Insights from Lee Kuan Yew

Introduction by the Blog Author
Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore from 1959 through 1990. He is still alive and giving interviews. Amazon.com features, below, a new book about Yew that combines interviews and incisive quotes of this unique east Asian leader.

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Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World

by Graham Allison (Author) , Robert D. Blackwill (Author) , Ali Wyne (Author) , Henry A.Kissinger (Foreword) and two others.

When Lee Kuan Yew speaks, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs listen. Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House; British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair have recognized his wisdom; and business leaders from Rupert Murdoch to Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, have praised his accomplishments. This book gathers key insights from interviews, speeches, and Lee's voluminous published writings and presents them in an engaging question and answer format.

Lee offers his assessment of China's future, asserting, among other things, that "China will want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S." He affirms the United States' position as the world's sole superpower but expresses dismay at the vagaries of its political system. He offers strategic advice for dealing with China and goes on to discuss India's future, Islamic terrorism, economic growth, geopolitics and globalization, and democracy. Lee does not pull his punches, offering his unvarnished opinions on multiculturalism, the welfare state, education, and the free market. This little book belongs on the reading list of every world leader.

Editorial Reviews
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World forms a kind of last testament of the ailing, 89-year-old Mr. Lee. It is based on interviews with Mr. Lee by the authors -- Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard's Kennedy School, and Robert Blackwill, a former U.S. diplomat -- to which the authors add a distillation of Mr. Lee's speeches, writings and interviews with others over many years.
--Karen Elliott House, Wall Street Journal

Lee excels in pithy evaluations of regional and national strengths and weaknesses. At his best, the man is a cross between Confucius and Machiavelli.
--Washington Times

Lee is a force of nature. Up close and personal, he can blow you away with one overpowering dismissive glare. Has there ever been anyone like him?... [The book] will reinforce the consensus view that Asia bred something special in Lee.
-- Tom Plate South China Morning Post)

The new book of interviews with Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, by Graham Allison, Robert Blackwill, and Ali Wyne is fantastic.
--Boston Globe
　

Most Helpful Customer Review

66 of 74 people found the following review helpful
By Loyd E. Eskildson, February 26, 2013

Singapore has an airport like a movie set and home ownership for 95% of citizens, science and math scores higher than Japan's. Singapore's per capita GNP is now higher than that of its colonizer, Great Britain. It has the world's busiest port, is the third-largest oil refiner, the lowest cost of health care of any developed nation, and has become a major center of global manufacturing and service. In 1965 it ranked economically with
Chile, Argentina and Mexico, now its per capita GNP is 4- 5X theirs, exceeding that in America. Lee was prime minister from independence in 1959 until 1990, when he allowed his hand-picked successor and now his eldest son to succeed; he's still 'Senior Minister' with enormous influence. Nixon speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have 'attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone.'

On America, Lee likes the free and open argument about what is good or bad for society, and none of the secrecy and terror that's part of communist government. He also sees the focus on individual freedom as creating its leadership in innovation. Other parts are totally unacceptable - guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public, symptoms of the breakdown of civil society. Freedom to have maximum enjoyment of one's freedoms can only exist in an ordered state - not contention and anarchy.

America has a vicious drug problem. To solve it, it goes around the world helping other anti-narcotic agencies try and stop the suppliers. And when provoked, its captures the president of Panama and puts him on trial. In Singapore, any policeman who sees someone behaving suspiciously leading him to suspect the person is under the influence of drugs can require that person to have his urine tested. If it contains drugs, the man immediately goes for treatment. Unmentioned by Lee is the added fact that Singapore executes drug dealers. (Singapore also has one of the lowest crime rates in the world - chewing gum is banned because of the messes created.)

If we did not have the good points of the West to guide us, we wouldn't have gotten out of our backwardness. But we don't want all of the West. Lee also says he admired America more 25 years ago. Liberal, intellectual thinking after WWII supported everyone being allowed to do their own thing. There is such a thing as evil, and it is not the result of being a victim of society. Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government - we in the East never believed that. He's concerned about the focus on individual rights, not paired with individual responsibility, in America, that sociologists have convinced Americans that failure isn't their fault but that of the economic system, that charity has become an entitlement without any stigma, and the growth of entitlement costs [is] creating huge debts for future generations.

In the East, the government does not try to provide for a person what the family best provides. In the West, government has become seen as able to fulfill those obligations - eg. provide the support to make up for the absent father. A Chinese aphorism is appropriate - 'Look after yourself, cultivate yourself, do everything to make yourself useful, look after your country.' We start with self-reliance, in the West today it is the opposite.

Conversely, Lee is more confident in the government's ability to promote economic growth and technological advancement. It starts with a good education, buttressed by strong values of self-responsibility.
America makes the hopeful assumption that all men are equal, that people all over the world are the same.

They are not. Genetics and history interact, and they are different, especially in their neurological development and cultural values. Americans gloss over these issues because it is politically incorrect to study them. This leads to social policies embarked upon with great enthusiasm but with meager results. (Lee also adds that he started off believing all men were equal, but now knows that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been.) The Bell curve is a fact of life - blacks on average score 85% on IQ and has nothing to do with culture, whites score on average 100, Asians score higher, by at least 10 points.

Chinese leaders are serious about displacing the U.S. as the #1 power in Asia and want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S. China sees overall GDP, not GDP/capita, as what matters in international standing. It does not want to be an honorary member of the West. Other nations, especially neighbors, know there will be consequences if they thwart China's core interests. The mistake of Germany and Japan was their effort to challenge the existing order - the Chinese have avoided this mistake. They've calculated they need maybe 50 years of peace and quiet to catch up. The Russian mistake was that they put so much into military expenditure, so their economy collapsed. Lee's worry is that existing generation has been through the anti-Japanese war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four and know the pitfalls. However, they are inculcating enormous pride and patriotism in the young, and it is volatile.

The government of China will change, but it will not end up like Western systems. Cheap and available technology and migration to the cities require that China remain pragmatic, keep tight security control, while easing up and give more local authority. The biggest single fear China's leaders have is the corrosive effect of graft. If China became a liberal democracy it would collapse. To ask China to become a democracy, when in its 5,000 years of recorded history it never counted heads; if you disagreed you chop off heads, not count heads. Lee does predict comprehensive legal codes by 2035, with a stable legal system.

China will find it difficult recruiting outside talent unless it makes English the dominant language, as Singapore has. Chinese is a very difficult language to learn - one can learn conversational Chinese after a few years, but it is very difficult to be able to read quickly. (Lee speaks both English and Mandarin.)

Brazil has put aside an area as big as Massachusetts to grow soybeans for China.

The Chinese are very conscious of being encircled by allies of the U.S. But they are also good at countering those moves - South Korea has the largest number of foreign students in China, and they see their future in China. The only Asian country that's openly on America's side is Japan - the others are either neutral or pro-China.

North Korea's leaders believe their survival depends upon having at least one nuclear bomb - otherwise they will collapse and the leaders will be put on trial. The Chinese could stop them by denying food and fuel so they would implode. But that would bring the South into the North, and the Americans to the Yalu River. So the North Koreans know this won't happen.

Lee does not believe democracy necessarily leads to development. In multiracial societies, people don't vote in accordance with their economic and social interests, rather in accordance with race and religion. Lee's solution has been to turn Singapore into a one-party state, while running a meritocracy. The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions inimical to development; further, diverse opinions and competing ideas doesn't guarantee you will succeed. He does not believe that Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore could have succeeded if they had to work under an American-type constitution where gridlock exists on every major issue.

The U.S. has not functioned for the U.S. since the Vietnam War and the great Society. Those who prevail in American elections are not necessarily those most capable in governing, but those who can present themselves and ideas 'in a polished way. To beat your opponent in the next election, you have to promise to give more away.'

He also criticizes U.S. immigration practices, declaring 'multiculturalism will destroy America.' The key question, per Lee, is will 'you make Hispanics Anglo-Saxons in culture or will they make you more Latin American?'

Singapore is still one-man, one-vote, but Lee believes it would be better if every man over the age of 40 with a family had two votes because he's likely to be more careful. At 60 they should go back to one vote. Nonetheless, Lee also says polling shows a weakness of mind - if you can't force or are unwilling to force your people to follow, you are not a leader.

On the topic of change, Lee advises 'make haste slowly.' Nobody likes to lose his ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic identity. On the other hand, you cannot have many distinct components and be one nation. If you want complete separateness you should not come to live in the host country. There are some circumstances best left alone - eg. Muslims are extremely sensitive about their customs, especially diet; in such matters one has to find a middle path.

The people and governments of East Asia have learned that the more they engage in wars and conflict, the poorer and more desperate they become

'We were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came, and if you asked me for my observations, the other communities have easier integration - friends, inter-marriages and so on - than Muslims... I would say, today, we can integrate all religions and races, except Islam.' He sees Confucianism, Hinduism, Shintoism as secular and knowing that to progress you must master science and technology; Muslims, however, believe that if they master the Koran and do all it prescribes, they will succeed.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the cause of Islamic terrorism, rather a sense (especially in the Middle East) that the West has put them down for too long. Because globalization is largely U.S.-led and driven, militant Islam identifies America as the threat. America's support of Israel aggravates their sense of threat, but terrorism would continue even if the Middle East problem was solved.

China is a vast, disparate country - there is no alternative to strong central power. It will want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S.

As for Japan, allowing it to send forces abroad is like giving liquor to an alcoholic - whatever they do they carry to the nth degree, and they know this. Lee blames Saudi Arabia for encouraging Islamist extremism by financing mosques and religious schools worldwide that spread an austere version of Wahhabist Islam.'
Lee's heroes include Winston Churchill and Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who turned China around beginning in 1979, despite holding a weak hand at the start.

http://www.amazon.com/Lee-Kuan-Yew-Insights-International/dp/0262019124/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381896362&sr=8-1&keywords=Lee+Kuan+Yew