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  • Lee Kuan Yew, The Benevolent Dictator

    Lee Kuan Yew, The Benevolent Dictator

    KUALA LUMPUR, March 23 — The world can finally judge Lee Kuan Yew and determine if Singapore’s glittering skyscrapers were worth the price of democracy and chewing gum, although he wouldn’t have cared for such assessments anyway as it was he, and only he, who decided what was right for Singapore. Never mind what the people thought.

    Lee, who transformed Singapore from a backwater to one of Asia’s richest nations in three decades of what some called dictatorial rule, died today at 91 in Singapore.

    The first prime minister of Singapore, who was in office from 1959 to 1990, died in the Singapore General Hospital at 3.18am after being admitted for severe pneumonia.

    When Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965, two years after the federation was formed, Lee was left with a tiny city-state of migrants without a common language, culture or destiny, with no natural resources, surrounded by powerful neighbours like Indonesia and China.

    “The basis of a nation just was not there,” Lee told the International Herald Tribune(IHT) in 2007.

    He also had to contend with high unemployment, corruption and a housing shortage when he assumed office earlier in 1959.

    At the helm of a nation-state in its infancy, Lee built Singapore after his own image – stern, disciplined and no-nonsense. He brooked no dissent and did not tolerate corruption. He focused on running an efficient, pragmatic and meritocratic administration. Corporal punishment was used for even minor infractions like vandalism.

    The People’s Action Party (PAP) government under Lee’s leadership industrialised Singapore, turned it into an exporter of finished goods and brought in foreign investment. A low-cost public housing programme was implemented and Lee introduced serious measures to tackle graft by creating an enforcement agency that reported directly to him, besides revising government service salaries periodically and increasing the standard of living for workers.

    Lee expanded education and made English the working language in Singapore, although the majority in the multi-racial country spoke Mandarin. While he worried of the racial turmoil that could come with a monolingual policy favouring the majority Chinese community, it was his practical concerns that guided his decision since Singapore was trying to attract multinational corporations as a manufacturing hub.

    “I’m a pragmatist and you can’t make a living with the Chinese language in Singapore,” Lee told National Geographic in 2009 after shutting down Chinese education.

    He also boosted Singapore’s defence force and implemented an Israeli model of national service, where all 18-year-old men are required to train in the programme for two years.

    Singapore spends a quarter of its annual budget on defence and is the fifth-largest importer of military hardware, according to an Al-Jazeera report last March.

    Lee described himself as a street fighter. A knuckle duster who took on communists with “killer squads” and “Malay ultras” when Singapore was in Malaysia for two years. A tough and unyielding man feared by citizens.

    Lee was the longest-serving head of government in Asia and remained in government even after stepping down as prime minister in 1990. Although he had resigned as prime minister in 1990, he had remained in government for another two decades: first serving as senior minister and later as minister mentor.

    He only fully retired from the Cabinet in 2011 after PAP’s worst electoral showing since independence.

    Seth Mydans of the New York Times (NYT) told Lee in 2010 that a taxi driver had said, upon learning that he would interview Lee, it was safer not to ask Lee anything because someone would “follow” him.

    Yet, despite Singapore’s success as a “first world oasis in a third world region”, Lee believed that the country was still fighting for survival and that everything could come undone very quickly. He had a paranoid fear of nebulous threats and constantly reminded his people about the country’s vulnerabilities and to be vigilant.

    “Where are we? Are we in the Caribbean? Are we next to America like the Bahamas? Are we in the Mediterranean, like Malta, next to Italy? Are we like Hong Kong, next to China and therefore, will become part of China? We are in Southeast Asia, in the midst of a turbulent, volatile, unsettled region. Singapore is a superstructure built on what? On 700 square kilometres and a lot of smart ideas that have worked so far,” Lee said in a 2007 interview with US columnist Tom Plate and new-media expert Jeffrey Cole.

    Crying at Singapore’s separation from Malaysia

    The one time when the man known for his strictness and unsentimentality lost his composure in public was when Malaysia ejected Singapore.

    In a press conference on August 9, 1965, where he announced Singapore’s independence and separation from the federation, a tearful Lee described it as a “moment of anguish”, his voice choked with emotion, pausing a few times as he spoke before finally asking for the recording to be stopped temporarily.

    “For me, it is a moment of anguish because all my life… you see, the whole of my adult life… I have believed in Malaysian merger and the unity of these two territories. You know, it’s a people, connected by geography, economics, and ties of kinship… Would you mind if we stop for a while?” he had said.

    Singapore joined Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak in 1963 to form Malaysia. At that time, the federation wanted to prevent the communist insurgency from taking root in Singapore.

    Political and economical disputes between Singapore and the Malaysian government, however, soon arose. Tunku Abdul Rahman’s Alliance Party took part in Singapore’s 1963 general election but failed to win any seats. PAP retaliated by participating in Malaysia’s 1964 general election, in which it won one out of nine federal seats contested.

    Tensions flared between the Alliance and the PAP that Lee co-founded. Umno called on the Malays in Singapore to demand for special rights, special occupancy in government housing projects and job quotas, as what was done in the peninsula.

    Two bloody race riots broke out later in Singapore in July and September 1964 between the Malays and the Chinese, killing dozens of people.

    In May 1965, Lee mobilised Malaysian opposition parties, including those from the peninsula and Borneo, to call for a “Malaysian Malaysia” that sought for equality between the Malays and non-Malays.

    “The special and legitimate interests of different communities must be secured and promoted within the framework of the collective rights, interests and responsibilities of all races,” Lee was quoted saying by Dr Cheah Boon Kheng, retired history professor from Universiti Sains Malaysia, in local daily The Sun.

    Umno leaders demanded Lee’s arrest for his criticism of Malay dominance in Malaysia, eventually leading to Tunku’s conclusion that Singapore could no longer remain in the federation for the sake of national security.

    Malaysia and Singapore signed a separation agreement on August 7, 1965, and Lee wept two days later on national television.

    Lee focused on building a meritocracy in multi-racial Singapore and strove for equality to harness talent that was the city-state’s only resource. He disagreed with the way Malaysia managed its multi-cultural, Malay-majority society through affirmative action policies.

    “Our Malays are English-educated, they’re no longer like the Malays in Malaysia and you can see there are some still wearing headscarves but very modern looking,” he told NYT in 2010.

    Lee said Malaysians saw Malaysia as a “Malay country” and was critical of how the Bumiputeras dominated Malaysia.

    “So the Sultans, the Chief Justice and judges, generals, police commissioner, the whole hierarchy is Malay. All the big contracts for Malays. Malay is the language of the schools although it does not get them into modern knowledge. So the Chinese build and find their own independent schools to teach Chinese, the Tamils create their own Tamil schools, which do not get them jobs. It’s a most unhappy situation,” he said in the 2010 NYT interview.

    He even said much of what was achieved in Singapore would be achieved in Malaysia if Tunku had kept Singapore in Malaysia and if Malaysia had accepted multiculturalism like Singapore.

    A dictator?

    Lee’s critics have often accused him of suppressing civil liberties and using libel suits to intimidate his political opponents into not running against him. The opposition boycotted Parliament from 1966 onwards, leaving a Parliament completely dominated by the PAP until the ruling party lost a parliamentary seat in a 1981 by-election. The watershed 2011 general election later saw the opposition Workers’ Party winning six parliamentary seats.

    Lee believed that democracy was secondary to discipline, development and good governance.

    “What are our priorities? First, the welfare, the survival of the people. Then, democratic norms and processes which from time to time we have to suspend,” Lee said at a 1986 National Day Rally.

    He shied away from Western-style democracy, saying he had to amend the British system for multi-racial Singapore.

    “Supposing I’d run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them,” Lee told German magazine Spiegel in 2005.

    He laughed off a journalist who called him a dictator, saying, with a touch of arrogance, that he did not have to be a dictator when he could win “hands down.”

    “I can get a free vote and win. And there’s a long history why that is so. Because I have produced results, and the people know that I mean what I say and I have produced results,” Lee told NYT’s William Safire in 1999.

    A different side

    Lee, an agnostic, was indifferent to homosexuality. He was fine with gay people, but frowned on pride parades because he wanted to maintain social order.

    “China has already allowed and recognised gays, so have Hong Kong and Taiwan. It’s a matter of time. But we have a part Muslim population, another part conservative older Chinese and Indians. So, let’s go slowly. It’s a pragmatic approach to maintain social cohesion,” he said.

    Lee’s cold pragmatism, in line with his ambivalence about the divine, was devoid of romanticism and ideology. His Confucian values of obedience to authority and respect for social order underlined his policies on discipline above individual rights.

    Yet, for all of Lee’s clinical logic, his favourite book was Don Quixote, a Spanish classic about the adventures of a man bent on chivalry and romanticism in pursuing unrealistic ideals.

    He also practised meditation, in which he repeated a Catholic mantra “Ma Ra Na Ta” for 20 minutes, which means “Come to me oh Lord Jesus”, though he was an agnostic.

    When his wife Kwa Geok Choo was bedridden in 2008 from a stroke for two years before her death, he used to read her favourite poems to her and tell her about his day.

    Besides keeping fit through swimming and cycling, Lee stopped drinking tea because his doctors told him it was a diuretic. Since he didn’t like coffee as it gave him a “sour stomach”, he turned to warm water. Cold water reduces one’s resistance to colds and coughs, he told NYT in 2010.

    Lee remained a fighter to the end. He didn’t care what his critics thought of him. The final verdict would not be in his obituaries, he said.

    He admitted that not everything he did was right; he had to do “nasty things” like detaining people without trial, but it was all for the greater good, he insisted.

    Lee had built the foundation for a thriving Singapore from nothing and turned the country into Asia’s financial centre, a developed country in a Third World region. But he also realised that his time of fighting communists and extremists had passed and that it was a new world now. He called for a “fresh clean slate” when he retired from Cabinet in 2011.

    Younger voters who grew up in Singapore’s concrete jungle now worry about the cost of living amid a widening income gap and resent the country’s liberal immigration policy that PAP had long introduced to support its flourishing economy.

    The government could no longer quell dissent due to the growth of social media, unlike Lee’s days when information was tightly controlled in a muzzled press. It remains to be seen whether his successors can adapt to Singapore’s new age, free from Lee’s prevailing influence over the past 50 years.

    “Even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up,” Lee once said in 1988.

     

    Source: www.themalaymailonline.com

  • Lee Kuan Yew’s Political Legacy – A Matter Of Trust

    Lee Kuan Yew’s Political Legacy – A Matter Of Trust

    As Singaporeans mourn their charismatic leader Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), whose political acumen, drive and ideas defined the young nation and played a major role in its successful development, attention turns to assessment. Moments of transition always bring reflection, and this is especially the case with the passing of the man who both personified and defined Singapore. The fact that LKY has passed on in the pivotal year of the nation celebrating the country’s 50th anniversary only serves to reinforce the need for review.

    There is good reason to acknowledge the accolades of a man who has been labeled as one of Asia’s most influential leaders. Most of the media, especially in the government-linked media of Singapore, lay out these reasons well. LKY was a force to be reckoned with, a complex man who made no excuses in his views and was direct in stating his opinions. He trusted few, but chose to collaborate with those who shared his hard work ethic with talent and ideas to develop the busy port of Singapore into a safe dynamic cosmopolitan city-state. He will rightly be remembered for not only putting Singapore on the world map, but as a model that is admired and respected by many the world over.

    LKY was a man who was respected, but importantly not loved by all. He used fear to stay in power. From the inception of Singapore’s independence – when it was expelled from Malaysia – the ideas of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘survival’ were used to justify decisions. He promoted the idea that Singapore had to have a strong armed forces, requiring national service in 1967, to protect itself as a nation surrounded by the perceived threat of its Malay neighbors. The enemies outside were matched by those inside, who had to be displaced and in some cases detained.  Among the most controversial were the arrests of men labeled as communists in Operation Coldstore of 1963 and Operation Spectrum of 1987 (a.k.a. the ‘Marxist Conspiracy’) that targeted social activists who promoted greater social equality and were seen as challenging LKY’s People’s Action Party’s (PAP) authority. Two other round-ups occurred with Operation Pecah (Split) in 1966, which coincided with the year of the arrest of Dr. Chia Thye Poh who was held under detention and restriction until 1997, and the arrests of the ‘Eurocommunists’ in 1976-77. Many others from opposition politics, business to academia faced the wrath for challenging and questioning LKY, his PAP and the politicized decisions of its institutions, castigated in the government controlled media, removed from position, forced to live in exile and, in some cases, sued and bankrupted. In the relatively small city state, it did not take much to instill a political culture of fear by making a few examples.

    A main point of contention goes that LKY sparred with Western critics over democracy and human rights, with LKY dismissing these ideas as not part of ‘Asia’s values.’ The debate was never about differences in values, but the justification of holding power in the hands of a few for nearly five decades. Singapore’s political model is at its foundation about the elites, with Lee, his family and loyalists at the core. In recent years, reports in Singapore have highlighted a growing trust deficit in the PAP government that LKY founded. The real deficit that defined LKY and became embedded within the party he molded is that he never fundamentally trusted his people.

    The group that received the special focus of LKY’s distrust was the Malay population, who now comprise over 10% of the country’s population. Even as LKY matured as a politician, he continued to reinforce negative stereotypes of this community that rioted over their grievances in 1950, 1964 and 1969 when LKY was in his early years in power, and with whom he expressed hard judgments about their religion, Islam. This distrust was shaped in part by a worldview that was not only shaped by his early experiences in political life but had sharp racial cleavages, drew from eugenics and believed in a clear social order. Part of LKY’s outlook prioritized women as homemakers and disparaged single women who opted not to marry or follow a career – another group similar to Malays that faced discrimination within LKY’s Singapore.

    In the heyday of Singapore’s economic miracle, the 1970s through the 1990s, the LKY PAP government worked to win over the trust of its people. It did so by providing for the basic welfare of its citizens, with an impressive housing program, affordable food prices, a living wage, job security, safety, education and opportunity. This involved hard work of LKY’s founding team of PAP cadre, as well as the sacrifice of ordinary Singaporeans. It also reflected the wise realization of LKY that fear was not enough to stay in power. There needed to be a healthy balance of deliverables. The LKY decades of economic growth translated into real rewards – at least through the 1980s.

    Singapore’s trajectory of sharing the benefits of development has followed a pattern of diminishing returns, as the country now boasts the highest per capita of millionaires and is the world’s most expensive city, with a large number its citizens unable to save and afford the lifestyle promised in the nation’s early narrative. As much as LKY deserves credit for Singapore’s success, he also should be seen to be part of today’s shortcomings. Elitism has breed arrogance, and a distance between those in power and those governed. Most of the new leaders of the PAP have come from subsequent wealthy generations that do not fully understand the sacrifices of the country’s working poor – shocking in number – and the obstacles elderly and young people face in an era of high costs. Years of following the LKY’s example and being told that the PAP is made up of the ‘best and brightest’ has imbued a mindset of superiority, a lack of empathy, and frequent dismissal of difference in engagement with the public.

    While LKY’s son Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has worked to win over support, he has suffered consecutive drops of support in the two elections he has led since he assumed office, failing to match the 75% popular vote height of the predecessor Goh Chok Tong in 2001. Unlike in the information controlled era of his father, Lee Hsien Loong is not able to effectively censor and limit public discussions in today’s wired and connected Singapore.  His recent expansion of social services and incentive packages that provide small sums for pensioners, modest support for health and childcare and tax reductions for the middle class are a drop in the bucket for the growing grievances and costs faced by ordinary citizens.

    This has to do in part with the challenge Lee Hsien Loong faces in dealing with his father’s legacy. In 2007 LKY claimed that he governed without ideology. This was not quite true. The ideological foundation of LKY’s pragmatic tenure was materialism. This obsession with money, saving it and forcing the public to save it in rigid regulated ways, assuring that government funds were only given to those ‘worthy’ and loyal and defining the value of the performance of his government ministers by pegging their salaries to growth numbers comprised the lifeblood of LKY’s state. With annual ‘bonuses’ to perform, there is a focus on short-term gains rather than long-term investments. The irony is that it is not even clear how much money the government of Singapore and its linked companies actually have. Singapore is one of the few countries in the world that does not follow the International Monetary Fund guidelines on its budget reporting. It also does not transparently report losses in many of the financial accounts of the government linked companies (GLCs). Lee Hsien Loong has had to tackle head-on the ingrained pattern of limited government spending on social welfare and services, as he attempts to move away from his father’s restrictive parsimony and secretive mindset that originated from a lack of trust in people.

    Lee Hsien Loong also has to address the problems of a government dominated economy. Singapore Inc. emerged out of the political economy LKY put in place, with the government and its linked companies controlling over half the country’s economy and undercutting almost all domestic business. LKY did not trust local capital, and did not want to strengthen an alternative power center to his own. As such, Singapore’s economy is not a genuinely competitive one. It favors big business, especially property developers, and those allied with government rather than independent entrepreneurs. Those in the system have apparently disproportionately benefited from it, although the exact amounts and assets remain unknown. The accumulated assets of individuals remain hidden as the estate tax was removed in 2008. What is known is that workers have limited rights in the LKY-shaped political economy. A recent example is the sexual harassment bill passed in parliament that excludes employer liability. The harsh response to the bus driver strike in 2012 is another. Much is made about the limited corruption of Singapore, but few appreciate that the country ranks high on theEconomist crony-capitalism index, an important outgrowth of the government dominance of the economy. The ties between companies and government are close, at times with government and family members on their boards and a revolving door that never really closes.

    Singapore’s economy also favors foreigners. LKY was to start this trend, with the appeal to outsiders for capital rather than a focus on domestic business. Foreigners may have been easier to engage, as they could always be kicked out. Foreign investment has been extremely important in Singapore’s growth numbers initially in manufacturing and later in services. To maintain global competitiveness, keep wages low and maintain high growth numbers, Singapore also turned to foreign labor – cheap workers to staff their construction sectors and to work as domestic help and foreign talent to bring in ideas and the occasional sports medal. This prioritization of outsiders has fostered resentment. When LKY assumed office he worked to force a nation, but with his passing many in Singapore feel the government he left behind is working for others and undermining the fabric of the nation. The crowded trains, strain on services and displacement of Singaporeans in the job market and advancement have angered many, who now see LKY’s legacy as one that in fact left many Singaporeans vulnerable and worried about survival.

    No one can take away LKY’s contributions. He lived a long meaningful life, and shaped the lives of all Singaporeans. This does not mean that there is agreement on what he left behind. Singapore now faces the challenge of moving beyond LKY’s ideas and shaping a more promising future for all of its citizens. An integral part of this dynamic will be moving away from fear, promoting more effective policies for inclusion in the economy and society and building trust. It starts with placing more trust in Singaporeans.

    It is arguably the latter that is the hardest. LKY lived in an era where societies trusted their leaders. He was given the benefit of the doubt. The PAP remains a relatively closed institution, with the distrust of those not inside deeply embedded. Today in the age of social media and instant messaging there is not as much leeway to work behind closed doors. There is an urgent need to forge genuine dialogue, connectivity and understanding that moves beyond materialism, and reignites the sense of belonging that LKY forged in his early years.

    Singapore today has become a more politically divided nation, with those who strongly defend LKY’s incumbent government, die-hard opponents and the majority in the middle. As the country marks its 50th year it moves toward a different narrative, the task at hand is to forge a new Singapore story, one in which LKY is a valued part of its past, but not a constraint on the dreams and aspirations of Singaporeans’ future.

    Bridget Welsh is a Senior Research Associate of the Center for East Asia Democratic Studies of the National Taiwan University where she conducts research on democracy and politics in Southeast Asia.

     

    Source: http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au

  • Singapore Inc: A Lee Kuan Yew Legacy

    Singapore Inc: A Lee Kuan Yew Legacy

    Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has made his prosperous little realm a nice place to do business. But it’s not much fun to live there.

    This Fortune article first ran in the magazine in July 1974. We are running it again to mark the passing of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first and longest-serving prime minister, and the architect of the nation’s remarkable transformation.

    Singapore, the smallest nation in Asia, occupies a 225-square-mile expanse of swampy, tropical islands—an area about the size of Trenton, New Jersey. The former British colony has almost no natural resources, except a superb harbor situated along the main shipping route from Europe to the Far East. And it has fewer people—2.2 million—than metropolitan St. Louis.

    Yet the tiny city-state has swiftly seized a large place in the world economy. It is a thriving manufacturing center turning out ships, precision machinery, and electronic components. And it is fast becoming the Zurich of the East, an international haven for money and bankers. In nine years of full independence, the gross national product has nearly tripled—raising the average per capita income to a level exceeded in Asia only by that of Japan.

    Singapore has achieved this dazzling growth by stretching its meager means and using some extraordinary techniques of statecraft. The country is run very much like a corporation. Striving above all for efficiency, the government coldly weighs every move, from school curriculums to foreign relations, against cost-effectiveness. The key criterion, as one top-rank official puts it, is always : “What good can we get out of it?”

    Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a fifty-year-old lawyer educated at Cambridge, calls himself a “democratic socialist.” But he shows more concern with rates of return (for both investors and the state) than with political dogma. In fact, Lee rules as though he were the autocratic chief executive of Singapore Inc.

    Under his tight managerial control, nothing is long tolerated if it interferes with economic performance. Young men are prohibited from wearing modishly long hair, which the chairman regards as a symbol of the Western counterculture and a menace to the work ethic that he prizes. Lee keeps the country’s labor force cheap and disciplined by setting strict guidelines for both wage increases and working conditions. Since he has the political power to enforce his rules, factory wages, which are about one-fifth of those in the U.S., help to keep Singapore products internationally competitive.

    Lee’s economic philosophy is stern and simple. “We do not expect something for nothing,” he says. In a characteristic jab at his less energetic Asian neighbors, he explains: “We haven’t got oil and minerals on which other people have to pay royalties. So we develop a different approach to life.” He calls it “the rugged society,” but it is really his own special blend of pragmatic socialism, freewheeling capitalism, and plain opportunism.

    The Prime Minister has hitched the island to the global economy through multinational corporations, which supply needed capital, expertise, and export markets. Singapore ardently woos foreign business, a rare policy among countries that have only recently emerged from colonialism. Besides providing such familiar tax incentives as a five-year income-tax exemption for coveted corporations, the government often shares the cost of training workers and even puts up part of the capital for plants and equipment.

    During the past five years, international manufacturers have responded by pouring in $1.2 billion of their own to start more than a hundred factories. About half the money has come from U.S. corporations. All together, 425 American companies now operate in Singapore. General Electric alone has seven plants assembling home appliances and components.

    An avowedly nonaligned foreign policy makes Singapore useful—for a price—to nearly every trading nation. Soviet merchant ships as well as vessels of the U.S. Seventh Fleet patronize its efficient port and repair yards. Peking maintains a busy Bank of China branch, while within walking distance Taiwan runs an active trade office. Arab oil producers, which provide most of the crude for the refineries, are now being urged to invest in Singapore industries. And Lee’s government has entered into a joint venture with an Israeli concern that produces communication equipment, and has hired Israeli military advisers to shape Singapore’s fledgling armed forces. His country’s real protection against undue influence by any foreign power, says Lee, is to maintain a balance of investment by the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe.

    Profits even from the postal service
    The Prime Minister not only demands that government services operate smoothly and honestly, an uncommon achievement in the Orient, but also wants them to produce profits, if possible. Part of the police force is hired out through a state-owned company as guards for banks and factories. The government printing office accepts commercial work. The postal service proudly reported $7.5 million in earnings last year, partly because it charges the equivalent of 40 cents for airmail letters to America. (U.S. air postage to Singapore is just 26 cents.)

    Sometimes this approach leads to what surely would be considered excess profits in other countries. A 3 percent sales tax on hotel and restaurant bills provides funds to promote tourism, but for the past several years a substantial portion of the take has been hoarded in bank accounts gathering interest for the state. Eventually, the tax proceeds are to be invested in an offshore resort island and a handicraft center, not merely to help tourism but also to make money.

    Lee has also moved his government directly into business in a variety of ways. Its ever growing array of profitable enterprises includes shipyards, banks, hotels, an oil refinery, and even a small steel mill. All together, the government wholly owns about twenty sizable companies, and it holds substantial shares of about 100 others in every sector of the economy. Again, the main motive isn’t to implant socialism, but to make profits. As one cabinet minister explains: “We see opportunities, and we can make some money out of them. If a company doesn’t pay, we just let it go bankrupt.” An unprofitable charter airline, Sabre Air, was abruptly folded in 1972.

    Management by mandarin
    To run his fiefdom and its business holdings, Lee relies heavily on an elite cadre of about fifty senior civil servants. These modern mandarins, like the functionaries of ancient China, are selected on a merit basis and are ultimately accountable only to the ruler. But many are active in politics as members of Lee’s party, which holds all the seats in Parliament. At least one mandarin is usually assigned to the board of each corporation in which the government holds equity. Some sit on the boards of as many as a dozen companies.

    The mandarins belittle their pervasive influence. “We’re bureaucrats, not managers,” insists J.Y.M. Pillay, a permanent secretary in the finance ministry, who is also chairman of Singapore Airlines and a board member of half a dozen other corporations. “We know how to read a balance sheet and mostly just keep a check on management.” Still, the mandarins are under considerable pressure from Lee to perform. Any head of a money-losing state company is bound to be replaced.

    The government keeps secret the amounts the mandarins collect as directors’ fees from their private enterprises. But some Singapore academicians calculate that top performers get paid about $50,000 a year, including their perquisites and official salaries. The extra income, Lee claims, induces competent men to stay with the government.

    The state’s moves into business increasingly intermingle private and public enterprises in joint ventures. Government-controlled companies not only have interlocking boards of directors, but also do more and more business with one another. A Singapore economist who has studied this trend detects the emergence of “something like a single national corporation.”

    The managers of Singapore Inc. tend to treat local citizens somewhat like the employees of an old-fashioned company town. Grade schools seek to instill what are officially termed “correct attitudes” toward manual work by assigning students to sweep classrooms and clean toilets. Colleges have downgraded liberal arts to stress accounting and engineering, in line with business needs.

    Public housing in high-rise apartments is provided for nearly half the population. Thanks to government subsidies, low-income workers pay only 13 percent of their salaries for rent, and many are encouraged to buy the apartments with part of the otherwise untouchable savings that they are forced to put into a national retirement fund. “It’s an all-embracing system,” explains a senior public-housing officer. “When people own homes, they aren’t likely to start revolutions, and they’ll see that nothing happens to disrupt their jobs.”

    Lee and his associates are constantly lecturing on the virtues of hard work, thrift, and clean living. Appearing at routine meetings of civic and professional groups, they deliver uplifting sermons, which are invariably broadcast on radio and television. The Prime Minister repeatedly warns Singaporeans not to drop out, take drugs, or indulge in sexual promiscuity. Job-hopping is denounced as another deadly sin, along with such “vulgar displays” of affluence as marble floors, elaborate door chimes, and sports cars. Such homilies may sound quaintly Victorian to Westerners, but most Singapore citizens seem to take them seriously.

    A legacy of struggle
    The paternalistic society that Lee has shaped is largely a response to the difficulties of transforming the former British colonial outpost into a self-supporting nation. For nearly a century and a half, Singapore made its living largely from the foreign trade of neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia. Perched between them in the Malacca Strait, the city processed and shipped their rubber, copra, and other products; it also handled most of their imports. But nowadays the producers of raw materials increasingly do their own processing and trading, depriving Singapore of its traditional role.

    Seeking a broader economic base, Lee merged his country with Malaysia in 1963. He hoped to make Singapore the commercial capital of a larger, mainly rural country. But Lee proved too independent to suit Malay leaders, and the federation split after two stormy years. Shortly after the breakup, Singapore met another serious setback. In 1966 the huge British military establishment—which had provided much of the island’s livelihood—began withdrawing, and now has all but vanished.

    Thrust on his own, Lee had to devise new arrangements for Singapore’s survival. “It was the best thing that ever happened to us,” the Prime Minister says. “We didn’t get much chance to collect fat, and we’ve had to struggle.”

    A fourth-generation Singaporean, son of a retired oil-company employee who now clerks in a jewelry store, Lee has thrived on struggle all his life. While achieving the highest honors at Cambridge, he acquired strong anti-colonial views, which brought warnings from the British the moment he returned home. In 1952, as a brash, ambitious attorney, he backed postal workers in an unprecedented strike against British authorities. He established himself as a public figure by successfully defending the editors of a student journal, which had supported the strike, against sedition charges.

    His People’s Action party opportunistically teamed up with local Communists, who helped Lee get elected Prime Minister when the British granted local autonomy in 1959. Later on, he broke with his former comrades and jailed more than 100 of them to forestall a leftist take-over. “If they had won, I’d be dead,” he now says.

    During fifteen years of uninterrupted rule, Lee has gradually changed from a street-brawling left-wing politician to an astute manager and unchallenged boss. He has gained the respect of Singaporeans by giving them clean, rigorous government that delivers solid results. One of the few Asian leaders untouched by personal scandal or corruption, Lee draws an annual salary of only $38,400. He and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, who now runs his prospering law firm, live in modest style in their own wood-frame home.

    A powerful combination of intellect and arrogance underpins the Prime Minister’s authority. Lee, who grew up speaking English, has patiently learned Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin Chinese so that he can deliver a speech with equal force in all the common languages of Singapore. Though personally cold and aloof, he takes pains to appear in public clad as a man of the people—that is, without a jacket or tie. But his ruthless techniques and frequent rudeness deprive him of popular affection. At a meeting with university students, Lee grew so impatient with a testy, long-winded question that he physically shoved aside the student who was presiding and took over himself.

    In his zeal for achievement, Lee insistently shuns small talk. Any foreign visitor who begins by discussing the weather is likely to be dismissed at once. He regards concerts, movies, and novels as “time-wasting.” His only hobby is golf, which he considers healthy exercise. Lee abhors smoking so much that no one is allowed to smoke either in his presence or in a room he plans to enter. (One chain-smoking minister ducks outside cabinet meetings for a quick cigarette.) An old British hand who admires his accomplishments aptly describes Lee as “the most brilliant man around, albeit just a bit of a thug.”

    Brain-picking at Harvard
    Abroad, Lee’s thoughtful, forceful speeches on international affairs have won him a reputation as a regional statesman. Actually, he is unpopular with many other Asian leaders, who dislike his smug, undiplomatic manner, though they envy his accomplishments. The Prime Minister takes time every year or two to visit the U.S., where he quietly spends a couple of weeks at such universities as Harvard and Yale, picking the best available brains for ideas useful to Singapore. Among other notions, he has picked up some obsessive impressions of America. Though an admirer of U.S. technology, he deplores the new permissiveness, the weakening of family ties, and the lax discipline in the labor force. He seriously contends that the U.S. has lost five or six years of progress from “riotous, drug-induced madness.” If children of American businessmen in Singapore are caught smoking marijuana, Lee usually expels the whole family.

    Despite his country’s striking success, Lee often talks and acts as if his island realm were threatened by unnamed enemies and economic disaster. To guard against potential threats to his power, he maintains a large force of secret police who watch his political opponents, tap many telephones, and even investigate all students applying for admission to a university.

    There sometimes seems to be a slightly paranoid strain to Lee’s personality. He often erupts in rash actions. A few years ago, he wildly claimed that hostile foreigners were trying to subvert Singapore through local newspapers. So he abruptly closed down two papers and jailed four top executives of a third. He also threatened to eject the Chase Manhattan Bank for lending money to one of the papers. But Lee produced not a shred of hard evidence supporting his charges. “He runs scared and always creates a kind of purposeful tension,” observes a banker who knows Lee well. This is partly his way of keeping Singaporeans disciplined and hardworking.

    In the Prime Minister’s closely guarded office, he actually sounds like a board chairman—and he nodded approvingly at the characterization. He is proud that his system “deliberately exposes civil servants to decision making based on corporate rewards and profitability.” His bureaucrats, Lee boasts, Have picked up business attitudes and “the sense of the percentage.”

    Getting Rollei into the picture
    These talents have been plainly evident in Singapore’s effort to attract international business. Hewlett-Packard is assembling sophisticated calculators “primarily because of the ease of doing business here,” says Tom Lauhon, the local managing director. “This government wanted us and was geared to help. Elsewhere in Asia we ran into a lot of red tape.”

    On barren hills and swamps at the outskirts of the city, Lee’s government over the past twelve years has built the satellite town of Jurong, which in addition to housing and retail stores is crammed with 510 factories; another hundred will be completed this year. To attract foreign manufacturers, the authorities provide plant buildings at nineteen industrial parks scattered around Singapore.

    Four years ago Lee decided that Rollei-Werke, Franke & Heidecke—the West German camera company famous for the Rolleiflex—would be a prime recruit. Rollei was seriously threatened by stiff Japanese competition and a labor shortage at home that made production costly. The Prime Minister flew to Braunschweig and personally made the sales pitch. Among other things, he promised that if Rollei moved its production to Singapore, no Japanese camera makers would be permitted to set up shop there. Naturally, said Lee, he would expect the company to allow some local participation in the venture.

    Rollei succumbed to the pitch and invested $52 million of its own in five plants, which now employ 5,300 Singaporeans. Substantially lower labor costs have enabled the company to produce cheaper cameras and counter the Japanese in most foreign markets. Once operations went into the black, Lee’s regime added shares in Rollei to its bulging portfolio.

    Ready to seize chances
    Singapore goes to considerable lengths to snare key industries. Two small offshore islands were cleared not only of jungle, but also of resident fishermen and their family graves to make way for an Esso refinery and Mobil oil-storage tanks. Thanks to its obliging attitude and central location, the city-state has become the site of the principal refinery complex in the region. Shell, British Petroleum, and Amoco also process oil there, primarily for Japan and other Asian markets. By the end of this year, total refining capacity will exceed a million barrels a day—making Singapore the world’s third-largest oil-processing center, after Houston and Rotterdam.

    The oil-exploration rush in nearby Indonesia has been beneficial for Singapore, which now supplies much of the equipment used in offshore drilling. The government itself has three logistical bases to service wildcatters with pipe, drilling mud, and other gear. And the island serves as headquarters for dozens of contractors participating in the search. “We’ve had a fair amount of luck in the events around us,” admits Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee. “They gave us chances, and we were ready to seize them.”

    The Vietnam war and its aftermath gave the corporate state another opportunity to provide products and services. Initially, the conflict brought windfall sales of patrol boats, oil, and construction materials to the U.S. military in Saigon. More recently, Lockheed has established a service base in Singapore to repair American planes for South Vietnam.

    In a broader sense, American military activities have also helped stimulate plant investment. The war effort not only brought inflation to the U.S. but focused attention on Southeast Asia, where American businessmen saw opportunities outside the battle zones. As Japanese rivals grabbed business away from them, U.S. electronics companies moved production to countries with lower labor costs. Among those that flocked to Singapore were National Semiconductor, Fairchild, and Teledyne. In the last few years, fast-climbing wages in Japan have prompted such major Japanese shipbuilders as IHI, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi to make the switch, too.

    Money is a major export
    To realize his grand design of making Singapore an international financial center, Lee shrewdly turned to the world’s most prestigious banks. His government has admitted virtually every big international bank, from New York’s First National City to Moscow’s Narodny, and has left them free of the numerous restraints that they face elsewhere in the Far East. So a towering new financial district is taking shape along the waterfront.

    “We decided to open up the banking system to provide services that other countries don’t offer,” explains Michael Wong Pakshong, managing director of the government’s Monetary Authority. As a start, he broke up a cartel of established British and local banks that fixed rates on all transactions. “They’d sit on their bottoms waiting for captive customers,” complains Wong. “The newcomers actually went out to buy business with loan rates that were competitive. That made the others get busy fast.”

    Singapore’s main growth in financial stature came after the government, at the urging of the Bank of America, decided in 1968 to allow banks to accept deposits in foreign currency. These funds, called Asian Dollars, are the Far Eastern equivalent of Eurodollars. The foreign-currency deposits now amount to $6.3 billion and are still rising rapidly. The money comes from corporations, other banks, and affluent individuals, including overseas Chinese seeking a haven beyond the reach of prying revenue officers. Singapore banks attract funds with rates comparable to those paid for Eurodollar deposits, plus two advantages that Hong Kong and Tokyo don’t offer: tax exemption for depositors and strict secrecy. (The Monetary Authority keeps track of the amounts on deposit but not the identities of depositors.)

    Today money is a major Singapore export. The country’s hundred or so banks finance business and industry throughout Asia. Their aggressive push for loan customers has quickened the development of the whole region.

    The state has pushed into banking, too, partly by flexing official muscle. At first, it invested public funds directly in shipyards and factories because local businessmen and bankers, accustomed to quick returns from trading, shied away from such ventures. In 1968 the government established the Development Bank of Singapore to back priority industries. Lee’s mandarins twisted private bankers’ arms to ante up about half of the $40-million paid-up capital. The government’s share was a portfolio of loans it had already made to local industries.

    Once in business, D.B.S. gathered $260 million of working capital from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and—at concessional rates—the Singapore government. Today D.B.S. has grown into a commercial bank with profitable side ventures in computer services, real estate, ship and machinery leasing, and merchant banking. The government, of course, appoints the majority of board members, mainly mandarins who are top administrators of government agencies.

    The D.B.S. building, a $25-million showpiece of the new financial district, covers one side of a city block, Naturally, the structure was also designed as a revenue earner and most of the space is rented to commercial banks. “D.B.S. is in competition with us,” complains one foreign banker, “but also insists on our support because it’s a government institution.”

    D.B.S. is particularly effective as the banking arm of Singapore Inc. Having noted the success of oil refineries, the government-controlled bank invested in one. It has a one-third interest in a $50-million refinery established by Amoco and U.S.-based Oceanic Petroleum Co., which is owned by a group of Chinese-Americans. The bank supports Lee’s programs in many other ways. As a boost to urban renewal, a D.B.S. subsidiary is constructing an $18-million shopping center and office building. The government housing board is a big buyer of elevators, so the bank owns a minority interest in a new Japanese venture to fabricate them locally.

    The bank’s official status greatly enhances its commercial operations. D.B.S. has little trouble finding depositors, for many other state enterprises with large cash flows keep accounts there. Foreign banks find it politic to include D.B.S. in large consortium loans, such as the $25 million that the Bank of Montreal organized recently for International Nickel to use in Indonesian mining. D.B.S. has also formed three separate joint-venture merchant banks with such prominent foreign partners as Sumitomo Bank and Morgan Guaranty. “It’s like marrying three wives,” says a D.B.S. officer. “Each provides something different.”

    Penguins for the tourists
    Thanks to the relentless pursuit of economic growth, Singapore today throbs with the clump of pile drivers and is clouded with dust blown from construction sites. Entire city blocks of ramshackle open-front shops are being replaced by high-rise apartments, office buildings, and shopping centers. The corporate state has also invested in four hotels and provided tax incentives for about seventy others. “Some of the hotel people weren’t too happy when we suddenly had 13,000 guest rooms and couldn’t fill them,” acknowledges a government official. “But we knew that those with money invested in hotels would work very hard to attract tourists.” For several years, surplus rooms plagued hotelmen, but recently occupancy rates have reached a profitable average of 70 percent.

    Though Singapore has no notable scenic or historic sites, it draws a million foreign visitors a year, largely on the strength of man-made “tourist attractions.” The most notable include a bird park equipped with imported penguins and piped-in music, stores that offer duty-free Japanese radios and cameras, and those abundant hotels.

    The campaign to attract more and more businesses has succeeded so well that Singapore now faces a labor shortage. Consequently, the government has brought in 100,000 Malaysian workers, who make up about a fifth of the labor force. In 1966, Lee was seeking whatever investment he could get because 72,000 Singaporeans were jobless. Today his policy is to discourage any expansion of garment making and simple assembly operations in favor of industries that require more skillful labor and use more capital per worker. For example, Lee’s government intends to invest in a $420-million petrochemical project that Sumitomo Chemical Co. has agreed to organize. And Lee hopes to form a joint venture with other multinational companies to construct a $400-million integrated steel mill.

    As soon as Singapore moves on to such activities, says Lee, “we can slowly slough off our labor-intensive factories and get them to move into the countries around us—Malaysia and Indonesia.” Accordingly, he insists that “immigrant workers are just here for the time being.” Several government planners, however, doubt that Singapore can do without imported labor anytime soon. Lee’s own expansion plans are creating too many jobs, and his government leans heavily on Singaporeans to limit the size of their families through an array of financial disincentives such as progressively higher hospital fees for each successive baby.

    No place for poets
    Lee’s managerial approach to statecraft produces great economic progress at considerable social cost. He has built an industrious, clean, well-ordered but bland society. Government leaders see little need for poets, philosophers, or public dialogue. “We are more concerned with filling our rice bowls,” declares Toh Chin Chye, minister of science and technology. “Western political liberalism and economic discipline are hard to have at the same time.”

    Not all Singaporeans share in their country’s economic progress, of course. No one goes hungry, but about a quarter of the population lives at a subsistence level. Even those who prosper most under the corporate state tend to resent its frequent intrusion in their lives. “They treat us like children,” complains a wealthy businessman. But openly challenging fundamental policies can land citizens in prison, indefinitely and without trial, under internal-security laws. Criminals who use or threaten violence are punished with both jail terms and flogging. Though he concedes that Singapore-style discipline is harsh by Western standards, Lee insists he can afford no slack.

    For all its prosperity, the city-state is disquietingly sterile and seems to lack a soul or culture other than pursuit of profit. Even the poorest Asian countries produce a profusion of art, music, and folk literature, none of which has much place in Singapore life. One minister derisively describes the national creed as “money-theism.”

    Lee provides an exceptional educational system and seeks to make his domain a “brain center” providing managerial and technical services throughout the Far East. In this he may be overreaching himself, for he discourages independent, creative thinking. His approach systematically stifles intellectual curiosity. As one American professor learned to his dismay, most Singapore law students don’t even read newspapers.

    Many popular movies, songs, and publications are deemed dangerously corrupting influences. Whereas the very name Singapore once conveyed the promise of exotic pleasures, the present reality is so antiseptic that one current novel about the city, Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack, recounts the misfortunes of a pimp who can’t make a living there. Fleshly pleasures are surely no measure of national well-being, but Lee’s Singapore lacks humor and laughter too. As pressures mount, an increasing number of citizens commit suicide by jumping off the towering public apartments. Social workers are equally alarmed by a high rate of attempted suicides.

    A yearning for culture
    Despite all the money the government spends on subsidizing housing, the resulting environment leaves a great deal to be desired. Even at their nocturnal best, the housing projects are -ablaze with harsh fluorescent lights, and they are perpetually noisy and far too impersonal for many Asians. In the context of Lee’s tight little state, the apartments often seem to be, as one Western businessman says, “a glimpse of 1984 in concrete and steel.”

    Lee, of course, has been forced by circumstance to stress discipline so Singapore could survive economically. The country’s volatile racial mix—ethnic Chinese, Malays, and Indians—makes firm direction essential to promote cooperative effort. Singapore is the only country in which overseas Chinese form a majority; they compose three-quarters of the population. The Chinese originally came more than a century ago seeking better opportunities, and the experience gave them and their descendants great drive. To his credit, Lee has carefully cultivated a multiracial society, not another China. He has encouraged the Malays and Indians, who tend to be more languid and leisurely because of their rural value system, to work hard, too.

    Now that Singapore has achieved such enormous material success, Lee says that he is appalled by the lack of books, culture, and social graces among citizens. He talks of nurturing “a gracious society” without sacrificing the economic drive of his “rugged society.” But Lee faces a dilemma, for there is room to doubt whether his well-run state can add culture to its line of products and services. Perhaps Singaporeans will do it themselves if Lee fully realizes that he leads a country as well as a corporation—and relaxes his authoritarian ways. As Deputy Prime Minister Goh points out: “We can’t order people to like music or drama, even though our ministry of culture tries. It’s up to people to decide for themselves.”

     

    Source: http://fortune.com

  • Lee Kuan Yew, The Leader Who Lasted

    Lee Kuan Yew, The Leader Who Lasted

    By the time of his death on Monday at age 91, Lee Kuan Yew had been out of the Western limelight long enough that some people may wonder why his passing deserves such notice.

    I’d offer these reasons:

    • A post-colonial leader who lasted. Fifty-five years ago, when a slew of former European colonies were gaining independence and other nations were taking modern form, the landscape was full of charismatic leaders. Kwame Nkrumah was president of Ghana. Jomo Kenyatta was in detention but would become the president of Kenya. Ben Bella led Algeria. Patrice Lumumba became (briefly) prime minister of Congo. Julius Nyerere was about to become prime minister of Tanganyika, which was about to become Tanzania. Nasser was president of Egypt and (briefly) of the United Arab Republic. Tunku Abdul Rahman was head of Malaya, which had not yet become Malaysia and at the time included Singapore. And on down a long line—including of course Mao Zedong, then a decade-plus into his control of China.

    Within a few years most of them were gone, because of coups, corruption, assassination attempts or successes, or other challenges. But not Lee Kuan Yew. In 1960 he had already been elected prime minister of Singapore, which a few years later would separate from Malaya/Malaysia to become an independent state. He stayed in that role until 1990. The few early leaders who lasted as long as Lee Kuan Yew, notably Fidel Castro in Cuba and Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Cote d’Ivoire, increasingly shielded themselves from real democratic accountability. Lee Kuan Yew’s version of democracy for Singapore was a “guided” one, as I’ll mention below. But I can’t think of another figure from that era whose power and reputation were as durable.

    • A practitioner and a theorist. The Western world knows its statesmen, nation-builders, and political leaders. Churchill, de Gaulle, and Mitterand. FDR and—whichever Americans you’d choose after that. And not just the Western world: Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping, Ho Chi Minh.

    Then as a separate category we have the big thinkers. George Kennan or Hans Morgenthau for an earlier generation of Americans. Henry Kissinger, for better or worse, in this niche now.

    Lee Kuan Yew is the rare person to come close to being recognized in both realms. (Richard Nixon aspired to this status, but that’s for another day.) While in office, he cultivated leaders from around the world who turned to him for his big-picture strategic guidance. At the moment I can’t think of any particular piercing insight he provided, which I don’t mean in a dismissive way. (Early and often he counseled Western leaders about the importance of coping with China, and also its possible menaces.) But time and again foreign leaders sought his judgment on big strategic questions, and outside scholars and journalists pored over his comments in interviews. Not many practicing politicians can present themselves simultaneously as geostrategists, and he managed to be taken that way.

    • A man equipped and ready to debate the Western world on its own terms. Lee Kuan Yew’s original first name was Harry, and English was his native language. His renown in Singapore included the fact of his having earned a “double first” in law studies at Cambridge University and then having gone into legal practice in England.

    Through Lee Kuan Yew’s era as leader of Singapore and in the decades since then, a remarkable trait of this tiny country’s political culture has been its willingness, even eagerness, to take on outside critics and prove, prove, prove why it is completely right to do things exactly the way it chooses to. Anyone in the international press who has worked in Southeast Asia, including me, is likely to have run afoul of official Singapore’s sensitivities at some point. When I was living in Malaysia in the late 1980s, I observed the beginning of a long-standing feud over press freedoms between William Safire, a former Nixon aide who was then an influential New York Times columnist, and Lee Kuan Yew’s government. (You can see a later ripple of the feud here.) I never was vouchsafed the opportunity to interview Lee Kuan Yew directly, but I saw him speak at many events in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan, and I received starchy notes from Singaporean officialdom when I wrote anything they thought incorrect in any detail.

    At the time, the thin-skinnedness of Lee’s government seemed noteworthy. (In their prime, they might well have served me with a libel action for the preceding sentence. Or at least submitted a 5,000-word letter to the editor with a demand that it be run with not a single word changed or cut.) But from a distance, the yet more remarkable fact is a non-Western state assuming that it could and should engage the world’s opinion machine on its own terms, in its own language, and in its own forms of debate. This really is something we have not seen anywhere but Singapore.

    * * *

    Lee Kuan Yew’s form of government had its clear strengths and limitations. When we would take trips to Singapore from our home further up the Malay peninsula in Kuala Lumpur, we would know that everything could be done more efficiently in Singapore, but that you would have to watch your step in various ways. It was and is the best possible version of an authoritarian guided democracy. Family ties have mattered a lot in Singapore: the current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is Lee Kuan Yew’s eldest son, and happened to become the youngest brigadier general in his country’s history at age 31. But an America that is contemplating a possible Bush-Clinton run for the presidency can’t act too shocked when meritocracy takes this form.

    Lee Kuan Yew certainly changed history, and from my perspective he changed it mainly for the better. Fuller assessments will follow from more-informed sources (and see Matt Schiavenza’s assessment here), but on the occasion of his death that is the note I choose to strike.

     

    Source: www.theatlantic.com

  • European Football Clubs Express Condolences On Death of Lee Kuan Yew

    European Football Clubs Express Condolences On Death of Lee Kuan Yew

    Spanish club Valencia, who are owned by Singaporean billionaire Peter Lim, led a host of leading European football clubs that expressed its condolences on the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and first prime minister.

    Valencia, which Singaporean billionaire Peter Lim, acquired a majority share in late last year, posted on its website yesterday a message from fellow Singaporean Chan Lay Hoon, who is also president of the club’s board.

    “Valencia CF’s majority shareholder, Mr Peter Lim, and my fellow Singaporean directors of the board are deeply saddened by the passing of Singapore’s founding father, Mr Lee Kuan Yew.

    “Together with our fellow Singaporeans, we salute the late Mr Lee’s complete devotion to Singapore. Truly, as Mr Lee Hsien Loong has said, ‘We won’t see another like him.’

    “Our hearts go out to the family of the late Mr Lee. May they be comforted by the knowledge that he had lived life to the fullest and had left a transformative and indelible mark in this world. Rest in peace, Mr Lee.”

    English Premier League sides Chelsea and Arsenal, who have a huge following in Singapore, also expressed their sympathies.

    “Everybody at Chelsea Football Club is saddened to hear the passing of Singapore’s founding father and first Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew,” the club’s Facebook post read.

    “We offer our deepest condolences to the Lee family and to all Singaporeans at this time of sorrow and remembrance for a great man and leader.”

    Similarly, in a letter addressed to the “Singapore Gunners”, Arsenal’s supporter liaison officer Mark Brindle wrote: “We are deeply saddened to hear of the recent passing of Lee Kuan Yew. On behalf of Arsenal Football Club, I would like to send our respect and heartfelt sympathies to you during this difficult time in Singapore.”

    German club Borussia Dortmund, which plan to visit Singapore as part of the club’s pre-season tour of Asia this year, also posted a message on its Facebook page, wrote yesterday: “Our thoughts are with his (Mr Lee’s) family and all the people in Singapore.”

    Mr Lee, Singapore’s first prime minister from 1965 to 1990, died at 3.18am on Monday (March 23) at the age 91.

     

    Source: www.todayonline.com