China, friend or foe to Singapore? How a wily Lee Kuan Yew made it both in building his nation
- Beijing has largely been seen as a hindrance to the Singaporean statesman’s efforts to construct a country after World War II
- But a new paper by Taiwanese scholar Philip Liu argues Lee and China had a tacit understanding that pragmatic cooperation trumped ideological divides
It has widely been believed that Lee and his People’s Action Party (PAP) wanted to create Singapore’s own multiracial national identity, and therefore downplayed overseas “Chineseness” to persuade Chinese-educated Singaporeans to buy into the national consciousness.
By establishing English as Singapore’s common language, Lee created a national identity separate from that of China. Lee said he understood that “the PRC aimed to increase the loyalty of the overseas Chinese to Beijing”, so when he visited China for the first time in 1976, all meetings were conducted in English “to avoid any suspicion that Singapore was influenced by kinship ties with China”.
But Lee was a Straits Chinese, whose identity was usually situational, and thus he was not necessarily always opposed to invoking a Chinese identity, especially for commercial gain.
He said of business opportunities in China: “We would be foolish not to use the ethnic Chinese network to increase our reach and our grasp.”
The PAP government meanwhile encouraged enterprises “to exploit their dual identity as ethnic Chinese and Singaporean”.
