Patron Former Minister Mentor, Singapore
Mr Lee Kuan Yew
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'This is common ancestry'
The Straits Times
2010-07-17
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IN 1993, relations between a pro-independence government in Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party were tense.
 
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, then Senior Minister, thought that Singapore could play a constructive role, given its good relations with both sides and the common history all three shared.
 
At then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui's behest, he presented a proposal to Beijing to establish an airline and shipping line between Taiwan and China, registered in Singapore.
 
As MM Lee later revealed in media interviews, he got an "earful" from then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
 
"He stressed that this was a Chinese family matter concerning people in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau,"

 
MM Lee said. "Unsaid was that Singapore was not family."
 
Since the incident, Singapore leaders have been loath to show presumption in any of China's affairs.
 
In fact, Foreign Minister George Yeo insists to Insight that MM Lee never had intentions in that direction.
 
"I don't think he ever offered Singapore as a middle party," he says. "In fact, we're very careful not to be passing messages from one to the other."
 
Singapore's position, he says, is that "we're all trying to be helpful because we don't want cross-strait relations to go wrong".
 
"We don't interpose ourselves, we are not trying to be keh kiang (Hokkien for 'act smart') and say, we can give you advice. We're not in that position at all. But if we can play a helpful role, we play a helpful role."
 
Mr Yeo says it would be "silly and presumptuous" of Singapore to act unsolicited, but that when Singapore leaders communicate with either side, "we give them our views".
But the common history that Singapore, Taiwan and China share must not be forgotten, he says.
 
In the early 1900s, Dr Sun Yat-sen chose Singapore as the base of his revolutionary movement in South-east Asia. He came to Singapore eight times, each time staying in a double-storey bungalow named "Wan Qing Yuan", which was owned by rubber magnate Teo Eng Hock.
 
Mr Teo is the great-granduncle of Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean. Wan Qing Yuan was renamed the Sun Yat-sen Nanyang Memorial Hall in 1996.
 
In fact, says Mr Yeo, the first Kuomintang (KMT) flag, which is the Taiwanese flag today, was sewn in that bungalow by Mr Teo Eng Hock and his wife.

 
The flag is now in the KMT museum in Taipei.
 
"The division of one into two between the Communists and the KMT, it came after (all this).
 
"This is common ancestry," he says with passion. "Only later we had the bifurcation. We're talking about that which was common to China, to Taiwan, to Singapore."
 
 
Courtesy of The Straits Times, 17 July 2010.
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