From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

36. China: The Dragon with a Long Tail
No foreign country other than Britain has had a greater influence on Singapore’s
political development than China, the ancestral homeland of three-quarters of
our people. The Singapore-China relationship has been long, complex and
unequal. From the founding of Singapore in 1819 until 1867, Qing dynasty
China did not recognise the existence of the overseas Chinese. This changed in
the 1870s when China set up consulates in Nanyang (the South Seas), then under
the colonial control of the British, French and Dutch. These consulates,
including one in Singapore, were intended not so much to protect the Chinese as
to harness their loyalty to China by promoting Chinese culture and education,
and to obtain their financial support.
In the 1920s the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sent an agent to Singapore
to build up a communist movement in Nanyang. When the communists held a
secret meeting in Singapore in 1930 to found the Malayan Communist Party
(MCP), Ho Chi Minh, the legendary Vietnamese communist leader, was present.
The rivalries and conflicts between the Kuomintang Nationalist Party (KMT)
and the CCP in China extended to their supporters in Singapore and Malaya.
During the war both the KMT and CCP fought against the Japanese in China.
Because of their stronger anti-Japanese resistance activities, the CCP enjoyed
greater support from Chinese workers and farmers.
The rise of communist China in 1949 inspired an intense patriotic pride that
surged through the Chinese-educated community in anticipation of the
emergence of a powerful China, one that would banish their sense of humiliation
and subjugation at the hands of the British and other Europeans. On the other
hand, it aroused deep-seated fears among Malays, Indians, English-educated
Chinese and a minority of the Chinese-educated who supported the KMT. In
1949 both the KMT and the CCP were proscribed in Singapore, but the division
of the community between the two remained.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) aimed to increase the loyalty of the
overseas Chinese to Beijing. In 1949 it formed the Overseas Chinese Affairs

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Commission and began radio broadcasts. It supported Chinese education
overseas and encouraged the Nanyang Chinese to send home to China their sons
for education and remittances for their relatives. It also appealed to qualified
doctors, engineers and teachers to return and help rebuild the motherland. It was
a subversive challenge to the colonial governments and to the newly independent
governments of Southeast Asia in Indonesia and, later, Malaya. Radio Beijing,
the 
People’s Daily
and the 
Beijing Review
regularly denounced Malaysia as a
neo-colonialist plot to persecute people of Chinese descent.
The Tunku and other Malay leaders feared Beijing’s influence over the MCP
and over the bulk of their Chinese-speaking population. When in 1963 Zhou
Enlai wrote to me a letter similar to that addressed to many other heads of
government, calling for the removal and destruction of nuclear weapons, I gave
him a bland reply that such a solution would be welcomed by all. This was while
we were a self-governing colony and not a state in Malaysia. When my letter to
Zhou was made public by China in 1964, after we were in Malaysia, the Tunku
publicly reprimanded me for having “entered into direct correspondence with a
government which Malaysia does not recognise and which has proved by word
and deed to be hostile to Malaysia”.
In January 1965 Premier Zhou Enlai had condemned the formation of
Malaysia in a speech to an Indonesian delegation in Beijing. After independence,
we had no diplomatic contact with the PRC. Indeed, up to 1970 Beijing did not
recognise the existence of an independent Singapore. PRC broadcasts and
publications referred to Singapore as “a part of Malaya”. Malaysia, too, did not
exist because it was “a neo-colonialist plot”. Their propaganda regularly
condemned “Singapore authorities” for their “criminal armed suppression of
Singapore people”. In 1966 the All China Federation of Trade Unions sent a
telegram to left-wing unions in Singapore expressing the indignation of Chinese
workers at the “barbarous acts of suppression of the workers perpetrated by the
Singapore authorities who are tailing behind US and British imperialism”. I was
attacked by name in 1968 when Radio Beijing reported Lee Kuan Yew as a
“running dog of US and British imperialism”.
When the Cultural Revolution in China was at its height, we used to
confiscate large quantities of Chinese stamps bearing “Thoughts of Mao”
imported by some Chinese-language bookshops, and also thousands of copies of
Mao’s little red book brought in by Chinese seamen who wanted to distribute
them. Even the Singapore branch of the Bank of China joined in this madness
and gave out Cultural Revolution propaganda pamphlets to customers at their

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counters. We arrested and prosecuted our own citizens who indulged in this
frenzy, but left Chinese nationals alone to keep open the trade with China.
In late 1970 Beijing quietly changed its stance towards Singapore. In those
capitals where we were represented, our heads of mission were invited to
China’s national day receptions. China’s priority then was to get as many
governments as possible to close ranks against the Soviet Union and check the
expansion of its influence into Southeast Asia. The Soviet intervention in
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and border clashes between Chinese and Russian forces
across the Amur River in 1969 had rendered China’s revolutionary antics
dangerous. They were weakening China’s capability to resist Soviet aggression.
By 1971 China stopped public attacks on the Singapore government. That
year, the Bank of China’s branch in Singapore hoisted the Singapore flag on our
national day, something it had not done before. Trade between our two countries
had always been in their favour. Singapore then was China’s second biggest
foreign exchange earner after Hong Kong. We were not concerned over this
adverse balance of trade because we were an entrepôt economy. But we required
all Singapore Chinese firms that dealt with China to be registered with a
government agency that controlled trade with communist countries. Thus a
franchise from the Chinese side had to be matched with a permit from the
Singapore government.
The first contact came through “ping-pong diplomacy” in 1971. We allowed
a Singapore ping-pong team to accept an invitation to play at the Afro-Asia
Table Tennis Friendship Games in Beijing. A few months later, a second
delegation went for the Asian Table Tennis Union. We then accepted a Chinese
offer to send their ping-pong team for a friendly visit to Singapore the following
year, a few months after President Nixon had been to China. We had refused two
previous offers, one of a troupe of acrobats, the other a Beijing trade mission.
Raja as foreign minister thought a third rebuff would be unnecessarily offensive.
During the friendly ping-pong matches I was angered when a large part of the
audience jeered at the home team and shouted slogans in praise of Mao. I
publicly castigated these infantile left-wingers as Singapore’s “mini-Maos”.
The PRC had also altered its position towards the overseas Chinese.
Malaysian Prime Minister Razak had sent a delegation to Beijing in May 1974, a
year before the fall of Saigon. After its return the Malaysian government sent us
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