Preface to “A Malayan Vision,” a Portfolio of Stories Involving Lim Chin Siong
By Thum Ping Tjin
Lim Chin Siong is the most important figure of Singapore’s decolonisation struggle. By Lee Kuan Yew’s own admission, without Lim, the People’s Action Party (PAP) could not have accessed both the Chinese-speaking and the working-class spheres with anywhere near the level of success that it did. Lim and his colleagues were the fundamental reason why our nationalist anti-colonial movement grew to such a massive size and gained such widespread support, and why the party that represented that movement – the PAP – ended up winning power in 1959. Lim’s popularity, and his vision for a multiethnic, socialist, non-aligned Singapore, terrified the British, Federation of Malaya, and Singapore governments so much that the primary reason for the reunification of Singapore with the rest of Malaya was to stop him, via the contorted structure of Malaysia. The goal of that structure was to quarantine Lim in Singapore by allowing Singaporeans to exercise their full political rights only in Singapore.
Even as Lim stands as the defining figure of our independence movement, Lim himself remains an elusive figure in our historiography. Who was he, really? What did he actually believe? What were his goals? These questions are asked again and again. There are very few academic works on Lim, because he left so little behind on which we can base any analysis of him. His political career was tragically short. It ended in 1963 when he was detained without trial, tortured and drugged, and finally sent into exile in 1969, a broken man. He left behind little in terms of his private views and thoughts, only two interviews post-1969. In any event academically-reliable works on Lim have faced censorship and suppression in Singapore. All too often, we get to see Lim only through the eyes of his comrades and enemies.
Any study of Lim, however, offers a glimpse into a tantalising alternative vision for Singapore. From 1955 to 1963, the anticolonial nationalist movement led by Lim practiced and promoted a very different vision of post-colonial nationalism: multicultural, multiethnic, multilinguistic, built upon numerous mutual-interest associations that were brought together through painstaking dialogue and bridge-building. It espoused a vision of Singaporean identity that was built from the ground up, collectively negotiated, and grounded in the concept of individual and group self-determination as articulated by the Bandung Asian-African conference of 1955. The economic policy of Lim’s movement was virtually identical to the PAP’s, but the sociopolitical basis of his movement was entirely different. It was predicated on individual dignity and respect, an end to discrimination, and social justice as preconditions for the achievement of self-determination.
Where non-fiction is only able to offer facts, fiction can go deeper and offer truths. The four stories in this series commissioned by New Naratif and SUSPECT give us different looks at the world of Lim Chin Siong, the vision of Singapore that he fought for, and the hope he inspired. Through these stories, we are able to ask ourselves what we lost when Lim was forcibly removed from the political scene. The past is set in stone but the future is ours to create. By learning about the past, we may aspire to one day fulfil Lim’s dream of a kinder Singapore, where human rights are upheld, where lives are valued more for their inherent dignity than for their economic output, where people learn to love rather than fear each other.
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The representative of law and order comes to life in Salil Tripathi’s story. “Was Chin Siong trying to create solidarity between the people and the police to rise up against the government?” Senior Inspector Tan Kim Wah has to decide what to write in his report to his superiors.