A professor at the National University of Singapore once told me that everybody, including Lee Kuan Yew’s enemies, will cry if and when he finally dies. “Whether you like it or not, he has been such an integral part of Singapore,” he said. “You will cry too, trust me.” Underpinning such an assumption is how Lee Kuan Yew has been such a force in Singapore, that his influence on our lives and emotions has been so carnal that it has reified into the subconscious of most Singaporeans.

Let me disclose up front that I have, at best, a grudging respect for the man’s single-mindedness in governing Singapore through the 1960s and beyond. But I wish his achievements came without the baggage of his methodical removal of his political opponents back in his day. I’d always believed that what a person says tells us a lot about him, as much it helps us understand the things he/she is talking about… and American journalist, Charlie Rose’s latest chat with Lee Kuan Yew here is a classic exemplification of that truism. Here’s my take on their conversation.

  1. On all things Singapore: You have really got to admire Rose’s interviewing technique. Whether it’s a rapport developed from having interviewed Lee twice before, or otherwise, it is wonderful to watch Rose press Lee when the elderly statesman tried to dodge Rose’s question about his authoritarian tendencies. The Online Citizen provides a nice transcript of that portion of the hour-long interview, which I reproduce here:

    CHARLIE ROSE: You’ve never had a moment where you thought Singapore was too authoritative did you? Not one moment?

    LEE KUAN YEW: My job was to get the place going and get everybody a decent life and a decent education. And we’re now the best educated people in the whole of east Asia. Our universities — we got three, four universities, fourth one coming up.

    CHARLIE ROSE: So the end justifies the means whatever it might be?

    LEE KUAN YEW: No. The ends were laudable. Everybody wants the same ends. Everybody wants good education and good health.

    CHARLIE ROSE: A good life and their children to do better than they did.

    LEE KUAN YEW: The means — I had the consent and support of the population. If they opposed me and they did not cooperate, it wouldn’t have worked.  

    CHARLIE ROSE: You were in control of everything.

    LEE KUAN YEW: No.

    CHARLIE ROSE: Yes you were, you know that.

    (LAUGHTER)

    Lee also talked about how America attracts the most adventurous and the most hardworking… which brought me back to his (almost annual) observation of the brain drain of those born and bred in Singapore to countries in the West when he expressed skepticism about China’s attempts to woo back its former citizens who’ve migrated to the West. Lee said that even if these people do return, their children, who might have been born and raised in America, would be unaccustomed to the lack of freedom in China and choose to return to America. This guy knows exactly why Singapore is bleeding so many of its young and brightest, but he’s not about to do anything about it other than his annual ritual of lamenting such a reality.

    Contrary to some online chatter about Lee’s “false humility,” his nervous laughter suggests otherwise. He is backpaddling fast and is probably trying to avoid losing his temper on air because unlike TV interviewers in Singapore, American journalists, certainly not experienced, no-nonsense hands such as Charlie Rose, do not buckle under pressure. They can stand their ground and still not lose their cool even under pressure from such a forceful character as Lee. But Rose’s artistry is evident in how he presses and then decides to let go because he knows he has forced Lee to react in a way that substantiates his point about his authoritarian past.

  2. On Singapore as an inspiration and model for China’s capitalist development: The Deng Xiaoping story was repeated here… of how he visited Singapore and then returned to China to tell people to replicate the Singapore model in China… and surpass the Little Red Dot in Southeast Asia. China being a gazillion times larger than Singapore, Deng’s 12 special economic zones were therefore an attempt to create multiplicities of Singapore in different urban areas in China. Today, Singapore’s universities continue to host a flood of middle management government officials from China in various public-policy related courses taught in both English and Mandarin.
  3. On US-China relations: I thought Lee really showed his real mettle when he started talking about US-China relations. Lee said China’s rise globally is inevitable, so it is in America’s interest to make China feel like an equal member of the global power elite when this reality eventually comes to pass. But Lee made it clear that while China is in ascendancy now, it isn’t quite “there” yet. But in the meantime, the current generation of Chinese leaders whose second language is mostly Russian, Lee said, had suffered a lot under Mao… so Americans have to understand their survival mentality and accommodate that, for now. At least until the next generation of Chinese leaders take over – who would be different because they would have been educated in America and Britain and have English as their second language. This, Lee said, would be the time when China finally matures on the world stage and lead to a transformation of US-China relations, possibly characterized by increased levels of mutual trust and a sense that both their futures depend on each other prospering. It is therefore not in China’s interest to go into war because that would set their progress back by 50 years, he said.

    Also, while it used to be very self-contained and didn’t need to care about the world, China will be forced learn that it has to be bothered about what goes on in the world as it trawls the world for resources to fuel its own development, probably referring to the current Chinese practice of resource diplomacy in Africa, Latin America, Russia and the Middle East. The Chinese will need to realize that membership of the global community comes with certain responsibilities and abiding with the rules of the game.

    More crucially, I thought Lee emphasized the importance of America (and I would say implicitly, the world) dealing with the current China reality and misreading the Chinese current “edginess”. Lee didn’t spell out the details, but it is not hard to see that he’s warning against letting the hawkish elements in the US foreign policy and defense machinery dominate the conversation about US-China relations. Unlike Russia, China doesn’t want to be an honorary member of the West. China’s determined to succeed on the world stage, Lee said, because it wants to make up for the “lost” 5000 years. What America has to help China understand, is the responsibilties that go with that, to convince the Chinese that hunger in Africa is also their problem, if they want to be a global player.

  4. On India and Japan: Lee thinks India will be a power too, but probably not on China’s scale. He also thinks Japan needs to overhaul its political and social system, to embrace immigrants a lot more – at least, for economic reasons.
     
  5. On the role and goals of America in Afghanistan: This was when I thought Lee was rather flaky. He started well enough when he said the US’ attempts at trying to build an Afghan state are a huge distraction, but he couldn’t substantiate it any further beyond pointing out that trying to impose stability in Afghanistan after the Americans only “won” there the last time with the help of the mujahideen, is being too ambitious. Lee said that he doesn’t think Afghanistan, stable or not, affects global polity too much. While I can see Lee’s logic in that it was incredible he was so blatant about it, especially since he went on to excuse himself by saying that he is unable to perceive things beyond what affect his self-interest. Here, I suspect Lee is not saying what he really thinks. Since it’s impossible that he doesn’t have a definitive view on this, my only guess is that he is reserving his opinion on this for the ears of Hillary Clinton and other senior Obama administration officials.
  6. On America’s global position in the 21st century: Lee sees America potentially as a benign stablizer of the world order in a multi-polar global polity, but he said this is conditional on America or any global leader to hold his ground in the Pacific because that’s where most of the growth would be happening in the 21st century. Two economic fundamentals are integral for that to happen: managing America’ fiscal deficit so that it wouldn’t adversely affect the value of the American dollar in the short run. What the world wants to see, according to Lee, is the political will to make it happen… the health reforms are an example of how American politicians, both Congress and the president, have seemingly lost their will to confront the American people with the truth. But at the same time, he said he has confidence that America will eventually do what is necessary. 

So what does this tell us about Lee Kuan Yew, at 86 years old?

For one, I am finally starting to appreciate why he is so highly regarded by Western leaders… and perhaps, also why the British favored his leadership over Lim Chin Siong’s back in the 1960s. His understanding of the mindset of China’s political leadership is thought provoking and perhaps the most insightful of everything he said. What I found a little awkward was how Rose framed his questions as if it was Lee (was it?) who decided that Singapore was going into stem cell research. Lee was long gone as Prime Minister when that decision was taken at the turn of the millennium. 

I think it’s safe to say that Lee is a hyper-realist politically, but while that might work with China, it doesn’t seem to quite offer anything fresh on Afghanistan. He did qualify that it does not mean he thinks the Middle East is not important, but this also shows either he’s not saying what he knows publicly or his lack of appreciation of emergent fundamentalisms, particularly religious ones, emerging as a reaction to and a rejection of the dominant position of the capitalist and democratic values espoused by the West. It’s not only in the Middle East that this is happening, but also in Africa and much of South America – Hugo Chavez anybody? 

His view on China also doesn’t consider the emerging social discontent on the ground. The change in a society’s cultural and social logic that perpetuates from the imposition of capitalism, is something Lee continues to not grasp very well. Lee did allude to how people are going to want to be heard as China grows and develops more, but his rosy picture of China’s inevitable growth and world superpowerdom seems to be based on a view of China that is divorced from the problematic Western inland. Tibet and Xinjiang, for example, were not talked about at all. All combined, his view that the Pacific will be the global economic engine of the 21st century therefore seems a little too Asia-centric.