Wither PAP. It's time for two party system in Singapore.
Let the chinese take over Singapore for a change. That peranakan
bastard Harry Lee Kuan Yew and his clique should end their control
of Singapore.
Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of
Control
Far Eastern Economic Review
September 2006
Reviewed by Garry Rodan
Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control
by Carl A. Trocki
Routledge, 211 pages, $100/$33.95
CARL
Trocki offers a refreshingly different look at Singapore’s colonial
and postcolonial history, emphasizing important
continuities in the city-state’s history of
authoritarian rule and the struggles involving its Chinese-educated
and ethnic Chinese majority.
His book also makes the most theoretically explicit statement yet that social
conflict is the decisive force for
change.
For Mr Trocki, a professor of Asian studies at Queensland
University of Technology, class friction was the key dynamic that
shaped modern Singapore, with control over the opium trade and the
system of labor organization being two fundamental aspects.
However, he takes the legacy of precolonial social structures
seriously in his explanation of the limits and possibilities of
elite rule. His approach is also empathetic to the losers of these
struggles and cognizant of the analytical importance of explaining
their defeats. Consequently, the diminished power positions of
local capitalists and the working class are afforded special
attention and significance.
The complex ethnic mix of forces important to the struggles over
economic and social control throughout Singapore’s history poses
challenges for class analysis. Mr Trocki appreciates this
complexity, detailing much of it in the book. However, his
principal focus is on how the different ethnic groups have been
involved in, and affected by, the struggle to establish and shape
capitalist development.
Therefore, whereas writers like Mervyn Wynne, Leon Comber and
Wilfred Blythe saw Hokkien-Teochiu tensions in the 19th century as
“doctrinal influences” imported from China, Mr Trocki argues that
the root cause lies in the competition over control of pepper and
gambier plantations.
Similarly, the fragmentation of Chinese secret societies into
small-scale criminal gangs is traced by Mr Trocki to their being
squeezed out of revenue farms, the coolie trade and pepper and
gambier agriculture between the middle to late 19th century.
The two points most powerfully made in this book relate to his
class analysis but are not reducible to it. The first is the
observation that the limited institutional penetration and social
neglect of the colonial state had long-term political
ramifications.
The second is that the recent championing of Chinese cultural
values by the ruling People’s Action Party contradicts its own historic role in the
marginalization of social forces and interests associated with
Chinese culture.
Mr Trocki argues that due to both convenience and a lack of
political will on the part of colonial authorities, many of the
collective organizations of immigrant communities assumed a vast
array of social and political roles. British rule in Singapore was
“largely indirect and decentralized as a matter of necessity” given
the unwillingness to invest in police forces and other
infrastructure.
The British relied, for instance, on voluntary collaboration from
Chinese triad associations, Malay chiefs who exerted authority over
trading communities, and other networks to control the rapidly
expanding Chinese population. In the 19th century, Singapore-born
Chinese merchants organized powerful kongsi organizations to ensure
the wealth and welfare of their families and clans over the long
term, providing for education, burials, support for the destitute
and other social benefits.
Yet Mr Trocki explains that there were unintended political
consequences from leaving the masses to their own welfare and
organizational devices. The influence of the Singapore Chinese
Chamber of Commerce (SCCC), labor unions and assorted student and
cultural organizations expanded in the first half of the 20th
century. Chinese schools also represented the largest and most
vibrant education sector in Singapore by the 1940s.
While the authorities selectively engaged with the SCCC, it was
largely through other organizations that the postwar struggle for
independence was conducted. This was a reality that Lee Kuan Yew
and his faction in the pap had to contend with, the ultimate
solution to which was harsh responses to independent, critical
voices.
Despite Mr Trocki’s emphasis on class, he contends that
the division between the
Chinese-educated and the English-educated “lies at the heart of
Singapore’s social fabric and has been one of the dynamic themes
that binds the 19th-century history of the place to the 20th
century.” In advancing this argument, Mr
Trocki submits an especially unflattering contrast between the
English-educated middle-class nationalists aligned with Lee Kuan
Yew and Chinese-educated nationalists:
It was the
Chinese-educated, some of them communists, who had organized the
labor unions in Singapore, fought secret-society thugs hired by the
government, stood against police batons and,
where necessary, gone to jail. None of
these were things that Lee himself would ever have
done.
Significantly, once the PAP was in government and Mr Lee’s faction
in control of the executive, it was
not just the organized working-class, Chinese-educated masses but
also the local Chinese capitalists that Mr Lee sought to
politically neuter.
On this point, Mr Trocki makes a valuable contribution toward
a better understanding of how early and
strategically Mr. Lee thought about curtailing organizational
structures outside his control.
Nevertheless, his observations could still benefit from
elaboration.
For instance, what were the “left-leanings” of such business people
as Tan Kah Kee, Lee Kong Chian and Tan Lark Sye that formed the
basis of links between sections of the Chinese-educated business
elite and the Chinese-educated mass organizations in the late 1950s
and early 1960s?
Was it only economic nationalism that provided any basis for
extending the shared language and cultural agendas of these
different social forces?
Irrespective of the answers, Mr Trocki is right
to emphasize how the tag of “Chinese chauvinism” was used
expansively by Mr Lee to suppress legitimate debate about Chinese
language and culture.
Having played so decisive a role in the social,
economic and political marginalization of the Chinese-educated,
there is thus considerable irony in Mr Lee’s championing of
Confucian values during the 1990s—a point to
which Mr Trocki’s book gives acute expression. In this respect, the
book’s target is as much the pap’s version of Singapore’s modern
history as it
is professional historians who may have paid inordinate attention
to elite colonial and postcolonial
actors.
In the latter chapters of the book, Mr Trocki offers a wide range
of observations about the tensions unfolding in the present
political economy of Singapore, including the growing dependence on
new forms of immigrant labor.
However, the real strength and originality of this book lies in the
attempt to decipher the underlying nature and causes of social
conflict over the last two centuries.
Mr Trocki highlights the surprising continuity,
maintaining that the real legacy inherited from the British was not
a parliamentary system but “130 years of autocratic rule by an
unresponsive bureaucracy and an ambitious and exploitative economic
elite.”
For Mr Trocki, contemporary power structures in
Singapore have much deeper roots than are generally
recognized.
Mr Rodan is director of the Asia Research Centre and
professor of politics and international studies at Murdoch
University in Australia.
http://www.singapore-window.org/sw06/0609FEER.HTM
