WASHINGTON
The eulogies to Lee Kuan Yew, founding father of the modern city-state of Singapore, are flooding in for good reason. Few world leaders stood astride as grand a sweep of history or represent as much to their nation. Later this year, Singapore will mark a half-century of full independence defined by Lee's rule and vision.
Lee, who died at age 91, went from advocate of trade unionists and socialists to state-building nationalist to global paragon of good governance, credited with transforming his tiny country from a sleepy backwater. Lee in his later years became a seemingly endless font of soothsaying global wisdom, hailed by Western politicians and business management gurus alike.
But there will always be one shadow hanging over Lee's incredible legacy: that of his views on democracy and the draconian methods his government sometimes deployed to stifle it. Lee governed Singapore as a virtual one-party state. Freedom of speech, despite slow reforms, was strictly curtailed. Intense libel laws led to the bankrupting and marginalization of opposition politicians.
Lee, erudite and articulate, was outspoken in his ambivalence toward democracy, which he said “leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development.” He also said, “The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.”
Under Lee, Singapore became a model of economic growth and efficiency, an unabashed nanny state led by supposedly apolitical technocrats. Deng Xiaoping's 1978 trip to Singapore is believed to have opened the communist Chinese leader's eyes to the benefits of a market economy in an authoritarian context.
The Singapore model got spun into a larger lesson for the world: to advance, Asian societies needed to avoid the pitfalls of Western liberal systems. The cult of “Asian values” grew in the 1990s as the economies of East Asia and Southeast Asia took off. Largely discredited after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, this ethos remained a fundamental part of Lee's worldview.
He argued that in “Eastern” cultures, the individual matters less than in “Western” cultures and, as a consequence, in “Eastern” cultures, human rights matter less than the need for the security of the collective and economic growth. This argument finds its backers in Asia's authoritarian countries, but it has been widely panned, as well.
Hong Kong, another former British colony that's now uncomfortably part of China, remains a leading Asian metropolis, with a far freer and more robust civil society. “Colonial Hong Kong, so similar in many ways, prospered as well without the guidance of a ‘philosopher king' or a ‘Moses,' as Lee Kuan Yew was to be later described,” writes veteran Asia hand Philip Bowring in Britain's Guardian newspaper.
And that may be Lee's legacy after all: A man so unique and so capable, he should be remembered as a one-off figure in history, rather than an emblem of an entire civilization's progress.
Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at Time, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
