The Impossible Nation

The morning of August 9, 1965, broke over Singapore with the peculiar stillness that precedes transformation. In the government quarters at Oxley Rise, Lee Kuan Yew sat alone in his study, the pre-dawn darkness pressing against the windows. He had slept perhaps two hours. The documents scattered across his desk—letters from Kuala Lumpur, cables from London, the unsigned Separation Agreement—testified to the frantic diplomacy of the previous seventy-two hours, negotiations that had concluded not with triumph but with an exhausted capitulation to circumstances neither side had wanted but neither could prevent. Malaysia's Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had made his calculation: eject Singapore, and the fusion of Malay political dominance with Chinese economic dynamism that had always lurked beneath the surface of the Malaysian Federation would be severed, the communal anxieties that plagued the peninsula's politics would be contained, and the larger Malay nation could proceed on its own terms. The Tunku had decided that a Muslim Malaysia was preferable to a multiracial one, and that decision would redraw the map of Southeast Asia.

Lee picked up a pen, then set it down. He would sign later, in the afternoon, before the cameras. But for now, in the solitude of his study, the weight of what had happened—and what was about to happen—settled upon him with crushing force. Singapore, the island city-state that had existed for no more than a century in its colonial form, a place that had never governed itself, that possessed no natural resources beyond its harbor and its people, that was ringed by nations and ideologies that viewed its multiracial, Anglophone, pro-Western orientation with varying degrees of hostility—all of this now fell into his hands. The question that would define his life, and the lives of nearly two million Singaporeans, was deceptively simple: how would Singapore survive?

The answer, as it would emerge over the following decades, was neither simple nor obvious. It would require the systematic construction of institutions capable of transforming a colonial entrepôt into a modern nation, the management of communal tensions that had repeatedly erupted into violence across Southeast Asia, and the cultivation of human capital in a society that had few other assets. The survival of Singapore would demand the coordination of policies across multiple domains—housing, commerce, education, legal order—each reinforcing the others in a manner that would eventually be called the Singapore Model, though at the time it was simply the desperate improvisation of a government that could not afford to fail. This book tells the story of that construction, of how Singapore built itself from nothing into something remarkable, through the systematic convergence of four governance pillars that, taken together, constitute the most coherent development strategy of the postcolonial era.

But to understand what Singapore would become, we must first confront what it was.

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In the years immediately preceding independence, Singapore was a city of contrasts so stark they seemed to belong to different centuries, if not different planets. Along the waterfront, the harbor hummed with activity—ships from every nation, cargo cranes swinging containers that would soon revolutionize global trade, the controlled chaos of a port that handled the bulk of Southeast Asia's entrepôt commerce. The colonial-era buildings of the Central Business District housed banks, trading houses, and the offices of multinational corporations whose reach extended from London to Tokyo. Singapore was already, in 1960, one of the busiest ports in the world, a testament to its geographic fortune: positioned at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, at the terminus of the Malacca Strait, the island could not be bypassed by any ship traveling between the oil fields of the Middle East and the factories of Japan.

Yet barely a mile from this gleaming waterfront, the reality of Singapore's poverty revealed itself in all its squalor. The kampongs—villages of wooden stilt houses, attap-thatched roofs, and unpaved paths winding between structures that had been constructed without architectural plan or sanitary consideration—stretched across much of the island's interior. In these settlements, water was fetched from communal taps, electricity was a luxury that many did without, and the nightsoil bucket system still served as the primary means of human waste collection well into the 1960s. When the rains came, the unpaved paths became rivers of mud; when the dry season arrived, dust choked the air and fires spread with terrifying speed through the densely packed structures. Kampong Chai Chee, in Bedok; Kampong Glam, near the city center; the countless settlements that would eventually give way to public housing estates—these were home to the majority of Singaporeans, and the conditions they faced were those of the developing world pressed into the space of a small island.

Chinatown, where the majority of Singapore's Chinese population lived in concentrated poverty, presented a particular tableau of deprivation. The shophouses that lined its narrow streets—two or three stories of weathered brick, their ground floors given over to commerce and their upper floors to cramped, inadequately ventilated living spaces—were home to multiple families, sometimes to multiple generations, in arrangements that offered no privacy and little dignity. A single room might house a family of five; a single floor might house a dozen families, sharing toilets and cooking facilities in conditions that would have violated any reasonable standard of habitability. Tuberculosis rates in these districts were among the highest in Asia; infant mortality followed similar patterns. The smells of Chinatown—overripe fruit, fish sauce, human waste, the acrid smoke of charcoal stoves—were the smells of poverty in its most concentrated form.

Into this landscape of deprivation came the additional pressures of communal tension. Singapore's population in 1965 was approximately 1.9 million people, divided among three major ethnic communities whose relationship to the island, to each other, and to the wider region was fraught with historical grievance and present anxiety. The Chinese, who constituted roughly 75 percent of the population, were themselves divided by dialect—Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, and others—each dialect group carrying its own associations, its own economic niches, its own memories of the circumstances that had brought them to these shores. The Malays, who made up about 15 percent of the population, viewed themselves as the indigenous people of the region, their relationship to the land predating the Chinese immigration that had transformed the island over the preceding century and a half. The Indians, who constituted perhaps 9 percent, were themselves divided by religion—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian—language—Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi, Gujarati—and caste, a system of social stratification that transplanted itself across the ocean along with the laborers who had come to build the colonial economy. Each community possessed its own institutions, its own associations, its own sense of what it meant to be Malay, Chinese, or Indian in Singapore.

The potential for conflict was never far from the surface. In September 1964, communal riots had erupted between Chinese and Malays, leaving 23 dead and hundreds injured, a reminder that the harmony Singapore's government would later claim as a foundational achievement was neither natural nor inevitable. The riots had been sparked by a Malay Muslim procession celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday—a procession that encountered a group of Chinese spectators, and from that encounter, violence had spread through the streets with the speed of a fire finding dry kindling. The underlying tensions—economic competition, cultural friction, the resentment of