Dr. Thum Ping Tjin is Coordinator of Project Southeast Asia and a Research Associate at the Centre for Global History, University of Oxford. The views expressed here are his own.



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Lee Kuan Yew was a quintessential, and perhaps the ultimate, product of a massive confluence of historical forces that defined Singapore in the twentieth century. But his legacy also represents a fundamental disruption to the broad sweep of Singapore history. This contradiction is central to understanding Lee’s place in the history of Singapore.

Innovation is a fundamental theme of Singapore. Even before there was a Singapore (and likely long after), pirates, traders, and entrepreneurs were establishing a tradition of independent thinking and action on the island. Their descendants have followed.

Singapore’s success is built upon the spontaneous creation of economic institutions like clans and guild associations and Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce; educational institutions, cultural and charitable organisations; activism, and political parties, from the first political party in Singapore, the Kesatuan Melayu Singapura (KMS), to the ruling People’s Action Party.

Sitting at the nexus of many great local and regional trading and intellectual networks, Singapore has always been cosmopolitan, deeply politicised, and constantly awash with new ideas. Singapore was a centre for pan-Islam, for overseas Chinese networks, for Malay culture and literature. Singapore has long been a public sphere where these ideas have met and found new forms of expression.

Lee, born in 1923, was a product of these innovative forms of thought and action. He was perfectly positioned to arbitrage between the ideas of nationalism and self-determination which were sweeping through Singapore, and the fading but still powerful forces of colonialism and imperialism. Taking advantage of the expansion of the Anglophone colonial educational system to rise all the way to Cambridge, he returned to Singapore in 1950 and quickly realised where the future lay. Singapore’s economic success had been built by the dynamism and vitality of Singapore’s economic innovators and entrepreneurs. Singapore’s political future would be built by the dynamism and vitality of Singapore’s political innovators and entrepreneurs – Chinese, Malay, and Tamil-speaking trade unionists, intellectuals, and community organisers. He allied himself with them and rode them all the way to the Prime Ministership in 1959.

To understand his achievements, it is necessary to dispel some of the myths which obscure Lee Kuan Yew. Lee’s government did not make Singapore rich – As Lee himself noted in 1960 in a Straits Times report, Singapore had the “highest average income in Asia - $1,200 per capita per annum”. His government’s great legacy was to make Singapore fairer. Singaporeans in the 1950s faced systemic colonial discrimination. Singapore was plagued by massive inequality; high property prices; high cost of living; congestion, overcrowding, and unemployment; and systemic colonial discrimination which privileged Europeans and English-speakers. The PAP’s systemic reforms reduced inequality, empowering Singaporeans to take advantage of opportunities that were at that point of time beyond their grasp.

However, Lee’s government did not originate many of the ideas on which Singapore’s prosperity is based. The period of 1955 – 1963 was also a time of great political upheaval, with eight elections and one referendum – an average of one vote a year. Political parties cleaved and coalesced as circumstances and issues changed. In this creative destruction lay Singapore’s future prosperity. Political parties, facing the discipline of the ballot box, fought by innovating on policy. From this arose the great ideas which would lay the foundation for Singapore’s success: The Central Provident Fund; the Housing Development Board; a flexible multilingual educational system; heavily reducing systemic class, gender, ethnic, and linguistic discrimination; industrialisation and economic development.

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