Excerpts from an International Herald Tribune interview with Lee Kuan Yew

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The following are excerpts from an interview with Lee Kuan Yew, who served as prime minister of Singapore from 1959, when it gained partial independence from Britain, until he stepped down in 1990. He is currently minister mentor.

The interview took place at the Istana, where the Singapore president and prime minister work, on Aug. 24, 2007. Lee was questioned by Leonard M. Apcar, deputy managing editor of the International Herald Tribune, Wayne Arnold, a Singapore correspondent, and Seth Mydans, Southeast Asia bureau chief.

On Social Changes

IHT: You and others have also talked about the need to open Singapore up a little bit more in the modern world of fast moving technology and information and communications.

Lee Kuan Yew: No other way.

IHT: No other way. But this is going slowly. Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong talked about thinking and acting like revolutionaries. It was very hard to decree looseness and boldness. But is this a direction that you would like to go in?

Lee Kuan Yew: No, I think we have to go in whatever direction world conditions dictate if we are to survive and to be part of this modern world. If we are not connected to this modern world, we are dead. We'll go back to the fishing village we once were.

IHT: The marketplace of ideas is so often discussed outside of Singapore. You have said it is a beneficial notion so that there will be a ferment and growth. But . . .

Lee Kuan Yew: If we don't have that stimulus, if we are not connected to the world and know what's going on, how could we keep abreast of it? How can we know where the action is? Where are the expanding sectors we should be in?

IHT: But won't that require a greater opening up of society here? A loosening of the press, of free speech, of political competition?

Lee Kuan Yew: You're giving me the classical . . .

IHT: I am, I want to . . .

Lee Kuan Yew: No, the classical, Western, liberal approach.

IHT: It's not my practice . . .

Lee Kuan Yew: No, no. It's the Western, classical, liberal approach.

IHT: Right.

Lee Kuan Yew: I'm giving you the answer of a pragmatist.

IHT: That's what I want to hear.

Lee Kuan Yew: For the top 20 percent of the population, there are no constraints there. I would say . . . top 20 percent, the educated population. They're educated abroad, at university.

So, they know the wide world and they are on the Internet and they've got friends, they e-mail them. They travel. Every year, about 50 percent of Singaporeans travel by air.

So, this is not a closed society. But at the same time, we try to maintain a certain balance with the people who are not finding it so comfortable to suddenly find the world changed, their world, their sense of place, their sense of position in society.

We call them the heartlanders in the HDB estates [government housing developments], the people who live in three- and four-room flats. Three and four rooms are the lowest end. Five rooms and the executives are the upper end.

And so we have this dichotomy. You can read the analysis by our academics who wrote that we are using the heartlanders to keep progress in check.

But they have not governed the place. (laughs) The academics, they write these things from abstract analysis. Like gays, we take an ambiguous position. We say, O.K., leave them alone but let's leave the law as it is for the time being and let's have no gay parades.

IHT: Don't ask, don't tell?

Lee Kuan Yew: Yes, we've got to go the way the world is going. China has already allowed and recognized gays, so have Hong Kong and Taiwan.

It's a matter of time. But we have a part Muslim population, another part conservative older Chinese and Indians. So, let's go slowly. It's a pragmatic approach to maintain social cohesion.

On Global Warming

IHT: What about the risks to Singapore, what are the risks to Singapore in those scenarios?

Lee Kuan Yew: Oh! We are already in consultations with Delft in Holland to learn how we can build dikes!

IHT: Is that right?

Lee Kuan Yew: Oh, yes! Let's start thinking about it now.

IHT: Are you serious?

Lee Kuan Yew: We are. We are in consultations with them.

It scares me because many world leaders have not woken up to the peril that their populations are in.

This melting ice cap. I expected great consternation! What would happen to this earth? But, no. Has it triggered off emergency meetings to do something about this?

Earth warming, the glaciers melting away? Never mind the Swiss Alps and skiing resorts having to manufacture snow. When the glaciers in the Himalayas and Tibet melt away, the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong, may dry up, except for rainy seasons. What will happen to the hundreds of millions? Where do they go? Where can they go? This will be a very serious problem.

IHT: Why don't you think the world isn't focusing on this?

Lee Kuan Yew: Because it's not an election issue. You know maybe 50 years, a 100 years, most of us would be dead. Leave it to the next president.

IHT: That's human nature isn't it? But it doesn't seem to be the way Singapore operates. You're taking a lot of pains . . .

Lee Kuan Yew: Because we are too vulnerable. If the water goes up by one meter, we can have dikes and save ourselves. If the water goes up by three, four, five meters, (laughs) what will happen to us? Half of Singapore will disappear! The valuable half - the seafronts!

Well, let us say, it has gone up to one meter and we have protected ourselves. But our neighboring islands have disappeared! And then Indonesia may not have 30,000 islands - many will be under water.

IHT: Yeah, so what's the answer to that, cap and trade [referring to a program to cap emissions and trade pollution allowances] or can you somehow tax industry a carbon tax of some sort?

Lee Kuan Yew: If you ask me, I think you can ameliorate this problem. But you cannot solve it. Because our dependency on energy will only grow - can only grow. I do not see any tribal leader, any democratic leader, any dictator telling his people, "We are going to forgo growth. We are going to consume less. Travel less. Live a more spartan life and we'll save the earth."

But I see a need to mitigate wherever we can through green technologies. Less CO2 and try to prolong the period of adjustment.

IHT: Can I come back to something that I just want to close the loop so I understand exactly what you're saying. We talked about openness and whatnot. And you said, "Oh for the top 20 percent or so of Singaporean society, it's open. Fifty percent travel, the rest are educated. They know the West. They're connected. Openness for them is a matter of . . .

Lee Kuan Yew: It's a fact!

On Cultural Assimilation and Value Attrition

IHT: It's a fact. But what I don't quite follow is that are you saying that over time this will permeate Singaporean society as well? I'm not sure I understand that . . .

Lee Kuan Yew: I'm not sure how it will develop. Let me explain why I say I'm not sure. We are placed in a very unusual environment. And you cannot divorce yourself from your environment. Right?

If we were Malta, we would have joined the European Union, we would have a different backdrop. But we are Asean. And you've got to live with your neighbors, neighbors at a different level of societal development. What they think and do has to be factored into consideration to decide what we can do.

IHT: Let me connect one more thought here that I am not clear about. In this more open, interconnected world where the educated and the elites are traveling and easily moving all over the world, what does this do to Asian values? Does it inevitably dilute them?

Lee Kuan Yew: It's already diluted and we can see it in the difference between the generations. It's inevitable. One of the things we did which we knew would call for a big price was to switch from our own languages into English.

We had Chinese, Malay, Indian schools - separate language medium schools. The British ran a small English school sector to produce clerks, storekeepers, teachers for the British. Had we chosen Chinese, which was our majority language, we would have perished, economically and politically.

Riots - we've seen Sri Lanka, when they switched from English to Sinhalese and disenfranchised the Tamils and so strife ever after.

We chose - we didn't say it was our national language - we said it was our working language, that everybody learns English whatever language medium school you go to. Which means nobody needs interpretation to read English.

So, our sources of culture, literature, ideas are now more from the English text than from the Chinese or the Malay or the Tamil.

So, there's a clear difference between the grandfathers and the grandchildren. Look, my grandchildren, never mind the grandfather, their Chinese is not equal to their parents' Chinese.

My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren.

I've got one grandson gone to MIT. Another grandson had been in the American school here. 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.

Between him and his father, there's a clear breach in cultural continuity - never mind between him and me.

But that's the top 20 percent, right?

For the majority in the heartlands, they don't go to American schools or have that exposure. But from 20, it will become 30 percent going to tertiary institutions, universities.

You asked me to predict what it will be in 50 years or even 20 years. I cannot, because we have left our moorings.


On Political Dominance and Kamikaze

IHT: Well, what about your opponents? Do you ever feel that, looking back now, maybe I didn't have to go that far?

Lee Kuan Yew: My political opponents, you mean?

IHT: Uhm-hmm.

Lee Kuan Yew: No, I don't think so. I never killed them. I never destroyed them. Politically, they destroyed themselves.

IHT: To what extent can you replicate the Singapore model in other countries? Does it work?

Lee Kuan Yew: Supposing we had oil and gas, do you think I could get the people to do this? No. If I had oil and gas I'd have a different people, with different motivations and expectations. It's because we don't have oil and gas and they know that we don't have, and they know that this progress comes from their efforts. So please do it and do it well.

We are ideology-free. What would make the place work, let's do it.

IHT: Thank you.