Indeed, there was a reigning philosopher king, who these diplomats and defense officials kept mentioning and quoting from: who I must now introduce. For he is Singapore’s version of Deng Xiaoping. In fact, it was partly from him that Deng got his vision to modernize China.
Just consider: in three decades, Singapore had gone from a malarial hellhole of overpowering smells and polluted, life-threatening monsoon drains to a global economic dynamo that topped businessmen’s lists for efficiency and quality of life. The old Singapore was a place of slums, rats, garbage, and stray dogs. The new Singapore was so clean, sterile, and easy to negotiate that I thought of it as beginner’s Asia. In the early 1960s, Singapore was as poor as many countries in sub-Saharan Africa; by the 1990s, this city-state, one fifth the size of Rhode Island, had a standard of living higher than Australia’s. Credit for the miracle went to one man: an English-educated ethnic Chinese barrister, Harry Lee, who, when he decided to enter politics, changed his name back to the traditional Lee Kuan Yew.
Whenever in the 1990s I sat with influential figures in the Arab and ex-communist worlds, I always posed the question, Who was the greatest minor man of the twentieth century—not someone on par with Churchill or Roosevelt, but a tier below—the kind of man your country needs at the moment? The answer I got was never Nelson Mandela or Václav Havel, but invariably Lee Kuan Yew. Some journalists and intellectuals who had never wielded bureaucratic responsibility over large groups of people, and who preached moral absolutes from the sidelines, disliked him. But Western leaders—Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher, to name a few, each of whom understood the need for moral compromise in the face of implacable, violent forces—rightly held him in awe. Lady Thatcher observed: “In office, I read and analyzed every speech of Harry’s. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda.… He was never wrong.”2
In the best short analysis of Lee’s career, Australian editor and intellectual Owen Harries writes that Lee’s political philosophy was the upshot of his experiences in the 1940s: in the first half of the decade he knew the utter brutality of Japanese occupation; in the second half studying at Cambridge he experienced a civil society established under the rule of law.3 “The three and a half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life,” Lee writes in the first volume of his memoirs, The Singapore Story. “They gave me vivid insights into the behavior of human beings and human societies, their motivations and impulses.” He goes on. “The Japanese demanded total obedience and got it.… Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare.… As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. That was not my experience in Singapore.” Lee says he “learnt more” from the Japanese occupation “than any university could have taught me.” Nevertheless, at university after the war he also learned much. He and his fellow Singaporean and Malayan students at Cambridge “were enthusiastic about the mature British system, under which constitutional tradition and tolerance allowed fundamental shifts of power and wealth to take place peacefully.”4
Lee tempered the Japanese fascist penchant for order with the lawful rule of the British to achieve a developmental miracle on this small island that comprises 214 square miles at low tide. Lee tells how he accomplished this in two massive volumes of compulsively readable memoirs. Most political memoirs are dreadful ghost writer-assembled hackwork that are little more than a stitching together of banal justifications. But Lee’s two-volume set, The Singapore Story and From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom, are contenders for inclusion in Plutarch’s early-second-century AD The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans.5 Lee’s books tell a story that challenges the philosophical underpinnings of the Western intellectual elite, because it implies that virtue is not altogether connected with democracy and that meritocratic quasi-autocracy can in a poor country achieve economic results quicker than can a weak and chaotic parliamentary system.
Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore constitutes a more worthy model of leadership than Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia. Both men imposed an authoritarian style over newly wrought democratic systems. Yet Lee is without Mahathir’s decidedly nasty prejudices and petty meannesses, while harboring a more acute strategic vision that, unlike Mahathir’s, goes far beyond the Muslim world. Mahathir is head and shoulders above most other Muslim leaders; whereas Lee, as I indicated, is head and shoulders above most other leaders worldwide in the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the first volume of his memoirs, Lee assesses Singapore’s situation as he found it in the 1950s, the time when he established the People’s Action Party by combining an English-speaking elite with a broad working-class base. Though located at “the heart of the British Empire in Southeast Asia,” with the decline and dissolution of empire, Lee feared that Singapore would become “a heart without a body.” As he explains, British defense spending accounted for 20 percent of the city-state’s GDP, and created employment for 10 percent of its workforce. Thus, the end of the British Empire would signal Singapore’s greatest domestic crisis since the entrepôt was founded in 1819 at the ultra-strategic southernmost tip of the Asian mainland, with deep harbors and sheltered anchorages dominating the Strait of Malacca—where the Indian Ocean ends and the Western Pacific begins in the form of the South China Sea. Seventy-five percent of Singapore’s population of two million back then were ethnic Chinese, surrounded at the time by 100 million Malay and Indonesian Muslims. “How could we survive in such a hostile environment?” the young aspiring politician asked himself.6
Moreover, the Chinese themselves in Singapore were a feudal community divided by clan and dialect, with the exception of a small group of English speakers to which Lee’s family belonged. Within the Chinese community, the dominant political force was the local Communist Party, whose raison d’être was the “latent animosity” that the Chinese population had for its white bosses, which, in turn, led to a communist strategy of provoking confrontation with the British. Then there were the Indian and Malay minorities in Singapore itself. (Singapore, or Singapura, is Malay for “City of the Lion.”) Malay culture, Owen Harries explains, was “hierarchical, deferential, and characterized by an easygoing cronyism that shaded into corruption.” And there was Indonesia, adjacent to Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, where Sukarno, the most anti-Western leader in the Third World, was about to run amok through the manipulation of the largest Communist Party outside of the Warsaw Pact. For Harry Lee, about to become Lee Kuan Yew, it was hard to be an optimist.7 The only way to survive politically and create a modern polity was through indirect thrusts and maneuvering among hostile forces for years on end, especially in regards to the communists.
For Singapore’s ethnic Chinese were in the early years, before the crimes of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution came to light, very proud of Mao Zedong’s Red China—even as they despised Western colonialism in the guise of their British occupiers, the same occupiers who, as Lee was painfully aware, provided Singaporeans with jobs. It was Singapore’s chronic unemployment that inspired trade unionism, and it was trade unionism that inspired communism. Lee knew that it was the communist threat in both Singapore and Malaya that motivated the British toward the “less unpleasant option” of handing over power to his own People’s Action Party in Singapore and to the moderate and traditional force represented by Tunku (Prince) Abdul Rahman in peninsular Malaya.
“In pre-war India, where there was no communist threat, constitutional methods of passive resistance took decades to work,” Lee writes in true Machiavellian style. Indeed, with communists and their kindred spirits in power in both China and Indonesia, the British, who could no longer afford an empire, were desperate to hand power to Western-oriented local rulers in Singapore and Malaya, in order to keep the sea lanes open in the South China Sea and in the all-important Strait of Malacca. That meant that the political positions of Lee and the Tunku had to be strengt
hened by the British, because in the early post-World War II years a democratic system—in Singapore at least—would have likely brought a pro-communist government to power. In the history of the Cold War, Lee’s ability and willingness to engage in a “ceaseless ding-dong” with local communists, “exchanging vitriol with them in the press and exercising restraint in the face of provocation by their strikes,” while borrowing their mass mobilization techniques like street-sweeping campaigns and the organization of work brigades, constituted a godsend to the West.8
It was Lee’s very drive, energy, and life force that altered history in this hotly contested theater of the Cold War, roiled as it was by communist insurgencies in nearby Malaya and Vietnam. Amidst the struggle to consolidate power against the communists and maneuvering between Malaya and Indonesia as a prime minister in his late thirties, Lee compelled himself to learn a new language, Hokkien Chinese.
Lee decided early on that his first strategic move would be to identify his political party with “independence through merger” with Malaya. Malaya, with its large stores of tin and rubber, provided Singapore with an economic base and the prospects for a common market to sustain Singapore’s industrialization and reduce its unemployment. Furthermore, Singapore shared a common British colonial past with Malaya, and needed it as protection against Sukarno’s Muslim demographic Goliath of Indonesia. Malaya, for its part, needed to control Singapore for the sake of a tighter grip on communism in the city-state, even as it desperately yearned to incorporate the budding export dynamo. The problem for Malaya’s leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, was that adding Singapore to Malaya would upset the ethnic balance in favor of the Chinese: to solve the problem, the heavily Malay populations of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo were, with British acquiescence, added to the federation, thus creating Malaysia in 1963.9
The very creation of the federation elicited threats from Indonesia and the Philippines, both of which coveted the northern and northwestern Borneo territories of Sabah and Sarawak, which the Indonesians and Filipinos felt the British had no right to cede to the new Malaysia. Sukarno’s Indonesia was especially dangerous. Sukarno, his own economy unraveling by the minute, was warning Great Britain and the United States to get out of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea region, and make way for the axis of Red China, North Vietnam, and neutralist Cambodia. Sukarno’s leftist-populist, blood-and-soil appeals to ethnic Malays in both Indonesia and Malaysia posed another threat. In order to compete with Sukarno, the Tunku had to adopt a similar strategy of advancing the rights and privileges of ethnic Malays in the new federation, which angered the ethnic Chinese and Indians, the former of which were concentrated in Singapore. Thus did the federation with Singapore begin to come undone.
Sukarno would be toppled in 1967 by the pro-Western Suharto, who would bring order and stability to Indonesia, educating his people and making Indonesia into a budding tiger economy, while his own family would add to—rather than alleviate—the megacountry’s rampant corruption. But in the mid-1960s the bad blood between ethnic Malays and Singapore-based ethnic Chinese in the new Malaysia could not be assuaged. Lee had tense negotiations with the increasingly populist Malay leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, in order to preserve ethnic Chinese rights in the federation, even as Lee fought political battles with Chinese chauvinist groups and pro-communists at home in Singapore. Lee was evidently more ambitious than he lets on in his memoirs. His deep, unstated reason for the union with Malaya was so that he could one day rule Malaysia. Singapore was simply too small a prize for his capability and genius.
Above all, Lee was a man of vision. In the radical 1960s, when Western youth nursed ideas of world peace and connoted centralized power of any kind with evil, Lee saw that “half-digested theories of socialism and redistribution of wealth,” when compounded with “less than competent government” in the Third World, would have “appalling consequences” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Lee was a Thatcherite and Reaganite before their time, holding off communist forces in Southeast Asia, a key ideological and strategic battleground of the era.10
But inside Southeast Asia, Lee just couldn’t make the new Malaysia work. He understood that pressures within the Tunku’s own ethnic community would force the Tunku to concede to Singapore autonomy only over matters like education and labor. And this would not satisfy Lee’s own constituents. Then in 1964 came intercommunal riots in Singapore between ethnic Chinese and ethnic Malays, partly incited by racial propaganda coming from Kuala Lumpur, leaving dozens dead and hundreds wounded. Afterward, in Kuala Lumpur, an ethnic Malay member of Parliament and a future prime minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad, denounced Lee’s People’s Action Party as “pro-Chinese, communist-oriented, and positively anti-Malay.” Mahathir accused Singapore of retaining its multilingualism rather than adopting Malay as its language, which he claimed it should have. To Mahathir, Lee represented a type of Chinese who was “insular, selfish and arrogant,” and who could not bear being ruled by Malays, people the Chinese had oppressed for so long.11
Finally, the more moderate Tunku told Lee: “You go your way, we go our own way. So long as you are in any way connected with us, we will find it difficult to be friends because we are involved in your affairs and you will be involved in ours. Tomorrow, when you are no longer in Malaysia … we’ll be friends again, and we’ll need each other, and we’ll cooperate.”12
And that is exactly what happened.
Lee concludes the first volume of his memoir from the vantage point of 1965, saying: “I had let down many people in Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak.… By accepting separation, I had failed them. That sense of guilt made me break down.”13
All looked bleak.
“We had to make a living, to persuade investors to put their money into manufacturing plants and other businesses in Singapore. We had to learn to survive, without the British military umbrella and without a hinterland.”14
So begins the narrative thread in Lee’s second volume, which, even more than the first, approximates the lessons of Machiavelli’s The Prince.15 As Lee writes, “A soft people will vote for those who promised a soft way out,” and because there was no soft way out, Lee determined to forge a hard island race of overseas Chinese with Malay and Indian minorities. Only a hard people could build the “throbbing and humming” industrial, commercial, and communications center he envisioned. He would make a fair society, not a “welfare” society.16
Like the Israelis, Lee decided to “leapfrog the region”: faced with an initially hostile Malaysia and Indonesia, not to mention hostile communist regimes in China and North Vietnam, Lee’s Singapore would link up with America, Europe, and Japan by effusively welcoming multinational corporations, which, at the time, in the radical late 1960s, the “dependency school” of economists were condemning as Western colonialism in disguise. He would give multinationals taxfree status for years on end and control the labor unions to boot, in return for having Singaporeans learn Western technical skills at the new plants. Moreover, he would establish standards of safety, security, infrastructure, service, and even aesthetics—like highways lined with pruned shrubbery—that would attract a professional class of Western engineers and entrepreneurs, who would make Singapore their “base camp” in Asia. Corruption would not be a problem as in other Third World countries. Lee would attack it by simplifying procedures, establishing clear and precise guidelines in business, and making living beyond one’s means corroborative evidence in court for taking bribes. English would be the national language, reducing tensions among the various groups who all spoke different tongues and adding another lure to bring in Western banks and companies. Already, in the 1970s, as the oil crisis hit in the United States and the rebellious spirit of the 1960s youth movements was wearing off in the media, glowing reports began surfacing in newsmagazines about Singapore’s progress. Singapore, Inc., was in the process of being born. The fact that twenty-first-century Asia is all about business had a start in 1970s Singapore.17
More so than Mahat
hir, Lee was manic and meticulous. He demanded maintenance of facilities, and banned spitting, chewing gum, and tobacco advertisements. He chastises the Americans for being far behind in stigmatizing cigarette smoking, because their tobacco lobby was too powerful for too long. Foreign correspondents ridiculed Singapore as a “nanny state.” Lee’s response is that journalists make fun of his edicts only because Singapore offered them no big scandals, corruption cases, or grave wrongdoing to report. Lee criticizes the Western media for being “cynical” about authority, and points out that a freewheeling press in India, the Philippines, and Thailand have not stemmed raging corruption in those places, while Singapore, with its controlled press, has little corruption and meritocratic government.
Lee is nothing if not feisty. He defends caning as inhibiting crime more than long prison terms. He again refers back to the harsh Japanese occupation, when people were semi-starving but there were no burglaries. Lee’s tough love was extended to the Malay minority, whose low test scores in math and science he attacked head-on, by working with Malay community leaders and the media to encourage students to study harder.18
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