My introduction into the world of the Chinese-educated came after what was called the 5-1-3 incident, named after the riots of 13 May 1954. Five students turned up at my home one evening in 1954, soon after the Fajar trial: Robert Soon Loh Boon, a small young man with a crew cut and a front tooth missing, who acted as their interpreter and spokesman, Louis Hwa, who was also competent in English, and three pigtailed Chinese girls. The boys were in shorts, the girls in skirts, their school uniforms. Seven of their fellow students had been convicted for obstructing the police during the riots in which 500 Chinese middle school students, mainly from Chung Cheng High School, clashed with the police. They were marching in support of a delegation on its way to Government House to present a petition against registration for national service when they were stopped and asked to disperse. Instead they threw stones at the police, six of whom were also stabbed. The police charged with batons and hit some students on the head. Twenty-six people were injured;
48 students, including two girls, were arrested.
The trial was held on 28 June. Of the 41 students accused of disobeying police orders to disperse, 26 were found guilty and given a six-month suspended sentence. Seven were tried on the more serious charge of obstructing the police. They asked for their case to be transferred to another court because the judge had shown prejudice in the way he had treated and convicted their fellow students the day before. They refused to say anything in their defence and were sentenced to three months, the maximum for the charge. Their appeal would be heard in October. Would I ask Pritt to take up their appeal?
Their defiance of the law was the immediate concern of the court. But the underlying issues were deep and fundamental. The Chinese-educated had no place or role to play in the official life of the colony, which employed only English-educated locals as subordinates. The government provided primary schools teaching in English and in Malay, and secondary schools teaching only in English.
But immigrant communities were left to fend for themselves. The Chinese collected donations and built their own schools. Completely self-supporting, they used textbooks published in China and employed teachers recruited in China who taught in Mandarin just as if they were in Guangdong or Fujian province.
Culturally, they lived in a world apart. Graduates could either continue their studies by switching over to an English school and so make their way up the English-educated ladder, or look for jobs in firms that used the Chinese language – Chinese shops, restaurants and business houses, and the few Chinese-owned banks.
They felt dispossessed, and their lack of economic opportunity turned their schools into breeding grounds for the communists, who had been burrowing away in Malaya and Singapore since 1923, when the Comintern (Communist International) first sent agents from Shanghai to the island. After the war, the record of its resistance to the Japanese gave the MCP a prestige that made it a powerful force among the impressionable young, and it proceeded to build up a network of cells in the classrooms. Many teachers became communist cadres or sympathisers; many overaged students whose education had been interrupted by the Japanese occupation were indoctrinated and co-opted; and the school management committees of merchants and shopkeepers were either sympathetic towards them or fearful of opposing them.
Once the Emergency was declared, the communists in Singapore were superficially dormant, but in fact they were recruiting and expanding. In 1952, the British introduced national service bills in Singapore and Malaya, making all males between the ages of 18 and 55 liable for callup into the armed services, police, or civil defence forces, and in April 1954, the government started registering them. It needed only 800 for the Singapore Military Forces and 1,200 for the Civil Defence Corps, and was going to choose them by ballot.
But registration in the schools was slow, and on 12 May, the closing date, Chinese High School students presented a petition to the acting colonial secretary asking for mass exemption. In response, Acting Governor W.A.C. Goode issued a statement saying that exemptions could be granted only on a case-by-case basis.
This led to the demonstration by 500 students, whose leaders the governor had refused to see until they had all first registered.
I did not understand the background of the problem at the time, though I knew something was simmering and bubbling away in this completely different world. The students were well-organised, disciplined and cohesive. They had remarkable self-control and were capable of mass action, of collective demonstrations of defiance that made it difficult for the government to isolate and pick out the leaders for punishment. After the arrests, they set out to blow up other issues that would enable them to engineer clashes with the police, to produce martyrs and so arouse public feeling against the government. I understood their motivations and methods only much later. Many of the English-educated, including the University of Malaya Students’ Union, were equally ill-informed and naive. On 18 May, they came out in support of the Chinese demonstrators by calling for an inquiry into the rioting because the police had used improper force. They were as simple-minded as I was.
The communists immediately commemorated the clash on 13 May with the numbers “5-1-3”, 5 for May and 13, a Chinese shorthand for famous or infamous incidents – the Tiananmen episode on 4 June 1989 is “6- 4”, 6 for June. The students mounted camp-ins and protests, and formed a 55-man exemption delegation, which organised different sections to collect information on injured students, provide them with medical treatment and drum up public sympathy.
They fanned out across Singapore to enlist the support of other students, parents, shopkeepers, local Chinese leaders – indeed the entire Chinese-speaking community. Theirs were tried and tested methods of mass agitation that the communists had worked out in China. At the first sign of trouble from the police, they shut themselves up in schools or factories to form a critical mass, attract attention, win sympathy, defy authority and provoke the government into “victimising” them.
So on 14 May, the day after the 5-1-3 incident, they barricaded themselves in Chung Cheng High School, but dispersed after one day when a 12-man committee formed by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce asked them to do so. They had become important, and the elders of the Chinese community had come down to plead with them, promising to intercede with the authorities. In response to pressure from a government faced with growing indiscipline, the chamber brought forward the mid-year holidays by two weeks and closed the school. But its representatives had first to accept a list of six demands from the students for submission to the colonial administration. These called for total exemption from national service, unconditional discharge of the 48 accused awaiting trial, a public inquiry into the incident, and several other concessions. The students had skilfully involved the elders of the Chinese community in their cause, and on 22–23 May, 2,500 of them locked themselves up in Chung Cheng High School again, refusing to leave until all were exempted from national service. They dispersed three days later, but only after the police stopped their food supplies and irate parents forced them to.
And so it went on. The Chung Cheng students demanded that schools be reopened, the Chinese High School students threatened to go on a hunger strike, and on 2 June, a thousand students drawn from various middle schools assembled at the Chinese High School to begin a camp-in during the enforced holidays. It was an act of defiance. They held their own lessons in the classrooms and in the open fields, with senior pupils teaching their juniors mathematics, English, Chinese and geography. Parents brought them food, but it was otherwise a self-organised mid-year holiday refresher camp.
The students also sent more petitions to the governor, but none were answered. When seven schools reopened on 24 June, new disciplinary measures were imposed: among others, teachers would be screened and pupils would be forbidden to use the school premises for extramural activities not approved by the principal. But these orders read well only in the newspapers. They could not be enforced because the management committees and the principals were afraid of the organised underground among the teachers and students.
Then, on 13 September, the government announced that it intended to give itself powers to close down any school that did not comply with the Schools Ordinance. Its supervisor could henceforth be asked to show cause if in the preceding six months it had been used for political propaganda detrimental to Singapore. This was a ghastly mistake. The committees of the Chinese schools had been divided among the anti-communists, the fence-sitters, and the fellow travellers. But once the government proposed to control their schools, they were all united against it, and were supported even by the nationalist Kuomintang press.
Governor Sir John Nicoll was taken aback. Speaking to the Legislative Council on 21 September, he deplored suggestions that the government was adopting an anti-Chinese policy. It did not intend to assimilate
the Chinese schools into the colonial system of education. The communists knew that the governor’s plan was to stifle their subversive activities, but he had in fact given them a chance to rally all Chinese-educated groups around a patriotic cause, and they cleverly twisted the issue into a threat to anglicise Chinese schools and destroy Chinese culture, language and education. These were a sacred heritage dear to the hearts of all Chinese, especially the poorly educated merchant millionaires and shopkeepers of Singapore. They had been mesmerised by glowing reports from Communist China, depicting its transformation into a great nation. And now, just when this rejuvenated China should be a source of new pride and dignity to Chinese everywhere, the British seemed out to strip them of their birthright. The colonial government had stumbled into a cultural minefield. If Special Branch had had Chinese-educated officers who could feel the pulse of the chauvinistic communities in Singapore and Malaya, they would have warned the governor to move with greater sensitivity and circumspection.
The Chinese-educated were nothing like the English-educated students who had published Fajar. They were resourceful fund raisers. When I approached Pritt on their behalf I told him they could mobilise the financial resources of the merchant community in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He suggested a fee of
$30,000. I put it to the students. They did not bat an eyelid. Long before Pritt flew to Singapore on 7 October for the hearing of their appeal, which was to begin five days later, they brought the money in cash to my home. (They seemed to feel uncomfortable about going to Laycock & Ong, where an Englishman was the senior partner.)
Having read the record of the appeal, Pritt must have known there was no chance of it succeeding, so with the practised vehemence of years of experience he again made as much noise and propaganda for the students as he could to damage the government. The students gave him a tea party at the Badminton Hall the day after his arrival. Pritt made a speech in English, and his hosts made several in Mandarin, but none of this was translated to him. Not surprisingly, for this was an opportunity for the backroom leaders to mobilise support, work up enthusiasm, and generate more steam for mass action, utilising a perfectly legitimate cause.
The proceedings left so deep an impression on him that in his autobiography published 12 years later, Pritt remembered the organisation and logistics that had produced 5,000 students neatly seated in a hall, each one provided with a box of cakes, buns, peanuts and bananas, the leftovers of which were placed back in the same box and carried away by ushers along the aisles, so that the hall was left neat and tidy when they marched off to their buses to go home. And all this in response to crisp orders given over the loudspeakers with great aplomb and self-confidence by boys and girls of only 15 or so who were instantly obeyed. It was a performance that would have gladdened the heart of any staff officer in the army, and I was as impressed as Pritt. That was the first of several such meetings I was to attend. I had never seen anything like it among English-educated students, who spoke diffidently, lacked self-confidence, and were psychologically hobbled when they used a language that was not their mother tongue.
The appeal itself, I knew, would be an anticlimax. But the students saw it as an occasion to organise demonstrations against the government. On 12 October, a large crowd of them gathered on the Padang outside the Supreme Court, and according to the Singapore Standard, “a storm of applause” broke out from them when Pritt arrived. The English judge, Mr Justice Knight, asked, “Why has a trivial appeal like this been listed for three days?” Pritt said he was responsible, as he estimated it would not be safe to say that it would be concluded in less. He then ploughed through his grounds for appeal, putting up a stout performance that lasted two days (I would have been hard pressed to keep it going beyond one morning), but with no effect.
After submissions were completed at the end of the second day, the judge said that he upheld the conviction.
However, he would set aside the prison sentences if the young students would sign bonds of good behaviour for 18 months.
Each student was asked in turn if he or she would sign a bond. Each signified refusal by a shake of the head. The judge was determined to uphold the rule of law, and the students were determined to be martyrs.
The judge had no alternative but to send them to prison, although in doing so he had given them another issue with which to work up anti-government feelings among the Chinese-speaking masses.
Knowing now how the communists would exploit it, I would have released them on a bond of good behaviour signed by their parents, whom I could have called to court and dealt with directly before the communist backroom boys could get at them. The government would have scored a moral victory and the parents would have been relieved that their children had been let off with a warning. But at that time I, too, got
carried away by the wave of sympathy for them, and on 20 September, the Nanyang Siang Pau quoted me as saying, “Until now the authorities have no evidence of any communist activity in the Chinese schools; but they regard opposition to the government’s refusal to allow the students postponement of service as communist activity, and under this pretext, they seek to exercise better control over the Chinese schools.” I was ignorant, gullible and stupid. I did not know just how efficient the communists were, how their tentacles reached out and controlled every single organisation that was bubbling up against the government.
The appeal to the Privy Council was heard on 15 February 1955 and was dismissed. The case was over, but my initiation into the world of the Chinese-educated had just begun. It was a world full of vitality, of so many activists, all like jumping beans, of so many young idealists, unselfish, ready to sacrifice everything for a better society. I was deeply impressed by their seemingly total dedication to the cause of revolution, their single-minded determination to overturn the colonial government in order to establish a new world of equality and fairness. And I was to grow increasingly fearful of the direction in which their leaders were taking them.
But I was also convinced that if I could not harness some of these dynamic young people to our cause, to what my friends and I stood for, we would never succeed. So far, we had links only with the English-educated and the Malays, who did not have the convictions or the energies to match, never mind the will to resist the Chinese-educated communists. The only “Chinese-speaking Chinese” in our network were small groups in the Naval Base and the Harbour Board, largely Cantonese skilled labourers, and some daily-rated City Council workers. The one union whose members were all Chinese-speaking was that of the night-soil workers in the Municipal Council, who every morning collected human waste in two metal buckets, one at each end of a pole. They were not well-educated, and did not look to me like revolutionary material.
The students must have been instructed to use me as their lawyer, after having employed others who were not very political nor as willing to stand up to the government as I was. They started turning up at Oxley Road looking for advice on a hundred and one problems they encountered whenever they came into conflict with or were obstructed by authority, from schoolboys scalded during their camp-ins to permits for public meetings.
They usually arrived in a bright pink Chevrolet with the number plate 1066. (Choo recognised and remembered it: the year of the Battle of Hastings.) One of these pigtailed schoolgirls was evidently using her father’s car; he was probably a wealthy shopkeeper or merchant.
I never turned them away, however inconvenient the hour. I wanted to poach in this pond where the fish had been fed and nurtured by the communists, to use hook and line to catch as many as I could. After all, they had fished in our English-speaking pond, poaching John Eber, Sharma, Devan Nair, Samad and others. I was innocent – it was like recruiting police cadets in mafia territory, a hazardous business. I believed then that the discipline of the students and the energy and dedication of their leaders were natural and spontaneous, born of youthful enthusiasm and idealism. It took me two years from 1954 to 1956 to fathom their methods, to get glimpses of their intrigues and deviousness and to understand the dynamics of the communist united front (CUF). Behind the scenes, the anonymous Town Committee of the MCP controlled and ran open front operators like Robert Soon Loh Boon and those section leaders at mass rallies. The communists had a secret network of disciplined cadres grouped in cells of about four, each with a leader who gave the orders (dressed up as the outcome of democratic discussion), who in turn took orders from a leader in another cell of a higher rank.
These orders were disobeyed at the risk of isolation and marginalisation for those on the fringes, of rustication and punishment for those who were members of the Anti-British League or the MCP, and of death by assassination if a party member had committed an act of betrayal. It was a ruthless system in which a past record of sacrifice could count for nothing, and therefore not one to be defied lightly, as the case of Liew Yit Fun should have taught me.
Liew joined the MCP in Malaya in 1942 and operated against the Japanese in Negeri Sembilan in the Second Regiment of the MPAJA. After the war, he became the MCP representative in Malaya for contacts with the authorities, and the publisher of a party newspaper called Min Sheng Pau. Just before the Emergency was declared in 1948, he was convicted for sedition and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment.
In October 1949, as his sentence was about to expire, a detention order was served on him, and this was extended three times to 1955.
Asked by his friends to represent him in the judicial review of his case, I saw Liew in Johor Bahru jail and found him a most intelligent, eloquent and dedicated communist. He wanted to be banished to China (or to