Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  Politics also meant he had to give up a potentially well-paying career as a lawyer, which one of his brothers went into.

  “When I decided to go into politics, Bashir Mallal, the man who ran the Malayan Law Journal, came to see me. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was a lawyer’s clerk and he knew a lot about law. Had there been night courses, he would have been a very good lawyer. His son and I were schoolmates, so he knew me as a teenager. He liked me.

  “I was doing well then as a lawyer in Laycock & Ong – ’54, ’55 – but I was getting involved in politics, all those unions and clan associations. He said to me, ‘Make your name at the law first and make your fortune, then go into politics’, which was what people of his generation did. That was conventional wisdom. You make a name at the law, you make your fortune, then you go into Congress politics, as in India.

  “He didn’t understand that something dramatic had happened to my generation, that making a fortune, playing safe, doesn’t add up when the system is wrong. I was dead set against the system. But going into politics meant a hazardous, peril-fraught career. It’s not a career, it’s a vocation. You’re taking a plunge, no return. And if you fail, you pay for it with your life. The communists, if they fix you, they fix you good and proper.”

  But, he admits, he had the luxury of allowing his convictions to rule his decision as his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, was herself a successful lawyer.

  “My great advantage was I have a wife who could be a sole breadwinner and bring the children up. That was my insurance policy. Without such a wife, I would have been hard-pressed. To be fair, I was able to make these decisions because I had this fall-back position, I was insured.”

  In 1970, when the pay of other ministers was raised from $2,500 a month to $4,500, he chose not to raise his pay of $3,500 as he wanted Singapore to first ride out the rough economic times caused by the British withdrawal. Explaining his move, he said then, “I am able to do this only because my wife is a practising solicitor with an adequate income. But it is unrealistic to expect the next prime minister, one qualified for the job, to discharge the functions of this office for the present salary.”

  Money is not important

  He points out that money has not been a determining factor in his life.

  “Supposing I had been differently constituted and I had stuck to the law like my brother. At the end of the day, he has got millions of dollars worth of shares and houses. Maybe I could have the same, but where does that get me? I suppose he would be worth a hundred million dollars, I could be worth two hundred million because of our double income, my wife and I. But where does that get us?

  “It makes no difference really whether I’ve got one million or a hundred million or one billion dollars. What can I do with it? I’m not going to change my way of life. So I could buy myself a big house and a big car and a yacht and a private aircraft.

  “It’s a matter of what is enough. And I pitched what is enough at a very basic level – well, ‘basic’ for my class. If you ask me to live today in an HDB three-room flat, and I had to eat at a hawker centre every day, that would be a real problem. But at the time I started, in the ’50s and ’60s, I think if you tell me to live off the hawker centre, I could. Now probably with age, my digestion is no longer able to cope, and I have to be careful what I eat.”

  Lee and his bride in 1950. “My great advantage,” said Lee, “was I have a wife who could be a sole breadwinner and bring the children up. And that was my insurance policy. I think without such a wife, I would have been hard-pressed.”

  Lee believes that education, more than money, is important. That is what he grew up believing and he cannot understand why other politicians amass fortunes.

  “I can understand a person wanting to have, in today’s Singapore, a house, a car. Projecting myself back as a young man, I would probably need about $10 million – $5 million to buy a house, the things that would go with the house and education for the children. So if I have another three, four million in the bank and income from it, and three, four hundred thousand dollars annual income, that’s the kind of life that I as a non-politician would probably aspire to if I were in my 30s. That I can understand.

  “But what I cannot understand to this day is why Marcos looted the place clean. What was the point of it? … I find that not understandable. He ate very frugally. I’ve had meals with him. He had stomach problems and was very careful what he ate. So wherever he went, he would have his own white rice whenever possible and his own kind of food. And he would eat two bananas because they helped him sleep – two of a special kind of banana, Filipino bananas because they were good for his sleep. And he had a presidential car and a presidential plane, and Malacanang palace. His clothes were not $20,000 clothes or $10,000 clothes. So why?

  “I suppose they needed money to buy and sell people, to get things done. He probably wanted to set his children up, but they already had enough. So cleaning up the shop and leaving the Philippines with a $27 billion debt is something I do not understand. What could he do with it? But obviously, he found something worthwhile …

  “And in the same way, I don’t understand why some of our neighbours do what they do. I can only believe that, as young people, they were deprived and hungry. And they imagined that if you have all this wealth, you will be very happy. And having got started, they believe that they can make their children and grandchildren happy, which is a fallacy. They are building up unhappiness.

  “My philosophy, I’m not sure whether it is valid today, but it was valid in my generation – if you’ve got an education, if I give my children a good education, the rest is up to them. That’s the way I grew up because my father was the son of a very rich man. He lost everything. And my mother always told me, my father, he only passed his Junior Cambridge at SJI, then he stopped … When the fortunes were lost, all he could do was to be a storekeeper with Shell company. Whereas his friends, who were also children of rich men, were lawyers or doctors. One of them is Richard Chuan Ho Lim, whose children are William Lim and Arthur Lim. They were family friends. They always used to tell me, ‘Get yourself a profession. Be educated. Then even if you are poor, you’ll make your way up.’

  “And that influenced my thinking, I suppose. So my responsibility for the three children, which I’d placed with my wife, was to get them educated. As it turned out, they won their own scholarships, so good luck to them. That’s enough.”

  Lee’s determination to do what he considers the right thing and the strength of his convictions has meant that he has had to make many unpopular decisions. He approaches this philosophically.

  Eu Chooi Yip – Former Malayan Communist Party leader. Barred from entering Singapore in 1967, he was allowed to return in 1991 on compassionate grounds, after agreeing not to engage in any political activity here. He was a consultant on China affairs in the Institute of East Asian Political Economy before he died in 1996.

  “In many cases, it cannot be helped. I don’t consciously go out to make enemies of people. But when we are on opposing sides, we have to fight. You fight for your cause, I fight for mine, it cannot be helped. But you shouldn’t extend that beyond the person involved.

  “For instance, the Plen. A few years ago, Eu Chooi Yip approached Goh Keng Swee in Beijing and said, would we help the Plen’s son? His son was born when he was on the run in Indonesia, and was brought up in Changsha with the whole lot of other children of communist cadres from the Malayan Communist Party. The son is a bright fellow and he won a scholarship to Qinghua University, and was working in a research institute. He wanted to get out because he didn’t belong.

  “I don’t know whether it’s the society or the system, or maybe both. If you are not a China Chinese, you are separate, different. They treated him as a foreigner. They gave him special privileges, but he was never one of them. His girlfriend was a fellow Malayan. He wanted to come here. Goh Keng Swee spoke to me, I looked at it … I had the Internal Security Department check on him, whether he is a communist. If he�
�s a plant, then we’re looking for trouble. They were convinced that he was not, so we let him in. Now, he’s working for one of our research organisations. That’s all right. So the Plen wrote to me and thanked me from Haadyai.”

  Being a politician has also made him more wary of people, especially those who might use their relationship with him for their own gain.

  “I’ve got used to that and I think I’m pretty sensitive in discerning who’s on the level and who’s wanting to get something out of me. One of the qualities that you need to have to last as a leader is you must be good at that, otherwise you get taken for a ride. You must be able to smell people out.

  “It’s a difficult thing to describe. I think it’s being sensitive. I discussed this with the people who did our Shell system of appraisal for recruitment and promotions. And I asked them whether some people are naturally good at it, at interviewing and appraising. They said, yes, some people are better than others.

  “It’s got to do with being able to interpret body language. Watch the chap, his voice, whether he is dissimulating, what’s his real position, the tone of voice, the tic in his face, his body position or whatever. You can see into a person and through a person.

  “And the best two persons I have met with very high sensitivities will be Tan Teck Chwee who was chairman of the Public Service Commission … he’s very sharp … and Lim Kim San. I’m not sure if he’s as good now because, as you get old, your faculties, your sharpness of eye and ear, like your sensory capabilities, diminish. But he would shake hands with a person and recoil from that man. He once said to me, of Khaw Khai Boh, who was the head of our Special Branch and who became a minister in the Malaysian government, ‘When I shake his hand, I feel I want to wash it.’ You know, the oiliness of the man and the viciousness of the man – he just sensed it. It’s a gift.

  “And I think I may not be as sharp as Tan Teck Chwee, maybe not even like Lim Kim San. But I’m not far behind. I can tell a person who’s on the level and whom I can trust and whom I cannot and won’t.

  “Dr Goh Keng Swee cannot do that, he’s always making mistakes. He’s very brainy, very thorough, very methodical, but lacking here. And I don’t know why. He doesn’t see through people. The person has got to work with him, then after he’s thoroughly disappointed, he gets rid of the man.”

  Lee was already courting Kwa Geok Choo before they left for studies in Cambridge, England.

  I would do a lot for a friend, but …

  As prime minister, he has had to take tough action against friends. When President Devan Nair, a long-time ally, was found misbehaving because of alcoholism in 1985, for example, he had to be removed from office. Then, in 1986, he let the law take its course when National Development Minister Teh Cheang Wan was discovered to be accepting bribes.

  “Let me put it in a simple way. I would do a lot personally for a friend, provided what we set out together to do is not sacrificed. We set out to get this place up. If I sacrifice that now, we are doing harm to what we’ve been trying to do; that cannot be done.

  “But if you need a hundred thousand dollars, I’ll sign it out of my own resources or raise the money. Good luck to you. And that’s a different matter, that’s a personal relationship. But that personal relationship cannot be transmuted into a concession that will jeopardise state interests. That cannot be done because that’s what we’re trying to establish – a system where people act in accordance with certain principles.

  “The purpose is not just to be righteous. The purpose is to create a system which will carry on because it has not been compromised. I didn’t do that just to be righteous about Teh Cheang Wan. But if I had compromised, that is the end of the system.”

  Lee acknowledges that if Singapore had been under another person, the manner in which the country was run would probably have been quite different.

  “The best example of what actually could happen is when I had to discuss with Goh Keng Swee what happened if I got knocked down by a bus and he took over. And he told me, ‘Frankly, I can’t run it your way. I’ve got to change the method, but I will go in the same direction. I will get there, but a different way.’

  “He could not do it my way. He didn’t have my temperament. He is as determined as I am – but he could not do the things my way because he’s not so good at interpersonal skills. So he would have to do it through another route.”

  Although politics has been a way of life for Lee for more than 40 years, he is not so sure that he would walk the same path if he had been born later. Needs and motivations are changing, he says, and the young who might have gone into politics in his time today see little need to enter public life.

  “Supposing I had been born in a different era, in ’73 or ’74 in Singapore, and I’m now 21, 22, what would I do? I would have got a scholarship, judging from what I did the last time, I think I would have got a scholarship and gone off to study abroad.

  “I’d come back. The environment is different, the future is different, I would not be so absorbed in wanting to change life in Singapore. I’m not responsible for Singapore … I’ve done my National Service, I’m willing to do my reservist training. Why should I go and undertake this job and spend my whole life pushing this for a lot of people for whom nothing is good enough? I would seriously think of other jobs.

  On Mrs Lee and the children

  The Lees with their three children, from left, Hsien Loong, Wei Ling and Hsien Yang.

  Mrs Lee Kuan Yew is often by Lee’s side at official functions and trips. What influence does she have on him? He revealed this to the authors:

  “Not in political matters. In political matters she would not know enough to tell me whether this is right or wrong. But she would tell me whether she would trust that man or not. That’s a gut feeling. And often she is right because she has got an intuitive sense of whether the chap is trustworthy and friendly or unfriendly.

  “She did tell me that she didn’t think Malaysia would work … She didn’t think it would work because, she said, ‘You know the way they do things and we’ll never change them.’ So I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t mean we need to be like them. And we’ll have to work with them because somebody must represent the Malays. And we will not be able to represent the Malays for a very long time, so we would have to find a way of working with them.’”

  Lee is also known to be close to his sons – Deputy Prime Minister Hsien Loong and Singapore Telecom chief executive officer Hsien Yang – and only daughter, Wei Ling, a doctor. He told the authors that he took pains to ensure that they grew up living normal lives.

  “When I took office, they were very young. They were seven, five and two years old in ’59. So first thing my wife and I decided was we should not move into Sri Temasek, which was the official residence, because that would be a very bad thing for them. You’d get an inflated idea of who you are, what you are, with all the servants around and the gardeners. So we decided to stay put [at their Oxley Rise house].

  “And all the time we’ve tried to make them have a sort of a normal environment which was equal to the kind of life I led before I was prime minister. And I believe that’s been to their advantage.”

  He said they got used to being the children of the prime minister after a while. “I don’t think it went to their heads. They were treated in school just as another student. And they were not difficult students. So, there was no reason for them to throw their weight around.

  “I suppose in her [Wei Ling’s] case, it was more difficult because young men would shy off her. But that’s not the only reason, that she’s my daughter. She’s also a bright student and it didn’t help that she became the Honours student of her year, as a doctor. The doctors just stayed away, so she has had to pay a price for it. But the boys didn’t have the same problem. I suppose being a prime minister’s son did not make them less marriageable.”

  Lee with Hsien Loong during a Pulau Ubin visit in June 1960.

  “Given this kind of a Singapore, I’d ask myself: Wha
t they need is a real bad setback and then they’ll understand how damn fortunate they are. Then they will learn. Let the setback take place first, then I’ll enter politics. And in case we don’t recover from the setback, I will have a fall-back position, which many are doing – have a house in Perth or Vancouver or Sydney, or an apartment in London, in case I need some place suddenly, and think about whether I go on to America.

  “ I had lunch with Lim Kim San. And he said, ‘No, no, you won’t enjoy life. There’s no meaning.’ I said, ‘Don’t say that, Kim San. If I ask you now, and you were 40 years old, to enter politics, would you do so?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I said, ‘That answers my point.’ Whereas in 1963 he gave up his business – pawnshop business, sago business, director of UOB, to take on this job after working for HDB from ’60 to ’63. If he were 40 years old, would he do it now? I don’t think so.

  “… I was the product of the times. That Japanese Occupation brought the whole world crashing down. I understood what power was about. From that, it all happened. If I am back again aged 21 or 22 in today’s Singapore, I don’t think I will undertake this work voluntarily. At that time I felt such a compelling need to do something.

  “… I don’t think my younger son feels any compelling need to change Singapore. He’s quite happy, he has done his job. He took his SAF scholarship, he did his job. Now he’s joined Singapore Telecom – do a good job of it. Go into politics? Lose all weekends going around meeting people. He sees his brother, he sees no reason why he should do it. The brother, I believe, may be different, because he is older by about five and a half years. He went through the race riots in 1964 and 1969. At the time of the riots – ’64 – he was already 12, 13, in Catholic High School. He remembers the separation. So he has a different outlook. For him, Singapore was in peril and life was perilous. He got drawn into it because I took him around when I went on my constituency tours … He followed me in the afternoons and early evenings. As dinner time approached, I would send him home. Singapore is a small island, it takes just half an hour to go home. So he got drawn into it.”