From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

8. The Communists Self-destruct
On the morning of 17 November 1965, the superintendent of Changi Prison
noticed that Lim Chin Siong, who normally greeted him, was strangely silent.
The leader of the communist united front in the 1950s and ’60s, and once PAP
member of the Legislative Assembly, had been detained since a 1963 security
operation. Lim was trembling. His clothes were dishevelled, his trousers torn,
and he appeared to have been in a fight. He wanted to be transferred to another
part of the prison. His fellow detainees asked and were allowed to interview Lim
in the superintendent’s presence. Looking upset, Lim muttered, “They will beat
me up, they will poison … I will finish myself or they will. … Ideological
differences.” He again asked to be moved and was transferred to another section
of the prison.
He was taken ill the next day and was brought first to the prison hospital,
then to the General Hospital. At about 3:00 am a detective saw him near a
medical trolley looking for something. Questioned, he replied he was looking for
a knife. At 6:15 am Lim got up and went to the toilet. A warder and a detective
waited outside. When Lim did not come out after 3 minutes, they knocked on the
door. There was no response. The warder looked into the toilet from an adjacent
one and saw Lim hanging from a cistern. He kicked the door open, rushed in and
lowered him. Lim had used his pyjamas to hang himself. The doctors
resuscitated him.
The communists in detention were confused and divided by the reverses they
had suffered: first, their setback in September 1962 when they lost the
referendum on merger with Malaysia, and second, their defeat in the September
1963 elections. The Barisan Sosialis, their united-front party, won only 13 out of
51 seats and 33 per cent of the votes and emerged as the second largest party.
When Singapore was separated from Malaysia, Dr Lee Siew Choh, the Barisan
Sosialis chairman, denounced Singapore’s independence as “phoney”. He had
lost his seat in the 1963 election and was not a member of Parliament when it
met in December 1965. On behalf of the Barisan MPs he declared that they

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would boycott Parliament. A short while later he announced that they would
abandon constitutional politics and “take the battle to the streets”. He was
imitating the madness of the Cultural Revolution in China gleaned from Radio
Beijing broadcasts. As Red Guards took to the streets in China, he ordered his
Barisan cohorts to mount demonstrations at hawker centres and mobile night
bazaars (
pasar malam
), and wherever there were crowds. Like the Red Guards,
they too carried banners and placards and clashed with the police. The police
broke up their assemblies and charged the demonstrators in court for mischief
and rioting.
Instead of winning public support, these tactics further split and destroyed
the Barisan. On 1 January 1966 Lim Huan Boon, the Barisan opposition leader
in Parliament, announced his resignation as MP. He said that Singapore was
independent; the Barisan’s policies were irrelevant and in the interests of
international communism, not of the people. The following day the party
expelled him. He responded that the Barisan had broken faith not only with the
democratic system but also with the people who had elected them. A week later
two more Barisan MPs resigned, declaring that the party under Lee Siew Choh’s
leadership was at a dead end, and it was a fallacy to think that Singapore’s
independence was “phoney”. Two days after that another Barisan MP, S.T. Bani,
then in detention, resigned, renounced communism and quit politics for good.
The communist united front was in total disarray.
Lee Siew Choh had not only rendered the communist united front
ineffective, he had in effect surrendered the constitutional arena to the PAP. It
was a costly mistake, one that gave the PAP unchallenged dominance of
Parliament for the next 30 years.
I sensed a fundamental change in the attitudes of the people. They realised
Singapore was on its own. The British would soon leave; the Malaysians had no
love for us; the Indonesians wanted to destroy us. Politics was now no longer a
game of mass rallies and demonstrations. It had become a matter of life and
death. All Chinese know the saying: big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp.
Singapore was a shrimp. People worried over their survival. They knew only the
PAP had been tried and tested and had the experience to lead them out of danger.
In the Bukit Merah by-election in January 1966, the PAP won with an
overwhelming majority of 7,000 out of 11,000 votes. The Barisan call for blank
votes got less than 400. In succession we won six more by-elections, all
unopposed, to fill Barisan resignations, and brought in higher-quality, better-
qualified MPs, many of them Chinese-educated Nanyang University graduates.

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They helped to move the Chinese-speaking towards the political centre.
In January 1968, soon after the British announced their decision to withdraw
their forces, I called for a general election. The Barisan boycotted the election. It
was another major mistake, one that was to keep them out of Parliament for
good. We were returned unopposed in 51 constituencies and won the remaining
seven with over 80 per cent of valid votes cast. Singapore’s future looked so
bleak that the opposition parties abandoned the field to us. After winning all the
seats, I set out to widen our support in order to straddle as broad a middle ground
as possible. I intended to leave the opposition only the extreme left and right. We
had to be careful not to abuse the absolute power we had been given. I was sure
that if we remained honest and kept faith with the people, we would be able to
carry them with us, however tough and unpalatable our policies.
It is impossible in Singapore’s political climate of the 1990s to imagine the
psychological grip the communists had on the Chinese-speaking in the
Singapore and Malaya of the 1950s and ’60s. The communists made these
people believe that what had happened in China would also come to pass in
Malaya, that communism was the wave of the future and those who opposed
them would be buried by history. They had then a hardcore following of some
20–30 per cent of the electorate that we could not win over for many years,
despite the economic benefits we brought them over the next decade.
We had formed and shaped our political strategies and tactics during our
struggles as the opposition party from 1954 to 1959, and in government from
1959 to 1965. The skilful and tough methods of the unyielding communists,
followed by the equally ruthless communal methods of the UMNO Ultras, were
unforgettable lessons on political infighting. Street fighting with them was like
unarmed combat with no holds barred, in a contest where winner took all. We
learnt not to give hostages to our adversaries or they would have destroyed us.
Even after we had reduced the communist strength in the united-front
organisation, their lurking presence in the underground had to be taken into our
political calculations. At any time they could resort to violence or choose to
rebuild their open-front organisations, or both. Weekly intelligence reports from
the Internal Security Department made us ever mindful of their presence in
Singapore and their secret network that linked them to armed groups in
peninsular Malaya.
After the Barisan became ineffective, the communists reverted to violence
and terror. They reappeared as the Malayan National Liberation Front (MNLF),
an adjunct of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), exploding several bombs in

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Jurong and Changi, two ends of Singapore, in the 1970s. Among those killed
was the 6-year-old daughter of a British serviceman.
By the 1970s, they had been reduced to some 2,000 guerrillas on the Thai
side of the Thai-Malaysian border, a few hundred scattered in the jungles of
peninsular Malaysia, and some terrorist squads in the towns. Could we have
defeated them if we had allowed them habeas corpus and abjured the powers of
detention without trial? I doubt it. Nobody dared speak out against them, let
alone in open court. Thousands were held in detention camps in Malaya, and
hundreds in Singapore. The British had banished thousands to China in the
1940s and ’50s.
Among those not banished was Lim Chin Siong. The price he paid when
communism failed him was his attempted suicide. This was recounted in detail
by the superintendent of prisons in December 1965 during the trial of two
Barisan Sosialis editors of the party’s Chinese-language tabloid. They were
charged with sedition because they wrote that the “PAP regime” was “plotting to
murder comrade Lim Chin Siong”. The defence brought many witnesses to give
false evidence to support their absurd allegation that there had been a conspiracy
to murder Lim at the General Hospital. The two editors were convicted.
In July 1969, three and a half years after his suicide attempt, Lim asked to
see me. I had not met him since he led the Barisan split from the PAP in June
1961. When he came to Sri Temasek, my official residence, on the evening of 23
July, he looked a disillusioned man. He had decided to give up politics for good
and wanted to leave for studies in London. He would like his girlfriend and
fellow detainee, a former trade union worker of the Singapore Factory and Shop
Workers’ Union in the 1950s who had been released earlier, to accompany him.
I readily agreed and wished him well in his new life in London. He had wasted
the best years of his life, ending up disgusted with his former comrades and
bitter at their blinkered and unthinking refusal to face reality.
In an open letter to Lee Siew Choh, he wrote, “I have completely lost
confidence in the international communist movement”, and resigned from all
posts in the Barisan. Lee immediately denounced Lim as a “spineless and
barefaced renegade traitor” and expelled him from the party. Lim’s unhappy
break from the party he had founded marked the final disintegration of the
Barisan as a political force.
After more than a decade in Britain Lim returned to Singapore in the 1980s.

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We never met again although we exchanged greetings in New Year cards. When
he died in 1996, his former comrades forgave him. Although in 1969 they had
denounced him as a “spineless and barefaced renegade traitor”, hundreds of
former communists and their supporters attended his wake. At the funeral
service he was praised as “a hero of the people and nation”. Some 500 other
sympathisers held another memorial service in Kuala Lumpur, more to show the
world they were still strong and firm in their beliefs than to honour him. Lim had
been the wiser to have acknowledged earlier than they did that communism was
a lost cause. In an open letter of condolence to his wife I expressed my respect
for his personal honesty and his dedication to his cause.
The communist battle in Singapore and Malaysia was lost years before the
collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and well before China abandoned
them in the 1980s. However, one communist cadre held out after more than 20
years in detention, a believer who refused to give up even after communism
collapsed worldwide – Chia Thye Poh. He was a determined man with stubborn
if misguided convictions. Although a member of the MCP, he strenuously
denied having any links with or sympathy for communism in spite of his
membership being confirmed to our Internal Security Department (ISD) by
several MCP members, two of whom he directly reported to.
He was released in 1989 to reside on Sentosa, a resort island, where he
worked as a part-time translator, and was finally freed from all restrictions in
1998. He was not able to accept that his vision of the future had failed. He
continued to deny his communist links, playing on the human rights sentiments
of the Western media. His detention, in spite of Western media pressure, served
to discourage other communist cadres from reactivating their cause under cover
of exercising their democratic rights. They were formidable opponents. We had
to be as resolute and unyielding in this contest of wills.
We were reminded from time to time that the communists never give up. The
switch to English in our schools had dried up their supply of Chinese-educated
recruits so they tried hard to enlist the English-educated. Knowing how skilful,
resourceful and tenacious the communists were in their methods of infiltration
and manipulation, we were determined that they should not be given any chance
to make a comeback by rebuilding their front organisations, especially in the
trade unions. Their ability to penetrate an organisation with a few cadres and
take control of it was fearsome.

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A small group of English-educated pro-Marxist activists made use of the
Workers’ Party in 1985, writing articles for the party paper, the 
Hammer
, and
helping to produce it from behind the scenes. They declined to take charge of the
publication openly although requested by the party to do so. This put the ISD on
alert. The group included some University of Singapore graduates associated
with Tan Wah Piow, a pro-communist student activist who had fled to London in
1976. Others in Tan’s group had gone to China to work for the CPM clandestine
radio. The ISD considered these pro-Marxist English-educated activists an
incipient security problem, and in 1987 recommended that they be detained. I
accepted the recommendation. I did not want a couple of pro-communist cadres
including Tan, on whom we had hard evidence of links with the CPM, to rebuild
their influence using innocent but disaffected activists. Their new united front
included a Roman Catholic who had given up becoming a priest to dabble in
liberation theology.
Because of Singapore’s experience of communist infiltration and subversion,
the ISD is always alert to any clandestine penetration of open organisations,
especially trade unions and old boys’ associations. To make it difficult for them
to manipulate non-political bodies, we require all who enter the political arena to
form their legitimate vehicle, a political party. This forces them out into the open
and makes them easy to monitor. In this way we have prevented our trade unions
from being infiltrated and kept our social, cultural and trade organisations free
from communist influence. One important reason why we will not allow the
remnant communist cadres in Thailand to come back without squaring their
accounts with the ISD is so they will not pass their infiltration and subversion
skills to a younger generation of cadres, now English-educated.
The most prominent and senior communist leader we allowed to return to
Singapore from China was Eu Chooi Yip, Keng Swee’s old friend and
contemporary in Raffles College. Keng Swee had met him on many occasions
when he went to China in the late 1980s and was convinced he had given up
communism. Keng Swee asked me whether I would allow Chooi Yip to return. I
did, and in 1989 he returned to Singapore with his wife and two daughters. Soon
after that P.V. Sharma also asked to return from China where he had been living
after he was banished. He was a former president of the Singapore Teachers’
Union who had been arrested in 1951, at the same time as Devan Nair and
Samad Ismail, and banished to India where he was born. From India Sharma had

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gone to China. Sharma also returned with his wife and children.
Eu Chooi Yip was the direct superior in the MCP of Fang Chuang Pi, the
leader of the communists in Singapore whom I had met in the 1950s and named
the Plen, short for “plenipotentiary” of the communists. In mid-1990, Chooi Yip
asked through Keng Swee if I would allow the Plen’s son to work in Singapore. I
agreed after Keng Swee assured me the son was not a security risk. An ISD
officer interviewed the young man and confirmed that he was no communist. He
was born in late 1965 in the Riau islands where his father was in hiding after
leaving Singapore in 1962. At the age of 5, he was sent to China and grew up
and attended schools in Changsha, Hunan province, where the MCP radio
station, “The Voice of the Malayan Revolution”, was sited. He did engineering
in Qinghua University, one of the best in China. He and his father must have
believed he would have a better future in Singapore than in China. He came to
Singapore in November 1990 to take a job that Keng Swee had secured for him
as an engineer in a government-linked company.
Shortly after his son arrived in Singapore, the Plen sent me a letter through a
Singapore Chinese journalist “to seek reconciliation”. He also sent me a video
documentary entitled