I work on the basis that all men and women first work for themselves and their families, and only then will they share a portion of it with the less fortunate.
THE SINGAPORE-CHINA relationship is an important part of this conversation. But first a little background is needed.
LKY would be the first to admit that he is riveted by China. After his Singapore, he probably thinks about nothing else more, though rising India has lately been high on his radar screen.
China is not just a huge place almost beyond human imagination, but it also has become a huge new concept. For the first time in a long time, all our futures will depend a lot on what China does or does not do. This will be tough for many of us in the West, especially, to digest. We are used to being center-stage.
China is not only a country with more inhabitants than any other. Now rising to re-establish its normal high ranking in the planet’s geopolitical universe, it is also an icon for breakneck economic development. Unstoppable? No one knows; anything can happen, and in China, it has. But it does look to be the Asian express train of the 21st century. This was not the vision of the future back in the 1960s, when it was still a stumbling, half-sleeping giant. But deeply embedded historical forces do not stay down for long.
It has been the instinct of LKY and his inner circle to try to look beyond (and be publicly articulate about looking beyond) history’s next great breathtaking, hairpin curve. Much like the great thinker Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), his sense is that civilizations and cultures need (more or less urgently) to respond to the challenges and threats of history, if they are to survive. He also shares the view with Toynbee that a culture or country that lacks a driving, highly educated elite deeply committed to public service is doomed to be slow to respond—perhaps tragically and even fatally slow.
On one level, Lee’s huge bets on the elitist approach to governance can be attributed to his DNA debt, as it were, to the track record of highly effective Chinese Mandarins in past dynasties. But beyond mere reprise, Lee’s contemporary power elite represents an affirmation and extension of that principle in a very different set of circumstances. In effect, modern governance, which includes basic decision-making and priority-setting, is too complex to be left to the man in the street.
Lee always knew that his obsession about China was in Singapore’s long-term national interest. If a tiny vulnerable country like Singapore doesn’t climb aboard and perhaps even slip into a seat behind the pilot-engineer on the Chinese train, operating as a kind of unofficial back-seat driver, it will be left dangerously behind. He has also steadily obsessed that if China itself didn’t change dramatically, that train would never even leave the station—and the whole region would be stuck without this huge economic engine.
Quick as ... well ... a fox, LKY climbed aboard, ran into the cabin, and began engaging with Deng Xiaoping (1904–97). The late master leader of China—the successor to Mao Zedong—saved China from total collapse. The former prime minister of Singapore may ‘only’ be a Fox, by his own estimation, but Deng was a Hedgehog if there ever was one. Deng came to accept the very large idea that only some kind of reformed entrepreneurial capitalism could save communist China from self-destruction. He had that ‘vision thing’, as we say in the U.S.
The two leaders had in common extreme ambition, a determination not to let anything or anyone get in their way, and a shared sense of the Chinese people, everywhere, deserving a special place on the world stage. They first met when the diminutive, chain-smoking Deng, 74 years old, was still nowhere yet near the height of his powers on the mainland. Lee, from the colossally smaller country south of the Malay Peninsula, was then approximately two decades younger and well into his powers over Singapore, though not so well known on the global stage. This was in 1978. The timing is important to appreciate. Lee was worried about Singapore being left behind when China got back up to speed.
The near-epochal Deng-Lee get-together did not finally occur until a half-dozen years after the stunning February 1972 secret visit of Richard Nixon to China. As screamingly cynical a move for both sides of the Sino-U.S. aisle as the Nixon ploy was, it yielded the pivotal Shanghai Communiqué. This pledged the governments of the United States and the People’s Republic of China to work toward the normalization of relations and not “seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region”. Few American diplomatic about-faces had ever so stunned the world. And for Asia, it was nothing less than a major political earthquake. Today, Lee, in particular—though hardly uniquely, of course—views 1972 as a positive watershed year in the evolution of the strategic structure of East-West relations.
In Lee’s eyes, President Richard Nixon carved out a special place for himself in history. That is, he may have been inept in a hundred smaller ways, but not on this very big issue of China. The sins of Watergate and other serious errors of judgment notwithstanding, Nixon, for one, at least understood the big ideas that make the world go around. For a long time prior to that breakthrough, the best policy wisdom about China was that the sleeping giant should be fed tranquilizers with its daily slathering of shark-fin soup to keep it sleepy. But Nixon sensed that China would not sleep forever, and those who did not try to use China for its own national interests would inevitably lose the game to those that did. Trying to ally Beijing against Moscow, which was then the enormously menacing Soviet Empire, seemed like a very good idea at the time.
Lee greatly admired the hard geopolitical groundwork of Nixon and his then-national security advisor Henry Kissinger. And as Mao began to come to his end, Lee reached out to Deng in as seemly a way as possible. By 1978 Deng was itching to get the country moving forward—and fast. His visit to Singapore then became known as something of a widely heralded crash-course in rapid state-driven, capitalistic economic development, with Lee as Friendly Collegial Tutor. When Deng ended the visit and went on to other stops, he complimented Lee on Singapore’s impressive achievements. Lee said thank you for the compliment, but of course both understood that Singapore was scarcely a third or a fourth the population of Shanghai alone. Lee says that Deng sighed and replied with something like: “If I only had Shanghai to do, I too might be able to change Shanghai quickly [as you have Singapore]. But I have the whole of China!”
Tiny or little titan, you have to admire the way small Singapore, being demographically two-thirds Chinese, became the smartypants tutor in the re-education of Deng, the master rebuilder of massive China. This tutorial role has been an immensely positive factor in Singapore’s prestigious rise in Asia—and one of a number of important factors in China’s lusty embrace of a kind of socialized capitalism. The true measure of Lee’s influence on China’s tilt toward a kind of Chinese capitalism can of course be overstated, but it can also be understated. For few dispute that China was desperate for models that were (a) Chinese and (b) success stories. There weren’t too many of them in 1978. One was Singapore—and the place was in Asia, not in Scandinavia; it was Chinese, not Japanese or Occidental; and it was a winner.
Lee nods: “The Chinese know I have helped them in the past. The ideas that Deng Xiaoping formed, if he had not come here [in the 1970s] and seen the Western multinationals in Singapore producing wealth for us, training our people so as a result we were able to build a prosperous society, then he might never have opened up ... opening up the coastal SEZs [Special Economic Zones] that eventually led to the whole of China opening up by joining the World Trade Organization.
“He had fortuitously seen Singapore. In 1978, we had a discourse. I said to him, Communism will only work if you believe that all men will sacrifice themselves for their fellow men and not [first] for themselves and their families. I work on the basis that all men and women first work for themselves and their families, and only then will they share a portion of it with the less fortunate. That’s the basis on which I work.”
Lee, in effect, is claiming a role (which magnitude to be determined by history’s later judgment) in helping lay the groundwork for what may turn out to be a Chinese century.
“So, he decided, lease the land to the farmers, individual farmers, whereupon productivity went up. He must have been thinking about it, but seeing Singapore confirmed his thinking. It worked well in the coastal provinces, SEZs, especially Shenzhen, tapping Hong Kong. Then all the cities opened up. Now, the whole country is in WTO.”
And I add the very obvious point: “Which was a huge historical jump and political decision.”
Right, he nods: “So, the relationship with me goes back a long way, opening windows for them. When they deal with my successors, it’s different. The Chinese are already successful. But since they can still learn from our system, they still visit us.”
This is a key point with LKY, and central to understanding the proposition that Singapore’s importance must transcend its size and population. Instead of cowering and feeling diminished in the shadow of giants, this microwave-size nation gains stature by playing with the big boys, even somewhat fearlessly, though never recklessly.
He looks at me with that pair of raisin-black eyes and quickly adds: “It is silly to think they will just copy us. They look at us and say, well, will this work in China? Where they think something will work, they take that particular segment and bud-graft it onto their system with some alterations.”
He goes into detail about a specific Singapore policy that works in China: “Take their housing program for public housing. [Then Chinese Vice Premier] Zhu Rongji came here in 1990, and he went into the bolts and nuts with us: how did you succeed in getting a whole population to own their own apartments? He studied our system; we had a Central Provident Fund with individual accounts and you pay 20 percent of your salary, your employer pays 20 percent. Out of that account, you can pay your installments for your home over a 30-year period. A portion of the CPF is kept for their ‘Medisave’; medical care requires co-payments so people don’t go to hospitals or clinics for frivolous reasons. Zhu Rongji started something similar for housing in Shanghai.”
“Did the Singapore health insurance approach work in Shanghai?”
“Yeah, it’s working and copied with variation, and with further modification for different parts of China.”
I ask him to compare the late Deng with the very recent Zhu Rongji, who until 2003 was the Number Two in China and the much-acclaimed technical virtuosi of China’s most recent economic reforms and plunge into the WTO: “In modern times in China, isn’t Zhu Rongji the sort of spiritual successor to Deng Xiaoping as a pragmatist?”
LKY thinks that one over a bit, re-adjusts the pad, looks out toward his right where the long corridor leads to his office, then says: “The veterans of the Long March do not really understand the free market. They may have read Adam Smith in translation, but what they knew best was the communist system. It brought China down. Deng could see the Soviet Union, Cuba and Eastern Europe. He was looking for a way out of this. Singapore was a useful source for a different working system for them, best with adjustments.”
I work on the basis that all men and women first work for themselves and their families, and only then will they share a portion of it with the less fortunate.
Without at all diminishing the brilliant Zhu, Lee cannot escape the pull of Deng as the communist who in effect broke with Communism—a gigantic leap of leadership.
I counter, trying to bring the matter into the useful present: “How about this, then? We think of it as Singapore seedlings, little parts of your national experience can be transplanted and can sprout in compatible soils elsewhere. How does that metaphor work for you?”
Lee doesn’t disapprove and refers to the famous Suzhou project on the Chinese mainland: “I don’t know if you have been to Suzhou. It’s their best township, well laid out, beautiful, by a lake. We chose the site. It was farming land, a 70-square kilometre [27-square mile] site, and we had much trouble because they were poor at that time so they made us carry all the overheads, the infrastructure. We paid for moving the power lines out of the land, and for connecting the site to the main highway.”
He sighs, adjusting the heat pad with some irritation: “We had to bear the cost; we lost money. We brought over 2,000 of their officials to Singapore to learn and when they went back, our officials went with them. Suzhou is now their prized project. Other provinces are going there, learning from them and they are very proud of it. They have just celebrated the 15th anniversary. They invited me, brought out all the old ministers and the present minister in charge to attend and publicize it, which is for them good and for us, too, good because after it was completed, at first they advertised in the Financial Times that this project came about without Singapore, just Suzhou. They did it all by themselves. But until we got involved, the investors didn’t come.”
I say: “Is that right?”
“Then they put it out as a Singapore-Suzhou joint venture. Then the investors came. The Chinese asked us, ‘Please, don’t leave.’ ”
“Because the Singapore addition is the guarantee of standards?” In America we would call it the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval!
He nods: “We gave it credibility. What is interesting is because if you say to most Americans, even those who have been to Harvard, if you say to them, Singapore is excellent, they will say, well, how big is Singapore? Well, I say, four million people, okay. But then one can say, but Singapore has had an influence on, not a control of, but an influence on, China for reasons XYZ, and those reasons XYZ are generally good for everybody, the world, and then, now, they are more interested.”
That’s a rather convincing way of describing it.
For many Americans, however, helping China get on its feet after centuries of relative sleep and seeing it wake up with a roar is disconcerting.
We joke about whether he might be a closet communist after all!
He laughs and says: “William Safire [the legendary former New York Times op-ed columnist who died in September 2009] thought I was a dangerous fellow, teaching the Chinese how to do things! Why do you want the communists to succeed? Well, even some of my own officers told me, look, why do we teach them and then they will outdo us and then we are in trouble?
“So, I told them, this is a chance for us to get a foot in China at a time when they don’t know how to do it. But they’ve got so many bright fellows and they are going to go all around the world, and you can’t prevent them from coming to Singapore with a camcorder and taking pictures and studying us. So, we might as well do this for them; make a great impact on them and the leadership.
“Now we have one foot in China. And so we have got a joint committee that meets once a year, their vice premier and our deputy prime minister. We have started an eco-city in Tianjin, which will take 15 more years to do. We are engaged at various levels; they are sending 110 to 120 mayors, or officials on the mayor level, every year from all their cities, to a course here for eight to nine months on public administration and urban management. We run the course in Chinese for them, and then they go round and study and we see them right back in their own cities writing about their experience here, which is not bad. It gives us a good reputation in Chinese cities.”