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Lee Kuan Yew, who dominated Singapore politics for more than half a century and transformed the former British outpost into a global trade and finance powerhouse, setting a template for emerging markets around the world, died Monday. He was 91 years old.
“The Prime Minister is deeply grieved to announce the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Mr Lee passed away peacefully at the Singapore General Hospital today at 3.18 am (19:18 GMT),” a statement from the prime minister’s office said.
Mr. Lee had been battling “severe pneumonia,” a condition the government disclosed in late February after he was admitted to Singapore General Hospital on Feb. 5. Mr. Lee had been in intensive care and was put on mechanical ventilation.
On Tuesday, the government said Mr. Lee’s condition had worsened due to an infection; it said a day later that his condition had deteriorated further and that he was “critically ill” in the ICU. On Sunday, the government said that his condition had weakened even further.
Mr. Lee had been battling “severe pneumonia,” a condition that the government disclosed more than two weeks after he was admitted to Singapore General Hospital on Feb. 5.
Mr. Lee’s core principles—including a focus on clean and efficient government, business-friendly economic policies, and social order—helped attract massive investment and many of the world’s biggest companies to Singapore after he became prime minister in 1959, catapulting living standards to First World status from Third World levels in hardly more than a generation.
Leaders of other countries rushed to copy his model, with some success, though they often fell short because they didn’t rein in corruption or were governing states too big to manage as easily.
Along the way Singapore, now one of the world’s richest nations, drew criticism from rights groups that said it attained its developed-world living standards without adopting full Western-style democracy or some of the freedoms taken for granted in Western societies.
Although Singapore held regular free elections under Mr. Lee, laws proscribing public gatherings and limiting other civil liberties hampered the development of a powerful opposition. Western media called Singapore a “nanny state” and lampooned its attempts to create an orderly society through rules, incentives and ad campaigns, including a famous ban on the sale of chewing gum that was relaxed slightly in 2004.
Mr. Lee argued that Western-style democracy just wasn’t suitable for all nations, and that young countries needed stability and economic development before they could afford the luxuries of democracy and personal liberty in a Western mold.
Writer T.J.S. George, in a biography of Mr. Lee, saw it another way: For Mr. Lee, he wrote, “means never mattered so long as the ends he desired were reached. He ran Singapore like a tightly managed private corporation, paying what he considered good dividends to the shareholders.”
When Mr. Lee assumed power, Singapore was saddled with huge income disparities and a fragile economy as an entrepôt, or trading post. By the mid-1960s, its neighbors, including Malaysia and Indonesia, were turning hostile.
Mr. Lee sought to assert Singapore’s relevance by becoming globally important in certain sectors, with state investments in strategic industries such as ports, shipping, construction and airlines, though he pressured local companies to become efficient enough to compete with their global peers. Many, such as Singapore Airlines andSingapore Telecommunications, became highly profitable.
As other Asian economies in the 1960s and 1970s were plagued by social and political upheaval, Mr. Lee’s comparatively stable government was able to establish industrial zones, training colleges for workers, first-class infrastructure and business tax breaks, notably for electronics companies, powering the city-state’s growth as an export hub.
Hundreds of Western companies set up regional headquarters there, with Hewlett-Packard Co. and General Electric Co. among the early investors. Gross domestic product per capita, which stood at $512 in 1965, grew to more than $56,000 in recent years—similar to levels in the U.S. and surpassing those of Japan and Germany.
The government transferred some of the wealth to Singaporeans in the form of subsidized housing and other benefits. Rather than give money directly to the poor and unemployed, Mr. Lee supplied affordable state-built apartments that he encouraged citizens to buy. Today, 90% of Singaporean resident households own their homes, one of the highest rates in the world.
Mr. Lee, who was influenced by socialism in his youth, argued his hard-nosed policies were born of necessity, because tiny Singapore lacked many of the material advantages enjoyed by countries like the U.S., China or even Indonesia, with their vast natural resources, abundant farmland and large populations. What Singapore did have was a prime location along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, which argued for doing everything possible to make it a global trade hub attractive to investors, he reasoned.
His philosophies were further influenced by Confucian ideals, which called for thrift, self-reliance and respect for elders, education and social order. “I stressed that freedom could only exist in an orderly state,” he wrote in a memoir, “From Third World to First.”
Mr. Lee’s success meant that his name became synonymous with Singapore. The political party he co-founded, the People’s Action Party, or PAP, has won every election since 1959—when Singapore became self-governing—and has almost always controlled the vast majority, and at one point all, of the country’s parliamentary seats.
The government was accused of muzzling the local media while PAP leaders peppered opposition politicians with defamation suits. To critics, this was simply harrying an already weak opposition, and made Mr. Lee appear vindictive.
Mr. Lee defended his actions by saying that, unlike Western countries, Singapore wanted its government to be respected. Newspaper owners weren’t elected, he said, and didn’t have the right to champion political causes and potentially destabilize the country.
“Our critics believe we stayed in power because we have been hard on our opponents. This is simplistic,” Mr. Lee wrote in his memoirs. “If we had betrayed the people’s trust we would have been rejected. We led them out of the depths of despair in the 1960s into an era of unprecedented growth and development.”
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Founding Father, Dies at 91 - WSJ
“The Prime Minister is deeply grieved to announce the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Mr Lee passed away peacefully at the Singapore General Hospital today at 3.18 am (19:18 GMT),” a statement from the prime minister’s office said.
Mr. Lee had been battling “severe pneumonia,” a condition the government disclosed in late February after he was admitted to Singapore General Hospital on Feb. 5. Mr. Lee had been in intensive care and was put on mechanical ventilation.
On Tuesday, the government said Mr. Lee’s condition had worsened due to an infection; it said a day later that his condition had deteriorated further and that he was “critically ill” in the ICU. On Sunday, the government said that his condition had weakened even further.
Mr. Lee had been battling “severe pneumonia,” a condition that the government disclosed more than two weeks after he was admitted to Singapore General Hospital on Feb. 5.
Mr. Lee’s core principles—including a focus on clean and efficient government, business-friendly economic policies, and social order—helped attract massive investment and many of the world’s biggest companies to Singapore after he became prime minister in 1959, catapulting living standards to First World status from Third World levels in hardly more than a generation.
Leaders of other countries rushed to copy his model, with some success, though they often fell short because they didn’t rein in corruption or were governing states too big to manage as easily.
Along the way Singapore, now one of the world’s richest nations, drew criticism from rights groups that said it attained its developed-world living standards without adopting full Western-style democracy or some of the freedoms taken for granted in Western societies.
Although Singapore held regular free elections under Mr. Lee, laws proscribing public gatherings and limiting other civil liberties hampered the development of a powerful opposition. Western media called Singapore a “nanny state” and lampooned its attempts to create an orderly society through rules, incentives and ad campaigns, including a famous ban on the sale of chewing gum that was relaxed slightly in 2004.
Mr. Lee argued that Western-style democracy just wasn’t suitable for all nations, and that young countries needed stability and economic development before they could afford the luxuries of democracy and personal liberty in a Western mold.
Writer T.J.S. George, in a biography of Mr. Lee, saw it another way: For Mr. Lee, he wrote, “means never mattered so long as the ends he desired were reached. He ran Singapore like a tightly managed private corporation, paying what he considered good dividends to the shareholders.”
When Mr. Lee assumed power, Singapore was saddled with huge income disparities and a fragile economy as an entrepôt, or trading post. By the mid-1960s, its neighbors, including Malaysia and Indonesia, were turning hostile.
Mr. Lee sought to assert Singapore’s relevance by becoming globally important in certain sectors, with state investments in strategic industries such as ports, shipping, construction and airlines, though he pressured local companies to become efficient enough to compete with their global peers. Many, such as Singapore Airlines andSingapore Telecommunications, became highly profitable.
As other Asian economies in the 1960s and 1970s were plagued by social and political upheaval, Mr. Lee’s comparatively stable government was able to establish industrial zones, training colleges for workers, first-class infrastructure and business tax breaks, notably for electronics companies, powering the city-state’s growth as an export hub.
Hundreds of Western companies set up regional headquarters there, with Hewlett-Packard Co. and General Electric Co. among the early investors. Gross domestic product per capita, which stood at $512 in 1965, grew to more than $56,000 in recent years—similar to levels in the U.S. and surpassing those of Japan and Germany.
The government transferred some of the wealth to Singaporeans in the form of subsidized housing and other benefits. Rather than give money directly to the poor and unemployed, Mr. Lee supplied affordable state-built apartments that he encouraged citizens to buy. Today, 90% of Singaporean resident households own their homes, one of the highest rates in the world.
Mr. Lee, who was influenced by socialism in his youth, argued his hard-nosed policies were born of necessity, because tiny Singapore lacked many of the material advantages enjoyed by countries like the U.S., China or even Indonesia, with their vast natural resources, abundant farmland and large populations. What Singapore did have was a prime location along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, which argued for doing everything possible to make it a global trade hub attractive to investors, he reasoned.
His philosophies were further influenced by Confucian ideals, which called for thrift, self-reliance and respect for elders, education and social order. “I stressed that freedom could only exist in an orderly state,” he wrote in a memoir, “From Third World to First.”
Mr. Lee’s success meant that his name became synonymous with Singapore. The political party he co-founded, the People’s Action Party, or PAP, has won every election since 1959—when Singapore became self-governing—and has almost always controlled the vast majority, and at one point all, of the country’s parliamentary seats.
The government was accused of muzzling the local media while PAP leaders peppered opposition politicians with defamation suits. To critics, this was simply harrying an already weak opposition, and made Mr. Lee appear vindictive.
Mr. Lee defended his actions by saying that, unlike Western countries, Singapore wanted its government to be respected. Newspaper owners weren’t elected, he said, and didn’t have the right to champion political causes and potentially destabilize the country.
“Our critics believe we stayed in power because we have been hard on our opponents. This is simplistic,” Mr. Lee wrote in his memoirs. “If we had betrayed the people’s trust we would have been rejected. We led them out of the depths of despair in the 1960s into an era of unprecedented growth and development.”
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Founding Father, Dies at 91 - WSJ
