Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, and Ali Wyne on Lee Kuan Yew’s Predictions for China’s Future
News
January 30, 2013
Cover image, Time Magazine, Feb. 4, 2013 international edition
Time magazine’s Feb. 4, 2013 international edition published an extensive excerpt from the new book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, Feb. 1, 2013), by Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, with Ali Wyne.
The book draws on their in-depth interviews with Lee and his voluminous writings and speeches. The excerpt in Time distills Lee’s strategic insights about the future of China.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than a half century on the world stage. He has served as a mentor to every Chinese leader from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, and as a counselor to every U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. With his uniquely authoritative perspective on the geopolitics of East and West, Lee does not pull his punches.
The sage of Singapore Lee's steely micromanagement of the Lion City brought out some of the worst in him; his geopolitical thought--incisive, prescient and at times brilliantly framed--some of the best
Lee Kuan Yew hails from a very small country, but, for decades, he has been a very big man — at home and on the world stage. During more than a half-century of public life, including some 30 years as Prime Minister, Lee transformed Singapore from a simple trader of commodities into a sophisticated hub of finance and technology — The Little Red Dot, as many of its people affectionately call it.
A stern, patriarchal figure, Lee realized his ambitions for Singapore through the sheer force of his personality, buttressed by an unapologetic conviction that he knew best. The same qualities that influenced his finer policies affected his worse ones too. Single-mindedness, for example, could become heavy-handedness. The stain on Lee's standing is that, in the controlled experiment of molding a society in his own severe image, he marginalized social liberties both sacred and mundane: from expressing dissent to chewing gum.
That dark side will undoubtedly color Lee's legacy. Yet he has always had too much vision to be limited to tiny Singapore, or to be your run-of-the-mill strongman. Lee possesses an ability to interpret the past, understand the present and divine the future. The more enduring, and endearing, part of him is the globalist long sought out by national leaders and corporate titans for his counsel on the way of the world.
“Lee's powerful intellect is captured in a new book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World. It's a collection of interviews with him by Harvard University professor Graham Allison, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Robert Blackwill and Harvard's Belfer Center researcher Ali Wyne, while also drawing on other selected and cited writings by and about Lee. Now 89, officially retired and somewhat frail, Lee has mellowed with age — not unlike his creation Singapore, governed today with a lighter touch even as its citizens grow more vocal. Yet, as the book, and the adaptation here of the China chapter, reveal, Lee is as sharp, direct and prescient as ever. Though the volume was completed before China's current territorial tensions with its neighbors, it helps expose, and explain, Beijing's hardball mind-set. Over the years Lee has been called many things — unflattering as well as admiring. But perhaps the single most fitting description is: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.”
An excerpt from Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World:
Are Chinese leaders serious about displacing the United States as the number-one power in Asia in the foreseeable future and in the world thereafter?
Of course. Why not? They have transformed a poor society by an economic miracle to become now the second-largest economy in the world—on track, as Goldman Sachs has predicted, to become the world’s largest economy. They have followed the American lead in putting people in space and shooting down satellites with missiles. Theirs is a culture four thousand years old with 1.3 billion people, with a huge and very talented pool to draw from. How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia, and in time the world?
Today, China is growing at rates unimaginable fifty years ago, a dramatic transformation no one predicted. The Chinese people have raised their expectations and aspirations. Every Chinese wants a strong and rich China, a nation as prosperous, advanced, and technologically competent as America, Europe, and Japan. This reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.
Unlike other emergent countries, China wants to be China and accepted as such, not as an honorary member of the West. The Chinese will want to share this century as coequals with the United States.
How will China’s behavior toward other countries change if China becomes the dominant Asian power?
At the core of their mindset is their world before colonization and the exploitation and humiliation that brought. In Chinese, “China” means “Middle Kingdom,” recalling a world in which they were dominant in the region, when other states related to them as supplicants to a superior and vassals came to Beijing bearing tribute.
The concern of America is what kind of world they will face when China is able to contest their preeminence. Many medium and small countries in Asia are also concerned. They are uneasy that China may want to resume the imperial status it had in earlier centuries and have misgivings about being treated as vassal states having to send tribute to China as they used to in past centuries.
They tell us that countries big or small are equal; we are not a hegemon. But when we do something they do not like, they say you have made 1.3 billion people unhappy. So please know your place.
What is China’s strategy for becoming number one?
The Chinese have concluded that their best strategy is to build a strong and prosperous future, and use their huge and increasingly highly skilled and educated workers to outsell and outbuild all others. They will avoid any action that will sour relations with the United States. To challenge a stronger and technologically superior power will abort their “peaceful rise.”
China will not reach the American level in terms of military capabilities any time soon but is rapidly developing asymmetrical means to deter US military power. China understands that its growth depends on imports, including energy, raw materials, and food. China also needs open sea lanes.
The Chinese have calculated that they need thirty to forty—maybe fifty—years of peace and quiet to catch up, build up their system, and change it from the communist system to the market system. They must avoid the mistakes made by Germany and Japan.
Their competition for power, influence, and resources led in the last century to two terrible wars. I believe the Chinese leadership has learned that if you compete with America in armaments you will lose. You will bankrupt yourself. So, avoid it, keep your head down, and smile for forty or fifty years.
What are the major hurdles in executing that strategy?
Internally, the chief challenges are culture, language, an inability to attract and integrate talent from other countries, and, in time, governance.
Even if China were as open to talented immigrants as the United States, how can one go there and integrate into society without a mastery of Chinese? Chinese is a very difficult language to learn—monosyllabic and tonal. One can learn conversational Chinese after a few years, but it is very difficult to be able to read quickly. I do not know if China will be able to overcome the language barrier and the attendant difficulty in recruiting outside talent unless it makes English the dominant language, as Singapore has. Children there learn Chinese first. Then they learn English. They might go to the United States as a teenager and become fluent, but they have four thousand years of Chinese epigrams in their head.
China will inevitably catch up to the United States in absolute GDP. But its creativity may never match America’s, because its culture does not permit a free exchange and contest of ideas. How else to explain how a country with four times as many people as America—and presumably four times as many talented people—does not come up with technological breakthroughs?
Technology is going to make their system of governance obsolete. By 2030, 70% or maybe 75% of their people will be in cities, small towns, big towns, megabig towns. They are going to have cell phones, Internet, satellite TV. They are going to be well informed; they can organize themselves. You cannot govern them the way you are governing them now where you just placate and monitor a few people because the numbers will be so large.
How do China's leaders see the U.S. role in Asia changing as China becomes No. 1?
The leadership recognizes that as the leading power in the region for the seven decades since World War II, the U.S. has provided a stability that allowed unprecedented growth for many nations including Japan, the Asian tigers and China itself. China knows that it needs access to U.S. markets, U.S. technology, opportunities for Chinese students to study in the U.S. and to bring back to China new ideas about new frontiers. It therefore sees no profit in confronting the U.S. in the next 20 to 30 years in a way that could jeopardize these benefits. Rather, its strategy is to grow within this framework, biding its time until it becomes strong enough to successfully redefine this political and economic order.
What impact is China's rise having on its neighbors in Asia?
China's strategy for Southeast Asia is fairly simple: China tells the region, "Come grow with me." At the same time, China's leaders want to convey the impression that China's rise is inevitable and that countries will need to decide if they want to be China's friend or foe. China is also willing to calibrate its engagement to get what it wants or express its displeasure.
Will China become a democracy?
No, China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. Of that I am quite sure, and the Chinese intelligentsia also understands that. If you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China for democracy, you are wrong. Where are the students of Tiananmen now? They are irrelevant. The Chinese people want a revived China. Can it be a parliamentary democracy? This is a possibility in the villages and small towns. The Chinese fear chaos and will always err on the side of caution. It will be a long evolutionary process, but it is possible to contemplate such changes. Transportation and communications have become so much faster and cheaper. The Chinese people will be exposed to other systems and cultures and know other societies through travel, through the Internet and through smart phones.
One thing is for sure: the present system will not remain unchanged for the next 50 years. To achieve the modernization of China, her communist leaders are prepared to try every method, except for democracy with one person and one vote in a multiparty system. Their two main reasons are their belief that the Communist Party of China must have a monopoly on power to ensure stability and their deep fear of instability in a multiparty free-for-all, which would lead to a loss of control by the center over the provinces. To ask China to become a democracy, when in its 5,000 years of recorded history it never counted heads — all rulers ruled by right of being the emperor; if you disagree, you chop off heads, not count heads.
How should one assess new Communist Party chief Xi Jinping?
He has had a tougher life than [his predecessor] Hu Jintao. His father was rusticated, and so was he. He took it in stride, and worked his way up. It has not been smooth sailing for him. His life experiences must have hardened him. He is reserved — not in the sense that he will not talk to you, but in the sense that he will not betray his likes and dislikes. There is always a pleasant smile on his face, whether or not you have said something that annoyed him. He has iron in his soul, more than Hu Jintao, who ascended the ranks without experiencing the trials and tribulations that Xi endured. He is a person with enormous emotional stability who does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect his judgment. He is impressive.
Adapted from Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World. Interviews and selections by Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, with Ali Wyne. To be published by The MIT Press, February 2013. © 2013 Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. All rights reserved.
Source: Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, and Ali Wyne on Lee Kuan Yew’s Predictions for China’s Future
More sites for Lee Kuan Yew:
http://leewatch.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-publications/vbt/index/allison-lee-kuan-yew
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/02/13/insights-from-asias-senior-statesman-lee-kuan-yew
