history of singapore

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WITHIN THE SINGAPORE STORY: The Use and Narrative of History in Singapore Author(s): Loh Kah Seng Source: Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2

(1998), pp. 1-21Published by: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40860676Accessed: 24-03-2015 09:29 UTC

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WITHIN THE SINGAPORE STORY The Use and Narrative of History in Singapore

Loh Kah Seng1*

Political groups rarely embrace history for altruistic reasons. In Singapore, the past is an important legitimizing instrument in sustaining the hegemony of the governing People's Action Party. The PAP government has abandoned its initial hostility to history and embarked on the creation of an authoritative "Singapore Story" of the nation's past. Official initiatives like National Education, introduced in 1997, draw selectively from Singapore's history to formulate sustained themes like the country's "vulnerability" and the need for "communitarian values." The object lessons drawn from the past are directed toward young Singaporeans, whose supposed individualism and preference for parliamentary opposition are perceived by the PAP as proof of a dangerous disregard for such lessons. The most compelling chapter of the "Singapore Story," that dealing with the 1950s and 1960s, has been authorized primarily by the personal experiences of the PAP Old Guard, whose privileged positions as leaders of government during that period have allowed them to pre-empt alternative interpretations of contemporary events.

Introduction Nineteen ninety-seven was a significant year to those in

Singapore with an interest in history. On 19 May, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong introduced the National Education (NE) initiative. At the nationally televised launch, Lee justified the new program by pointing to the need to inculcate in young Singaporeans a heightened sense of national identity, which he claimed was necessary if they were to face the challenges of the future

v Loh Kah Seng pursued his undergraduate course at the National University of Singapore, majoring in History and English Language. He graduated with a B. A. Honours degree in History (Second Class upper) in 1996. The article is based on his unpublished Honours thesis, "The Use of History by Singapore's Political Leaders since Independence." He currently teaches History at National Junior College in Singapore.

Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asia Studies 12(2):1-21

© Copyright 1998 by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University



Loh Kah Seng

successfully. The "Singapore Story/' as he labeled the officially sanctioned history of the nation, constitutes, he said, "the backdrop which makes sense of our present. It shows what external dangers to watch out for, and where our domestic faultlines lie. . . . [O]ur young must understand Singapore's unique challenges, constraints and vulnerabilities" (Straits Times 1997f).

This attitude toward the validity and use of historical knowledge constitutes a radical departure from the government's previous position. When Singapore achieved independence in 1965, the People's Action Party (PAP) government had rejected history as a threat to nation-building. After a decade of disinterest, however, the PAP in the late-1970s began constructing a politically expedient narrative of the past. NE represents one product of this positive revaluation of history, and it now constitutes part of the formal school curriculum. To understand the reasons behind NE and why the "Singapore Story" embodied in it emphasizes so forcefully to young Singaporeans the presence of "external dangers" and "domestic faultlines," we need to examine closely the development of the PAP's political objectives since the first decade of independence and the manner in which the themes of national vulnerability and "crisis mentality" have consistently characterized the party's agenda toward maintaining its position of power.

The "Ideology of Survival" Reconstituted The PAP's objective since 1965 may be perceived as an

ongoing attempt first to establish and then to sustain hegemony over the state. "Hegemony" is a concept articulated by Antonio Gramsci to explain how one class achieves a rule of consensus over subordinate classes not through coercion but through the voluntary consent of those governed (Hyug 1991:123-124). As Gramsci describes this process, a new regime begins with an ideological campaign to legitimize its leadership by showing its class interests to be at one with those of the nation at large, while simultaneously furthering the material interests of the subordinate classes. With time and material success, the general populace comes to accept as common-sense truisms the regime's ideas about class, thereby allowing "state interventions into the social body to be rationalised, criticised and defended" (Chua 1995:2).

Legitimacy was a vital problem for the PAP government in 1965. Faced unexpectedly with the challenge of independence following the failed merger with Malaysia, the party's position as

2 Crossroads 12:2



Within the Singapore Story

leader of the infant nation depended primarily on the success of its economic program. To highlight the urgency of modernization, PAP leaders generated among Singaporeans a "crisis mentality," according to which immediate and rapid material development was essential to the survival of the nation (Chua 1995:19). As Lee Kuan Yew (1966) put it: "[W]e are playing for keeps and, if we make a mistake, there is no safety net underneath. You will fall down and the chances are you will never get up again." Although the question of whether Singapore should follow the lead of other former colonies and invoke its historical heritage as an adjunct to nation- building was put forward, it was immediately answered in the negative. Survival meant modernization, and if Singapore was to modernize, it was thought necessary to reject all links to the past and to tradition. Devan Nair notes that history was conceived of as so many "jealous gods of the past" that resist change and innovation (1982:313). He explains that

[t]he advent of industrialisation and scientific concepts of progress has really cut the course of history in two: one epoch in which men looked to the past for inspiration and guidance, another in which they turned their look to the future. . . . [F]or modern man, the past is a poor guide, and the present a clash of possibilities from which the future will emerge. Unlike the pre- modern man who dreamed of the world he had left, modern man must dream of the world he will make. (274-275)

Former PAP leader S. Rajaratnam similarly reasoned that if Singapore was to develop from a society of "transient immigrants" to one of "permanent settlers," the older Singaporeans' historical- emotional attachments to the ancestral country had to be severed (1987:129).

By the mid-1970s, with the nation's economy strong and growing, Singaporeans had come to accept the PAP's single-minded pursuit of economic development and the severance of links to the past. In this context of success, however, notions of "crisis" and "survival," as previously formulated, became less useful as political rallying cries. At the same time, dissenting voices became increasingly strident, and in 1981 J. B. Jeyaretnam's by-election triumph in Anson ended the PAP's thirteen-year absolute control of

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Loh Kah Seng

Parliament and sparked a foreboding sense within the government that the party's power was waning. In effect, Anson legitimated the idea of political opposition as part of the formula of national success, and from that moment, "vulnerability" became transformed from being a fact of public life for the meanwhile only to being an essential part of the nation's character. S. Rajaratnam commented that

if Mr Jeyaretnam or rather people like him succeed in persuading a majority of Singaporeans that the PAP . . . has become a dictatorship of tyrants . . . and that therefore this tyranny should first be checked by a strong opposition and then ... be overthrown!, t]hen a different history begins for Singapore. This theory of "Democracy as Opposition" is not without attractions for those who take today's prosperity and stability for granted. (1987:166)

The party's response to this situation was to reconceptualize its strategy for hegemony. With the country's material needs having been met, the authorities took to emphasizing the cultural dimension of nationhood. "One of the strongest factors for Singapore's success," runs a line from a publication of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (1991:128), "was the cultural values of the generation of the 1950s-70s[, which was] brought up to accept the need for sacrifice by the individual for the sake of family and society." The PAP warned that survival remained a pertinent issue because the generation of Singaporeans born after 1957, being too young to appreciate the "trials and tribulations" of nation- building, has succumbed to the harmful ideals of Western-style democracy and individualism and under that influence has adopted "a more critical posture against authorities" (Mutalib 1992:82).2

2 When, in 1984, J. B. Jeyaretnam was "tarnished by unsavoury book- keeping and accounting practices," Lee declared forcefully that his previous warnings on parliamentary opposition were now vindicated: "[Fjrom our perilous years in the 1950s and 60s . . . Singaporeans . . . were educated in a narsh political school [and] were wise to the ways of an irresponsible opposition, [but now there exists] a younger generation of Singaporeans who, not having experienced the conflicts in this House in the '50s and '60s, harbour myths about the role of the opposition [and] have no idea how destructive opposition can be" (1984:6-10).

4 Crossroads 12:2




The government therefore has attempted to promote a sense of national community through a system of social values variously called "Asian," "Confucian," and "communitarian" (Chua 1995:26- 37). Rajaratnam, for instance, drew upon the concept of "asabiyya," or group solidarity, which Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun had identified as the "X-factor" that determined the rise and fall of civilisations, to warn Singaporeans that "as a society prospers ... the X-factor undergoes a self-destructive change. . . . The individual no longer sees himself as a member of a community . . . but as one entitled to rights and no obligations" (1987:169). The young generation's efforts to gain recourse through parliamentary opposition, as demonstrated in the Anson opposition victory, thus became indicative of decay in the nation's asabiyya, and it was now the government's task to restore whatever communal strength had been lost. Of course, this agenda directly contradicted the government's former policy on history, for it is predicated upon the belief that, as Roland Stromberg explains, "the natural order of society is traditional and historical, while individualism and democracy are diseases resulting in social anarchy" (1990:61). In short, the past, dismissed heretofore, now becomes profoundly relevant to the future of the nation. One press release even has the PAP indirectly apologizing for its former neglect of history, saying that in its haste to modernize, the party "may have gone too far ahead. . . . [O]ur priorities were different then, but we have to do something about preservation now" (Straits Times 1986). The PAP's new ideology of survival is persuasive because it places at stake the prevailing prosperity that the majority of Singaporeans had come to enjoy. History reconceptualized thus maintains "survival" as a pertinent concern in a reshuffled ideological framework in which the "crisis" is no longer one of older immigrant Singaporeans opposed to modernization but one of the tainted ego of the collective youth, who in their recourse to parliamentary opposition are taken to exemplify the corruption of the nation from within.

The Singapore Story As Historical Narrative In the lay view, history is about facts, not interpretations, and

there is only one historical "truth." From this premise, the PAP leadership has constantly encouraged Singaporeans to judge for themselves whether its version of the past is truth or propaganda. The day before publicly launching NE, Lee Hsien Loong told school teachers that a crucial test of the Singapore Story was factual

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Loh Kah Seng

verifiability: "If it's truth and facts, then it is objective, and it can't be propaganda" (Straits Times 1997c). In the launching speech itself, he admitted that NE, like similar programs in Japan and the United States, "is a process of indoctrination," but he again denied that it was political propaganda:

The Singapore Story is based on historical facts. We are not talking about an idealised legendary account or a founding myth [but rather] objective history, seen from a Singaporean standpoint. Not all the history books have been written, because hitherto many documents have been locked away in archives. But now, 30 years after our independence, the archives are starting to be opened, and the documents for this period are becoming available to historians. Progressively, a more complete picture will emerge. (Straits Times 1997d)

And the Story does contain verifiable facts; but it is also a complexly nuanced historical narrative, an interpretation of the past that has been manufactured for political reasons. Indeed, the PAP treads a fine line on the matter, for while it denies that the Singapore Story is propaganda, it does not perceive history as simple absolute truth but rather as a mode of rhetoric. Still, by claiming that their rhetoric is more pertinent than others in that it directly addresses the need of the nation to "survive," they are quick to pre-empt contrary interpretations of the same events. The Singapore Story is therefore a tactical selection of facts: those that can be taken to support the party line are highlighted while others are either marginalized or silenced. Little mention is made, for instance, of how the Japanese treated the Malays better than the Chinese, and of how, as a result, many Chinese after the war accused the Malays of being Japanese collaborators (Lian 1992:104). In this way the Story is a good example of what Trouillot had in mind in saying that "any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences" (29).

As propaganda, the Singapore Story aims to propagate two related ideas: first, that the nation is "vulnerable" and, second, that "communitarian" solutions to this vulnerability can be found in the historical record. To this end, major episodes of Singapore's history have been carefully revaluated. Generally speaking, the earlier pre- colonial and colonial episodes emphasize "communitarian" values. The account of the pre-colonial past, for instance, stresses the socio-

6 Crossroads 12:2




economic solidarity of "ancient" (i.e., Pre-British) Singapore as well as the multiple heritages of the island's Asian immigrants, including their links to their ancestral homelands. The colonial narrative similarly focuses on the lauded growth of the port of Singapore - attributed largely to the toil of the immigrant population - under the British Crown. But as historian John Tosh has pointed out, when people look for historical analogies to the present, they most often turn to the recent past, meaning that past which lies within the memories of persons still living (1991:27). Certainly this is the case in Singapore, where the PAP Old Guard have become the principal narrators of the nation's official history, transforming their experiences into the party's account of what really happened (Hong and Yap 1993:33). Historian Mary Turnbull has gone so far as to claim that "the consciousness of Singapore's vulnerability and the dangers of the recent past weighed perhaps too heavily with the leadership, and particularly with Lee Kuan Yew, making him over- fearful for the future and trapped in his own 'experience of history'" (1989:327). But rather than the Old Guard being trapped in their memories of the past, they have in fact used their experiences to predetermine popular perceptions of recent history. Lee Kuan Yew, for instance, while acknowledging the subjectivity of his own recollections (Ministry of National Development 1984:4), nevertheless insists that the history of the 50s and 60s (and presumably that of the rest of the recent past as well) cannot be written by academics. "History," he wrote, "does not happen in clean cut units. ... It is after forces let loose in tumultuous events have run their course that the historian comes along . . . and narrates them in clear-cut chapters" (1980:4).3 As a result of this focus on the past within living memory, the Singapore Story deals mostly with the political and military themes of the Japanese Occupation, the struggle for independence in the 1950s and 60s, and the period of post-independence prosperity - a prosperity that is taken to justify the PAP's continued hegemony in parliament.

3 The history derived from the narratives of a privileged group of PAP leaders has been reduced in recent years to one derived from the experiences of Lee Kuan Yew alone. One CD-ROM on Lee (Lee Kuan Yew 1995) portrays him as solely responsible for routing the communists and bringing about Singapore's near-miraculous economic development. Lee has become the basic focus of politics, a patriarchal figure around whom Singaporeans can rally to counteract current trends toward individualism.

Crossroads 12:2 7



Loh Kah Seng

World War II and the Japanese Occupation In the early independence period, the PAP leadership deemed

it necessary to ignore the period of Japanese occupation from early 1942 to 1945 because of the sensitive "blood debt" issue of Japanese compensation for war damages and atrocities. Lee Kuan Yew emphasized that economic relations with Japan were essential for modernization, and that the nation could not indulge in memories of oppression and suffering under Japanese rule. "In our industrialisation programme," he claimed, "the participation of Japanese industries [in] trade, technical co-operation and industrial development . . . would be out of all proportion to any gesture of atonement they can make" (qtd. in Josey 1968:252). Lee alternatively encouraged a detached, positive view of the Japanese interlude, interpreting it as a useful transition to independence. "The Japanese" he said, "brought politics to me [that made it clear] . . . this was our country. We will govern it ourselves" (qtd. in Josey 1968:29). Since the government's positive revaluation of history in the 1970s, however, the period of Japanese occupation has been gleaned for politically useful themes. Lee Kuan Yew's much-recounted escape in 1942 from a Japanese guard, for instance, an experience that by his own testimony forged his desire to free Singapore from colonial rule, has become identified in the popular mind as the single moment of Singapore's inception as a sovereign state.

But the legacy of World War II presented in the Singapore Story is primarily that of an object lesson to present-day Singaporeans to remain ever mindful of real and potential threats to the island's sovereignty. In a well-timed statement during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Goh Chok Tong warned that "[h]istory reminds us that a threat can arise unexpectedly. . . . Singapore was attacked and overrun in 1942 ... by Japan, over five thousand kilometres away" (1990:29-30). The view of the war and the occupation as constituting an admonition to the present has been re- enforced through such means as oral history projects that query older Singaporeans about the infamous Sook Ching screening and massacre of Chinese by the Japanese, "reality television" programmes like Between Empires, which interlaced eyewitness accounts of events with vivid re-enactments (the most graphic being that of a baby thrown up in the air and bayoneted), and the exhibition When Singapore was Syonan-To, which likewise focused on Japanese torture methods, such as lip-sewing and trampling on a victim's abdomen. The official fiftieth anniversary commemoration

8 Crossroads 12:2




in 1992 of Singapore's surrender and that in 1995 of the end of the war, accompanied by the signposting of war sites and the opening of Fort Canning's bunkers to the public, further reminded Singaporeans of the nation's past and (by implication) its continuing vulnerability to divisive forces from both within and without.4

The Post-war Period: Communism and Communalism Of greater relative importance than the Second World War, as

far as the Singapore Story is concerned, are the post-war and early independence periods. The PAP Old Guard have been able effectively to control this history by limiting public access to government records on the one hand while, on the other, making themselves conveniently available to historians John Drysdale and Dennis Bloodworth, who have since published their accounts (Lau 1992:56). The events of the 1950s and 60s thus have became the core of the Singapore Story and have received considerable, even disproportionate, attention in the public media. In the recent National Education exhibition The Singapore Story: Overcoming the Odds at Suntec City (1998), for example, four of the seven theatre sections showcased issues and events from these two decades. By pre-empting alternative accounts of this period in the nation's past, the Old Guard has insured that the theme of national "fragility" is continued. John Drysdale's commissioned book, for instance, is premised on the "political gullibility" of Singaporeans with respect to communism and communalism (Straits Times 1984). And it is these two issues - communist insurgency and communalist factionalism - that form the duel threats to national sovereignty that the PAP claims continue to plague the nation.

The PAP's struggle with "communists" in the 50s and 60s is, in Lee Kuan Yew's view, a potent reminder of Singapore's "vulnerability":

4 The means by which public commemorations shape public consciousness is more subtle than one might at first think. As Trouillot explains, such commemorations in effect center the past on a single date, thereby "imposing] a silence upon all events surrounding the one being marked" (11/). History therefore becomes linear since "[a]s arbitrary markers of time, dates link a number of dissimilar events, all eaually decontextualized and equally susceptible to mythicisation" (118). With reference to Singapore specifically, George Yeo has commented while it is up to the individual to make his own conclusion on the war, the "anniversary" - which is tantamount to a popular "celebration" of the war - makes it difficult to reach any other conclusion but that offered by the government (Straits Times 1992).

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Loh Kah Seng

Every time I pass by Alexandra Road, I remember the Hock Lee Bus depot there, and workers linking arms in 1955, refusing to let the buses out, police coming in with water cannons, finally the riots. ... It is vividly etched in my mind and anytime anybody starts anything which will unwind and unravel this orderly, organised, sensible, rational society and make it irrational, emotional, I put a stop to it and without hesitation. (Straits Times 1982)

In fact there did occur, in 1976 and 1987, respectively, two "Marxist conspiracies" that in the PAP's view justify its insistence that the vigilance of the 50s and 60s be ongoing. In both cases, the "conspirators" were English-educated and middle-class, unlike the Chinese-educated and working-class "communists" of the Emergency. This factual distinction was interpreted as proof that a new "crisis" - one in which the so-called communists had penetrated the educated middle classes - was now at hand. In 1976, the desire to perpetuate a crisis mentality was partly offset by the need to reassure Singaporeans that the "communist" resurgence would not frustrate the nation's efforts toward further economic development. Thus, Lee Kuan Yew downplayed the incident, asserting that "[c]ompared to what it was in the 1950s and the early '60s, this [Marxist conspiracy] is a very small activity" (qtd. in Josey 1980:317-318). By 1987, however, economic success was fully realized, and the government's response to the "conspiracy" of that year was accordingly unmitigated. Opposition MP Chiam See Tong questioned the government's tough line against the perpetrators, but Lee Kuan Yew defended their detention without trial under the Internal Security Act: "You don't argue with killer squads I have not claimed that we have beaten the communists fighting Queensberry rules and they using Siamese boxing. We have put curbs on them. And as a result they have not been able to expand and grow" (Straits Times 1988a).

To highlight the "communists'" manipulation of students and workers, the Hock Lee bus riots are often cited by the Old Guard and reproduced in public histories. Most poignant is the image of a fatally injured 16-year-old Chinese schoolboy being paraded in the streets by alleged communists for two and a half hours before dying of his injury. Three other people died in the riots, but this well- chosen touch of personal, immediate drama transcends the detached

10 Crossroads 12:2




factuality of objective reportage and shows the "Marxist conspiracies" to be not mere warnings of how history could repeat itself, but concrete proof that it is repeating itself.

To set the chronic "communist" threat still more firmly in the public mind, the Old Guard have used their authority to give out the definitive word on vanquished opponents and their place in the story of the nation. A case in point is the qualified eulogizing of former Barisan Sosialis leader Lim Chin Siong, who died on 5 February 1996. Lee Kuan Yew (see Straits Times 1996c) appraised Lim's role in history as constituting a timely challenge to the PAP: "[Lim] taught my colleagues and me the meaning of dedication to a cause. . . . Because of the standards of dedication they set, we [PAP leaders] . . . had to set high standards of personal integrity ... to withstand their political attacks. . . . We became as determined as they were in pursuing our political objectives." Summarizing Lim's career in a way that is as self-congratulatory as it is tinged with a generous pity that can only have arisen from a victor of history's reflection on a defeated enemy, Lee goes on to say that Lim "expended the best years of his life in the ... futile bid to ... create a communist state." This dismissive estimation of the former Barisan Socialist was repeated when a member of the opposition claimed that Lim had actually been fighting for a "more compassionate and caring government" at the time he was detained by the PAP in 1969. The PAP's terse reply was that Lim "was fighting for a communist Singapore, not a democratic one" (Straits Times 1996b). Lim's renunciation of his cause in his 1969 letter to Barisan Sosialis chairman Lee Siew Choh, a letter written to gain release from the detention, became both proof of his allegiance to communism and vindication of the PAP government. In all its complexity, the drawn- out debate over Lim's place in Singapore's history reflects the PAP's attempt to set the "facts" of history straight by using their personal authority to characterize communism as a perpetual, socially- disruptive threat that justifies the "ideology of survival."

The second major focus of the PAP account of the 50s and 60s is on the disruptive communalist tendencies in Singaporean society. In general, while the failure of the Malaysia interregnum from 1963- 65 has been attributed by the Old Guard to Malaysian communal politics, separation has been positively evaluated in hindsight. Lee Kuan Yew averred in a public speech that "We had to go through this roundabout course of merger with Malaysia. . . . We would have collapsed in fractious strife if we had not first . . . learnt the sharp

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Loh Kah Seng

collapsed in fractious strife if we had not first . . . learnt the sharp lessons of the politics of communal intimidation" (Lee Kuan Yew 1980:4). The party thus sees itself as vindicated in the Malaysia break-up, even though the PAP's renunciation of communal politics in the Malaysian Federation was itself regarded as communal politics by Malaysian Malays and was therefore considered a contributing factor in Singapore's "expulsion."

Communalism forms part of the "ethnic issue" that the PAP conceptualizes both as a warning of the ever-present racial live wire and as a justification for affirming the ethnic diversity in public culture and thereby encouraging Singaporeans to be racially- tolerant. An instance of warning occurred in 1986 when Israeli President Chaim Herzog's visit provoked anti-Singaporean and anti- Chinese demonstrations on both sides of the causeway. Lee Kuan Yew declared that the Singaporean Malays' response to the Herzog visit revealed a dangerous ethnic affiliation to Malaysia that threatened to lead to riots even more disastrous than those that took place in 1950, when "hell broke loose" over the case of Maria Hertogh (Straits Times 1988b).5 In other ways, the government has tried to play the race issue more positively. A case in point is the PAP's promotion of welfare subsidies for minority education, which it says are needed to bring about equality among the races. One might also mention the National Museum's 1996 concurrent exhibitions on the cultural and socio-economic life of early Hokkien and early Malay immigrants, respectively. Still, such programs might be questioned, since in the minds of some Malays the government's endorsement of culture along ethnic lines favours the Chinese. The above-mentioned National Museum exhibitions, for example, although singualarly successful as far as most ordinary Singaporeans were concerned, were contradictory in that rather than showcasing ethnic balance, they subtly emphasized derogatory distinctions. The Chinese exhibition, The Winding Road Beckons, presented a well-chronicled success story of the Hokkiens, depicting their cultural richness with elaborate displays on religious customs. The Malay exhibition, on the other hand, contained no coherent celebratory theme and made no clear statement as to where the Malays came from or whether their lives had improved after settling

5 Maria Hertogh was a Dutch Eurasian girl who was raised in a Muslim family but then returned by court order to the custody of her natural parents and placed in a convent.

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in Singapore. Thus, despite one Malay government official's claim that the latter exhibit emphasized the progress of the Malays (Straits Times 1996a), it might well be otherwise interpreted to have affirmed their oft-alleged economic backwardness.

The Search for "Communitarian" Values To counteract the perceived threats of communism and

communalism, the government sought to foster a system of shared communitarian values grounded in pre-colonial and colonial history. This was not a simple matter, for the early history of the island is complicated by the complexities of race relations in Singapore's plural society. Rajaratnam explains that at the time of independence, when it was argued who should be touted as the fathers of Singapore, the period prior to 1819 was discounted in the interest of avoiding racial unrest. "The government," he writes,

fixed responsibility [for Singapore's beginning] on Sir Stamford Raffles and officially declared him the founder of Singapore. Singapore's knowable past began in 1819. . . . [W]e could have contrived a more lengthy and eye- boggling lineage by tracing our ancestry back to the lands from which our forefathers emigrated[, but the] price we would have to pay for this more impressive genealogical table would be to turn Singapore into a battleground for endless racial and communal conflicts. . . . So from our point of view, to push a Singaporean's historical awareness beyond 1819 would have been a misuse of history. (1984:5-6)

Since then, historian Ernest Chew has further disputed Raffles's pre- eminence on legal grounds: Raffles did not found Singapore, says Chew, for his treaty "did not involve a cession of sovereignty" and provided only for a "factory" on the coast (1991:38-39).6 What is more, Raffles's treaty was signed only by a claimant to the throne of Johore and not by the Sultan, who was backed by the Dutch. Some commentators consider this latter point alone sufficient to render the treaty invalid. On the pretext of the "racial issue," however, all legal questions have been silenced, and the official account remains that

6 According to Chew, sovereignty was ceded only with John Crawfurd's

treaty in 1824.

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Loh Kah Seng

Even so, the previous PAP position that pre-colonial history is ethnically sensitive and should be dismissed from the Story has been overturned, and the search for a historical basis for "communitarian" values has focused on the period before 1819, for as MP Chiang Hai Ding noted, the short history of modern Singapore is insufficient for the purposes of highlighting both national "vulnerability" and the importance of "communitarian" values (Parliamentary ¡Debates 1977:68). Although written sources - Chinese travellers' accounts and the Malay annals, the Sejarah Melayu - remain epistemologically suspect, archaeological excavations at the historical site of Fort Canning Hill from 1984 onwards have uncovered artifacts to confirm the existence of a thriving commercial centre as early as the 14th century. Some leaders have used this knowledge to justify present economic initiatives. Kwa Chong Guan (1994:8), for instance, has characterized the Johor-Singapore-Riau Growth Triangle as "a continuation of [a] longer cycle and rhythm of Melaka Straits history." The authorities have also traced Singapore's cultural ties, via the colonial immigrant, back to ancient civilizations elsewhere in Southeast Asia, in China, and in India. The rich cultural heritage invoked in the NE curriculum, as in the new Secondary Two history text, The Ancient History of India, Southeast Asia and China (Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore 1995), provides a useful thematic counterpoint to the rising individualism in Singapore's ultra-modern society. The traditional Chinese, Indian, and Malay cultures are co-opted as distillations of "Asian" values that stress "the importance of placing society over self" (Lee Hsien Loong 1989:34-35).

The colonial and early independence chapters within the Singapore Story also stress a core national ethos based on communitarian values. Bypassing the typically British-biased colonial texts, the government has used museum exhibits and oral histories to recreate a socio-economic picture of immigrant Singapore. The National Museum exhibition Memories of Yesteryear, for instance, represented life in the 1950s and 60s through disparate exhibits such as an ice-waterman's cart and a traditional style Chinese provisions shop. Such dioramas target the layman, who is less interested in scholarly research than in the personal, "emotive" awareness of the past evoked by its tangible reminders (Kwa 1994:2- 3). Similarly, the preservation of buildings and monuments of historical value reduces history to a "passivised" material culture whose undesirable aspects have been filtered out (Yeoh and Kong

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historical value reduces history to a "passivised" material culture whose undesirable aspects have been filtered out (Yeoh and Kong 1994:9-11). Through such selectivity, kampongs appear not merely as housing for Malays but as the environment within which are fostered the intangible communal values of "neighbourliness, thrift and hard work" (Kampong Days, Foreword, 1993)7

The "End of History" The period from 1965 onwards, in the PAP's view, heralds the

"end" of Singapore's history, when the Old Guard triumphed over adversity and ushered in a period of unmitigated success culminating in the "glorious present." The Singapore Story is thus a linear account of the past where "chronology replaces process" and "[a] 11 events are placed in a single line leading to the [culmination]" (Trouillot 113). Devan Nair has argued that the PAP's successful weathering of the tumultuous post-independence period indicates the importance of "constants" in good government and the need to continue PAP hegemony. "The same constants," he says, "must remain the sheet anchor . . . tested and proven in the trials and struggles of the past [There ever remains a need for] intelligence, honesty, courage and decisiveness in a crisis, and for high standards of public and private morality and integrity" (1982:58-59). For its own part, the PAP dismisses support for the opposition as "irrational," saying that the opposition is "not worthy" and that "all votes for it are to be read as 'protest' votes based on emotions rather than reason" (Chua 22). Lee Kuan Yew called the years from 1965 to 1981 "Singapore's best" and reiterated the PAP's belief that parliamentary opposition jeopardized the nation's well-being. He declared that it was not merely coincidence that those years of unprecedented progress were also "our years of political stability, blessed by no fractious, querulous, carping opposition in

7 Since the era of PAP rule remains the culmination of the official history of Singapore, the Singapore Story is careful not to make colonialism appear as an unqualified success. Without being overtly anti-colonial, the PAP has therefore constructed a "difficult" colonial past which allows it to claim a privileged place in the present Rajaratnam has thus decried colonialism as 'a shameful episode of exploitation, oppression and humiliation of a people" (qtd. in Kwa 1994:4), and the 1960s-era secondary school textbook Social and Economic History of Modern Singapore emphasizes how ordinary Singaporeans during the colonial period suffered as a result of inadequate public health care and social welfare programs not to mention poor standards of living in general.

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Conclusion: The Jealous Gods of the Past Revisited Following the launch of NE, rival interpretations of

Singapore's history were put forward in the press by former opposition leaders. In a series of letters to the Straits Times, former Barisan Sosialis chairman Lee Siew Choh argued that the PAP referendum for merger in 1961 was "undemocratic, unfair and unjust" (Straits Times 1997e). A month later, Fang Chuang Pi, the Communist Party of Malaya leader known in Singapore as "The Plen," publicized an interpretation of the merger that highlighted the Barisan Sosialis party's contributions to the success of the nation (Straits Times 1997b). The government's own expressed commitment to objectivity and truth in NE worked against the PAP to a certain extent, as when Lee Siew Choh (1997) sought to claim his own place in Singapore's history, saying that "since I played not an insignificant part in trying to prevent the People's Action Party from railroading the referendum through the people of Singapore against their will, it is my hope that my writing will contribute towards a more balanced view of the history of the period."

This disagreement about what is and is not true of the past has the advantage of illustrating to the public how history is both complex and open to differing interpretations. This is no academic debate between historians but a pragmatic one between the various contending actors of history that possibly will result in a more balanced view of the 50s and 60s, a view that would undermine the PAP's claim to a single preferred "story" of the past. But the opposed sides are not equal, and because the present available "space" for historical narrative in Singapore has been filled by the "Singapore Story," Lee's and Fang's arguments are undermined, since the events they emphasize are "silenced" in the prevailing interpretation offered by the PAP. Furthermore, Lee Siew Choh and Fang Chuang Pi, in keeping to the lay belief that history should be determined purely according to factual truth, have failed to present their views as interpretations of the past. Government officials thus have been able to reject their alternative accounts outright, using the "verifiability principle" to discern how Lee "ignores documented facts, shifts position [and] undermines a professional and objective effort to educate Singaporeans on the facts of our history" (Straits Times 1997a). It seems, therefore, that whatever Lee Hsien Loong had in mind when he predicted that "a more complete picture will emerge [from the debates on officially sanctioned history]" (Straits

16 Crossroads 12:2




Times 1997c), that history will continue to preclude the perspectives of the PAP's opponents. It is certainly ironic that whereas the PAP once cautioned against the "jealous gods of the past," they themselves now have become such gods, jealous of their monopolistic version of history and hostile to the idea of an alternative one.

Finally, it must be said that the Singapore Story is more than an account of the past; rather, it is a complex bundle of pre- determined axioms and arguments on Singapore's history, geography, economics, sociology, and politics. While it does allow a range of possible perspectives, all of these nonetheless focus on the basic concept of "vulnerability." The persistent admonition that the nation is racially explosive discourages the public from dismissing dubious ideas as PAP propaganda since to do so would be, in effect, to threaten one's own economic future. The Singapore Story thus predetermines how Singaporeans perceive and interpret the reality they experience, and to the extent that they regard the regime's ideas uncritically as "common-sense" truisms, they partake in the government's ongoing hegemony.

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