Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 6 - Walking on a Razors Edge After Independence
When the British marched back into Singapore in 1945, they were not the gentlemen the locals had been raised to expect. A Malay observer described them as “often drunk and disorderly, consorting openly with women of the streets.” The image of the English gentleman was shattered. And honestly, so was pretty much everything else.
Coming Home to a Wreck
Post-war Singapore was a mess. The city was dirty, broken down, and running out of everything. Food, tools, paint, machinery, clothing. Rice rationing. Bread lines. People were malnourished. Malaria was everywhere. Tuberculosis cases shot up. Most families lived in one room. Some shared open bucket toilets with other families and cooked over charcoal fires.
And then the authorities declared all the Japanese occupation currency worthless. They called it “banana money” because of the banana tree on the ten-dollar note. People who had managed to save anything during the occupation woke up with nothing. Crime, prostitution, corruption, gambling, opium smoking, wildcat strikes. It was chaos.
The British Military Administration that took over first was so incompetent and corrupt that locals nicknamed it the “Black Market Association.” They did manage to restore water and electricity. The port started operating again. But unemployment soared and the cost of living kept climbing.
Here’s the thing. The British who came back seemed to think they could just pick up where they left off. Many of them genuinely believed the old colonial world was still waiting for them. It wasn’t.
The Communist Question
While Britain had been losing the war in Malaya, Chinese Communists had been in the jungles fighting the Japanese. Effective guerrilla resistance. But once the war ended, the Communists wanted independence, and the British wanted nothing to do with them.
On the mainland, this turned into armed insurrection. In Singapore, the Communists couldn’t really hide anywhere. The island was too small, too packed with British military bases. But they didn’t need jungles. They wrapped themselves around schools, factories, clubs, and newspapers. They played on a real class divide. The Chinese-educated majority felt locked out of good jobs. Only English speakers got access to government work and higher positions. Language was as much a fault line as class.
When Mao proclaimed “we have stood up” in Beijing in 1949, many Singaporeans felt a surge of pride. They identified with the idea of liberation from both class oppression and foreign imperialism. The Communists had real appeal to people who felt forgotten.
Britain Fades, Singapore Stirs
Meanwhile, Britain itself was broke. The country had lost two-thirds of its export trade, more than a quarter of its shipping, and a fourth of its national wealth. It went from the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor. London in 1947 was described as “the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities.”
Lee Kuan Yew was studying in England during this period. He saw the decline up close. He became completely committed to breaking with Britain. The socialist idea of government intervention attracted him, but he found the emerging British welfare state offensive. Still, watching a once-great power crumble left a deep impression. He took notes.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 sealed it. When Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and Britain tried to take it back by force, the Americans shut the whole operation down within a week. Britain was no longer a global power. The so-called “Fortress Singapore” was becoming an anachronism. Not coincidentally, Britain granted Singapore self-government in 1959.
The Men in White
The People’s Action Party emerged in the late 1950s. Lee Kuan Yew led the English-speaking moderates. Lim Chin Seong, charismatic and a powerful speaker, led the left wing. The party won big in 1959 elections and Lee became the first prime minister. They wore open-collar white shirts as a symbol of clean governance. Hence, “the men in white.”
They had two priorities: nationalism and industrialization. Singapore needed everything. Water. Electricity. Housing. Schools. Roads. Docks. And what already existed needed fixing. All of this required massive foreign investment, which was hard to attract when wildcat strikes kept breaking out and Communists seemed to be lurking everywhere.
But here’s the problem. Lee and his team saw the Communists as a genuine threat. So on February 2, 1963, the eve of an election, police arrested more than a hundred leftists under the Internal Security Act. No trial. They targeted the leaders, including Lim Chin Seong. His political career ended with his imprisonment. The charge of being a Communist was never proven.
This effectively eliminated organized opposition. The PAP veered away from social justice and democracy toward authoritarianism. They argued that internal stability and economic progress justified harsh measures. Defining dissent as dangerous became a recurring pattern. Political prisoners were treated worse than convicted criminals. Constant surveillance, no personal belongings, deliberately demeaning conditions.
Perry doesn’t try to smooth this over. A former political prisoner named Tan Jing Quee later wrote: “We have been sucked into a huge historical amnesia, reading and listening to one universal narrative of our historical transition from colonial rule to nationhood. That transition, I think, was far more complex.”
Kicked Out of Malaysia
Singapore’s leaders had pushed hard for merger with Malaysia. Standing alone seemed unthinkable for such a tiny place. In 1963 they got their wish. Singapore joined the new state of Malaysia.
It lasted two years.
Malaysia’s leaders feared the Chinese population that Singapore brought to the union. A rural, agricultural, Islamic peninsula facing an urban, commercial, secular island. No cultural, political, or economic cement held the thing together. Racial tensions boiled over into actual riots in 1964.
Meanwhile, Indonesia’s Sukarno announced his aggressive “Konfrontasi” policy, dreaming of a vast Malay super-state that would absorb Malaysia, Singapore, all of Borneo, even the Philippines. He seized Singaporean fishing boats and ordered sabotage against Singapore’s port.
In August 1965, Singapore was ejected from Malaysia. Suddenly independent. No hinterland. No resources. No plan B.
A Dutch Economist and a Very Sharp Edge
So here’s what happened next. Back in 1960, the government had invited a UN team to study Singapore’s economic future. The team was led by Albert Winsemius, a Dutch economist and shipping man who had helped the Netherlands rebuild after World War II. He knew a thing or two about starting from nothing.
When Winsemius arrived, he found a “rudderless ship.” One-third of the workforce was unemployed or underemployed. He attended a forum literally titled “Can Singapore Survive?” He told Lee Kuan Yew that “Singapore is walking on a razor’s edge.” That’s the chapter title, and it wasn’t an exaggeration.
Winsemius stayed involved for nearly 25 years. His advice was practical and sometimes surprising. Keep the statue of Raffles standing. It shows the developed world that Singapore wants them as partners, not enemies. Break the “village mentality” and go global. Prepare the port for containerization, even though locals were scared of the financial risk. Start with textiles because women already knew how to use sewing machines. Move into ship repair. Then electronics. Then services like finance and tourism.
He also pushed for better labor relations. Workers on the docks were putting in 76-hour weeks. Ship repair took twice as long as in Hong Kong. In one incident, Indian workers dropped the lines on a ship being towed to dock because they refused to work more overtime. The board of inquiry made things worse by ordering their reinstatement without fixing the underlying problem. Winsemius saw this and said both sides needed to realize “they are in the same boat and therefore might well start rowing.”
So What’s the Takeaway?
This chapter covers twenty years that could have gone wrong in a hundred different ways. Singapore could have stayed a broken post-war colony. It could have fallen to Communism. It could have been absorbed into Indonesia. It could have stayed in Malaysia as a marginalized partner.
Instead, it stumbled into independence with almost nothing going for it except a good port, some smart leaders, and a willingness to take advice from anyone who had it. Lee Kuan Yew’s ambition was wild. In 1963 he was already talking about making Singapore “the New York of Malaysia.” By 1965 there was no Malaysia to be the New York of. But the ambition didn’t go away.
Perry makes clear that this period planted the seeds of both Singapore’s success and its contradictions. The economic pragmatism that would make it rich. And the authoritarianism that would make it complicated. The razor’s edge was not just about survival. It was about what kind of country Singapore would become.
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