Tag: Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew: Judge Him By The Prosperity We Enjoy

Probably no Singaporean besides Lee Kuan Yew has ever been loved, and hated to such a degree.

For every comment we’ve seen praising Old Lee, there’s bound to be another wishing he’d burn in hell.

We’ve heard of how Old Lee crafted Singapore into the nation it is today, building a propsrous city despite the odds stacked against us ever making it.

We’ve also heard tales of his ruthless streak, and alleged human rights abuses such as the unfair detention of supposed dissidents using the Internal Security Act as a guise.

The biggest question when looking back at the life of this man and his contributions remains: Would Singapore be better without Lee Kuan Yew at the helm?

We can speculate, but we’ll never know for sure.

What we can answer is this: “Has Singapore prospered under its first ever Prime Minister?”

(1) Housing

As Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew assembled a great team of leaders in their own right, people with brilliant ideas.

He gave them the rein to develop those ideas, so long as they were practical, and stood up to reason and feasibility.

One of those that changed our landscape forever – HDB flats.

Despite the West criticising how such high-rise monsters would stain our landscape, the issue at hand was, “how can the government house the expected boom in Singapore’s population, affordably?”

Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee spearheaded this development.

Against all opposition, especially the poor sould who had to be evicted for flats to be built, it was done.

Generations of Singaporeans 40 years down the road have a place to call their own.

(2) Transport

Planning started in 1967, and took place throughout the 1960s.

Foreign specialists were brought in to assist state boards in the planning of what would be the most ambitious transport project in Singapore’s history.

The first train line was launched in 1987.

In 28 years, we’ve a public transport network that can rival the best in the world.

We can sneer at Singapore’s MRT network, compared to say, the London subway.

The tube opened in 1890.

This was Singapore in 1890.

The MRT is still a work in development, as we can see from the many breakdowns it continues to suffer.

But we can take pride in how quickly work progressed.

Guess who started the ball rolling.

(3) Education

In 1966, Lee mandated that all students learn a “mother tongue” – the language associated with their ethnicity.

This, besides the English language.

This came at a time when most former colonies were trying to strengthen their own national identity by falling back on their ethnicity.

“If we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a living. Becoming monolingual in English would have been a setback,” he wrote in his memoirs. “We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence about ourselves and our place in the world.”

Today, we can deal with the West, our most prominent neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, and the rising global power – China.

At that time, Lee Kuan Yew spoke English and Malay.

He would go on to learn Mandarin and other dialects well into his thirties just so he could communicate when the time came for it.

The man lived as an example of adaptibility, and forced us to be versatile as well – for our own benefit down the road.

(4) Society

The greatest criticism of Lee Kuan Yew has to be his iron-fisted rule, and his ruthlessness when it came to clamping down on people who opposed his policies.

As theories go – Lee played the Malaysia card to get Singapore out of British rule, then he antagonised the Malaysians so Singapore would get the boot and forced to become independent, giving him a free rein to sculpt this nation according to his vision.

That’s pretty damn well-played!

1950s Singapore was marked by the Maria Hertogh riots, Hock Lee bus riots, and the Chinese Middle School riots.

The 1960s – the Prophet Muhammad Birthday riots and Konfrontasi, which was essentially an Indonesia-Malaysia issue, which led to insugencies spilling over to Singapore.

That culminated in the MacDonald House bombing

This was the climate in which Lee Kuan Yew had to forge a nation.

Would anything besides an iron-fisted approach work?

A united China came about only because of a ruthless Qin ruler.

The next united China was built on the back of another single-minded leader, Mao Zedong.

These legendary men brought China out of civil war, forged stability out of destruction, and enabled China to prosper today.

The same goes for Singapore, albeit on a less dramatic scale.

Leadership must adapt to the times, and Singapore in its infant phase as a nation demanded stability and unity.

Lee Kuan Yew got that done.

In Sum

Look around you.

50 years – that’s what it took to build all this.

Some overseas might still mistake Singapore for a part of China, but on the whole, our nation is globally recognised and respected.

We have prospered – on the domestic front, and on the foreign front.

That was what Lee Kuan Yew wanted, that is what he set out to build, and that’s what we enjoy now.

50 years.

Times have changed, and Lee’s methods might not work today.

But they did then.

It’s time to push forward, to adapt to a new world order, and to better Singapore.

All this, while respecting the band of men who brought us this far.

Lee was the leader of that band.

Source: http://redwiretimes.com

March 26, 2015
Lee Kuan Yew – A Life Less Ordinary

Every once in your lifetime someone moves you in a way that you find difficult to understand , let alone express . I write this in the hope that my children will catch a glimpse into the man they never knew.

Separate the man from his politics , the motives with the methods , the means with the passion .

I want to remember him for his intellect , his searing passion and his steely determination to reach the end line . And I want to ponder his uncanny vision that was never of his time but always of a minimum 20 years into the future .

He has lived his life without apologies . Many question his need to still have a siege mentality fighting the communists in his mind 50 years on. Many challenge the need to always be on the lookout for the shadows of disorder and anything that would destroy our heritage and all that he has built. I fully understand that . But for now , as he lies there, I just want to celebrate his passion for the nation that he loves, as a father who would fight to the end for the child that he has brought into this world and nurtured .

I want to remember the things he did which no one understood or appreciated when he did it 50 years ago so that we could see it today.

How many of us could understand why he would plant thousands of trees when he came into power ? He wanted the world to come here one day and see the blanket of trees in our garden city. And perhaps he foresaw that we will be successful and inevitably be transformed into a cold steel and concrete jungle today. So he planted .Trees takes time to grow.

How many appreciated his incessant insistence on building wide roads and intricate infrastructure that we didn’t think we needed that badly in our fathers time . Think of when he introduced what we thought was excessive grandeur at the time – our MRTs which is a lifeline today in the way we live . All the successful major cities in Asia today are plagued with gridlock and there is not much they can do about it because they planned those roads 50 years ago to fit those times only . And today they are starting to dig . We built wide roads and started digging more than 20 years ago because of him. He put us 20 years ahead of everybody else . We never knew that.

We questioned what we thought was his all too pious morality in refusing the citizens access to casinos . He held it off as long as he could but today we have two because it was all about economic survival . We wanted a choice and was annoyed to find one man deciding for us . But talk to the families today who are destroyed by those casinos and perhaps we will begin to understand him.

What is our biggest ill today that is plaguing us as a nation ? What has caused us to change the way we live , to change our neighbors and even change the person you may marry ? And which will threaten our economic survival . It is our falling birth rate . Who would have thought ? He mentioned this when I was a schoolboy . He saw this . We were outraged when he wanted to introduce radical policies like the graduate mother scheme. And to the best of my memory he never withdrew anything he started but he withdrew that . And we are where we are today with a problem that no one can solve in a hurry, but which threatens our very existence . Babies take time too.

I want to take time to think about his humanity and the only glimpse he allowed us to see of a chink in his strong amour . It is the woman he loves . Go read his books and his chapters of her . It is all there . And when she passed I thought of the albatross that has only one mate and who will not last the next winter once his soulmate is gone .

We will never produce another person like him. I hope we remember him for the next 50 years . And celebrate his life in ours.

Source: Andrew Ong

March 26, 2015
Bill Clinton To Lead High-Level White House Delegation To Singapore For State Funeral

Former US president Bill Clinton will lead a high-level White House delegation to Singapore to attend the funeral of Mr Lee Kuan Yew this Sunday.

The delegation will include the US ambassador to Singapore Kirk Wagar, former US ambassador to Singapore Steven Green and the former assistant to the president for national security affairs Thomas Donilon.

Notable American statesman Henry Kissinger, who had close friendship with Mr Lee, will also make the trip.

All members of the delegation have strong ties to Asia. Mr Donilon was a strong advocate for the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia.

Secretary of State John Kerry had said in a speech earlier on Wednesday that the US would be sending a high-level delegation to Singapore because Mr Lee “was deeply pro-American and deeply involved with the United States and much of our strategic thinking through that time.”

Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken was also at the Singapore embassy to pen a condolence message for Mr Lee.

“He was a great man, a great leader and a great friend to the United States and we will miss his wise counsel, we will miss his voice, we will miss his vision,” he told reporters.

“We are also grateful because thanks to his labour, the foundation between our countries, the relationship between our countries is extraordinarily strong and it will endure forever and that is a wonderful legacy.”

Source: www.straitstimes.com

March 26, 2015
Robert Kuok: Lee Kuan Yew Is The Greatest Chinese Outside Mainland China

On his regular visits to Hong Kong, Mr Lee Kuan Yew observed that when people there failed in business, they blamed themselves or bad luck, picked themselves up and tried again.

He wondered how to encourage that entrepreneurial spirit among Singaporeans, and would put the question to powerful businessmen he met there. South-east Asia’s richest man, Mr Robert Kuok, remembers how he responded to Mr Lee: “I told him, you have governed Singapore too strictly, you have put a straitjacket on Singapore. Now, you need to take a pair of scissors and cut it.”

The Malaysian tycoon would sometimes invite other Hong Kong businessmen to meet Mr Lee, who was always ready to talk politics.

But on his last trip, in May 2012, Mr Lee was more subdued. His wife had died, and he visited another old friend, media mogul Run Run Shaw, who was ill. Mr Lee sat quietly by Sir Run Run’s wheelchair, saying little but patting the centenarian’s knee from time to time.

“He had grown far more mellow,” recalled Mr Kuok in an interview at his Deep Water Bay home in March 2013. It was a different side of a man he had known for seven decades.

They were born 20 days apart – Mr Lee on Sept 16 and Mr Kuok on Oct 6, 1923 – and met in 1941 as students at Raffles College in pre-war Singapore. “We’re both pigs, born in the Year of the Pig,” Mr Kuok said with a laugh, referring to the Chinese zodiac sign.

Did that make them stubborn? No, he said. “Greedy. See food, eat. See power, grab.” From Hong Kong, Mr Kuok presides over an US$11.4 billion (S$15.4 billion) family business empire that spans the Shangri-La hotel chain to logistics to being the world’s biggest processor of palm oil.

He said they were not especially close in school. Harry, as the young Mr Lee was known then, already had a reputation for pugnacity. “He was combative, wanting to win every argument. Not someone you would take an immediate great warmth and liking to,” said Mr Kuok. And because Harry was “intellectually a cut above the average”, there was “a slight feeling of superiority” about him. He did not mix much, though he did attend the college’s annual fancy dress ball in 1941 in Malay garb complete with a songkok. Mr Kuok went as a Mandarin.

On Dec 8 that year, their lives were disrupted when the first Japanese bomb landed, bringing World War II to Singapore.

Mr Kuok returned to Johor Baru, where his parents ran a shop selling rice, sugar and flour. By the time he returned to Singapore in 1955, he had established a sugar refining business that would be the foundation of his fortune and earned him the title of Malaysia’s Sugar King.

Mr Lee was a lawyer and rising politician, and a founder of the People’s Action Party.

They would meet occasionally and Mr Kuok found Mr Lee “still pretty curt”, but now he was obsessed with Singapore. In 1970, Mr Kuok received a call from the Istana inviting him to the Prime Minister’s Office. Mr Lee wanted his views on Malaysia, saying his analyses were more down-to-earth than the official briefings he received. These meetings occurred regularly till 1973 when Mr Kuok moved to Hong Kong. After that, they met mostly when Mr Lee visited Hong Kong.

“Over the years, he shed a lot of his stiffness,” he said, though they did not agree on everything.

“Politically, I did not share all his views,” revealed Mr Kuok, citing as an example the benchmarking of ministerial pay to the private sector.

He thought Mr Lee was too obsessed about Singapore. “He wanted to talk about politics all the time. There is more to life than politics. To me, there is more to life than business.”

Yet it was Mr Lee’s single-mindedness that made Singapore thrive, Mr Kuok acknowledged, and it helped that he possessed “all these strong leadership traits – an intimidating attitude, presence of face and body”.

“He was very sure of himself, resolute, even ruthless. But he turned Singapore into a model nation, put in place a government that cared for its people, and made sure that others would not bully Singapore,” he said. “The greatest Chinese outside the mainland is Lee Kuan Yew.”

Source: www.straitstimes.com

March 26, 2015
Jean Marshall: Lee Kuan Yew And David Marshall Were Exceptional Speakers With Different Styles

Before I knew either Mr Lee Kuan Yew or David Marshall, I remember being at a political meeting at the university in 1957 or 1958. I can’t remember the circumstances, but both David and Mr Lee spoke on the future of Singapore.

After my years at the London School of Economics, I was not unfamiliar with political speeches. But it struck me that here were two exceptional speakers of great difference in their styles.

Mr Lee was a master of silence and the pause. He could pause and everybody would be absolutely on edge as to what he was going to say next. David had a different, sometimes more oratorical, style. He could inspire people and take them out of themselves to be something bigger than themselves.

Both of them were of course lawyers of some eminence, and I think they both respected each other as lawyers. But David had a very different personality from Mr Lee and it was at times difficult for them to appreciate each other because they really looked at life in very different ways.

David’s emotional reactions were a very important component of his personality. Mr Lee appeared to have ironed out or not used emotional reactions, or possibly covered them up.

David believed that every human being has value, and that the individual has a value that can’t be ironed out because every individual is worthy of respect and is important.

Of course this is difficult when it comes to working out public policy. But it did permeate his views about Singapore’s post-colonial status, the need for independence, and the need for public participation in the political process.

It also permeated his professional life and the way he fought in court – not necessarily for high fees either – but for people he thought would otherwise be denied justice.

This outlook could place him at odds with the systematic planning and thinking that Mr Lee and his team had, from the very beginning, planned, worked on and maintained for years and years.

For instance, one policy to which David took great exception was the “stop at two” policy. He was very against that and said so. He felt it was taking away a very fundamental right for people to choose to have or not to have children.

Mrs Lee was very friendly. We talked about knitting patterns, education policies, children – all kinds of things. I was very relaxed with Mrs Lee and I think she was relaxed with me. I was not relaxed with Mr Lee. He could be very, very acerbic.

We would host them for dinner when David was ambassador to France from 1978 to 1993 but I was never relaxed. I think Mr Lee was probably just as awkward with David as David was with him. They were painfully correct with each other and Mr Lee then probably still regarded David as a bit of a maverick – though he did later express appreciation for David’s work in France.

David had immense admiration for what the PAP team had achieved in Singapore.

Let nobody say that David held back in paying tribute to the achievements of Mr Lee and his government!

Mr Lee’s way of doing things was different from David’s, but David said, and not only to me, that he could never have achieved what the PAP had achieved through its organisation, cohesiveness and sheer abilities.

David saw the PAP as a juggernaut which did iron out legitimate opposition at various times in its history. I think it would be very difficult for David ever to forget that.

But he would be very capable of openly showing admiration for many of the ministers and PAP people who concern themselves with some of the issues that David was concerned with.

For instance, all the conversations that have been taking place about the people who feel left out, the people who are being left out. There is a real concern, for whatever reason, among the ministers and PAP of today about that group. That’s a group that David certainly would have been concerned about.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

March 26, 2015