Leninism, Asian Culture and Singapore (Part 7) posted on Monday, December 20, 2004
The network of trust is an informal and diffuse entity. It has no
membership registers, holds no meetings and keeps no files. It is just
a group of connected people who have some mutual interest in promoting
each other's career, very much in the spirit of free enterprise. While
the network has some similarity to the party cell structure, it cannot
be described as a party or movement as its members do not necessarily
share a common ideology. There is nothing sinister in a government
wanting a support group of like minded people, but why has the network
of trust not been formally established and incorporated into the
People's Action Party? Probably an informal structure was found to be
better, since organizations can become static and obstructive. If I
have a job to do, I just ask around and look at the names people I
know give me, and choose one that looks best.
Traditionally, Chinese people have a deep suspicion of governments and
ideology, since in their experiendce every government turns out to be
a bad government in the end (just like the Mayflower puritans had to
move to the new world to get away from bad governments everywhere in
the old). While Chinese entrepreneurs take readily to the rampant
individualism of the Americans, they do not share the same enthusiasm
for community organizations, which require a belief in law and
ideology. To the Chinese, laws are just methods rulers use to extract
money from the people and to make life hard for enemies, and
ideologies are just nice stories to trick followers. In their eyes,
political parties are just a cut above street gangs and kungfu
societies, as the Taiwan members of parliament who regularly get into
fist fights would readily illustrate.
The book "Tiger and Trojan Horse" by Dennis Bloodworth records another
one of those deadly serious yet near comical episodes: a senior PAP
official was found to be a communist spy, and a junior minister was
shown to be aware of this all along without reporting it. When
confronted with this apparent betrayal of the Party, he said to Lee
Kuan Yew: "If I reported him I would be an untrustworthy person to
you. A man who betrays a close friend would betray anyone." His
explanation was accepted and he was allowed to keep his job. To a
Chinese, even a highly western educated Chinese, personal loyalty
above party discipline and ideological commitment is perfectly sound,
provided of course he can depend on the personal loyalty to himself.
It is therefore no wonder that, as the country became more wealthy
under the PAP government, the party organization has all but lost its
identity as a political party. It has ceased to have a party ideology
that is distinct from the policies of the government, and its members
at large, just a few thousand in a citizen body of 3 million, play
almost no part in policy initiation. In theory, the party can tell its
members of parliament how to vote, and if it so chooses, can bring
down the government by causing MPs to pass a vote of no confidence,
but the chance of this actually happening is zero because there is
literally nobody in the party with the influence to make any decisions
other than those in the government itself. The leaders, the
government, the important national institutions, and the country as a
whole are so closely identified with each other that it is difficult
to oppose one without coming under suspicion of being also opposed to
the others; being against what policies the PAP has worked out for the
country is almost automatically considered unpatriotic. Further, given
the career situation, it is easy to believe that the government and
its network of trust encompass the best educated and most able people
of Singapore; to oppose all these must mark one as a disgruntled
incompetent or a deliberate spoilsport, motivated by alien thinking.
The idea of several political partiesof equal legitimacy competing for
power as alternative governments, seems very remote from reality.
Physically the People's Action Party continues to have an
organizational infrastructure. In each MP's electorate there is a
Party office that runs child care centres and other community
services, hears voter grievances, and organizes occasional election
campaigns. There is a central executive committee comprising of the
top leaders, elected by the 1000 or so cadre members, who are
themselves appointed from the ordinary members by the leaders, a
circular process that Goh Keng Swee, a former deputy prime minister,
compared to "Pope chooses cardinals, and cardinals elect Pope". But
these structures are all just appendages to the government, acting as
the leadership group requires them to.
Most significantly, the Party is no longer the structure through which
individuals sharing its beliefs put in work to advance their political
careers, with the hope of being nominated to stand for Parliament. In
the recent elections, few of the candidates were party activists in
the traditional sense. Instead, like a company headhunting for senior
executives, the leaders identified suitable individuals who have
already made successful careers in various spheres and invited them to
join the Party. They were then put through a process of induction and
participation in community services in particular electorates, before
being nominated as candidates in the next general election. They were
almost to a man (few female candidates were found) well educated,
usually possessing overseas degrees, with an increasing number of past
government cadets being brought in recently. Several of the more
successful members have since been appointed to the cabinet, including
the current Deputy Prime Minister, Brigadier General Lee Hsian Loong,
the elder son of Lee Kuan Yew, who has a Cambridge 1st Class Honours
degree in Mathematics which he took on an armed forces scholarship.
The process of younger people being introduced into government has
been called PAP's political renewal, but it seems to be renewal to a
very set pattern. Political career is now viewed as an extension of a
normal career, like promotion in a company from operational staff to
executive, instead of an alternative calling for people with
particularly political interests. There is of course nothing wrong
with the idea that only well educated and already successful persons
should run the country, but the set pattern does raise the question
"is there any other way to succeed?" If one is not selected as a
government cadet at 18, does not have an Oxbridge/Ivy League degree
and is not plugged into the network at an early stage, will there be
any opportunity in life of reaching high places at all? In theory, any
school child has the chance to do well at A Level examinations and
qualify for a government cadetship. In practice, the chance of a child
from a wealthy or upper middle class family is very much greater. Its
parents can afford to hire domestic tutors, have a home library, buy
computers and take the child on frequent overseas trips to widen their
exposure. Whereas the better off children are whisked to school in
cars by parents, or in some cases by family chauffeurs, poorer
children spend long periods of time each day travelling by public
transport or walking. They do their homework in cramped and noisy
homes, sometimes in the shops and hawker centres where their parents
work as there is nobody at home to keep an eye on them, whereas
wealthy families hire Filipino maids to take care of the children's
needs. Given an already unequal competition for better examination
results, it could only make many parents even more upset that from
1990 onwards, a number of the top schools were privatized, and began
to charge higher fees to pay for nicer campuses and better facilities.
While wealthy parents have no problem affording these, average and
lower middle class parents, who earn a little too much to qualify for
tuition fee assistance from the government, find these a significant
burden.
In school privatization, the government was following its philosophy
of "user pays", so that market forces regulate supply and demand. If
something like going to elite schools is desirable, then higher costs
control the demand and ensure that only those genuinely benefitting
from it would use it, while other schools are encouraged to strive for
the same status, thus enhancing supply. the same principle is applied
to medical services: charges for the better wards of government
hospitals were raised towards market levels, and full medical benefits
for public sector employees were reduced so that users share the cost
and take the responsibility of insuring themselves. Under the same
philosophy, the government strenuously refuses to introduce welfare
measures such as old age pension, unemployment insurance or child
endowment, for fear of reducing the incentive to work and encouraging
undesirable behaviours, such as children not taking care of aging
parents, illegitimate childbirth by teenage mothers, etc.
However justified, all this was taking place while the budget surplus
was increasing to ever higher levels, giving people the impression of
"greediness", though to be fair, perhaps the motivation is not so much
the money itself as the power it brings: the accumulated reserves make
Singapore an important financial player and investor in the
international scene, well out of proportion to the size of the
country. In the mean time, the recycling of the surplus through the
banking system further bloated liquidity, encouraging the banks to
generously lend money for home and automobile purchase, resulting in
rapidly inflating prices particularly in the years 1992 to 1995, to
the joy of the "have" and the anger of the "have not", another
division between "us" and "them".
Again it is no wonder that, as this feeling of "us" versus "them", the
feeling that if you are not "in" at an early stage, then you are "out"
for life, that you will not have much of a voice in anything because
"they" control everything, gets more deeply entrenched, there has been
a steady drop in the voting percentages for the government at general
elections over the past 20 years, even as the country scores more and
bigger economic successes. During the 70s, PAP achieved clean sweeps
in election after election, with some 80% of the national vote at one
point. In 1984 the percentage fell to 65. Earlier in 1981, Anson
became the first electorate to return an opposition party member in
over a decade. In a by-election, a small practice lawyer leading a
small Workers' Party decisively defeated the well educated technocrat
fielded by the PAP. Among the things that swayed the voters, it was
noted that the PAP candidate had spent little time in the district and
came only a few times for election rallies, driving his expensive
European saloon, while the opposition candidate diligently went from
house to house canvassing votes. A new era had dawned, in which the
voters need to be courted, even by a government with such a long and
successful record of delivering the goods.
The voters have no serious interest in the opposition parties as the
alternative government. There is certainly no perception that these
parties would be better at governing Singapore, nor that they have any
chance of defeating the PAP and forming the next government in a
general election. Going with the governing system provides such great
career advantages that, unless there is a very strong ideological
motivation, which the Chinese people rarely have, a well qualified
person with high career ambitions would have real difficulty
justifying a decision to join an opposition party. The few opposition
candidates that won elections usually performed poorly in debates and
parliamentary manoeuvres. Nor were they obviously effective in
delivering community and municipal services to their electoral
districts, and opposition party cohesion is little present either
within each or between them, with regular party switching by prominent
opposition figures.
Producing a common programme has been near impossible, and it is
difficult to come up with any kind of meaningful opposition party
ideology, partly because it is difficult to identify a government
party ideology to oppose. There is a governing ideology of course
-Maintain tight control; Develop the economy; Share the wealth with
those who help you - but it is hard to see how anyone running or
political office and seeking power could be against that. The
opposition side is usually reduced to vague mutterings of "too much
control is bad", hardly a resounding platform for mass mobilization.
With no ideological commitment to speak of, it is also natural that
voters that want to cast their votes against the government show no
significant loyalty to particular opposition parties. Within the same
electorate, a party that did reasonably well in one election could do
very poorly in the next, merely because another opposition party joins
the contest and puts up an apparently more attractive candidate. The
main motivation for voting with the opposition is simply to have an
opposition. In other words, the votes are not so much "gained" by the
opposition as merely "lost" by the PAP, in a basically negative show
of frustration and protest.
--
7. Would You Join My Party?
The network of trust is an informal and diffuse entity. It has no
membership registers, holds no meetings and keeps no files. It is just
a group of connected people who have some mutual interest in promoting
each other's career, very much in the spirit of free enterprise. While
the network has some similarity to the party cell structure, it cannot
be described as a party or movement as its members do not necessarily
share a common ideology. There is nothing sinister in a government
wanting a support group of like minded people, but why has the network
of trust not been formally established and incorporated into the
People's Action Party? Probably an informal structure was found to be
better, since organizations can become static and obstructive. If I
have a job to do, I just ask around and look at the names people I
know give me, and choose one that looks best.
Traditionally, Chinese people have a deep suspicion of governments and
ideology, since in their experiendce every government turns out to be
a bad government in the end (just like the Mayflower puritans had to
move to the new world to get away from bad governments everywhere in
the old). While Chinese entrepreneurs take readily to the rampant
individualism of the Americans, they do not share the same enthusiasm
for community organizations, which require a belief in law and
ideology. To the Chinese, laws are just methods rulers use to extract
money from the people and to make life hard for enemies, and
ideologies are just nice stories to trick followers. In their eyes,
political parties are just a cut above street gangs and kungfu
societies, as the Taiwan members of parliament who regularly get into
fist fights would readily illustrate.
The book "Tiger and Trojan Horse" by Dennis Bloodworth records another
one of those deadly serious yet near comical episodes: a senior PAP
official was found to be a communist spy, and a junior minister was
shown to be aware of this all along without reporting it. When
confronted with this apparent betrayal of the Party, he said to Lee
Kuan Yew: "If I reported him I would be an untrustworthy person to
you. A man who betrays a close friend would betray anyone." His
explanation was accepted and he was allowed to keep his job. To a
Chinese, even a highly western educated Chinese, personal loyalty
above party discipline and ideological commitment is perfectly sound,
provided of course he can depend on the personal loyalty to himself.
It is therefore no wonder that, as the country became more wealthy
under the PAP government, the party organization has all but lost its
identity as a political party. It has ceased to have a party ideology
that is distinct from the policies of the government, and its members
at large, just a few thousand in a citizen body of 3 million, play
almost no part in policy initiation. In theory, the party can tell its
members of parliament how to vote, and if it so chooses, can bring
down the government by causing MPs to pass a vote of no confidence,
but the chance of this actually happening is zero because there is
literally nobody in the party with the influence to make any decisions
other than those in the government itself. The leaders, the
government, the important national institutions, and the country as a
whole are so closely identified with each other that it is difficult
to oppose one without coming under suspicion of being also opposed to
the others; being against what policies the PAP has worked out for the
country is almost automatically considered unpatriotic. Further, given
the career situation, it is easy to believe that the government and
its network of trust encompass the best educated and most able people
of Singapore; to oppose all these must mark one as a disgruntled
incompetent or a deliberate spoilsport, motivated by alien thinking.
The idea of several political partiesof equal legitimacy competing for
power as alternative governments, seems very remote from reality.
Physically the People's Action Party continues to have an
organizational infrastructure. In each MP's electorate there is a
Party office that runs child care centres and other community
services, hears voter grievances, and organizes occasional election
campaigns. There is a central executive committee comprising of the
top leaders, elected by the 1000 or so cadre members, who are
themselves appointed from the ordinary members by the leaders, a
circular process that Goh Keng Swee, a former deputy prime minister,
compared to "Pope chooses cardinals, and cardinals elect Pope". But
these structures are all just appendages to the government, acting as
the leadership group requires them to.
Most significantly, the Party is no longer the structure through which
individuals sharing its beliefs put in work to advance their political
careers, with the hope of being nominated to stand for Parliament. In
the recent elections, few of the candidates were party activists in
the traditional sense. Instead, like a company headhunting for senior
executives, the leaders identified suitable individuals who have
already made successful careers in various spheres and invited them to
join the Party. They were then put through a process of induction and
participation in community services in particular electorates, before
being nominated as candidates in the next general election. They were
almost to a man (few female candidates were found) well educated,
usually possessing overseas degrees, with an increasing number of past
government cadets being brought in recently. Several of the more
successful members have since been appointed to the cabinet, including
the current Deputy Prime Minister, Brigadier General Lee Hsian Loong,
the elder son of Lee Kuan Yew, who has a Cambridge 1st Class Honours
degree in Mathematics which he took on an armed forces scholarship.
The process of younger people being introduced into government has
been called PAP's political renewal, but it seems to be renewal to a
very set pattern. Political career is now viewed as an extension of a
normal career, like promotion in a company from operational staff to
executive, instead of an alternative calling for people with
particularly political interests. There is of course nothing wrong
with the idea that only well educated and already successful persons
should run the country, but the set pattern does raise the question
"is there any other way to succeed?" If one is not selected as a
government cadet at 18, does not have an Oxbridge/Ivy League degree
and is not plugged into the network at an early stage, will there be
any opportunity in life of reaching high places at all? In theory, any
school child has the chance to do well at A Level examinations and
qualify for a government cadetship. In practice, the chance of a child
from a wealthy or upper middle class family is very much greater. Its
parents can afford to hire domestic tutors, have a home library, buy
computers and take the child on frequent overseas trips to widen their
exposure. Whereas the better off children are whisked to school in
cars by parents, or in some cases by family chauffeurs, poorer
children spend long periods of time each day travelling by public
transport or walking. They do their homework in cramped and noisy
homes, sometimes in the shops and hawker centres where their parents
work as there is nobody at home to keep an eye on them, whereas
wealthy families hire Filipino maids to take care of the children's
needs. Given an already unequal competition for better examination
results, it could only make many parents even more upset that from
1990 onwards, a number of the top schools were privatized, and began
to charge higher fees to pay for nicer campuses and better facilities.
While wealthy parents have no problem affording these, average and
lower middle class parents, who earn a little too much to qualify for
tuition fee assistance from the government, find these a significant
burden.
In school privatization, the government was following its philosophy
of "user pays", so that market forces regulate supply and demand. If
something like going to elite schools is desirable, then higher costs
control the demand and ensure that only those genuinely benefitting
from it would use it, while other schools are encouraged to strive for
the same status, thus enhancing supply. the same principle is applied
to medical services: charges for the better wards of government
hospitals were raised towards market levels, and full medical benefits
for public sector employees were reduced so that users share the cost
and take the responsibility of insuring themselves. Under the same
philosophy, the government strenuously refuses to introduce welfare
measures such as old age pension, unemployment insurance or child
endowment, for fear of reducing the incentive to work and encouraging
undesirable behaviours, such as children not taking care of aging
parents, illegitimate childbirth by teenage mothers, etc.
However justified, all this was taking place while the budget surplus
was increasing to ever higher levels, giving people the impression of
"greediness", though to be fair, perhaps the motivation is not so much
the money itself as the power it brings: the accumulated reserves make
Singapore an important financial player and investor in the
international scene, well out of proportion to the size of the
country. In the mean time, the recycling of the surplus through the
banking system further bloated liquidity, encouraging the banks to
generously lend money for home and automobile purchase, resulting in
rapidly inflating prices particularly in the years 1992 to 1995, to
the joy of the "have" and the anger of the "have not", another
division between "us" and "them".
Again it is no wonder that, as this feeling of "us" versus "them", the
feeling that if you are not "in" at an early stage, then you are "out"
for life, that you will not have much of a voice in anything because
"they" control everything, gets more deeply entrenched, there has been
a steady drop in the voting percentages for the government at general
elections over the past 20 years, even as the country scores more and
bigger economic successes. During the 70s, PAP achieved clean sweeps
in election after election, with some 80% of the national vote at one
point. In 1984 the percentage fell to 65. Earlier in 1981, Anson
became the first electorate to return an opposition party member in
over a decade. In a by-election, a small practice lawyer leading a
small Workers' Party decisively defeated the well educated technocrat
fielded by the PAP. Among the things that swayed the voters, it was
noted that the PAP candidate had spent little time in the district and
came only a few times for election rallies, driving his expensive
European saloon, while the opposition candidate diligently went from
house to house canvassing votes. A new era had dawned, in which the
voters need to be courted, even by a government with such a long and
successful record of delivering the goods.
The voters have no serious interest in the opposition parties as the
alternative government. There is certainly no perception that these
parties would be better at governing Singapore, nor that they have any
chance of defeating the PAP and forming the next government in a
general election. Going with the governing system provides such great
career advantages that, unless there is a very strong ideological
motivation, which the Chinese people rarely have, a well qualified
person with high career ambitions would have real difficulty
justifying a decision to join an opposition party. The few opposition
candidates that won elections usually performed poorly in debates and
parliamentary manoeuvres. Nor were they obviously effective in
delivering community and municipal services to their electoral
districts, and opposition party cohesion is little present either
within each or between them, with regular party switching by prominent
opposition figures.
Producing a common programme has been near impossible, and it is
difficult to come up with any kind of meaningful opposition party
ideology, partly because it is difficult to identify a government
party ideology to oppose. There is a governing ideology of course
-Maintain tight control; Develop the economy; Share the wealth with
those who help you - but it is hard to see how anyone running or
political office and seeking power could be against that. The
opposition side is usually reduced to vague mutterings of "too much
control is bad", hardly a resounding platform for mass mobilization.
With no ideological commitment to speak of, it is also natural that
voters that want to cast their votes against the government show no
significant loyalty to particular opposition parties. Within the same
electorate, a party that did reasonably well in one election could do
very poorly in the next, merely because another opposition party joins
the contest and puts up an apparently more attractive candidate. The
main motivation for voting with the opposition is simply to have an
opposition. In other words, the votes are not so much "gained" by the
opposition as merely "lost" by the PAP, in a basically negative show
of frustration and protest.
--