From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

party food it was a relief to join them for a plain bowl of noodles. We had been
offered banquet food but asked for their simple fare. He came from one of the
poorest provinces in China, Guizhou, which produced maotai, their most famous
liquor, more powerful than vodka. I have a healthy respect for its potency – its
delayed kick is tremendous and even a heavy meal does not buffer its effect.
Maotai flowed freely but I asked for beer.
Our visit to the university in Wuhan, one of China’s major industrial cities
along the Yangtze River, was a saddening experience. Some of the professors we
met were American-educated. Although advanced in age and their English rusty,
they were obviously men of erudition and quality. In the library, Ling, then a
medical student, spoke to a young man who was reading an English-language
biology textbook. She asked to see it and found that it was printed in the 1950s.
She was incredulous. How could they be reading a biology book 30 years out of
date? But they had been shut off for more than 30 years; having just opened up
to the West, they had no foreign exchange to buy the latest textbooks and
journals. And they had no photocopying machine. They were going to take a
long time closing the knowledge gap that had widened between them and the
developed world. The Cultural Revolution had set them back by a whole
generation. The present students, recovering from the Cultural Revolution, were
taught with outdated textbooks by teachers using outmoded teaching methods
and without audiovisual aids. This would be another semi-lost generation. True,
the most brilliant of them would make it regardless of the disadvantages. But an
industrial society required a well-educated total population, not just the brilliant

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few.
After the welcoming dinner in Wuhan, our host and all the officials
accompanying us disappeared. We wondered what had happened and sent our
aides to find out. They reported that they were all clustered around a television
set in a sitting room, watching the Gang of Four in the dock, on trial. It was the
moment of retribution for the people who had terrorised them for years, now
about to get their just desserts. We went to our guest drawing room to watch. It
was a Chinese version of what I had read of Soviet trials in Stalin’s time, except
that no executions were expected and there were no long self-incriminating
confessions. On the contrary, Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow, looked defiant and
ferocious, talking, almost screaming, in a high-pitched, shrill voice as she
pointed to all her judges and berated them. When Mao was in charge, they were
his dogs who barked when he told them to. How dare they sit in judgement over
her! She was as bold and defiant a shrew as when she cracked the whip while
Mao was alive.
For the rest of our journey, the Gang of Four and their evil deeds were
subjects of innumerable conversations between the Chinese officials and
members of our party. Some had sad stories to tell of their experiences. It was
frightening that an ancient civilisation could be reduced to such madness,
proudly referred to then as the Cultural Revolution.
Other things had also gone wrong. A friendly senior provincial official from
Fujian, a southern province, accompanying me on a drive through Wuhan,
pointed to a building nearing completion and said, 
tai zi lou
, a high-rise building
for princes. I did not understand. He explained that “princes” meant the sons of
important officials in the province and the city. He shook his head and said it
was bad for morale, but there was little he could do about it. Without saying so,
he acknowledged that it was a slide back to the old China where power had
always meant privilege, and privilege meant perks for family, relatives and
friends.
Of the other stops, Xiamen and Gulangyu (Amoy and Kulangsu in the Fujian
dialect) were memorable. For the first time in China, we heard the familiar
dialect sounds of Singapore. I had spent years learning it to fight elections and it
was a joy to hear them speak it the way I had been taught by my teacher, with
the Xiamen accent of the pre-war sophisticates in Fujian province who came into
contact with Western businessmen and missionaries.
At Gulangyu, an island next to Xiamen, they showed us two bungalows
belonging to the Singapore government. They had been purchased by the

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colonial government before World War II to house British colonial officers sent
to Amoy to learn Hokkien. What we saw were two dilapidated buildings, each
occupied by four or five families, many times the number of persons it was
meant to house. They hastened to assure us that they would restore and return
the buildings to us. (Hon Sui Sen, my finance minister, later told me he had
heard horror stories of landlords who had taken back possession of their
properties and been asked to pay arrears of salaries to caretakers for all the years
since 1949.) Gulangyu was remarkable as a relic of European dominance. Every
style of European architecture was represented. Some of the big houses were
owned by wealthy overseas Chinese who had returned before the war to retire
there. They had used French and Italian architects to build these once beautiful
homes with curved staircases and banisters of Travertine marble, and marble
statues indoors and outdoors as if they were in Florence or Nice. Gulangyu must
have been an oasis of luxury before the Japanese captured it in 1937 together
with Shanghai.
Our hosts pointed across the straits in the direction of Jinmen (Quemoy), an
island under Taiwanese control. On a clear day it could be seen with the naked
eye. That was exactly what President Chiang Ching-kuo had told me earlier that
year when he took me to Jinmen and pointed across the same stretch of water to
Gulangyu. Only a few years ago, the Taiwanese had been sending over balloons
from Jinmen to Gulangyu carrying food parcels, cassettes of Taiwanese pop
singers including Teresa Teng, their top-of-the-chart pop star, and propaganda
leaflets. In the 1950s and ’60s they had exchanged artillery barrages. In the
1980s they traded insults over loudspeakers.
The difference between the standards of living of Taipei in Taiwan and
Xiamen in Fujian was stark. One was linked to the outside world, particularly
America and Japan, with capital, technology, knowledge, foreign experts and
their own returned students from America and Japan building a modern
economy. The other was plodding along, proud of its agricultural prowess based
on knowledge of the 1950s and hardly any farm machinery, with deplorable
communications and a low standard of living.
The cuisine was familiar but different. At lunch they produced the original
baobing
(popiah), stir-fried shredded bamboo shoot wrapped in a pancake to
make a spring roll with the necessary garnishes and condiments. It was different
from the Singapore version. They had all the familiar candies, such as delicious
crushed peanut brittle, rolled up like a mini-Swiss roll, tastier than what we had
in Singapore. All of us knew this was where most of our ancestors came from.

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Wherever their village in Fujian province, for their journey to the South Seas,
most would have come to Xiamen, the international settlement, to board the big
ships that would take them south to Nanyang.
From Xiamen we flew to Guangzhou (Canton), then went back to Hong
Kong by train. They had stopped the constant exhortations over loudspeakers,
monotonous and repetitious speeches about the “capitalist roader” and other
clichés of the Gang of Four. The Chinese were also less rigorous in their dress
code. Once we left Beijing, the women interpreters who accompanied us wore
floral blouses with slacks or skirts, which they did not do in 1976. Maoist China
was fading into history. The old habits of the Chinese would return; a few good
ones, and more than a few bad ones, as we were to discover on my next visit in
1985 – growing corruption, nepotism and favouritism, the ills that have always
beset China.
This time we left with more favourable impressions. Our hosts were relaxed,
enjoyed the meals and conversation, and were ready to talk of the disastrous
decade of