Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “Well, it’s part of the law, and it will be enforced if anybody breaches it. But if you ask the human rights groups, that’s a violation of human rights, we should allow everybody to do what they like. Free speech and free conversions, then you’ll have an enlightened society. I do not accept that as the happy conclusion or outcome.”

  Preserving the society’s cultural ethos was not just a matter of culture. For Lee, it was a question of survival. Singapore society succeeded because it was quintessentially Singaporean. Lose that, and all would be lost.

  “We could not remain what we were, but we cannot change totally or we will be destroyed. If we change so thoroughly that we lose the qualities that have ensured our survival as a community or as different communities, what will guarantee us that American or British culture will see our survival with their atomistic approach to life? I don’t think we’ll survive.”

  Michael Fay, the American teen, was sentenced by a Singapore court to four months in jail and a fine of $3,500, plus six strokes of the cane. His conviction for vandalism and mischief drew protests from Western human rights activists and journalists. US President Bill Clinton appealed to President Ong Teng Cheong for Fay’s caning sentence to be commuted because of his youth. Fay eventually received four instead of six strokes.

  9

  First Order, then Law

  While American teenager Michael Fay lay in Singapore’s Queenstown Remand Centre in April 1994, waiting for his sentence of six swift strokes of the rotan to be meted out, his parents and lawyers, as well as human rights activists and newspaper columnists in the United States, unleashed a verbal lashing at Singapore and its leaders.

  The punishment, ordered by a Singapore court which convicted Fay of vandalising cars in the city state, was cruel, draconian, barbaric even, they charged. Lee and his ministers were portrayed as hardline autocrats, evil dictators, harsh neo-Confucianists. They were even likened to Nazi chief Dr Paul Goebbels, who revelled in human torture.

  Meanwhile, Lee was on a two-week state visit to Australia and New Zealand. As the charges grew wilder by the day – there were allegations of public canings in downtown Singapore, of women being whipped for littering and other incredible tales – Antipodean journalists saw their chance for a story that might make world headlines. They sought Lee out at press conferences and public events, demanding to know why the boy had to be flogged.

  To Lee, the matter was a simple case of crime and punishment. Vandals and other criminals had to be taught not to repeat their misdeeds. Better yet if they were deterred from committing their anti-social acts through the certainty that the law would seek them out relentlessly and inflict tough justice. This included a mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, murder, armed robbery or kidnapping, and caning for vandalism, violent rape and molest, and the unlawful possession of a weapon. Lee was unapologetic about this tough-minded approach. This, he asserted, was how he had managed to keep Singapore’s once gangster-ridden streets safe.

  “If anyone thinks it is barbaric, well then, please don’t bring your 18-year-old to Singapore. And if you do bring him, please warn him about the consequence,” he said of the caning of Fay at a meeting of the National Press Club of Australia, drawing applause. He went on to recount how an American journalist working on a documentary in Singapore had told him that she had gone for a jog in the streets around her hotel at Singapore’s Marina Bay at 2 am. She said she “would have been mad” to do that in the United States, he noted.

  “Why was she able to do that? Because we have established a certain security and personal safety,” said Lee. He later added, “I think, with right-minded people, or people I consider right-minded, it is a plus. You know that if you come to Singapore, your life, body, limb, properties will be quite safe.”

  The documentary, Lee recalled, had featured several people who had been caned, including one who had been given 15 strokes for gang rape. The offender had said that “every stroke was a stroke of hell”, which he would remember always. Would he do it again? “Never, not in my life,” the criminal had replied. Lee concluded, “The punishment is not fatal. It is not painless. It does what it is supposed to do, to remind the wrongdoer that he should never do it again. And it does work.”

  Order under the heavens

  To Lee, the upshot of the Fay case was clear: tough measures had to – and would – be enforced by the authorities to maintain order in society. Not for him the fashionable liberal ideas of modern-day penology, which sought not so much to punish as to reform criminals, and where crimes were explained away by blaming it on some failing of the system or society. He believed instead in the old-fashioned ideas of guilt and responsibility. Deterrence was to be a key aspect of the legal system he fashioned for his fledgling state.

  He dismissed as wishful thinking the Western liberal notion that all human beings, if left in the state of nature, would naturally be kind and gentle, forgiving and compassionate, and that only the evil of the system made them vicious and criminal. Even as a law student in Britain, about 40 years ago, he had thought that the new branch of criminology written by reformist sociologists and lecturers would not do Singapore much good.

  “I’ve always viewed them with a certain bewilderment, and I’ve watched what has happened to the countries that have implemented the theories. I am waiting for the day when even they will see the light. Human beings, regrettable though it may be, are inherently vicious and have to be restrained from their viciousness.

  “If these people said to us, cancel whipping and you will be a better society, we will underwrite this exercise in human liberty, then we would abolish effective punishments and treat criminals the way Americans do.”

  (Press conference in New Zealand, April 1994)

  However, Lee was well aware of the economic and social price that his people would pay if such a system failed. Foreign firms, he argued, would withdraw their investments at the first sign of disorder in the streets. Singaporeans, too, might send their money and their families to safer havens abroad.

  Lee’s first priority was therefore to establish and maintain order in Singapore, which in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a smouldering hotbed of communal and communist activities, quite a world apart from the urbane city of today. In this regard, he believed that more important than all the fine liberal pronouncements of individual rights and liberties was the government’s responsibility to ensure the individual his fundamental freedoms. In short, this meant that people must be safe, and have opportunities to obtain food, shelter, education and jobs so that they could maximise their potential. This would also assure investors of the country’s stability and security.

  This philosophy towards law and order appeared to be shared by the vast majority of Singaporeans, perhaps because of their Asian culture. In Oriental societies, Lee believed, people looked to the authorities to establish “order under the heavens”. Good rulers were those who could do so effectively and fairly.

  Put another way, the people conferred on their leaders a moral authority to act in the community’s collective interest. Leaders who failed to do so, or who acted unfairly or arbitrarily, risked losing their moral sway with the people. Indeed, the importance of maintaining its authority in the eyes of the people was stressed several times by Lee during the Fay episode. He said repeatedly that, had the government backed down in the face of American pressure to rescind Fay’s sentence, it would no longer be able to impose similar punishments on Singaporeans. Nor could it govern effectively thereafter.

  This was in stark contrast to the approach in the West, where government or state interference in an individual’s life was discouraged and kept to a minimum. Having fought to free themselves from overly powerful governments, Americans believed passionately that their leaders’ power should be fettered by checks and balances. Instead of restraining individuals, people should be left to their own devices, free to exercise their rights and responsibilities, and to look after their own concerns and interests.


  Such a sanguine view of the way human communities worked, Lee believed, could not be applied to his native state, a fledgling multiracial society riven with ethnic, communalist and ideological divides. His people, the bulk of whom were the children of immigrants from the lower rungs of societies in Asia, had yet to cultivate the finer social graces that made state sanctions unnecessary, he maintained.

  “Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they’re educated and they’re properly brought up, then you don’t have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It’s like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it’s got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate.

  “Unfortunately, when I was in Britain in 1946, I compared Singapore to Britain, and found we were very ill-behaved, ill-trained. They were well-trained, they were polite, they were honest, what I saw of the British in the south, in London, in Cambridge, in Devon and Cornwall where I went for my holidays. We did not have 300 years of cultivated living and training.

  Corruption – a way of life

  Lee took a very tough stand against corruption, especially the taking of bribes by officials for favours. He made clear that no one, not even top government officials or ministers, was immune from investigations into their financial dealings. Several were in fact charged and convicted when it was discovered that they were on the take. Lee also believed that, to help fight corruption, civil servants and political leaders would have to be paid well, so that there would be less likelihood of their succumbing to temptation.

  Explaining his hard line in a speech to the Singapore Advocates and Solicitors Society on March 18, 1967, he said, “We live in an area where to be corrupt is a way of life. And there are scales starting from 20 cents for this and 40 cents for that, to two dollars for this. There are rates for the job. You know it, I know it. What is most important really for us is that because it is a way of life for others around us, it has to be understood.

  “What is your answer? I say unless you are able to give our civil servants that pride in their standards and reward them for being able to maintain those standards, the standards in the end will be undermined.”

  In this regard, Lee believed that government leaders would have to set an example. They would have to be aboveboard and seen to be so. They should also not indulge in lavish living. As he explained to the authors: “We needed a civil service that was responsive to our goals. The most important thing was to make sure that they stayed honest. A civil service that is dishonest is a disaster to us. …

  “And that’s one of the reasons why we were forced to take over, because we could see that another four, five years of the kind of government that Lim Yew Hock was running would have become more thoroughly corrupt.

  “First, we had to set the example. If the ministers were taking something on the side, his personal secretary must know, right? So, we have got to set an example, not only in being uncorrupt, but also in being thrifty and economical, and not travelling in grand style. The previous government was living it up. They knew they were not going to last long, so they lived and travelled as best as they could. Enjoyed it while the going was good. We wanted to trim the cost of government, so we ran a very spartan government. No wastage, no lavish entertainment, no big offices. We set the tone, the example, they followed. They responded to it.

  “We had the Corrupt Practices Investigations Bureau already set up in the 1950s. And I knew it was an effective organisation. We knew that this outfit was an important way to ferret out and punish those who broke the rules. So we helped fund it and built it up.”

  (Interview with the authors and speech to the Singapore Advocates and Solicitors Society, March 18, 1967; text of speech on page 414)

  “So they could leave piles of newspapers at tube stations, and you have a coin box and you take the newspaper and put your sixpence, 12 pence, and take your newspaper and even manage your own change. I was most impressed by that. And the buses: people would go up and pay the conductor as they were running out if the conductor had not given the ticket. But of course, it’s a different Britain now. Partly because of different education, no discipline at home, in the schools, and partly because immigrants have come in, and the whole atmosphere has changed and the people have changed.

  “No, we were not that kind of a society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts. What do you do? That would not happen or would not have happened in the Britain that I knew in the ’40s and ’50s. It’s a standard of behaviour of people which springs from cultivated living over a long period and training of children in a certain way, so that they are considerate to other people. You tell me how long we take to reach that kind of a state. Maybe another hundred years of constant effort.

  “We don’t have that luxury. I cannot wait 300 years. And we’re already into highrise living and you have them behaving like this, throwing things out of the window, killing people and messing up the place. How can you put up with that?”

  Laws to fit the society

  To Lee, a community’s legal framework was very much tied to its cultural ethos and makeup. The genteel live-and-let-live liberalism of the British legal system, he argued, as early as the 1960s, would have to be adapted to fit the unpolished nature of Singapore society in the 1950s, if order was to be maintained. A wholesale and unthinking transplant of British laws and norms, many of which were alien to its colonies, would only bring chaos.

  “Our architects learn of classical forms of Grecian colonnades and the Roman forum, of the grace and beauty of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s, buildings of beauty and grace built out of marble and sandstone, of ancient Greece and ancient Rome and not so ancient London, to fit the style and climates of their time and their people. But then architects have to come back to Malaya and mould from granite and cement the buildings to fit our people and our climate.

  “There is a gulf between the principles of the rule of law, distilled to its quintessence in the background of peaceful 19th century England, and its actual practice in contemporary Britain. The gulf is even wider between the principle and its practical application in the hard realities of the social and economic conditions of Malaya. You will have to bridge the gulf between the ideal principle and its practice in our given sociological and economic milieu. For if the forms are not adapted and principles not adjusted to meet our own circumstances but blindly applied, it may be to our undoing. You must bridge this gulf quickly if you are not to spend the first few years of your practice after graduation floundering in confusion.

  Laws must fit society. Lee was acutely aware of the nature of the society he was charged with in the 1960s – a racially mixed population, largely of immigrant stock, the bulk of whom were uneducated. In such an environment, he believed, the fine legal principles he had learnt as a student would have to be adapted to suit the society.

  “The rule of law talks of habeas corpus, freedom, the right of association and expression, of assembly, of peaceful demonstration, concepts which first stemmed from the French Revolution and were later refined in Victorian England. But nowhere in the world today are these rights allowed to practise without limitations, for, blindly applied, these ideals can work towards the undoing of organised society. For the acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether in fact it is able to produce order and justice in the relationships between man and man and between man and the state. To maintain this order with the best degree of tolerance and humanity is a problem which has faced us acutely in the last few years as our own Malayans took over the key positions of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.”

  (Speech to the University of Singapore Law Society, January 18, 1962; text on page 411)

  His experience in working with people from all walks of life was to confirm this view. A liberal approach, he felt, was doomed to failure, as it was out of sync with the ethos of the peo
ple and the times.

  “My practice of the law has influenced my approach. Training of the law has led the British to what they call ‘the redemption theory’. Let’s redeem the criminal, quite forgetting the harm he has already done to the victims who demand some justice be done.

  “But what I saw of the criminals whom I defended, what I saw of them in the prisons when I used to see them on remand, left me in no doubt at all that to deal with these people you have to be quite strong and firm or they’ll draw circles around you. I knew the whole story and the real story, and I had to defend somebody who was in the wrong. And I know that this chap, unless properly punished, is bound to repeat it.”

  He had made this point in 1966 when introducing a controversial Bill to make caning mandatory for vandalism:

  “I know how strongly the professionals and the penologists are against caning. But we have a society which, unfortunately I think, understands only two things – the incentive and the deterrent … A fine will not deter the type of criminal we are facing here … But if he knows he is going to get three of the best, I think he will lose the enthusiasm.”

  The jury is out

  A telling example of the way in which his experience as a lawyer was to shape his view of how the legal system should be framed was his reaction to a case he handled in the 1950s, which left him with a sinking feeling about the pitfalls of a jury system. Such a system, found in Anglo-Saxon societies, would not work when transplanted to Asian ones, he concluded.