I remember 1958 as the year when the intense pressure that the communists had been mounting since 1954 subsided. Things were relatively quiet, and there was little excitement from go-slows, strikes, demonstrations, riots or rallies. I had time for reflection, to think and to plan the next important moves before the coming general election, due at the latest in May 1959. The first question I had to answer was whether it was better for us to win and form the government or stay in the opposition, but with more seats, and use another term to consolidate our position with the people.
After the test in Tanjong Pagar and Jalan Besar, however, I was already confident that, even if the communists opposed us in the election, they would not be able to defeat us unless they were able to rebuild their organisation to what it had been in 1956. To do this, they would have to start new parties, form new fronts, and then establish their credentials with the public. All this would take time. Their cadres and immediate supporters – a few thousand in all – could follow the twists and turns of each manoeuvre of the CUF, but not the mass of the people.
Whether or not we formed the next government, we would have to be completely in command of the PAP itself and able to prevent its reinfiltration and recapture. How were we to take advantage of this period of quiet, while the communists had to keep their heads down, to achieve that? They could still retake the branches, but we must on no account allow them to take over the party as a whole, and with it the symbol that would identify it on the ballot papers beside a candidate’s name. In a semi-literate, multilingual country, the candidate’s symbol is crucial; it is like the logo of a designer product, and the PAP’s blue circle with a red lightning flash across it had already won brand recognition. That was an immediate problem. But if we assumed office the problem would become more acute, for we would have to release Lim Chin Siong, Fong and their lieutenants. How could we then stop them – their prestige enhanced by their detention – from rebounding and threatening a PAP government? I was convinced we could not survive unless we had first won the high ground so that we could not be attacked and demolished like the Labour Front. The answer was plain. Somehow or other I must publicly commit Lim Chin Siong and Fong to our own position before we took power.
I had several other preoccupations. Lim Yew Hock now knew that his standing with the voters had been badly damaged, and that he and Chew Swee Kee would find it difficult to survive the communist onslaught against them for the purges they had mounted. But they continued to commit so many blunders that they seemed doomed. I tried to dispel Lim Yew Hock’s fears of sudden political death and assured him I would not press him to hold the early election he had foolishly promised, and that given time his political fortunes could change. I found reasons for him to postpone the polls: registration of new citizens, redelineation of constituencies from 25 to 51, changes to the election law to make voting compulsory and forbid the use of cars to carry voters to polling stations. I convinced him that it would be unwise to let voting remain voluntary, for the communists were better organised and better able to mobilise their followers, and the wealthy parties would find themselves supplying cars only to provide transport for the supporters of their left-wing opponents. Time was needed for the details to be worked out and legislation drafted and passed. He accepted these ideas gratefully because they prolonged the life of his government.
I did not tell him that I myself needed time to clean up the PAP, reorganise it, and select active, young Chinese-educated cadres who could be fielded as candidates but who were not committed Marxists or communists. We wanted a balanced multiracial slate. While we could find English-educated Chinese, Malays and Indians who would be totally dependable and non-communist, it was difficult to identify good Chinese-educated candidates who would remain loyal when the communists opened fire on us, such was their hold on the minds of the Chinese-educated.
I started cadre-training classes to talent-spot idealistic Chinese-speakers with political convictions that were not left-wing, but we were fishing in the same pond as the communists, who exploited both Chinese nationalism and Marxist-Maoist ideas of egalitarianism. The most energetic and dedicated of the Chinese were already imbued with these ideals. I had to swing them over to democratic socialism, to get our own political concepts across to them in my inadequate Mandarin – and then read the papers they wrote in Chinese running script, which is far more difficult to decipher than printed characters.
I believe the experience taught me more than it taught them. Their mental terms of reference were Chinese history, Chinese parables and proverbs, the legendary success of the Chinese communist revolution as against their own frustrating life in Singapore. None of this helped them to understand what I was propounding to them – a parliamentary, democratic, socialist, non-communist society in a multiracial Singapore and Malaya established through peaceful, non-violent and constitutional means. Their whole background led them to believe that a communist society should be brought about both by open persuasion and by clandestine subversion and revolutionary force. I later discovered to my dismay that there were quite a few converted hard-core communists even in the group I had picked. There was no way to filter them out. They were like radioactive dust.
One day in March 1958, a Chinese male in his late 20s came to Lee & Lee, my law firm in Malacca Street, and told Choo that he would like to speak to me personally. It was about 11 am, a busy time of the day when many other young men in short-sleeved shirts and slacks were coming and going, but after checking with me, Choo let him through. He said he had an important request. Would I meet a person who represented his organisation? – meaning, without saying it, the communist underground. I said, Yes. He stressed that the meeting must be secret. I proposed a rendezvous on the road between the Empress Place government offices and Victoria Theatre. This would be safest for me. I could take him to the select committee room in the Assembly House just a few yards away. It was quiet and secluded; I knew it was not going to be used for any meeting on the day I suggested, and that there would probably be no Members in the House since it was not sitting that morning.
When the day came, I walked from my office to the rendezvous and looked out, as instructed, for a slim, fair-skinned person with a pair of spectacles in his shirt breast pocket and carrying a Chinese newspaper. He was there, shorter than me, and leaner. We exchanged passwords and walked to the Assembly House as agreed. There was an air of stealth and furtiveness about him, a nervousness and jumpiness, as of a man on the run. The pallor of his face, arms and hands was that of a person who had not seen sunshine for many months. I felt that I was dealing with someone truly “underground”. He had a high forehead with a receding hairline, a long clean-shaven face, a long pointed nose and straight black hair combed back in the style of Chinese middle school students. He was very fair, and I guessed he could not be a Hokkien, but was possibly a Hakka or a Teochew. He was younger than me by some three to five years. He spoke softly, as if not wanting to be overheard, but in a firm voice. He soon impressed me as quick-witted and determined. He started the conversation in Mandarin, so I responded in Mandarin, but I repeated the important parts of what I had to say in simple English to make doubly sure I had made myself clear. From his expression, I knew he had understood me.
He said he represented the MCP in Singapore, and wanted to see me in person in order to establish cooperation between the communists and the non-communists in the PAP. He regretted very much that the pro-communist cadres had attempted to capture the party in 1957. He urged me to believe that that was not communist policy. They were over-enthusiastic young people who meant well and wanted to help bring about a revolution in Malaya. He asked me to believe in his sincerity, that his offer of cooperation in a united anti-colonial front was genuine.
What he was proposing meant that Lim Chin Siong and Fong should be free to do what they had been doing before they were arrested in 1956 – to mobilise the workers, the students, the teachers, the cultural groups, the petty bourgeoisie and friendly nationalists, and to form a powerful united front, which the MCP would lead and control through its cadres planted within their organisations. I did some quick thinking and said I did not know who he was, and had no way of knowing if what he said was true. He said I would have to trust him. I blandly asked him for some proof, not of his identity, but of his authority over communist and pro-communist cadres in Singapore as a true representative of the MCP. He smiled at me confidently, looked me in the eye and again said I had to take his word for it.
I named Chang Yuen Tong, who had won the City Council seat for Kallang. Chang was vice-president of Marshall’s Workers’ Party and president of the Electrical and Wireless Employees’ Union. I was fairly certain from his appearance, behaviour and speeches in the City Council that he was a pro-communist cadre. This time I looked him in the eye and said I believed the communists were using Marshall and his Workers’ Party to fight the PAP. They had not only put up Chang in Kallang, but had also fought the PAP candidate in the Jalan Besar division in the City Council election in December. (I did not remind him that the Workers’ Party candidate had lost.) I said he could prove he was a real representative of the communist command in Singapore and had spoken in good faith when he said that the MCP did not wish to attack the PAP, by instructing Chang to resign from the Workers’ Party and the City Council.
Without any hesitation, he said, “All right, give me some time. I shall see that it is done. If he is a member of our organisation, it will be done.” We had talked for an hour. He was assessing my character and my political position, and I was returning the compliment. He was taking a risk in seeing me. But so was I. Because if he was indeed a communist leader and I was caught with him, I would have some explaining to do. I was prepared for that, however. I would say that he had wanted to see me on some constituency matter, and I had met him near the House and taken him to the Assembly to listen to his problem. So I took care to part company with him in the committee room, walking ahead of him down the stairs and out of the main door without turning back to see which way he went. I did not think I would see him again. I did not know who he was and did not want to know. I had to protect my position as the leader of the opposition.
I told only Keng Swee about the meeting, and he was as intrigued as I was to see what the outcome would be. We called the man “the Plen”, the plenipotentiary. We knew he must be someone important in the MCP, but how important? And what were their real intentions and potential?
My next major engagement was in May 1958, the third constitutional conference. I flew to London and from the airport went straight to the House of Commons to meet Lennox-Boyd. As we travelled together to the conference, he asked for my assessment of future developments in Singapore and about Lim Yew Hock’s chances in the next election. I said they had been sinking by the month. Lim Yew Hock had a weak team, and several of his ministers had poor reputations for honesty and integrity. This made him vulnerable to the smear campaigns the communists had mounted against him and Chew Swee Kee. I expected the PAP to win, and having defended the proposed constitution in the Tanjong Pagar by-election in June a year ago, I asked for nothing more than what had already been agreed. I referred in particular to the Internal Security Council, the safety net that would ensure that the communists could not take over. With a Malayan representative holding the casting vote, any detention order it issued could be better defended politically and would not so immediately compromise an elected Singapore government.
All that remained for the conference to do was the serious but politically quiet business of settling the details. Both on the Singapore and the British sides, there was by now an unspoken acceptance that the PAP was likely to win the coming election, so that what I said carried more weight than the chief minister’s views. I had to examine the details carefully to make sure I could work the constitution that was now being reduced to legal language. But I remember only one issue that was mildly sensitive and could render us vulnerable to attack in Singapore.
The British government wanted all pensions for officers appointed by Her Majesty’s Government, local or expatriate, to be guaranteed against any future devaluation of the Singapore currency. Only later did I understand that they had to insist on this guarantee to keep up the morale of their colonial service officers in other territories that were heading for independence. But ironically it was the pound that was to be devalued, and by 1995 it had dropped to Singapore $2.20, a quarter its worth in 1958. The officers who had asked to have their pensions paid in sterling were unlucky. How were they to know that Singapore would not go the way of other former colonies?
One afternoon, while still in London, I read on the front page of the Straits Times that Chang Yuen Tong, vice-president of the Workers’ Party, city councillor, and president of the Electrical and Wireless Employees’ Union, had resigned “because the demands of his employment made it impossible for him to find sufficient time for council work”.
The Plen had given his orders and had been obeyed. He had proved that he was in charge. I found it unnerving. I thought it might happen, but not so quickly. Here was a man on the run, wanted by the police, probably in hiding in some cubicle or attap hut somewhere in Singapore. He had contacted me through a cut-out, who had given me his business card with the address of a bicycle shop in Rochor Road in case I wanted to get in touch with him. And I was sure the cut-out would not be able to lead the police to the Plen. Yet in a matter of eight weeks, his orders had been relayed to Chang and faithfully obeyed. It was an impressive demonstration of the discipline of the MCP organisation.
These were not men to be trifled with. So many were with them because people expected them to win and therefore climbed on the bandwagon. Since “history was on their side”, why be so stupid as to fight them? Yet here was I, with my few English-educated friends, ignorant enough to have the temerity to take on a movement that had established its credentials with successful revolutions in Russia and China.
I did not want to show any anxiety or concern, and as I had never been to Rome, I decided to break journey there for four days. This was the Rome of the occasional Vespa scooter, before it was clogged up with cars and choked with fumes. I spent much of my time walking around the ancient city, visiting the Forum and the Victor Emmanuel Memorial, with its bronze bas-relief showing the expansion of Roman hegemony across Europe and the Mediterranean. It reminded me that all empires wax and wane, that the British Empire was on the wane, like the Roman Empire before it.
I left with one even more vivid impression. One morning, I walked to St Peter’s Basilica and was pleasantly surprised when the Pope appeared, carried on a palanquin by his Swiss guards. He was being televised, and as he was brought down the centre aisle, the press of people immediately around him started to cheer and shout “Vive il Papa”, the nuns standing near the palanquin almost fainting with joy. After my experience with communist rallies I instinctively looked for the cheerleaders. I found them above me, choirboys on circular balconies up the pillars. The Roman Catholic Church had used such methods of mass mobilisation long before the communists. The Church must have got many things right to have survived for nearly two thousand years. I remembered reading about a new Pope being elected by some one hundred cardinals who themselves had been appointed by earlier popes. That recollection was to serve the PAP well.
When I got back to Singapore, we had to decide on a candidate for the Kallang by-election, which I felt reasonably confident of winning. We fielded a trade union activist, Buang bin Omar Junid. Just before the by-election, the Plen gave me a hard-cover English-Chinese dictionary printed in China on fine paper, sending it through the man from the bicycle shop. On the flyleaf, he had written in Chinese, “To respected Mr Lee Kuan Yew, wishing the PAP success in the Kallang by-election”. He signed it in Chinese, “John Lee July 1958” – his messenger had earlier told me that that would be his pseudonym. This meant the communists had not only abandoned Marshall but must have told their followers to support the PAP.
On election day, we had 4,278 votes, the Labour Front 3,566. The Workers’ Party won only 304 votes. It was a humiliating lesson for Marshall: without the pro-communists, that was what he was worth. With the Liberal Socialists staying out in order not to split the right-wing ballot, the Labour Front vote was close, but if we had fielded a Chinese instead of a Malay candidate the PAP would have done much better. I felt confident we could defeat a combined Labour Front and Liberal Socialist challenge in the general election.
But we were not out of the woods yet. The Preservation of Public Security Ordinance (PPSO), which gave the government powers of detention without trial, was due to come up in the Assembly for another three-year renewal. It was an important opportunity to make our position clear, but would require meticulous handling since we would be reversing our earlier stand. After thorough discussions with my close colleagues, I prepared a script for the speech.
The PAP could not vote in favour of extending the PPSO on this occasion, I explained to the House, for that would mean going back on our promise in the 1955 election to abolish it. But, I went on to say, that would not be our position in the 1959 election.
“We state our stand now on the question of the Emergency laws, and it is this: that as long as they are necessary for the maintenance of the security of the Federation, so long will they be necessary for Singapore. … Those who want the Emergency laws abolished in Singapore should try to help to establish conditions of peace and security in the Federation so that they may no longer be required there.”
That clarified our policy on detention without trial vis-à-vis the communists. Next we had to safeguard the PAP against any left-wing capture of the party. Soon after I returned from Rome, I proposed that PAP elections to the central executive committee be modelled on the system for electing the Pope. As we worked out the details, on 9 October Pope Pius XII died. The cardinals gathered at St Peter’s to choose the new pontiff, and within three weeks announced the election of Pope John XXIII. We noted the strength of the system, and at a special party conference on 23 November, we got the necessary changes adopted.
The amended constitution established two classes of party membership: ordinary members, who could join either directly through PAP headquarters or through the branches, and cadre members, a select few hundred who would be approved by the central executive committee. Only cadres who had been chosen by the CEC could in turn vote for candidates to the CEC, just as only cardinals nominated by a Pope could elect another Pope. This closed the circuit, and since the CEC controlled the core of the party, the party could not now be captured.
In December, we published an editorial in Petir, the party organ, emphasising that the PAP was non-communist and that the PPSO would remain in force if we assumed office. I did not doubt that the Plen would have read every word I had said in the Assembly debate on the PPSO and the proceedings of the party conference that had closely followed it. He would also have seen this editorial, which was reprinted in the Chinese press. I was not surprised, therefore, when the man from the bicycle shop approached me for another meeting, to which I agreed. At about 8 o’clock one night, I drove my father’s small green Morris Minor to Keng Lee Road, where I stopped, as I had been instructed, to pick up a Chinese girl in pigtails wearing a simple blouse and skirt. She sat in the front seat beside me and directed me by a roundabout route to a small bungalow in a housing estate off Thomson Road. She then disappeared, leaving the Plen and me in an inner room.
I spent nearly two hours with him. He assured me that I need not be so suspicious of communist intentions. The problems I had had with Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan and Lim Chin Joo had been due to their organisation’s difficulty in communicating with their cadres. Now that I was dealing directly with the top leadership, there would be no more misunderstandings. I listened, looked at him seriously, and said I hoped that that was so. I felt his options were limited. Whatever he promised, I knew we had to seize the high ground by publicly staking out our positions before the election. If the pro-communists stayed in the PAP and did not dissociate themselves from those positions, they would find it more difficult to attack us once we were the government. But I was certain that whether cooperation between us lasted one, two, or three years, in the end we must break. There must be a parting of the ways because we were determined not to have a communist Malaya, and they were equally determined that there should be one.
I could not be sure what his plans were, but he could see I was publicly adopting policies that would justify our taking strong action against the communists if it became necessary. I believed he was totally confident that once Lim Chin Siong and Fong and his other 150 detained cadres were released, they would be able to rebuild their strength within 12 to 18 months to the level of October 1956, when they had been purged. Then he would dictate the terms. And if I then moved against Lim Chin Siong, Fong and their battalions in the unions, Chinese middle schools and cultural organisations, I would be destroyed electorally like Lim Yew Hock and Chew Swee Kee.
He was not playing tiddlywinks. He was playing the Chinese game of wei qi (the Japanese call it go) in which two players place seeds on a square board until one of them has surrounded the seeds of the other, a chess game of encirclement. For the time being I was the better placed, but he was patiently trying to encircle me with his superior ground forces. If I did not want to lose, I had to take up strong positions that would give me the advantage in defence, even though he had greater numbers with which to launch his attacks. But if he made a false move through overconfidence, the tables would be turned, and I would have a chance to encircle him.