Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  When I was a law student I learned that every word, every sentence, has three possible meanings: what the speaker intends it to mean, what the hearer understands it to mean, and what it is commonly understood to mean. So when a coded message is sent in a telegram, the sender knows what he means, the receiver knows exactly what is meant, the ordinary person reading it can make no sense of it at all. When you write notes, minutes or memoranda, do not write in code, so that only those privy to your thoughts can understand. Write so simply that any other officer who knows nothing of the subject can still understand you. To do this, avoid confusion and give words their ordinary meanings.

  Our biggest obstacle to better English is shyness. It is a psychological barrier. Nobody likes to stop and ask, “Please, what does that mean?” or “Please tell me, where have I gone wrong?” To pretend to know when you don’t know is abysmal folly. Then we begin to take in each other’s mistakes and repeat them. We recycle and reinforce these mistakes, compounding our problems. Of course, this happens not just with us. It is worldwide. The Americans use English words and give meanings to them, never so intended by the British. Finally its usage becomes established. There are four times as many Americans as Britishers. They produce so many more books, films, and TV features that the American meaning of these words has overwhelmed the English.

  But let us discuss simpler problems that confront us. The facility to express yourself in a written language is yet another facet or manifestation of your ability, plus application and discipline. It is a fallacy to believe that because it is the English language, the Englishman has a natural advantage in writing it. It is not so. He has a natural advantage in speaking the language because he spoke it as a child, but not in writing it. It has nothing to do with race. You are not born with a language. You learn it.

  It is the same with Chinese. You have very able Englishmen like Giles and Wade who knew Chinese more profoundly than I think any one of us here. They spent their lifetime mastering the mysteries of the language. So Winstedt compiled the first Malay-English dictionary. And when I started learning Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian consul-general in 1957 presented me with an Indonesian-English dictionary by T. Wittermans, a Dutchman. And so Americans – whether they are of Dutch, French, German, Swedish, Italian, African, Japanese, or Chinese descent – born and bred in America suffer from no disability in their written English.

  It is a fallacy to believe that because it is the English language, the Englishman has a natural advantage in writing it.

  First, you must want to achieve it. I want you to, because without effective written communication within the government, there will be misunderstanding and confusion. Every passing year we shall more and more assess the worth of officers for their language competence. We cannot afford to overlook language incompetence. We ignored language competence in the past because it was too difficult a problem. It would have been unfair to those from the non-English medium universities. Now that Nanyang University is teaching in English we cannot afford to tolerate slipshod writing without grievous results. This is the price we have had to pay for inadequate bilingualism. However, those who have made it to university and the top echelons of the public service have no excuse for not being able to master the written language.

  Let me just give a few recent illustrations of writing so sloppy that I had to seek clarification of their meanings:

  First item: “With increasing urbanisation and industrialisation, we will require continued assistance particularly in the technological and managerial fields.” I asked myself, “What have I missed in this? What has the first part about urbanisation and industrialisation to do with the second part about continued assistance? Why do we need more assistance particularly in technological and managerial skills because of increasing urbanisation and industrialisation?” It is a non sequitur. We need technological and managerial assistance anyway. The first part does not lead to the second part.

  Next time impress me with the simple way you get your ideas across to me.

  Item from the Ministry of Education: “(It is necessary to study) the correlation between language aptitude, intelligence and values and attitudes to ensure that the various echelons of leaders are not only effectively bilingual but also of the desirable calibre.” I read it over and over again. It made no sense. This is gibberish. I inquired and I was told, well, they were trying to find out how language ability and intelligence should influence the methods for instilling good social values and attitudes. Well, then say so. But somebody wanted to impress me by dressing up his ideas in many important words. Next time impress me with the simple way you get your ideas across to me.

  Next item: “France is the fourth major industrial country in Europe after West Germany, Britain and Italy.” Calculating backwards and forwards, I decided France cannot be the fourth. I queried. The reply was that France was fourth in terms of number of industrial workers. Now, China probably has the largest number of industrial workers in the world. In some factories they may have 14,000 workers when a similar factory in America would have 4,000. Does that make China the first industrial country in the world?

  Item from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on North-South relations: “The Third World has the stamina to sustain pressure for the Common Fund. Progress will probably be incremental with acceleration possible if moderation prevails.” Now what does this mean? By “incremental” the officer meant “slow”. “Slow”, I understand, but “acceleration possible”, I do not.

  If we do not make a determined effort to change, the process of government will slow down. It will snarl up. I have noted this steady deterioration over the last 20 years. I want to reverse it. If we start with those at the top, we can achieve a dramatic improvement in two years, provided the effort is made. Now I want to discuss how we can do it.

  Let me explain my problems over learning languages so that you will know that you are not alone. When I made my first speech in Hokkien in 1961 during the Hong Lim by-elections, the children in China Street hooted with derision and contempt. I was unintelligible. I was talking gibberish. They laughed and jeered at me. I was in no mood for laughter. I could not give up. I just had to make myself understood. I could not, like David Marshall, get an interpreter – I would have lost. I had a Hokkien teacher follow me. He knew what I wanted to say. The ideas were there.

  Let me emphasise this point. Before you can put ideas into words, you must have ideas. Otherwise, you are attempting the impossible. My ideas were there. My problem was how to say it in Hokkien. So my teacher would listen to what I had said in Mandarin. He knew what I wanted to say. The next day he showed me where I had gone wrong and how I could express myself. I made rapid progress.

  Over successive election campaigns I reached higher and higher plateaux. He and I worked out this method. He would listen to me. Before I made my speech at a major place, I would first go to a minor function, a small street corner rally or a rural community centre gathering. There I would practise. My teacher would listen. He noted down my mistakes. My ideas he gathered from my Mandarin and my English speeches. He polished up my Hokkien, gave me new words and phrases, told me where I’d expressed myself wrongly so I made progress. If I had pretended I knew, or I had been shy to ask, I would have got nowhere.

  The written English we want is clean, clear prose. I choose my words carefully – not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening.

  That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure. The more the pleasure, you can assume, as a rule of thumb, the greater the effort.

  I do not think the correct script that I have seen circulated of my Chap Goh Mei speech gives you an accurate impression of the effort required. I made the speech off the cuff. In that way I sensed the mood of the gathering and pitched my thoughts on a note and in a way which made my listeners receptive. Then it had to go into print. I had to pencil it through, to tighten, to clarify, so that in written form it would be clea
r and clean. Remember: That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure. The more the pleasure, you can assume, as a rule of thumb, the greater the effort.

  So do not be ashamed that you have got to learn. I pencilled through my answers to the Asian Wall Street Journal. It was 45 minutes of questions and answers on tape. I took one hour and 30 minutes to pencil through. And yet when I reread it in the newspapers, I noticed a grammatical error, an obvious one, which I should have corrected. So this needs discipline.

  So when you send me or send your minister a minute or a memo, or a draft that has to be published, like the President’s Address, do not try to impress by big words – impress by the clarity of your ideas. Then I am impressed. I speak as a practitioner. If I had not been able to reduce complex ideas into simple words and project them vividly for mass understanding, I would not be here today. The communists simplified ideas into slogans to sway people’s feelings, win people’s hearts and settle people’s minds, to get the people to move in directions which would have done us harm. I had to check and to counter them. I learned fast. The first thing I had to do was to express ideas in simple words.

  How do you learn to do this? CSSDI [Civil Service Staff Development Institute] has only two trained persons who can help. There is Mr Roger Bell here, under the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation, and Miss Teo, who is also acting as my projectionist. That is the sum total of our teaching talent. This problem is similar to what we face in the joint campus. There we have about 1,800 English stream/Chinese stream students. Even those from the English stream suffer from poor English. There are about 600 from the Chinese stream, only 30 per cent with adequate English. Their teaching resources are stretched to the limit. The only way is for the students to teach each other. Those who know must help those who do not.

  My experience is that attending courses helps but not as much as lessons tailored for you. You have written a memo. Somebody runs through it and points out your errors: “You could have said it this way.” “This is an error.” “This can be broken into two sentences, a full-stop here, a different phrase there.” In other words, superiors and peers and even subordinates who spot errors should be encouraged to point them out. My PAs point out my mistakes; I tell them to. When going through a draft three or four times I am concentrating on and amending the meaning. So I miss the consequential mistakes in grammar. My PA who puts up a clean draft is not so hypnotised and by rereading the phrases, spots these errors and sidelines them. I tick the corrections off, indicating “Yes, incorporate.” If I do not do that, I will make more mistakes.

  Let us discuss how to improve, how to teach each other. Of course the ideal is to get one instructor for one person. One Miss Teo can probably cope with four officers. In six months to a year, the four officers should show dramatic improvement. You have the ability. The problem is applying this ability to mastering grammatical roles and the meanings of words, and using them to put your ideas across. You did not learn it in school thoroughly enough. It will be painful at the start, but it has to be done. In short, how do we maximise teaching resources, by what methods? I want a free discussion on how we can help each other because there just is not the staff to teach everyone.

  Three final examples on how urgent the problem is, from two papers coming before Cabinet on Thursday. The first is a very well written paper; the other badly written. But even the well written paper contained a repetitious phrase which confused me. Because it was well written I thought the repeated words must be there to convey a special meaning I did not see.

  “If the basis of valuation is to be on a basis other than open market value as evidenced by sales, arbitrariness and protracted litigation would occur, thus tarnishing the credibility of government machinery.” I ran my eye back over the opening words. I had to query: Do we lose anything if we dropped the words “to be on a basis” before “other” – “If the basis of valuation is other than open market value …” Answer came back – “No meaning is lost.” And this was in a well written paper.

  There is such a thing as a language environment. Ours is a bad one.

  I will read extracts from the other paper. The writer had to explain why we must set up an institute. I read the paper and found it disjointed. It made no sense in parts. So I reread it. Let me read one part: “The need for such services is made more acute as at present, there is no technical agency offering consultancy services in occupational safety and health.” I asked, “What’s happening as at present? Why ‘as at present’?” What the officer meant was: “There is acute need because there is no department which offers advice on occupational safety and health.” We have taken in each other’s mistakes. He had constantly read “as at present”, “as of yesterday”, “as of tomorrow”, so he just stuffed in three unnecessary words – “as at present”.

  Next extract: “He recommended that a central autonomous body be set up to give clear direction, to coordinate and to strengthen Singapore’s industrial safety and health efforts, to service industry and protect valuable manpower.” I asked, “What is it we are going to do?” If the officer has no ability, I will be wasting my time. But he has ability. What he wants is sufficient application, to know the rules, to try and achieve the simple. And this is not simple.

  There is such a thing as a language environment. Ours is a bad one. Those of you who have come back from a long stay in a good English-speaking environment would have felt the shock when reading The Straits Times on returning. I spent a month in Vancouver in October 1968. Then I went on to Harvard in Boston. For one month I read the papers in Vancouver. They were not much better than The Straits Times. They had one million people, English-speaking. But there was no sparkle in their pages. The contrast in Harvard was dazzling. From the undergraduate paper, The Harvard Crimson, to the Boston Globe to the New York Times to the Washington Post, every page crackled with novel ideas smartly presented. Powerful minds had ordered those words. Ideas had been thought out and dressed in clean, clear prose. They were from the best trained minds of an English-speaking population of 220 million!

  Every page crackled with novel ideas smartly presented. Powerful minds had ordered those words. Ideas had been thought out and dressed in clean, clear prose.

  Let us try to do better. We are not doing justice to ourselves. If you do not have the ability I would not be spending my time here. I know the ability is there; it has just not been trained to use the written word correctly and concisely. And it is not too late to start the training now. It is not possible to conduct the business of government by talking to each other with the help of gesticulation. You have to write it down. And it must be complete, clear and unambiguous.

  I have discussed this with Head of Civil Service and PS (Prime Minister’s Office). Dr Goh Keng Swee has sent his promising Mindef staff for training in batches of ten. They have improved. I believe if officers are prepared to point out each other’s mistakes, those who know can help those who do not. It does not mean that the person who does not know is the lesser mind. It is not the case. If he had concentrated on learning the use of the written word in school, he would have developed the skills. How do we do it, gentlemen? I want to hear you.

  So determined was Lee to induct good men into government that he made in 1994 a most revolutionary alteration to the way they would henceforth be rewarded. He introduced a formula pegging their salaries to the top earners in the private sector. In this speech in Parliament, he spoke about how times had changed and why it was no longer possible to depend on men who were motivated by a desire to serve the country while paid a pittance. He was speaking during the debate on the White Paper on ministerial salaries on November 1, 1994.

  How much is a good minister worth?

  My generation of political leaders have become dinosaurs, an extinct breed of men who went into politics because of the passion of their convictions. The problem now is a simple one: How to select younger leaders when the conditions that had motivated the old guards to sacrifice pro
mising prospects of a good life for a political cause no longer obtain in a completely different social climate. This change in climate is inevitable with economic progress and a change in social values.

  My generation of political leaders have become dinosaurs, an extinct breed of men who went into politics because of the passion of their convictions.

  In the ’60s and ’70s, as prime minister, I responded to this problem by a gradual increase in pay to reduce the big gap with the private sector. But in the 1980s it no longer worked. So in 1984 I decided to target ministers’ salaries at 80 per cent of their private sector counterparts.

  I’ve spent 40 years trying to select men for big jobs – ministers, civil servants, statutory boards’ chairmen. So I’ve gone through many systems, spoken to many CEOs, how did they select. Finally, I decided that Shell had the best system of them all, and the government switched from 40 attributes to three, which they called “helicopter qualities”, which they have implemented and they are able to judge their executives worldwide and grade them for helicopter qualities. What are they? Powers of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; concentration on the basic points, extracting the principles. You score high marks in mathematics, you’ve got it. But that’s not enough. There are brilliant mathematicians but they make poor executives. They must have a sense of reality of what is possible. But if you are just realistic, you become pedestrian, plebeian, you will fail. Therefore you must be able to soar above the reality and say, “This is also possible” – a sense of imagination.

  Then Shell has evolved certain other attributes – leadership and dynamism – a natural ability that drives a person on and drives the people around him to make the effort. The two psychologists who worked this out are Professor Muller, a Dutchman, and a Van Lennep, whom I met because I was interested some 15 years ago. These qualities are really inborn. You can develop knowledge but if you haven’t got them, you haven’t got them, including the ability to be a good interviewer. Have you got that capacity to see through a person? Listen to his voice, hear what his words are saying but look him in the eye, watch his face muscle and you’ll know that he is actually thinking the opposite. A good interviewer does that.