The Ruling Elite of Singapore

Networks of Power and Influence

Michael D. Barr

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Parteien

Michael Barr explores the complex and covert networks of power at work in one of the world's most prosperous countries - the city-state of Singapore. He argues that the contemporary networks of power are a deliberate project initiated and managed by Lee Kuan Yew - former prime minister and Singapore's 'founding father' - designed to empower himself and his family. Barr identifies the crucial institutions of power - including the country's sovereign wealth funds, and the government-linked companies - together with five critical features that form the key to understanding the nature of the networks. He provides an assessment of possible shifts of power within the elite in the wake of Lee Kuan Yew's son, Lee Hsien Loong, assuming power, and considers the possibility of a more fundamental democratic shift in Singapore's political system.

Chapter 1

Introduction

What is an ‘elite’? The dictionary defines it as ‘A group of people considered to be the best in a particular society or category, especially because of their power, talent or wealth’. I shall be talking about the elite in a society or a country, meaning the core group of people who occupy key positions of power and influence, and set the direction for the whole society and country.

Lee Hsien Loong, 19 March 2005¹

In our present context, it is essential to rear a generation at the very top of society that has all the qualities needed to lead and give people the inspiration and the drive to make it succeed. In short, the elite….

Every society tries to produce this type. The British have special schools for them: the gifted and talented are sent to Eton and Harrow and a few very exclusive private schools which they call ‘public schools’; after that they go to Oxford and Cambridge. And they have legends which say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

The Australians too are trying to achieve this. Recently, Prince Charles went to this school at Geelong, which is their equivalent where they try to build the complete Australian with great vitality, outdoor life, and resourcefulness, so that when caught in the bush, the new Australian will learn how to survive, and he will have great qualities of discipline and heart. That is our ideal….

The government at the moment – the whole of the Administration – is running on the ability, drive and dedication of about 150 people…. Whoever wants to destroy our society need only identify these 150 people and kill them; then the push will be gone. This represents a very thin crust of leadership. Therefore it has to be enlarged quickly but systematically….

Social organisation is analogous to military organisation. One battalion comprises of over 60 to 70 Officers, 100 to 200 corporals, and about 500 privates. This hierarchy must be. This is life….

This pyramidal structure of top leaders, good executives, well-disciplined and highly civic-conscious broad mass can only be produced by our education system.

Lee Kuan Yew, 29 August 1966²

The Republic of Singapore was born on 9 August 1965 through a formal act of separation from the Federation of Malaysia. Much of the population greeted it with fireworks in the streets,³ but Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew greeted it with tears that were immortalised by the television cameras.⁴ This historic moment was followed by a short-term breakdown of his health and mental equilibrium, which took months to fully recover.⁵ A year later, however, Lee had faced his demons and survived. Singapore was starting to look as if it might survive too – a prospect that appeared remote to many observers at the end of 1965, when it seemed more likely that Singapore would have to seek re-entry into Malaysia on humiliating terms.⁶ It was in this environment – on 29 August 1966, just after the first National Day celebrations (which were more an act of defiance than a real celebration) – that Lee delivered a seminal speech, excerpts of which are given at the opening of this chapter. It was just a speech to school principals, but it set down the fundamental principles on which Singapore’s national ideology and foundational mythology were to rest. Lee promised a hierarchical and unashamedly elitist society, the harsh edges of which were justified at least in the immediate future by the urgent need to work for Singapore’s survival.

One of the striking things in that speech is the reference to the 150 or so men on whom Singapore was dependent in the first years of her independence. Lee described this as a ‘very thin crust of leadership’ and declared his intention to enlarge it ‘quickly, but systematically’. The rest of the speech was leading to this point.

It is just possible that Lee was exaggerating the thinness of the crust of leadership at that time, but subsequent events suggest that he was deadly serious about using the education system to enlarge it, and to do so without compromising the strictly hierarchical and quasi-military conception of social organisation that the speech also revealed as being central to his social cognition. That speech to school principals in August 1966 is important to this book because it provided the blueprint for producing the elite that has ruled Singapore since independence and which has formed its only fully autonomous network of power. It was very much a blueprint of Lee’s own making, generated, as I have argued elsewhere, from his experiences growing up as the talented eldest son in a relatively well-off Singapore Chinese family and educated in institutions that were steeped in a consciousness of hierarchy and elitism. Furthermore, the combination of his supportive mother and his own remarkable academic triumphs at school and university imbibed in him a firm conviction that he belonged to the top echelon of his society’s hierarchy.⁷ These were very personal convictions, based ultimately on personal experiences. Insofar as his vision had any academic formation, it came as a young adult from his reading of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, which was all the rage while he was studying law at Cambridge University after the war. Toynbee’s primary role in the Lee Kuan Yew story was to provide a rationale for his pre-existing elitist impulses, but it also shaped his expectation of what elements serve to invigorate and re-invigorate dominant elites. Toynbee explained civilisational change through a theory of challenge and response, which posited that an established elite eventually loses its ‘creativity’ and then its end comes sooner or later because it begins meeting challenges to which it cannot adapt and with which it cannot cope. It is then inevitably superseded by a new, fresh elite. Lee was not interested in the fatalistic elements of this theory, but he became obsessed with its messages about elite regeneration.⁸ He latched onto the promises of Toynbee’s challenge and response thesis whereby until elites reach their fatal point they can rejuvenate themselves by successfully and creatively responding to serious and even existential challenges. Inspired by Toynbee, Lee became a firm believer in a pattern of behaviour whereby ruling elites can perpetually transform themselves to stay relevant and can continuously replenish their ranks to avoid the ruptures of regime change, but only for as long as they can keep themselves sharp, nimble and ‘creative’ through successfully facing and coping with new challenges.⁹

Lee’s selective reading of Toynbee had a direct impact on the subsequent pattern by which he built Singapore’s networks of power and influence. Firstly, he became Singapore’s Jeremiah, identifying challenges and threats with monotonous regularity over his first few decades in government so there would be a ready supply of ‘challenges’. Secondly, he came to focus an extraordinary amount of his attention on the selection and grooming of the next generation of leaders, on the assumption that keeping the elite ever-young and ‘creative’ was a key to smooth generational transfers of power. In fact, it would not be an understatement to say that he became fixated on the dynamics of elite regeneration, looking always for the mechanism that would guarantee the smooth passing of the baton to a new generation. And in his mind it was unambiguously regeneration that he pursued – not merely perpetuation of rule by a clique and certainly not replacement by a rival elite. Hence, Lee’s attention to elite education, elite selection and social engineering more broadly hinged on his presumption of a creative elite’s almost-infinite capacity to adapt to new challenges and new environments, and was driven by his fear of the ruptures that would follow an episode of elite failure. Yet beneath all the rhetorical flourishes and genuflections to theory, his was essentially a practical politician’s appreciation of elitism. I am not aware of any evidence that Lee ever read the great twentieth-century theorists of elitism such as Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, but even if he had, their complacent acceptance of social disruptions and regime change as essential elements of elite dynamics would have held no appeal.¹⁰ Toynbee, however, spoke a language Lee understood (or thought he did). He formed government in Singapore about a decade after he read Toynbee and according to his colleague Goh Keng Swee, he proceeded to cite Toynbee’s challenge and response thesis from the earliest Cabinet meetings.¹¹

The problem for Lee was that his aim of keeping the elite ever-young and creative conflicted with his natural propensity towards autocratic behaviour and surrounding himself with yes men. His autocratic style was a deep-set aspect of his personality and it had a much more powerful impact on his behaviour as a practical politician than any theory he might have read in a book. Even in school he had few friends his own age, but tended to surround himself with younger boys he could dominate.¹² This propensity to encourage adulation from juniors developed into a nearly fatal flaw in his early years in politics. Before he came to power, the party faithful used to cringe at the openly fawning attention that Lee accepted from his Parliamentary Secretary, Chan Sun Wing. As the authors of Men in White wrote after interviewing old timers from the 1950s:

Such was [Chan’s] influence in the corridors of power that he aroused much envy and resentment among his party colleagues. He was derided as Lee’s blue-eyed boy, favourite and protégé. He was labelled a sycophant for dashing down the City Hall steps every morning to greet Lee when he arrived for work.¹³

This power relationship must have appealed to Lee because he put Chan in charge of organising both the People’s Action Party (PAP) branches and the People’s Association (which was intended to be Lee’s personal grassroots organisation to counteract the influence of the Left). Yet Chan turned out to be a Malayan Communist Party plant. When the PAP split in 1961, the Left faction walked off with most of the PAP’s branches and the whole of the People’s Association, thanks largely to Chan.¹⁴

During his early decades in government, Lee found himself surrounded by strong, independent-minded contemporaries who regarded him as merely the first among equals, which was a novel experience that, to give him credit, he seems to have appreciated; but as soon as he had the opportunity to reproduce the pattern of his school days in the Cabinet, he took it. After the often-reluctant retirement or marginalisation of his strong-willed contemporaries in the first half of the 1980s,¹⁵ he surrounded himself with junior ministers who never argued with him.¹⁶ It was this disposition towards domineering and self-aggrandising autocracy that proved to be the most significant template for Singapore’s new networks of power and influence as they gradually emerged in Lee’s shadow.

The Singapore system in the literature

This book is a study of Singapore’s networks of power and influence – or to use the terminology preferred by Lee and his successors, Singapore’s ‘elite’. It does not sit in an absolute vacuum of literature, and yet this topic has been subject to remarkably little scholarly interrogation. There are some obvious reasons for this oversight, including the reluctance of Singaporean scholars to engage in critical analysis that might involve criticism of their own government. The opaqueness of the system and the smallness of the country have also undoubtedly deterred some potential investigators. Therefore, the literature available on and around the topic is so scarce that it can be reviewed in a few paragraphs.

Werner Vennewald made a valuable opening contribution to this topic with his 1994 working paper on ‘Technocrats in the State Enterprise System of Singapore’.¹⁷ Vennewald was the first scholar to probe the opaque world of semi-secret government committees and boards that controlled most key appointments in the public sector and he produced a fascinating but instantly dated mud map of the networks of patronage operating in the state-linked enterprises. Yet his work was apparently never intended to produce more than a working paper, limited in both scope and depth, and it has never been adapted for publication in any English-language book or journal.¹⁸ Beyond this, there has only been one dedicated book-length investigation of the networks of power and it is of relatively recent vintage. Ross Worthington, writing specifically of the 1990s, analysed the Singapore elite using conceptual tools originally intended to describe the modern power establishment in the United Kingdom: the ‘core executive’. In his conception, the ‘core executive’ in Singapore encompassed not only the executive of government, but key members of the military, the legislature, the judiciary, the civil service, government-linked companies (GLCs) and grassroots organisations (GROs) such as trade union and ethnic organisations.¹⁹ There may have been some virtue in drawing a comparative link with the United Kingdom – perhaps to underline the features of the Singapore elite that are shared in common with other ruling elites – but I prefer to stay with the more mainstream, and in the context of Singapore, more conceptually informative terminology of ‘elite’ and ‘elitism’: the terminology that Lee Hsien Loong prefers when he is speaking of the ‘core group of people who occupy key positions of power and influence’.²⁰ Regardless of which terminology is used, we are talking about the same thing: the networks of power and influence in Singapore, which, because of their high levels of cohesion, integration and dependence on a single, central source, can be considered to be merely different parts of a single network.

Thus far, Worthington’s book is the only serious attempt to analyse the networks of power in Singapore, but it was limited in scope to being a snapshot of the elite networks during the years of Goh Chok Tong’s premiership, informed exclusively through the prism of the ‘core executive’ literature. Leaving aside a few errors of fact that have diminished the book’s reliability,²¹ it is difficult to imagine any outsider being able to make a more thorough exploration of the networks of power in the Goh years than that made by Worthington, and yet thanks to its ahistorical character, it has dated with remarkable rapidity.

If we look more broadly than just studies that focus explicitly on the networks of power, and consider studies of the political system within which the networks of power live we find a little more material, though not necessarily more clarity. To begin with, terminology is problematic and important in this field. Rarely has the Singapore system of governance been seriously called a democracy except by apologists, but neither is it usually called simply a dictatorship except by its more enthusiastic detractors. It is a complex system, full of internal contradictions and inconsistencies, so that it is unlikely that any simple label will completely satisfy or apply at all times. In 1970, Thomas Bellows described the Singapore of the late 1960s as an emerging ‘dominant party system’ – not quite a one-party state, but not far from it.²² In the 1970s, Chan Heng Chee called it an ‘administrative state’ run by technocrats and because of the lack of an opposition, o...