From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

zi li geng sheng
”, one of the slogans Mao promoted: “self-reliance,
self-help”, meaning, I will help myself to the food, there is no need for you to
serve me. The ice was breaking. Behind the disciplined exterior of the
communist cadre was a human being who appreciated good food and good
wines, which they enjoyed only when VIPs came visiting.
Then a last dinner by the Guangdong provincial and the Guangzhou (Canton)
municipal revolutionary committees. Mercifully only one speech and one last
denunciation of the “capitalist roader”, delivered with absolutely no passion or
conviction.
The next morning they gave us a colourful send-off at the Canton railway
station before we boarded the special train for Shenzhen. For the final time,
hundreds of schoolgirls bounced up and down carrying paper flags and flowers,
chanting goodbye. I wondered how they could allow students to miss classes for
such displays. Two hours later we were at Lo Wu. As we walked across the
border away from China we breathed a sigh of relief at leaving behind the chants
and slogans.
All of us had been eager to see this new mysterious China. For ethnic
Chinese in Nanyang it had a mystical appeal as their ancestral homeland. The
Chinese put their children in their best clothes to greet and send us off at
airports, railway stations, kindergartens and other places we visited. Their
bright-coloured frocks, jumpers and sweaters were worn only on special

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occasions and then carefully put away. The mass of the Chinese people wore
drab dark blue or dark grey ill-fitting unisex Mao jackets. We did not know it
then, but these were the last few months of the Mao era. He was to die four
months later, after the Tangshan earthquake that September. Later, I was glad to
have seen the country before Deng Xiaoping opened up China, to have
witnessed the enforced uniformity of dress and speech and listened to their
mind-numbing propaganda.
Everyone we met gave the same answers to our questions. At Beijing
University I asked students what they would do after they graduated. The
answers came pat, “Whatever the party decides, how I can best serve the
people.” It was disturbing to listen to parrot-like responses from highly
intelligent young people. The answers were all politically correct but not sincere.
It was a strange world. I had read about China, especially after the Nixon
visit. But the relentless assault of the huge slogans – painted or pasted on walls,
giant placards planted in the middle of wheat and rice fields, all in the fiercest
revolutionary terms – was a surrealistic experience. To have these slogans
blaring forth from loudspeakers in railway stations and public parks and on the
radio numbed the senses. We found little of such fervour in the people, except
when they had to speak to us about the Cultural Revolution in simulated
animated tones of praise. It was a Chinese kind of Potemkin village.
Dazhai was their model commune in mountainous, infertile Shaanxi in the
northwest. For years it was frequently praised in their media for regularly
producing miracle harvests. Mao’s slogan was: To learn about agriculture, study
Dazhai. To learn about industry, study Daqing – 
Nong ye xue Dazhai. Gong ye
xue Daqing
. (Daqing in the northeast was where the oilfields were.) So I had
asked to see Dazhai.
Ten years later, they disclosed that Dazhai was a fraud. Its higher outputs
were due to special inputs that made its agricultural yield so high. In the Daqing
oilfields the model workers did not extract the maximum from the ground
because of poor technology, and their yields were going down. Revolutionary
fervour could not make up for expertise whether in agriculture or in mining. The
belief in the Mao era, “Better Red than Expert”, was a fallacy, a fraud practised
on the people.
At every provincial capital the chairman of the revolutionary council (or
governor, as he was known after the Cultural Revolution had officially ended)
gave me a welcoming dinner. Each uttered the same denunciation and
vituperation of “the capitalist roader”, the code name for Deng Xiaoping. We

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could make no sense of it, not understanding then the coded language they used
to denounce him. I watched the solemn faces of the men who read out the
speeches deadpan. The interpreters knew by heart what was coming and simply
repeated the stock phrases in English again and again. I wondered what their real
feelings were, but no one betrayed his thoughts.
There was such a welter of impressions that it took us some time to sort them
out. I compared notes with Choo every night. If they were eavesdropping as the
Russians did in Moscow in 1970, they did not show it. My daughter Wei Ling,
then a third-year medical student, accompanied us. She had been completely
Chinese-educated in Nanyang Girls’ High School up to O levels, ten years of
formal education in the Chinese language before she switched to English for her
A levels to read medicine at our university. She had no difficulty with the
language, but she had immense difficulty in really understanding them, their
inner thoughts. When she wandered about on her own in the provincial cities we
visited, crowds would gather around her out of curiosity. Where was she from?
Singapore. Where was that? Their women at dinners were equally interested in
Ling. She looked Chinese, spoke their language, yet was unlike them in her
behaviour – not shy, talking freely in adult company. She was well-dressed
compared to them, forward and outward-going, like a girl from the moon. She
herself felt different from them. Like me, she found the constant barrage of
propaganda from the loudspeakers and the radio a deafening and deadening
experience.
My daughter’s reactions were a revelation. She had studied pre-communist
Chinese history and literature in a Chinese school and looked forward to seeing
the historic monuments, cultural artefacts and scenic wonders, especially those
referred to in the purple passages she had memorised. But seeing their poverty
juxtaposed against mountains and temples with those romantic-sounding names
convinced her that China’s emphasis on being the world’s oldest continuous
civilisation was an obstacle to its catching up with the developed world; that
Singapore was better off because we had no such stumbling block.
She was surprised to see how different China was from even the East
European countries she had visited with me, more isolated from outside
influence; and how thoroughly the people had been indoctrinated to produce
politically correct standard answers however junior the official, from whatever
province. She had few opportunities to interact with ordinary people. Wherever
she jogged or walked, her security escort accompanied her and sealed her off.
What she tired of seeing were the big-character slogans, several in fashion then:

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“Criticise Confucius – Criticise Deng Xiaoping”, “Crush bourgeois economism
[sic]”, “Long live the ever-victorious Mao Zedong thought”. She was amazed at
the people’s unquestioning obedience to authority. By the end of the visit she
was glad her ancestors had chosen to seek their fortunes in Nanyang.
Before this visit our government had been strict in refusing Singaporeans
under the age of 30 permission to visit China. On my return I instructed that this
ruling be reviewed, convinced from my own observations and Ling’s reactions
that the best way to eradicate romantic ideas about the great fatherland was to
send them on a visit, the longer the better. Soon thereafter we removed this
restriction.
I was impressed by the size of China and the vast differences between their
30 provinces. What I was not prepared for was the gaggle of different accents I
came across. It was difficult to understand many of them. Premier Hua was a
Hunanese with a thick accent. Very few of the people I met spoke standard