Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “Remember, when we started, we were not even one society, never mind a nation. We were several different separate societies brought together under the British, an accident of history. Our loyalties and roots were in different parts of China, India and the Malay archipelago.”

  Lee at the hustings. “Never before have the people of Singapore had a government which they can kick out of office freely, without hindrance, by just crossing them off the ballot. And never before have they had a government which had to tend to their needs – every grumble, every bellyache – to make sure that the vote is on the side of the angels every five years.”

  For Lee, the task of governing Singapore within a democratic system was made doubly difficult as it was a society riven with ethnic and religious divisions, and made up of immigrants, the bulk of whom were poorly educated and unused to democratic procedures.

  Indeed, he concluded that there were times when decisions could not simply be a reflection of the majority will. One example was the question of whether Singapore should adopt English or Mandarin as the primary language. Left to the popular will, the Chinese, who formed the majority of the population, and for many of whom the Chinese language and cultural heritage was a source of much passionate pride, would have rooted for Mandarin, he believed. But this would not be in the country’s best interests if it was to survive in an increasingly technologically based and English dominated world economy. He therefore went against the popular sentiment of the times.

  “We had to intervene. Take some of the major decisions we have made … the problem of resettling our population and trying to make it a more cohesive society. We never took a vote. Had we asked people in Kampong Kembangan whether they wanted to be resettled, the answer must be no. If they had to be resettled, then they wanted to stay together in the same place. Go to Lorong Tai Seng and ask the Hainanese there: Would you like to have a Malay as your neighbour? The answer is no. We decided that if we’re going to make a nation, we can’t have race riots every now and again. Something brews up and people kill each other on the basis of race as the jerseys they wore. So we simply said, ‘Ballot for your flats.’

  “People talk about consultation, top-down and bottom-up. These are theories, yardsticks worked out by Western political scientists who have never been presented with the raw, unpleasant, unmanageable facts of making something out of nothing.

  “If we took a poll, we would never have had National Service. I simply decided, ‘Introduce it.’ It was necessary. After a while, everybody understood it was necessary. But it had to be fairly implemented. I can’t implement National Service, and my children don’t do National Service; that’s a disaster!”

  Were the views of the people then never heeded? To paint Lee’s Singapore as a repressive dictatorship, as some have done, would be to grossly oversimplify the politics of the place. He was mindful of the need to win the people’s hearts and minds. But unlike politicians elsewhere, he was adamant that he would do so on his terms and not just bend to the prevailing political winds.

  “Discussion is necessary for any successful policy. You have to get acceptance. So even if you don’t have a public debate, in the old days, we used to get the MPs to go down and sell the policy at mass meetings, at dinners, constituency groups and so on.

  National Service – After separation from Malaysia, a Singapore defence force was built almost from scratch. Singapore youths signed up for National Service at the Central Manpower Base when registration opened on March 28, 1967. The first batch of National Servicemen was drafted in July 1967.

  Does the ice-water man understand his vote?

  Ice-water man. “Do you honestly believe that the chap who can’t pass primary six knows the consequences of his choice when he answers a question viscerally, on language, culture and religion?” Lee would ask the liberal crowd who championed the right of the man in the street to have a vote on major issues.

  Although Lee was prepared to work the system of representative democracy he had been bequeathed by Singapore’s colonial masters, he was not one to believe that matters of state could be settled by consulting the people through referenda or opinion polls. His experience over the years threw up many examples of how people would have plumbed for options which were appealing but might have had disastrous consequences. One of these was the choice of working language for multiracial Singapore.

  Lee was in no doubt that the predominantly Chinese populace would have opted for Mandarin. But this would have upset the delicate racial balance in the country, upset its neighbours, and worse of all, hampered the people’s ability to ride on the Western – and hence English-dominated – wave of technological progress.

  “The big decision was made in 1965 … we had to make a decision. We decided to do it by evolution, not by suddenly deciding, ‘Right, English is the working language and we’ll also learn our mother tongues.’ I think there would have been riots. The Chinese would never have accepted that. So we said, ‘We leave things as they are. Don’t change it. But parents can decide.’ Whether you want to go to a Chinese school, where you learn English [as a second language], or to an English school and learn Chinese or Malay or whatever. Or to a Malay school and learn English, or a Tamil school and learn English.

  “By that policy, we knew that over time it would lead to English as the working language, as the lingua franca. Indeed, it turned out that way. Parents would choose a language that offered their children knowledge useful in life, today’s life, not yesterday’s. … Supposing we had said, ‘Let us all do English because it’s the working language’, I think we would have been in trouble. So we said, ‘Choose yourself.’ Parents chose. And the Chinese-educated language chauvinists were very, very angry and unhappy with us all those years.

  “But there was no better alternative. Supposing we had chosen Chinese or tried to sponsor Chinese, how would we make a living? How would we fit ourselves into the region and into the world? We could not have made a living. But the Chinese then would have wanted it. And if we had taken the vote, we would have had to follow that policy.

  “So when people say, ‘Oh, ask the people!’ It’s childish rubbish. We are leaders. We know the consequences. You mean that ice-water man knows the consequences of his vote? Don’t tell me that. That’s what Western journalists write. No Japanese journalist believes them. No, these are realities. But the West is creating a myth in order that we will follow them. But they haven’t got the Japanese to follow them. They will never succeed in persuading the Chinese to follow them. Taiwan will never be like America. Nor will South Korea. Not even Hongkong.

  “They say people can think for themselves? Do you honestly believe that the chap who can’t pass primary six knows the consequences of his choice when he answers a question viscerally, on language, culture and religion?

  “But we knew the consequences. We would starve, we would have race riots. We would disintegrate.”

  “Every policy I was going to implement I made public, and I made sure that it was made acceptable. But I had consultations on my terms; I wanted accurate feedback to improve the policy and the presentation, not to encourage pressure groups who were out to make me reverse policy. I had a certain view of how to survive and a certain policy to implement to improve things. If I had to modify it to get it accepted, I would modify it.

  “What people now mean by consultation is an imitation of what they see in America; pressure groups and lobby groups. So our gays are now fashioning themselves on the West … It’s an unthinking adoption of Western patterns of development without any pruning and modification to suit our circumstances.”

  Model democracies or cautionary tales?

  Lee’s experience, at home and abroad, was thus to lead him to the firm view that there was nothing inevitable about democracy. The system was premised on cultural and social assumptions which held in the developed societies of the West, but which were nonexistent in many developing countries.

  In the course of several speeches in the 1960s and 197
0s, he identified several of the factors underpinning the democratic system which were lacking in many developing societies. The most immediate of these stemmed from the fact that these states were at a stage when the government needed to extract maximum effort out of the people. Development required foregoing consumption, saving, investment, training; in short, a considerable amount of sacrifice and pain.

  But the democratic pull went the other way.

  “Where the majority of your population is semi-literate, it responds more to the carrot than to the stick, and politicians at election time cannot use the stick. So … he who bids the highest wins. … At a time when you want harder work with less return and more capital investment, one-man-one-vote produces just the opposite …

  “Effective government … in an underdeveloped situation means a government that must improve investment rate, that must demand more effort for less return over a sustained period – certainly more than five years. If you can make the demand for a period of two years, produce the results after the fourth, have the results enjoyed by the fifth, then all is well. … unfortunately the process of economic growth is much slower and painful, and neither five nor ten years is an adequate enough period for the demands that you make on a population to be felt and enjoyed by the population. Therefore, the result would be – unless you had exceptional leadership and exceptional circumstances … to take the solution which is least painful. … the least painful solution is not to make undue demands on your population … not to increase investment rate and not to jack up your society …

  “Then you are competing against people who not only promise not to maintain the investment rate, but … to spend what there is [already saved] in the kitty … and if an electorate is sufficiently naive to believe that these things can be done, you break the bank …

  “… there is an inherent defect in working that system [of one-man-one-vote] when one has to engage in a protracted period of economic growth; and if you had worked this one-man-one-vote in England in the 18th century, you would never have got your industrial revolution. You cannot get your coal miner to say he is going to put in more effort for less in order to build the industrial sinews of the state.”

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

  To enable these new states to take off economically, Lee believed that what these countries needed was firm, decisive government, with the staying power to see through its policies, rather than one which would be assailed by the voters and in danger of being tossed out at the next election.

  “One curious fact which emerges from the experiments in parliamentary democracy in Asia is that it works only when the governing party has a clear majority and is strong and decisive. Where a government is weak and has not got a clear majority or depends on coalition parties, then the system breaks down as it has in Indonesia, Burma and from time to time in Thailand.”

  (Speech at the Legislative Assembly, March 2, 1961)

  He would return to this point year after year. In a talk to civil servants in 1962, he singled out the three necessary conditions for growth and stability.

  “Authority has got to be exercised. And when authority is not backed by position, prestige or usage, then it has to defend actively against challenge. But let me explain this. I went to India … Authority there is not challenged. Mr Nehru is there. He is there and has been there almost as long as the Himalayas. Nobody doubts that he is going to be there as long as he lives. And that immediately produces a stiffening effect … on the civil service, on the administration, the people. There is the old boy, he is going to be there, never mind all that shouting going on, everybody knows he is the man to trust. …

  “He who exercises authority has got to exercise it with firmness, competence and fairness, and what is most important, with a degree of continuity. … People expect the state of affairs to develop, change gradually, progress, then they make their calculations accordingly. So that is what is happening in India. But when they don’t have this certainty, one day Tweedledum, the next day Tweedledee, everybody has a go at power – then pandemonium. And that is what we must never allow.

  “… the three basic essentials for successful transformation of any society. First, a determined leadership, an effective, determined leadership; two, an administration which is efficient; and three, social discipline. If you don’t have those three, nothing will be achieved. And that is one of the fatal effects of the democratic system. This business of seasonal change and your civil servants get rattled. They say, ‘My God! I’ll be in trouble, I’d better succumb. Why not look for something for myself, then whatever happens, I am all right.’ It’s all these creeping doubts, this wavering, this wishing to cushion oneself from trouble, that brings a complete sagging of the whole machinery and helps to bring about chaos and collapse.”

  (Speech to civil servants, June 14, 1962; text on page 362)

  Lee also came to the conclusion that governments did not necessarily enjoy more support among their people just because they were elected in a democratic process. There were unelected governments that enjoyed more public support because they had been effective in meeting their people’s aspirations for a better life.

  “Ne Win once was given a chance to run Burma and he made sense out of it. There is no doubt about it. When he took over ’57, ’58 he whipped the place temporarily into shape. Piles of rubbish on the road, everybody was building right on the roads. That could easily happen in Singapore. Politicians outdo each other in popularity. It’s the easy way out. Build an attap hut over the road? Yes, why not? So next chap asks, why not a shop on the road? Yes, carry on. Politicians will supply you with water too. That’s the end of progress.

  “The General came in and smashed it all. He was not interested in being popular, he was interested in making sense. He ordered the troops out, cleaned up the streets, knocked the houses down, made new roads where they had been planned. When he came in this second time, there was no resistance for two reasons. One, he had proved himself the first time, and second, as the Opposition leaders told me, he was part of the leadership of the original revolution. So he was successful. And he is there to stay.

  “Just like Nasser. Nasser makes sense. … But there is not the slightest doubt that the government in authority is in authority. It is making a sincere, honest and dedicated attempt at transforming the country, brooks no nonsense from anybody and has popular support.

  “We arrived at three o’clock in the morning. … There were chaps in galabia [national dress]. They were sitting around the street corners. They cheered madly. They did not know who we were, what we were. Motorcycle sirens going, they thought, well, must be some official party, just give these boys a cheer! Everywhere that was so. Factories, street corners, every time we went out.

  “And if you go by constitutional and jurisprudential [theories], that is a bad guide of popular support. There was no popular elections. But the government is popular. Why? Because it has given the people a sense of purpose, it has given them a sense of importance and it’s making progress.

  “… What was interesting to me, in all these countries, was the fact that there was an effective leadership. These were men in authority who had tremendous worth. They were not men who were diffident about what they were about to do, nor did they lack the nerve to do it. Nehru, Nasser, Tito – they are completely different men but they had these common characteristics.”

  Lee, on swaying the voters: “My job as a leader is to make sure that before the next elections, enough had developed and disclosed itself to the people to swing them around. That’s the business of a leader. Not to go follow the crowd. That’s a washout, the country will go down the drain.”

  Scooting to success

  To Lee then, good government was not so much about fine liberal slogans and championing the rights of the people, but more a practical matter of strong leadership which would deliver material progress and improve the people’s lot. Voters, he mainta
ined, knew who they could trust to deliver the goods, be it houses, schools, or motorbikes. He made this point in a speech to civil servants in 1962.

  “When I was in Italy in 1957, everybody – that was the age of the scooter – everybody had a scooter. Five years ago, all Vespas running around. This time I went there and the first thing I noted was all the scooters had been replaced by little Fiats, 600, 500, and chaps who’ve got Fiats don’t go and embark on revolution. They are thinking of the next instalment, how to make sure that they’ve got the next instalment to pay the Fiat dealer. Yes, it’s a fact. We went out to the country one Sunday … there must have been 100,000 families with the same idea. They also went out, everybody with a little Fiat or an Alfa Romeo … And everybody brought a little tent or a fishing rod. … if they were young they made love, if they were old they just sat down under the sun and sipped mineral water. But no revolution.

  “… Men’s minds turn to revolution when things are getting worse, not when things are getting better. That is fundamental. What we want to do here is to make things get better. And the reason why Barisan is not successful is because things are getting better. Supposing you have got no houses – you know the number of school children who are being registered, the number of chaps who are moving into flats in Singapore? These are the basic factors on our side, telling factors. Watch the Barisan branches, they opened like mushrooms. Now they are closing down one by one.

  “Why? Basically, because there is progress. Houses are going up, chaps are earning money, there are lots of scooters around. Yes. Last year, they registered nearly 8,000 scooters, that’s what they told me, ROV. It’s no laughing matter. It’s a small state; 8,000 scooters. You just imagine that. Three in the family using it, you’ve got 24,000 people kept happy. With 24,000 girlfriends, you’ve got 48,000 chaps happy. …”