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LIFE | IDEAS | THE SATURDAY ESSAY

Lee Kuan Yew, the Man Who Remade
Asia

He preached Asian values and turned a tiny, poor city-state into an astonishing economic
success. Is Lees Singapore model the future of Asia?

SingaporesPrimeMinisterLeeKuanYewishoistedbysupportersafterleadinghisPeoplesActionPartytoalandslide
victoryinthecountryselectionsonSept.21,1963.PHOTO:ASSOCIATEDPRESS

By ORVILLE SCHELL
March 27, 2015 12:59 p.m. ET
When I arrived in Singapore one sultry summer evening in 1962 as a 22-year-old
student, the Union Jack still fluttered over the British colony. Coolies unloaded wooden
boats on the docks, per capita income was languishing under $500 and the young
independence leader Lee Kuan Yew was still in his 30s. It was a far cry from todays wellordered cityscape of manicured parks, gleaming office towers, high-rise apartment
blocks filled with middle-class families and glittering malls swarming with wealthy
consumers.
What distinguished Singapore back then was its colonial torpor, a total absence of
natural resources (not even its own supply of drinking water) and little industry. It was a
small, backward Third World outpost. Besides a few iconic British buildings, the city

consisted mostly of low arcaded shop houses, flimsy street stalls that made up its
outdoor markets and a chaotic infinity of dilapidated shacks that formed the slums
where most of Singapores poor Chinese, Malay and Tamil immigrants made their
homes.

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As Europes colonial era in

Asia drew to a close, this
ragtag, polyglot populace had
turned for leadership to a fiery
young anti-colonialist
organizer called Harry Lee (as
Lee Kuan Yew was then
known). By the time he died
last week at the age of 91, after
serving his country for well
over a half-century, not just

Singapore but much of Asia had come under his thrall.

Upon returning from legal studies at the University of Cambridge, Harry Lee had
plunged with single-minded determination into the task of first organizing his Peoples
Action Party to liberate his city from colonialism and then building a new kind of microcountry. After Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai snidely described him as like a banana
yellow of skin, but white underneath, he soon dropped the Anglicized Harry and
become, simply, Lee Kuan Yew.
In the early 1960s, his real problem was not his name but that Singapore was ethnically
fractured, under attack by Indonesia in its bizarre policy of konfrontasi, reviled by
Beijing as a running dog of U.S. and British imperialism, and then in 1965 expelled
unceremoniously from an ill-fated union with Malaysia. In announcing this devastating
rupture on television, Lee became so distraught by the apparent hopelessness of his
countrys situation that he ended up weeping.
Lee came from the diaspora of simple, poor emigrants who had been driven from the
South China Coast by penury. Stripped of anything but folk culture and an abiding belief
in the importance of their families, education and diligence, they had heaved onto the
alien shores of this unlikely colonialized city-state. As Lee ruefully observed in trying to
imagine his small countrys future, City-states do not have good survival records.
Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapores own people, who were immigrants like
himself. Because they were so divided by what he called the most hideous collection of

PrimeMinisterKuanYewLee,left,talkingtochildrenwhilevisitingahousingproject.PHOTO:LARRYBURROWS/THELIFE
PICTURECOLLECTION/GETTYIMAGES

dialects and languages, he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented,
everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common
interests of the country. Anyway, despite his British schooling and fluency in English, he
never accepted the idea that Western liberal democracy was the only suitable political
model for Singapore, or even that Western political principles were universal, much less
superior.
One finds expressions of this divided loyalty between East and West again and again in
his writings. We felt a sense of loss at being educated in a stepmother tongue, not
completely accepting the values of a culture not our own, he would say of his British
education. My world of textbooks and teachers was totally unrelated to the world I
lived in. He was, he lamented, lost between two cultures.

Though cut off from his Chinese roots, Lee was a proud Chinese, and that may very well
be how history remembers his astonishing career. Impressed by the economic growth
enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began
wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success.
He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as Asian
valuesfamily, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed
these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to
maintain order during times of rapid change.
In the East, the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everyone can have
maximum enjoyment of their freedoms, Lee declared, suggesting that the curtailment
of one freedom sometimes best assures the advancement of others. In his view,
economic success and social order fully justified whatever state controls were

necessary, even if a leader sometimes had to act in an arbitrary, even dictatorial,

manner. We have to lock up people without trial whether they are communists,
whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists, he
bluntly said in 1986. If you dont do that, the country would be in ruins.

Lee Kuan Yew: Life in Photos

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapores founding father who transformed the former British outpost into a global trade and
finance powerhouse, died on March 23. The Southeast Asian countrys former prime minister was 91 years old.

1 of 16

Singapore's first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew of the People's Action Party speaking during a rally

Sometimes what Lee said and did outraged Western liberals, but he took a certain
delight in being independent-minded and provocative. Between being loved and being
feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right, he proclaimed. If nobody is afraid
of me, Im meaningless! And his record on civil liberties and political pluralism was
checkered indeed: Many of his critics ended up in exile, jail or bankrupted by long, costly
libel suits.
But there was an irony in Lees latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and
Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of
modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese
intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian
Asian values as the very cause of their countrys backwardness and weakness, and then
sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking. After the Cultural Revolution, when
Red Guards drove a final stake through the heart of traditional Chinese culture by
savagely attacking it as retrograde and feudal, hardly anyone expected to see a selfconscious revival soon.

Then, just as Lee was extolling his notion of Asian values abroad, something
unexpected happened in China. Faced with social upheaval brought about by Deng
Xiaopings economic reforms, leaders in Beijing began groping for new ways to maintain
order themselves. Intrigued by what Lee had been doing in Singapore, they too began
reviving aspects of their old cultural edifice as a stabilizing force. The cultural vacuums
in Singapore and China may have had different origins, but some version of Asian
values suddenly felt like a comfortable remedy for both.

LeeKuanYew,left,welcomesChineseVicePremierDengXiaopinginSingaporein1978.PHOTO:ZHANG
GUIYU/XINHUA/ASSOCIATEDPRESS

Bythen, Lees earlier anticommunism had morphed into an ideologically more neutral
pragmatism. He found himself becoming not only a fan of Chinas new Confucianism
Lite but an enthusiastic booster of Dengs reform-minded leadership. In fact, to
demonstrate his fraternity with China, only a year after the 1989 massacre in
Tiananmen Square, when most countries still spurned China, Lee fully normalized
diplomatic relations.
I consider Deng a greater leader who changed the destiny of China and the world, he
said. He was deeply gratified by the way that Deng had brought wealth, power, order and
pride back to Chinastill his racial homelandas well as to all Chinese.
Dengs admiration of Lee was just as deep. He appreciated Lees pragmatism and
friendship, especially his refusal to criticize China for its undemocratic form of
statecraft, even after the infamy of 1989. And, because the Singapore model proved
that a country could modernize without surrendering to wholesale Westernization,
Deng (and all subsequent leaders in Beijing) celebrated it. If I had only Shanghai, I too
might be able to change Shanghai as quickly, he once wistfully lamented of his success.
But I have the whole of China!

Lees own support for Deng grew to the point where he started admonishing the U.S. for
being too critical of China and too sanctimonious about the virtues of liberal democracy.
It is my business to tell people not to foist their [political] system indiscriminately on
societies in which it will not work, he chided. In the West, he continued, the idea of the
inviolability of the individual has been turned into dogma.
For Lee, the Chinese aphorism that best captured the uniquely Asian/Confucian view of
the individuals role in society was: Xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia: Bringing peace
under heaven first requires cultivating oneself, then taking care of ones family, and
finally looking after ones country.
Various people have described todays supremely well-ordered Singapore as a think
tank state, a paradise designed by McKinsey or Disneyland with the death penalty.
Call it what you will: Lees nation-building experiment succeeded spectacularly well.
Modern Singapore boasts the worlds second-busiest port, its most celebrated
airline and an airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average
growth rate of almost 7% since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000,
making it the wealthiest country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per
capita in the world, trailing only the U.S.
But quite apart from Lees acumen as a leader or the fact that he became the longestserving prime minister in world history, we are still left to wonder: Where did his
enormous commitment and energy come from? How was he able to create such an
unusual success story from virtually nothing?
Lee was a very different leader from his confreres in Beijing, but he shared something
important with them: a mutual sense that, despite the long, painful and humiliating
history of the Chinese peoples modern weakness, it was their destiny to make
something of themselves. Where Lee seemed to connect most deeply with Deng and
other Chinese leaders was in this common yearning to win back a measure of the
prosperity, greatness and respect that they, as a people, had once known but had lost
to the West and Japan over the last bitter century of defeat.
Lee once described the Chinese as burdened by a sense of frustration that they were
down for so long and as enormously ambitious to catch up. As this rebirth finally
began in the 1990s, it allowed Lee to proudly proclaim that Chinas reawakened sense of
destiny is an overpowering force. In making such utterances, he seemed to be speaking
as a Chinese who identified as much with his race as with his nation. True, Lee was a
Singapore nationalist, but like many overseas Chinese, he often seemed to view the
destiny of his own small country as inextricably connected to the larger enterprise of
Greater China.

At the same time, his sympathy for Chinas rise never eclipsed his respect for the U.S., as
well as his firm conviction that the rule of law was important for Singapore and that its
interests would be best served by refusing to take sides in big-power competitions. We
will not choose sides between America and China, he told Charlie Rose, or between
China and India.
When Lees ancestors joined the great Chinese diaspora, they were stripped of their
culture and national identities. This defoliating process created, in them and later
generations of overseas Chinese, a strange kind of hunger for advancement, and in
Singapore, Lee could begin to satisfy that longing for progress uninhibited by the
conservative traditions that have so often clashed with modernizing impulses around
the world. His new country may have been an almost synthetic nation, without a
coherent cultural core, but this relative vacuum ended up being a blessing in disguise
when it came to the challenges of creating a completely new state from the bottom up.
China faced a similar situation
in the wake of its own tectonic
revolutionary upheavals. Mao
Zedong once spoke of his
people as possessing two
remarkable peculiarities.
They were, he said, first poor
and secondly blank, which
meant that they were inclined
to want revolution. As he
observed, a clean sheet of
paper has no blotches, and so
the newest and most beautiful
pictures can be painted on it.
Maos savage Cultural
Revolution destroyed even
more of his countrys cultural legacy. But he was fond of reminding his followers that,
Without destruction there can be no reconstruction. By the time Deng came to power
in the late 1970s, his own reforms met with little resistance from those traditional forces
that had so obstructed change earlier in the century. Like Lee in Singapore, Deng was
aided by the fact that traditional culture had already been demolished.
Lee was no Maoist, but when he came into Singapores narrative more than a halfcentury ago, just before I first landed there, his city-state did evince a certain poorness
and blankness. Aided by a powerful patriotic yearning to put an end to the long period

of imperial domination in Asia, Lee managed to kindle a miracle of development that

was distinctly un-Western. As a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing
eulogized Lee after his death, He was a uniquely Asian statesman and a strategist
boasting both Eastern values and international vision.
Fighting back tears, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapores current prime minister, memorialized
his father by saying: He fought for our independence, built a nation where there was
none, and made us proud to be Singaporeans. We wont see another man like him.
Lee Kuan Yew not only made Singaporeans proud;
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he also made Chinese and other Asians proud. He

was a master builder, a sophisticated Asian
nationalist dedicated not only to the success of
his own small nation but to bequeathing the
world a new model of governance. Instead of
trying to impose Western political models on
Asian realities, he sought to make autocracy
respectable by leavening it with meritocracy, the

rule of law and a strict intolerance for corruption to make it deliver growth.
Though his country was minuscule, Lee was a larger-than-life figure with a grandness of
vision. He saw Asian values as a source of legitimacy for the idea that authoritarian
leadership, constrained by certain Western legal and administrative checks, offered an
effective Asian alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy. Because his thinking
proved so agreeable to the Chinese Communist Party, he became the darling of Beijing.
And because China has now become the political keystone of the modern Asian arch,
Beijings imprimatur helped him and his ideas to gain a pan-Asian stature that
Singapore alone could not have provided.
As countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and even China continue
to search for new models of development and governance that do not bear the stigma of
their former Western colonizers, Lee Kuan Yews example is a tempting option. Even
though he is now gone, the Venice-like republic he founded will continue to be extolled
as a hopeful experiment, and the man himself, the progenitor of what has come to be
known as the Singapore model, will doubtless remain an influential political
evangelist.
Mr. Schell is Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
and co-author, with John Delury, of Wealth and Power: Chinas Long March to the 21st
Century.

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