Survival worries: if Singapore is not attached to forces bigger than Singapore, it will become smaller, could shrink and might even be absorbed by a larger country—and thus die. Lee talks often about the need for his little Singapore to see—and act on—the bigger picture.
“Shell Oil, the multinational, once gave me the idea for the term ‘helicopter quality’. In other words, you can see a problem in total and you can zero in on the detail, which you have to see to solve, and zoom on it. That’s called helicopter quality. Now, if you are too low, your helicopter quality is too low, you do not see the whole picture nor can your zoom be powerful.”
Hmmm: “Okay, but as you come up from the helicopter and you are seeing the bigger picture, what does that mean, the bigger picture?” I am still groping for a Hedgehog hint from him.
He senses the intellectual undertow—that I am trying to whoosh him out into deeper waters—but he is quick and nimble and digs his feet further in the sand: “The bigger picture means you can see this part as part of something else. I mean, you take Singapore. Singapore does not exist in isolation. What you see in Singapore is a reflection of the world it lives in, it is the world it is connected with. So, the world it is connected with widens with technology. Sailing ships, East India Company needed a watering place for their ships to go to China, from India to China. Finally, they’ve got opium to give to the Chinese and bits of silver. Then came the steamship, faster, more connections. Then came the Suez Canal, better still. Then came faster ships, then came the flying boats. Then came cables. Now, optic fiber, broadband. As the world changes, we are more and more connected.”
He sometimes talks the way his mind reasons—jabbing forward for intellectual position like a prizefighter trying to push uncertainty into a corner for the kill.
“So, the bigger picture now is this. Our fate does not depend just on what goes on in Johor or in Indonesia or in Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. It depends on what happens in America in this new order now. Thirty years ago, I would say Americas, Europe, Japan, they were the developed dynamos in the world. Gradually, that changed. Today, there is still America Number One, Japan Number Two, Europe Number Three, and the potential now is China, Number Four, likely to be Number Two in about 20 years, and India today, Number Seven or so, likely to be one behind China in 20, 30 years. So, you must factor that into your calculations as you are going forward in your policy. Because in the 1970s, I could see that China, once it changes its system, was bound to rise. Because when I went there and I talked to them, I found very capable minds, of course then blinkered by their ideology.”
“Our fate does not depend just on what goes on in Johor or in Indonesia or in ASEAN. It depends on what happens in America in this new order now.”
Dumb feet-in-cement Hedgehogs, Lee was probably thinking to himself, they’d be better off being a more flexible Fox like me.
Me saying: “Sure, held back by the system.”
LKY nods vigorously: “Yes, by the system, the communist system. So, I said, well, we’d better, whilst they need us, we had better help them, then we’ve got a foot in, which has happened. But riding with China alone will put us in hot weather.”
Like the little jungle bird that looks for safety by riding on the back of a giant hippopotamus while pecking away helpfully at the big monster’s annoying little insect issues, Singapore has more than one hippo it aims to ride. There’s emerging India, for another. Then—Lee says not to forget—there’s still Japan, with its still-giant economy.
But let’s linger on China.
For a long time, America only knew China by the extraordinary work of Pearl Buck, whose novel The Good Earth was practically viewed as a tourist guidebook on the Chinese peasant soul. She became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
So I put it to him this way: “The Good Earth stirred a really deep feeling among Americans that the Chinese people possess some kind of eternal soul no matter the political system under which they suffer. You have touched on this. You have said Mao Zedong may have had 100 sayings and all kinds of newfangled ideas, but there are 5,000 years of more or less continuous civilization before him, and so there are five million other sayings. So one wonders, the 600 million people in the Chinese countryside, those who are not along the coasts and the cities, are they still Pearl Buck’s peasants despite all the voracious economic development?”
Lee seems to like this question, mulls it over like a wine connoisseur lovingly opening an unfamiliar new bottle. He then grabs the heat pad like Linus huddling a blanket, the hacking cough reminding us that time stops for no man.
“Yes, but with this difference now, and I put it at two levels. One is what sociologists call low culture, your basic beliefs and your attitudes to things. I mean, after the first month of childbirth, you don’t do these things and you must eat these things and so on. That low culture persists, the way they are being governed in those areas of China, but where the officials are squeezing them for extra taxes and so on, they now have cell phones and they find out that this is not the central government doing this but thelocal officials. They’ve got the knowledge, so they’re no longer as submissive.
“So, you find clashes with the police and so on because the police are made use of by the lower officials, who push the rural people from their land at cheap prices and then they sell it at a profit to the commercial people who want to build big factories or houses.
“So, there is now a growing farming population with more knowledge of the way the country is because they’ve also got children running away and working in the coastal cities and many have gone back now, millions and millions of them … and so they have brought back the knowledge of the outside world, of their city life.”
Knowingly or not, it seems to me, Lee is painting a classic portrait of a pre-revolutionary situation: “So, China is gradually changing profoundly. Increasingly cheap and available technology and cascades of reverse migration are wising people up to the true story of the exploitation of China’s heretofore isolated rural regions.
“And, furthermore, the Chinese know that with their industrialization, every year, ten or plus millions will go into the new towns they are constructing for their people. So, they have prepared ten new towns of 40 million persons each.”
That is one breathtaking scenario, I say: “The most unbelievable aspect of China is just the sheer numbers … of everything. Is the Middle Kingdom going to be able to hold the whole all together?”
Lee saying: “If they change in a pragmatic way, as they have been doing, keeping tight security control and not allowing riots and not allowing rebellions and at the same time, easing up, you know, giving more provincial authority, more city authority, more grassroots power, it’s holdable.”
Please note that LKY equates tight security with national security. Conversely, easing up politically might trigger an unraveling. The Western perspective views official crackdowns critically; Lee sees them as unavoidable for a country of that size, history and degree of unsolved problems.
How can they pull that off—I wonder—without significant psychological, mental and ideological changes within the overarching Communist Party?
Lee nods: “Yes, of course. Their first hindrance, which is something they have not contemplated doing, is to remove the privileges of the 70 million members of the Communist Party. You can commit any crime; you cannot be investigated by the Public Procurator. Only the Party Disciplinary Committee can punish you. So, the Disciplinary Committee is influenced by, you know, which faction is this chap supporting? I mean, you don’t want to punish a chap who is supporting you. So, that is one of the reasons why the corruption has not been weeded out.”
I wonder out loud whether it is at least imaginable that the Chinese Communist Party will evolve out of its original control-all ambition into something like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. This was the huge umbrella structure that until last year [2009] ruled the Japanese polity like an octopus with tentacles hungrily grabbing at every unoccupied space.
LKY doubts the analogy.
“No, because the tradition is different, the history is different. The Japanese system grew out of the samurais, the samurai with X number of followers who will die for me or die with me. So, when they get together, samurais get together and each brings his followers.”
Me saying: “Those are the famous factions of the LDP.”
“Yeah. So, they brought that into their political system, their faction system, and [the] head of the faction finds the resources to shower on the other MPs. Otherwise, you cannot be a faction leader. You must have the money to support them. Every time an election takes place, it costs five million dollars. Their salaries and all the perks come up to nearly 100 million dollars. So, when election comes, you’ve got to find the money.”
Lee means a whole lot of money—yards and yards of yen.
“The [historic] Chinese system is different. In the imperial
system, the leader, or the emperor, appoints all the senior officials. How are
they appointed? Through the examination system. Whether the examination
produces good administrators or not, it’s questionable, but it produces very brainy
people. So, the Communist Party has modernized that system. After the Cultural
Revolution, they went back to that model. They put it down that (and Deng
Xiaoping started this) at such and such an age, you retire from this job; at
that age, you retire, and even if you get to the Central Committee and the
Politburo, you retire 65, or if you are the chief, the president or the prime
minister, you retire
at 70.
“So, each new crop now is
more highly educated than the last one. You get mayors now who’ve got PhDs and
some of them, MBAs from American universities. Therefore, there is no faction
as such but just loyalties to different leaders within the leadership.”
“And you don’t think that the Chinese will allow their Central Party to evolve into a faction-driven dynamic?”
“They know this, that if you break China up this way, it will fall apart.”
The counter-argument is that China in fact will fall apart if the Communist Party doesn’t drop dogmatic homogeneity, and develop open and vigorously competing schools of thought that better reflect honest differences of opinion across the great expanse of China. It seems so obvious, to me anyway.