Vale Lee Kuan Yew - a light has gone out in Asia

Lee Kuan Yew’s passing is an epochal moment not just for Singapore but for all Asia. I pay homage to the man who created an economic miracle from a tiny unpromising island and changed the lives of millions, including mine.

His achievement needs to be viewed not just as the creation of the third richest country in the world from a third-world country in a few decades with no natural resources, not even its own water supply. Instead they should also be viewed in the context of the history of post-colonial Asia, and how Singapore bettered the lives of people from across the whole continent.

When Lee Kuan Yew was cutting his teeth in Malaya’s independence movement, Asia was a continent of poverty struggling to unshackle itself from its colonial legacy. At a time when Asia’s countless millions were mired in a cesspool of ethnic violence, socialism, corruption and nepotism, Lee's Singapore was a shining beacon of meritocracy and opportunity, offering hope to individuals from all strata of Asian societies.

Japan may have been the first Asian country to show the continent that economic and military superiority wasn’t the white man's preserve, but it always was and remains a closed society. There have been other economic miracles such as Taiwan and South Korea, but it was Singapore’s unique location and history as an English-speaking Commonwealth nation that enabled it to become a cosmopolitan, pan-Asian success story.

Singapore’s economic miracle has offered opportunities across both race and class. It allows masses of poor but talented skilled workers from India and China to enjoy first world living standards for the first time. Entrepreneurs, billionaires and international corporations are offered a low-taxing, business-friendly environment to invest and create jobs, attracting the best expatriates from around the world. Even the unskilled labourers of Asia are given an opportunity to improve their lot, with waves of Bangladeshi labourers and Filipino maids finding relatively safe, well-paying opportunities, occasional instances of abuse and recent riots notwithstanding.

Needless to say, Singapore is far from perfect, and western criticisms of Lee Kuan Yew and his authoritarian rule are valid. But it’s important to understand that in the context of post-colonial Asia, they were largely irrelevant to most Asians until my generation. Freedom of speech, democracy and free debate are very distant, theoretical concepts for people struggling to feed themselves and their families. They are truly first world problems which Singapore has now started to address.

While Lee Kuan Yew was famously dismissive of public opinion, it is he who enabled his people to first get to the level where they had the luxury of complaining about political freedoms, when their grandparents would have been content with achieving basic living standards.

True democracy has not had many success stories in Asia. Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian multiracial capitalism was a far superior proposition to anything else Asia had to offer.

The Chinese escaped the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the economic devastation wrought by Maoism in their ancestral homeland while enjoying far better social and political freedoms. Singapore was a promised land for Indian emigrants escaping the wasteland of Nehruvian socialism and a faux democracy that veiled a corrupt, nepotistic, almost feudal system of government. Few ordinary middle class Indian emigrants lamented their lost vote in India’s democracy. Every new rape horror story coming out from India puts Singapore’s safe streets into stark relief, where parents scarcely worry about their daughters going out at night.

Even the native Malays have better opportunities despite not enjoying the affirmative action that Malaysia provides. While the Gulf States like the UAE offered similar if not better economic prosperity to immigrants particularly from the Indian subcontinent, their human rights record has been incomparably worse.

Lee successfully married the best strands of western economic liberalism with the Chinese tendency to respect authority, along with so-called “Asian values” which emphasise a certain respect for hierarchy in society. He did create a nanny state, but it is not patronising to suggest a good nanny is what a poor post-colonial, ethnically diverse society needed in 1965.

Lee Kuan Yew showed the world there is no limit to human ingenuity if it can be harnessed through the fertile environment of a free market and social stability. The only saddening aspect of Singapore’s success is it brings into question the effectiveness of free western societies. Western societies have so far chosen to prove Lee Kuan Yew's criticisms of democracy right. Their complacent welfare states have failed to tackle huge intergenerational wealth transfers through rising public debt, with economic growth smothered by high taxes, archaic labour laws and red tape. 

In Australia, at a time when a conservative government is raising taxes and running the white flag on bringing the budget to surplus, Lee Kuan Yew’s infamous warning remains as pertinent as ever: unless we reform, we risk becoming the white trash of Asia.