Singapore and the Pursuit of National Development

Abstract

The late former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew insisted upon social discipline amongst Singaporeans, often casting the matter most directly in terms of the vulnerability of the small island within the wider potentially hostile Malay world of Southeast Asia, and thereafter, more prosaically, the territory’s exposure to the putatively chill winds of the wider world of global commerce. Lee cast the role of the People’s Action Party in analogous terms, averring that the party was responsible, pragmatic and honest and thus uniquely fitted to lead. Lee also unpacked these claims in generational terms, suggesting that whilst his own generation could remember and appreciate the struggles of the early days of Singapore, younger citizens only had the experience of living in a prosperous, rapidly developing city. This group was tagged ‘post-65ers’, born after independence, those who had benefited most clearly from the country’s success. It is a familiar anxiety; the old leader recalls the struggles of his youth and casts doubt on the abilities of the comparatively easy living young to take up the burden. However, in this case, there is an identifiable basis for the anxiety because Lee and his generation did live through a period of violent change. For some 25 years, from the start of the Pacific War in 1941 through to 1965 when Singapore attained its unexpected independence, the territory was repeatedly swept up in violence: the Imperial Japanese invasion, the returning armies of Britain, civil insurrection, inter-ethnic violence and all the tensions and confusions of pro-independence movements within the local population. Lee was 18 years old at the start of this sequence of events, and he was immersed in them and was repeatedly obliged to respond to the urgent practical demands of sweeping changes.