His ancestors
were Hakka, the Chinese tribesmen who migrated from northern China
to Fujian and have a reputation for pugnacity and clannishness. Lee
was a third generation Straits Chinese, however, and grew up
speaking Malay, English and the Cantonese dialect of his family's
maid.
Ever the pragmatist, he was later to teach himself Japanese,
Mandarin and Hokkien as the political situation in Singapore
required. During
the Japanese occupation of Singapore he worked for a Japanese
government propaganda department...
http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990823/lee1.html
"Now, from all the already released records in London as well as
other historical researches, it is clear that in launching
Operation Cold Store, Lee Kuan Yew
was serving the then strategic interests of Britain which
wanted Singapore to continue to provide a forward military base in
Southeast Asia," said Lim
"It is also now an undeniable fact that Lee worked earlier for the
Japanese military during the Occupation making Britain's English
materials available in Japanese-language for the
occupiers," he added.
http://www.singaporedemocrat.org/articlelimhocksiew.html
"Because people
had to live, you've got to submit. I started off hating them and
not wanting to learn Japanese. I spent my time learning Chinese to
read their notices.
"After six months, I learnt how to read Chinese, but I couldn't
read Japanese. I couldn't read the Katakana and the Hiragana.
Finally, I registered at a Japanese school in Queen Street.
"Three months passed. I got a job with my grandfather's old friend,
a textile importer and exporter called Shimoda. He came, opened his
office. Before that, it was in Middle Road. Now it's a big office
in Raffles Place. I worked there as a clerk, copy typist, copied
the Japanese Kanji and so on. It's clerical work. "But you saw how
people had to live, they had to get rice, food, they had to feed
their children. Therefore, they had to submit. So it was my first
lesson on power and government and system and how human beings
reacted.
"Some were heroic, maybe misguided. They listened to the radio,
against the Japanese, they spread news, got captured by the
Kempeitai, tortured. Some were just collaborators, did
everything the Japanese wanted. And it was an education on human
beings, human nature and human systems of
government."
http://angeleong.tripod.com/leeky2.html
After his education in Britain, Lee
Kuan Yew returned to Singapore in 1949 to practise as a lawyer in
the law firm Laycock and
Ong.
He became the honorary legal adviser for several trade unions after
being acquainted with their leaders (in 1951) and subsequently
caught the public eye in February 1952, when the Postal Workers
Union succeeded, with his guidance, in obtaining important
concessions from the colonial government.
According to his memoirs and this website,
Lee Kuan Yew then proceeded to form the PAP with the help of the
communists.
Yet
these sources conveniently neglect to mention Lee Kuan Yew's
involvement in the Singapore Progressive Party in the 1951
legislative elections.
In fact, Lee
acted as the election agent for his boss John Laycock, helping him
to manage his campaign and canvass on his
behalf. (See here and here for proof)
He had thus entered into politics even before he became involved in
the trade unions' dispute with the British. (Polling day for the
1951 legislative elections was on 10 April, we can assume that his
political activities with the SPP started months before that)
If I may
speculate, LKY
joined the SPP initially to build up his political career
there.
However when
the Rendel Constitution expanded the electoral
rolls to include all local-born
as voters, resulting in a significant increase in Chinese
voters, LKY decided to jump ship and formed the PAP in
1954 because he saw that the SPP lacked the support of
the Chinese working class. (So the next time LKY
condemns politicians who change political parties, you know where
he's coming from)
Yet the problem isn't solely that LKY jumped ship and didn't care
to tell anyone about his great experience in his
memoirs.
The bigger problem lies in the fact that LKY
supported the SPP despite the fact that it
was
A) pro-British in both its policies and
in its composition of members (mostly English-speaking upper class
professionals)
B) unsupportive of achieving independence (it
merely paid lip-service to the idea by declaring in October 1952,
its objective of Singapore achieving independence through a
Singapore-Malaya merger without setting a target
date)
Lee Kuan Yew's miraculous change of
heart on these issues when he joined the PAP
only demonstrates how the pursuit of power can
sometimes make one very flexible about their beliefs. Unfortunately
for us, this flexibility of LKY's did not extend to the area of
political freedoms.
http://us.asiancorrespondent.com/secret-blog/2009/09/is-lee-kuan-yew-more-interested-in.html
