Introduction

“Singapore today is the house that Lee built,” the foreign correspondent Lewis M. Simons wrote in the Atlantic in 1991. Simons was referring to Lee Kuan Yew, the chief architect of the remarkable transformation of Singapore, a small island with virtually no natural resources, from an impoverished British colony plagued by racial friction and unemployment into a thriving, politically and socially stable city-state that boasts a strong industrial base, the world’s second-busiest harbor, nearly full employment, and the third-highest per capita income in Asia. Lee served as Singapore’s prime minister for thirty-one years, from 1959 until his voluntary resignation, in 1990. He then became the senior minister, a position in which he has continued to wield substantial power. Considered to be one of the world’s most adept politicians and reputed to be completely incorruptible, he headed the People’s Action Party (PAP), Singapore’s ruling political party for thirty-eight years, from its founding, in 1954, until 1992. “I make no apologies that the PAP is the government and the government is the PAP,” he was quoted as saying in Singapore: The Legacy of Lee Kuan Yew (1990), by R. S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy. Invoking the names of towering British statesmen, the former American president Richard Nixon once expressed the view that in a different era, Lee might have “attained the stature of a [Winston] Churchill, a [Benjamin] Disraeli, or a [William Ewart] Gladstone.”

A highly controversial figure, Lee Kuan Yew began his political career as a Socialist and anticolonialist. Even after adopting a conservative political outlook, he remained enamored of aggressive social engineering. In creating “an oasis of ordered cleanliness,” as a writer for the Economist (November 22, 1986) called Singapore—a place where slums, begging, vandalism, littering, and disorderly conduct have all but disappeared and where governmental services are performed with breathtaking efficiency—he also established a society that many Western observers have described as excessively regimented and totalitarian in atmosphere. Determined to silence dissent, as prime minister he suppressed his political opponents, reined in the press, hobbled the trade-union movement, and abolished the jury system, among other actions. He has steadfastly rejected many arguments for individualism and democracy and insisted on the necessity of maintaining traditional values and strict order in Singapore’s multiethnic society. “I say without the slightest remorse,” he told Singaporeans during a televised speech in 1986, “that we … would not have made the economic progress if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit (or where you spit), or what language you use…. It was fundamental social and cultural changes that brought us here.” In a New Yorker (January 1, 1992) profile of him, Stan Sesser declared, “Lee has put his stamp on Singapore to an extent that few political leaders anywhere in the world have ever matched.”

Early Life

Lee Kuan Yew (his name sometimes appears as Lee Kwan Yew) was born in Singapore on September 16, 1923. Longstanding residents of the city, the Lee family were of Chinese origin. Lee’s father, Lee Chin Koon, worked as a depot superintendent for the Shell Oil Company, and his mother, Chua Jim Neo, was a well-known cooking teacher. After completing his primary-school education, in classes conducted in English, Lee enrolled at Raffles Institution, a preparatory school, from which he graduated in 1939. With the outbreak of World War II, he abandoned his plans to continue his studies in England and instead attended Raffles College (which was later renamed the University of Singapore), where he studied economics as well as mathematics and English literature.

The Japanese invasion of Singapore, in 1942, provoked in Lee, as in many of his fellow countrymen, a nationalist response. Although he became proficient in Japanese and worked as a translator for the official news agency, he was later quoted as saying, “We decided that from then on our lives should be ours to decide, that we should not be the pawns and playthings of foreign powers.” In about 1946 Lee became a law student at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, in England, where he earned a “double first” and led the honors list. In a speech that he gave in 1956, Lee said that his education at Cambridge had been designed to make him “an educated man—the equal of any Englishman—the model of perfection!” But by the time he graduated, he felt that “the whole set of values was wrong, fundamentally and radically wrong.”

Life’s Work

In 1950, after being admitted to the British bar, Lee returned to Singapore. With his wife, whom he had met at Cambridge, he set up the law firm of Lee and Lee. Nominally a Socialist but by no means a Communist, he became associated with Singapore’s labor-union movement, as a lawyer representing more than one hundred trade unions. In 1952 he helped the postal workers’ union win an important strike, and he subsequently defended Fajar, a student newspaper that had been prosecuted under sedition laws, in a celebrated trial in which he passionately argued for the right of freedom of expression. By the mid-1950s he had become a well-known left-wing, nationalist figure and had secured for himself a position in the vanguard of the anticolonialist movement.

In 1954 Great Britain, which had reoccupied Singapore in 1945, granted the colony a constitution and offered plans by which the partially enfranchised citizenry would elect a head of government. Later that year Lee helped to found the People’s Action Party, which was initially a left-wing, populist organization, and he was named the PAP’s secretary general. In 1955 he won election to the legislative assembly as the candidate from Tanjong Pagar, a district with a large population of poor people, after campaigning in English (he had begun studying Mandarin but was not yet fluent; he later also learned to speak Malay) on a platform that called for Singaporean self-rule. By adopting during the campaign a strategy that projected the PAP as a revolutionary party, he had solidified his support with students and trade unionists. To reach the goal of self-rule, after his election Lee collaborated with Singapore’s Communists.

During the next several years, Lee consolidated his position as leader of the PAP and gained control of the party’s central executive committee. According to an article by Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal (November 7, 1990), within a short time he succeeded in purging the PAP of Communist members, by resorting to Communist tactics: he instituted a “Leninist cell system,” whereby the executive committee would be chosen not by regular party members but by “a select, secret group of ‘cadre’ members,” who “would be appointed by the central committee. No longer could the PAP rank and file call its leaders directly to account.” “Essentially the same vehicle” existed three decades later, Rosett wrote: “In other words, Mr. Lee appoints the cadres, and they elect Mr. Lee.” Stan Sesser quoted Chan Heng Chee, a leading Singaporean political scientist who has served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN, as saying that “Singapore is the world’s only example of forming a united front with the Communists and defeating them.”

In 1959 Great Britain ended its occupation of Singapore, while retaining control of its defense and foreign affairs. Campaigning that year in the now self-governing country’s general elections, Lee and other PAP candidates continued to use left-wing, anticolonialist rhetoric, and the PAP won forty-three of the fifty-one seats that then constituted the assembly. The British governor Sir William Goode asked Lee to form a government, and on June 5, 1959 he was sworn into office as prime minister. He immediately chose his cabinet (which, with its company of intellectuals, became known as the cabinet of dons) and then announced a five-year plan that called for, among other measures, “the development of industry, … a reorganization of city administration, increased liberal and technical education, and the emancipation of women.” He also proclaimed the launching of a broad-ranging cleanup campaign in which jukeboxes, pinball machines, and all forms of pornography were banned. In an interview with Nathan Gardels for New Perspectives Quarterly (Winter 1992), Lee recalled, “As prime minister of Singapore, my first task was to lift my country out of the degradation that poverty, ignorance, and disease had wrought. Since it was dire poverty that made for such a low priority given to human life, all other things became secondary.”

In 1961 Abdul Rahman, called “the Tunku” (“prince”), the leader of Malaya, formally proposed that Singapore join Malaya, North Borneo (now called Sabah), and Sarawak to create the Federation of Malaysia. Lee wholeheartedly supported the plan. In his book The Battle for Merger (1961) and in a series of radio talks and in other arenas, he argued that the union would help bring about greater economic prosperity and political stability. (According to Stan Sesser, some Singaporeans suspected that his enthusiasm for the federation stemmed from the idea that he “might someday preside over the Malaysian federation himself.”) A referendum was held in 1962, and Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia in September 1963. As stipulated by the terms of the merger, Lee remained prime minister of the State of Singapore, but final authority over Singapore rested with Abdul Rahman.

Much ambiguity about the nature of the alliance remained after the federation was established. Long negotiations concerning economic, social, and cultural matters degenerated into a feud between Singapore and her partners about such matters as a proposed common market and Singapore’s financial contributions to the federation. The conflict intensified when Indonesia severed trade relations with Malaysia, an event that had especially harsh consequences for Singapore; it worsened with the outbreak of race riots between Malays and Chinese in Singapore and came to a head when ten members of the PAP sought seats in the Malaysian parliament in elections held in 1964. “By contesting those seats, we alarmed [Malay politicians],” Lee told Stan Sesser, “because they could see that we could organize and rally not only Chinese but also Indians and Malays in the towns.” On August 9, 1965, under pressure from Rahman, Singapore withdrew from the federation. In an emotional televised speech, Lee declared that all his life he had “believed in merger and unity of these two territories … its people connected by geography, economics, and ties of kinship,” and then, breaking into tears, he requested that the television cameras be turned off.

After the rupture Singapore faced formidable economic problems. “Most factories have cut production drastically,” a Time (January 7, 1966) article reported. “They are plagued by strike-prone unions [and] face increasingly stiff competition from aggressive and more experienced manufacturers in Hong Kong, Japan, and Formosa [now Taiwan]. Singapore may face insurmountable odds.” Those odds worsened after Great Britain announced in 1968 that in the following few years, it intended to withdraw all British defense forces from Singapore and, in the process, close a huge naval base and other facilities that, in total, accounted for what various sources have reported as one-tenth or as much as one-fifth of the island’s income.

Undaunted, Lee instituted an aggressive policy designed to entice business from abroad. Having recognized “very early on,” according to an article in Forbes (June 11, 1990) by former United States secretary of defense Caspar W. Weinberger, that “socialist economics do not work, and that a free-market economy will work if encouraged by a government that knows it can attract capital only if capital knows it will be rewarded,” he introduced free-trade policies and industry-friendly legislation, including laws aimed at holding labor unrest in check. He also oversaw major improvements in the nation’s infrastructure. In addition, proceeding in the conviction that “a country succeeds” by “picking] winners”—“You concentrate on those items, on those skills, on those products, which will sweep the market,” he was quoted as saying in the Economist (November 22,1986)—he promoted industries such as shipping, ship-repairing, shipbuilding, oil-rig construction, printing, and electronics, all of which indeed proved to be winners for Singapore, while avoiding industries that were “vulnerable to regional competition and Western protectionism.” (Years later, in 1979, the government put into place a “restructuring program” that was designed to discourage labor-intensive industries while keeping wages high.) By abolishing “many traditional impediments to the movement of capital,” as John Quirt noted in The New York Times (July 28,1974), Singapore also became an important center for international finance, and skyscrapers housing the offices of dozens of foreign banks came to replace the city’s quaint money-changing stalls.

By 1978 the per capita income in Singapore had grown to about $3,000 per year, a fivefold increase since 1960. According to the 1986 Economist article, the gross domestic product (GDP) in Singapore rose in real terms by an average of 9.4 percent annually between 1969 and 1979 and 8.5 percent between 1980 and 1984 despite global recessions and two energy crises. In 1985, in the midst of a recession that gripped nations on the rim of Asia and elsewhere, Singapore experienced an economic downturn after nearly two decades of uninterrupted growth. More than forty thousand jobs were lost before the economy began to recover in mid-1986. By 1989 the GDP per person (the population—currently 2.7 million—of the 210-square-mile main island is about 76 percent Chinese, 15 percent Malay, and 6 percent Indian, with Eurasians constituting most of the remainder) had reached $10,500, a figure topped in Asia only by Japan and the oil-rich kingdom of Brunei.

Meanwhile, early on in his regime, Lee spearheaded a variety of urban reforms. Singapore’s vast slums, in which thousands of people had lived in conditions of extreme squalor, were systematically bulldozed and replaced by blocks of uniform apartments equipped with such modern amenities as refrigerators. In 1974 Sydney H. Schanberg reported in The New York Times (June 7, 1974) that Singaporeans were “well dressed and well fed” and that most of them [seemed] satisfied with their lives.” In the early 1980s the United States Department of State estimated, as reported in its publication Background Notes: Singapore (May 1990), that the construction industry was responsible for “as much as 30 percent” of the country’s total economic growth, through the construction of housing complexes, airports, roads, and port facilities. According to Lewis M. Simons in the Atlantic (July 1991), “80 percent of the population are homeowners, thanks to mandatory participation in a superbly invested government fund.” Lee also introduced a program of universal health care.

On the political front, the withdrawal of the Socialist opposition from Parliament in 1966 left the PAP as the sole remaining party with legislative representation, and its power increased commensurately. In the 1968 elections the PAP won all fifty-eight seats in Parliament, with fifty-one of their candidates running unopposed. Repeats of that performance, in 1972, 1976, and 1980, while indicative to some extent of the popularity of Lee and the PAP in a period of remarkable growth, serve also as evidence of the government’s willingness to curb political dissent. Political prisoners were detained indefinitely, and in 1971 the government shut down two newspapers that voiced opposition to Lee’s policies.

At the same time, observers noted that life in Singapore was becoming more and more regimented. “Whichever way Singaporeans turn there is a uniformed organization waiting for them,” T. J. S. George reported in his book Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore (1973). Citing an array of police units, people’s defense corps, vigilante groups, and other patriotic associations, all of which helped to enforce bans on such things as long hair for men and the sale of Playboy magazine, George stated, “Together these organizations and activities reinforce the impression of a militant people dedicated to upholding high moralistic and nationalist values.” Through the years the government has imposed fines for such infractions as failing to flush public toilets, littering, and smoking in restaurants, government offices, or public conveyances.

In 1982, in another move to ensure that Singapore would remain strong and independent, Lee—who has continually urged his constituency to work hard and eschew moral laxity and excessive materialism-announced plans to revive the study of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese philosophical system of ethical precepts, in the nation’s schools. According to an article by Colin Campbell in The New York Times (May 20, 1982), Lee’s plans had grown out of his belief in the advantages of the tradition of the extended family, in which several generations live under the same roof, and his conviction that the trend toward the nuclear family must be reversed, because with the latter arrangement, in Lee’s words, “the survival chain is weakened and a civilized way of life is coarsened.” Within a few years Lee also set about improving Singapore’s “genetic outlook,” by taking steps to discourage poorly educated, low-income mothers from having more than one or two children and by other measures—such as the formation of the Social Development Unit, a government body that in effect runs a dating service—to encourage college-educated women to marry and produce several children.

During the early 1980s signs of social discontent, although mild, began to appear. The PAP won every seat in the legislature in the 1980 elections, but its share of the popular vote declined from a 1968 high of 84.4 percent to 75.5 percent. In a 1981 by-election, the PAP lost a seat in Parliament to the Workers’ Party candidate Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, and three years later it lost two seats in Parliament. In 1986 Jeyaretnam was jailed; later, based on a series of technicalities, he was banned from Parliament. Among other actions designed to stifle opposition, Lee’s government revoked the right to habeas corpus, forbade political activism by organizations that had not received express government approval, and restricted or banned certain publications, including the widely respected Far Eastern Economic Review. In 1987 twenty-two Singaporeans were arrested and charged with being party to a Marxist plot to overthrow the government, accusations widely considered to be as absurd as the detainees’ televised confessions. “Long regarded as an authoritarian state,” a 1989 report by the human rights organization Asia Watch declared, as quoted by Claudia Rosett, “Singapore has moved in the direction of totalitarianism as it succeeds in dismantling its civil society and the rule of law.” All the while, Lee dismissed criticisms of his actions. In a speech that he gave in April 1988 during a visit to the United States, for example, he said, “The American concept of the marketplace of ideas, instead of producing harmonious enlightenment, has, from time to time, led to riots and bloodshed.”

In August 1990 Lee Kuan Yew resigned from the position of prime minister of Singapore. He was succeeded by Goh Chok Tong, a longtime cabinet member. Lee became the cabinet’s senior minister, a change in title that in fact represented a lateral career move and not a diminution of power. Since then, in addition to his continued immersion in the affairs of Singapore, Lee has taken upon himself the role of international social critic. His sometimes scathing opinions of the United States were the focus of an interview with Fareed Zakaria for what turned into a much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994). After expressing admiration for, in his words, “the free, easy, and open relations between people [in the United States] regardless of social status, ethnicity, or religion” and “a certain openness in argument about what is good or bad for society; the accountability of public officials; none of the secrecy and terror that’s part and parcel of Communist government,” he said, “As a total system, I find parts of it totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public-in sum the breakdown of civil society.”

“The liberal, intellectual tradition that developed after World War II claimed that human beings had arrived at this perfect state where everybody would be better off if they were allowed to do their own thing and flourish,” Lee explained to Zakaria. “It has not worked out, and I doubt if it will.” In the same interview, he questioned the wisdom of the philosophy of one man, one vote. “I’m convinced … that [Singapore] would have a better system if we gave every man over the age of forty who has a family two votes because he’s likely to be more careful, voting also for his children. … At sixty they should go back to one vote,” he added, “but that will be difficult to arrange.”

In 1994 the clash between Eastern and Western values was epitomized in the case of Michael Fay, an American teenager living in Singapore, who was sentenced to be caned after confessing to various acts of vandalism, including spray-painting automobiles. Caning is intensely painful, and the imposition of the sentence provoked a storm of protest in the United States. Strong objections from the administration of President Bill Clinton led the Singaporean government to reduce the number of lashes Fay received from six to four. Lee Kuan Yew stoutly defended the use of corporal punishment. “I am an old-style Singaporean who believes that to govern you must have a certain moral authority,” he said during an interview for Time (May 9, 1994). “If we do not cane [Michael Fay] because he is an American, I believe we’ll lose our moral authority and our right to govern.”

In another incident that aroused the indignation of many Westerners, Singapore police interrogated Christopher Lingle, an American who had been teaching at the National University of Singapore, about an op-ed article that he wrote for the International Herald Tribune, which is owned jointly by The New York Times and the Washington Post. The article, which appeared in the Tribune’s October 7, 1994 issue, criticized what Lingle identified as “Asian states” as being “intolerant regimes” that suppress free speech, censor the media, and rely on “compliant judiciaries] to bankrupt opposition politicians.” Although the article did not mention Singapore (or any other country) specifically, the police warned Lingle that he might face criminal charges, and he left the country. Despite protests by the Clinton administration, in January 1995 a Singapore judge found Lingle, the Tribune, its publisher and editor, and its Singapore printer guilty of contempt of court and ordered them to pay thousands of dollars in fines and court costs. Although the International Herald Tribune published two apologies to Lee Kuan Yew, who claimed that he had been defamed by Lingle’s assertions, Lee filed libel suits against both Lingle and the newspaper.

When Lewis M. Simons interviewed Lee in 1991, he was “struck by how little he’d aged since [Simons] had first interviewed him, some twenty years earlier.” “His hair had turned white, and the pockmarked skin of his craggy face had smoothed out somewhat,” Simons wrote. “But his body was as trim and lithe as ever, dominated by a large head and a heavy, overhanging brow. Certainly his verbal combativeness has not diminished” Fareed Zakaria described Lee as being unlike any politician he had ever met—“there were no smiles, no jokes, no bonhomie”—and reported that he has “an inexpressive face but an intense gaze.” “The quickness and acuity of Lee’s mind are impressive to witness …,” Stan Sesser wrote; “several times, as I started to ask [him] a long question, he interrupted after only a few words, and he never failed to deduce just what I was going to say.” According to the 1986 Economist article, Lee’s “many strengths” include “a formidable self-discipline and the ability always to obey his head and not his heart.” Notwithstanding his lifelong respiratory allergies, Lee is an avid golfer, jogger, and swimmer. He has received many honorary degrees and awards, among them the Order of Sikatuna, from the Philippines, in 1974, and Most Honorable Order of Crown of Johore (First Class), from Malaysia, in 1984, and he was named an Honorary Freeman, City of London, in 1982.

Personal Life

Lee lived in Singapore, in a house that was described as modest, with his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, whom he married in 1950. As of 1991 Kwa Geok Choo headed the law firm of Lee and Lee along with Lee Kuan Yew’s brother, Dennis. The Lees are the parents of two sons and one daughter and have several grandchildren. Many observers have speculated that their older son, Lee Hsien Loong, a former brigadier general in the Singaporean army who has served as the minister for trade and industry in the nation’s cabinet and is currently the deputy prime minister, will someday follow in his father’s footsteps and become the prime minister of Singapore.

Lee died of pneumonia on March 23, 2015. A week of national mourning was observed in Singapore, with community tributes around the island.

Further Reading