AT THE end of World War II, when the British Labor Government bowed to Indian, Ceylonese, and Burmese demands for independence, Whitehall looked for a new Far Eastern base in which Britain’s commercial interests in Asia could be coordinated with its foreign, colonial, and military policies. Its gaze rested on the island of Singapore, which hangs from the tip of the Malay Peninsula.
The Straits Settlements, consisting of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, were broken up. Penang and Malacca came under the jurisdiction of Kuala Lumpur, the capital of the Federation of Malaya, while Singapore was officially designated a crown colony; and since Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, of the Honorable East India Company, had bought Singapore’s 224 square miles of malarial swamp and jungle from the Sultan of Johore in 1819 for a down payment of about $20,000, plus a lifetime annuity of $8000, there seemed little reason why its status should ever change.
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The population of Singapore when Raffles landed had totaled no more than fifty, and, as these were peripatetic Malay fishermen and pirates, there was no question of Britain’s having imposed its authority on an alien people. Opportunity, not people, was what Britain had exploited in Singapore. Its growth could be attributed directly to Raffles’ foresight. He saw it as the buoy on the southeastern corner of Asia, around which all seagoing traffic between India and China would have to turn, and he was sure it would grow as a free port into Asia’s biggest shop.
Events justified his optimism. Within six months of its settlement, Singapore’s population had risen to five thousand, and the harbor that had sprung up around its muddy little river was host to thirty-five thousand tons of shipping. Today the population, half of it under the age of twenty-one and five sixths of it Chinese, is nearing the 1.5 million mark, and Singapore port this year is expected to handle more than eight million tons of general cargo and ten million tons of bulk mineral oil.
Smugglers’ paradise
To some of Singapore’s neighbors these figures are more a source of anger than of admiration. For instance, Indonesia, struggling to conserve its foreign exchange and to restrict expenditure on luxury imports, sees the colony as a protected smugglers’ cove and a serious threat to its own economic well-being.
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As the world’s primary rubber market, Singapore handles upwards of three hundred thousand tons of Indonesian rubber each year. Of this, almost a third reaches its markets by methods that are illegal at the Indonesian end but of no concern to Singapore, which is untroubled by doctored manifests or the nighttime arrival of tongkangs loaded down with smuggled cargo.
The rebel leaders in Sumatra and the Celebes use Singapore freely as their chief barter center, and such are the profits of this trade that a tongkang may be reckoned to pay for itself in three trips. The smugglers make their money both coming and going. In place of the rubber and copra that they take to Singapore, they load up with consumer goods, and, judging by the quantity exported in this way to the adjoining Riouw Archipelago, the inhabitants of those islands must have enough pens, radios, bicycles, sport shirts, and other bric-a-brac to equip a population ten times greater. On the profits of this trade, Singapore’s standard of living has been rising at the rate of more than 5 per cent a year; and the per capita income of $400 a year is several times greater than that of most Asian countries.
Last year the Singapore government briefly considered imposing a purchase tax on luxury goods. The plan was hastily dropped when it was discovered that almost all consumer goods were reexported to countries that imposed a purchase tax. Of 134,500 radio sets imported into Singapore over a three-year period, for instance, only 31,000 sets were either officially re-exported or sold for use locally; the rest, it was clear, had left the colony in the bottoms of the tongkangs and junks that crowd into the Singapore River.
Population boom
With the exception of Tokyo and Peiping, no Asian city in recent years has grown, or improved, more rapidly than Singapore. A slum clearance program by the official Singapore Improvement Trust resulted in the rapid construction of scores of new apartment buildings, which were made available at low rates of rental to families that had hitherto existed in cubicles. The boom in rubber and tin during the Korean War also sparked private enterprise into action, and with a plenitude of unskilled labor, modern, California-style bungalows appeared like mushrooms in the residential suburbs.
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Nevertheless, the annual natural increase in population of more than 50,000 continues to outstrip the colony’s building and construction capacity and, despite the progress of the last decade, slum dwellers continue to number an estimated 10 per cent of the population. There are also serious income inequalities. On the one hand there is a substantial Chinese class that is wealthy, on the other an infinitely larger section of the population that works for a living in sweatshop conditions.
Since the Europeans total fewer than 20,000, the exploitation here is largely by Chinese of Chinese. The British have long been conscious of this situation, but remedial action has always been difficult in the face of what appears to be a complete lack of community consciousness among the majority of the population. Kidnaped Chinese millionaires pay the ransom rather than invoke police aid.
Life in Singapore, in fact, invites comparison with a Ferris wheel, with the Indian, Pakistani, Malay, European, and Eurasian minorities in their own little compartments revolving helplessly on the periphery of the closed Chinese circle. By dint of much hard work, the British secured three hundred Chinese detectives for the Criminal Investigation Department and another hundred and fifty for the uniformed branch, but in a police force of approximately four thousand only slightly more than six hundred arc Chinese.
Gang wars
From the earliest days of Singapore the Chinese secret societies have acted as a state within the state, making their own laws and ruling with the knife and the gun. By conservative estimate there are still three hundred secret societies with a total membership of ten thousand in the colony. They have turned the city’s shady night life into a vast protection racket, with taxi dancers, hawkers, and bar owners all paying protection money or the bloody penalties exacted by the societies’ thugs. Early this year a society member was shot dead by a detective as he hacked at a hawker with a parang, the sharp-bladed Malay knife. Next day sixty members of the society, their faces shielded behind fans, attended their comrade’s funeral.
Before World War II, the Kuomintang flourished in Singapore despite repeated British pleas that the Chinese when they came to Malaya should leave their domestic politics behind. But the Kuomintang’s decline was accompanied by a corresponding increase in Communist support. The semiautonomous nature of Chinese society in the colony provided almost unlimited opportunities for subversion in the Chinese schools, which had become “little Marxist academies” before anyone suspected the danger.
The Communists also worked hard on the industrial front, finding mass support in factories and shops, where conditions of employment were often cause for legitimate grievances. Thus, the British found themselves confronted with a twin threat to their new Far Eastern headquarters: an inevitable demand for an increasing degree of self-determination, coupled with the unpalatable evidence that by granting a large measure of self-government they might find the air and naval bases that they proposed to retain in Singapore established in a de facto colony of Peiping.
Qualified autonomy
Second thoughts about the folly of separating Singapore from Malaya could not put the pieces together again. Malcolm MacDonald, former British commissioner general in Southeast Asia, saw a solution in the creation of a new British dominion that would include the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, and the British Borneo territories of Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo. The proposal had merit, but little that the colonial territories could see.
Singapore was anxious enough to join Malaya, but Tengku Abdul Rahman shuddered at the thought. Singapore’s Chinese population, added to Malaya’s, would eliminate the Malays’ already thin numerical majority and reinforce the ranks of the Malayan Communist Party.
Under normal circumstances Singapore, which is joined to Malaya by a causeway three quarters of a mile long and which handles most of Malaya’s rubber and tin, as well as its banking and insurance, is, in effect, the New York of Malaya, and the separation of the two territories makes little economic sense. But since Malaya does not want Singapore, and the Borneo territories do not want one another, little progress has been made toward unification.
Instead, Singapore has moved steadily, if sometimes tempestuously, toward a form of self-government that will give it qualified autonomy. Britain will continue to accept responsibility for its defense and external affairs while a committee, under the chairmanship of the United Kingdom commissioner and consisting of two other British members, the prime minister of Singapore assisted by two ministers, and one minister from the Federation of Malaya, will have overriding authority in matters concerning the new state’s internal security.
After a false start in 1956, an agreement was successfully negotiated in London in 1957 by an allparty delegation from Singapore, led by Lim Yew Hock, head of the Labor Front Alliance government. In his period as chief minister, Lim, a former trade union organizer, has been vigorously and courageously anti-Communist. Despite repeated threats against his life, he began a campaign to break up the Communist groups in the Chinese schools and dissolved the Chinese Student’s Union, whose ten thousand members were a rioting force.
Lim then turned his fire on the Communist-led Singapore Factory and Shopworkers’ Union and the Communist wing of the People’s Action Party, using his special powers under the public security ordinance to throw the leaders into jail. His firmness encouraged both Whitehall and anti-Communists in Singapore to view the future with optimism.
Events in recent months have brought new clouds to the Singapore scene, however. In City Council elections, the anti-Communist Labor Front was eclipsed by the People’s Action Party under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew.
Political high jinks
Of the half million on the electoral rolls, only 176,000 turned up to cast their ballots. Lim is fighting for time. He plans to postpone the legislative assembly elections, which were due to be held in August as a prologue to self-government, until April of next year. He is also investigating the Australian system of compulsory voting, in the hope that by sending the politically ingenuous to the polls he may submerge the obedient and indoctrinated ranks of the extreme left wing. He concedes that his chances are doubtful. Both the left wing and the right wing of the People’s Action Party have substantial mass support, and it is far from clear where the two divide.
Lee Kuan Yew, who studied law at Cambridge and is a gifted orator, represents the right wing. He is shocked by the extent of the Communist following in Singapore and in his own party, yet he often outbids the Communist wing of his party in his vituperative outbursts. He saw in the Indonesian expulsion of the Dutch a precedent that might well be followed in Singapore.
His colleague, Ong Eng Guan, the new mayor, also represents the right wing of the People’s Action Party. He began his period in office by throwing out the mace as a “colonial relic,” tearing down the Union Jacks in the council chamber, and inviting party followers to watch the council at work. Hundreds of barefooted and shirtless Chinese youths crowded into the chamber, jeering and hooting when council members spoke in English and cheering Ong and former Chief Minister David Marshall, who saluted his followers’ applause by waving a huge hammer, the symbol of the new left-wing Indian Workers’ Party.
Singapore was still ruefully analyzing these high jinks when the British Government announced in its defense report that it planned to maintain an all-purpose naval force there. To many this seemed to point to the abrogation of the new constitution and a return to colonial rule.
Prime Minister Macmillan quickly scotched these rumors when he passed through Singapore at the conclusion of his Commonwealth tour. “We shall proceed with what we have undertaken,” he said. “I regret Communism everywhere, but the proper people to deal with Communism in Singapore are the people of Singapore.”
This shock treatment produced some unexpected results. Businessmen of all nationalities realized that they would have to prepare to live with the People’s Action Party. It was also suggested that Mayor Ong was perhaps speaking the truth when he referred to the incompetence and corruption of previous city administrations.
Safeguard against extremism
The People’s Action Party, which had been confidently predicting that it would win the assembly election and be denied, by Britain, the opportunity of forming a government, reacted unpredictably to the Macmillan statement. If it was too much to hope that the prospect of responsibility would breed responsibility, there were now some indications that it might beget moderation.
Realizing that socialism will not work in such a small entrepot state, Lee Kuan Yew’s objective is to persuade Tengku Abdul Rahman to accept Singapore as Malaya’s twelfth state, thus providing him and his party with a wider and more fertile field for their endeavors. His chances are remote now; they would be wholly destroyed by irresponsible government. Here, then, is one unexpected safeguard against extremism. But the question for Singapore, for Southeast Asia, for Malaya, for Britain, and for Lee Kuan Yew himself is whether he has the power to control the Communists in his party.