No Triumphal Marches: How Singapore Looked Beyond Resentment After WWII

Remembrance about acknowledging suffering, drawing lessons from it, and looking ahead

- Yew Lun Tian

BEIJING - On Sept 3, the roar of fighter jets and thunder of goose-steps filled Changan Avenue as China marked its World War II victory with a grand military parade.

Nine days later, on Sept 12, Singapore will mark the same war in a lower key: with a ceremony at Kranji War Cemetery to honour the fallen.

There will be no triumphal marches or reminders of war atrocities.

Instead, remembrance will be about acknowledging the suffering, drawing lessons from it, and looking ahead – a cool-headed approach born of necessity for a small and vulnerable state.

In remembering, one point that bears highlighting is that the people in Singapore, too, contributed to China's war efforts and paid dearly for it.

When Japan started its full-scale invasion of China in 1937, Tan Kah Kee – the Fujian-born industrialist who had settled in Singapore – rallied overseas Chinese to support the homeland under siege.

He raised tens of millions for China's war relief, and, when the country's ports were blockaded, called for volunteer drivers and mechanics to run supplies along the treacherous Burma Road. Some 3,200 ethnic Chinese from Singapore and Malaya answered; one in three never returned.

Such public fund-raising, boycotts of Japanese goods and recruitment drives unfolded in full view of Japanese spies.

This convinced Tokyo that Singapore's Chinese community was capable of resistance and had to be crushed.

Days after the city fell in February 1942, the Japanese launched Sook Ching, a two-week purge of ethnic Chinese.

What began as revenge against those who had aided China's resistance spiralled into arbitrary executions. Historians estimate that tens of thousands were killed in the city of one million.

Among those who escaped was 19-year-old Lee Kuan Yew, who would later become Singapore's founding prime minister.