What"s the big idea?

BY A remarkable and entirely appropriate coincidence, September 16th marks both the date of Singapore’s full independence from Britain in 1963 and the birthday of Lee Kuan Yew, who has just turned 90. Mr Lee, Singapore’s prime minister at the time and until 1990, remained in the cabinet until 2011, is still a member of parliament and, internationally, is Singapore’s best-known and most influential politician.

The 50th anniversary of independence was not celebrated in Singapore. It marked the beginning of its unhappy, short-lived membership of the Malaysian Federation. August 9th, 1965, when Singapore struck out alone, is hailed as National Day, from when the country counts its birth.

Mr Lee’s 90th birthday, however, has not gone unnoticed. The media have been full of tributes. Mr Lee has always eschewed a personality cult—even when he was prime minister, his photograph did not adorn public buildings—and he long refused to allow any building or institution to bear his name. He said he had visited too many countries where the names of former leaders were being erased from public places. But he relented after he turned 80. So it was perhaps also appropriate that the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy should mark its ninth birthday and Mr Lee’s 90th by holding a day-long conference on his “Big Ideas”.

It brought together former officials, politicians, diplomats and others who had worked with him. They came to praise him—understandably enough. Singapore is, by almost any reckoning, a success story: prosperous, stable, orderly, efficient, clean, largely free of corruption and playing an influential international role out of all proportion to its tiny size and a population of just 5.3m. And even Lee Kuan Yew’s fiercest critics would find it hard to argue that none of this is thanks to his leadership.

His leadership, however, was less about “big ideas” than a big personality. He is, as many speakers noted, a pragmatist and empiricist. Like Deng Xiaoping he is interested less in theory than in what works, and has often been prepared to change his ideas when the facts change.

So the conference was more interesting for the glimpses it gave of the man himself, rather than insights into “Lee Kuan Yew-ism”. Of all the fond reminiscences and laudatory anecdotes heard through the day the one that most struck me came from S.R. Nathan, a former president. In May 1976, as a diplomat, he had accompanied Mr Lee on his first official visit to China. He described a sticky encounter with China’s prime minister, Hua Guofeng, who later that year was to succeed Chairman Mao when he died.

Mr Hua presented Mr Lee with a copy of Neville Maxwell’s book “India’s China War”, a revisionist, pro-China history of the two neighbours’ 1962 hostilities. Mr Hua said this was the “correct” version of the war. Mr Lee handed the book back, saying : “Mr Prime Minister, this is your version of the war. There is another version, the Indian version. And in any case I am from South-East Asia—it’s nothing to do with us.” Mr Nathan recalled that there was silence for a while: presumably a rather awkward one.

This shows astonishing nerve for the leader of a tiny country in a meeting with a huge regional power. In fact, in his memoirs Mr Lee recalls other tense exchanges that trip: over his attempt to get Mr Hua to disavow support for South-East Asian communists; and over Mr Hua’s complaints about Singapore’s military links with Taiwan. Yet within a few years Mr Lee was to become the foreign politician admired perhaps above any other by Chinese leaders—from Deng all the way to the present leader, Xi Jinping.

Deng noticed how good “social order” was in Singapore. To the extent that Mr Lee went in for “big ideas”, this was certainly one of them. Another was the importance of the rule of law. But order came first. As he noted as early as 1962 “without order, the operation of law is impossible.” So Singapore’s imposes harsh punishments—including caning and the death penalty—for some crimes, and retains a draconian act allowing detention without trial of those deemed a threat to national security.

Tommy Koh, one of Singapore’s leading former diplomats and scholars, who moderated some of the conference, raised two of the common criticisms of Singapore, pointing out that they do not come just from foreigners. One is of the provisions of Internal Security Act. It is very hard to see what threat some of those detained under it in the past could have posed. Another is of Mr Lee’s habit of celebrating an election victory not with a magnanimous word of consolation to the opposition he had just trounced, but with a lawsuit for defamation, always leading to a legal victory for Mr Lee and sometimes to bankruptcy for the loser.

Mr Koh did not challenge Mr Lee’s legal justification in doing this, but asked whether, in the bigger picture, he was right. He did not really get an answer.

On a day designed to celebrate Mr Lee’s achievements some time was also devoted to the difficulties Singapore now faces, for which he must bear some responsibility, too. The biggest, in his own eyes, is the low birth rate—far below replacement level—meaning Singapore has to rely on immigrants, which is causing some resentment.

Another is that, even now, more than two decades after he stepped down as prime minister, and even though his own son now holds that office, people worry about what Singapore will be like without him.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

What"s the big idea?