George Yeo with Woon Tai Ho. Musings, Series One. Singapore: World Scientific, 2022. 480 pages, hardcover (US$ 88), softcover (US$ 58), e-book (US$ 46).
George Yeo’s book, Musings, gives an eyewitness account of a meeting between then Chinese President Hu Jintao and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Santiago, Chile in November 2004. When Lee and Hu sat down facing each other, Lee reiterated the reasons for his visit to Taiwan in July 2004, Yeo recounts in his book. “I saw Hu Jintao’s normally expressionless face tighten. He countered that there was a larger picture which Singapore ought to be aware of. For a brief moment, I thought that the carefully-crafted settlement [to restore friendly relations between the two countries after Lee’s visit to Taiwan] would be undone. Happily, neither side pressed things further, and both sides quickly adjourned to take photographs. That photo was to announce to the world that bilateral relations were good again,” writes Yeo.
Lee visited Taiwan in July 2004 when he was Singapore deputy prime minister, shortly before becoming prime minister in August 2004. Lee’s visit to Taiwan, which Beijing regards as part of China, drew criticism from the Chinese government. This was the first issue which Yeo had to deal with when he became Singapore Foreign Minister in August 2004.
“It could not have come at a worse time for me personally because my youngest son, Frederick, had had a second relapse of his leukemia just a month earlier,” Yeo recalls in his book.
It took the Chinese government and the Singapore government months of negotiation to reach the abovementioned “carefully-crafted settlement” to restore ties between both countries, a rapprochement in which Yeo had played a key part.
“The Chinese did not let up on the pressure they put on us during the negotiations. When Lee Kuan Yew visited Shanghai for a meeting of an international advisory board, the Chinese did not extend the usual courtesies to him,” Yeo writes. Till his last days, the late Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister and the father of Lee Hsien Loong, never forgot how the Chinese treated Singapore’s venerated founding father, Yeo adds.
While China and Singapore were trying to mend their relations, in September 2004, Yeo gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he declared that a drive for Taiwanese independence by certain Taiwanese groups would lead to war with China, according to media reports. The then Taiwanese Foreign Minister, Mark Chen, took great umbrage at Yeo’s speech and used a crude phrase in Hokkien, a Chinese dialect spoken in Taiwan, to dismiss Singapore as a little piece of booger, Yeo writes in Musings. The Taiwan Foreign Minister’s strong reaction actually strengthened Singapore’s standing with China before Yeo’s meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, Yeo writes. “My signal to China was subtle; Taiwan’s Foreign Minister had amplified it for me.” This is one of the anecdotes Yeo reveals in his capacity as a witness and participant in history-making events.
There was another happy outcome. Frederick Yeo has since survived his cancer. But the book mentions tragedies among George Yeo’s other relatives. His eldest brother Joseph Yeo Hian Pio was schizophrenic and was interred in Woodbridge Hospital, now known as the Institute of Mental Health, a psychiatric hospital in Singapore. Joseph Yeo died in 2008. George Yeo’s sister, Nellie Yeo, died in 2021 from a sudden heart attack.
“Like with my eldest brother, I often wonder about the meaning of her life. . . Our second brother had died during the Second World War without a proper burial. . . Suffering is part of the human condition. However unpleasant our family’s experiences, many families endure much worse. Philosophically, I am inclined to the view that it is suffering, pathos, which forges the identify of individuals and of groups,” Yeo writes.
Thus, travails of his family accompanied George Yeo as he ascended to high office. He was Singapore Foreign Minister from August 2004 to May 2011, after having served as Minister of Trade and Industry from June 1999 to August 2004, Minister of Information and the Arts from July 1991 to June 1999, and concurrently Health Minister from January 1994 to January 1997. Yeo lost his parliamentary seat during Singapore’s general election on May 7, 2011. Subsequently, he became chairman of Kerry Logistics, a Hong Kong-listed company controlled by Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok, from August 2012 to May 2019, when he was based in Hong Kong.
Musings describes the sensitivities surrounding a monument to the Indian National Army (INA) in Singapore. When the Japanese occupied various parts of Southeast Asia during the Second World War, they sponsored various Asian nationalist leaders including Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of INA, which was headquartered in Singapore.
In Myanmar, the INA, which struggled for India’s independence from British rule, fought alongside the Japanese army against the British during the Second World War. Before the war ended in August 1945, the INA built a monument on the Esplanade Park in Singapore. When the British returned to Singapore in September 1945, they immediately demolished the monument. In India, the British colonial rulers prosecuted members of the INA as traitors, but Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru defended them as patriots, according to Musings. Between November 1945 and May 1946, the British colonial authorities held several trials of various INA members. Three defendants were found guilty, but immense public pressure from the Indian populace, as well as demonstrations and riots among the Indian population and British Indian army, compelled the British colonial authorities to set them free.
An admirer of Bose was the late Singapore President S.R. Nathan, who was of Indian origin, Yeo writes. “President Nathan shared another snippet with me. In 1947, when Nehru visited Singapore, he asked for a bouquet of flowers. . . It turned out that the flowers were for Nehru to honour INA fighters at the site where the memorial once stood.” In November 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid his respects to Bose at the Esplanade Park, according to Musings.
In 1995, Yeo unveiled a plaque to mark the site of the demolished INA monument at the Esplanade Park. A few years later, Yeo suggested a replica of the demolished INA monument be installed in the Esplanade Park. He told me about this suggestion in an email in early December 2022.
“Some (Singapore) ministers objected as the INA was associated with the Japanese Army, which did terrible things during their occupation of Singapore. I understood their discomfort and later suggested a replica be placed at the Indian Heritage Centre,” Yeo reveals in his book.
When the Japanese occupied Singapore, they committed atrocities including executions of many people, especially ethnic Chinese men, imprisoning and torturing people, and conscripting so-called “comfort women” into enforced sexual slavery to service Japanese troops. Thus, a replica of the INA monument was not built, but the plaque remains on the site of the demolished INA monument instead.
“Singapore’s role in India’s independence parallels our role in China’s 1911 Revolution. As we are proud to recall Singapore’s support of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, so we should be too of the role Subhas Chandra Bose played. However, we must take care not to forget the cruelties which his Japanese sponsor inflicted on innocent Singaporeans,” writes Yeo.
Thus, Yeo performed a tricky balancing act between Indian nationalist sentiments and Chinese memories of Japanese cruelty. He also had to enact balancing acts among the various linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups in the multi-religious and multi-racial nation of Singapore.
As Minister of Information and the Arts, Yeo inherited the Speak Mandarin Campaign launched by then Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1979. For this campaign, the English slogan was initially, “If you’re a Chinese, make a statement—in Mandarin.” The English slogan caused considerable offence among non-Mandarin speakers, Yeo recalls. So, the Singapore government, with Yeo’s involvement, changed the slogan to “Speak Mandarin. It helps,” which was palatable to everyone, he explains.
“On some issues, we had to act decisively. For example, we banned The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie without a second thought. In the case of Paul Schrader’s The Last Temptation of Christ, however, we did nothing. On such issues, Christians and Buddhists did not react the same way as Muslims. We were not wedded to abstract equality. The considerations were completely practical,” Yeo writes.
At an unspecified date while Yeo was Minister of Information and the Arts from July 1991 to June 1999, he received a request from the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore), to ban publications by the Ahmadiyya, a movement that was considered heretical by many mainstream Muslims, he recalls. “I remember authorizing a reply to MUIS stating that the Ministry was not in a position to judge which sects were heretical.” The above examples demonstrate the adroit balancing act which George Yeo performed in foreign affairs, historical remembrance as well as racial and religious matters in Singapore. What makes this book an absorbing read are the interesting details of events which it reveals.
There is, however, a flaw in the book. Yeo writes of some matters and persons without giving sufficient information about them, assuming the reader would be familiar with them. I was not sufficiently knowledgeable of some of the events which Musings alludes to, such as the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in retaliation for an Indian Army assault on the holy Sikh Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. More background explanation would have been helpful.
This book is the first of a series of three books which Yeo planned to write. His second book, Musings, Series Two, was published by the same publisher, World Scientific, and is available since February 2023.
Toh Han Shih holds a B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in Physics from Oxford University. He also has a Master’s in Southeast Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and has completed a part-time Master’s in Economics at Hong Kong University. Han Shih is a Singapore-born writer resident in Hong Kong with twenty years of experience reporting on business and economics related to China, including ten years as a reporter with the South China Morning Post. In December 2016, he published the book, Is China an Empire? From 2007 to 2008, he worked at Kroll, and in the late 1990s, he was a reporter at the Business Times in Singapore. He was also a senior correspondent of MLEX, a regulatory risk news agency, and senior reporter of Finance Asia, a financial trade publication. He is currently chief analyst of Headland Intelligence, a Hong Kong risk consultancy.
