Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  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.

  He who exercises authority has got to exercise it with firmness, competence and fairness, and what is most important, with a degree of continuity. The expectation of continuance of policy. And that is where the Federation of Malaya has succeeded. It is not the Tunku’s great quality of charm, which he has in abundance, but the fact that he has left an impression that he is there to stay, and the fact that he has left that impression helps the whole position.

  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.

  I have enumerated in several of my talks what I consider to be 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.

  But in these three countries which are making progress, India, Egypt, Yugoslavia (backward countries, no doubt about it), there was in every one, dedicated leadership and determination. Whatever there may be of petty corruption in the provincial governments, even the opposition in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House in Delhi – I had a chat with them – they admit the government is honest. That is important. You must be able to command respect. You may agree with Mr Nehru and his colleagues. You may agree with Mr Menon, you may like him, you may not like him, but you admit these are honest men who are out to do a decent job. If they command authority, that makes things easier. Their civil servants are self-respecting, the minister acts with reasonable decorum, the permanent secretary acts with reasonable confidence, the tamby feels he’s got to behave himself; if he doesn’t, he gets a rap on the knuckles. Everything ticks.

  In every one of them, there was an effective administration. In the case of Egypt they had none, but they filled up. They changed the top hierarchy which was corrupt and everywhere they filled it with trusted army officers, young army revolutionary types. They knew nothing about administration. They have since learned, but the idea was to infuse a certain amount of backbone and stop the petty thieving that was going on. And in Yugoslavia the whole of the Partisan movement, the officer corps, went in and took over the administration.

  The third quality: in every one of them, there was this social discipline. And what is strange is this. Where the social discipline is less, the progress is slower. And the social discipline was slightest in India. And tightest in Yugoslavia. You see, that is something which no politician, no political leader, no revolutionary band, can create overnight. It takes years to change a people in their habits, in their attitudes. If you don’t get social discipline, everybody does what he likes to do, or will not bustle about what he is told to do. And that becalms the whole momentum.

  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.

  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 and I think there must have been 100,000 families with the same idea. They also went out, everybody with a little Fiat or an Alfa Romeo, depending upon your prosperity. And everybody brought a little tent or a fishing rod. They went round to the country; 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.

  Ah yes, the democratic system is erratic. Whilst I was there, the House or their Parliament was meeting day and night trying to elect a new president. And they couldn’t elect the president because nobody had a majority. But they are kept down because their economy is bouncing. 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. …

  No government has yet gone down to communist subversion which has an effective administration. They only went down when the administration collapsed. And here you have got a determined leadership.

  I say, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, the administration is wholesome, but it needs to be shaken up, chaps get flat. Chaps get lazy, you shake them up, flap them up, sometimes rap them on the knuckles. Reward them when they do outstanding work.

  And the social discipline? Well, it’s not what’s strictly desired, but it can be improved. In my prognosis for the future, I say, if I had to choose any place in Southeast Asia as the one most likely to survive for the longest possible time, in the best of possible circumstances, I say that is Malaysia.

  As early as the 1960s, Lee had expressed doubts about the applicability of the democratic ideal to developing countries. In a question-and-answer session following his address to the Royal Society of International Affairs in London in May 1962, he spelt out some of the difficulties of doing so. He also said that he believed he could govern Singapore more effectively if he did not have to face elections every five years. Below are excerpts of the question-and-answer session.

  What price democracy?

  QUESTION: May I ask the Prime Minister if he will enlarge on his observations about one-man-one-vote?

  LEE KUAN YEW: Yes! There are vagaries about the system of one-man-one-vote which make it an extremely hazardous system to run anywhere in the underdeveloped and the under-educated world. It is a hazardous system to run anywhere, as people who are in charge of the electoral machinery of major political parties here may well agree.

  We are not exceptional, we are neither more intelligent nor better-educated than many of our neighbours. We have been more fortunately endowed and enjoy a better standard of living, but I do not think the basic factors are materially different. 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 this leads to a situation where he who bids the highest wins.

  I would say that but for the enormous prestige of Mr Nehru and the quality of the leadership at the very top around him, I do not think it would have worked in India either.

  At a time when you want harder work with less return
and more capital investment, one-man-one-vote produces just the opposite. The offer of more return with less work ends up in bankruptcy. I would say that but for the enormous prestige of Mr Nehru and the quality of the leadership at the very top around him, I do not think it would have worked in India either. It is not for me to say what is likely to happen in India in the next decade – Mr Nehru cannot go on forever.

  But I do not think it is a coincidence that it has flopped in Pakistan, did not succeed in Burma, nearly came to grief and is already in severe difficulties in Ceylon which was the model of peaceful transfer of power from a governed to a governing nation. It has been abandoned, decried and condemned in Indonesia, and it is not held in esteem anywhere in Asia.

  It is not a tradition with the Malays nor with the Chinese to count heads; it has always been [the tradition] to listen to the dicta of the elder. Mind you, I think it will endure in Malaya for some time, but for how long, I don’t know. I should imagine that with every passing year there will be mutations made to the system in order to make it still work. We all know that barely five months ago the Tunku brought in several basic amendments to the constitution, a constitution drafted by five eminent jurists from the five Commonwealth countries. They settled in Rome and drafted what was jurisprudentially a sensible and an elegant constitution – but it was not going to work. Very wisely, the Tunku decided that he would change bits and pieces.

  It was my unfortunate burden to attend a Law Society dinner shortly after that in the university, and hear a somewhat idealistic president of that society decry the fact that the Tunku had already moved 137 amendments, namely more amendments than there are articles in his constitution! Gratuitously I defended the need for making something work, even if it meant departing from my norms; and I should be surprised if in the course of the next five years there are not as many amendments as there were in the last five years.

  QUESTION: May I follow up that question with a supplementary? One-man-one-vote has broken down already in various ex-territories of the Commonwealth – of the Empire. It has been succeeded in those cases by military dictatorships. You will not, I imagine from what I know, in Malaysia face the danger of a military government, but how are you going to secure a smooth transition from a system which will not work (I would agree there) in an illiterate – large illiterate – country? How are you going to secure a smooth transition to something else which will not involve autocratic government?

  How are you going to secure a smooth transition to something else which will not involve autocratic government?

  LEE: I do not think it is quite true to say that the system of one-man-one-vote has been abandoned. Parliamentary government has been abandoned, but it has not necessarily been followed by a military dictatorship. President Nkrumah is not a military dictatorship. He was no general of any army.

  QUESTION: Pakistan, Sudan …

  LEE: Yes, true – Pakistan, Sudan, Burma; but Indonesia is not a military dictatorship; the President just decided one morning, with the support and concurrence of the executive powers of the State, that the Legislative Chamber should be dissolved and that power should be vested among those who were competent to exercise that power. But I do not think the proposition that it must be followed or superseded by a military dictatorship is valid, because I do not think it is.

  What I think is valid as a general proposition is that the system of cutting up the country in accordance with the number of adult citizens of given proportions, to elect representatives who then elect among like-minded people a Cabinet which then elects a primus inter pares among the Cabinet, is one which presupposes so many basic conditions which are often nonexistent, that I do not think it will ever work. They have all been superseded by systems which give power effectively to one man, or a group of men, for an indefinite period.

  If I were in authority in Singapore indefinitely, without having to ask those who are governed whether they like what is being done, then I have not the slightest doubt that I could govern much more effectively in their own interests.

  Government, to be effective, must at least give the impression of enduring, and a government which is open to the vagaries of the ballot box – when the people who put their crosses in the ballot boxes are not illiterate but semi-literate, which is worse – is a government which is already weakened before it starts to govern.

  I say this with no desire to explain away my problem: if I were in authority in Singapore indefinitely, without having to ask those who are governed whether they like what is being done, then I have not the slightest doubt that I could govern much more effectively in their own interests. That is a fact which the educated understand, but we are all caught in this system which the British – I do not know what the French do in their colonies in Africa – export all over the place, hoping that somewhere it will take root.

  India is still working it, but I think that but for the enormous prestige of Mr Nehru and the momentum of the independence movement – the Congress movement – it would not have endured. It would not have carried on for so long, and certainly would not have produced the results which in fact it has. But, in every country where it has been supplanted, the tendency is towards more – I would not say autocratic – centralised power; and power which is not open to question in the way the system of one-man-one-vote opens it at frequent periodic intervals.

  I do not know what the answer is, and I would hate to commit myself on what I think the answer is for Malaya, but I am pretty sure that there must be amendments to the system in order to continue to provide effective government in Malaysia. When it happens, as I am sure it will within the next ten years – I think it is necessary, it has got to be done – there will be changes in Malaysia, otherwise it will lead to perdition, or, what is worse, the taking over of the organs of the State by soldiers who are not necessarily the best-equipped people to look after the administration of a country.

  When it does happen you will perhaps remember that it is not the first time – nor will it be the last time – that the British parliamentary system, when planted on ground that is not suitable, does not take root.

  QUESTION: I should like to follow up on that and ask the Prime Minister to be a little more specific. I am not quite sure whether the misgivings he expressed about democracy are based upon his belief if the wrong people get elected, or on his conviction that after they are elected, they are not able to carry on with their jobs. If it is the former, this would appear to be a contradiction, because he himself achieved power through democratic election. If it is the second, it would be very interesting to hear his exposition; in what way has his work been impeded by parliamentary democracy?

  LEE: I would say without the slightest hesitation that it is not the first, and I would not put the second point quite in the way that Mr Sington has done.

  Effective government, as I envisage it, 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.

  “If Mao Zedong had to stand for election today he would lose his deposit.”

  But 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 as in the case of India, where there is no doubt as to the dedication and the ability of the leadership at the top, where the momentum of the independence movement, plus the inherently stable character of the Hindu society, has prevented a sudden upset of the whole social structure of society.

  But in many cases political leaders have got to yield to forces around and beneath them, and the answer always, unless you have a superhuman group of leaders is to take the soluti
on which is least painful. Therefore the least painful solution is not to make undue demands on your population, to slide over the fact that not to do so is not to increase investment rate and not to jack up your society, or there is never any chance of taking office.

  Then you are competing against people who not only promise not to maintain the investment rate, but positively promise to spend what there is [already saved] in the kitty, and you have three or four terms, and if an electorate is sufficiently naive to believe that these things can be done, you break the bank, as the Indonesians have done. They had very little in the bank to begin with; everybody promised that if he came in, whatever there was in the bank would be for the people, and they came in; the bank was broken anyway, and that was the end of it.

  There is an inherent defect in working that system 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.

  As many of my former colleagues (those who have gone over to the communists) told me last year, “If Mao Zedong had to stand for election today he would lose his deposit.” There is no doubt about it, and nobody makes any pretence about it. You can govern as long as the organs of the state are effective and obedient and as long as the intelligentsia is with you. The intelligentsia is with Mao and he will continue to govern, but if he asked for a popular mandate, that is not possible. Who can do it apart from Mr Nehru, I do not know.