Lee Kuan Yew is peranakan.
Mandarin is not the mother tongue of peranakans.
Although the sinkeh dominated Singapore's
population, it was the babas who dominated public
decision-making.
In effect, a baba minority captured sinkeh
Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of Victorian
England than China.
It was the babas who were the framers of Singapore's rules and
institutions. Many of Singapore's most prominent Chinese have had
baba backgrounds. Lee
Kuan Yew, who became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is
the most obvious example. He claims a
Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba: at
home, he spoke English with his parents and baba Malay to his
grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected
with my life," Lee said of his childhood.
For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and later a political
necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a focus on
China, but as
a baba who looked to England. He
followed the conventional career path of a baba and went to London
to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore
became Harry
Lee of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
His father had given him and two of
his brothers English, as well as Chinese,
names.
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese
ways?
No. He ran
it in a manner to which a British colonial administrator would have
aspired.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
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