Lee Siew Choh and His Discontents: Maoism and the Factionalization of Singapore’s Progressive Left after Operation Coldstore

This article explores how Maoism shaped, and was shaped by, the factionalization of Singapore’s progressive left and its flagship political party, the Barisan Sosialis (Socialist Front) after Operation Coldstore on February 2, 1963. Focusing especially on the Cultural Revolution period, it traces the emergence of Maoism in the city-state to texts and ideas from the People’s Republic of China that circulated widely within left-wing circles in Singapore starting in the 1950s, as well as to the three years after Coldstore, when Maoism came to dominate public leftist discourse and practice in Singapore. The article intervenes in the historiography of global Maoism by triangulating between the work of orthodox scholars such as Yinghong Cheng and recent, left-historical interpretations by the likes of Matthew Galway and Fabio Lanza. By focusing on the increasingly extremist Barisan and its Maoist critics such as the student activist Li Xiquan, it shows, contrary to orthodox analyses, that Maoism in Singapore cannot be reduced to a purely foreign ideology, and was, rather, underpinned by the Barisan and its critics’ shared commitment to Malaya as an anticolonial project and adaptation of Maoism to fit local circumstances. Maoists were likewise capable of critical self-reflection, as left-historical scholarship contends and the example of Li Xiquan suggests. Yet, such scholarship fails to capture how fanaticism, mimicry, and emotion were constitutive of Maoist experiences in Singapore, and indeed how ideological commitments evolved over time in ways that underscore these aspects of Singapore Maoism.