From Third World to First
From Third World to First
Singapore: A Modern History by Michael D. Barr
Lee Kuan Yew barely held back tears as he announced his country’s independence on August 7, 1965:
Now I, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, do hereby proclaim and declare on behalf of the people and the Government of Singapore that as from today the ninth day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five Singapore shall forever be a sovereign democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society.
After being kicked out of Malaysia, Singapore was in a bad place. It was a swampy, undeveloped third-world country, with no natural resources and surrounded by enemies on all sides, with a communist insurgency growing within.
Two months later in the Serangoon gardens, Lee outlined his vision of an independent Singapore:
…if you want a nation and a society to flourish and to prosper, it must
produce leaders. And leadership is not just being clever and writing essays. You need men of action: sportsmen, gymnasts, rugby players , boxers, outward bound school types, rowers, sailors, airmen, leaders of debating societies, organisers of men. In other words, the whole orientation of your education is different. Your purpose is to breed a fighting, effective generation with the guts and the will to survive. And if we are finally to be overwhelmed by forces bigger than ourselves, then I say it will be "Over our dead bodies".
Against all the odds, little Singapore prevailed. Against ethnically-based identity politics, Lee’s government promoted meritocracy. Its free-trade principles allowed it to grow its economy and develop its housing and industry. Massive infrastructure programs housed those who were living in slumtowns along the filthy Singapore river. In just one generation it had raised itself up to the living conditions of a first-world country, far beyond what anyone could have imagined for it in 1965.
Unraveling the Myth
This has been the received narrative for a long time. The extent to which it is Singapore’s actual history - as opposed to a national mythology - has been a subject of long debate, especially since Lee Kuan Yew’s death in 2015. A flurry of revisionist histories have come out since then, seeking to understand Singapore’s history on more objective grounds.
Instead of understanding Singapore as the product of two great men, Sir Stamford Raffles and Lee Kuan Yew, Michael D. Barr argues that we should see it in the context of southeast Asia’s broader geopolitical patterns. For a long time, mastery of this area depended on a ruler’s practical ability to control the flow of goods on the sea-lanes between India and China. As one port declined, another grew to replace it, ebb and flow.
More than just a humid swampland, Singapore was an island at the centre of the world’s busiest shipping lane, as much a subject to the broader geopolitical patterns of southeast Asia as those polities around it. Much of the first part of Michael D. Barr’s book is about establishing this pattern, so he can show its effect on the social and commercial life of Singapore. He does this by drawing on recent historical and archaeological work by Carl A. Trocki, A. C. Milner, and John K. Miksic.
Ebb and Flow
In pre-modern southeast Asia, “the level of administration was rudimentary to the point where the modern citizen would not recognise it as such.” (66). Politics was inherently elitist, but a raja could rule only at the behest of his followers. Though born into his position, it was the practical support of his followers which allowed a raja to sustain his authority and project his power over the sea-lanes. The sea-lanes were always more important to a raja than large contiguous land borders, as much of the land was impassable jungle and mountain. “Domains were not demarcated by geographical land borders, but by the personal reach and alliances of rajas based in port cities.” (68).
In the Malay Annals - an ancient, semi-mythological chronicle of Kings - it is recorded how the raja of Palembang was driven out of his territory by the newly ascendant Majapahits. He fled to Singapore with his followers, establishing a city there which flourished as a port. Only several years later, it was abandoned. We don’t know the full extent of why, but it is the first time we know of that Singapore had any significance as a political entity.
The locus of power shifted again with the collapse of the Majapahits, this time to a series of rulers based in Malacca/Johor. This came to an end in 1699 with the murder of Sultan Mahmud Syah, whose subjects could no longer tolerate him; apparently he would take their wives for himself, only to discard and thereby disgrace them once he got bored.
Into the vacuum emerged a new Malay/Bugis consortium based in Johor/Riau. The Bugis were a sea-faring people from further south that had migrated into the region. The new pre-eminence of the Bugis bred resentment. When the Dutch arrived in the region, the Malays sided with the Dutch in order to overthrow the Bugis. They were defeated in 1784 and their most important port-city, Riau, was razed.
Then came the British. They had already established themselves in the region by acquiring the island of Penang - located at the north entrance of the Straits - in 1786. More important ports like Aceh were already under Dutch influence. Fearing they would be cut out entirely, British traders were seeking a new port closer to the mouth of the Straits. In 1818, Stamford Raffles found a location for a new port that had no existing Dutch claims: Singapore.
The Early Days
Raffles masterminded the Treaty of Singapore, after which the island fell under the joint sovereignty of the East India Company, Sultan Hussain of Johor, and his Temenggong, Abdul Rahman.
It was a dubious legal arrangement, signed without the Sultan’s knowledge, which rankled the colonial administrators: they wanted to reduce their operating costs and were more interested in maximising their profits in India. But Raffles was willing to run Singapore on a shoe-string budget, driven by his burning belief in free trade, and so long as he kept things under control, they were willing to let him do his thing.The main task of the Singaporean administration was to stop piracy. Based on Raffles’ belief in free trade, there were no excise duties or income taxes. The combination of free trade and protection from the British navy attracted many traders - Asian and European - whose actions, totally independent of any government initiative, became the economic life of the island.
Since there were no taxes, the administration often struggled to make ends meet. Its only method of raising income was to auction off its monopolies to local traders, who paid a regular rental fee for possessing it. These were called “tax farms”. They could be literal farms, but also firms that produced or distributed consumer products. There was a “neat symbiosis between tax farms that grew nothing (but sold both the necessities and the vices that made life tolerable) and agricultural farms that, among other businesses, grew gambier and pepper. The Chinese labourers working and living on the farms served as both the exploited workers and the exploited consumers in this political economy.” (83).
Beyond stopping piracy, the administration had little influence on Singaporean society. This was largely driven by the pre-existing institutions, the most important of which were the kongsi. This was a uniquely Chinese system, something of a cross between a charity organisation and a joint business venture, and a precursor to the secret societies that came to dominate Singapore in the late 19th century. The European traders who came often lacked business contacts, and the Chinese societies became their prime facilitators with Asian businessmen and traders.
The Malays had their own power structures too but these were struggling to adapt to the changing times. The 1824 Anglo-Dutch treaty drew a line between Johor and Riau, the two most important ports of Sultan Hussain. And in acting without his consent, his Temenggong, Abdul Rahman, had undermined his authority. Hussain died in poverty in 1835, and the British established a new power-sharing relationship with the new Temenggong Daing Ibrahim directly, effectively ending the sultanate.
Ibrahim established new economic ventures in Johor. His initial business was in gutta-percha, a kind of rubber tree whose latex was used to coat submarine telegraph cables. His business was so successful he harvested all the gutta-percha trees in one year. He moved on to pepper, gambier, and rattan plantations, as well as tin mines.
To control these, he devolved authority over each river and inlet to a local Chinese headman - a kangchu, or riverlord - who was in charge of the plantation there. He based this on Singapore’s tax-farm system.
As this system expanded to Johor, it drove up competition in Singapore and increased the stakes. Chinese secret societies, farming syndicates, and triad gangs fought one another for control of these monopolies. They would bribe, extort, smuggle, impose price hikes, and fight in the streets.
This all lurked under the official channels of government, which had only a faint idea of all these goings-on. Singapore’s importance in the western mind only grew when it became a hub for telegraph and telephone cables. In 1882, the telegraph office was handling 10,000 messages a day from everywhere around the Anglophone world. In 1894 there were 256 telephone lives serving European businesses. (86).
As the Colonial Office took a more direct interest in the Malayan peninsula,
they consolidated their holdings - Penang, Malacca, and Singapore - into The Straits Settlement. Everywhere else on the peninsula they set up a British resident. They also took a more direct role in Singaporean society, outlawing the secret societies which often exploded at each other in violence, and investing money in infrastructure and education. Singapore became the most important port in the region. For Asians, it was the gateway to the west, from which new conceptions of Islam, various nationalisms, and political ideologies spread.The Occupation
Barr spends little time talking about the early 20th century, skipping right ahead to the Japanese occupation of the island in World War II. Two days after it began, 10,000 Chinese civilians were massacred. Numerous others were rounded up and taken away. The Chinese were treated especially harshly in comparison to the Malays and Indians, some of whom were sympathetic to the Japanese, including Malay nationalists in the Young Malay Union.
This mistreatment emboldened the communist movement. They waged an insurgency from the jungles, which was armed and funded by the British. When the war was over, the communists were welcomed back into the cities as heroes. They began to mete out a somewhat arbitrary and punitive justice against those who collaborated with the Japanese, or whom they simply disliked.
As Britain marched towards decolonisation, it wasn’t clear what shape the Malayan peninsula would take. Ethnic tensions were high. Certain political groups effectively became synonymous with expressions of ethnic pride and identity, such as the Chinese and the communist groups. Britain had lost confidence in the ability of the Malay sultans to govern, so administrators pushed for a new Malayan federation, into which Penang and Malacca were integrated. They retained direct control of Singapore though for two reasons: one, it was an important port; two, being majority Chinese, it allayed Malay fears about Chinese domination.
Once the war was over, Britain disbanded the communist militias. Many refused to hand over their weapons and continued to fight an insurgency for the next two decades. In response to this, over a million Chinese in Malaya were resettled into 600 new towns so their activities could be monitored and the insurgency campaign starved out. Rather than live in these compounds, many Chinese left for Singapore, and a series of unplanned, overpopulated, off-the-grid kampungs and shanty-towns sprung up there.
Towards Independence
In the 1950s, well-organised left-wing groups with revolutionary wings gave way to undisciplined, grass-roots populism. Singapore was also beginning to gain more rights to self-government. At the time of its first election, the Chinese population was largely unenfranchised. The first Chief Minister of Singapore was David Marshall, who led an Anglo-dominated Labour party to victory. A principled man, Marshall made many attempts to push for a greater degree of self-government. When Britain would not take him seriously, he resigned.
The leader of the opposition was Lee Kuan Yew of the People’s Action Party. His star had begun to rise at this time for a variety of reasons. As the opposition leader during the Marshall government - which was trying to negotiate with Britain for more self-rule - Lee wasn’t compromised by the taint of collaborating with the colonial administration, and could maintain his pristine hard-line left-wing anti-colonial credentials. Western-educated, with an eye for the manners that defined polite British society, he could also present himself as a credible mainstream political leader to the British.
His party soaked up the populist energy sweeping Singapore. This included a 1957 City Council election, spearheaded by Ong Eng Guan, and the 1959 election, after which Lee Kuan Yew emerged as the first prime minister. That same year the communists won the civil war in China, which caused a surge in ethno-nationalist pride among Singapore’s Chinese that opened up tensions within the party. Lee Kuan Yew’s hold on the PAP was always shaky, and in 1961 members followed Ong Eng Guan and Lim Chin Siong away to two breakaway parties, one more radical, the other more moderate.
Malaysia, which had recently become an independent federation, looked on these events with despair. Its prime minister, the conservative Malay Abdul Rahman, was scared that Singapore might fall to communists. But he also didn’t like the idea of allowing Singapore, with its million Chinese, to join the federation. He privately warned Lee that Malaysia would act to crack down on the radicals - by force, if necessary.
In 1963 Lee authorised the arrest of over a thousand people with claimed links to the Malayan Communist Party, in what was known as Operation Coldstore. The official narrative was a cover-story: well-organised communist groups with terrorist wings had genuine influence in the 1940s, but in 1963 the MCP had fewer than 50 members. The real reason for the arrests was so Lee could neutralise the radical actors in Singaporean politics. This had the support of both Britain and Malaysia. It was also a convenient pretext for Lee to arrest his legitimate parliamentary opposition, many of whom had nothing to do with communism.
With the Singaporean radical left eliminated, Malaysia seemed open to Singapore joining the federation. Lee Kuan Yew put a referendum to his people in which they were offered three ways to say yes, and none to say no. It was obvious: Singapore was joining Malaysia.
It went disastrously.
The two countries were very different. Rahman led a more rural, conservative, Islamic Malaysia, and Lee a more modern, secular, Chinese Singapore. Not all the fruits of modernity and colonisation had flowed equally to all the races and ethnic tensions were very high along the peninsula. Race riots broke out in which hundreds were killed. The two countries also had irreconcilable differences on legal systems, a common market, and citizenship laws. Lee’s habit of making inflammatory speeches didn’t help either; one of them finally landed him in a jail in Kuala Lumpur.
Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee opened secret negotiations with Malaysia. Malaysia would release Lee and Singapore would leave the federation. Both parties agreed to a cover-up story in which Malaysia would theatrically kick Singapore out of the federation. This would help Singapore save face and draw attention away from Lee’s arrest.
Which is where we come to the famous image of Lee tearfully announcing his country’s independence. Perhaps these emotions were genuine, an expression of real frustration at Singapore having to make its future alone. But the official narrative masked what was actually a deliberate, bilateral agreement, carefully designed to create an atmosphere of insecurity into which the PAP could insert themselves as the solution. Singapore’s independence was a shock even to Britain and Australia. The details surfounding the incident were kept secret for more than 30 years before the truth was finally revealed to the public.
The Politics of Survival
Singapore was in a precarious place. Union activity and race riots had disrupted the fabric of everyday life. It was dependent on food and water imports. Malaysian soldiers were patrolling the streets, as well as British soldiers, who were to withdraw in 1971; their presence may have discouraged a military takeover by Malaysia. In this difficult situation, the PAP cultivated a style of politics which Chan Heng Chee called “the politics of survival”, and embarked upon a wide-sweeping agenda to transform every sphere of society.
They started by bulldozing the unplanned shantytowns and kampungs that had sprung up everywhere. In these places, people often lived off-the-grid and outside the cash economy. They were rehomed into massive apartments built on the site of their former village. This process had already begun under British rule, but now its pace intensified. It had the convenient side-effect of dispersing population centres on the periphery of government control, where political opposition or social unrest may have formed.
Temples and other buildings on prime land were given 30 year leases, after which the land had to be re-bought at market rates. This allowed the government to use the island’s precious land more efficiently. A new rail network was laid down to connect new apartments, factories, and urban hubs.
All these rehomed people needed work and the port was their biggest employer; at one point it employed a fifth of all workers. The port was an enthusiastic early adopter of containerised shipping, and from it, all the tin, rubber, and oil of the Malay peninsula found its way into international markets. Demand for these goods surged because of the invention of the motor-car as well as the Vietnam War. Singapore was also able to add value to the end goods by smelting the tin.
Singapore’s first oil refinery was built in 1966 by Mobil. Mobil was concerned that Sukarno would nationalise their existing facilities in Indonesia, so they were looking to move their operations. Singapore was an attractive choice, offering few regulations as well as a large, cheap labour force. The success of this oil refinery, as well as Singapore’s active pursuit of foreign investment, allowed it to pivot away from its reliance on Malaysian raw materials, the flow of which was being strangled by a number of trade barriers and economic restrictions. Singapore’s manufacturing took another turn as the global economy restructured in the 1980s and the country pivoted towards high-skill manufacturing, such as in electronics.
The PAP’s style of governing - the politics of survival - came with a crackdown on civil liberties and a wider consolidation of their hold on Singaporean society. Politics was condemned as partisan squabbling, a distraction from the real work that the government was doing in order to keep Singapore alive. This rather technocratic, managerial view of politics entailed the suppression of government criticism. Media companies were consolidated. Pesky journalists and political rivals were arbitrarily detained. The unions were nationalised and their focus recalibrated towards retraining new arrivals from the kampungs and shanty-towns so they could slot into the burgeoning economy.
Singapore developed its own aristocracy, setting up a pipeline that created a pool of largely well-educated, English-speaking Chinese, from whom were drawn the politicians, business leaders, and civil servants. These people overwhelmingly went to the same schools, competed for the same scholarships, took similar jobs and internships, and studied abroad at the same university, the Kennedy School of Government, where Lee Kuan Yew himself had studied. Contacts made at this university were also invaluable for attracting foreign capital and investments.
Singapore also began to pivot away from its traditional ally, the United Kingdom. The final straw was in 1967 when Britain devalued its pound and devastated Singapore’s foreign reserves. Singapore found itself more closely aligned with the United States, which had become the pre-eminent Pacific power in the late 20th century. Singapore also always maintained decent relations with China, an important trade relation (Singapore is today China’s top trading partner). Singapore played an important role in helping China join global society in the 1990s.
Being Singaporean
Southeast Asia has always been a cosmopolitan place, a meeting ground of numerous ethnic groups that have mixed and mingled and co-existed. This did not coalesce into a national Singaporean identity until after World War II; society was - and to an extent, still is - fractured along the cleavages of ethnicity, class, and language.
The major ethnic groups were the Europeans, Indians, Malays, and Chinese. Within these were many more groupings. For example, Europeans were generally English, but there were also Dutch traders. The first Chief Minister of Singapore, David Marshall, was a Sephardic Jew. Chinese came from numerous groups, including Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, and Cantonese.
This situation was fertile grounds for the formation of new ethnic identities. Eurasians were a distinct group consisting of a mixture of Asian and European (typically Malay and Portuguese). The Pernakans were those Chinese who had lived in Southeast Asia for centuries and formed an identity that was distinct from the more recent arrivals from China. Often they were the ones best positioned to learn English and take up important roles in the colonial administration, and formed the backbone of Singapore’s later ruling class.
Your role within society was, to an extent, determined by your ethnic group. This was reinforced by colonial attitudes towards race, which imposed a schema according to which certain races were set out for certain kinds of work: Malays were lazy, Indians not fit for work above hard labour, and the Chinese considered hard-working and thrifty. Certain ethnic groups dominated certain professions: bankers were usually Tamils or Jews, gambier and pepper farmers were Teochew, business-owners were Hokkien, tin-miners were Hakka…
These communities were insular to the point where, as late as 1957, only 22% of the population over 15 spoke English (188). Colonial policy had an extremely limited reach into the everyday lives of people. This only began to change as the government rehoused people and educated them into the new, modern Singaporean society. Lee Kuan Yew was a vocal opponent of narrow, ethnic-based political loyalties (“communalism”) and a firm-believer in meritocracy, “the right man for the job.”
The effect of Lee Kuan Yew’s governance was to slowly weld the colonial and Asian spheres of Singapore into one cohesive society. Entry into it offered precious jobs and better standards of living. Some ethnic groups were better positioned to make this adjustment, especially the pernakans and anglicised Chinese. The dominance of this way of life came about as a result of Lee Kuan Yew’s capture of the unions, government, the media, and the education system.
Two Great Men
Singapore’s history is captured within the lives of two men: Sir Stamford Raffles and Lee Kuan Yew. While acknowledging how they helped shape the city into a nation, Michael Barr’s work demonstrates quite convincingly that Singapore has always had a large, active society of independent traders and businessmen who were largely uninfluenced by the actions of government. He seeks to make Raffles’ acquisition of Singapore in 1818 a punctuation mark, not a beginning. Barr’s contribution to the current wave of revisionist Singaporean histories is to show us that there has always been an Asian Singapore that largely escaped the control and notice of the government.
Was Lee Kuan Yew a man of action in a time of survival? Barr gives a more even-handed evaluation of this than the official narrative might. But ultimately we seem to be left with the conclusion that he was. His political tactics, ambitious ideals, and self-restraint allowed him to turn his city into a country with a good living standard. In some ways, Singapore is quite unpalatably authoritarian to western sensibilities. But the fact remains that Lee Kuan Yew was a nation-builder.
Singapore’s location was an enormous advantage. As a communications and trading hub, it was well-positioned to succeed as an independent nation. To an extent this may undermine the “survival story”. We have to keep in mind that Singapore’s success was not guaranteed though, and Lee’s ability to exploit the island’s fortunes - as well as the mere fact that the island had fortunes - does not diminish his political life. A less capable leader may well have led it to ruin. If you’re not put off by the antiquated notion of historical great men, if there really are still such titanic figures living in the modern age, then Lee Kuan Yew must surely figure among them.
Temenggong was a formal position subordinate to the Sultan. It was a kind of mixed sheriff/mayor/chief justice/police chief position.
The terms “Malay”, “Malaysian”, and “Malayan” are somewhat overlapping and confusing. “Malay” denotes an ethnic group and a family of languages. Malaysian refers to the people of the modern nation-state (not all of whom are Malays). Malaya is an old-fashioned term with colonial overtones. It can refer to the peninsula as a geographic entity - which is how I’m using it - or to the peoples and states that comprised the Malayan Federation on said peninsula from 1948 to 1963 (which only briefly included Singapore).