Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  (Text of speech on page 321)

  “Any society needs leadership. The established ones have their system. I am most familiar with the British system because that is where I had most contacts. It had a ruling elite, with public schools, universities, designed to bring forth qualities of leadership.

  “How do you create it, in this area, without tradition, without a past to fall back on? Can it be created? Can you talent-scout? Can you, in fact, prejudge 20 or 30 years before a man matures, that he is likely to make a more than above average contribution? The wastage rate is very high. No Rhodes’ Scholar – and they assess these people extremely carefully – has ever become a national leader of any distinction. These scholars are chosen at university level, very carefully.

  “What are the qualities of leadership? Integrity, drive, verve, intelligence, physical and mental discipline. And yet, no Rhodes’ Scholar has ever become a prime minister or the president of any of the English-speaking countries of the world. But a good number of them have become very good second-rank leaders – permanent secretaries, under-secretaries and so on. No president of the Oxford and Cambridge Union – now the Oxford Union and Cambridge Union Debating Societies – has in the last 20 years since the war become the prime minister of Great Britain. They were not the qualities that were required: wit and witticism have their uses, but not in looking after the destiny of a people.

  “What is it then? This is the problem with Asia. At least, these established societies, whatever their shortcomings, did contrive some system which, in a broad stream of talent, provided every now and again the more-than-average performer to give leadership.

  “Being confronted with this problem myself, I have often asked, ‘How do we ensure succession?’ – not on the basis of ‘I like A and therefore I groom A for leadership.’ Unless you want long periods of anarchy and chaos, you have to create a self-continuing – not a self-perpetuating – but a self-continuing power structure.

  “Human beings should be equal. But they never are. Some can do more; some can give more of themselves than others. How do we anticipate that? Why is it that often we can’t? The problem of all countries in Asia is how to establish some system which will bring forth an unending stream of people with character.

  “True, Khrushchev never went to a university; neither did Stalin. Mao, it seems, spent some time in the libraries of Peking University. But if you leave these things to chance, then surely you are taking chances with your own people’s lives and destinies. So it is that in the established societies – in Britain, the United States, large parts of Western Europe, even in Australia – all their leadership comes from a broad stratum of people who have gone to universities.

  “But there are large parts of Asia where this is not the case. The idealism that fired a leader in his early stages, instead of staying with him to the end and making him want to pass the torch on to a younger generation, is corrupted and debased in the process, and leaders lose interest in their future beyond their lifetimes.

  “And so, automatically, you go on to military leaderships. When you pass from a leadership, endowed at least with some political motivations, on to one which is there as of might, then the future becomes extremely problematical, unless there are other leavening influences which can counteract the corrupting tendencies of power. These are problems which will beset us for a long time to come …

  “You start off with idealism, you should end up in maturity with a great deal of sophistication giving a gloss to that idealism. But what usually happens is a great deal of erosion by the soft and baneful influences of power, leaving almost nothing of the idealism behind and only the professionalism of political leadership without its leavening values.”

  (Speech at a conference on youth and leadership, April 10, 1967)

  Cabinet decision-making, the Lee way

  Not just pure military sums – when it came to a toss between the superior American Hawk (below) and the less impressive British Bloodhound (above), Lee chose the latter, bearing in mind the long-term goodwill of the British.

  “In the Cabinet, I would say there were about five or six strong ministers with strong views. And you want to get a consensus if you can. If you can’t, then you get a majority. And by that, I mean not just a majority in numbers: I would prefer the strong ministers to back the policy. If one or two strong ministers strongly felt, very fervently, against the policy, I would postpone it because I would take their objections very seriously.

  “Supposing on an economic matter, if Dr Goh had very strong views to the contrary, I would postpone it. I would not overrule him lightly, because I know that he has a deep understanding of the subject. His opposition would not be based on personal considerations. But if I had personal knowledge, if I had the expertise on the subject and I felt confident of it, then I would be happy even with a weak majority. And even if some strong minister objected, I would feel confident that in this area I am more of a specialist than he is.

  “In most cases, I would say in 80, or maybe even 85 per cent of the papers that come up, the answer is quite simple. Between A, B, C, D, it’s quite obvious you’ve got to choose A. It’s only that 10, 15 per cent where, you know, it could be A, it could be B and it’s a toss-up; then you say, ‘What’s the price if it fails, if A fails; what if B fails? Supposing B costs less after failure, maybe we try B. And then if it fails, we go back to A.’But there are some decisions you make which do not allow that kind of simple cutting of losses, then you’ve got to be extremely careful.

  “I’ll give you an example. This is where militarily I was wrong, but politically I was right. We had to buy surface-to-air missiles. And the superior missile was the Hawk, American. This was in the 1960s as the British were withdrawing. And the British had installed Bloodhounds and they were prepared to let us have it at giveaway prices, but we had to refurbish them. Now, the Bloodhound is a high-level missile. It can reach up to 30, 40, 50 thousand feet up in the air, long range. So the professionals weighed the comparisons and said the Hawk was a better missile. It’s mobile, it’s not fixed on the ground, so is not easily targeted. And the aircraft coming in can come in lower and then this Bloodhound cannot reach them.

  “But I decided that if we are going to get cooperation from the British and we want them to leave their air bases without denuding them, then we’ve got to try and go as much as we can with the British so that we do not make them feel they are being discarded for higher American technology, or that we do not take their interests into account. So despite the technical superiority arguments, I decided on the Bloodhounds. And I think, politically, it was the right decision and we had a very smooth transfer when the Royal Air Force withdrew in ’71 and gave up all their bases. We had no trouble. They left most of the hangars and all fixtures. We took over all fixtures.”

  Wit and will

  Having made getting good leaders the first prerequisite of good government, two practical problems arise: first, how to identify these people; second, having identified them, how to attract them into government.

  There are two schools of thought on the first problem. Lee was naturally inclined to the one that held out the hope that a solution was possible.

  “There are two schools of thought. Dr Goh Keng Swee once asked an Israeli general, ‘How do you find out whether a commander will stand up under fire?’ He wanted to find out, of the commanders he’s got, who will stand up and who will wilt.

  “The general said, ‘There’s no way of knowing. Wait till the fire comes, and you will know who are the ones who are cool and collected, and who are not. Sometimes the ones you thought would be the calmest, the coolest and the most calculating under fire, they have cracked, and the least promising have turned out to be the ones with the ballast, the calm, the detachment, the verve under pressure.’

  “I do not accept that. That might have been true, but look at Apollo 13. The Americans had to choose astronauts. The three astronauts had only one chance: listen closely to ground control, preserve po
wer, take one swing around the moon and come back. If they had missed it, they would have gone on forever and ever into outer space. If any one of the three had panicked, all three would have gone.

  “The Americans must have found some way of testing men in pressure chambers, claustrophobic conditions, simulated real crisis conditions to cause fright, and eliminated those who panicked. Because not one of the three panicked, Apollo 13 came back.”

  (National Day Rally speech, August 19, 1979)

  And then there was that indefinable quality called character, which is so essential for any leader. How to find out if someone has it or not?

  “The problem is that the human being is unable yet to assess this thing called ‘character’. You can assess a man’s intelligence: set him tests, then rate his IQ; and you can say, ‘Well, you are 141 as against norm 100.’ Of course, if you have a leader with a good IQ, that helps – because you don’t have to go through the memorandum or the minutes with him three times over and explain what it means. You just have to go through three-quarters of the way and he has seen the last one-quarter that you want to lead him to.

  “It is amazing the number of highly intelligent persons in the world who make no contribution at all to the well-being of their fellowmen.

  “And it is this as yet unmeasurable quality called ‘character’ which, plus your mental capacity or knowledge or discipline, makes for leadership.

  “I read recently the account of someone who spent some years in Buchenwald (a Nazi concentration camp). A French Roman Catholic, he survived it to write his diaries. And, reading parts of it, I thought they were most illuminating.

  “He said: ‘Some of the most intelligent, some of the most socially distinguished of people, in normal situations, if put under the pressure of those abnormal and, in fact, subhuman conditions, are soon exposed and often destroyed. And it has nothing to do with quality of the mind, the quickness of wit and intellect or even intellectual discipline. It has to do with something called the “will” which may or may not be related with one’s beliefs, dedication, convictions, values.’

  “He recounted two instances: one was a dietician, a distinguished dietician in ordinary civilian life. He knew just how much food he must consume – a certain number of calories per day – or he must die. But he loved cigarettes and he traded these precious calories for cigarettes. And he died.

  “He recounted also how a famous surgeon – a man of great intellectual distinction, with skill and, obviously, with discipline to bring about such a sustained skill – could not contain his own physical weaknesses. There was a fire in this hut in Buchenwald, in the centre of a dormitory, to keep them warm at nights, the long winter nights. If you go and sleep very near the fire, you will be comfortable but when you are rudely awakened at five o’clock in the morning to take the roll-call outside in the cold, you will get pneumonia and die. This surgeon knew that. And so did the others, who were not surgeons. So an optimum point was worked out beyond which you could go closer to the fire only at your peril. But this surgeon could not contain himself. He lost that will to live. He went closer and closer as the weeks went by, and the winter became deeper and longer. And sure enough, one day at five, it was too cold: he had pneumonia and died.

  “You see, this is the other quality that is required in leadership: character – whether your melting point is low or high; whether you believe enough and fervently in what you have to do, to go through a great deal of trial and tribulation.”

  (Speech at a conference on youth and leadership, April 10, 1967)

  Can the Singapore system be replicated elsewhere?

  The small talent pool in Singapore, said Lee, makes it impossible to reject good leaders just because they had never been through tough battles.

  One perennial question which has been raised is whether Singapore’s method of governance and especially its system of inducting the best and the brightest into government can be replicated elsewhere. What appeals to many about the Singapore system is its record of not only achieving rapid economic development but of doing so with a government acknowledged for its clean and open style.

  Can the Singapore way be transplanted elsewhere? Lee recognises the limitations of the model.

  “I do not want to be dogmatic. If we were 30 million and not three million, I think the system would work differently because the number of people available to form a Cabinet would multiply by 10, right? Or if we were 300 million people, then it will multiply by 100. Then if you have so many people, although you may run a good system, it is still possible somebody outside there, some maverick, can get together a comparable group and can challenge you. And in a moment of unhappiness, the people will vote the other way.

  “But when you’re dealing with three million people and the talent pool is so small, I think really competent people to be in government, between the ages of 35 to 65, fit people I would entrust the government to, would not number more than 100. So where is the alternative?

  “If we reject people who are natural activists with ideas, with ability, with dedication, then the PAP is inviting breakdown of the system. It cannot reject people who are committed with ideas and ability. It must absorb and allow change to take place from within because the party cannot have the foresight to incorporate in its programme and its policies all the changes that are going to happen in this world.

  “But we devised this system because we were confronted with a problem of succession and we analysed our situation and said, ‘Well, this is it.’ No other way. And there were honest differences of opinion. In the end, Dr Toh Chin Chye and Ong Pang Boon, they were not very enthusiastic about this. They said, ’No, we’re getting a lot of careerists, people who have not gone through battle.’

  “But there are no battles. And if we don’t do this, who takes our place? The branch activists? He may deserve it because he’s run around for so long. But can you, in good conscience, hand over your authority, even for a few years or a few months, to people who you know do not have that helicopter quality?”

  There were other qualities which he looked out for and considered important in the making of a leader.

  “You need, besides determination, all the other attributes that will push a project along. You must have application, you must be prepared to work hard, you must be prepared to get people to work with you. Especially for political leaders, you’ve got to have people work for you and work with you. You’ve got to enthuse them with the same fire and the same eagerness that pushes you along. I think that’s a very big factor in leadership.”

  Don’t impress me with big words

  “That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure,” Lee would tell civil servants in February 1979. Seen here, reading with evident pleasure, is Lee as a law student in Cambridge.

  How hands-on was Lee as an administrator? On February 27, 1979, he gathered the top brass of the government and the civil service at the Regional Language Centre for a discussion on falling standards of written English. It was one long session on the simple rules of writing clearly and concisely, with Lee going through various examples of sloppy writing, culled from Cabinet papers. But more than just delivering an English lesson, he wanted to persuade the audience that the problem was a pressing one, that it was worth their while to master the art of writing clearly.

  “The written English we want is clean, clear prose. I choose my words carefully – not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening. … Remember: That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure. The more the pleasure, you can assume, as a rule of thumb, the greater the effort. …

  “So when you send me or send your minister a minute or a memo, or a draft that has to be published, like the President’s Address, do not try to impress by big words – impress by the clarity of your ideas. Then I am impressed. I speak as a practitioner. If I had not been able to reduce complex ideas into simple words and project them vividly f
or mass understanding, I would not be here today. The communists simplified ideas into slogans to sway people’s feelings, win people’s hearts and settle people’s minds, to get the people to move in directions which would have done us harm. I had to check and to counter them. I learned fast. The first thing I had to do was to express ideas in simple words.…

  “First item: ‘With increasing urbanisation and industrialisation, we will require continued assistance particularly in the technological and managerial fields.’ I asked myself, ‘What have I missed in this? What has the first part about urbanisation and industrialisation to do with the second part about continued assistance? Why do we need more assistance particularly in technological and managerial skills because of increasing urbanisation and industrialisation?’ It is a non sequitur. We need technological and managerial assistance anyway. The first part does not lead to the second part.

  “Item from the Ministry of Education: ‘(It is necessary to study) the correlation between language aptitude, intelligence and values and attitudes to ensure that the various echelons of leaders are not only effectively bilingual but also of the desirable calibre.’ I read it over and over again. It made no sense. This is gibberish. I inquired and I was told, well, they were trying to find out how language ability and intelligence should influence the methods for instilling good social values and attitudes. Well, then say so. But somebody wanted to impress me by dressing up his ideas in many important words. Next time impress me with the simple way you get your ideas across to me.”