THERE was no vainglory in the title of the first volume of Lee Kuan
Yew’s memoirs: “The Singapore Story”. Few leaders have so embodied and
dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in
their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s
achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the
second volume is called). Moreover, he managed it against far worse
odds: no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources;
and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history. The
search for a common heritage may have been why, in the 1990s, Mr Lee’s
Singapore championed “Asian values”. By then, Singapore was the most
Westernised place in Asia.
Mr Lee himself, whose anglophile grandfather had added “Harry” to his
Chinese name, was once called by George Brown, a British foreign
secretary, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez”. He was proud of
his success in colonial society. He was a star student in pre-war
Singapore, and, after an interlude during the Japanese occupation of
1942-45, again at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge. He
and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, both got firsts in law.
When Geok Choo first appears in “The Singapore Story” it is as a
student who, horror of horrors, beats young Harry in economics and
English exams. Mr Lee always excelled at co-option as well as coercion.
When he returned to Singapore in 1950, he was confident in the knowledge
that she “could be a sole breadwinner and bring up the children”,
giving him an “insurance policy” that would let him enter politics. He
remained devoted to her. Before her death, when she lay bedridden and
mute for two years, he maintained a spreadsheet listing the books he
read to her: Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In his political life he gave few hints of such inner tenderness.
Influenced by Harold Laski, a British academic whom he had met at the
LSE, he was in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, and in Britain
had campaigned for the Labour Party. But for him ideology always took
second place to a pragmatic appreciation of how power works. He also
boasted of his streetfighting prowess: “Nobody doubts that if you take
me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” He
was a ruthless operator, manoeuvring himself into a position at the head
of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to become Singapore’s first prime
minister when self-governance arrived in 1959. He remained so for 31
years.
Just once in that time the steely mask slipped. Having led Singapore
into a federation with Malaysia in 1963, Mr Lee led it out again when it
was expelled in August 1965, with Malaysia’s prime minister accusing
him of leading a state government “that showed no measure of loyalty to
its central government”. For his part, he had become convinced that
Chinese-majority Singapore would always be at a disadvantage in a
Malay-dominated polity. Still he had believed in and worked for the
merger all his life. Announcing its dissolution, he wept.
In compensation, he turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic
success story. As he and his government would often note, this seemed
far from the likeliest outcome in the dark days of the 1960s. Among the
many resources that Singapore lacked was an adequate water supply, which
left it alarmingly dependent on a pipeline from peninsular Malaysia,
from which it had just divorced. It was beholden to America’s goodwill
and the crumbling might of the former colonial power, Britain, for its
defence. The regional giant, Indonesia, had been engaged in a policy of
Konfrontasi—hostility
to the Malaysian federation just short of open warfare—to stress that
it was only an accident of colonial history that had left British-ruled
Malaya and its offshoots separate from the Dutch-ruled East Indies,
which became Indonesia.
Singapore as a country did not exist. “How were we to create a nation
out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia,
Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” asked Mr Lee in retrospect.
Race riots in the 1960s, in Singapore itself as well as in Malaysia,
coloured Mr Lee’s thinking for the rest of his life. Even when Singapore
appeared to outsiders a peaceful, harmonious, indeed rather boringly
stable place, its government often behaved as if it were dancing on the
edge of an abyss of ethnic animosity. Public housing, one of the
government’s greatest successes, remains subject to ethnic quotas to
prevent the minority Malays and Indians from coalescing into ghettoes.
That sense of external weakness and internal fragility was central to
Mr Lee’s policies for the young country. Abandoned by Britain in 1971
when it withdrew from “east of Suez”, Singapore has always made national
defence a high priority, although direct threats to its security have
eased. Relations with Malaysia have frequently been fraught, but never
to the point when a military conflict seemed likely. And Indonesia ended
Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. The formation in
1967 of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with Mr Lee as one
of the founding fathers, helped unite the region. Yet Singaporean men
still perform nearly two years of national service in the armed forces.
Defence spending, in a country of 5.3m, is more than in Indonesia, with
nearly 250m; in 2014 it soaked up over one-fifth of the budget.
Singapore’s vulnerability also justified, for Mr Lee, some
curtailment of democratic freedoms. In the early days this involved
strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it
became more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering,
stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians
and critics, including the foreign press. Singapore has had regular,
free and fair elections. Indeed, voting is compulsory, though Mr Lee
said in 1994 that he was “not intellectually convinced that one-man,
one-vote is the best”. He said Singapore practised it because the
British had left it behind. So he designed a system where clean
elections are held, but it has also been almost inconceivable for the
PAP to lose power.
The biggest reason for that has been its economic success: growth has
averaged nearly 7% a year for four decades. But Mr Lee’s party has left
nothing to chance. The traditional media are toothless; opposition
politicians have been hounded into bankruptcy by defamation laws
inherited from Britain; voters have faced the threat that, if they elect
opposition candidates, their constituencies will get less money;
constituency boundaries have been manipulated by the government. The
advantage of Mr Lee’s system, proponents say, is that it introduced just
enough electoral competition to keep the government honest, but not so
much that it risks losing power. So it can look round corners on behalf
of its people, plan for the long term and resist the temptation to
pander to populist pressures.
Mr Lee was a firm believer in “meritocracy”, or government by the
most able, defined in large part by scholastic success. “We decide what
is right. Never mind what the people think,” as he put it in 1987. His
government’s ministers were the world’s best-paid, to attract talent
from the private sector and curb corruption. Corruption did indeed
become rare in Singapore. Like other crime, it was deterred in part by
harsh punishments, ranging from brutal caning for vandalism to hanging
for murder or drug-smuggling. As Mr Lee also said: “Between being loved
and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is
afraid of me, I’m meaningless.” As a police state, however, Singapore is
such a success that you rarely see a cop.
A cool guy
In some ways, Mr Lee was a bit of a crank. Among a number of 20th-century luminaries asked by the
Wall Street Journal
in 1999 to pick the most influential invention of the millennium, he
alone shunned the printing press, the internal combustion engine and the
internet and chose the air-conditioner. He explained that, before A/C,
people living in the tropics were at a disadvantage because the heat and
humidity damaged the quality of their work. Now, they “need no longer
lag behind”. Cherian George, a journalist and scholar, spotted in this a
metaphor for Mr Lee’s style of government, and wrote one of the best
books about it: “The air-conditioned nation: Essays on the politics of
comfort and control”. Mr Lee made Singapore comfortable, but was careful
to control the thermostat.
Singaporeans, seeing their island transform itself and modernise,
seemed to accept this. But in 2011 the PAP did worse than ever in a
general election (just 60% of the vote but 93% of the elected seats).
Many thought change would have to come, and that the structure Mr Lee
had built was unsuitable for the age of Facebook and the burgeoning of
unbiddable networks. They began to chafe at the restrictions on their
lives, no longer so convinced of Singapore’s fragility, and less afraid
of the consequences of criticising the government.
They resented above all that many people, despite a much-vaunted
compulsory savings scheme, did not have enough money for their
retirement. And they blamed high levels of immigration for keeping their
wages down and living costs up. This was a consequence of a unique
failure among Mr Lee’s many campaigns to make Singaporeans change their
ways. He succeeded in creating a nation of Mandarin speakers who are
politer than they used to be and neither jaywalk nor chew gum; but he
could not make them have more children. In the early 1980s he dropped
his “stop at two” policy and started to encourage larger families among
the better-educated. But, three decades later, Singaporean women have as
low a fertility rate as any in the world.
The hereditary principle
The “setback” of the 2011 election led Mr Lee into the final stage of
retirement. In 1990 he had moved from prime minister to “senior
minister”, and in 2004 to “minister mentor”. Now he left the cabinet,
but remained in parliament. By then, Singapore’s prime minister for
seven years had been Lee Hsien Loong, his son. The Lee family would sue
anyone who hinted at nepotism. And for the elder Mr Lee, talent was
obviously inherited. “Occasionally two grey horses produce a white
horse, but very few. If you have two white horses, the chances are you
breed white horses.”
Such ideas, applied ethnically, veer close to racism. The stream of
distinguished Western visitors who trooped to see Mr Lee in Singapore
would steer clear of such touchy areas. They preferred to seek his views
on the rise of China or America’s decline. They also admired the
comfort and the economic success of Singapore, and sought his advice on
how to replicate it. Meanwhile, the control and good “social order”
there attracted admirers, too, including Chinese leaders, notably Deng
Xiaoping, who was, like Mr Lee, a member of the Hakka Chinese minority.
Thus a man who was both a scourge of communists at home and a critic of
Western decadence and its wishy-washy idealism was revered as a
geopolitical sage in China and the West alike. What, he must have
wondered, if fate had allotted him a superpower instead of a city-state?
