Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “It’s a good slogan, ‘The Caring Society’. It’s actually a crib, it’s plagiarism from the British Labour Party’s ‘The Compassionate Society’. It sounds much better than ‘caring’; it’s ‘compassionate’. You have compassion for the poor, for the disabled, for the less successful.

  “You know the end result? It’s not to each man his worth. They are no longer seeking equal opportunities in Britain. What they want is equal reward, regardless of what your contribution is. That is a different game altogether.

  “So when I was asked in Australia ‘Are you a socialist?’ it is a loaded question, because they know I don’t agree with the new Left. I said, ‘Yes, perhaps an old-fashioned one.’

  “I believe in equal opportunities. I believe the human being wants an equal chance with his fellow human being, regardless of his father’s wealth or status, in order that he can do his best, in order that he can compete and climb up to the top. And that is so whether you are in Moscow, Beijing, Washington or London.

  “You can’t reverse human nature. When you try to do that, as the British Labour Party or a section of it has tried, then you bring a whole great people down.

  “They say, ‘Ah, that’s elitism!’ Competitive examinations, the creaming of the best into special institutions where they are made to go faster, become high achievers and high performers for the society. They are penalised. Net result, the country suffers. Why should you try? In order that you will pay penalising taxes to keep the layabout happy?”

  “In every culture, there is a desire to preserve your distinctiveness. And I think if you go against that, you will create unnecessary problems, whether it is with the Indians and their castes or with the Chinese and their clans. That is why, in the end, we decided we had to recognise facts.” – Lee on how he came to realise the wisdom of harnessing ethnic ties, such as those in the Sikh community, which he would often praise for its spirit of self-help.

  Going with the grain

  Lee’s approach to welfare then was to be based on a recognition of basic human nature: that individuals strove for their own advancement and that of their families. He believed that government policy should work in tandem with these human tendencies rather than try to counter them. The state should be wary of any initiative which would supplant, wittingly or otherwise, individual effort and responsibility. Nor could ties of care and concern between families and communities be “nationalised” or replaced by the state. The traditional family support systems would have to be maintained and fostered, as would the poor-law tradition which attached a certain sense of shame to state handouts.

  “We live in different concentric circles. And your closest circle is your own family, then your extended family, then the clan and then your friends. One is your social, cultural or scholarly pursuits, or sports, recreation and so on. But when it comes to helping family members out, you’ve got to club together to help your family, because that’s part of the culture that you have inherited.

  “For survival, you will need protection, help, and succour, and that comes from your family. The only people who are going to help you when you are starving and sick and you need medicine and medicines are scarce, the only people who will sacrifice for you are your family. The big idea of altruism, when resources are scarce – that counts for nothing. But the genetic drive to protect your own offspring is a very powerful one.

  “I saw that in the raw during the Japanese Occupation. Medicine was in short supply. Who would sacrifice? Your mother and your father; beyond that, your uncles, your aunts, your grandfather. Friends, maybe very close friends will help you, at the margins. So as part of that protective instinct, it’s in the genes.

  “And built into that is a certain cultural pattern, which varies from society to society. The Chinese culture is the one I know best. … the extended family network and the clan … they supported each other, for survival. It was a survival method worked out over thousands of years of war, devastation, floods, famines. Suddenly you’re flattened by a typhoon – who helps you? You go to the government agency and ask for food? There is no agency. So this was the mechanism. I share your clan name, I will help you. So they transported and transplanted it here … it helps survival.

  “The Indians have their own method. So do the Malays. The Malays: Islam and also the kinship ties … I don’t think you can erase all that. That’s for hundreds of years, or thousands of years. You can’t erase it. Because I recognised it, I decided you cannot change this. Or if you tried to change it, you’d change it for the worse.

  “For example, the Chinese communists had tried to dismantle families by separating them into communes, with husbands and wives sent to different parts of the country to work. When I read about it at the time, I thought it was all madness. And now they admit it was wrong. That not only was it wrong to try it, it has also failed. These were basic survival instincts, mechanisms. Both instinct and culture reinforcing each other and increasing the chances of survival.

  What I learnt from my gardener

  Although Lee started out as a social democrat, his approach was never an ideological one. He recognised early on that the masses were driven by the desire to improve their own lot and that of their families, rather than by missionary socialist zeal. That being the case, Lee concluded that the socialist paradise of a society where each man was given according to his needs in return for his best effort had, at best, to be postponed. Put simply, unless workers were motivated to do their best, the state would lack the wherewithal to improve the lot of its people.

  “I had a part-time gardener. He worked in the Health Ministry as an anti-malaria worker and turned up to tend my garden at 2 o’clock. How he was able to do that, I often wondered. He increased his duties over the years and was paid additional sums of money for cleaning the car, besides doing the garden. Then one day he started coming at 4 pm, instead of 2 pm, and was discovered to have taken on another garden near by.

  “I was convinced that his whole purpose in life was to give the minimum to his major employer, the Health Ministry, in order that he could perform his other functions. All he had to do in his major job was to avoid the attention of the mandore. And all the mandore had to do was to avoid the attention of the overseer for not having discovered that such a man was not stretching himself. All the overseer’s worry was to make sure that his supervisor did not catch him not catching the mandore.

  “It is not by accident that our building trade is probably the most successful. Supervision is at a minimum, problems of discipline do not arise. A man is paid for performance: ‘You complete this in accordance with a certain standard, you are paid the agreed price.’ I am not suggesting that we could do this for all the complicated mechanical operations of modern industry. But we must recognise this urge, the instinct in our people to perform and give of his best only if he is rewarded better than the other who did not do as well. More and more, we must make this a cornerstone of our drive for high performance.

  “It is not just the capitalist or free enterprise world that has had to recognise this hard fact. One of the most instructive journeys I had was the one to Eastern Europe in May last year. They understood that uniformity must mean a lowering of the effort. And in the many factories that I went to, the wages were not equal. They were paid in accordance with their performance. Further, if your performance needed special recognition and reward, there were all the social status symbols of the photographs on the driveway to the factory, and tickets to the ballet, the opera, and the hotel by the Black Sea. These brought forth high performance.”

  Mendaki – A grassroots and community-based organisation started in 1982 to raise awareness in the Malay community of the importance of education and to help the underclass by holding tuition programmes. Other ethnically based self-help bodies like the Singapore Indian Development Association (Sinda), the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC) and the Eurasian Association were set up later.

  “That’s why Chinese meet on Chinese New Year’s Ev
e, to remind themselves of their obligations to each other and to recognise new entrants into the family circle. It’s a cultural technique or method, so that in times of crisis you know who to call upon. And it has helped survival. When they came here, the government didn’t care for them. They formed clan associations. They helped each other.

  “That is an instinct of all human tribes or societies. In every culture, there is a desire to preserve your distinctiveness. And I think if you go against that, you will create unnecessary problems, whether it is with the Indians and their caste or with the Chinese and their clans. That is why, in the end, we discovered we had to recognise facts. And so I encouraged Mendaki to be formed because you could not get Chinese officers to enthuse Malay parents to do something about their children. But Malay leaders can. They share a certain common destiny. The Malay parents look at their leader and they talk the same language, they say, ‘Yes, you have my interest at heart, so you’re telling me all this. I’ll listen to you.’

  “I tell the leader? They say, ‘Oh, you’re prime minister, you’d tell me that.’ But do I really share their fate, their destiny? Not quite so. So once I recognised that as a fact, I then built government policies around those facts.”

  Everyone has a prize

  The state’s role was therefore to be a supportive one, working with basic human networks and instincts rather than supplanting them, wittingly or otherwise. But did this mean that it adopted a minimalist approach to government? What was it to do about the less well-off in society? Should it simply adopt a laissez-faire social policy, leaving individuals and their families to fend entirely for themselves? If that was the case, how could the state ensure that the less well-off continued to have a stake in society? What would hold such a collection of individuals together? Indeed, what made them a “society”?

  Lee believed that to achieve a cohesive society, all citizens would have to be given a stake in the system.

  “How do you organise society so that you encourage everybody to do his best, never give up, even if he can do only one-tenth of the course, but still, encourage him and give him something? I don’t know what kind of ‘ism’ that will be. I mean, you have to think up some system to keep everybody in the race. It’s a problem of social cohesion and performance.

  “If you don’t give the also-rans a chance to feel that they belong and they’ve not been discarded, then the society will have no cohesion. If you have too much cohesion, there’s not enough rewards for high competitive performance and winning, then achievements will be low. So you’ve got to balance the two.

  “How you balance it depends on the nature of your society and how much you’re prepared to reduce in competitive excellence to achieve a national cohesion. If you have too much of it, you collapse. You may have all the cohesion in the world, everybody in Mao blue suits or grey suits, and you will fail, that’s all.”

  The yeast to raise society

  The “ideal” product – the graduate with intellectual discipline, stamina and compassion for society.

  Lee was not one who believed in the politically correct egalitarianism of his day. He argued that every society had a segment of its population – say, the top 5 to 10 per cent – which was exceptionally able. These people, like the philosopher kings of old, would have to be thrown up through a meritocratic process, or actively sought out, and put into the top positions in government and the private sector. To charges that such an approach was elitist, Lee would counter that doing so would help raise the lot of all in society, more so than a pretence that all men were equally capable or talented.

  “Supposing now, I am given superhuman powers. I say, ‘Look, here is Singapore with this limitation: 2 million people. What kind of schools, education would I have?’ I will tell you what I think I would want to do if I were endowed with superhuman powers.

  “I would like first, at the very top of your society, to rear a generation that has all the qualities needed to lead and give the people the inspiration, the drive to make it succeed. This would be your elite. If you go to any country, even young ones like Australia, they have special schools.

  “What is the ideal product? The ideal product is the student, the university graduate who is strong, robust, rugged, with tremendous qualities of stamina, endurance and, at the same time, with great intellectual discipline and, most important of all, humility and love for his community; a readiness to serve whether God or king or country or, if you like, just his community.

  “Every society produces this type or they try to. The British have special schools for them. They send them to Eton and Harrow and a few very exclusive private schools which they call ‘public schools’, then they send them on to Oxford and Cambridge. They have legends that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. …

  “We should try to do that. Not every boy is equal in his endowments in either physical stamina or mental capacity or character. But you want to try and get all those with the potential to blossom forth. That is your spearhead in your society. On them depends the pace of progress.

  “This government at the moment – the whole of this administration – is running on I would say the ability and drive and dedication – not on the basis of what they get in salaries – of about 150 people. You remove these 150 people, if you can identify the 150; whoever wants to destroy this society, identifies these 150 people and kills them, the push will be gone. This is a very thin crust of leadership. This has to be spread quickly, more and more.”

  (Speech to school principals, August 29, 1966; text on page 393)

  Lessons from Lenin: the limits of government

  Perhaps the clearest summary of Lee’s view of how the art of government and policy-making had to be tailored to fit the nature of the societies they were meant for is seen in a speech he made in Parliament in 1991. This was the first time he was moved to intervene in a parliamentary session after stepping down as prime minister in November 1990. He rose to answer his old political adversary from the Workers’ Party, Dr Lee Siew Choh, the former Barisan Sosialis leader, who returned to the House as a non-constituency MP in 1988.

  “God did not make the Russians equal. Lenin and Stalin tried to. You are too long, they chop you down. … They tried it in China; it has failed. They tried it in Vietnam, boat people. In North Korea, total devastation. … Even in the capitalist West where they have tried throwing money at problems … You go down to New York, Broadway. You will see the beggars… Worse than in the ’50s and in the early ’60s, before the Great Society programmes. Why? Why did it get worse after compassion moved a president, motivated with a great vision of a society which was wealthy and cared for, could look after everybody – the blacks, the minorities, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged. There is more unhappiness and more hardship today and more beggars, more muggers. Why is that? Have we not learnt?

  “Where are the beggars in Singapore? Show me. I take pride in that. Has anybody died of starvation? Anybody without a home left to die in the streets, to be collected as corpses?

  “Because we came to the realistic conclusion that the human being is motivated by instincts that go down to the basic genes in life. And the first basic instinct is to protect yourself, and stronger than that, to protect your offspring so that there is the next generation. You kill that link, you have killed off mankind. They half killed that link in China by removing children from parental control to the communes, and disaster followed. We went with the instinct of the individual.

  “Not all can perform in a free and equal society. Free chances, there will always be the losers. There is the altruistic streak in society. Individuals who have done well, who want to do something for their fellowmen, and we should use that. … You ignore that and substitute for the altruistic individual with that drive to do something for his fellowmen, a bureaucracy, and you have got corruption, inefficiency, and failure …

  “I am proud of the ethos with which we have infused a younger generation of Singaporeans. We have given th
em the chance to stand up, be self-reliant, and be enough of a team, of a nation, so that all can perform at their best, and the whole group, including the losers, will not perish. And that is achieved by going with human instincts, going with basic culture, and making adjustments along the way for those who would otherwise lose.”

  (Parliamentary speech during the 1991 Budget debate; text on page 390)

  Lee’s views about human abilities thus shaped his policies over the years.

  But he was also to worry about the future. If a society’s human stock was a critical determinant in its success, how could it ensure that future generations were given a headstart? He worried that the nation’s brightest were not reproducing themselves in sufficient numbers. In a controversial speech in 1983, he noted that only about one in four Singapore men with tertiary education was marrying his intellectual equal. This meant that a large pool of graduate women were left unmarried, or marrying down, and having fewer children. On the other hand, less educated Singaporeans were spawning large families. To him, this signalled a dangerous trend which would diminish the quality of the nation’s gene pool. While others would deride this as an attempt to tinker with the genetic makeup of society, for Lee it was little more than a forward-looking attempt to forestall societal problems.

  “I never regretted my 1983 speech, although it caused a lot of unhappiness.” As prime minister, Lee held a National Day Rally every August, when he would address the nation in his inimitable candid style, sharing his analysis of the past year and the years to come. In 1983, he caused a stir when he highlighted the country’s declining birth rate and the tendency of its graduate women to remain single and have fewer children. This, he said, would lower the quality of the country’s gene pool.