Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew did not say Yes or No
when Charlie Rose asked him in a televised interview: "You’ve never
had a moment where you thought Singapore was too authoritative, did
you? Not one moment?"
Instead, he said: "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?
MM Lee: 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.
MM Lee: 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.
MM Lee: No.
Charlie Rose: Yes you were, you know that.
(Laughter)
MM Lee: The numbers of people opposing me, including the
communists in the very early years, was endless.
Charlie Rose did not press him further. Instead, he said: "That
brings me to President Obama. What are your observations
about him?"
Obama very great and eloquent
MM Lee responded: "He’s a very great and eloquent man who is
very persuasive and is very able and has appointed very able people
into his key positions. And what impressed me most is his
appointing people of different minds. For instance, on his
economic team, there is (Larry) Summers, Paul Volcker, and they’re
both very strong-minded people."
Read the full transcript on Charlie
Rose.com where, if you have the patience, you can
also watch the interview. Here are some extracts.
Changes that MM Lee never expected
Charlie Rose: What’s the most important change and significant
change in your way of thinking about the world over the last 20
years?
MM Lee: That the impossible can happen. I never thought the
Soviet Union would implode so easily, and I never thought the
Chinese would abandon the communist system and move into the free
market so readily. It was unthinkable 20 years ago. Both have
happened. The world has changed.
China will take 100 years to catch up with
America
Charlie Rose: What should the United States do as it looks at
the inevitable growth of China as a dominant player. What
would be a wise foreign policy? Because you have two or three
decades before it reaches the full strength.
MM Lee: Even in three decades it won’t reach its full strength.
In three decades its per capita is still about one-third of
America.
Charlie Rose: It’s gross domestic product.
MM Lee: For it to reach America’s standard of living and
standard of technology will take more than 100 years.
Charlie Rose: So what should the United States do while it has
the position it has now?
MM Lee: I think make sure that they feel that they are accepted
at the top table.
Ukrainians in Singapore army
MM Lee: But we are a small population, so we can make it up with
numbers from young bright Indians and young bright Chinese, young
bright Malaysians, and all the people around the world, and some
Middle Easterners.We now have Ukrainians serving in the army.
Charlie Rose: Ukrainians in Singapore?
MM Lee: Yes, of course, Russians too, east Europeans, and
British who married our local girls, and British women who married
Singapore men.
Charlie Rose: Will India have an advantage, some argue,
because it’s
a democracy and China is not?
MM Lee: Let me put it this way.
(Laughter)
MM Lee (Inaudible): If India were as well-organized as China, it
will go at a different speed, but it’s going at the speed it is
because it is India. It’s not one nation. It’s many
nations.It has 320 different languages and 32 official
languages.
So no prime minister in Delhi can at any one time speak in a
language and be understand throughout the country. You can do
that in Beijing.
Beijing will change with IT and
urbanization
Charlie Rose: So, in the end, do you think the system will
change in Beijing?
MM Lee: I think it will have to change as the people get more
organized.
Today it’s 40 percent urban or less than 40 percent urban, and
more than 60 percent rural. When you reach the tipping point
and 60 and 70 percent are urban with mobile phones, PDAs, and you
can download anything you want, send any messages you want -- it’s
already had its effect.
The Szechuan earthquake -- in the old days nobody would know
about except seismologists that who saw that an earthquake took
place. Here immediately all the Chinese knew the world knew,
and they had to go public. And the prime minister took a plane full
of pressmen and went there and tried to comfort them and assured
them that there would be...
Charlie Rose: So you are saying that communication and
technology and the flow of information will have an
impact.
MM Lee: And the urbanization. If you’re in the countryside
that’s different, you can be isolated. But when you’re
together in the urban centre and they’re planning 10 urban centre
at 40 million people each… you can call a meeting anytime you
want. You can have a riot any time you want.
So it’s a different world. Therefore you have to pay
attention to what people think. And today they’re watching
the Internet very carefully, because they know what the average
person in the cities are thinking.
Charlie Rose: What are they afraid of? What is there
fear of?
Chinese leaders don't want to lose control
MM Lee: They’re not afraid. They just don’t want to lose
control.
Charlie Rose: So they’re afraid of control.
MM Lee: No. They’re afraid that they will lose control in the
situation.
In the old days, way back in Mao’s days, everybody is dependent
on the state. The state is the only employer and everybody
has what you call a Huku. A Huku is a residence permit.
And if you lose your job because you’re anti-government or
whatever, you’ve had it. There’s no other employer.
But today there are multiple employers, all...
Charlie Rose: So people have options.
MM Lee: Yes, absolutely. And that means the government has lost
control over the people. They can be entrepreneurs. They run
their own businesses, shops, whatever it is.
Charlie Rose: But are they moving toward some form, not a
western form, some form of more participation in the political
process?
MM Lee: They are co-opting all the successful people into the
government system.
(Laughter)
Charlie Rose: That’s a smart policy.
Singapore will keep changing to be relevant to the
world
Charlie Rose: You have said that Singapore has to maintain its
relevance.
MM Lee: Yes.
Charlie Rose: It has to be a place that people want to invest
in.
MM Lee: It has to be a place that is useful to the world.
Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
Charlie Rose: And that’s what you had created since the founding
of the modern city-state.
MM Lee: We have made ourselves relevant to the world.
Charlie Rose: And how will you maintain your
relevancy?
MM Lee: But keeping on changing. You cannot maintain your
relevance by just staying put. The world changes. There are
shifts in the geopolitics and the economics of the world. We
have to watch it and ride it. You surf with them. As
the surf comes this way you ride the surf.
We are keeping our links with America, with Japan, with Europe.
They brought us to where we are.
Charlie Rose: And you don’t have to choose sides. No other
nation will have to choose sides.
MM Lee: We absolutely refuse to choose sides. We will not choose
sides between America and China or between China and
India.
http://www.pressrun.net/weblog/2009/10/singapore-too-authoritative-charlie-rose-asked-lee-kuan-yew.html#more
You can fool some people most of the time, can you fool everyone
all the time ?
Was MM LKY speaking the truth about Singapore to a foreign
audience, when the locals know better ?
MM Lee: 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.
From the beginning, Operation Cold Store ensured everything
worked for LKY.
"We have to lock up people, without trial,
whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists,
whether they are religious extremists. If you don't do that, the
country would be in ruins." - Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew,
1986
"I am often
accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I
did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say
without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would
not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very
personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise
you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is
right. Never mind what the people think." - Prime Minister Lee Kuan
Yew, Straits Times, 20 April 1987
"Between being loved and being feared, I have
always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me,
I’m meaningless." - Lee Kuan Yew, 6.10.1997
MM Lee: The numbers of
people opposing me, including the communists in the very early
years, was endless.
The "Superman" never fails with his imaginery battles with
the Communist boogie man, even as the British ISD had
reported to the Colonial Government that Lim Chin Siong was not a
Communist, and after incarcerating Chia Thye Poh for 32 years - he
was released without any written admissions of his supposed guilt,
nor undertakings not to pursue what he was accused and
incarcerated for.
‘Between
1959 and 1963 Singapore remained a British colonial territory
enjoying internal self-government, and the most important British
military base in South-East Asia. During these years Britain was
the People's Action Party's guarantor against subversion. Newly
released British documents deal with the assessment of the
communist threat. They reveal that Britain did not have a single
view of that threat. The British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur
and Britons remaining in the employ of the Federation of Malaya
after it gained independence in August 1957 argued that Britain
should act as if the threat was serious, in order to encourage the
Malayan government to create a Malaysian federation. The
United Kingdom Commission in Singapore believed that Singapore's
communists were indigenous leftists with valid claims to political
legitimacy. They argued that these leftists could be
overcome by political means rather than by mass detention.’
(*1)
Are 'leftists' polliticians Socialist, Communist,
or even Nationalist ?
MM Lee responded:
"He’s - (Obama) - a very great and eloquent man who is
very persuasive and is very able and has appointed very able people
into his key positions. And what impressed me most is his
appointing people of different minds. For instance, on his
economic team, there is (Larry) Summers, Paul Volcker, and they’re
both very strong-minded people."
‘Obama is a flash in the pan, and lighweight compared to the
Republican candidate’ (*2)
"The Bell curve is a fact of life.
The blacks on
average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing
to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score
more ... the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher.
These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to
frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions
and the results cannot follow." - Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His
Ideas, 1997
MM Lee: But keeping
on changing. You cannot maintain your relevance by just staying
put. The world changes. There are shifts in the geopolitics
and the economics of the world. We have to watch it and ride
it. You surf with them. As the surf comes this way you
ride the surf.
We are keeping our links
with America, with Japan, with Europe. They brought us to where we
are.
Since the beginning of Singapore Industrialization program in
the early 1970s, the Singapore economy continue to depend on the
MNCs to open factories and make available the low wage
jobs for the trained and upgraded Singaporean
workers.
Keep on changing to stay relevant ?
After 40 years, LKY certainly can be proud of his PAP policies
that never help Singaporeans to move away form the MNCs, but
instead had made Singapore continuously dependent on the goodwill
nature of the MNC.
This is the way that LKY made Singapore relevant to the MNCs
from America, Japan. and Europe, even if foreign cheaper labor is
brought into Singapore.