“Changes are coming!” cried Singapore’s fiery Lee Kuan Yew, 37, on the wild night last year when 80,000 supporters of his left-wing People’s Action Party celebrated its sweep of the island’s first general elections. Seventeen months have passed since Lee and his motley crowd of Chinese, Indian and Malay anti-colonialists took over the internal government of the famed imperial base. The most startling change last week seemed to be the change that has come over Singapore’s revolutionary rulers.
Puritans by Exertion. Taking office, they poured out their avenging anti-Western zeal by ripping down Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, slashing British bureaucrats’ salaries, banning juke boxes, comic books and other manifestations of what they called the West’s “yellow culture.” Tieless, coatless puritans presiding over the sybaritic center of the old South Seas, they rapidly got a name as Southeast Asia’s most honest administrators. Certainly their streets were the cleanest. But Prime Minister Lee, a wealthy, Cambridge-schooled Chinese, soon grasped that Singapore by itself is an island emporium ill suited to revolutionary socialism since, among other things, it lacks any major industries to nationalize. His revised economic policy: “Teaching the capitalists how to run their system.”
To lure back fugitive investment money and to attract new capital, Lee offered five years’ outright tax exemption to new industry. By last week Socialist Lee had landed eight new enterprises led by Shell, which is building an $18 million refinery.
The Japanese have started building an $8,000,000 refinery and are making plans for a steel mill. London has promised $20 million to improve the harbor. World Bank and U.N. missions have been in Singapore discussing ways to provide the $110 million outside help needed to complete Lee’s $330 million, five-year plan to turn Singapore into an industrial outpost to rival Hong Kong. Labeling Communists “the ultimate enemy,” Lee has shaken up trade union leadership, set up an arbitration court to cut down on strikes.
Lee’s most serious opposition now comes from the left, including Communists within his party whom he at first tried to placate with government jobs. They are led by fiery young Fong Swee Suan, a secretary of the Trades Union Congress. Last week Fong attacked Lee for “softness on capitalism.” Lee retaliated by summarily ordering Fong to “vacate” his post in the Labor Ministry.
Federation by Example. Unlike the leaders of most other restive dependencies, Lee has no interest in seeing Singapore trade its present status as an autonomous state for complete and permanent independence. Instead, he insists that despite Singapore’s overwhelmingly Chinese population (Chinese outnumber Malays six to one), the island’s future lies in joining the Federation of Malaya. With this in view. Lee has made Malay the official language, has appointed as chief of state a Malay personage, Inche Yusof bin Ishak. So far, the Federation itself has been wary: Singapore’s 1,200,000 Chinese would upset the Federation’s racial balance, put the Malays in a minority.
Lee and his sober, intelligent administrators are supported by a 40-to-11 parliamentary majority and an economy that provides Asia’s second highest per capita income ($400). They are hopeful that by the time their first term is up in 1964, they can win membership in the Malayan Federation—not by revolutionary exertions but by evolutionary responsibility.
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