Mr. Lee Kuan Yew,
the founding father and first prime minister of Singapore who transformed the volatile
ethnic mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians tiny island outpost into one of the
wealthiest and least corrupt countries in Asia, died on Monday morning. He was
aged 91.
“Mr. Lee passed away peacefully at the
Singapore General Hospital today at 3:18 am.”
Mr. Lee was prime
minister from 1959, until 1990, when he stepped down. The nation, reflected the
man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and
pragmatic.
“We are
ideology-free,” Mr. Lee, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what
had become, in effect, Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s
try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try
another one.”
“To understand Singapore and why it is what it
is, you’ve got to start off with the fact that it’s not supposed to exist and
cannot exist,” he said in the 2007 interview. “To begin with, we don’t have the
ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors: a homogeneous population,
common language, common culture and common destiny. So, history is a long time.
I’ve done my bit.”
The commentator
Cherian George described Mr. Lee’s leadership as “a unique combination of
charisma and fear.”
Mr. Lee was a
master of “Asian values,” a concept in which the good of society took
precedence over the rights of the individual and citizens ceded some autonomy
in return for paternalistic rule.
Generally passive
in political affairs, Singaporeans sometimes chide themselves as being overly
preoccupied with a comfortable lifestyle, which they sum up as the “Five C’s” —
cash, condo, car, credit card, country club.
Even among people
who knew little of Singapore, Mr. Lee was famous for his national
self-improvement campaigns, which urged people to do such things as smile,
speak good English and flush the toilet, but never to spit, chew gum or throw
garbage off balconies.
In his memoirs,
“From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000.” Mr. Lee said,“But I
was confident that we would have the last laugh. We would have been a grosser,
ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts.”
He was proud to
describe himself as a political street fighter more feared than loved.
“Nobody doubts
that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a
cul-de-sac,” he said in 1994. “If you think you can hurt me more than I can
hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.”
In a policy
intended to remove the temptation for corruption, Singapore linked the salaries
of ministers, judges and top civil servants to those of leading professionals
in the private sector, making them some of the highest-paid government
officials in the world.
Mr. Lee also
promoted the use of English as the language of business and the common tongue
among the ethnic groups, while recognizing Malay, Chinese and Tamil as other
official languages.
Despite his
success, Mr. Lee said that he sometimes had trouble sleeping and that he calmed
himself each night with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra:
“Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”
Lee Kuan Yew, who
was sometimes known by his English name, Harry Lee, was born in Singapore on
Sept. 16, 1923, to a fourth-generation, middle-class Chinese family.
He worked as a
translator and engaged in black market trading during the Japanese occupation
in World War II, then went to Britain, where he earned a law degree in 1949
from Cambridge University. In 1950 he married Kwa Geok Choo, a fellow law
student from Singapore. She died in 2010.
Besides the prime
minister, Mr. Lee is survived by his younger son, Lee Hsien Yang, who is the
chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore; a daughter, Dr. Lee Wei
Ling, who runs the National Neuroscience Institute; a younger brother, Suan
Yew; and a younger sister, Monica.
Ho Ching, the
wife of the prime minister, is executive director and chief executive of
Temasek Holdings, a government holding company.
In the 2010
interview with The Times, though, he took a reflective, valedictory tone.
“I’m not saying
that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honorable
purpose,” he said. “I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without
trial.”
He said he was
not a religious man and that he dealt with setbacks by simply telling himself,
“Well, life is just like that.”
Mr. Lee
maintained a careful diet and exercised for most of his life, but he admitted
to feeling the signs of age and to a touch of weariness at the self-imposed
rigor of his life.
“I’m reaching 87,
trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it
worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front.
It’s become my habit. So I just carry on.”
#singapore
