Lee Kuan Yew: China watcher who offered Beijing a model

On his first visit to China as Singapore's prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew - whose great-grandfather came from Guangdong province - said of his family's impression of his hosts: "We found them and their manners alien".

But the UK-educated Lee, who has died aged 91, developed one of the keenest understandings of China and its leadership on repeated visits after that first trip in 1976, when he managed a brief handshake with the ailing Chairman Mao.

Indeed, perhaps no other world leader could claim a better understanding of China's secretive leaders and its political system over the past few decades than Lee, who always managed to stay onside with both Beijing and Washington.

"He spotted the rise of China before anyone else," says Michael Barr, associate professor in the school of international studies at Australia's Flinders University.

In his memoirs, in which he chronicles in detail his trips to China, Lee declares Deng Xiaoping, whose pro-market reforms unleashed the economic giant that is today's China, to be "a great leader who changed the destiny of China and of the world".

But he never strayed into eulogy, writing with clear-headed realism about the limitations of China's communist bureaucracy and the importance of understanding the relationship between the centre of power in Beijing and the provinces.

It was that understanding that led him to be one of the first foreign leaders to visit China after the death of Zhou Enlai, and one of the earliest to meet Deng - the relationship led to Deng visiting Singapore in 1978 to see the economic miracle that Lee had created in the tiny equatorial island.

Ever since Deng abandoned orthodox Maoism in the late 1970s, Chinese leaders have been enthralled by the Singapore model of "managed democracy" or "benevolent dictatorship". Many senior officials have long felt such a system should be the Communist party's ultimate goal.

Large groups of Communist officials have flown to Singapore every year on study tours for decades, and business ties between the two countries have always been close.

Lee, who spoke Mandarin Chinese, rejected the idea - held by some in the west - that China might some day embrace a form of western-style democracy. While they were "likely to move towards a more participatory form of government", the idea of one person, one vote was unrealistic for China, he believed.

"How do you canvass 1.3bn people?" he said in his last book, One Man's View of the World, published in 2013 when he had turned 90.

Unfortunately, such apparent clarity of analysis did not prevent Lee misjudging the Chinese when it came to Singapore's first dealings with China on foreign investment.

A vast $3bn industrial park for the city of Suzhou, which Lee had vigorously promoted in 1994 as a way of showcasing Singaporean industrial know-how, came unstuck after city officials backed a rival project.

Ακολουθήστε το Euro2day.gr στο Google News!Παρακολουθήστε τις εξελίξεις με την υπογραφη εγκυρότητας του Euro2day.gr

FOLLOW USΑκολουθήστε τη σελίδα του Euro2day.gr στο Linkedin

Lee refused to describe this as a failure in his memoirs. But many years later he described a lesson apparently learnt - one many foreign investors would become familiar with. "The Chinese have not accepted that when you sign an agreement, it is final," he wrote.

In the early 1990s, not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lee was already talking about China soon challenging the US as the pre-eminent power in Asia and even the world.

<

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

Singaporean diplomats still pride themselves on their ability to maintain warm and friendly relations with China while keeping the city-state firmly in the camp of the US and its allies. Singapore's port bristles with US naval vessels on rotation through the region most months of the year.

Beyond Lee's Chinese ethnicity and his espousal of "Asian values", particularly Chinese Confucian values, the model of a wealthy, docile population controlled by a small elite is highly attractive for China's leaders.

Meanwhile, the tiny Asian city state is rapidly developing closer financial and commercial ties with China, through its role as the second-biggest offshore centre for trading in the renminbi after Hong Kong.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation