What Makes Lee Kuan Yew Venerable?

I know that paying tribute to a political figure is a risky remark; after all, all powerful statesmen and stateswomen have left behind some trace of “atrocity” on their homelands or the wider world. The art of acclaiming a politician or statesman lies in weighing their contributions against their atrocities. For instance, for left-leaning students who want to brand Winston Churchill purely as a racist and imperialist while ignoring his contributions, they should be fully aware that, without Churchill’s resistance against Nazi Germany and the defeat of Mussolini’s Italy, they would likely have been consigned to concentration camps. By that measure, I would say that Lee Kuan Yew is my favourite historical figure, even though he passed away in 2015—not long ago, in historical terms.

Lee was widely regarded as a Chinese-style authoritarian, and one of the common accusations against him was his crackdown on political opponents—at the time, mainly the communists in Malaysia and Singapore. Sometimes, the only way to counter authoritarianism is with another form of authoritarianism. I’m quite sure Mr Lee understood that well. Communist parties around the world have behaved much like terrorist organisations; the activists encouraged the masses to loot anyone who enjoyed a higher living standard or better education than them, all under the guise of communism. The ultimate goal of the communists is simply to become the new oligarchy. In their world, if you earn a better salary or live in a better flat, you must be a criminal, because what you have should have been theirs. Since the Russian Revolution in 1917, every country that has been ruled by a Communist Party has ended up with a tiny oligarchic class and a vast majority who are equally impoverished. Countries that later abandoned communism—like China, Vietnam, and those in Eastern Europe—have lifted many people out of poverty, although corruption still plagues them. Had Lee ever been “democratic” or “soft” on the communists and leftists, Singapore might well have become one of those impoverished countries. Communists insist that looting and killing the better-off is legitimate. They don’t debate with logic—communist regimes abolished logic in school education as soon as they seized power.

British and American commentators wanted the newborn Singapore to be “democratic” and were unsettled by Lee’s firm grip on the state apparatus. Yet idealism must always bow to realism—and Lee was clearly an expert in this. Lee and his People’s Action Party (PAP) founded modern Singapore, so why should they have deliberately cultivated a permanent opposition force to challenge them at every turn? If the opposition had become the Communist Party, with its addiction to organised violence and disregard for legal norms, wouldn’t that have posed an even greater problem for the UK and US?

Perhaps what made British and American scholars uneasy—or even resentful—towards Lee was precisely his pragmatism, or utilitarianism. In Western politics, it is an unspoken rule that a party or politician must fall into a fixed category: leftist, centre-left, moderate, centre-right, or far-right. Once in office, a party is expected to behave in accordance with its ideological slot in order to retain approval. But Lee and the PAP defied such categorisation. They simply adopted whichever measures they thought would most effectively solve the problem at hand. Lee’s refusal to transplant Western-style democracy into Singapore also stemmed from this practical mindset—what the general public demands is not always beneficial for a country’s long-term development.

Another truly venerable contribution of Lee Kuan Yew was his thinking around building a functioning country like Singapore at the constitutional level. Though he was highly astute in dismantling his rivals and critics, he remained committed to the legacy of the rule of law inherited from British colonial rule. The essential difference between Lee’s Singapore and other authoritarian regimes is that his administration enforced laws it had itself passed, whereas other authoritarian governments allow their ruling party to flout the very laws they enacted. In Singapore, the rule of law became the foundation of public trust in the government and the ruling party—both among citizens and international investors. Lee’s strong grip on power, in this case, became a guarantee of that legal order. That was where his wisdom lay.

That said, even as an admirer, I must point out that Lee’s governance design may have planted the seeds of future dictatorship. For example, since the anti-corruption bureau is directly under the Prime Minister’s Office, how can Singaporeans be certain they won’t one day elect a prime minister who weaponises these anti-corruption powers to persecute opponents or loot the state for personal gain? I think questions like this must be left to future generations in Singapore to resolve. As Lee often said, future generations will be smarter.