[lbo-talk] Singapore

[James Heartfield]

Singapore is a very interesting place. My father-in-law was sent there in the 1950s to put down the Communists. They gave him a picture of Chin Peng and another of Lee Kuan Yew with orders to shoot on sight. There are some good books that tell the story of how the Communist movement among the Chinese (the Island is split between Chinese and Malays) turned into a kind of nationalist, and eventually capitalistic movement when Lee Kuan Yew betrayed his allies on the Island, and clashed with those in Indonesia and Malaysia. The best history I've read is by John Dugdale (I think I've remembered that right).

As he tells it in his memoirs Lee Kuan Yew coped with the Island's isolation after he clashed with the Indonesians and Malays by turning it from an Entrepot economy (like Hong Kong) into a manufacturing one.

I wrote about it in passing in this paper http://independent.academia.edu/JamesHeartfield/Papers/144626/Chinas_Comprador_Capitalism_is_Coming_Home