Lee Kuan Yew
Based on Wikipedia: Lee Kuan Yew
In February 1942, a young law student named Harry Lee stood in a queue with thousands of other Chinese men, waiting to be screened by Japanese military police. The British Empire had just surrendered Singapore in what Winston Churchill would call "the worst disaster in British military history." The men in that queue didn't know it, but many of them were being selected for execution on the beaches.
Lee noticed something. The guards changed shifts.
He asked permission to collect his clothes, spent another night in the dormitory, and the next morning walked past a different guard who waved him through. The men he'd been standing with were marched to the sea and shot. This moment—a brush with death navigated through observation, timing, and nerve—would prove characteristic of a man who would go on to build one of the most improbable nations in modern history.
The Making of a Revolutionary
Lee Kuan Yew was born on September 16, 1923, into a world that no longer exists. Singapore was a British colonial possession, part of the Straits Settlements, a trading post built on the same principles as Hong Kong and the other jewels of the Empire's Asian crown. His family were Peranakan Chinese—a community whose ancestors had migrated to Southeast Asia centuries earlier and developed their own distinct culture, blending Chinese and Malay traditions. They spoke English at home, which in that era marked them as aspirational, westernized, part of the colonial middle class.
His grandfather had worked on British ships and gave him the English name Harry. His father worked for Shell Oil and had a gambling problem. His mother held the family together.
The name "Kuan Yew" means "light and brightness," or alternatively "bringing great glory to one's ancestors." It was either prophecy or an extraordinary coincidence.
Lee excelled at Raffles Institution, Singapore's most prestigious school, though he was a slow starter—he performed poorly in his first two years before something clicked and he began dominating examinations. In 1940, he achieved the highest score in the Senior Cambridge examinations across all of Malaya and the Straits Settlements. At the prize ceremony, he met a girl named Kwa Geok Choo. She was the only female student at the school. They would marry seven years later, in secret, at Stratford-upon-Avon.
Then the Japanese came.
Lessons of Occupation
The fall of Singapore shattered something in the psyche of an entire generation of Asians who had grown up under European colonial rule. In seventy days, the Japanese dismantled the myth of white supremacy that had underpinned colonial governance for centuries. The British weren't invincible. They weren't even particularly competent. They had simply had better weapons and the confidence that comes from centuries of imperial success.
Lee survived the occupation through a combination of luck and adaptability. After his near-execution during the Sook Ching massacres—the Japanese term meant "purge through cleansing"—he obtained a Japanese language proficiency certificate and found work. He listened to Allied radio broadcasts for the Japanese propaganda department, monitoring Morse code signals from the top of the Cathay Building. He engaged in black market trading. He even developed and sold a tapioca-based glue called Stikfas.
The logo later appeared on his wedding cake—a small joke, perhaps, about how the worst years of his life had also taught him how to survive.
In a radio broadcast two decades later, Lee reflected on what the war had taught him:
"I emerged determined that no one—neither Japanese nor British—had the right to push and kick us around... that we could govern ourselves."
He also learned something else: that harsh punishment works. That raw power matters. That sentiment and good intentions count for very little when someone is pointing a gun at your head. These lessons would shape his entire approach to governance.
Cambridge and the Birth of Conviction
After the war, Lee sailed to England to study law. He initially enrolled at the London School of Economics but hated London—the grime, the poverty, the class-ridden condescension of postwar Britain. He transferred to Cambridge, to Fitzwilliam College, where he would graduate with what the British call a "Starred First"—the highest possible honors—in law.
Cambridge transformed him. Not because it made him more British, but because it made him understand Britain. He saw that the colonizers were not gods or natural rulers but ordinary people operating a system designed to extract wealth from places like Singapore. He supported the Labour Party because he believed the Conservatives wanted to hang onto the empire. He campaigned for a friend in a local election, driving him around in a lorry and delivering speeches.
He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1950. Before returning to Singapore, he dropped the name Harry.
It was a small act, but symbolic. He was no longer trying to be British. He was going home to build something new.
The Labor Lawyer
Back in Singapore, Lee joined a law firm founded by a British lawyer named John Laycock. Laycock was a co-founder of the Progressive Party, which supported continued British rule. Lee represented them as an election agent. It was an odd arrangement—a man who had privately concluded that colonialism was exploitation, working for a party that wanted to perpetuate it.
But Lee was building something. In May 1952, during a postal workers' strike, he negotiated a settlement that marked his entry into the labor movement. Over the following years, he represented nearly fifty trade unions and associations against the British authorities, almost all of them pro bono. The disputes were usually about wages. His boss eventually asked him to stop taking these cases because they were hurting the firm's reputation with its paying clients.
Lee didn't stop.
In 1954, he served as junior counsel in a sedition trial that would make his name. Student editors at the University Socialist Club had published an article titled "Aggression in Asia" in their magazine, The Fajar. The colonial government charged them with sedition. Lee helped win their acquittal, and overnight he became known as a "left-wing lawyer" and a leader of the anti-colonial movement.
This was strategic. Lee wasn't a communist—he would spend much of his career fighting them—but he understood that the energy in Singaporean politics came from the left. The workers, the unions, the Chinese-speaking majority who felt excluded from the English-speaking colonial elite: these were the people who wanted change badly enough to fight for it. Lee positioned himself as their champion.
Building the Party
During his time in Britain, Lee had met two men who would become his closest political allies: Goh Keng Swee and Toh Chin Chye. They had gathered at something called the Malayan Forum, which met at 44 Bryanston Square in London and discussed independence for Malaya. Deliberately, they avoided any talk of forming a political party—that would have been subversive, potentially illegal. But they were planning.
Back in Singapore, Lee methodically built connections across every community. Through his legal work, he cultivated the English-educated professionals, the Malays, the Indians. He befriended journalists and writers. Then he turned to the Chinese-speaking majority—the people the British had largely ignored—and made contact with Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan, leaders of the powerful bus and factory unions.
Lee knew these unions had been infiltrated by communists. He didn't care. He wanted their support because he wanted a popular front, a broad coalition that could challenge British rule. The communists had the grassroots organization. Lee had the legal skills, the English fluency, the ability to negotiate with the British. It was a marriage of convenience.
The debates about the new party happened at 38 Oxley Road—Lee's family home. What should they call it? What should they believe? What should they promise?
On November 21, 1954, the People's Action Party was inaugurated at Victoria Memorial Hall. Lee delivered his first speech as secretary-general, denouncing the British for their slow transition to self-rule and demanding immediate withdrawal. The party's goal was clear: independence, and merger with Malaya to form a larger nation.
About a thousand people attended. Many of them had been rounded up by union leaders to fill the seats.
The First Election
The 1955 election was not supposed to change anything. The British had created a legislative assembly with 32 seats, but only 25 were open to direct election, and the governor retained significant powers. It was a controlled experiment in limited democracy, designed to let the locals feel involved while keeping real power in British hands.
The PAP decided to contest only four seats. They didn't have the manpower or money for more, and besides, Lee saw this as a protest gesture, a way to establish the party's presence. He chose to run in Tanjong Pagar, a working-class district. When asked why, he said he didn't want to represent "wealthy merchants or landlords."
The British press called him a "commissar" and accused the PAP of being communist-backed. His opponents mocked his inability to speak Chinese fluently—a significant weakness in a majority-Chinese city. Lee proposed a multilingual debate that never happened, then spent several hours being coached before delivering his first speech in Chinese.
On polling day, the ruling Progressive Party won only four seats. The political establishment was shocked. Lee won Tanjong Pagar comfortably, and the PAP captured three of their four contested seats. An independent member joined them after the election, giving them four seats total.
Lee became Leader of the Opposition. He was thirty-one years old.
The Art of the Strike
Understanding what happened next requires understanding the role of labor unions in 1950s Singapore. These weren't just organizations fighting for better wages. They were power centers, capable of shutting down the economy, and they were battlegrounds in the global Cold War. The communists saw unions as the path to revolution. The colonial government saw them as threats to order. Lee saw them as tools.
In April 1955, workers at the Hock Lee Amalgamated Bus Company went on strike. The union's leader was Fong Swee Suan, one of Lee's allies. As the union's legal advisor, Lee negotiated with the new Labour Front government, led by David Marshall. They reached an agreement. The company reneged.
On May Day, Lee addressed the strikers alongside Fong and Lim Chin Siong. He called Marshall's government a "half-past six democracy"—a Singaporean expression meaning half-hearted, not quite the real thing. The strike escalated into a riot on May 12.
This pattern—negotiation, escalation, crisis—would repeat throughout the 1950s. Lee was playing a dangerous game. He needed the communists and the unions to build his political base, but he couldn't let them take over the movement. They needed him because he could talk to the British and navigate the legal system. It was a partnership built on mutual utility and mutual suspicion.
The Significance of Singapore
Why does any of this matter? Why should anyone care about the political machinations of a tiny island in Southeast Asia in the 1950s?
Because what Lee Kuan Yew built there became one of the most studied experiments in governance in modern history. Singapore in 1965, when it was expelled from Malaysia and became independent against its will, was a swampy backwater with no natural resources, no hinterland, no army, and a population of less than two million people, most of them poor. It had just lost its economic rationale—serving as a port for the Malayan peninsula.
By the time Lee stepped down as prime minister in 1990, Singapore had a higher per capita income than its former colonial master. Today it is one of the wealthiest nations on earth, with a GDP per capita higher than the United States. Its schools consistently rank among the best in the world. Its government is famously clean in a region plagued by corruption. Its airport is routinely voted the world's best. It transformed itself from a third-world country to a first-world country in a single generation.
How?
That's what everyone wants to know. And the answer is complicated, because Lee's methods were effective but deeply controversial. He built what scholars call an "illiberal democracy" or a "soft authoritarian" state. Elections were held regularly, but the PAP never lost power. Opposition politicians were bankrupted through defamation suits. The press was controlled. Public assembly was restricted. People were detained without trial.
Lee justified all of this with a philosophy he called "Asian values"—the argument that Western concepts of individual rights and liberal democracy were culturally specific and not necessarily appropriate for Asian societies, which (he claimed) valued community, hierarchy, and stability over individual freedom.
Was he right? The debate continues. Singapore's citizens are wealthy, safe, educated, and healthy. They also cannot freely criticize their government, organize political opposition, or read certain books and websites. They accept restrictions that would be unthinkable in Western democracies. Whether this trade-off is worth it—whether it was ever necessary—is perhaps the central question of Lee's legacy.
The Man Behind the Myth
Lee Kuan Yew was not warm. He did not cultivate a lovable public persona. He was famous for his bluntness, his willingness to say things that other politicians would never dare say. He told Singaporeans they were getting fat. He told them to have more children. He implemented policies that most democratic politicians would consider political suicide—like linking public housing allocation to family planning.
He was also brilliant, in the cold, analytical way that lawyers can be brilliant. He saw systems where others saw chaos. He understood incentives. He knew that people respond to carrots and sticks, and he was willing to use both without sentimentality.
His relationship with the communists illustrates this perfectly. He used them to build his political base, then turned on them when they threatened his power. He detained his former allies without trial. He showed no regret. From his perspective, they were trying to impose a totalitarian system that would have been far worse than anything he implemented. He may have been right. The communist movements in neighboring countries—in Vietnam, in Cambodia—produced horrors that Singapore never experienced.
But the methods he used to prevent those horrors were themselves harsh. And this is the paradox at the heart of his legacy: a man who built a prosperous, orderly society through means that violated the liberal principles most Westerners consider essential to a good society.
The Long Goodbye
Lee stepped down as prime minister in 1990, but he never really left. He served as "Senior Minister" until 2004, then as "Minister Mentor" until 2011. Even in retirement, he remained the most influential figure in Singaporean politics. His son, Lee Hsien Loong, became prime minister in 2004.
He died on March 23, 2015, at the age of ninety-one, of pneumonia. A week of national mourning was declared. Approximately 1.7 million people—nearly a third of the population—visited tribute sites around the country to pay their respects.
The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore is named in his honor. Leaders from around the world sought his advice on governance, and his books on Singapore's development became required reading for anyone interested in how poor countries can become rich.
What He Left Behind
Singapore today is Lee's monument. The gleaming skyscrapers, the efficient subway system, the gardens and parks carved out of what was once swampland, the schools that produce students who outperform almost everyone else on international tests—all of this exists because of choices he made.
So do the restrictions. The defamation suits against opposition politicians continue. The press remains constrained. The government still monitors and shapes public discourse in ways that would be illegal in most Western democracies.
Lee never apologized for any of it. He believed he had done what was necessary. He believed that Singapore's survival required sacrifices that comfortable Westerners, secure in their large countries with their abundant resources, could never understand. A city-state with no natural resources and hostile neighbors could not afford the luxury of unlimited freedom.
Whether you see Lee Kuan Yew as a visionary who built one of the great success stories of the twentieth century or as an authoritarian who suppressed human rights in the name of development depends largely on what you value. His admirers point to the results: the wealth, the stability, the absence of the chaos and corruption that plague so many developing countries. His critics point to the costs: the dissidents jailed, the newspapers shuttered, the opposition bankrupted, the climate of fear that prevented Singaporeans from ever truly challenging their government.
Perhaps both views are correct. Perhaps Lee was both a great nation-builder and a ruthless autocrat. Perhaps the same qualities that made Singapore possible—the clear-eyed pragmatism, the willingness to do whatever it took, the refusal to be constrained by sentiment or ideology—were also the qualities that made his rule so harsh.
He survived that queue in 1942 by noticing when the guards changed shifts. He built a nation by noticing everything else.