Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 7 Part 1 - Kicked Out and Starting From Scratch
On August 9, 1965, Lee Kuan Yew went on TV, cried, and told Singapore it was now a country. Not because they wanted to be. Because Malaysia kicked them out.
Perry opens Chapter VII with one of the wildest origin stories any nation has. Singapore didn’t fight for independence. It got dumped. As one observer put it, Singapore is “the only nation I know of that was kicked out into freedom and nationhood.” Lee himself later called it being “turfed out.” That’s the chapter title.
The reason was racial math. Malaysia’s leaders feared the Chinese population Singapore brought into the union would tip the political balance. After just two years of merger, the Tunku said enough.
A Heart Without a Body
Lee described the newly independent city-state as “a heart without a body.” No hinterland. No natural resources. Half the size of Hong Kong. Over a million people who needed jobs. And neighbors who weren’t exactly friendly.
Here’s the thing. Singapore had no history of being a nation. No independence heroes. The national anthem was still in Malay. People didn’t think of themselves as “Singaporean.” Minister Rajaratnam had to practically beg: “If you think of yourself as Chinese, Malays, Indians and Sri Lankans, then Singapore will collapse.”
Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1969 that a sovereign city-state was simply too small to survive in the modern world. What Toynbee didn’t foresee was container shipping. That single innovation would reshape global trade and hand Singapore one of the biggest advantages in its history.
Lee said he was privately pessimistic but publicly optimistic. He looked at Taiwan and Hong Kong and thought, if those Chinese maritime communities can make it, so can we. But he also used the crisis brilliantly. The vulnerability theme, the idea that Singapore could fail at any moment, became a permanent feature of the national story.
Goh Builds Jurong
If Lee was the face and voice of Singapore, Goh Keng Swee was the brain behind the economy. Perry’s physical description of Goh is almost comically unflattering: “spatulate nose sprawling over the lower part of his face, not much chin, and protruding Adam’s apple.” Terrible public speaker. Droned in English.
But here’s the problem with judging people by their stage presence. Goh was probably the most capable person in Singapore’s entire government. Lee called him “the thinker, whereas I was the executor” and in the same breath “my trouble shooter.”
In 1961, while Singapore was still a colony, Goh launched what critics called “Goh’s Folly.” He took nine thousand acres of swamp and tussock in Jurong, displaced a Malay fishing village, and started building an industrial park. Nobody thought it would work. A foreign observer in 1967 described Jurong as “windswept emptiness.”
Within three years, fifty enterprises had set up there, creating five thousand jobs. The initial focus was steel, shipbuilding, and shipbreaking. Lee wanted a huge steel plant because in the 1960s, steel production was the universal status symbol for developing nations. Every country wanted one, even if they couldn’t actually run one. Singapore’s version had problems and eventually shrank to modest dimensions under UN guidance. But the learning curve was real, and foreign investors noticed the hustle.
Strategic Pragmatism
Singapore’s leaders were obsessed with Israel. A small nation surrounded by hostile neighbors, surviving by its wits. Goh visited in 1959 and met Israeli economist E. J. Mayer, who gave Lee advice that became the entire national playbook: “If you are surrounded by neighbors who don’t want or need your products, you must leapfrog them economically so that they will come to need your products.”
Forget the immediate region. Go long distance. Build ties with Japan, the US, and Europe.
The Economic Development Board became the engine of this strategy. They recruited foreign investors with insane levels of service. When Hewlett-Packard came looking for a place to make computer components, the board found them land, labor, and handled every bureaucratic detail. HP executives marveled that “if you asked them about something, it would be on your desk the next day.”
My favorite story from this section: William Hewlett was visiting the new offices on the top floors of a six-story building. The transformer to power the elevator hadn’t arrived. So the board rigged a cable from a neighboring building to supply power. Hewlett rode the elevator. The cable was never used again. HP eventually grew to employ six thousand locals.
The government also declared war on corruption by paying cabinet ministers more than a million dollars annually, probably the highest government salaries in the world. The logic: high salaries reduce temptation and attract top talent. Perry notes the contrast with Imperial China, where officials were expected to spend year one paying off patrons, year two enjoying perks, and year three collecting enough for retirement.
Economist Edgar Schein called Singapore’s approach “strategic pragmatism”: solving immediate problems while fitting those solutions into a longer-range plan.
A New Schoolhouse
Education reform was a mess of languages. The British had set up schools for four ethnic groups, but within those groups were dozens of dialects. Indians alone spoke Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, and more.
The solution was bilingual education. Everyone learns two languages, one of which is always English. Chinese students also learn Mandarin even if they speak Hokkien or Cantonese at home. The expectation was that dialects would fade away. For some older people, this was devastating. Grandparents who only spoke a dialect could no longer talk to grandchildren raised on Mandarin and English.
Then there’s Singlish. This local patois mixes Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and English into something genuinely creative. “Buay tahan” combines Hokkien (“cannot”) with Malay (“tolerate”). The government hates it. A satirical website called Talking Cock responded with The Coxford Singlish Dictionary. But when two young Singaporeans meet abroad, they slip right into it.
Perry makes a sharp observation here. The government loves the rhetoric of creativity but distrusts the real thing. Singlish is the tension between national identity and global ambition in spoken form.
Lion of the Lion City
Lee Kuan Yew titled the first volume of his memoirs The Singapore Story. Not modesty, that. Time magazine called him a twentieth-century philosopher king. Perry notes a critic might say “more king than philosopher,” which made me laugh.
The portrait Perry draws is fascinating. Lee grew up with separated parents, was unusually close to his mother, studied at Cambridge and LSE, and cultivated the persona of an upper-class English gentleman who drank Chivas and played golf. Everyone called him “Harry.” Zhou Enlai supposedly dismissed him as a “banana,” yellow outside, white inside. But Perry says “egg” is more accurate. Lee never forgot his Chinese core.
He was ruthless about it, too. “Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” Richard Nixon wrote that in a different time or place, Lee could have been Churchill. A Japanese diplomat offered a more ambiguous take: “Too big for his country.”
Lee’s nation-building was top-down and comprehensive. He sent botanists around the world to find plants that could survive Singapore’s tropical climate. The road from airport to city center was designed to look like a park because he wanted foreign investors to see greenery and invest money. Fruit trees were rejected for road dividers because fallen fruit might cause traffic accidents. Practicality always won.
Housing was perhaps the biggest transformation. Singapore’s slums after World War I were reportedly “the worst in the world.” The government demolished them, relocated people to high-rise estates, and engineered ethnic diversity within each community. People didn’t get a vote. “We decide what is right,” Lee declared on National Day 1986. Malays missed their kampongs. Rules in the new flats prohibited throwing garbage out windows, urinating in elevators, and walking around naked at home. Failure to flush a public toilet carried a stiff fine. Lee requested weekly reports on Changi airport’s toilets.
The president of the Restroom Association of Singapore said it best: “Toilet etiquette reflects Singaporean culture.” And that sentence, more than any other in this chapter, captures the very specific brand of nation-building Perry is describing. Comfort and control, tightly wrapped together.
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