Anyone interested in Singapore or thinking
of coming or settling here should read Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s interview
in the International Herald Tribune. He is not even sure if Singapore has a
future.
"We have survived so far, 42
years," he says. "Will we survive for another 42? It depends upon
world conditions. It doesn’t depend on us alone."
This coming from Singapore’s first prime
minister — whose son, Lee Hsien Loong, is
now the prime minister –- shows how vulnerable Singapore is. Even the leadership
admits the future depends on external factors.
MM Lee has spoken of Singapore’s
vulnerability before. But it’s alarming when he says:
“Our armed forces can withstand an attack
and inflict damage for two weeks, three weeks, but a siege? (he laughs ),”
reports the Herald Tribune.
The Herald Tribune comments:
This sense of vulnerability is Lee’s answer
to all his critics, to those who say his country is too tightly controlled,
that it leashes the press, suppresses free speech, curtails democracy, tramples
on dissidents and stunts entrepreneurship and creativity in its citizens.
But I can’t quite agree when MM Lee says
Singapore is “ideology-free”.
It’s
a small island with a big government which runs on a strange mixture of
capitalism and statism. There’s a huge income gap with ministers earning million-dollar
salaries on the principle of meritocracy that talent should be rewarded. On the
other hand, the state presence can be felt everywhere. Virtually every major
Singapore company is government-linked. Even when Singaporeans die, they are subject to government rules. Their organs can be recycled by the state
and used in transplants to save the lives of others.
This benevolent omnipotence of the state is
the result of the way Singapore developed. Everything from public housing to
major local business enterprises had to be created by the government.
Modern Singapore — "an
economic powerhouse with one of the world’s highest per capita incomes,
high-quality schools, health care and public services" — is MM Lee’s “creation”, as the Herald Tribune says. He himself is more
modest. “I wasn’t a loner. I had some very powerful
minds working with me,” he says.
But what’s intriguing is why, if the
country has such a good education system, the minister’s sons and government
scholars go abroad for higher studies. MM Lee says:
"I’ve got one grandson gone to MIT. Another
grandson had been in the American school here (in Singapore). Because he was
dyslexic and we then didn’t have the teachers to teach him how to overcome or
cope with his dyslexia, so he was given exemption to go to the American school.
He speaks like an American. He’s going to Wharton."
So the latter is continuing his American
education. But what about the other? Why go to MIT and not the National
University of Singapore? After all, it’s ranked among the best in the world –-
or so the newspapers say.
Is it because studying abroad makes one
more cosmopolitan? Or is it something to do with the quality of education?
MM Lee
himself went to Cambridge. And he is absolutely brilliant.
He is spot on when he says the United
States has become so preoccupied with the Middle East that it is neglecting Asia. China’s power is growing, he points out. And who knows what the consequences of that
might be?
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