Founder of modern Singapore whose austere rule turned the island state from a colonial trading post into an 'Asian tiger'
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5:50PM GMT 23 Mar 2015
Lee Kuan Yew visiting a housing project Photo: Time Life Pictures
Lee Kuan Yew, who has died aged 91, was the creator of modern Singapore and the outstanding Asian statesman of his generation.
A brilliant legal scholar, formidable political organiser and powerful orator in several languages, Lee became prime minister of Singapore aged 35 in 1959, under the last British governorship, and remained in power until his chosen retirement date more than 30 years later. He led the island state to independence as part of Malaysia in 1963, and as a nation in its own right two years later.
Throughout his premiership — and afterwards, as “senior minister” then “minister mentor” — he imposed his austere, incorruptible and often prickly persona on Singapore life. Stability and economic progress were, for him, unequivocally higher priorities than western notions of freedom. Those who criticised him from abroad often found themselves sued for defamation; those who dared to oppose him domestically were overpowered by every legalistic means at his government’s disposal.
The result was the transformation of Singapore from a mosquito-ridden colonial trading post and military base to a proud and prosperous — if somewhat antiseptic — “Asian tiger”, with the ninth highest per capita income in the world.
Lee Kuan Yew was born in Singapore on September 16 1923, into a family of Hakka Chinese descent — the Hakka are a tough northern tribe, and despite being a fourth-generation Singaporean, Lee believed himself physiologically better suited to cold climates than tropical ones. His great-grandfather left Guangdong province in China for Singapore at the age of 16, made money as a trader and returned to his homeland, leaving behind a son who became a pharmacist . Lee Kuan Yew’s father was a storekeeper for the Shell oil company, and later worked in a jewellery shop.
The given name Kuan Yew means “light that shines far and wide”, but to his family and friends Lee was known as Harry. As a child he spoke English, Malay and Cantonese, and was educated almost entirely in English; while prime minister he applied himself to learning Mandarin and Hokkien as well.
The Queen and Lee Kuan Yew during an official tour of Singapore (Getty)
He was educated at Raffles Institution, Singapore’s most exclusive school, where he was the top scholar of his year. His ambition to go straight to university in England was interrupted by the outbreak of war in Europe, so he took up a scholarship to Raffles College, the forerunner of the University of Singapore. He was a student there at the time of the British capitulation to the Japanese in 1942.
The brutality of the Japanese was seminal in the formation of Lee’s political views. He narrowly avoided the fate of other Chinese youths who were rounded up on lorries by Japanese troops to be taken to the beach, forced to dig their own graves, then shot. On one occasion as he tried to cross a bridge, a Japanese sentry thrust the bayonet of his rifle through the brim of Lee’s hat, slapped him, made him kneel, then sent him sprawling with a kick. This and many other humiliations to which he was witness made him “determined to work for freedom from servitude and foreign domination”.
Black market trader
Nevertheless he set to learning Japanese, and in due course found work as a translator of news bulletins for the Hodubo, or propaganda department. In the later stages of the war he also operated as a black market trader and ran a venture making stationery gum, under the brand name “Stikfas”.
In September 1945, Lee was among the crowds who watched the Japanese surrender ceremony from the padang outside Singapore’s City Hall, and a year later he was at last able to leave for England to take up a place at the London School of Economics. He sailed on the troop ship Britannic — and was shocked by the promiscuity of returning British servicemen and women, whom he observed in large numbers “unashamedly making love on the lifeboat deck”.
In his single term at the LSE Lee fell briefly under the Left-wing influence of Harold Laski — but he hated his cold, lonely bedsit in Swiss Cottage, and swiftly arranged to move to Fitzwilliam House at Cambridge. There he was much happier, all the more so because he was able to arrange a place at Girton for his fiancée Kwa Geok Choo — who had been the only pupil at Raffles Institution to out-score him, to his horror, in English and economics exams.
Lee addressing a May Day rally (Photo: Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty)
The couple married secretly at Stratford-upon-Avon registry office in December 1947. Lee took up golf, pipe-smoking and motorcycling, joined the university’s Labour Club, and built up a network of contacts among Malay student activists, including the future prime minister of Malaysia, Tunku (Prince) Abdul Rahman.
Lee and Choo both took Firsts in Law . The couple then took off to Tintagel in Cornwall, in preference to a winter in London, to read for their Bar exams, and Lee had time off to campaign for a friend, David Widdicombe (later a High Court judge) as the Labour parliamentary candidate for Totnes.
In June 1950, Lee and Choo were called to the bar by Middle Temple and in September, after returning to Singapore, they were officially married. Both joined a local law practice, Laycock & Ong, before in due course setting up their own firm, Lee & Lee, of which Choo was to be a senior partner (with Lee’s brother Dennis) throughout her husband’s political career.
Lee made a name for himself not at the criminal bar but as a legal adviser to many of Singapore’s trade unions, notably during a strike by postal workers. In 1953 he also successfully defended a student journal against charges of sedition. By now he was at the heart of ferment against continuing British rule, and in 1954 — with Tunku Abdul Rahman’s support — he and his cohorts announced the formation of the People’s Action Party, which was to be Lee’s power base for the rest of his life.
Lee Kuan Yew in 1969 (Photo: Michael Stroud/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The PAP’s first manifesto called for independence for a unified Malaya and Singapore, the repeal of emergency legislation imposed by the British in response to communist violence in Malaya, and universal adult suffrage. In the elections for a new, partially representative Legislative Assembly in 1955, Lee — despite a fundamental aversion to communism — solicited all shades of Left-wing support. The PAP won three seats, including one for Lee, who emerged as the leading voice of opposition to the ineffectual and short-lived Labour Front administration led by David Marshall.
In the period of disorder that followed, many Communist PAP members were arrested and Lee gradually manoeuvred them out of influence. By 1958 the British had cleared the way towards full self-government under a new constitution, and Lee was preparing his bid for power.
In the 1959 Assembly elections, the PAP triumphed (despite the arrest of several of its candidates) with 53 per cent of the vote and 43 out of 51 seats. When the party’s executive met to choose a prime minister, Lee won out — by the casting vote of the chairman — over his chief rival Ong Eng Guan, the populist mayor of Singapore.
He took office on June 3 1959, and the veteran BBC journalist Anthony Lawrence observed of one of his first press conferences: “The deep impression he left was of a hard-headed, no-nonsense popular leader, and of a man it would be very dangerous to cross. I never saw anyone so lacking in joviality, so in command of a situation.”
Campaigns against corruption
Although the British governor, Sir William Goode, retained control of Singapore’s defence and foreign policies, Lee immediately established the tone of the domestic policies which were to prevail from then on. Ministers were ordered to be at their desks in shirt sleeves by 8am and civil servants were ordered to be more civil. Campaigns were launched against corruption and immorality, and newspapers were warned not to be subversive.
Lee’s long-term strategic goal was always independence for Singapore: any union with Malaya was bound to be dominated by what Lee saw as an indolent, feudal-minded Malay elite, determined to keep the more industrious Straits Chinese in a subordinate role. Nevertheless he saw partnership with Malaya, or “freedom through merger”, as the path to his goal, and signed a pact to that effect with Tunku Abdul Rahman in 1961.
Lee Kuan Yew on June 5 1959 after winning the elections in Singapore; the People's Action Party symbol is visible in the background (Photo: Terence Khoo/AFP/Getty Images)
The move provoked a split of the PAP, whose Left-wing elements broke away to campaign for a separate, socialist Singapore: Lee responded by putting more than a hundred of them in jail.
Malaysia, incorporating the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo as well as Singapore, came into being in September 1963, provoking armed hostility from Indonesia’s President Sukarno and rioting in the streets of Singapore. From the start it was an uncomfortable marriage of interests. Lee — whose fluency and dynamism as a leader had already made him a celebrity on the world stage — spoke out abroad against the anti-progressive policies of the federal government in Kuala Lumpur, while expressing tenuous loyalty at home.
Jekyll and Hyde
One fellow minister compared him to Jekyll and Hyde, while Tunku Abdul Rahman observed that “there cannot be two prime ministers in one nation”. Within less than two years, the Tunku decided it was time to ask Singapore to withdraw from the federation, having “ceased to give even a measure of loyalty to the central government”.
At a press conference after the announcement of the split, proceedings were held up for 15 minutes while Lee wept openly, declaring that he had spent all his adult life working for the unity of Singapore and Malaya. Singapore became a republic in its own right on August 9 1965.
Another upheaval came three years later, when Harold Wilson announced — contrary to earlier pledges — his cabinet’s intention to abandon Britain’s remaining military presence “east of Suez” and to close (in 1971) the Singapore base which employed 50,000 local civilians and contributed a fifth of the island’s national income. Lee was furious, threatening to invite the Japanese to take over the dockyard and to withdraw Singapore’s sterling balances from London.
But having accepted the inevitability of the decision, he made the British departure the catalyst for a massive redevelopment which was the foundation of the modern Singapore economy. A state-owned shipbuilding and repair company took over the naval base; British, American and Japanese manufacturers — attracted by low wage rates and ruthless repression of union militancy — were encouraged to build high-tech factories; a crop of foreign banks and new hotels followed. Soulless but spotlessly hygienic public housing projects replaced barrack blocks, shophouses and shanty towns. In the consumer boom of the 1980s, glittering (and largely tax-free) shopping malls attracted the millions of tourists who passed through the island’s vast, immaculate airport at Changi, once the site of the notorious Japanese prison camp. The economy grew at a phenomenal rate, with full employment year after year.
Enforced obedience
Prosperity, and relative harmony in a melting pot of Chinese, Malay and Tamil racial groups, came at a price which Singaporeans were on the whole content to pay. The price was an absence of anything resembling free political debate, and enforced obedience to Lee Kuan Yew’s all-encompassing diktats on personal behaviour. Singaporeans were subject to fines for spitting, swearing, not flushing public lavatories, or allowing standing water in their gardens to attract mosquitoes.
To discourage the western hippy culture which Lee despised, neither Singaporeans not visiting tourists were allowed to wear their hair over their collars. Drug traffickers and armed robbers were regularly hanged, but in general crime (other than stock market shenanigans, which were endemic) was almost non-existent. Reflecting Lee’s belief in elitism, and in social engineering verging on eugenics, the brightest Singaporean students were sent on “love cruises” to find partners of similar IQ with whom to breed.
As for political opposition, Lee permitted it to exist but made it as difficult as possible. One agitator, Chia Thye Poh, was imprisoned under the Internal Security Act for 32 years. J B Jeyaratnam, the leader of the Workers’ Party and for some years the sole opposition MP, was subjected to a barrage of legal ploys which included fraud charges, a defamation suit forced bankruptcy and finally disbarment from parliament.
When Devan Nair — a Leftist co-founder of the PAP who became president of Singapore in 1981 — fell out of favour, he was hounded from office by allegations of alcoholism and womanising, and left to live in Canada — where Lee later sued the Globe & Mail for suggesting he had conducted a character assassination of Nair.
Singapore’s student associations were banned not only from political activity but even from staging rag weeks. Academics were dismissed from their university posts if they spoke out of turn, and one visiting professor was charged with contempt for making reference to “a compliant judiciary”.
Lawyers who defended oppositionists in court were themselves at risk of prosecution — as were Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roman Catholic activists suspected of being “Marxist conspirators”.
Uncritical press
In the latter case, Lee sued the Far Eastern Economic Review for implying that he had been intolerant. On another occasion he sued the International Herald Tribune for saying that he planned a dynastic succession for his son.
Yet Lee was never a tyrant. He believed in the rule of law, though he used it as a blunt instrument in merciless pursuit of his suspected enemies. His authoritarian instincts were mitigated by intellectual rigour, patent incorruptibility and a modest personal lifestyle.
At the end of the working day in the Istana, his official quarters, he returned to his plain family home nearby; he ate sparingly, rarely drank anything stronger than tea, and allowed himself no distractions except golf. Lee often expressed contempt for the decline of western moral fibre, yet he retained an admiration for the colonialists of earlier generations, including Singapore’s founder, Sir Stamford Raffles. After one diatribe by Lee on the rotten state of modern England at a garden party in honour of the visiting foreign secretary, George Brown, in the late 1960s, Brown replied, “Harry, you’re the finest Englishman east of Suez”, leaving Lee momentarily lost for words. He was made an honorary Companion of Honour by the Queen in 1970, and was appointed honorary GCMG in 1972.
Relations with Thatcher
During the 1980s, Lee and Margaret Thatcher developed a mutual respect which overcame the gaps between their philosophies. Thatcher sought Lee’s advice at Commonwealth conferences and on her dealings with Beijing's communist leadership over Hong Kong: it was Lee’s view that although authoritarianism was engrained in the Chinese character, communism was not, and would not endure. Lee finally stood down as prime minister in November 1990, handing over to his loyal deputy, Goh Chok Tong. As senior minister without portfolio, the semi-retired Lee ranked second in cabinet seniority. He remained in the cabinet until 2011, for the last seven years with the new title of “minister mentor”.
Lee Kuan Yew in 2013 (AP Photo)
He said that he wanted to “spend the rest of my life making sure that what I have done is not a waste of time”. He also applied himself — mostly at night, until three or four in the morning — to writing two weighty volumes of memoirs, The Singapore Story.
Old age
World leaders continued to pay homage to him in old age. He in turn did not hold back either from criticising his own successors or expressing himself trenchantly on the great issues of the day. In 1992, addressing a gathering of worthies at Hong Kong University, he subjected the new Governor, Chris Patten, to a withering attack on his proposals for democratic reform. “I have never believed that democracy brings progress,” he said. “I know it to have brought regression. I watch it year by year, and it need not have been thus.”
A vigorous and uncompromising presence on the world stage for half a century, Lee Kuan Yew commanded universal respect; in Singapore itself, respect turned in later years to genuine affection for a stern but dedicated father of his nation.
Lee’s wife Choo died in 2010. They had two sons and a daughter. Their elder son, Lee Hsien Loong, a Cambridge scholar and a former brigadier general in the Singapore Armed Forces, succeeded Goh Chok Tong as Singapore’s prime minister in August 2004.
Lee Kuan Yew, born Sept 16 1923, died March 23 2015
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