From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

party, it was the PAP government that allowed the British shareholders to
continue owning and publishing the newspaper in Singapore. Simmons came to
make peace, and the paper became a purely commercial concern, now without a
political agenda. Leslie Hoffman did not return to Singapore but settled in
Australia.
Because I wanted competition, I encouraged other newspapers to set up.
Several did but failed. After more than a hundred years of British rule, the 
Straits
Times
dominated the market. The 
Singapore Standard
had folded up in the

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1960s. A newspaper called the 
Eastern Sun
was launched in 1966 by Aw Kow,
the son of one of the Tiger Balm Aw brothers, known more as a playboy than a
serious newspaper baron. After secret negotiations with high-ranking officials of
an agency of the People’s Republic of China based in Hong Kong, they lent him
S$3 million. It was repayable over 5 years, with interest at the ludicrous rate of
0.1 per cent per annum. The undeclared condition was that the newspaper would
not oppose the People’s Republic of China on major issues and would remain
neutral on minor ones. The 
Eastern Sun
incurred heavy losses because of poor
management. In 1968 it received a further subvention of S$600,000. In 1971 we
exposed this “black operation” funding by a foreign power. Aw Kow admitted it
was true. His outraged and humiliated editorial staff resigned, and the paper
closed down.
The 
Singapore Herald
was another “black operation”. This time the money
came from a non-communist source. It started in 1970 as a wholly foreign-
owned newspaper employing Singaporean editors and local and foreign
journalists. At the start I wondered why two foreigners, nominal owners, wanted
to start an English-language newspaper to work up issues against the
government through its editorials and its news presentation on matters like
national service, press restraint and freedom of speech. It was losing money. The
ISD reported that the largest shareholder was a Hong Kong firm, Heeda &
Company, a registered partnership with two dummy names. The paper soon
exhausted its S$2.3 million working capital, and Chase Manhattan Bank in
Singapore extended to it unsecured loans of S$1.8 million. Pressed for an
explanation, the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller, phoned me from New
York to claim that his second vice-president and manager of his branch in
Singapore was unaware of the bank’s standing rule not to lend money to
newspapers! I was sceptical.
I asked the paper’s newly appointed Singaporean editor who had put up the
money in the name of Heeda & Company of Hong Kong. He said he thought I
knew it was Donald Stephens, the Malaysian high commissioner to Canberra and
former chief minister of the state of Sabah, Malaysia. I asked whether he
believed Stephens, who had become Fuad Stephens after his conversion to
Islam, would risk losing a million and a half dollars in a newspaper which took
on the Singapore government. He agreed this was difficult to believe.
When I disclosed this conversation in a public speech in mid-May 1971,
Stephens, whom I knew well from our Malaysia days, wrote to me from
Canberra: “I feel I should tell you that my only motive in putting money into the

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Herald
is because I have been in the newspaper business before and because I
believe Singapore to be a country where my investments would be safe. … I am
not getting younger and I thought if I were to retire before very long I will be
able to get a living out of my investments in the 
Herald
.” He did not explain
why he did not first inform me about his investment and seek my support and
blessings. A newspaper influences the politics of a country. When a foreigner,
British newspaper baron Roy Thomson, considered starting a newspaper in
Singapore in the mid-1960s, he first discussed it with me. I discouraged him
because I did not want a foreigner not rooted in Singapore to decide our political
agenda.
As the 
Herald
was running out of funds, a Hong Kong newspaperwoman,
Aw Sian, Aw Kow’s sister but unlike him a serious businesswoman,
mysteriously came to the rescue with S$500,000. She was a hard-headed woman
who owned a Hong Kong Chinese newspaper. She produced to me receipts for
the money she remitted, but had no share certificates. I asked whether she
intended to put more money into the paper. She replied “no”, and immediately
left for Hong Kong.
The Press Foundation of Asia, an affiliate of the International Press Institute,
issued a statement asking us not to cancel the paper’s licence and invited me to
speak at the IPI annual assembly at Helsinki in June 1971. Before leaving for
Helsinki, I cancelled the printing licence of the