Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  (Interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, June 14, 1995)

  Lee would therefore argue that despite the media barrage against Singapore, the country would have to assert its “right to be ourselves”. It would have to chart its own course regardless of the criticisms that this might draw from the liberal Western press, which sought to fashion developing societies in their own image. To taunts in the Western media about Singapore being “authoritarian”, a “dictatorship”, or just plain “boring”, or even jibes which likened Lee to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, he would reply:

  “If I were a Saddam Hussein, then I would be a pariah which, unfortunately for them, I am not. I have access to any of the leaders I would like to meet in Europe, in Asia and indeed in America. And I think we should have the courage to withstand their assaults but only because we are open to scrutiny and will withstand microscopic examination. We shall proceed, and in the end, I believe we will be able to justify ourselves to the world.”

  (From the stand during a defamation suit against the International Herald Tribune, quoted in Straits Times, June 13, 1995)

  THE MAN BEHIND THE IDEAS

  Lee is at work in his Istana office six days a week.

  11

  I Did My Best

  Four thirty on a Saturday afternoon and the Istana is quiet save the steady, sleepy sound of cicadas snuggled deep in the trees on the sloping lawns. The Istana, Malay for “palace”, stands on what was once part of a massive nutmeg estate belonging to a British merchant named Charles Robert Prinsep. In 1869, Governor Harry Ord, who was in charge of Singapore from 1867 to 1873, acquired the land and built Government House on it. The stately white building, a mix of Ionic, Doric and Corinthian orders, was constructed by Indian convicts from Bencoolen in Sumatra.

  Over the years, other structures were added to the grounds. One of them, Sri Temasek, is the official residence of the prime minister of Singapore, though no prime minister has ever lived in it. There is also the Istana Annexe, Istana Villa and Istana Lodge. The main Istana building houses the president’s office, while the Istana Annexe serves as the prime minister’s office.

  On the second floor of the Annexe, all is busy on this humid afternoon. Plainclothes security officers tread the narrow carpeted corridors, buzzing each other periodically over their walkie-talkies. In a brightly lit room, a secretary works at her computer, one ear peeled to an intercom linking her to an adjoining office where Lee Kuan Yew works.

  It is an L-shaped room with an attached bathroom. It is free of personal paraphernalia. No family photographs decorate his table, no personal mementoes line his walls.

  He sits behind a desk, his back to a computer. A low cabinet next to it is stacked with books and files. A wood-panelled wall camouflages the door to the room where his two secretaries work. A teak table for eight stands four metres from his desk, a jade dragon jar in the middle.

  Lee works in this office six days a week, from about 10 in the morning to 6:30 in the evening, when he puts his work aside for his daily exercise in the Istana grounds. He has been known to come back to the office on Sundays and public holidays.

  He is about 1.8 metres tall, and slim. His trousers, which are usually in light hues, are loose, and he tugs at the waistband frequently. He is at least 10 kilograms lighter than when he was in his forties. His shirts are well-pressed though well-worn, and he wears a windbreaker, usually beige, when he is in the office.

  At 74, his hair is white. The once wiry black mop has thinned considerably over the years, accentuating a broad, high forehead under which small, piercing eyes stare. His face is pink in tone, the skin mostly unlined, though tiny creases crisscross the skin on his eyelids. His nails are neatly trimmed.

  Even in a private setting, he is a forceful personality. His facial expression changes quickly and his hands often chop the air to emphasise a point. His voice rises and falls according to his emotions. He is quick to show impatience, and slow to smile. He has never suffered fools lightly.

  Who is this man who, more than anyone else, has shaped the history of modern Singapore? Who is the person behind the personality Singaporeans regard with awe, respect, love, fear or hate? How would he describe himself? How does he see his 40 years of political life? What is his role now? What is his family life like? And what are his dreams and fears? Lee revealed his personal life in these interviews with the authors, weaving in events that took place 40 years ago as if they had happened only yesterday.

  Keeping fit has always been part and parcel of Lee’s life. After his first operation to open up a narrowed artery, in 1996, he said that regular exercise had saved his life. If not for his healthy lifestyle, he might have been hit by heart problems years ago.

  I have to be taken seriously

  Asked to describe himself, Lee is careful and takes his time to answer the question.

  “I would say that I’m very determined when I set out to do something. First, I’ve got to decide whether something is worth doing. If it’s not worth doing, well, I’m not prepared to spend the time over it, to make the effort. Then I just coast along, it doesn’t matter whether it succeeds or doesn’t succeed, it’s of no consequence.

  “But if I decide that something is worth doing, then I’ll put my heart and soul into it. I’ll give everything I’ve got to make it succeed. So I would put my strength, determination and willingness to see my objective to its conclusion. Whether I can succeed or not, that’s another matter – but I will give everything I’ve got to make sure it succeeds. If I’ve got to get good people, I get good people. If I’ve got to change tack, I will change tack. But the objective is the same. The presentation may change … If you have decided something is worth doing, you’ve got to remove all obstacles to get there.”

  What others think of him – many commentators have had a field day writing about him, and coffeeshop gossip about his life constantly hovers in the air – is water off a duck’s back. He has always relished a fight with his critics for, as he noted in April 1975 in an interview with New Zealand journalists, “criticism or general debunking even stimulates me because I think it is foolish not to have your people read you being made fun of”. He also puts it this way:

  “I have never been overconcerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. If you are concerned with whether your rating will go up or down, then you are not a leader. You are just catching the wind … you will go where the wind is blowing. And that’s not what I am in this for.

  “Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless. When I say something, to make it easier for me to govern, I have to be taken very seriously. So when I say ‘please don’t do that’, you do it, I have to punish you because I was not joking when I said that. And when I punish, it’s to punish publicly. And people will know the next time, if you want to do that when he said ‘no, don’t do it’, you must be prepared for a brutal encounter.

  “… My job is to persuade my flock, my people, that that’s the right way. And sometimes it may be necessary not to tell them all the facts because you will scare them.

  “What the crowd thinks of me from time to time, I consider totally irrelevant …

  “The whole ground can be against, but if I know this is right, I set out to do it, and I am quite sure, given time, as events unfold, I will win over the ground. … My job as a leader is to make sure that before the next elections, enough has developed and disclosed itself to the people to make it possible for me to swing them around. That’s the business of a leader – not to follow the crowd. That’s a washout. The country will go down the drain!”

  How I get my ideas

  Lee has never shied from borrowing ideas from other countries if they could benefit Singapore. He believes it is important for leaders to read and be interested in how other societies function. He related this to the authors:

  Drivers waiting in line for their cars
to be inspected, after Lee implemented vehicle testing, an idea he got from one of his many trips abroad.

  “Way back in the early ’70s, when Japan had trouble with the Minamata disease and pollution was a problem in Tokyo, I decided that we, as a small country industrialising rapidly, had no choice but to tackle the environmental problem right from the beginning. Retrofitting would be a disaster because they (foreign companies here) are all multinationals. Having approved them, how do you get them retrofitted?

  “Anti-pollution came directly under me. It started off as a part of the Prime Minister’s Office. I created that unit. I discussed it with the officials, and I started reading up on it. Then in my travels, I watched what other countries were doing – the way they sited their factories away from inhabited or residential areas, their anti-pollution controls for traffic. For instance, I was in Boston in 1970. There, I saw cars all lining up at garages. I asked, ‘Why are they lining up at the garage?’ and they said, ‘Once a year, you must have a garage to certify that your car is up to certain standards, the emission, the brakes, etc., or you can’t renew your licence.’ I thought, why don’t we have such a rule? Ours, you just wait until the car breaks down. When I came back, I said, ‘Look into this.’ So we started Vicom [Singapore’s first vehicle inspection company].

  “Long before a problem became acute, because we were travelling along the same road that these more advanced countries had travelled, I pre-empted the problem before it got out of control. We started putting pressure on diesel taxis puffing away fumes. Buses – endless problems! We had seven or eight bus companies until 1974. The problem was not solved until the 1980s. We had already started monitoring the towns, in Jurong.

  “But more than reading, it’s a frame of mind, it’s an interest in the things around you that matters, and taking note of the happenings in other countries when I travel. When I travel, yes, I occasionally go to plays in London and New York or an exhibition. But I’m watching how a society, an administration, is functioning. Why are they good? … And the ideas come from not just reading. You can read about it, but it’s irrelevant if you don’t relate it to yourself or Singapore’s problems, which I constantly do.”

  The makings of a leader

  Lee has strong views about what makes a good and effective leader, what qualities are important and will make a difference to the way a country is run.

  “You need, besides determination, all the other attributes that will push a project along. You must have application, you must be prepared to work hard, you must be prepared to get people to work with you. Especially for political leaders, you’ve got to have people work for you and work with you. You’ve got to enthuse them with the same fire and the same eagerness that pushes you along. I think that’s a very big factor in leadership.

  “At the end of the day, you must also have idealism to succeed, to make people come with you. You must have that vision of what is at the bottom of the rainbow you want to reach. But you must have a sense of reality … to feel when this vision is not practical, that it will ruin us.

  “For example, people don’t live the same lives. I can eat caviar every day, or at least George Lien can or Robert Kuok can. The world cannot. We therefore are entitled to the same level of medical services? No way. There may be only one such surgeon in the world who can do it. That surgeon will be flown, or you will fly to meet that surgeon. For everybody? No. So you’ve got to find something practical.

  “Therefore, right from the word go, I decided, you are entitled to medical treatment such as we can afford as a society, basic medical treatment; all frills above that, if you can afford it, then you buy the frills.

  “For heart transplant or liver transplant, you need a whole team of surgeons, anaesthetists, rejection experts. You can’t do that for everybody. There must be a practical streak in your judgement. I had that, or we would have failed.

  “[But] a leader without the vision, the idea to strive to improve things, is no good. Then you’ll just stay put, you won’t progress.”

  He also saw the importance of reading and exchanging views with experts.

  “You must read. It’s one way of getting information. But you’ve got to read what’s relevant, not only what you’re interested in. My wife reads Jane Austen. She was a student of English language and literature so she likes to read books in which she had found joy as a student. I wouldn’t read Jane Austen, not because I don’t admire her style, but because I would not have the time.

  “Novels? Very occasionally. I would read Tom Clancy. He imagined this kind of Third World War scenario, clash with the Soviets and so on, and the kind of battles that would take place. There was one particular novel which I’d read and enjoyed. But, of course, that was also related to my work because I have to approve all these high-tech defence equipment.

  “I suppose there are times when I get so tired and browned-off with certain problems, I want to take my mind off them, so I’ll read something totally different, about South American tribes or whatever. Occasionally, I would read little biographies or autobiographies. There’s one about an English lady in Kashgar. My wife would have read it, she’d say, “Oh, this is interesting!” It’s a totally different world. It transports me for one, two hours to a different world. Unless the book is riveting, I don’t read it from cover to cover. I’ll read it and if I see something else, I’ll pick it up.

  Lee as a young man studying in England. He had given this photograph to his wife-to-be Kwa Geok Choo.

  “You must not overlook the importance of discussions with knowledgeable people. I would say that is much more productive than absorbing or running through masses of documents. Because in a short exchange, you can abstract from somebody who has immense knowledge and experience the essence of what he had gained. In a one-hour exchange over dinner with some people who are knowledgeable in certain fields, you get the hang of a particular problem.

  “Let’s take a recent example. We had this Economic Development Board meeting with this international advisory group. I posed them this question. We are now using our knowledge and our capital and our expertise to help develop these countries – China, Vietnam, India, Myanmar – and help entrepreneurs from developed countries to go in with us, using our knowledge and our contacts to get these countries up. But after 20 years, 30 years, maybe less, they have caught up with us. And these MNCs, after five, 10 years, they get to know the place, they don’t need us anymore. So what’s our relevance?

  “And George Fisher of Kodak was a very thoughtful man. He said, in the end, you have to own knowledge, property, like … Kodak owns the technical knowhow and the name Kodak. Even if you can find out how to make films nearly as good as Kodak, you don’t own Kodak. He said, ‘Perhaps you should buy into these companies and co-own them, then bring some of them over here and have R&D both here and in America or whatever.’

  “You’ve got to start thinking ahead. You can’t just say, okay, let’s regionalise and we’ll make a lot of money 20 years up. I’d be dead, but my children will not be dead, my grandchildren will be there, they’ve got to find a role for themselves.

  “Then the Shell man, van Wachem, he’s a retired CEO and now he’s just chairman. He said, ‘There are certain things where you cannot predict what is possible.’ And he said, nobody – not even he – would have believed that Singapore in the age after the oil crisis, after ’73 when oil-owning countries took over their own oil fields, could become a refining and a petrochemical centre. But we have, we are an entrepôt in oil and in petrochemicals …

  “How do you extrapolate that? He has given me an idea of how something has developed in a way which he could not have predicted. He is in the oil business. He did not predict this. So we cannot be discouraged. In our way forward, things will happen which will offer us opportunities, which we will seize and can hold only if we remain alert, and on the ball, and competitive. In other words, finally, [what matters is] the quality of your manpower or quality of the teamwork behind the managers and y
our infrastructure.”

  I can live frugally

  When he decided to enter politics in 1955, Lee knew that he had to prepare himself for a life of uncertainty. He set about this in a characteristically practical manner.

  “When I went in, I had to be comfortable with my own self, that I can live with failure. And failure means it has failed, the communists have won and I’m in deep trouble. Either I have to flee, or they will brainwash me, break me. I don’t think they will just kill me because by that time, I would have become a prominent fellow, they want to use me like they used Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor. They brainwash you and break you. And I knew all that! I prepared myself for the possibility of failure, for the possibility of being able to live with failure. In other words, if you want a soft life, better not get into this.

  “So I led a pretty disciplined life; if the worst came to the worst, I could survive. I don’t need caviar for breakfast, or for dinner, or for supper. I can live on soya beans. I can live quite frugally if I need to. It became a way of remoulding my life in a direction or in a way which would withstand a sharp attack on it.

  “Even today, I would still drive my car in the Istana grounds. If tomorrow I have no driver, I can just pick up my car and drive. Occasionally, on a Sunday, I drive myself outside the Istana. I carry my own bag as a matter of principle, because otherwise, for 30, 40 years, with everybody pushing chairs for you, your limbs will atrophy.

  “And I was very keen that that shouldn’t happen to my children, that nobody pushed chairs for them. If a ball fell down and the Istana boy wanted to pick it up, I would stop him and say, ‘No, that’s his ball. Ignore him. He will go to the drain and pick it up.’ They had to learn that, and I think they have benefited from it.”