Singapore’s reclusive leader Lee Kuan Yew gave a set of interviews on the future of the city-state he modernised. Devjyot Ghoshal on what he says
If statecraft needs a new textbook — and it might, given the recent revolutionary activity in West Asia — then Lee Kuan Yew has the right to author a chapter or two.
Singapore’s elder statesman and founding prime minister, after all, led the transformation of a tiny island nation of 710 sq km from a territory shaken, in 1965, by its separation from Malaysia, into a city-state with an enviable economy. It is now a major global financial centre and has a geopolitical reach that belies its size.
But in Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, a compilation of interviews Lee gave to the Straits Times between December 2008 and October 2009, the Minister Mentor (the cabinet position was specially created for Lee in 2004) refuses to see past and present successes as securing a sustainable and successful future.
Instead, the co-founder and first general secretary of the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore since its independence from Malaysia, continually returns to the difficult history and vulnerability of the city-state, ideas that younger Singaporeans are beginning to put behind them.
The book, in which every chapter is in question-and-answer format with an introduction, opens with a lesson in realism. Lee quickly establishes his paradigm of Singapore as one based on countering weakness — in security, economy and human resources. “You cannot have a strong defence unless you have a strong finance,” he declares in the first chapter. “And you cannot have strong defence and strong finance unless you have a strong, unified, well-educated and increasingly cohesive society. They are all part of a whole.”
Grasping the correlation between a robust economy and a strong armed forces, according to Lee, is fundamental to understanding Singapore’s impressive growth story, especially as it is a resource-poor island in an unfriendly environment.
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“If we are not vulnerable,” he says, “why do we spend 5 to 6 per cent of GDP year after year on defence? Are we mad?” And later he adds, “Why do we have peace? Because it is not cost-free if you hit us. If you hit us we will hit you and the damage may be more on your side.”
In Lee’s eyes, Malaysia is prominent among the various threats that Singapore faces. The idea of the external threat is an idea that keeps resurfacing in these interviews, explicitly and implicitly.
In the later chapters, however, geopolitics make way for domestic politics. The focus shifts to the future of the PAP, which has kept an iron grip on politics, and on the country’s politicians and administrators, who also happen to be among the best paid in the world.
Lee is unapologetic about this model of democratic governance. Although it has attracted criticism, decades of “social and legal engineering” have produced a system that appears to works for a nation as diverse as Singapore.
Singapore will not have a “second chance” if it slips, Lee implies, so his party has delivered a structure that can deal with the immediate risks the country faces. “What am I doing this book for?” Lee asks at one point. “I want your readers to know the hard truths. If you believe that this superstructure is the same as other countries in our range, you are dead wrong. Absolutely dead wrong.”
He admits that the PAP is not undefeatable. Any viable opposition, however, will have to dip into the same limited pool of human resources that Lee’s party has exploited. Finding the right people for government remains Singapore’s biggest challenge. This is part of Lee’s justification for the high public sector salaries.
A similar argument involving limited talent underpins Lee’s thinking on Singapore’s so-called economic miracle. The country may regularly post impressive growth figures but it is well known that its economy would not survive without large multinational corporations (MNCs).
As the chief architect of Singapore’s contemporary economy, Lee is clear that his country will not be able to develop the scale or prowess at innovation of some of its neighbours. Instead, Singapore will “just have to stay ahead to become attractive to the best MNCs”.
“From here, they [MNCs] will spread to the region. They use Singapore as a base and take our people when they go into the region because they don’t know the region as well as us. Our people know the region, speak the languages and can help them break through. This is our role. We are interlocutors,” he explains.
Fast, sustainable growth will remain the target for Singapore, even as it tries to maintain the equilibrium between social classes progressing at different speeds.
While the state will provide opportunities based on merit, Lee refuses to deviate from his somewhat controversial stand on the influence of genetics on talent. The biological difference between races and sexes, he argues, cannot be overlooked, and any government will have to work around these factors.
There is also, not unexpectedly, a short chapter on Singapore’s place in the world, especially in the Asian context. The continued presence of the United States in the region, as some sort of gentle hegemon, is acceptable to him, while Singapore’s overarching strategy is one of maximising its economic and political space in a dynamic arena where China and India are fast-growing powers.
In the latter half, the book veers toward a more personal examination of Lee. His views on race, religion and language — most of them shaped by experience as much as theory — are a combination of the old-school and the contemporary.
The penultimate section, appositely titled “Not Your Average Grandad”, is an attempt to open up the private side of this public person. But Lee, with six decades of public life and his logical and straight-talking nature, is not an easy interviewee. He makes it difficult for the questioners to break in. The private side remains private.
Singapore does not have a free press; media is regulated.
A sense of wariness towards the interviewee, on the part of the journalist interviewers, even if understated, pervades the book. There must have been considerable pressures involved in interviewing Singapore’s defining personality.
The deference may also be a genuine reflection of the towering impact Lee has had on the lives of the individual interviewers and on Singaporeans at large; and because he is the man who turned a diverse population into a nation to reckon with within his own lifetime.
LEE KUAN YEW
Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going
Authors: Han Fook Kwang, Zuraidah Ibrahim, Chua Mui Hoong, Lydia Lim, Ignatius Low, Rachel Lin and Robin Chan
Publisher: Straits Times Press
Pages: 458
Price: S$39.90