Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas Read online

  LEE KUAN YEW

  THE MAN AND HIS IDEAS

  LEE KUAN YEW

  THE MAN AND HIS IDEAS

  Han Fook Kwang

  Warren Fernandez

  Sumiko Tan

  © 1998 Times Editions Pte Ltd

  The Straits Times Press

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  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Han, Fook Kwang, author.

  Lee Kuan Yew : the man and his ideas / Han Fook Kwang, Warren Fernandez, Sumiko Tan. – Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions : The Straits Times Press, 2015.

  pages cm

  Originally published: Singapore : Times Editions Pte Ltd : The Straits Times Press, ©1998.

  eISBN : 978 981 4677 68 4

  Lee, Kuan Yew, 1923-2015. 2. Singapore – Politics and government – 1965-1990. 3. Prime ministers – Singapore – Biography. I. Fernandez, Warren, author. II. Tan, Sumiko, author. III. Title.

  DS610.73.L45

  959.5705092 -- dc23

  OCN905843223

  Printed in Singapore by Craft Print International Ltd

  Acknowledgements

  We are grateful to Mr Lee Kuan Yew for his support of the project and the many hours he spent with us in interviews for the book, and for his advice and encouragement throughout. Our thanks, too, to Mrs Lee for the use of photographs from the family album.

  We would like to thank the Executive Chairman of Singapore Press Holdings, Mr Lim Kim San, and the Editor-in-chief of its English and Malay newspapers division, Mr Cheong Yip Seng, for their support of the project.

  Several people helped in the research and in reading the drafts, especially Straits Times journalist Pang Gek Choo, who was invaluable in both.

  Our thanks are due also to The Straits Times, the National Archives of Singapore, Lianhe Zaobao and the Ministry of Information and the Arts for the use of their resources.

  Contents

  Introduction

  THE MAKING OF A POLITICIAN

  1. It Began When My World Collapsed

  2. Taking on the Communists

  3. The Union Divided

  IDEAS THAT MADE A NATION

  4. The Secret of Good Government

  5. From Third World to First

  6. End of History? Asia’s Just Beginning

  7. The Nature of Human Society

  8. Culture, the X-factor

  9. First Order, then Law

  10. Minding the Media

  THE MAN BEHIND THE IDEAS

  11. I Did My Best

  IN HIS OWN WORDS:

  SELECTED SPEECHES AND INTERVIEWS

  If I were an Englishman

  The returned student

  Colonies are out of date

  The battle for hearts and minds

  How I came to know the communists

  Why the British misled the communists

  Clowns and crooks

  What does Malaysia mean to us?

  Preserving Malay special rights

  What will all this bickering lead to?

  Enemy of the people?

  Prime Minister, what if you had been arrested?

  On our own – but we will succeed

  Singapore’s fate depends on 300 men

  The trouble with the civil service

  Make sure every button works

  Clean, clear prose

  How much is a good minister worth?

  What I mean by a more just and equal society

  Endless arguments over how many engineers to produce

  What’s wrong with the Singapore worker

  Who does Singapore Airlines belong to?

  Leadership makes the difference

  What price democracy?

  They would want the stars

  Universality of democracy?

  What people want is good government

  Some men, two votes?

  An unrepentant socialist

  Why the welfare states failed

  Schools must have character

  Being a hard nation

  The difference between the Malays and the Chinese

  It’s not just about firing crackers and New Year food

  We are too Westernised

  Justice and fair play

  Don’t be afraid to innovate the law

  The ballot and the bullet

  The mass media in new countries

  Why everything and anything cannot go

  Which role model for the Singapore press?

  You appear to some degree dictatorial

  How to make SIA a great way to fly

  My birthday wish

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  When Lee Kuan Yew wanted Singapore to become a garden city, to soften the harshness of life in one of the world’s most densely populated countries, he did not write a memorandum to the environment minister or to the head of the agency responsible for parks and trees. He did not form a committee nor seek outside help to hire the best landscapists money could buy. For one thing, in the 1960s, when he was thinking of these matters, money was in short supply. In fact, having been unceremoniously booted out of Malaysia, the country’s economic survival was hanging in the balance. For another, there was no environment minister to speak of then, so low down in the list of priorities were these matters. When jobs had to be created and communists fought in the streets, only the birds were interested in flowers and trees.

  But Lee was interested. And he became personally involved in the project of transforming Singapore from just concrete and steel to concrete, steel, trees, shrubs, flowers and parks. He would become personally knowledgeable about soil and vegetation, trees and drainage, climate and fertilisers. And he surveyed the world for ideas, taking advantage of his travels abroad to look out for them. In France, for example, he discovered that the broad tree-lined boulevards were possible because a drainage system had been buil
t below the pavements. Around each tree was a metal grating through which surface water flowed into the underground system.

  The problem of the grass in Singapore, which everyone could see in the bald, yellow football fields, needed a nationwide solution. When he saw beautiful rolling meadows in New Zealand he was moved to ask for the services of two experts from the country under the Colombo Plan technical assistance scheme. Lee was told that Singapore did not have a grassland climate in which rain fell gently from the skies. Instead, being part of an equatorial region, it experienced torrential rainfall that would wash off the topsoil and with it the vital nutrients necessary for strong plant growth. In an equatorial forest, with tall big trees forming a canopy, the rain water drips down. But in Singapore, where the trees had been chopped down, it would all come down in a big wash.

  But Lee was not one to let climate get in the way. Fertilisers would replenish the soil, and so began the task of making compost from rubbish dumps, adding calcium, and lime where the ground was too acidic.

  Years later, when economic survival was no longer an issue and Singapore’s success was acknowledged worldwide, he was still working at it to make the garden city possible. When expressways and flyovers sprouted all over the island, he had officials look for plants which could survive below the flyovers where the sun seldom shone. And instead of having to water these plants regularly, which was costly, he got them to devise a way to channel water from the roads, after filtering it to get rid of the oil and grime from the traffic above.

  The constant search for solutions would not end. When development intensified even further and the roads and flyovers became broader still, shutting out the light completely from the plants below, he did not give up. The road was split into two so there would be a gap in the middle with enough space for sunshine and rain to seep through and greenery and vegetation to thrive below. “I sent them on missions all along the Equator and the tropical, subtropical zones, looking for new types of trees, plants, creepers and so on. From Africa, the Caribbean, Latin, Middle, Central America, we’ve come back with new plants. It’s a very small sum. But if you get the place greened up, if you get all those creepers up, you take away the heat, you’ll have a different city,” he said.

  Making Singapore a different city! That has been Lee’s constant obsession. Even when the difference had to do with trees and flowers, subjects which one would not normally associate with the man who has been at Singapore’s helm for 38 years, 31 of which he served as prime minister, his approach to the problem has been typical – hardheaded and pragmatic. For him, the object of the exercise was not all about smelling roses. In the end it was about keeping Singapore ahead of the competition. A well kept garden, he would say, is a daily effort, and would demonstrate to outsiders the people’s ability to organise and to be systematic. “The grass has got to be mown every other day, the trees have to be tended, the flowers in the gardens have to be looked after so they know this place gives attention to detail.”

  The story of how Lee transformed Singapore is a fascinating one because no other leader in the modern world has had such a hand in influencing and directing his country’s progress from independence to developed nation status the way he has. None has straddled the two worlds with as much success: the revolutionary world in the first half of this century for independence from empire, and the development world in the second half for wealth and progress.

  The great Asian revolutionaries – Mao Zedong, Pandit Nehru, Sukarno and Ho Chi Minh – earned their rightful place in history but failed to build on their revolutionary zeal. Lee’s place is, of course, smaller. But he has been able to achieve what they could not, which was not only to destroy the old system but also to create a new and more successful one. That Singapore is a success today and the success is largely attributable to Lee, there can be few doubts, even among his most severe critics.

  What were those ideas of his which made the critical difference in Singapore? How did he come round to those views? How were they made to work in Singapore?

  This book has been written for those interested in the answers to these questions. It is a book about Lee Kuan Yew and his ideas and how those ideas have shaped modern Singapore and made it what it is today. For the story of Singapore’s transformation from a British colonial outpost with an uncertain future into the ninth richest country in per capita terms is a story of how Lee’s ideas have been put into practice on an island of 600 square kilometres, on which three million people today enjoy a standard of living higher than their former colonial masters.

  Lee’s views are thus significant for two reasons. First, they enable us to understand the man himself: what he stands for, how he approaches problems, what he believes in. Second, they help us understand Singapore: what key ideas have been put to the test here, how they have worked or not worked in practice, what have been tried, discarded or modified.

  The first task of the authors was to survey Lee’s entire range of ideas and views over almost a half century of his political life, beginning with the first political speech he made in Britain as a student in 1950. In all, we read more than 2,000 speeches. Then came the job of identifying those we believed to be crucial to Singapore, which had made a difference to life here. We narrowed the field to seven key areas: the secret of good government, economic development, politics and democracy, law and order, the importance of culture, the nature of human society, and media.

  The most interesting part of the assignment was a series of interviews with Lee on these subjects – 13 in all over about 30 hours in 1994 and 1995, the most extensive he has given to anyone so far.

  In these interviews, he talked about how he came round to those key ideas, the circumstances surrounding their genesis, and whether experience later led him to modify them or strengthened his belief even more. Some of the most revealing interviews were about his early days and the three events that shaped his outlook on life: the Japanese Occupation from 1942 to 1945, the battles with the communists in the 1950s and 1960s, and the trauma of merger with Malaysia in 1963 and separation two years later. Not surprisingly, these were the events which in the authors’ view had the greatest impact on modern Singapore.

  The Japanese Occupation made Lee decide to become a politician, the communist battles turned him into a hardened politician, and separation from Malaysia provided the final drama which led to Singapore’s independence, and made Lee govern it the way he has. How Lee went through those tumultuous events, his views about them today and how they affected him: the answers to these questions are essential for anyone who wants to understand the man that Lee is today and the Singapore that he has shaped.

  The first three chapters cover these areas, and set the stage for the rest of the book, which is organised thematically according to those key ideas of his that have been applied to Singapore.

  His revelations of his early life in Chapter 1 might surprise some. He remembers carefree days at Telok Kurau Primary School, catching fish in drains, flying kites and challenging friends to duels with spinning tops. The pace quickened at Raffles Institution, and then at Raffles College, where his education was interrupted by the war.

  Lee’s accounts of life in Japanese-occupied Singapore are especially interesting. Not only was there high drama, as when he was under suspicion by the dreaded secret police, the Kempeitai, there was also political education in the raw when he saw, at first hand, how power poured out from the barrel of a gun.

  Political soul-searching continued when the war ended and he left for England to study law. His account of life there is revealing. How many people know that in Britain Lee had campaigned for the Labour Party, driving his friend, David Widdicombe, the Labour candidate for Totnes, Devon in a lorry and making campaign speeches for him? The text of one of those speeches, possibly Lee’s earliest political speech, is reproduced in this book. In another landmark speech, made in London at the Malayan Forum, he spoke about the political situation in Malaya and all but declared his intention to do someth
ing about it when he returned.

  And what a battle it turned out to be when he did return! For those interested in how Lee fought, first the communists, and then the leadership in Malaysia, Chapters 2 and 3 should prove enlightening. They tell the story of the making of a politician, and of a fledgling nation.

  Chapters 4–10 discuss Lee’s views on key issues which he strongly believes in, and which when applied in the governance of Singapore has made it what it is today. Some of the big questions they answer are:

  • How did he see the economic situation facing Singapore in 1965 when it was booted out of Malaysia, and what did he set out to do?

  • What does he consider the most important ingredient for any government, and how did he go about making sure it was present in Singapore?

  • What are his views on leadership, and on democracy?

  • How did Lee maintain law and order in the gangster-ridden Singapore of the 1960s?

  • What are his views on the nature of human society and how best to organise people so that they can make the maximum effort to improve their lives?

  • How did Lee form his ideas about which societies are more likely to succeed than others? Where do the differences lie?

  • Why has he taken such a robust stand against the foreign press?

  The last chapter is devoted to his personal life, how he would describe himself, what he holds most dear as well as his thoughts on subjects such as religion, his family and personal wealth.

  An important part of the book are the 46 speeches we have selected out of the more than 2,000 speeches Lee has made throughout his political life. Taken together, this selection should give readers a comprehensive picture of Lee’s outlook and thoughts on the essential issues of the day. The speeches are in the last section of the book.

  One question should be answered here at the outset: is there one golden thread running through Lee’s views? Does he believe in one central theme which has guided him through the years?

  The answer is yes, and no.