Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  The world watched spellbound for five weeks in 1989, as China’s supreme leaders stood powerless before a crowd of thousands of protesting students who besieged Tiananmen Square, demanding reform. As the crowds swelled and the students’ cries rose in pitch, communist party leaders were split over how to deal with the unruly crowd – should they try to mollify the young demonstrators, or assert their authority through the proverbial barrel of a gun? The impasse dragged on, culminating in a statue of the Goddess of Democracy being erected in the square, an affront to those at the helm. To their early chants against corruption and inefficiency, as well as a lack of openness and democracy in the system, were added little doggerels and barbs directed at China’s paramount chiefs, including Deng Xiaoping, the country’s paramount leader. Students in the university campus threw bottles out of their windows, an obvious play on the leader’s name, which sounds like the Mandarin words for “small bottle”. On May 20, martial law was declared in parts of Beijing. Deng backed a military solution to the crisis. But popular support for the students prevented the armed forces from moving against them, prolonging the impasse.

  Back in Singapore, Lee followed these developments with more than a casual interest. As events unfolded, he sensed that a firm reaction from China’s leaders would soon come. At about midnight on June 3, the tanks started to roll.

  “The students asked for trouble at Tiananmen. I was watching the TV every night, fascinated. And the slogans were changing. The early slogan was an attack on corruption and on nepotism and inefficiency, and that won the support of Zhao Ziyang and company. There’s a strong body of opinion in the Communist Party which says, ‘We’ve got to put this right.’

  “Then as it gathered steam and more and more people joined them, it shifted. And it became an attack on individuals within the party, including Li Peng.

  “In the final stages, the last 10 days, I saw slogans attacking Deng Xiaoping. When I saw that, I said, boy, this is it. This Chinese government, Deng Xiaoping as the leader, cannot govern if you can do that and get away with it, because the Chinese people will lose respect for you. I was convinced they were going to get whacked, and they were whacked.”

  Why was Lee so sure about the explosion that was to take place at Tiananmen? The simple answer is that he understood well the nature of Asian societies and the way in which they had been governed for centuries. Leaders in these societies were expected to lead. They were looked up to, and granted a high degree of respect and deference in recognition of their role in providing for their people and improving their lives. Good, honest leaders who were able to deliver the goods were considered worthy of the people’s support. Those who were corrupt, ineffective, or unable to assert their authority were dismissed.

  This basic principle of power and allegiance would shape Lee’s political beliefs, leadership style and public persona more than any great tracts of political theories. As leader, he was firm. As the island republic’s elected head of government, he was decidedly in charge. Critics and those who opposed him knew they would be countered without compunction. He once remarked that if he found an obstacle in the way of a policy or goal he thought needed to be achieved, he would not hesitate to run a bulldozer to clear the way. No one imagined for a moment that the remark was made in jest.

  A more recent example was the case of Dr Catherine Lim, a Singapore academic. In 1994, she wrote a series of critical commentaries on Lee’s successor as prime minister, Goh Chok Tong. Many believed she was unlikely to have penned the piece if Lee were still at the helm. The writer, it was widely thought, would not have contemplated taking Lee on in such a public manner. Lee too was of this view.

  “Let me put it like this. Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister … She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac … Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle-dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.”

  The nature of leadership and how this related to the needs, desires and aspirations of a people were matters Lee pondered from his early years in politics. Not for him the notion that all men yearned for democratic freedoms, prizing free speech and the vote over other needs such as economic development. Asian societies, he contended, were different, having evolved separately from the West over the centuries.

  He made this point in a BBC interview in 1977:

  “… I often wonder whether the foreign journalist, or the casual visitor like you, has fathomed or can fathom the mind of an Oriental. And I am having to look after Orientals, whether they are of Chinese descent or Malay or Indian or Eurasian or Ceylonese and so on. What’s inside is completely different: Is this a good government that I can trust to look after me and my family, and will see that my children are educated and will have a job better than mine, and have a home better than mine? Is it fair or is it unfair and unjust, favouring its relatives, its friends; looting the public purse for its relatives, for itself so that ministers live in luxury whilst the masses live in squalor?

  “Those are the crucial issues because those are the issues that have toppled governments in the Third World. You can ask any taxi driver – he is a most uninhibited Singaporean you can think of. You can ask any bartender in any hotel. He’ll let off a bellyache. But at the end of the day, when he puts his cross, when election comes, he has given me and my colleagues over seventeen and a half years – come June, eighteen years in office … which I think is cause for some satisfaction.”

  (Interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, March 1977; text of interview on page 369)

  Firm, decisive, farsighted. Those were the hallmarks of Lee’s political leadership. Some called his style authoritarian, even autocratic. He cared not a jot. Having studied the nature of the society he was charged with, he believed that “there was no other way” to lead his people forward.

  “My idea of popular government is that you don’t have to be popular all the time when you are governing … There are moments when you have to be thoroughly unpopular. But at the end of your term, you should have brought about sufficient benefits so that the people realise what you did was necessary and will vote for you again. That is the basis on which I have governed. If you want to be popular all the time, you will misgovern …”

  Journey from the Left

  How Lee came round to these views about political leadership and governance is mainly a story about his experience operating the system in Singapore, and his observations about how it was working or, as was sometimes the case, not working in various parts of the world. He had begun his own intellectual journey through the political theories and ideas of his time in the 1950s, from a very different starting point as a democratic socialist. The manner in which he changed his views along the way is a fascinating story of how Lee, when confronted with the fact that reality and observation did not quite conform to ideology, plumbed decidedly for the former.

  How the PAP mustered the vote

  Lee’s election poster during the 1972 general election appealed to the voters’ trust in the PAP’s performance.

  Lee’s doubts about the viability of the democratic system in developing countries begs an ironical question: How is it his PAP government, which never shied from taking “tough and unpopular measures”, was able to win decisively at the ballot box time and time again, over 10 elections. If the democratic system was as flawed as he believed, what explained the fact that the people of Singapore backed his party? Was the Singapore experience a counter to Lee’s own doubts about democracy? Lee thought not. Rather, he believed Singapore and the PAP survived through a combination of fortuitous circumstances. The sharp shock delivered by the traumas of Singapore’s early years as an independent state was a key to this.

  “I’m absolutely convinced that if we had never had Malaysia, if the British had just given
us independence, we would have failed because we would have continued with the stupidities, the excesses, the riots, the strikes, the go-slows, the ethnic quarrels over languages. And we would have decided on Chinese as the national language, or Chinese as one of the major languages or the major language, and we would have failed.

  “But that two years’ experience had a very salutary effect in bringing about a realisation that this was a matter of life and death. And if we did not pull ourselves together and rein ourselves in and stop these excesses, we would die. That was how it happened. It wasn’t planned that way.

  “We made it succeed by very unorthodox methods of mustering the vote. First, we won in ’59 on anti-colonialism, and against corruption. Second, we won in ’63 on merger and against communism. Third, we won in ’68 on the basis of seeing the country through after British withdrawal. Then, because the people recognised that we were determined people, not self-seekers, trust was established, then we could pursue our policies. It was the luck of the draw. It could not be repeated.

  “If that was not the issue in ’63, we would not have been re-elected. We would have had turnover governments and Singapore would have petered out. If ’68 did not turn out that way, we would also not have been re-elected. Supposing it had been differently played, Singapore would have gone the way of other countries.”

  “The world that I lived in was a very unequal world, and unjust. The whites were on top. You might be a good doctor, but if you are an Asian, you would be under a white doctor who’s not as good … The injustice of it all, the discrimination, struck me and everybody else. We became strongly against the system.

  “I sympathised with the underdog because, in a way, I was an underdog under that system. But I was a privileged underdog among underdogs because my family was comfortably off and I was educated. But I could understand how the other underdogs felt. I started off on the premise that if we helped them, then they could be like us. That was the premise which turned out to be only partly true …

  “At that time, I could not accept communism … emotionally, I rejected it because it was coercive, it used methods which I disapproved of … A chap disagrees and you stab him and kill him. There is no give-and-take …

  “Capitalism at that time was associated with the British … When I studied economics in Raffles College, I was taught by a white professor who was paid three or four times the Chinese lecturer, who was paid ten times the Chinese tutor … the system was just wrong. We had native capitalists, a few Chinese rubber merchants, bankers, shopkeepers, small-time manufacturers … But capitalism benefited the people with the resources and the power … We decided that capitalism was wrong. We rejected it.

  “When I found in Britain this idea of doing it the democratic way, by argument, by the vote, by gradualism, by taxing the rich and helping the poor, it was so emotionally attractive and, conceptually, intellectually sound. That in practice it was wrong and it didn’t work was not obvious at that time. We believed democratic socialism would achieve maybe 80 per cent of what the communists would achieve, but without the injustices, the rigours and the brutalities of communism.

  “Over the years, we recognised the limits and the counterproductive effects of subsidies on the incentive to work, and on training and achievement which are necessary for the creation of wealth for everybody. We did not see that in the early stages. Furthermore, we did not see that you can have a system where the white man is not superior, but he competes on equal terms in his production of superior goods and services.

  “Today, the new meaning that capitalism has acquired, which means entrepreneurship, raising capital, putting your ideas into practice, testing the market, if the market accepts your service or your goods, you have created wealth for everybody and for yourself. That was not the way I saw capitalism as a young man.”

  I had seen so many fail

  Lee’s early dabbling with democratic socialism was to be tempered by his observations of how other developing countries had run aground trying to work a democratic system alien to their peoples. Such a system, he concluded, was premised on certain key underlying societal and cultural factors: strong government, leaders with a sense of duty, responsible opposition parties, a mature electorate prepared to endure pain for long-term gain as well as share the responsibility of administering the society. These were taken as given in many of the developed Western countries where democracies were in place. But many of these prerequisites, he felt, were nonexistent in the emerging states, thereby undermining his confidence that the system would take root there. Nor was he overly sanguine about the prospects for democracy in his native Malaya, and later Singapore.

  Me? Why, I am a liberal

  Few people, if asked to categorise Lee and his political beliefs, would choose the word “liberal”. But this was how he described himself in an exchange with the authors:

  Han: How would you describe your political beliefs, if you were a democratic socialist in the ’50s?

  Lee: Today, I would describe myself as a … [long pause] … in perhaps European terms, between socialists and conservatives, I would put myself as a liberal. As someone who believes in equal opportunities so that everybody gets an equal chance to do his best, and with a certain compassion to ensure that the failures do not fall through the floor.

  I would put myself really as a … [pause] … a liberal democrat. Not in the Japanese sense of the word, the Liberal Democratic Party. A liberal, in that I want to run the system as efficiently as possible, but make allowances for those who will not be doing well because nature did not give them enough, or they cannot make that extra effort.

  Han: That might surprise some people, that you would describe yourself as a liberal.

  Lee: A liberal in the economic sense of the word, you know. Not a liberal in the sense of the American word “liberal”. The American word “liberal” means somebody who thinks that you should allow everybody to develop in his own way and do his own thing. So, that has a special meaning.

  But a liberal in the classical sense of that word, in that I’m not fixated to a particular theory of the world, or of society. I’m pragmatic. I’m prepared to look at the problem and say, all right, what is the best way to solve it that will produce the maximum happiness and well-being for the maximum number of people. You call it whatever you like.

  He had these doubts about the viability of democracy in developing states as early as the 1960s.

  “One-man-one-vote” is a relatively new electoral system. Many systems began with unequal votes, with extra votes sometimes given based on the amount of taxes paid, property owned or whether the voter was married. Today plural voting is virtually extinct, in line with the ideal that every man should have an equal right to safeguard his interest. In some countries there are unequal votes for elections to different chambers of the legislature.

  “There are vagaries about the system of one-man-one-vote which make it an extremely hazardous system to run anywhere in the underdeveloped and the under-educated world … the system of cutting up the country in accordance with the number of adult citizens of given proportions, to elect representatives who then elect among like-minded people a Cabinet which then elects a primus inter pares among the Cabinet, is one which presupposes so many basic conditions which are often nonexistent. … They have all been superseded by systems which give power effectively to one man or a group of men, for an indefinite period.

  “Government, to be effective, must at least give the impression of enduring, and a government which is open to the vagaries of the ballot box … is a government which is already weakened before it starts to govern.

  “… if I were in authority in Singapore indefinitely, without having to ask those who are governed whether they like what is being done, then I have not the slightest doubt that I could govern much more effectively in their own interests. That is a fact which the educated understand, but we are all caught in this system which the British … export all over the place, hoping that somewhere it wil
l take root.”

  (Address to the Royal Society of International Affairs in London, May 1962; excerpts on page 365)

  Lee’s observations of developing states which had been swept up by the democratic tide only to come crashing down in a wash of disappointment cautioned him against being overly sanguine about the prospects of democracy in his native country.

  “I had seen so many fail. They came into power with such promising circumstances and much optimism, but this failed. The preconditions were not there. These were underdeveloped societies that had no national cohesion to hold them together.

  “Burma became independent and failed. Ceylon ran into difficulties by 1955. Solomon Bandaranaike had been assassinated by 1959. India was not successful. Pakistan had several constitutions failed and suspended. The generals took charge, first General Ayub Khan and General Yahya Khan. Then General Zia Ul Haq. These are countries where the British had been, much longer than in Singapore. They had universities. We never had universities. Ceylon had two universities at independence – 1948. India had many renowned universities of standards equal to London University, approximating Cambridge and Oxford. Their standards of examinations were very tough. And they had very bright and able men in the Indian civil service. But the basic preconditions were not there – a cohesive, united people, with universal education and a broad well-educated middle class to provide stability.

  “I saw so many governments not working. The Africans started off with great fanfare; Ghana collapsed; Nigeria fell apart. What makes Singaporeans think they are different? Were we better educated? Were we more homogeneous? Did we have more of the factors which will make for a successful functioning democracy?