SINGAPORE — Lee Kuan Yew's name has been synonymous with the development of Singapore for more than 40 years, first as an independence leader, then as prime minister and, since 1990, as senior minister, a powerful Cabinet post created just for him.
Now 76, Lee remains the unofficial kingmaker in his city-state of 3 million citizens and one of Southeast Asia's most influential voices, an elder statesman whose advice is sought by governments as diverse as those in communist Vietnam and capitalist, newly democratic Indonesia. Though Lee has his critics, among them human-rights activists and proponents of democratization, no one disputes that his singular vision for Singapore has created one of the region's great success stories: A prosperous, educated, stable, orderly, modern country that has capitalized on its human resources to become a global financial and commercial hub.
Lee has a fierce temper, pursues few pleasures except golf and maintained tight control over his people and the media as prime minister. His belief that individual liberties are less important than the welfare of society as a whole often put him at odds with human-rights activists--for example, he was widely criticized in 1983 for adopting a "graduate mothers' program" in which women with graduate degrees were paid to have children to improve the gene pool.
But Lee insists that the basis of Singapore's success is "Asian values," the notion that there is something inherent in Asians, particularly ethnic Chinese, that makes them industrious, family-oriented, disciplined and destined to achieve. (Ethnic Chinese are 76% of Singapore's population.) While Asian economies boomed, the merits of Asian values gained credibility and Lee's generation remained firm in its belief that most people were willing to forego a large degree of Western-style democracy in favor of economic opportunity and political stability.
But the past two years have been difficult for Southeast Asia and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. An economic crisis that began with the collapse of the Thai baht in July 1997 unleashed shock waves. Decades of stunning development came to a grinding halt, governments grappled with popular demands for more transparency and freedom, threats of political instability challenged the ruling elite from Indonesia to Cambodia.
Yet, the crisis did not shake Lee's confidence in the region's economic future or his belief that East and West have different values and the West can not judge Asia by its standards. He asserts that Western democracies are far too liberal, and he has zero tolerance for what he considers the symptoms of moral decay, such as drugs, pornography, crime and an ill-disciplined citizenry. Singapore's use of capital punishment is, on a per-capita basis, among the highest in the world.
Educated as an attorney in England, Lee formed an alliance with the communists in the 1950s to fight for Singapore's independence. Once it was won, he crushed the communists to pursue a capitalist, pro-Western agenda reliant on foreign investment. Lee resigned as prime minister in 1990, in favor of his handpicked successor, Goh Chok Tong, who is, in turn, expected to step aside one day for Lee's son, Lee Hsien Loong, a retired brigadier general and currently deputy prime minister.
Question: It wasn't too long ago that people were talking of the 21st century as the Asian century. Has the economic crisis dashed the likelihood of that happening?
Answer: No, I don't think so. I think the crisis is a blip on a long-term trend. When you talk about the next century, we are really talking about the mass in East Asia, the mass in China and Japan and Korea, then in ASEAN [Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations]. That's the order in which technology and industrial growth and just sheer weight of numbers will come. The trend is quite clear, because of the sheer numbers and human resources involved. Just look at the percentage of population that they turn out as engineers and scientists. If you extrapolate that to 50 years, they'll have all the managers, the accountants, the fund managers, the foreign exchange dealers and so on.
Q: Economies are now improving throughout the region. Is the recovery part of a natural economic cycle or have fundamental reforms been put in place?
A: I'm not sure that fundamental reforms have been completed. Reform is probably halfway through in [South] Korea, though they haven't broken off their chaebols [powerful conglomerates] yet; about one-third through in Thailand; it's barely started in Indonesia. I attribute the recovery to the return of money, investments, liquidity that has buoyed up the stock markets. Fund managers decided the markets were too low compared to other stock markets, and they've come back in and that's buoyed up property prices, consumer confidence and economy restarts. But if governments don't go through with the fundamental reforms, the restructuring, they lend themselves to damage in the next crisis.
