From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Party and government, posing threats to Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and,
to a lesser extent, Indonesia. Also, China was openly asserting a special
relationship with the overseas Chinese because of blood ties, and was making
direct appeals to their patriotism over the heads of the governments of these
countries of which they were citizens, urging them to return and help China in its
“Four Modernisations”.
A few weeks earlier, in October, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van
Dong had visited us and was sitting where he (Deng) was now seated. I had
asked Pham Van Dong the reason for Vietnam’s trouble with the overseas
Chinese, or Hoa people; his blunt answer was that, as an ethnic Chinese, I should
know that ethnic Chinese would always support China all the time, just as
Vietnamese would support Vietnam, wherever they might be. I was less
concerned with what Pham Van Dong thought than with the impact of what he
must have told the leaders of Malaysia. I recounted another incident where the
Vietnamese permanent representative to the UN had told the four Asean
permanent representatives that the Vietnamese had treated the Hoa people
equally, and yet they turned ungrateful; that was the main cause of the exodus of
160,000 ethnic Chinese from Hanoi to China across their border, while other
Chinese fled from the south in boats. The Indonesian permanent representative,
forgetting that his colleagues from the other three Asean countries, Philippines,
Thailand and Singapore, were ethnic Chinese, told the Vietnamese that they had
been too kind and generous to the Hoa people, and that they should learn from
the Indonesians. I left Deng in no doubt as to the visceral suspicions of its
neighbours Singapore faced.
Pham Van Dong, I added, had placed a wreath at Malaysia’s National
Monument. Deng had refused to do this. Pham Van Dong had also promised he
would not help subversion. Deng had not. The Malaysians must be suspicious of
Deng. There were underlying suspicions and animosity between Malay Muslims

---

and Chinese in Malaysia, and between Indonesians and their ethnic Chinese.
Because China was exporting revolution to Southeast Asia, my Asean
neighbours wanted Singapore to rally with them not against the Soviet Union but
against China.
Asean governments regarded radio broadcasts from China appealing directly
to their ethnic Chinese as dangerous subversion. Deng listened silently. He had
never seen it in this light: China, a big foreign power, going over the
governments of the region to subvert their citizens. I said it was most unlikely
that Asean countries would respond positively to his proposal for a united front
against the Soviet Union and Vietnam and suggested that we discuss how to
resolve this problem. Then I paused.
Deng’s expression and body language registered consternation. He knew that
I had spoken the truth. Abruptly, he asked, “What do you want me to do?” I was
astonished. I had never met a communist leader who was prepared to depart
from his brief when confronted with reality, much less ask what I wanted him to
do. I had expected him to brush my points aside as Premier Hua Guofeng had
done in Beijing in 1976 when I pressed him over the inconsistency of China
supporting the Malayan Communist Party to foment revolution in Singapore, not
Malaya. Hua had answered with bluster, “I do not know the details, but wherever
communists fight, they will win.” Not Deng. He realised that he had to face up to
this problem if Vietnam was to be isolated. I hesitated to tell this seasoned,
weather-beaten revolutionary what he should do, but since he had asked me, I
said, “Stop such radio broadcasts; stop such appeals. It will be better for the
ethnic Chinese in Asean if China does not underline their kinship and call upon
their ethnic empathy. The suspicion of the indigenous peoples will always be
there, whether or not China emphasises these blood ties. But if China appeals to
these blood ties so blatantly, it must increase their suspicions. China must stop
radio broadcasts from south China by the Malayan and Indonesian Communist
Parties.”
Deng said simply that he needed time to think about what I had said, adding
that he would not learn from Pham Van Dong. He, Deng, had also been asked to
lay a wreath at the National Monument which commemorated those who had
killed Malayan communists. As a communist, it had been impossible for him to
do this. Pham Van Dong could do such a thing because he was “that kind of a
communist”. He was “selling his soul”. China, he emphasised, spoke honestly.
The Chinese had never concealed their views, and what the Chinese people said
counted. During the Korean War, China had issued a statement that if the

---

Americans approached the Yalu River, the Chinese people could not sit idly by.
But the Americans took no notice. On foreign policy, China always spoke what
it thought. As for communist parties, he had nothing to add, so the interpreter
said. But in his Mandarin, what Deng actually said was, he had “lost interest in
stating it again”.
The reiteration of their overseas Chinese policy, he said, was for two
reasons: the first was the anti-Chinese activities of Vietnam; the second was the
internal considerations of China, the result of the activities of the Gang of Four
in the Cultural Revolution. Relatives in China of the overseas Chinese had
suffered badly, many persecuted and imprisoned. He wanted to restate China’s
position on ethnic Chinese abroad: that China favoured and encouraged them to
take up the citizenship of the country of residence, that those who wanted to
remain Chinese would still have to abide by the laws of the country of residence,
and that China did not recognise dual nationality.
On Cambodia, he assured me that China’s approach would not be affected by
the conclusion of the Soviet-Vietnamese treaty of friendship and cooperation.
China was not afraid if Vietnam should ask the Soviet Union to threaten China,
adding that the Soviet Union would not dare to engage China in a big way. He
looked deadly serious when he added that China would punish the Vietnamese if
they attacked Cambodia. China would make them pay a heavy price for it, and
the Soviet Union would discover that supporting Vietnam was too heavy a
burden. Then he asked what advice China’s friends (meaning Singapore) would
give on the problems confronting both countries (China and Singapore).
I replied that Cambodia’s leaders must be sensitive to international opinion
as they needed the sympathy of the world. They were behaving in an irrational
way with no feeling for their own people. Deng’s response was that he also did
not “understand” some of the things done in Phnom Penh; he made no defence
of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide.
Winding up, I said Deng had stated that China needed 22 years for
modernisation. In these 22 years, if there were no unnecessary problems created
in Southeast Asia, conditions should improve. If there were such problems, the
consequences would be adverse for China, as they had been for Vietnam and
Cambodia. Deng agreed with me. He hoped there would be unity and stability in
Asean. He was saying this “from the bottom of my heart”.
He was the most impressive leader I had met. He was a five-footer, but a
giant among men. At 74, when he was faced with an unpleasant truth, he was
prepared to change his mind. Two years later, after they had made alternative

---

arrangements for their fraternal communist parties in Malaysia and Thailand, the
radio broadcasts stopped.
During dinner I had urged him to smoke. He said, pointing to his wife, that
the doctor had told her to get him to stop. He was trying to cut down. That night,
he did not smoke or use the spittoon. He had read that I was allergic to smoke.
Before his departure I called on him at the Istana Villa to talk for some 20
minutes. He was glad he had come and seen Singapore again after 58 years. It
was a dramatic transformation and he congratulated me. I replied that Singapore
was a small country with two and a half million people. He sighed and said, “If I
had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly. But I
have the whole of China!”
He said he had wanted to visit Singapore and America before he joined Karl
Marx. Singapore, because he had seen it once when it was a colonial territory,
while on his way to Marseilles after the end of the First World War to work and
study. America, because China and America must talk to each other. It was not
until after Vietnam occupied Cambodia that I understood why he was keen to
visit the United States.
During the drive to the airport, I asked him point-blank what he would do if
the Vietnamese attacked Cambodia. Would he leave the Thais vulnerable and
watch them being intimidated, and then bend towards the Soviet Union? He
pursed his lips, and his eyes narrowed as he whispered, “It depends how far they
will go.” I said he would have to do something after the Thai prime minister had
so openly and wholeheartedly received him in Bangkok. Kriangsak had to rely
on China to maintain some balance. He looked troubled and again whispered, “It
depends how far they will go.”
At the airport he shook hands with the VIPs and ministers, inspected the
guard of honour, walked up the steps to his Boeing 707, then turned around and
waved goodbye. As the door closed on him, I said to my colleagues that his staff
were going to get a “shellacking”. He had seen a Singapore his brief had not
prepared him for. There had been no tumultuous Chinese crowds, no rapturous
hordes of Chinese Singaporeans to welcome him, just thin crowds of curious
onlookers.
A few weeks later I was shown articles on Singapore in their