Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “So there is a sense of being imperilled, endangered, running in a race in which they are bound never to win, or very few can win. You have this sense of being a deprived, a sat-upon minority. That has been handled sensitively and I think more than fairly. We have made concessions, given them free education when everybody else has to pay, given them land for mosques when everybody else has to buy their land for the temples or churches.

  “I do not believe that that solves the problem. We have diminished the problem by making them live together, scattered in the estates and at least they know that their neighbour is not a demon. You know, a Chinese neighbour can be just as friendly, although you will not borrow their kitchen utensils because there’s pork in the kitchen, but otherwise they are quite normal human beings. So it helps. But you will never dispel that sense of distinctiveness.

  “At the very beginning, the Malays were not hardworking, nor were a lot of the Indians. We encouraged them to keep up. I’m not sure whether they will not feel a little resentful, but I mean this is part of history. I know that it took a long time before the Malays accepted that they had to work hard because it was not in their culture.

  “Well, let me give you my experience. I was making a visit last week to some families who have upgraded, people with children who are in either late primary or early secondary school. And I moved from one flat to another flat, upgraded. One of the three families was a Malay family. And he’s bought an executive flat, beautiful marble floor. All he had was ‘O’ levels in Malay language in Maju School, and his wife too. But he has learnt English. His wife is now working as a receptionist in some big firm of accountants. This chap had been working for an American firm making computer parts and selling them. Now, he’s decided to branch out on his own and he’s selling them in Malaysia and he’s formed a company with a Bumiputra partner. And he is acting just like a Chinese. You know, he’s bouncing, running around, to-ing and fro-ing. In the old culture, he would not be doing that.

  “I’m not saying all of them have become like that. But here is one who has moved, shifted gears and has made his life a success.”

  I did the exact opposite

  Having arrived reluctantly at the conclusion that the gap in performance between races would not be eliminated simply by providing the less well off with a head start through better educational and life opportunities, Lee did what would have been unthinkable to most politicians elsewhere – he went public, airing his observations and concerns before the whole country.

  Not for him the race-blind approach, which sought to gloss over ethnic differences, whether out of political expedience or ethnic guilt. For Lee, that was an exercise in self-deception, or worse, raising false expectations. Nor would he brook programmes such as affirmative action schemes which he saw as misguided attempts to hobble the more adept in society so that others might catch up. This, he felt, would only hold the whole society back.

  “I did the exact opposite. Once I discovered that special tuition, special food and all this did not produce the necessary result, I looked up the prewar records and I found the same weaknesses in mathematics and so on. So I decided: first, inform the leaders and the elders and inform the teachers, then publish it. So please, let there be no misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with discrimination or lack of support or whatever. It’s a profound problem.

  “The reasons why I did this are simple ones. This way, we are going to get results. The other way, we are going to confuse people and you’re going to get wrong results. Now, I suppose maybe it’s too touchy a problem to say this openly, but to pretend that we are all equal and therefore I am not in it because you have discriminated against my caste, so I need a quota – it’s going to lead to very unhappy consequences …

  “I do not believe that the American system of solving the problem stands any chance. First, they deny that there is a difference between the blacks and the whites. Once you deny that, then you’re caught in a bind. All right, if we are equal, then why am I now worse off? You have fixed me. The system has fixed me. So they say, right, let’s go for affirmative action. Lower marks to go to university, and you must have a quota for number of salespersons or announcers on radio or TV. And so you get caught in a thousand and one different ways. And you say, since the army is now 30, 40 per cent blacks, you must have so many generals, so many colonels, and so on.

  “I don’t know how they have got into this bind, but I think that is not realistic. You don’t have to offend people because they are not as good as you. I mean I’m not as smart as an Israeli or many Chinese for that matter. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not to be treated as equal in my rights as a human being.

  “The only way we can all really be physiologically equal in brain power and everything else is to have a mélange. All go into a melting pot and you stir it. In other words, force mixed marriages, which is what the people in Zanzibar tried. The blacks wanted to marry all the Arab girls so that the next generation, their children, will be half-Arab. But I don’t think that’s a practical way nor will it solve the problem. And you can’t do that worldwide, you can – maybe you can do that in Zanzibar. In the process, you diminish Zanzibar. Because whereas before you had some outstanding people who can do things for Zanzibar, now you have brought them down to a lower level.

  “So my attitude now would be a very practical one of saying that we are equal human beings. Whether you can run 100 yards in 20 minutes, 20 seconds or 10 seconds, you’ve got a right to be here. But that doesn’t mean that because you run at 20 seconds, I must run at 20 seconds. Then we’ll all get nowhere.”

  Lee kicking off a sepak takraw game in Tanjong Pagar. “When I was a little boy, I changed the screw, the pin of my top … or I caught fighting fish, went into monsoon drains. … Now they are sitting down, watching television and given teddy bears and little toys.”

  When cultures ebb

  But if culture and values could change over time, what was there to stop them from retrogressing instead of altering for the better? Could societies lose sight of their values? Might those traits which built a society be superseded by others which were less favourable to its continued success?

  In this regard, Lee was to worry often that rising affluence among Singaporeans was producing a generation which was increasingly “soft”. Parents were indulging their children with their newfound wealth. Lee worried that the hard-driving virtues of the coolies and labourers who had built up the country might become displaced by the more languorous ways of their children, spoilt, ironically, by the fruits of their parents’ efforts.

  “The danger is very real and very present because parents who have got through a hard life give their children what they’d missed – comfort, all the sweets, all the toys, all the jeans and fancy shoes which they wish they had had when they were young. That breeds a certain attitude of mind in the young which is not very good for them.

  “They ought to begin to learn to do things. When I was a little boy, I changed the screw, the pin of my top. You buy a top, a wooden sphere, pear-shaped. And you change it [the pin] from a nail to a screw and you sharpen your screw and you put thumbtacks on the back of the top to armour-plate it, then you fight other people’s tops. So it was a game but in which you contributed something into what you were doing.

  “Or I caught fighting fish, went into monsoon drains. Along Changi Road, there were rubber estates in what is now Kampong Kembangan. In those ditches, you could get fighting fish. You went home and bred them. Some became fierce. Some were washouts, they ran away. But you were doing something.

  “Now, they are sitting down, watching television and given teddy bears and little toys. Of course, because of that danger, we keep on physical activities in school, discipline, we try to counteract that. But you see the obesity, it’s great. It’s born out of ignorance. Parents think they’re doing their children good. But in fact they’re harming their children.”

  But the community’s traditional values faced a threat not only from within. Be
ing a highly open society, Singapore was constantly exposed to other cultures. Lee feared that Singaporeans, subject to a barrage of Western values, through the media and travel, could lose the cultural traits that had underpinned the country’s success. Socioeconomic changes, unleashed when more Singapore women were drawn into the workforce, had also left them with less time to nurture their children and pass on traditional values as had been done in the past.

  Singapore too Westernised?

  Young people at a disco, a scene repeated in many nightspots. But more important than their “Western” exterior, Lee felt, was whether they retain the Asian core values.

  When a group of Hongkong professionals, who met Lee in 1984 to discuss the Hongkong problem, told him that, in their eyes, Singapore was a very Westernised country, his antennae immediately shot up. Hongkong, by comparison, they said, was a very Oriental society. Of all Singapore’s long-term problems, this question about how its values would change with affluence and modernisation is perhaps the most vexing for Lee. He knows that the nature of Singapore society will change in time, that change is inevitable. But will it be for the better? He shared his concern with Singaporeans in this speech to students at the two local universities in 1988.

  “I met a group of Hongkong professionals who were extremely uneasy, and we discussed a scheme that would make it possible for them to consider using Singapore as a perch in case of need, and continuing to work in Hongkong. At the end of their stay, when I met them, they said, ‘You are a very Western society, we are very Chinese.’ I said, what’s the difference? They said, ‘Your people, right down to ordinary workers, they look so Westernised, their behaviour is extremely Western. We are very Oriental.”

  “… As I met friends, looked up their data, I discovered that this casual remark had profound significance. This was ’84. It’s the software in the younger generation which will determine whether Singapore continues to thrive, to prosper, to be a dynamo as it used to be, as it has been, or whether it will plateau like so many Western societies, like Europe or Britain, where they’ve just lost steam. They don’t see the point of striving and achieving any more. They’re just comfortable and they’re happy. And the Europeans in particular, more than the Americans, they feel comfortable with an enlarged community in 1992. They can afford some protectionism. It does not matter if world trade becomes too fierce and too competitive for them. Life could go on, for at least some time. …

  “What is it that we should consider core values? I don’t think how you dress, whether you wear shorts or ties or open-neck shirts, or wear your hair short or long, makes the slightest difference. Unless it’s a manifestation of an inner urge. But these core values, I believe, are basic. Do you consider your basic relationships to be fundamental? The human relationships. What Confucius described as the five critical relationships. Mencius epigrammatised it in this way … ‘Love between father and son, one; two, duty between ruler and subject; three, distinction between husband and wife; four, precedence of the old over the young; and five, faith between friends.’ Father and son, ruler and subject, husband and wife, old over young, faith between friends. In other words, the family is absolutely the fundamental unit in society. From family, to extended family, to clan, to nation.

  (Speech to NUS/NTI students, August 22, 1988; text on page 406)

  Lee would lament this development time and again. He believed that efforts would have to be redoubled to help Singaporeans maintain their traditions and values if the society here was to keep the cultural “X-factor” that enabled it to thrive. Nothing, in this regard, was more important than preserving the family as the most basic and fundamental unit of society. A society able to do so would find half its problems solved, and would not require government, with its unwieldy bureaucracy and its tendency to succumb to corruption and lobby groups, to intervene. Indeed, he would place blame for much of the social ills of the West on the break-up of the family unit.

  Lee therefore moved to enshrine the family as the “basic building block in society” and as one of Singapore’s Shared Values. These cultural signposts had helped the country along its way in the past and would be vital guides in the tumultuous times of cultural confusion ahead as it became more international and cosmopolitan.

  “… to succeed, we must decide, yes, this is a problem, we are under assault, what is it we want to keep? … Have we changed? Let’s go through some of the basic core values.

  “Strong family ties? Yes, but only the immediate family, the nuclear family, father, mother, children. It does not include grandfather, uncles, cousins. They’re remote. They live somewhere else, in some other flat, perhaps near by and they can leave the baby with them. But the links are not as close as when I grew up.

  “I grew up in a big extended family home. A rambling house in Siglap, Katong. I grew up with a wealth of cousins … There were five households – grandparents and four married sons and daughters and their children. So the relationship was a close one until, just before the war, we set up home on our own. But because the years of childhood were years of living in an extended family, the bonds are close.

  “Marriage pattern? Altered beyond recognition. The arranged marriages are gone. Children are better educated than their parents. They decide the parents’ ways and tastes and choices are not acceptable. The result, you all know.

  “Relationship with authority? Ruler and subject by and large still abiding. But the older generation is more deferential, respectful of ministers, of officials, than the younger generation. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just an observation. …

  “Thrift, hard work, faith between friends? Hard work, yes; thrift, with CPF, less so. Faith between friends – I have not noticed deterioration, but with time, with mobility, we may get what Alvin Toffler once described as “the disposable society”. As you move up, you dispose of your furniture, your old wives, your old clothes and you acquire new ones and you dispose of your friends too. …

  “By and large, it’s a problem still at the top. Only the highly educated have that degree of bi-culturism where they are more Western than Eastern. At the middle and in the lower ranges, it’s still very much an Asian society. The Western habits, songs, dances, whether it’s a disco or Swing Singapore, their dress styles or their fast foods, that’s just a veneer. But if it seeps down, if we are not conscious of what is happening and we allow this process to go on unchecked, and it seeps down, then I believe we have a bigger problem to deal with, where the middle ranges will also be more Western than Asian. …

  “I would hate to believe that the poor, ragged, undernourished Chinese coolie and the equally ragged Malay peon and driver and Indian labourer had the inner strength to build today’s Singapore, and their children with all the nice mod clothes, well-fed, all the vitamins, all the calories, protein, careful dental care, careful medical checks, PT, well-ventilated homes, they lost that inner drive.”

  (Speech to NUS/NTI students, August 1988; text on page 406)

  Religious Harmony Act: “We were headed for trouble!”

  Buddhism now attracts more and more followers among the younger and better-educated, a result, said Lee, of the greater proselytisation in polytechnics and universities.

  Freedom of worship is enshrined in the Singapore constitution. By and large there have been few problems keeping the religious peace since independence in 1965 despite the multireligious composition of the people. But a new law passed in 1991, to pre-empt future problems from overzealous groups out to convert others to their faith, makes it an offence to proselytise in a way that would cause disharmony among the religious groups. Lee explains why it was necessary.

  “Religion is at the core of any culture – and Islam and Catholicism are two of the most exacting religions which command your way of life. Just like Judaism does. If you read the Talmud, what you should do, what you can eat, what you can’t eat, who you can marry, who you can’t marry, when you have sex, when you should not have sex and so on, it’s all laid down in
the book. It’s an injunction. …

  “So I would say that if we had a majority who were either Catholics or Muslims, then Singapore would never have developed in this way because the majority would demand that the minority comply, or at least do not publicly show a different way of life … But the majority happen to be Chinese Taoists, Buddhists. And Buddhism is a very mild sort of, not an exacting religion. Ancestor worshippers, Confucianists. So it was a very relaxed situation, so long as we live and let live. Now don’t go and force him into your religion. If you want to convert, don’t do it in an aggressive way. And don’t convert a chap who already belongs to a religion that’s fiercely against conversion. Avoid that. So we have succeeded.

  “But when the Christians became very active and evangelical, … wanting to convert the Muslims, and the Catholics decided to go in for social action, we were heading for trouble! So the Buddhists reacted. And this Japanese group, Nichiren Soshu, very active group – huge Buddhist groups were growing rapidly in our polytechnics and universities and in reaction to all these Christians – they were being threatened. We would have headed for trouble quite unnecessarily. We’ve just got out of one trouble – communism and Chinese chauvinism and Malay chauvinism – and you want to land into another? Religious intolerance? It’s just stupid. Stay out of politics. The Religious Harmony Act was passed; after that, it subsided.

  “You cannot begin converting others and taking a tough line and expect others not to react, because they are losing their followers. You use the church for political purposes, the other religions will also enter the political arena, or they will lose out. So, as I told the Catholics and the Christians, ‘The Muslims must react. The Buddhists are reacting. And I will help the majority because the Buddhists are in the majority. And do you want that?’So they stopped and agreed.