Lee Kuan Yew, Political Architect of Singapore, Undaunted by Opposition Inroads

At last month’s National Day rally, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew held forth for more than two hours, detailing past successes and demanding continued diligence of Singapore’s 2.6 million people.

As always, he made no apologies for his quarter-century of tough rule.

“Whatever I do I am prepared to justify publicly,” he declared. “Whatever I cannot justify, I never do.”

In the 27 years of independence from Britain, Lee has been the hands-on architect of the politics, economy and multicultural society of this small island nation. Few details have escaped his attention.

“I am accused often of interfering in the private lives of citizens,” he said at another point in his marathon address. “Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Lee is 63 now, and his grip seems as strong as ever, his energy undiminished. But the task is no easier. In the next few years a changing Singapore will test the institutions he has built. For example:

- His political machine, the People’s Action Party, holds 77 of the 79 seats in Parliament, but was shocked in 1984 when opposition candidates won 37% of the popular vote, up from 25% in previous elections. It was interpreted as a protest vote. The next elections are expected to come in 1988 or 1989.

- The economy, which skyrocketed for a decade and provides Singaporeans with Southeast Asia’s highest standard of living, fell flat in 1985. Overbuilding was a drag on profits. Luxury hotels, hurt by low occupancy, are competing for tourists with cut rates and free meals.

- An increasingly sophisticated populace bridles at some of Lee’s more intrusive policies, particularly those that smack of social engineering, such as a government dating service for women university graduates.

Most complaints deal with what Lee’s critics call an “arrogance of power”--rule from the top with little regard for popular reaction.

“I used to feel obligated to help the state,” said a 26-year-old researcher who was a child when Lee was laying the economic foundations of a new nation and fighting off a Communist challenge within the independence movement. “Now I feel I don’t have a say. . . . Everything is beyond your control, so I just live my life.”

Again, Lee makes no apologies:

“We know what we have to do that is necessary for the people’s survival,” he told his National Day audience. “We set out to persuade the people of our point of view.”

He expects the younger generation of his party’s leaders to do the same, but concedes that their style will be different.

“The ’84 election got us thinking,” said Tan Cheng Bock, whom the younger leaders chose to head the “feedback unit” of the Ministry of Community Affairs. Tan and his small staff try to spot trends in complaints about government policies and pass them up the line, bypassing some bureaucratic channels. The aim, he said, is to make the government “more consultative.”

In contrast, Lee’s style has been paternalistic and Confucian. Discipline, obedience and harmony are the watchwords. He keeps a statue of the Chinese philosopher beside his desk and has introduced Confucian ethics in Singaporean classrooms.

He also has promoted Mandarin as a common Chinese dialect to increase the sense of family, and he openly envies his competitors among Asia’s economic “little dragons”--Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea--for their commonly held social values. Singapore is a nation of immigrants--from India, Malaysia and China. The Chinese account for about 75% of the population. They speak a variety of dialects, and are so identified with their country of origin that mail still arrives addressed “Singapore, China.’

The vehicle for Lee’s authority is the multiracial People’s Action Party, an organization that a Lee biographer once compared to a Communist Party. The numbers and identities of its cadres are kept secret, and they are well placed in trade unions and various public and private bodies, according to Singaporean and foreign political analysts. There are also ordinary people among its members, they said, but the party is not mass-based. Only officials and cadres vote in its proceedings.

Party operations are also veiled, but a Western diplomat here suggested that its policy decisions are probably made within the small executive committee.

Decision-making is “very much from top to bottom,” agreed Lee Lai To, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

He said the prime minister and other members of the party’s old guard invariably favor an authoritarian approach: “They work everything out, they decide what’s good for Singapore and do it.”

That worked well in the past in the execution of national policy, he said, because most voters “could not care less, unless it hurts their pocketbook.”

The diplomat pointed out, quite seriously, that making money is the one ethical imperative in Singapore.

The successor generation in the ruling party, Lee said, wants more discussion. By encouraging a more sophisticated public to let off some steam, he said mobilization for national goals may come easier in the years ahead. But no People’s Action Party politician is talking about a multiparty system.

The youth movement in party and government began after the 1984 election, and now the average Cabinet minister’s age is in the early 50s. Two of Lee’s longtime associates are still influential, however: S. Rajaratnam, who was for years foreign minister, remains in the Cabinet as a senior minister without portfolio, and former Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee, although out of the government, is, according to the Western diplomat, a kind of gray eminence around the Finance Ministry.

The old guard in the government structure beneath Lee were replaced by Goh Chok Tong, 45, first deputy prime minister and defense minister, and Ong Teng Cheong, 50, second deputy prime minister.

Goh, according to rumor, is a potential successor to Lee, and though he is a member of the youth movement, he is close to the prime minister in his thinking about how to run a government.

Singapore’s prosperity, he said in a speech last year, could be assured only by maintaining a single, “mainstream” party. For instance, he observed, Britain’s parliamentary system causes the country to roll “from left to right, from right to left every few years,” and offers “no political stability, no fixed directives for people to plan their lives ahead.”

“I would not apologize if we end up in a situation where the PAP is the mainstream party and is returned for the next 25 years,” he said. “Better still, for the next 50.”

Another contender for future power here is the man Singaporeans call “the B.G.” He is Lee Hsien Loong, 34, a reserve brigadier general (hence the nickname), acting minister for trade and industry and minister of state for defense. He is also the prime minister’s son.

The senior Lee, while visiting Washington last year, was asked whether a dynasty was developing in Singapore. He replied: “It is a subject of considerable amusement in the Lee family, because my son feels that he is a person unto himself and not an object to be manipulated by his father. . . . It’s fortunate for him he wears the name quite lightly and, in fact, I may well have the discomfort of later on being compared unfavorably with the offspring.”

Lee, the successor generation and outside analysts all agree that the key to progress for Singapore is stability in government. The country has no resources except its people and its location on a major trade route. It pipes in most of its water from neighboring Malaysia and imports nearly all of its food.

(The government has decided to phase out the pig farms that have supplied some meat, and plans to turn instead to hydroponic vegetable farming.)

One key to development, therefore, has been foreign investment. Although multinational firms are under political fire in some other parts of Asia, they are welcome in Singapore. With a stable government, they have found the welcome attractive. When Singapore’s high wage scales were blamed in part for last year’s lack of economic growth, the government froze wages, exacting the sort of sacrifice that Lee expects Singaporeans to make for national well-being.

To visitors from the West, some restrictions may seem overdone--heavy fines for littering and public spitting, for instance--but they serve to keep Singapore “clean and green,” as Lee calls it, while instilling a little discipline. Singaporeans find more objectionable other practices, such as early tracking of children into vocational or academic studies in the classrooms.

The press, almost slavishly pro-government in the past, is publishing a bit more dissent in its letters columns and an occasional editorial, political observers say. But outspoken political opposition, either in the news media or Parliament, quickly earns the public wrath of the prime minister.

Earlier this month, Singaporeans watched with fascination as Lee dueled with J. B. Jeyaratnam, who in 1981 became the first opposition member in Singapore’s parliamentary history. A parliamentary committee was convened to hear Jeyaratnam’s charges that the government had politically interfered with the judiciary by transferring a senior judge from the bench because he had acquitted Jeyaratnam in a case before him.

(The hearings were telecast nightly on the government channel, and in restaurants and hotel lobbies, the show was the talk of the town. Jeyaratnam has been a constant critic of government policies, but neither he nor his small Workers’ Party is a political threat to the ruling PAP.)

For five days straight, the prime minister himself played the role of prosecutor, pointing his finger, arching his eyebrows in disbelief and demanding that Jeyaratnam produce evidence to back up his charges. In the end, the opposition politician had none, but by standing up to the PAP powers in Parliament, he appeared to pick up sympathy in the streets.

“He’s a very courageous man,” a chauffeur said.

Lee’s professed motivation was simple: He had built a political system that neutral observers call “squeaky clean,” and that reputation is important to the government’s stability. The independence of the judiciary had been impugned, and Lee insisted that the system had to “nail the lie” of Jeyaratnam’s charges.

The parliamentary committee deferred its decision, but it seemed unlikely that Jeyaratnam’s charges would be sustained. Whatever the eventual outcome, for a week at least, the televised hearings shook Singapore out of its political apathy.

Lee, the political scientist, without addressing the merits of the case, described the televised drama as “one man taking on the political system.”

“Some people think it’s a waste of time,” he said. “I don’t.”