PACE OF LIFE IN SINGAPORE BY TODAY ONLINE
It is no secret that Singapore is a fast-paced society, with Singaporeans striving to get ahead of one another. Children as young as three years old are scheduled back-to-back “enrichment” activities. Adults evidently do not fare any better, with people in Singapore found to sleep the least and working among the longest hours in the world.
Not only does working longer hours result in less leisure time, but Singapore’s prosperity has also compelled people to maximise the utility of their leisure time, resulting in a “harried leisure class”. Maintaining this frantic pace of life not only exerts a toll on Singaporeans’ physical and mental well-being, but also has broader social and economic ramifications.
Singapore’s attempt at being productive has led to Singaporeans having one of the longest work weeks in the world. Long working hours might have made sense in a manufacturing economy where the value of output produced by each worker is limited by the speed of production; and where each worker needs to be physically present to perform his or her tasks.
In contrast, today’s knowledge work transcends the boundaries of space and time. One could gain insights from a casual conversation with a colleague from another industry, draw inspiration from how nature solves complex problems during a trail run, or discover a creative way to resolve a workplace dispute in the midst of resolving an argument between kids at the playground.
For knowledge workers, transition periods — times for rest, recuperation, introspection, fostering relationships and developing personal interests — contribute to, rather than detract from, productivity.
Maintaining the routines, work practices and assumptions of a manufacturing economy are detrimental to the quality of knowledge work, and damage Singapore’s transformation into more of a knowledge economy.
Exposing children to this frantic pace can also stymie Singapore’s transformation into a knowledge economy. Filling a child’s schedule with “enrichment” activities, to give him or her an edge in school, reinforces the perception of being trapped in a race. This perception discourages experimentation, discovery and learning from trial and error, in favour of uniform thought processes and reproducing scripted responses.
While uniformity is prized in a manufacturing economy that values a predictable workforce, such traits are less valued in a knowledge economy that deals with complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability.
If this frantic pace in Singaporean children’s lives persists and becomes more pervasive, I am concerned that the nation will have a workforce skilled at performing production work in the knowledge economy, but will still lack visionaries, creative thinkers and collaborators — the main drivers of a knowledge economy.
Resistance to slowing down
Maintaining a simplistically fast pace is clearly unsustainable for Singaporeans. Yet, the idea of slowing down will raise eyebrows. Such a reaction is expected; the virtues of speed are embedded in Singaporeans’ national consciousness, as evident from the narrative of Singapore’s successful transformation from a sleepy fishing village to a modern metropolis.
The belief is that speed allows for economic and social advancement, while slowness threatens Singapore’s sovereignty, especially given the nation’s size and scarce natural resources.
While a slow pace of life might translate into slower economic growth in manufacturing economies, this change is needed to be successful in a knowledge economy. For Singapore to be competitive and “fast” in a knowledge economy, Singaporeans will need to slow down their pace of life.
This paradoxical idea — of the parts in a system moving at a different pace from the system itself — is evident in competitive swimming. The next time you watch a race, pay attention to the tempo of the swimmer’s limbs in relation to the speed of the body’s movement through the water. You will notice that the fastest swimmers are not the ones with the quickest tempo, but the ones who cover the most distance per stroke.
Being efficient conserves energy, allowing the swimmer to finish the race strongly. In the final lap of the race, the synchrony between the tempo of the limbs and the body’s movement through the water will be evident for the fastest swimmer, while the slower swimmers can be seen flailing their arms and making big splashes with little forward movement.
Similarly, one would have to be mindful that a packed, frenetic lifestyle is not mistaken for being productive in a knowledge economy.
Productive slowing down
While Singapore has been focused on building capabilities and a culture around speed, I see the next big challenge for Singaporeans as grappling with productive slowing down in order to thrive as a knowledge economy.
What does it mean to productively slow down? I shall discuss this idea in the context of people’s mindsets and work routines. Productive slowing down entails a shift in mindset from a competitive orientation to an artistic one.
With a competitive orientation, life events are perceived as a race that creates winners and losers. These “races” are zero-sum games in which a single champion prevails and is distinguished from the rest of the pack.
In contrast, with an artistic orientation, life events are perceived as opportunities for expression and discovery. Instead of focusing on winning, an artistic orientation focuses on the authenticity of expression.
In an examination, these orientations manifest as the difference between an emphasis on scoring the highest versus an emphasis on applying one’s best effort to prepare for the exam.
In the choice of occupation, a competitive orientation influences one to make decisions based on external rewards such as pay, whereas decisions influenced by an artistic orientation place greater emphasis on fulfilment and other forms of intrinsic reward.
Adopting an artistic orientation allows people to slow down by reducing the compulsion to pack their schedules with “strategic” activities that are purported to give them an edge over the competition. Instead, activities are fuelled by one’s interests and natural curiosity, and completed at his or her pace.
Thus, the difference between competitive and artistic orientations lies not in productivity, but in the source of motivation.
Productive slowing down also involves creatively reconfiguring work routines to protect transition periods. Singaporeans’ strong work ethic has led them to prioritise production goals over temporal boundaries.
These priorities have led to longer hours at work at the expense of transition periods. Productive slowing down involves protecting these periods from “work time”.
To be clear, I am not advocating for reduced workloads, but for reconfiguring the flow and allocation of work to protect these transition periods that are vital to performing knowledge work.
By Mark FenDoes Singapore have a problem with xenophobia? It seems that barely a month goes by these days without news reports highlighting friction between Singaporeans and foreign workers in the tiny, multi-ethnic city-state.
The population has increased dramatically in recent decades thanks to an influx of foreigners, who now make up around two out of five residents. This has put a growing strain on jobs, housing and infrastructure, and raised fears about the dilution of the Singaporean national identity.
It has also—predictably—resulted in an angry backlash, with many taking to social media to disparage foreign workers, from highly paid “foreign talent” to heavily exploited laborers from China and the Indian sub-continent.
The abuse is often so vicious that in his 2012 national day rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted the proliferation of posts “tormenting and berating” foreigners, adding: “Very few people stand up to say this is wrong, shameful, we repudiate that. I think that is no good.”
In the latest high-profile incident, British banker Anton Casey lost his job and was forced to flee the island last month with his wife — a former Miss Singapore Universe — and son. The hapless Casey received death threats after making sneering comments on Facebook mocking the “poor people” using public transport, though his comments probably had more to do with social class — a subject rarely discussed in Singapore — than with race per se.
The previous month saw a major backlash on social media after Indian and Bangladeshi workers rioted in Singapore’s Little India district, leading Lee to again warn against “hateful or xenophobic comments, especially online.”
Anyone familiar with Singapore knows that race is a national obsession, and far more than a box to be ticked on official forms. This obsession permeates the country, and Dr Michael Barr of Australia’s Flinders University argues that it is important to distinguish between racism within the mainstream of society and that directed at outsiders.
“Singapore is very racist even towards its own minorities, but this is mostly accepted by the minorities as the cost of living in a society that is safe and prosperous, and which they can genuinely call home,” says Dr. Barr, senior lecturer in international relations and the author of a forthcoming book on Singapore’s leadership.
He argues that after independence in 1963, the government of former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew tried to break down the rigid racial divides inherited from the British, and to create a genuinely multiracial society.
But from the late 1970s it changed course, pushing instead to create a “Chinese” society with Indian and Malay minorities. From then on, race became “the major social identifier for Singaporeans,” and racism “a natural consequence of living in a society where racial stereotypes are encouraged and indulged by the government.”
“Unfortunately this has meant that in the 2000s and 2010s, just when foreign workers are moving into the front view of Singaporeans’ consciousness for the first time due to the government’s decision to flood the market with foreign workers, Singaporeans are already well-trained in racial stereotyping. They’ve had a lifetime’s training,” says Barr.
“Of course, even without this training the elements are there for a racist reaction. With two out of every five people in Singapore being a foreigner, it is a recipe for disaster, even without any other factors operating. Then we throw in the fact that the government, by its own admission, completely dropped the ball on providing infrastructure to cope with the influx of outsiders, and it would be surprising if there wasn’t a negative reaction to the outsiders, whether or not it was racist.”
Singapore’s stellar growth in the past few decades has seen it hailed as one of the world’s great economic success stories. The People’s Action Party (PAP) has ruled with an iron fist while overseeing the island’s transformation into an international financial center and manufacturing hub, with a per capita gross domestic product higher than the U.S.
However, this growth has been achieved predominantly by adding labor input — importing foreign workers — rather than increasing the underlying productivity of home-grown workers. Foreigners now make up about 38 percent of the total population of 5.3 million. In 1990, that figure was 14 percent, when the total population was around 3 million.
Last year, a government policy paper called for the population to increase a further 30 percent by 2030, to 6.9 million, at which time immigrants would account for nearly half of the island’s population. Thousands of people attended two rare protests against the white paper, holding signs with slogans such as “Singapore for Singaporeans.”
Fueled by angry reactions on social media and websites critical of the government, the issue of immigration has become a political hot potato for the PAP. At the 2011 general election, opposition parties won six seats in Parliament — the most since independence.
Kenneth Jeyaretnam, leader of the opposition Reform Party, says there is “no minimum wage and no social safety net, so competition from immigrants has definitely depressed wages and reduced job prospects for Singaporeans.”
“All racism is at bottom economic, and Singapore is no different,” he told The Diplomat. “The rising population has raised the returns to the owners of fixed factors like land. Since the Singapore government owns 80 percent of the land, this benefits them. The surpluses generated from the growth of the economy and the higher population have not been used to compensate Singaporeans but instead gone to the accumulation of foreign assets in our SWFs [sovereign wealth funds].
“If we had a minimum wage and greater protections for our workers then there would be less objection to foreigners. Instead of that, we have senile old men like LKY [Lee Kuan Yew] talking about the need for more Darwinian competition and how admitting more foreigners acts as a spur in the sides of Singaporeans … The reaction to Anton Casey shows that Singaporeans increasingly see themselves as patsies who are being exploited by not very well educated or particularly talented foreigners. Resentment extends to foreigners at all levels and regardless of race, except perhaps for those doing the dirty and dangerous jobs for less than S$20 per day.”
There is anecdotal evidence that the increasing hostility is driving some foreigners away. This writer experienced unpleasant racism in the workplace during the three years he spent working at a major media company in Singapore, and several fellow expats have cited it as a reason for leaving the country.
One Briton said he did not want his son growing up in such a poisonous atmosphere, a German friend compares Singapore with Nazi Germany, and a Dutch friend was driven to leave after a woman in a supermarket told his pregnant Thai wife to abort their “whore child” because it “would not be welcome in Singapore.”
The Dutchman, a 37-year-old who works in IT and relocated to Bangkok last year, said he was also set upon on three separate occasions by local youths shouting racial slurs and things like “go home to your own country” and other unpleasant epithets. Each time, he said, police refused to investigate, saying he must have been involved in a drunken altercation and should leave it at that.
Yet the worst abuse is usually reserved for low-paid construction and service sector workers from China, India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Mainland Chinese are known as “PRCs” — from the People’s Republic of China — and are often ridiculed for their poor English and perceived lack of social graces by the ethnic Chinese who make up around 75 percent of Singaporeans. Chinese bus drivers who staged an illegal strike in 2012 cited this discrimination as one of the reasons for their unhappiness.
Online forums are full of vicious comments about “PRC scum,” “foreign trash,” Filipino “cockroaches” and so on. An event held by Singaporeans in Sydney to celebrate the city-state’s national day last year attracted attention when locals and other foreigners were apparently refused entry. Summing up the siege mentality of many Singaporeans, one of the attendees wrote on a local blog afterwards that: “Everyone of us were on the same page. There were no PRCs, India Indians, Bangla or Pinoys [Filipinos] to annoy us.”
Associate Professor Tan Ern Ser, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, argues that the influx of mainland Chinese “enhances Singaporeans’ sense of identity insofar as they seek to differentiate themselves against the other nationality.”
He adds: “My sense is that competition produces prejudice or enhances pre-existing prejudice, which could come in the form of putting down the other nationality. The feeling of cultural superiority could be mutual.”
Dr. Barr concurs, noting while Singaporean Chinese and Singaporean Indians react negatively to the arrival of new immigrants from, respectively, China and India, “we must remember that there are ethnic prejudices operating within each of these societies, and some of these prejudices contain elements of racism — but more on the part of some of the foreign workers than on the part of Singaporeans. The ancestors of both Singapore Indians and Singapore Chinese come from the south of India and China, and most of the new immigrants come from the north — and in the old countries, northerners looked down upon southerners and southerners resented it.
“All these prejudices and resentments and insecurities are being imported with the foreign workers — especially the highly skilled ‘foreign talent’ — and no one in the government seems to be even aware of it. This is because the government and Singaporeans more generally have always dismissed foreign workers as being of no consequence other than the economic benefits they bring to the country. That was a viable attitude only while the numbers were manageable and the foreign workers were happy and able to remain passive and invisible. This is no longer the case. The foreign workers are now part of the social and perhaps even the political equation. They are no longer invisible.”
There are other factors at play in this growing resentment, such as the fact that Singaporean men have to do two years of national service, putting them at a disadvantage compared to foreigners. Singapore is also a fast-paced, stressful society — both a city and a country at the same time — and Singaporeans work the longest hours in the developed world, according to some studies. With an authoritarian government tightly restricting legitimate outlets for protest and the timid state-linked press rarely raising the issues in a critical manner, the backlash against foreigners has been all too predictable.
Indeed, the surprising thing is perhaps not that it has occurred, but that it hasn’t occurred on a greater scale. Several initiatives have been launched by civic-minded Singaporeans to tackle the problem of racism and xenophobia, and many expats and visitors note the warmth and friendliness of locals. Indeed, argues Jeyeratnam, it is “unfair to accuse Singaporeans of racism when if a European government adopted the PAP’s policies it would soon be replaced by a far-right party!”
However, the issue of immigration is likely to become more heated, and more strikes and social unrest, like the recent rioting in Little India, seem likely in the future.
“My concern is that apart from stresses on infrastructure, we have two-fifths of the population who have not been at all assimilated into Singapore society and who are becoming both victims of and perpetrators of prejudicial attitudes and reactions,” says Dr Barr.
“Almost none have any loyalty to Singapore, many don’t speak English. Many don’t speak any of Singapore’s four official languages. Most are living in dormitory ghettos and are being exploited shamelessly. And they stand out. Even the PRC Chinese stand out from the Singapore and Malaysian Chinese. It is just human nature to both blame and fear the ‘other.’”
Mark Fenn is a British journalist based in Bangkok.
The forthright and farsighted Cambridge-trained lawyer who transformed Singapore from a colonial entrepot in Southeast Asia to one of the world’s most important financial centers has died.
Lee Kuan Yew, the city-state’s founding prime minister and one of Asia’s most prominent statesmen, had been in the hospital on life support for several weeks, suffering from severe pneumonia. He was 91.
“The Prime Minister is deeply grieved to announce the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore,” says a statement on the prime minister’s official website. “Mr Lee passed away peacefully at the Singapore General Hospital today at 3:18am.”
For much of his adult life, Lee dominated the politics of this small island nation, assembling the People’s Action Party (PAP) in 1951 and ensuring its control over Singapore for half-a-century and counting.
While Lee’s undeniable talents that propelled Singapore’s meteoric rise will define his legacy, the man sometimes described as Asia’s Henry Kissinger also leaves behind a country at the crossroads.
“We are at an inflection point,” his son and incumbent prime minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a 2013 speech, “Our society is more diverse, our economy is more mature, our political landscape is more contested.”
The Singapore that his father inherited and helped build when he was prime minister between 1959 and 1990 is now an entirely different country. And Lee’s passing could potentially trigger a shift in Singapore’s political and economic landscape.
Kampongs to casinos
The Singapore of Lee’s youth. This photo was taken in 1941, when he was 18.(AP Photo)
Singapore was barely a shadow of the economic powerhouse that it is today when it was expelled from Malaysia and became an independent nation in 1965. After hundreds of years of colonial rule as part of “British Malaysia,” the island had been invaded by Japan in WWII and left in a shambles. Its population was a mix of traders, former indentured servants, escaped convicts and businessmen, who frequently clashed along economic and racial lines.
As first prime minister of Singapore, serving for three decades until 1990, and a continuing cabinet presence for the two that followed, Lee Kuan Yew, who has died aged 91, was a man whose story reflected his times. A relentless nation-builder like Tito, an instantly identifiable symbol like Haile Selassie, Lee also had a third dimension, especially in western eyes – statesman, philosopher king, embodiment of the wisdom of the east.
Lee’s role in and articulation of events from the Pacific war and the Japanese occupation of Singapore till leaving politics completely in 2011 made him a pivotal figure of the modern world. To many he became the embodiment of the orderly transition of a region from western dominance to neo-Confucian success. Yet experience had taught him to be a pessimist, which drove him to work harder, to be more ruthless.
Lee himself may not have changed the world outside little Singapore very much. Indeed, his greatest apparent achievement, the creation of a viable independent state, was the outcome of his biggest failure – Singapore’s expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965, two years after the organisation’s inception. His first vision of Singapore’s future, as part of a multicultural Malaysia, may prove in time to have been the correct one, but he can be at least partly judged by the achievement of his second vision for Singapore, the prosperous, prickly and obsessively hygienic city state.
He did not create modern Singapore’s prosperity. The city state thrived naturally in a region of economic growth and rapid development of world trade. However, he certainly created the image of the state in his own likeness.
Being liked was not part of his agenda. A combination of high intelligence and unswervable determination were Lee’s characteristics, and he transferred them, at least superficially, to modern Singapore. Without him, it may in time go a different way, more reflective of its multiracial background and potentially precarious existence. But while he was alive few dared think, let alone put forward, alternative visions.
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Lee has been described as many things. To Chinese, particularly during his days fighting Chinese chauvinism in the name of a multiracial Singapore identity, the Cambridge-educated lawyer brought up to believe in English education if not in British institutions, Lee was a “banana” – yellow on the outside, white inside. However, later in life, as Chinese identity and Confucian attitudes emphasising education, discipline and hierarchy became more important, he would be criticised for presenting himself as a fount of wisdom, a convincing articulator of modern Asia to western audiences, while actually behaving with all the intolerance of a Chinese emperor. At his worst, he could combine imperial hauteur with extraordinarily petty spite, relishing the destruction of irritating but unthreatening critics. At his best, he had an incisive mind and clear political judgment. For an avowed elitist, he had a remarkable ability to talk to a crowd.
Born in Singapore, Lee was the eldest son of Lee Chin Koon and Chua Jim Neo, members of a comfortably off but not rich Straits Chinese family. The Straits Chinese were those who had been settled in the region for many years, losing much of their Chinese identity both to the language and institutions of their British rulers, and to the Malays, their neighbours whose tongue was the lingua franca of south-east Asia.
The young Harry, as Yew was known in the English-language environment of the time, came first in Malaya in the Senior Cambridge exams (the equivalent of A-levels) of 1939 and was destined to go to Britain to study law. But the second world war intervened and he had to go to the local Raffles College instead, where he acquired some basic economics, and met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo. The delay in going to Britain was but a minor inconvenience compared with the sudden and humiliating British surrender of Singapore in February 1942. Lee described his own initial humiliation at the hands of Japanese troops as “the single most important event of my life”.
Little is known of his actual role during the occupation, other than that he learned Japanese (he had a remarkable facility for languages), worked for Domei, the Japanese news agency, and may in the latter days of the war been of help to the British. The obscurity with which this period has been shrouded subsequently gave rise to much speculation about his relationships with the British and the Japanese. But he saw enough of British failures not to want to ape them, and enough of Japanese brutality – mostly directed against the recent migrant Chinese than against the more compromising Straits Chinese – to resent them. As he later wrote, he emerged from the war “determined that no one – neither the Japanese nor the British – had the right to push and kick us around”.
Lee Kuan Yew climbing up the steps at the city council chambers following the People’s Action party’s win in the national elections in Singapore in 1959, the year the country achieved independence. Photograph: Reuters TV/Reuters
Combining drive with connections, he got himself to Britain in 1946 to study at the London School of Economics. But deciding he needed to aim higher, he talked his way into Fitzwilliam Hall, Cambridge, and graduated in 1949 with a starred first in law. His wife-to-be, whom he married the following year, also got a first.
It was also during this time that he began to develop ambitions beyond returning home to a prosperous legal career. He recognised that the British could not recreate the comfortable, colonial Singapore of prewar days. Nationalism, socialism and communism were in the air. In a speech in 1950 to the Malayan Forum in London, he said: “The choice lies between a communist republic of Malaya and a Malaya within the British Commonwealth led by people who, despite their opposition to imperialism, still share certain ideals in common with the Commonwealth ... if we [the returning students] do not give leadership, it will come from the other ranks of society.” Malaya, he noted prophetically, could be either “another Palestine or another Switzerland”.
Even before returning to Singapore, Lee had identified the strands necessary to make a successful politician with the aim of securing an independent, non-communist Malaya. The first was a commitment to greater social justice and income distribution. This was part of the ethos of the time, both in Britain, where Lee was involved with the Labour party, and with such exemplars of independence and social democracy as Nehru’s India. But it was also necessary politics. Lee believed that without a commitment to both anti-imperialism and socialism, radicals would win control of the freedom struggle.
The other element in Lee’s equation was multiracialism, which he saw as necessary to prevent Malaya from dissolving into war between two nationalisms, a Chinese one which was communist in sympathy and a Malay one which tended to be exclusive and feudal.
Back in Singapore, Lee the lawyer and Lee the politician were soon inseparable as he took up the cases of trade unionists, radicals and nationalists. Being from the British-educated Chinese elite, he had to work all the harder at being a leader to dialect-speaking Chinese and Indian union firebrands. His energy and application were prodigious, and he added fluency in Mandarin and Hokkien and passable Malay and even Tamil to his roster of languages.
He was the driving force behind the creation of the People’s Action party (PAP) in 1954, including within it people sympathetic to the communist insurgency, then at its height in the Malayan peninsular. The PAP adhered to constitutionalism while Lee acted for those detained under the Internal Security Act.
Lee’s fortunes as a politician benefitted from his bravura courtroom performances. It was this very success with juries that made him critical of the jury system. Judges were less easily swayed by emotion, and were appointed by the government. Once in power, Lee abolished juries.
Despite his advocacy on behalf of leftists and nationalists, there were those who believed he connived to ensure that the left faction did not get the upper hand in the PAP. The party, which had been seen as the main agent of constitutional development in Singapore, swept aside more conservative forces to win the 1959 election by a large margin. Lee became chief minister of a self-governing state within the Commonwealth, promoting social reform but retaining political detention without trial.
His principal objective became to achieve, in co-operation with the Malayan prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, independence through merger with a somewhat suspicious Malaya – which had been independent since 1957 – plus the territories of Sarawak and Sabah to form Malaysia. The PAP was divided on this and other issues and formally split in 1961, the left faction forming the Barisan Sosialis. However, the merger proposal was approved in a referendum.
Lee further solidified his position by mass detentions, including those of prominent Barisan leaders. Though he justified the detentions by reference to the lingering communist threat and Indonesia’s avowed opposition to Malaysia, they came to symbolise Lee’s authoritarian tendencies. With the Barisan decapitated, he won the 1963 election and the Barisan never recovered.
Lee Kuan Yew, right, and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, second left, posing with the Japanese Emperor Hirohito and his wife Empress Nagako, in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in 1968. Photograph: AP
While unification made sense to the moderate majority of Singaporeans and Malayans, it soon ran into problems. Chief among them was the reluctance of the hyperactive Lee to play second fiddle to a Kuala Lumpur-based federal government led by the relaxed, aristocratic tunku, or prince. Lee insisted on the PAP trying to win seats in the peninsula itself, in the process setting itself up as the party more likely to protect Chinese interests than the Malaysian Chinese Association, the conservative Chinese element of the tunku’s ruling alliance. Lee made speeches which many regarded as racially inflammatory. Some Malays wanted him arrested. In the end, the tunku decided in August 1965 that the only way out was for Singapore to leave the federation.
One vision had failed. Now Lee redoubled his efforts to create a new vision – of a republic of Singapore with its own identity and national interests that could hold its own among potentially hostile neighbours. Malaysia and Singapore still needed each other. The Indonesian policy of confrontation ended with the downfall of Sukarno in 1966. However, times were difficult, exacerbated by British military withdrawal, which created additional problems of finding jobs for a rapidly expanding population.
The first 10 years after the expulsion from Malaysia saw Lee forge the society that is modern Singapore. It could have been done differently. Colonial Hong Kong, so similar in many ways, prospered as well without the guidance of a “philosopher king” or a “Moses”, as Lee was to be later described. Nonetheless, Lee was very much in charge of the new Singapore and thus deserves the credit, and the blame.
The ingredients included a dominant role for the state. This combined aspects of social democracy, for example in major efforts to improve health and public housing, with “the mandarins know best” attitudes to social and economic activity.
Foreign capital was relied upon to create jobs. This was a pragmatic recognition from the beginning that Singapore lacked the capital and knowhow to create industries. Meanwhile its entrepot role was, by definition, dependent on the services it could provide to foreigners.
Nationalism was fostered too, which meant infusing an opportunistic, multiracial commercial hub with a Singapore identity, sense of pride, citizenship and separateness. It meant having strong armed forces, a Swiss-style national service and international assertiveness.
For Lee, western notions of liberal democracy, free association, independent trade unions, juries and other aspects of the separation of powers might have proved an obstacle to achieving these nation-building goals. Yet he was well aware that the British had left behind some democratic expectations, and in order to compete economically, Singapore had to present itself to the outside world as a reasonably open as well as competently run state.
Some government intervention in the economy was simply pragmatic. But much of it had political overtones. The state, for example, created what is now the largest commercial bank, the Development Bank of Singapore, though there was never any lack of private ones. Its forced savings scheme was a colonial-eraprovident fund that was used to generate savings that helped give Singapore the best infrastructure in Asia. The scheme gave the government control over far more money than it needed, thus enabling it to dictate not only the pattern of investment but housing and consumer spending. The nation amassed huge foreign reserves, which underpinned its growth, reflected in a currency that was as strong as the German mark.
Emphasis on education, especially in science, helped Singapore develop as a base for multinationals. Lee’s government was very successful in identifying and fostering growth industries, whether it was the Asiadollar money market in the late 60s, oil exploration, production and refinery services in the 70s, or electronics in the 90s. However, critics – and even some government loyalists – noted a decline in the entrepreneurial spirit. Educated Singaporeans did not create enterprises: they went to work, very efficiently, for ones already created by foreigners, or the government. The administration was both extraordinarily pedantic and uncorrupt. Yet part of Singapore’s prosperity rested on it providing a safe haven for money made corruptly in neighbouring countries, smuggling or drug trafficking.
Intellectually, Lee recognised the importance of money-making. Money brought power. Yet he exhibited the kind of distaste for businessmen common among Chinese mandarins, socialists and intellectuals. Thus Singapore’s indigenous capitalists were kept on a short leash. From time to time prominent examples were made of “misbehaviour”.
Lee Kuan Yew thanking voters in his parliamentary constituency in 1988. Photograph: Soon Tan Ah/AP
For all its potential shortcomings, for all its dependence on the growth of neighbours, the rise of Japan and latterly of China, the reality is that for four decades from 1970 Singapore delivered economic growth rates almost as good as any in booming east Asia. There have been few hiccups. Thanks to the prosperity of its oil-producing neighbours, Singapore rode the oil crises easily. The mid-80s recession necessitated some minor policy adjustments, but generally, once the mould had been established, Singapore’s economic progress was as unruffled as its politics.
Internationally, Lee played a key role in the development of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean). At first he had been somewhat suspicious, fearing it could become a vehicle for Indonesian domination, or an expression of pan-Malay identity. However, he soon embraced it as an anti-communist buffer which linked countries with formal ties to the US (Thailand and Philippines) to the anti-communist but “neutral” Indonesia and Malaysia. Anti-communism cemented Singapore’s ties with the US when it badly needed implied protection as well as investment. With ties to Washington and Beijing, Lee helped to ensure that Asean participated fully in the cold war to force Vietnam out of Cambodia.
In practice, politics seldom stood in the way of business opportunities. After all, Singapore was commerce (not ideology) in action. But once the Soviet empire had collapsed, foreign policy emphasis changed to a wholehearted pursuit of economic goals. Again, Singapore was quick to see the advantages of turning Asean attention to trade, providing a new raison d’etre for the group. Freer trade was not just good for Singapore but for the region’s ethnic Chinese business community, many of whom saw Singapore as their spiritual home and salted away profits there.
In social as in economic affairs, Lee tried to shape society to an extent attempted perhaps only by Mao Zedong in recent times. What began in the early years as a voluntary family-planning campaign ended up with the state trying to influence marriage choices and “enhance” Singapore’s genetic quality by encouraging graduates to reproduce among themselves. Myriad rules, taxes, incentives and exhortations confronted the citizen. The result was an orderly society, but only marginally freer of crime than Hong Kong. It was a society where people were afraid to speak out. Lee the great debater was now the winner by default, whether in parliament or the courts.
While continuing with parliamentary elections, Lee muzzled the press, international as well as local, and stamped hard on opponents of the PAP. Opposition politicians were hounded by legal actions – often for libel, which Lee invariably won – and bankrupted. Social workers were branded as communists and detained till they confessed, often after coercive treatment.
Quite why Lee, revered as the father of the nation, found it necessary to use such sledgehammers was not clear. In the 50s, the communists were real and ruthless. But as time went on, real threats vanished. Yet the unrelenting ambition did not, and Lee was unable to change his self-image as a political streetfighter, the gang boss who forever had to prove his ruthlessness. Beyond that, he had a sense of insecurity about the future of Singapore after he was gone. Partly this was a sense that society would go soft with success, or, like the Malays, surrender to the easy languor of the tropics. The younger generation knew only success and the cultivation of wealth.
He, with his recollections of Japanese occupation, the expulsion from Malaysia, the potential threat from Indonesia, always imagined the worst. Singapore could not afford gentlemanly disagreements or real debates. The leaders led, and that was it.
Increasingly, there was only one leader. Comrades from the heroic anti-colonial days retired, drifted away or were pushed out – in the case of President Devan Nair in 1985, after a humiliating allegation of alcoholism that he contested. New blood was brought into the PAP, but increasingly it became a tightknit elite. It retained an effective command structure but the mass base eroded.
The so-called second generation had no real political experience but was full of intellectual accomplishment. Goh Chok Tong, who succeeded Lee as prime minister in 1990, was a competent and well-liked bureaucrat, but Lee remained in cabinet as senior minister. In 2004, Lee’s eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, became prime minister, and his father “minister mentor”. He resigned from that cabinet position in May 2011 following an electoral setback when the PAP share of the vote fell to its lowest level since independence. He then took no further part in public life.
Lee Kuan Yew sharing a toast with Queen Elizabeth II during a state banquet in Singapore in 2006, by which time he was a ‘minister mentor’ in the cabinet. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/AP
Goh had been unable to deliver the “kinder, gentler” Singapore that had been expected. The force of Lee’s personality, the moral authority that he commanded, left him the arbiter of anything he cared about. Like a Mao in miniature, he seemed both to enjoy and have contempt for the adulation that surrounded him. Never a tolerant man, he began to show some of the symptoms of age. International acclaim added to his convictions of his own brilliance and righteousness.
Some saw excesses of personal power, not just in his treatment of opponents but in the rapid promotion of his sons. The Singapore courts silenced a string of suggestions of dynastic politics.
With Goh and Hsien Loong minding day-to-day affairs, Lee was free to devote his energies to the world. He saw in the economic success of east Asia the triumph of “Confucian values”: discipline, order, respect for education and authority over western values of individualism, liberalism and democracy. He even succeeded for a while in promoting Singapore as the centre of “Asian values”. Lee was especially heartened by China’s economic success, defended its political repression and criticised Taiwan’s new-found democracy. China’s success fitted not only with his own philosophy but with the increasing emphasis in Singapore on its predominantly Chinese, as distinct from multiracial, character.
Ethnic prejudice lurked just under Lee’s image of technocratic rationalism. He combined assumptions about Chinese cultural supremacy with belief in genetic theories which influenced social policy in Singapore. But if Lee’s actions were sometimes driven by gut instinct, his head was more often the winner, particularly in international affairs. He could set aside his underlying distaste for America, with its crude culture and populist politics, and his Chinese ethnic sentiments to deliver masterly analyses of regional and global affairs. Only occasionally did he let prejudices get in the way of Singapore’s national interest – which, he clearly saw, lay with keeping US forces in the region.
Perhaps only he could succeed in making oppressive Singapore the main Asian critic of the US commitment to human rights and personal freedoms while ensuring that Singapore remained a key to the strategic plans of American military and multinationals alike.
Mostly – though not always – he could guard his tongue sufficiently to keep his Malay neighbours co-operative. His sheer length of service gave him a regional prestige that only Suharto could match, and his successors would not inherit. Suharto, with 180 million people and a vast archipelago to rule, had a big stage, while Lee gave every sign of regarding Singapore – with a population of 5 million in 700 square kilometres – as far too small for his talents.
Indeed, it was far too small. Its size accounted for his obsession that its every detail, down to choice of roadside trees, fit with his plans or prejudices, as well as his eagerness to advise larger countries on how to run their affairs.
Because of his background and early life, he could operate and dominate in many different milieus, but was totally at home in none of them. That perhaps accounted for his ruthlessness. He had permanent interests, not permanent friends. In sum, always a leader rather than a fullower, he set his own agenda.
Kwa Geok Choo died in October 2010, and Lee is survived by their two sons and a daughter. Lee Hsien Loong continues to be prime minister; his brother, Lee Hsien Yang, is chairman of the civil aviation authority; and their sister, Dr Lee Wei Ling, is director of the national neuroscience institute.
•Lee Kuan Yew, statesman, born 16 September 1923; died 23 March 2015
