Lee Kuan Yew:
The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World
Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill
When Lee Kuan Yew died on March 21 of this year,
accolades poured in from around the world and focused mainly on his greatest achievement,
the spectacular growth of Singapore. As Prime Minister from 1965 to 1990 he utterly
transformed a tiny, poverty-stricken, Third World island nation of less than 2
million people, devoid of natural resources, lacking even a water supply,
reeling from a series of economic shocks, its only major asset being a port for
entrepôt trade. In 25 years he catapulted it into the front ranks of the First
World. Today the IMF lists Singapore as third richest country in the world in terms
of per capita GDP, after only Qatar and Luxembourg (Canada is no. 20). It has
the tenth largest foreign reserves of $251B (Canada has $75B, holding down 27th
place, just behind the Philippines).
Less well known
is the reputation of Lee Kuan Yew as one of the most brilliant strategic
thinkers of our times, admired in the top echelons of government, academia and
business. Margaret Thatcher expressed this elite view with characteristic force:
“In office, I read and analyzed every speech of Lee’s. He had a way of
penetrating the fog of propaganda and expressing with unique clarity the issues
of our times and the way to tackle them. He was never wrong.”
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on
China, the United States, and the World is an attempt
to offer to U.S. decision makers a compact version of Lee’s analyses on the
future of various subjects—China and India on the rise, the position of the U.S.
in the 21st century, Islamic extremism, national economic growth,
geopolitics, globalization, and democracy. Consisting of brief extracts from
Lee’s writings, speeches, and interviews, the book was compiled by two senior
U.S. foreign policy academics who regularly serve in top government posts. It is
published by MIT Press under the auspices of the Harvard Kennedy School. Anyone
interested in public affairs will find it valuable. Lee’s comments on
leadership are alone worth the price of the book.
Lee’s views on
the future of China are especially prized, not only because of his acumen but
also because he was in close and constant communication with Chinese leaders since
the 1970s. In fact, China’s opening up and conversion to capitalism is often traced
to Deng Xiaoping’s eye-opening first visit to Singapore in 1978. For Lee the
rise of China is absolutely inevitable but also completely unprecedented, for
while the world has seen new actors appear on the international stage before,
it has never experienced a new player of China’s gargantuan size. He reminds us
that memories of its former greatness are fundamental to its current resurgence
and that it will insist on being accepted on its own terms, not as some honorary member of the West. Its leaders
calculate that three, four, maybe five decades will be required for its GDP to
surpass that of the U.S; in the meantime it will avoid confrontations with the
U.S. and be content to assert its power in the economic sphere rather than the
military. By 2050, even with the world’s largest GNP, China will still remain
behind the U.S. technologically and thus militarily, so it sees the 21st
century as a time of sharing power with America. Its day in the sun will come in
the 22nd century. While Lee is clear about the significant problems
China must overcome, he judges that its chances of success are about four in
five.
The U.S.
presence in the Pacific is welcomed by Lee as a force to counterbalance China, so
that all of East Asia is not absorbed wholesale into the Chinese economic behemoth.
Unlike “declinists” who are pessimistic about the future of the U.S., he sees American
innovation as so fundamental to its DNA that it can overcome major challenges
by reinventing itself. In the area of the Indian Ocean he once hoped that India,
“a nation of unfulfilled greatness,” would also moderate the influence of
China, but when Nehru and Indira Gandhi failed to make the necessary changes to
kickstart their economy, he decided India had taken a slower path to
development. Infrastructure is poor, progress is forever impeded by
bureaucracy, corruption, and a complex constitution, and meritocracy, a
cardinal principle for Lee, is stymied by the feudal caste system.
Nevertheless, India’s political system is more flexible than China’s, its
private sector is stronger, and its population is more youthful—an asset, provided
that the young are all well educated. India’s future importance is undeniable,
he says, but present projections limit its potential to 60-70% of that of China.
The range of
topics in the book is wide, and one always senses a powerful intellect at work,
free from ideology or preconceptions, drilling down whenever possible to first
principles. (It is impressive to watch that formidable mind in action, even in
old age, in his speeches and interviews on YouTube.) If he reaches surprising conclusions,
so be it. He once told a Chinese leader that China should make English its
first language and Mandarin its second. It was hardly a practical suggestion,
but it underscored his point that Chinese language and culture are barriers to
the nation’s progress, first, by limiting its ability to attract foreign talent
and, second, because the four thousand years of epigrams embedded in the
language stifle creativity, suggesting that everything worth saying has been
said before, and said better. In the West, he believes the welfare state has
proven a failure, both economically, as evidenced by the enormous debts and
deficits, and morally, by degrading the virtues of self-reliance and family
responsibility. He questions the principle of one man, one vote, preferring to give
two votes to people who are over forty with children on the grounds that their
thinking is more long-term. He would give just one vote to people over sixty.
On a trip to Australia, he warned that if the country did not open up and join
the Asian renaissance, it would become “the white trash of Asia;” that bit of
plain speaking sparked a national debate and resulted in an overhaul of government
policy.
By focusing almost
exclusively the fact that the Singapore miracle came at the cost of
restrictions on personal freedoms, the Western media have disseminated a
caricature of one of the most remarkable men of our time. Even if there were no
Singapore, the ideas of Lee Kuan Yew would be well worth the time spent
studying them. This is not a thick book, but it is dense with thought.
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