The Hock Lee bus riots took place on 12 May 1955 in Singapore. The riots started as a result of confrontation between the police, bus workers of the Hock Lee Amalgamated Bus Company and students who supported the bus workers.
In February of that year, the Hock Lee Amalgamated Bus Company fired 229 bus workers due to their association with the Singapore Bus Workers' Union. As a result, the bus workers went on a strike. Despite mediation efforts, the strikes escalated into riots on 12 May, resulting in the deaths of four people and thirty-one people injured.
Background
Postwar conditions and the rise of trade unions The global trend of decolonisation, led the way for the liberalisation of Singaporean politics. The 1948 constitution that reformed the political and judicial systems in Singapore paved the way for Singapore's first elections in 1948.Kevin Tan, "The Evolution of Singapore's Modern Constitution: Developments from 1945 to the Present Day," Singapore Academy of Law Journal 1, 1989, 7-8. This partial liberalisation was impeded as the British saw their strategic interests in Southeast Asia being challenged by peasant uprisings especially in Malaya.Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (New York; London: Allen Lane, 2007), 420-435.
Role of the British To maintain their control, the British tried to construct a narrative of communist insurgencies and militarism which could be potentially threatening to the security of the region. On the premise of containing communist activities, emergency regulations were implemented in 1948. These emergency regulations increased restriction on civil society meetings in Singapore.E. Kay Gillis, Singapore Civil Society and British Power (Singapore: Talisman Publishing, 2005), 136. A turning point came as the Rendel Constitution was accepted by the British government and resulted in elections that brought David Marshall and the Labour Front party into power. This new constitution led to the provisional easing of restrictions under Emergency regulations, which in its turn sparked off much interest in politics among the people living in Singapore.C.M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore: 1819-2005 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), 259; T.N. Harper, "Lim Chin Siong and the Singapore Story," in Lim Chin Siong in History: Comet in Our Sky, ed. Poh Soo Kai (Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: 2015), 27. This renewed liberalisation led to the establishment of many trade unions during this period which would have alarmed many employers that were worried about their business interests.P.J. Thum, "The Limitations of Monolingual History," in Studying Singapore's Past: C.M. Turnbull and the History of Modern Singapore, edited by Nicholas Tarling (Singapore: NUS Press 2012), 99; Loh Kah Seng, "Interview with Lee Tee Tong," in The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore: Commemorating 50 Years, eds. Poh Soo Kai, Tan Kok Fang and Hong Lysa (Malaysia: SIRD, 2013), 373. Oppressive colonial educational and labour policies discriminated against Chinese students and workers.Mark R. Frost and Balasingamchow Yu-Mei. Singapore: A Biography (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2009), 356. Perceived unjust colonial policies led to various episodes of labour unrests in 1954 and 1955. In 1954 there was The May 13 National Service Ordinance. And in 1955, there were three notable strikes namely the Hock Lee Bus workers' strike, the Singapore Traction Company strike and the Singapore Harbour Board strike.
Role of Americans in Singapore's labour movement American officials were alarmed by both the rise of social unrest in Singapore and the Labour Front's inability to control labour radicalism. It was estimated that 31,000 workers were involved in 129 official and sympathy strikes between March and June 1955.Robert Black to Alan Lennox-Boyd, 20 June 1955, CO 1030/366, The National Archives, London, UK in Mixed up in Power Politics and the Cold War: The Americans, the ICFTU and Singapore'sLabour Movement, 1955-1960 Author(s): S. R. Joey Long Source: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Jun., 2009), pp. 323-351 Some work has been done to study the significance of certain figures that arose from United States government sources.P.J. Thum, "The US, Cold War and Counter-Subversion in Singapore," in Makers and Keepers of Singapore History, edited by Loh Kah Seng and Liew Kai Khiun (Singapore: Ethos Books and Singapore Heritage Society, 2015), 170. The seeds of a communist discourse was being sown by American diplomats, pressuring the British government to take subversive actions against student and labour movements in post 1954 Singapore.Thum, "The US," 160-161. Thus leading to the construction of events like the Hock Lee incident as a violent event instigated by communists. Kumar Ramakrishna's latest work on the communist threat in Singapore necessitates the polarisation of the scholarship on Singapore history and suggests that historians should take sides.Kumar Ramakrishna, "Original Sin"? Revising the Revisionist Critique of the 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015), 15-20. Conventional historical narratives have represented the workers and students actions as violent and conceived out of communism. The emerging work on the Hock Lee incident have foregrounded the experiences of the people through the provision of accounts that focus on the social and economic anxieties that were felt by both the students and the workers due to life in colonial society.
Student movement Bilveer Singh stated that the Hock Lee riots revealed "the ability of the communists to mobilise other elements of the [Communist United Front], such as the students".Bilveer Singh, Quest for Political Power: Communist Subversion and Militancy in Singapore (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2015), 94. Singh's reconstruction of the Hock Lee riots rely on the works of Bloodworth,Dennis Bloodworth, The Tiger and the Trojan Horse (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2005). Drysdale,John Drysdale, Singapore: Struggle for Success (Singapore: Times Books International, 1984). and Lee.Ting Hui Lee, The Open United Front: The Communist Struggle in Singapore, 1954-1966 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1996). His analysis agrees with the colonial perspective and concludes that the students' involvement in the Hock Lee incident was part of a larger plan of communist subversion.Bilveer Singh, Quest, 98. Bloodworth starts his narrative by accusing the 'communist' students of being at the centre of the violence that occurred in the Hock Lee event.Bloodworth, The Tiger, 178-179. He attributes the cause of the unrest to union leader, Fong Swee Suan and takes on a perspective which favours the actions of the bus company.Bloodworth, The Tiger, 179.
The above conventional accounts commonly attribute the student involvement to be one of communist action and again do not give the students any form of political consciousness. The students who were involved in the riots were part of the Singapore Chinese Middle School Student Union (SCMSSU). The relationship between the workers and the students is one that is often overlooked in many accounts of history and thus leading to the common conclusion that students' involvement was part of a violent extremist movement.Turnbull, A History, 263. The British adopted a substitution strategy to replace Chinese schools with English institution.Ting-Hong Wong, Hegemonies Compared: State Formation and Chinese School Politics in Postwar Singapore and Hong Kong (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 129-130. A ten-year education plan unveiled by the colonial administration in 1949 sought to significantly decrease student enrolment in Chinese vernacular schools.Wong, Hegemonies, 131-132. Chinese students were faced with the implementation of high school exams that served little purpose in ensuring the students' path into university.Thum, "The Limitations," 93. The National Service Ordinance act also disrupted the education of Chinese students as the colonial government was unwilling to allow them to defer if they had to sit for examinations.Hong Lysa, "Politics of the Chinese-speaking Communities in Singapore in the 1950s," in The May 13 Generation: The Chinese Middle Schools Student Movement and Singapore Politics in the 1950s (Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: SIRD, 2011), 66. This eventually led to the May 13 incident in 1954.Hong, "Politics," 57-67. In January 1955, the students' application to register the SCMSSU was rejected and subsequently met with many obstacles which the students felt were unreasonable demands by the colonial government to prevent the set up of the student union.Hong, "Politics," 91-92.
Newspaper reports of the government not providing help or compensation to victims of World War Two in Singapore also served as a reminder to students that they were being asked to fight for a government that does not have their interests at heart.Thum, "The Limitations," 96. Students were seen to be the allies of the workers serving as a political force that could influence the decisions of the ruling elite.Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge, 2006), 136. Loh et al. highlighted that many of the workers were ex-students and that the Chinese school students knew that the workers who were intertwined in labour negotiations was a reflection of their future.Loh Kah Seng et al., The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 88-89. The anxieties of the students coupled with the students' sympathy to the workers resulted in their support for the Hock Lee bus workers.Chu Wei Li et al., "An Interview with Lim Chin Joo," in Education-at-Large: Student Life and Activities in Singapore 1945–1965, ed. Siao See Teng et al. (Singapore: The Tangent and World Scientific Publishing, 2013) 89.
Workers C. M. Turnbull saw the cause of the riots to be a battle between moderate and left-wing politics within the People's Action Party (PAP) and attributed the workers' involvement to be one of "joint direct militant campaign of obstruction and violence." The book Men in White also frames the Hock Lee event as a "demonstration of the ruthlessness of the communists and their capacity to unleash violence in Singapore."Sonny Yap et al., Men in White: The Untold Story of Singapore's Ruling Political Party (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 2009), 78. In both these accounts, the bus workers were not given any political consciousness as the event is seen as a spontaneous one that was initiated by the communists that eventually went out of control.
Workers in the 1950s were subject to the many effects of colonial society. The Rendel Constitution paved the way for the liberalisation of Singapore politics coupled with the workers increasing anxiety about wages and working conditions as seen from an increase from 11 trade unions in 1946, to 236 unions in 1955.Michael Fernandez and Loh Kah Seng, "The Left Wing Trade Unions in Singapore, 1945-1970," in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-War Singapore, edited by Michael D. Barr and Carl A. Trocki (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 208-209. The post-war colonial administration was seen to be corrupt and inefficient and blamed for the poor working and economic conditions that the workers were subjected to.Carl Trocki, "Development of Labour Organisation in Singapore: 1800-1960," Australian Journal of Politics and History 47, no. 1 (2001): 124–125. Strikes became more frequent as progression in the trade union movement was being challenged by the employers' refusal to recognise the unions and in its turn form splinter unions that would threaten the existing unionised workers.Fernandez and Loh, "The Left Wing," 212.