The Saturday Essay
Lee Kuan Yew, the
Man Who Remade
Asia
He preached ‘Asian values’ and turned
a tiny, poor city-state into an astonishing
economic success. Is Lee’s ‘Singapore
model’ the future of Asia?
Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is hoisted by supporters after leading his
People’s Action Party to a landslide victory in the country’s elections on Sept. 21, 1963.
PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Orville Schell
March 27, 2015 12:59 p.m. ET
When I arrived in Singapore one sultry summer evening in 1962 as a 22-year-old student, the
Union Jack still fluttered over the British colony. Coolies unloaded wooden boats on the docks,
per capita income was languishing under $500 and the young independence leader Lee Kuan
Yew was still in his 30s. It was a far cry from today’s well-ordered cityscape of manicured parks,
gleaming office towers, high-rise apartment blocks filled with middle-class families and glittering
malls swarming with wealthy consumers.
What distinguished Singapore back then was its colonial torpor, a total absence of natural
resources (not even its own supply of drinking water) and little industry. It was a small,
backward Third World outpost. Besides a few iconic British buildings, the city consisted mostly
of low arcaded “shop houses,” flimsy street stalls that made up its outdoor markets and a
chaotic infinity of dilapidated shacks that formed the slums where most of Singapore’s poor
Chinese, Malay and Tamil immigrants made their homes.
As Europe’s colonial era in Asia drew to a close, this ragtag, polyglot populace had turned for
leadership to a fiery young anti-colonialist organizer called Harry Lee (as Lee Kuan Yew was
then known). By the time he died last week at the age of 91, after serving his country for well
over a half-century, not just Singapore but much of Asia had come under his thrall.
Upon returning from legal studies at the University of Cambridge, Harry Lee had plunged with
single-minded determination into the task of first organizing his People’s Action Party to liberate
his city from colonialism and then building a new kind of micro-country. After Chinese Premier
Zhou Enlai snidely described him as “like a banana—yellow of skin, but white underneath,” he
soon dropped the Anglicized “Harry” and become, simply, Lee Kuan Yew.
In the early 1960s, his real problem was not his name but that Singapore was ethnically
fractured, under attack by Indonesia in its bizarre policy of “konfrontasi,” reviled by Beijing as “a
running dog of U.S. and British imperialism,” and then in 1965 expelled unceremoniously from
an ill-fated union with Malaysia. In announcing this devastating rupture on television, Lee
became so distraught by the apparent hopelessness of his country’s situation that he ended up
weeping.
Lee came from the diaspora of simple, poor emigrants who had been driven from the South
China Coast by penury. Stripped of anything but folk culture and an abiding belief in the
importance of their families, education and diligence, they had heaved onto the alien shores of
this unlikely colonialized city-state. As Lee ruefully observed in trying to imagine his small
country’s future, “City-states do not have good survival records.”
Prime Minister Kuan Yew Lee, left, talking to children while visiting a housing project.
PHOTO: LARRY BURROWS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like
himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects
and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would
simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.
Anyway, despite his British schooling and fluency in English, he never accepted the idea that
Western liberal democracy was the only suitable political model for Singapore, or even that
Western political principles were universal, much less superior.
One finds expressions of this divided loyalty between East and West again and again in his
writings. “We felt a sense of loss at being educated in a stepmother tongue, not completely
accepting the values of a culture not our own,” he would say of his British education. “My world
of textbooks and teachers was totally unrelated to the world I lived in.” He was, he lamented,
“lost between two cultures.”
Though cut off from his Chinese roots, Lee was a proud Chinese, and that may very well be
how history remembers his astonishing career. Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by
Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their
common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding
the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety,
education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing
countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.
“In the East, the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everyone can have
maximum enjoyment of their freedoms,” Lee declared, suggesting that the curtailment of one
freedom sometimes best assures the advancement of others. In his view, economic success
and social order fully justified whatever state controls were necessary, even if a leader
sometimes had to act in an arbitrary, even dictatorial, manner. “We have to lock up people
without trial whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they
are religious extremists,” he bluntly said in 1986. “If you don’t do that, the country would be in
ruins.”
Lee Kuan Yew: Life in Photos
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father who transformed the former British
outpost into a global trade and finance powerhouse, died on March 23. The
Southeast Asian country’s former prime minister was 91 years old.
Mr. Lee waving to supporters as he arrived at an elections nomination center in Singapore on April 27,
2011. WONG MAYE-E/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew of the People's Action Party speaking during
a rally at Farrer Park in Singapore on Aug. 15, 1955. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY
IMAGES/NEW NATION
Mr. Lee was hoisted by supporters after leading his People's Action Party to a landslide
victory in the Singapore elections on Sept. 21, 1963. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Lee, right, and his wife Kwa Geok Choo, second left, posing with Japanese Emperor
Hirohito and his wife Empress Nagako in the Tokyo Imperial Palace on Oct. 15, 1968.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Lee shaking hands with French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac at Matignon in Paris on
July 2, 1974. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Lee speaking to a packed lunchtime rally crowd at Fullerton Square in Singapore on
Dec. 20, 1976. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES/NEW NATION
Mr. Lee thanking voters who elected him as a member of Parliament for the Tanjong Pagar
constituency in Singapore on Sept. 11, 1988. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Lee taking his oath of office as senior minister in the new government of Prime Minister
Goh Chok Tong, left, as President Wee Kim Wee, front right, looks on, in Singapore on Nov.
28, 1990. ROSLAN RAHMAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Chinese President Jiang Zemin, left, welcoming Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew
for talks at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing on Dec. 8, 1997. ROBYN
BECK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shaking hands with Mr. Lee at the Istana,
or presidential palace, in Singapore on July 31, 1998. TAN AH SOON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Lee and his wife blowing out candles on his birthday cake as he celebrated his 80th
birthday in Singapore on Sept. 16, 2003. DAVID LOH/REUTERS
Newly-appointed Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, right, shaking hands with his father,
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, at the presidential palace in Singapore on Aug. 12, 2004.
WONG MAYE-E/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Queen Elizabeth II sharing a toast with Mr. Lee during a state banquet at the presidential
palace in Singapore on March 17, 2006. JONATHAN DRAKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew before their
meeting at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 26, 2009. JEWEL
SAMAD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Lee met with U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in
Washington, D.C., on Oct. 29, 2009. GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Lee giving his wife two final kisses as she laid in her casket at the Mandai Crematorium
in Singapore on Oct. 6, 2010. Kwa Geok Choo, 89, died on Oct. 2. TERENCE TAN/AGENCE
FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Lee waving to supporters as he arrived at an elections nomination center in Singapore on
April 27, 2011. WONG MAYE-E/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sometimes what Lee said and did outraged Western liberals, but he took a certain delight in
being independent-minded and provocative. “Between being loved and being feared, I have
always believed Machiavelli was right,” he proclaimed. “If nobody is afraid of me, I’m
meaningless!” And his record on civil liberties and political pluralism was checkered indeed:
Many of his critics ended up in exile, jail or bankrupted by long, costly libel suits.
But there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian
authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization.
After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including
Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause
of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese
thinking. After the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards drove a final stake through the heart of
traditional Chinese culture by savagely attacking it as retrograde and “feudal,” hardly anyone
expected to see a self-conscious revival soon.
Then, just as Lee was extolling his notion of “Asian values” abroad, something unexpected
happened in China. Faced with social upheaval brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s economic
reforms, leaders in Beijing began groping for new ways to maintain order themselves. Intrigued
by what Lee had been doing in Singapore, they too began reviving aspects of their old cultural
edifice as a stabilizing force. The cultural vacuums in Singapore and China may have had
different origins, but some version of “Asian values” suddenly felt like a comfortable remedy for
both.
Lee Kuan Yew, left, welcomes Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping in Singapore in 1978.
PHOTO: ZHANG GUIYU/XINHUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By then, Lee’s earlier anticommunism had morphed into an ideologically more neutral
pragmatism. He found himself becoming not only a fan of China’s new Confucianism Lite but an
enthusiastic booster of Deng’s reform-minded leadership. In fact, to demonstrate his fraternity
with China, only a year after the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, when most countries still
spurned China, Lee fully normalized diplomatic relations.
“I consider Deng a greater leader who changed the destiny of China and the world,” he said. He
was deeply gratified by the way that Deng had brought wealth, power, order and pride back to
China—still his racial homeland—as well as to all Chinese.
Deng’s admiration of Lee was just as deep. He appreciated Lee’s pragmatism and friendship,
especially his refusal to criticize China for its undemocratic form of statecraft, even after the
infamy of 1989. And, because “the Singapore model” proved that a country could modernize
without surrendering to “wholesale Westernization,” Deng (and all subsequent leaders in
Beijing) celebrated it. “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as
quickly,” he once wistfully lamented of his success. “But I have the whole of China!”
Lee’s own support for Deng grew to the point where he started admonishing the U.S. for being
too critical of China and too sanctimonious about the virtues of liberal democracy. “It is my
business to tell people not to foist their [political] system indiscriminately on societies in which it
will not work,” he chided. In the West, he continued, “the idea of the inviolability of the individual
has been turned into dogma.”
For Lee, the Chinese aphorism that best captured the uniquely Asian/Confucian view of the
individual’s role in society was: Xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia: “Bringing peace under
heaven first requires cultivating oneself, then taking care of one’s family, and finally looking after
one’s country.”
Various people have described today’s supremely well-ordered Singapore as “a think tank
state,” “a paradise designed by McKinsey” or “Disneyland with the death penalty.” Call it what
you will: Lee’s nation-building experiment succeeded spectacularly well.
Modern Singapore boasts the world’s second-busiest port, its most celebrated airline and an
airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average growth rate of almost 7%
since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000, making it the wealthiest
country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per capita in the world, trailing only
the U.S.
But quite apart from Lee’s acumen as a leader or the fact that he became the longest-serving
prime minister in world history, we are still left to wonder: Where did his enormous commitment
and energy come from? How was he able to create such an unusual success story from virtually
nothing?
Lee was a very different leader from his confreres in Beijing, but he shared something important
with them: a mutual sense that, despite the long, painful and humiliating history of the Chinese
people’s modern weakness, it was their destiny to make something of themselves. Where Lee
seemed to connect most deeply with Deng and other Chinese leaders was in this common
yearning to win back a measure of the prosperity, greatness and respect that they, as “a
people,” had once known but had lost to the West and Japan over the last bitter century of
defeat.
Lee once described the Chinese as burdened by “a sense of frustration that they were down for
so long” and as “enormously ambitious to catch up.” As this rebirth finally began in the 1990s, it
allowed Lee to proudly proclaim that China’s “reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering
force.” In making such utterances, he seemed to be speaking as a Chinese who identified as
much with his race as with his nation. True, Lee was a Singapore nationalist, but like many
overseas Chinese, he often seemed to view the destiny of his own small country as inextricably
connected to the larger enterprise of Greater China.
At the same time, his sympathy for China’s rise never eclipsed his respect for the U.S., as well
as his firm conviction that the rule of law was important for Singapore and that its interests
would be best served by refusing to take sides in big-power competitions. “We will not choose
sides between America and China,” he told Charlie Rose, “or between China and India.”
When Lee’s ancestors joined the great Chinese diaspora, they were stripped of their culture and
national identities. This defoliating process created, in them and later generations of overseas
Chinese, a strange kind of hunger for advancement, and in Singapore, Lee could begin to
satisfy that longing for progress uninhibited by the conservative traditions that have so often
clashed with modernizing impulses around the world. His new country may have been an
almost synthetic nation, without a coherent cultural core, but this relative vacuum ended up
being a blessing in disguise when it came to the challenges of creating a completely new state
from the bottom up.
China faced a similar situation in the wake of its own tectonic revolutionary upheavals. Mao
Zedong once spoke of his people as possessing “two remarkable peculiarities.” They were, he
said, “first poor and secondly blank,” which meant that they were inclined to “want revolution.”
As he observed, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful
pictures can be painted on it.”
Mao’s savage Cultural Revolution destroyed even more of his country’s cultural legacy. But he
was fond of reminding his followers that, “Without destruction there can be no reconstruction.”
By the time Deng came to power in the late 1970s, his own reforms met with little resistance
from those traditional forces that had so obstructed change earlier in the century. Like Lee in
Singapore, Deng was aided by the fact that traditional culture had already been demolished.
Lee was no Maoist, but when he came into Singapore’s narrative more than a half-century ago,
just before I first landed there, his city-state did evince a certain “poorness and blankness.”
Aided by a powerful patriotic yearning to put an end to the long period of imperial domination in
Asia, Lee managed to kindle a miracle of development that was distinctly un-Western. As a
spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing eulogized Lee after his death, “He was a
uniquely Asian statesman and a strategist boasting both Eastern values and international
vision.”
Fighting back tears, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s current prime minister, memorialized his
father by saying: “He fought for our independence, built a nation where there was none, and
made us proud to be Singaporeans. We won’t see another man like him.”
Lee Kuan Yew not only made Singaporeans proud; he also made Chinese and other Asians
proud. He was a master builder, a sophisticated Asian nationalist dedicated not only to the
success of his own small nation but to bequeathing the world a new model of governance.
Instead of trying to impose Western political models on Asian realities, he sought to make
autocracy respectable by leavening it with meritocracy, the rule of law and a strict intolerance for
corruption to make it deliver growth.
Though his country was minuscule, Lee was a larger-than-life figure with a grandness of vision.
He saw “Asian values” as a source of legitimacy for the idea that authoritarian leadership,
constrained by certain Western legal and administrative checks, offered an effective “Asian”
alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy. Because his thinking proved so agreeable to
the Chinese Communist Party, he became the darling of Beijing. And because China has now
become the political keystone of the modern Asian arch, Beijing’s imprimatur helped him and his
ideas to gain a pan-Asian stature that Singapore alone could not have provided.
As countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and even China continue to
search for new models of development and governance that do not bear the stigma of their
former Western colonizers, Lee Kuan Yew’s example is a tempting option. Even though he is
now gone, the Venice-like republic he founded will continue to be extolled as a hopeful
experiment, and the man himself, the progenitor of what has come to be known as the
“Singapore model,” will doubtless remain an influential political evangelist.
Mr. Schell is Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and
co-author, with John Delury, of “Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century.”