Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  Stepping aside

  On November 28, 1990, Lee handed over the reins of government to Goh Chok Tong. The event was televised, and many observed that he looked emotional. Since then there has also been talk about whether he has really relinquished power and whether his influence behind the scenes has diminished. To him, all this misses the mark completely. Those who indulge in such idle speculation, he said, do not understand what his stepping aside as prime minister meant to him and the country.

  “I had prepared for it for a long time, so I was impatient for it to take place … The Western press, they write up these things projecting their reactions into me, that to give up power was a disastrous loss of authority and so on. Whereas my approach was totally different.

  “I had a job to do. I had come to the conclusion by about ’76 that my most important job was to get a team that could carry on the work, otherwise we would fail. We’d been trying since ’68 to get capable successors. We fielded Chiang Hai Ding, Wong Lin Ken in ’68. In ’70, Augustine Tan. All bright PhDs. They couldn’t do it. You need more than a capacity to write treatises or argue logically. You need practical minds, tough characters who will push a policy through.

  “By ’76, I was getting very anxious. Hon Sui Sen had a profound influence on me. We were close friends from Japanese days. … One day, he told me that he wanted to retire after the next elections. I said, ‘How can you do that? You’re still young.’ He said, ‘No, I’m not.’ He said, ‘You know, when these chairmen and CEOs come to see me, they are not just looking at me, they are looking for who will be taking my place. Because their investments are going to go on a long time – 10, 15, 20 years, and I won’t be here. The Americans have a succession system in place. At 65 you’re out, and you’ve got to find a successor before then for the Board to confirm. So they were looking around and watching the younger team. They’re watching you too,’ he said to me. ‘You are still okay,’ he said, ‘but, you know, they are looking beyond your lifetime.’

  “So I spent a long time hunting for good men, working out a system that will produce a team of good men, comparable, at least as competent as what I had in place. They may not be as tough and tough-minded, or as imaginative or creative because that’s in the luck of the draw. But they must be able to run the place. They must first know the problems. So we set out head-hunting.

  “I set the target at 1988, when I would be 65, believing that the sooner I give up, the younger I will be and the more active I can be to make sure that the team succeeds. I’ll be around to make sure that the team can succeed. The later I give up, the older and slower I will be, the more risky its success.

  “When ’88 came, Chok Tong wasn’t confident of taking over from me and dealing with our immediate neighbours, Suharto and Mahathir. He felt he would be at a disadvantage. So he said, ‘Better give me two years; meanwhile I can get a feel of the job.’ Meanwhile, I had been passing over more and more of the work to him. And I said, ‘What do you think? What’s your view?’ – pushing him to make decisions and then supporting him. Or if I disagreed, I would explain the reasons.

  “So when 1990 came, he wanted me to stay on for the 25th anniversary of Singapore’s independence, for a sentimental reason, 1965 to 1990. So I finished my term in August and he was ready to take over by November, after I’d tidied up some odds and ends.

  “My job after that was to make sure that an error which is avoidable because of my experience should not be committed if I can help it. I think the team in place is functioning. And I believe, without me, it can function as well. That is a triumph!

  “The Western correspondents don’t understand that this is a completely different approach to the problem of succession. For him and his team to fail, it’s my failure. I brought this team together. If they succeed, it is I who brought about the success. It’s a very serious business, of ensuring the continuation of good government.”

  On November 28, 1990, Lee relinquished the reins of government to Goh Chok Tong. “I had prepared for it for a long time, so I was impatient for it to take place. … For him and his team to fail, it’s my failure. I brought this team together. If they succeed, it is I who brought about the success.”

  It was for this reason, he says, that he went public in 1988 to give an assessment of whom he thought could best take over from him. He had rated Tony Tan his first choice, even though Goh Chok Tong was then First Deputy Prime Minister.

  “When I went public to say, ‘Look, this is my assessment,’ I did that deliberately to make sure people understood that this was an open exercise, that they, Goh’s peers, had chosen him. In other words, having chosen him, they have to support him. I had not appointed him. If I appointed him and they disagreed, they could withhold support and he would not succeed …

  “Having seen what went wrong, particularly in the communist countries, and even in Britain, where Churchill handed over to Anthony Eden, Eden failed and Macmillan picked it up – I did not believe that if I appointed the leader, they would give him the same wholehearted support. So I forced them to decide amongst themselves. I had said to them, ‘Look, my assessment is as follows.’

  “This was after the 1984 elections. I watched them run the elections and I watched their press conferences. I said the most decisive leader was Tony Tan. He would say yes or no and he would stick to it. Goh Chok Tong would try to please you. You can see him in a press conference, even today. If he sits back and talks to his Cabinet, then he comes out with a firm position, after long discussion. But if you engage him in a press conference, you might get him to make some concessions.

  “You will never get Tony Tan to do that. You won’t get me to do that. You can talk to me till the cows come home; if I have decided that this is no go, it is no go. You may be unhappy, but I am quite convinced, after six months, maybe after six years, you will know that I was right. But he [Goh] has one advantage – he has their support. They’ve got to support him because they elected him. And I think that that was a wise move. I made it public to let people know that the choice was that of his colleagues.

  “There was a reason and method behind what people thought was a casual passing of judgement. I was seriously placing the weight on the shoulders of his colleagues. They have worked with me, I have pointed out this is right, that is wrong.

  “I thought at that time that Deng Xiaoping made a mistake getting rid of Zhao Ziyang. Maybe he had compelling reasons, I don’t know – must have been powerful reasons. After working with a man for 30, 40 years, why knock him down like that?”

  Does he miss being the prime minister?

  “Frankly no. Supposing I’m prime minister, I have to attend to all the day-to-day problems, I’ve got to go to all these conferences, Asean summit, Apec, visit so many countries. I have done all that for so long. What’s the point of it? I have outgrown it. I don’t hanker to go to an Asean summit or an Apec summit, or to have a state visit to America or Britain.

  “I’ve been through all that. I have been the guest of honour at formal dinners, state visits – from President Johnson to Nixon, to Ford to Reagan and Bush. Well, that’s enough!

  “The prime minister has to work with Clinton. It’s not my job. He’s a younger man. Supposing I were the prime minister and I had to deal with Clinton, I would find it quite an effort dealing with a Vietnam War generation, a man who was against the Vietnam War. I was for the Vietnam War and had encouraged the president of the United States, both Johnson and then Nixon.”

  Zhao Ziyang – Chinese premier and party chief hand picked by Deng Xiaoping to be his successor. His star fell swiftly and he was sacked in 1989 for sympathising with pro-democracy student demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He was barred from attending Deng’s funeral in February 1997.

  On his role as senior minister and his life now, Lee sees himself as a guardian to the younger team running Singapore.

  “At 70-plus, what do I need? Time to reflect. I need enough to keep me engaged and interested in life. What is it I
want to do? What can I best do with the balance of my time? I don’t know how much time I’ve got left. If, let’s say, I have another five or 10 years – if I am lucky, and am like my father more than like my mother, who died when she was 74. But it’s 10 years in which my energy levels will be declining, year by year.

  “What I’d like to do now is to give this government the benefit of my experience in avoiding mistakes. I can’t tell them what to do as their great achievements, their great breakthroughs. That’s for them to work out with younger Singaporeans. But I know that certain things are sure paths to trouble, so avoid them.

  “It’s not by accident that we got here. Every possible thing that could have gone wrong, we had tried to pre-empt. That’s how we got here, that’s why we have substantial reserves. Because if we don’t have reserves, the moment we run into trouble, who will lend you money when you’ve got no gold mines or oil fields? We’ve got nothing. All we have is this functioning organism which requires brains, specialised skills put together in a very intricate form, with inputs from many nations and their experts in financial services, manufacturing, tourism, all sorts of economic activities put together. It’s not easy to replicate.

  “I consider this as the best contribution I can make, the most worthwhile thing to do.”

  I’ve been a lucky man

  Lee describes himself as an agnostic, but he appreciates that there are those who regard religion as a main pillar of life. Others, like himself, are guided by certain personal beliefs.

  “I was brought up as an ancestor worshipper, Taoist, Buddhist – the traditional Chinese family. If I visited a funeral wake of a Chinese family, I would perform the necessary rituals with joss-sticks in respect. At home, after some years, around the 1960s, we stopped the rituals in memory of my grandfather on certain days like Qing Ming, with the offerings, candles, joss-sticks.

  “If you ask me, ‘Is there a God?’ my answer is ‘I don’t know.’ But I do know that those who believe in God – like Hon Sui Sen and his wife – they derive great strength and comfort from their religion. They do not believe that this is the end of the world. Their behaviour and their hopes do not end with this life. That gives them enormous reserves of stamina and serenity of mind.

  “I would not dismiss religion as so much superstition. The communists have failed in stamping out religion because it is part of human nature.

  “I don’t think I have ever, in times of great danger or peril, gone down on my knees to pray, or gone to the temple and hoped for some miracle. I do not believe strength comes, necessarily, from a belief in God. You must have some belief in a philosophy, in an idea, in a concept.

  “It is a question of faith which, in the case of the communists, had nothing to do with God. It is a question of faith, the belief that something is right and they’re going to do it. So if you ask me, what is my faith, I’ll say, well, I believe certain things are worth doing and let’s do it … People are made that way.”

  Would he describe himself as a happy man?

  Lee with his extended family at a Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion on January 22, 1993. The family network and the traditions they uphold have always been important to Lee.

  “Ask a man in his 70s like me what is happiness, and I would say a certain serenity of mind, a certain satisfaction with having done things which were worth doing and in not having more than one’s normal share of tragedies.

  “Everybody goes through the vagaries of life. I am fortunate that I escaped death at the hands of the Japanese and death and injury in a nasty accident when my car turned over at Thomson Road, at Caldecott Hill, near Radio Singapore. It was a bad turn. It’s no longer there now. There was a deep ravine on the side with iron waterpipes. And on a very rainy day, this was in ’51 – I was going to play golf at the Island Club. The car just skidded and then rolled over two times, but landed on soft grass and soft earth! If I had hit that pipe, that would have been the end of both of us, and my wife was expecting her first child then. So I think it was deliverance.

  “Taking everything into account, I’ve been a lucky man. My son is not so lucky, he lost his wife. Quite inexplicable. She was a doctor, should have known that she was having heart trouble because she was feeling pains in her neck. But too late. And by the time the attack took place, doctors could do nothing … And he got lymphoma. That’s the luck of the draw and he has to live with it. So if you compare my fate with his, I am luckier. But in the end, he will have to be the stronger person.

  “Life has an unfair, unpredictable quality about it and you must take it as it comes. But then, that’s not what I would have thought if you had asked me when I was 30 years old. Now it’s a different perspective. How many of my generation are alive, never mind being fit and mobile and still compos mentis?”

  Lee said his greatest personal achievement is his family.

  “I’m very happy that I’ve got a good, happy family. I’ve got a happy marriage, I’ve got three children I’m very proud of, I can’t ask for more. That’s my personal achievement.”

  Of his political achievements, he pointed to a thriving Singapore.

  “What I have to show for all my work is Singapore, and Singapore is still working. It would have been better if we had Singapore as part of a successful Malaysia. I still believe that, but it wasn’t possible, so that’s that.”

  Would he live life differently if he had to do it all over?

  “Among those of my generation, very few are alive, very few have been as fortunate as I have been, very few have taken the risks I have taken and survived. Why do I want to live my life all over again?

  “A golf pro once demonstrated a trick shot. He took an egg, put it on a tee and he took a sand wedge. And he said, ‘I’ll hit that tee, snap it and the egg will drop on the grass unbroken.’ And he did it. He snapped a tall wooden tee and the egg dropped down unbroken. I wanted to see how actually it was done. I thought he turned the blade, so the blade snapped the tee, and did not touch the egg. So I said, ‘Do that again.’ He said, ‘No, I may not be as lucky the second time.’

  “I think I will give you that answer. I may not be as lucky a second time in so many things. … All I can say is, I did my best. This was the job I undertook, I did my best and I could not have done more in the circumstances. What people think of it, I have to leave to them. It is of no great consequence. What is of consequence is, I did my best.”

  IN HIS OWN WORDS: SELECTED SPEECHES AND INTERVIEWS

  Lee Kuan Yew’s first election campaign was not in Singapore, for the People’s Action Party, but in England, for the Labour Party during the 1950 British general election. To help his friend, David Widdicombe, the Labour candidate for Totnes, Devon, he drove a lorry, making the rounds in the constituency and stopping by the gates of factories, delivering speeches on the back of the vehicle. This speech, in early February 1950, focussed on how he saw the electoral fight between Labour and the Conservatives.

  If I were an Englishman

  If I were an Englishman, I would not have to explain my presence on this platform for it is the right and indeed the duty of every Englishman to take sides in a general election. You may well wonder what a Chinaman should be doing here. You have important domestic issues to discuss that should not concern any foreigner. Let me say at once that I am not a foreigner. I am a British subject from British Malaya. And I am here because your vote on February 23 will affect me and 7 million other Malayans some 8,000 miles away. It is your Colonial Office here which decides our fate. It may be that some of you could not care less what happens to a lot of ignorant and illiterate natives. But, unfortunately, what happens to my ignorant fellow countrymen, and what they do, is going to affect you in England.

  From Malaya, Britain gets more dollars every year than she gets from Marshall Aid. It is the country that produces the world’s rubber and more than one-third the world’s tin – two raw materials which America does not have and must import. Malaya’s dollar earnings are so important to Britain that
Sir Stafford Cripps obtained a promise from President Truman to keep down the American production of synthetic rubber in order that America will buy more Malayan natural rubber. If Britain loses Malaya her dollar gap will rip open. That would mean a heavy cut in your imports of food and raw materials, consequent unemployment and a steep rise in the cost of living.

  When it is a choice between Labour, a party with a social conscience, and Conservative, a party without one, we in the colonies have no difficulty in deciding which is the better.

  Since Labour came into power four years ago I have often criticised their colonial policy and administration; and your Labour candidate, whom I have known since I came to this country three years ago, has received his full measure of what I thought were the faults of Britain’s colonial programme. But when it is a choice between Labour, a party with a social conscience, and Conservative, a party without one, we in the colonies have no difficulty in deciding which is the better. To the Tories, the colonies are just areas for very profitable investment. Every other week you will notice in the Times the 50–60 per cent dividends, such dividends as you never see anywhere else in the world. To them, we are just a lot of natives providing their younger and less able sons with a decent career and a comfortable pension on retirement. They had and still have no plans for helping the less fortunate peoples in the Empire to a better standard of living and a greater degree of self-government. Indeed they say quite openly that they do not intend to liquidate the Empire. And to them the giving of self-government to the non-European peoples would be the liquidating of the Empire. What they refuse to see is the fact that the Asiatics and African peoples in the Empire have grown up politically and are no longer content to be governed from Whitehall, no longer happy about being developed by big capitalist interests. There was no socialist government in Holland after the war. They wanted to go back to the glory of their prewar empire. They refused to face the facts of postwar nationalism in Asia. So they engaged in a bitter and costly war in Indonesia. Now, after three years of it, they have had to admit defeat.