimpses of their intrigues and deviousness and to understand the dynamics of the communist united front (CUF). Behind the scenes, the anonymous Town Committee of the MCP controlled and ran open front operators like Robert Soon Loh Boon and those section leaders at mass rallies. The communists had a secret network of disciplined cadres grouped in cells of about four, each with a leader who gave
the orders (dressed up as the outcome of democratic discussion), who in turn took orders from a leader in another cell of a higher rank.

These orders were disobeyed at the risk of isolation and marginalisation for those on the fringes, of rustication and punishment for those who were members of the Anti-British League or the MCP, and of death by assassination if a party member had committed an act of betrayal. It was a ruthless system in which a past record of sacrifice could count for nothing, and therefore not one to be defied lightly, as the case of Liew Yit Fun should have taught me.

Liew joined the MCP in Malaya in 1942 and operated against the Japanese in Negeri Sembilan in the Second Regiment of the MPAJA. After the war, he became the MCP representative in Malaya for contacts with the authorities, and the publisher of a party newspaper called
Min Sheng Pau
. Just before the Emergency was declared in 1948, he was convicted for sedition and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. In October 1949, as his sentence was about to expire, a detention order was served on him, and this was extended three times to 1955.

Asked by his friends to represent him in the judicial review of his case, I saw Liew in Johor Bahru jail and found him a most intelligent, eloquent and dedicated communist. He wanted to be banished to China (or to Jamaica, where he had been born), but there was little I could do for him under the law. So I decided to use the threat of an action for habeas corpus, which would generate adverse publicity. This was about six months after I had brought D.N. Pritt out for the
Fajar
case and, four months later, for the defence of the Chinese students, so my threat was taken seriously. In a letter dated 11 July 1955 and addressed to police headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, the director of Singapore Special Branch paraphrased me as saying, “if the habeas corpus action did not succeed, the facts would become known in the press of the world, and Peking would start taking an interest in this case of one of its nationals”. Within three months, the British banished Liew to China. The final twist was
yet to come. Like so many communists, he was eaten up by his own revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, Chin Peng, the leader of the MCP, expelled him from the party and he died in disgrace, a disillusioned man. He had been martyred by both sides.

But in 1954, I was still blind to the true nature of the communist adversary, and was not deterred. I believed I could win over some of the non-committed who had open minds and would see that Mao-inspired communism could never succeed in Malaya. I had much to learn.

10. Enter the PAP

Choo was on the veranda with our son Loong, then aged 2, when two men turned up at 38 Oxley Road one Sunday morning in 1954. This was a fortnight after I had told some of the Chinese-educated students that I wanted to meet some leaders in the Chinese trade unions. I came to the sitting room to greet them. They said they were from the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union. They were soft-spoken and could understand a little English, but had brought Robert Soon Loh Boon along as interpreter. Their names were Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan. I had made contact with the activists in the Chinese-educated working class world and was excited at the prospect of exploring it for recruits to our cause of a democratic, non-communist, socialist Malaya. Lim and Fong looked the right type: well-mannered, earnest and sincere in demeanour, simple in their clothes, Fong to the point of shabbiness. Keenness and dedication were written in every line of their faces and in every gesture.

They were in marked contrast to the shallow characters whom my colleagues and I had earlier met at David Marshall’s flat, when he and Lim Yew Hock of the Labour Party were discussing the formation of a new political grouping that would later emerge as the Labour Front. That had been part of our probing; we wanted to assess what they were capable of. But we found it difficult to take Marshall seriously. A mercurial, flamboyant Sephardic Jew, he was then the leading criminal lawyer in Singapore, but when he made what he considered a sound proposal, we often could not help laughing at him. He was apolitical and naive. We knew he was a prima donna who loved to be centre-stage and would be uncontrollable. On one occasion, he was so furious when we laughed
at him at the wrong moment that he flounced out of the room in a tantrum, and then out of his own flat altogether. We found ourselves left with his friends and a lot of food and drink. We ate, drank, exchanged pleasantries, thanked the maid, and left. After the third meeting, we decided that it would be ruinous to be in any way associated with these people. What we were looking for were serious-minded men for a long-term enterprise, men who would take with equanimity the ups and downs of politics in pursuit of our objectives.

Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan were the exact opposite of Marshall and company, and I liked what I saw. They were the Chinese-educated equivalent of the
Fajar
boys who were prosecuted for sedition, but more determined, more selfless, more hardworking, the kind of lieutenants we had been searching for. I was hopeful that we could win such people over.

I explained to them my plans for forming a party to represent the workers and the dispossessed, especially the Chinese-educated, not in order to win the coming election, but to gain a significant number of seats so as to show up the rottenness of the system and the present political parties, and to build up for the next round. They were non-committal, but after my experience with the Chinese school students, I was not surprised. I knew that before making any major decision they would have to report back and submit their assessments, whereupon somewhere above or beyond them earnest discussions would be held and they would eventually be given the MCP line. Two weeks later, they returned with another interpreter. Yes, they were prepared to join me, not to seek power but to expose the colonial regime, the inadequacy of the proposed Rendel constitution, and to demolish the parties that would take office.