politalX Politics Store - From Third World to First (Singapore and the Asian economic boom)

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• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Few gave tiny Singapore much chance of survival when it was granted independence in 1965. How is it, then, that today the former British colonial trading post is a thriving Asian metropolis with not only the world's number one airline, best airport, and busiest port of trade, but also the world's fourth-highest per capita real income?

The story of that transformation is told here by Singapore's charismatic, controversial founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. Rising from a legacy of divisive colonialism, the devastation of the Second World War, and general poverty and disorder following the withdrawal of foreign forces. Singapore now is hailed as a city of the future. This miraculous history is dramatically recounted by the man who not only lived through it all but who fearlessly forged ahead and brought about most of these changes.

Delving deep into his own meticulous notes, as well as previously unpublished government papers and official records, Lee details the extraordinary efforts it took for an island city-state in Southeast Asia to survive at that time. Lee explains how he and his cabinet colleagues finished off the communist threat to the fledgling state's security and began the arduous process of nation building: forging basic infrastructural roads through a land that still consisted primarily of swamps, creating an army from a hitherto racially and ideologically divided population, stamping out the last vestiges of colonial-era corruption, providing mass public housing, and establishing a national airline and airport.

In this illuminating account, Lee writes frankly about his trenchant approach to political opponents and his often-unorthodox views on human rights, democracy, and inherited intelligence, aiming always "to be correct, not politically correct." Nothing in Singapore escaped his watchful eye: whether choosing shrubs for the greening of the country, restoring the romance of the historic Raffles Hotel, or openly, unabashed persuading young men to marry women as well educated as themselves. Today's safe, tidy Singapore bears Lee's unmistakable stamp, for which he is unapologetic: "If this is a nanny state, I am proud to have fostered one."

Though Lee's domestic canvas in Singapore was small, his vigour and talent assured him a larger place in world affairs. With inimitable style, he brings history to life with cogent analyses of some of the greatest strategic issues of recent times and reveals how, over the years, he navigated the shifting tides of relations among America, China and Taiwan, acting as confidant, sounding board, and messenger for them. He also includes candid, sometimes acerbic pen portraits of his political peers, including indomitable Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the poetry-spouting Jiang Zemin, and ideologues George Bush and Deng Xiaoping.

For more than three decades, Lee Kuan Yew has been praised and vilified in equal measure, and he has established himself as a force impossible to ignore in Asian and international politics. This novel offers readers a compelling glimpse into this visionary's heart, soul and mind.

All one gets here is some highly Aesopian and elliptical language (to put it mildly) to explain some awfully repressive behaviour. The rubbish in Singapore is certainly collected efficiently, and Western businessmen certainly genuflect towards Lee through their marketing departments in order to do business in Singapore. But where, for instance, is there in this book a candid assessment by "Senior Minister" Harry Lee Kuan Yew, of "the fear that even the most highly-educated Singaporeans feel" for their government, as author Stan Sesser puts in in his wonderful book, The Lands of Charm and Cruelty, containing a wonderful critical essay on Lee and Singapore (the description of Sesser's face-to-face confrontation with Harry, pulling banned books critical of Singapore out of his briefcase, and asking the flustered Senior Minister why no one can buy them in S'pore, is worth the price of the book alone). The Singapore I knew matched Sesser's description - my local neighbors were afraid to even discuss politics, let alone critcize Lee. But there is no frankness in Lee's book about this (nor the way Malays and Indians privately admit to feeling second-class citizens).

Other books readers may wish to read along side this enormous, uninformative memoir include Ian Buruma's The Missionary and the Libertine, with a famous essay on Lee's Singapore, "The Nanny State of Asia," and Buruma's other book, likewise with a S'pore chapter, God's Dust. Lastly, Paul Theroux's Singapore novel, Saint Jack, though set in the seventies, contains many surprisingly modern bits, in terms of the actions and attitudes of the Asian and Expat characters, still recognizable on the streets of S'pore a few years ago, and no doubt today. All these books are (at least to this former expat) far more informative of the actual Singapore of existence than Harry's fanciful autobiographical junk.