Throwing Good Money After Bad: The Kuomintang Involvement in the Chew Swee Kee Case, 1956–59

ABSTRACT The absence of ROC consulates and KMT party branches in Singapore after 1949 precluded any possibility of open KMT intervention in post-war Singapore and necessitated clandestine operations through Taipei’s liaison agents. Backing the Labour Front government’s Minister of Education Chew Swee Kee, who sought to regulate and restrict Chinese education, the KMT leadership effectively subordinated the promotion of Chinese education to the larger overarching goal of fighting communism. Following the 1959 Legislative Assembly elections, the KMT leadership realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse, a fiasco which must ultimately be attributed to unreliable intelligence gathered by liaison agents.