Recalling insights of Lee Kuan Yew

Do you care that they say boy, Lee Kuan Yew has created a miracle in Singapore? But he is an authoritarian. He doesn't care about democracy. He cares little about a free press. Doesn't care. Uh, believes almost that he knows what's right for Singapore. He knows what's right for the people, and that he is gonna see it the way he believes it ought to be, come hell or high water.

Let's put it in a kind of more objectively. No, no, no, not kind of, just more objective. I have to govern now four million people. Three million are Singaporeans. One million are foreigners who get jobs in Singapore. I love that. One million, 100,000 are professionals. Why do they come there? Because it's a thriving economy that gives them jobs, and their families are happy and safe. No drugs, no muggings, no rapings. You can walk the streets three o'clock in the morning, you're okay.

Now, how was it achieved? By the mayor's fist. You won't see any policemen there. You won't see if soldiers aligning the streets. Every four years to five years, I have to renew, I had to renew my mandate. That's a free election, and about five, six, seven different parties that will spring to life one year before the elections and try their luck. And in the last few elections, they devised a new strategy. They knew that the people wanted the PAP government but wanted an opposition. So they say, "Right, our nomination day, we will contest less than half." So the PAP has already formed the government, and it worked, and they won four seats. But what was the concession they made? That the people wanted a PAP government. So why should I be authoritarian when I had the people with me? That's what the people wanted. They wanted a high quality of life, low crime rate, good future for the education of the children and jobs, better homes, better hospitals, and a higher quality of life culturally.

Did you have an internal belief in markets? That somehow you have been convinced that markets were the way to go and the competition would produce an economy that would be competitive? It wasn't that simple. By 1965, I've traveled through the whole of Africa. 17 countries I went through in 1964 on a special mission. I've traveled widely in Asia and in Europe and in the region. I've been to Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma. And I've seen what didn't work. First, leaders became soft. Right, they promised the world. Follow me. In fact, in Ghana, there was a statue of Nkrumah, right? And he called it Black Square, Black Star Square. And there was a black star and there was a statue. And there's a plane which says, "Seek ye the kingdom of politics and all will be unto you." I thought, God, that's blasphemy. But never mind. Yeah, that was Nkrumah. And it was an awful mess because you could see the thing wasn't working. It had all the symbols. Black Square, marching troops. We had to feed 2 million people. How? Agriculture was negligible. Commerce was coming to an end. Industry was in its infancy. So I had been to see Hong Kong, the nearest to us. But Hong Kong had the British government which ensured military defense, security, stability, and British capital. Now, I had none of those. I saw Taiwan. They had an American alliance. So somehow I had to get this thing going. So we tried many things. Brought garment manufacturers from Hong Kong and Taiwan, textile mills, started our own glass factory with our own cash. When we didn't have this the silica to make good bottles, we sold it off later. Trial and error. And finally, I had spent one term in Harvard, right? It was in the 60s, was it? And the fall of '68, right? And as luck would have it, that was also the height of the Cultural Revolution in China. And I had earlier met a UNDP expert who had come to help us. And he came up to see me one day. He said, "Why are you looking so worried?" I said, "I'm in a spot." He says, "No, you are in a spot. But imagine how much more difficult a spot would be if you had 100 million Japanese as your neighbors instead of Indonesians." That set me thinking. He said, "Yeah, think what you can do with them, or what they will do to you. Provide a market." I know they'll take you over. So I said, "Look at Israel. It's got 100 million Arabs that refuse to trade with them. They leapfrog flowers, fruit in winter to Europe and many other things, and manufacture stuff, but starting with very simple agriculture." So in my term in Harvard, I met many people. Economists, people like Samuelson, who taught me why Americans made textiles, and although it's low-tech. Economists. Uh, I also met many businessmen. Then I decided, no, we will leapfrog a different way. We'll get these big American multinationals still manufactured in Singapore and re-export to America and the world. And as luck would have it, the Cultural Revolution made them bypass Taiwan, Hong Kong. They came to Singapore. Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductor, you name it, they all came. Seagate. And we became the biggest manufacturer of these things in 20 years. We were the center for disk drives and computer parts and computer peripherals. We never looked back.

Then, as a corollary to that, the other side of the coin. I came up with the idea. It says, "Look, people are going to come here and explore the region. And it's a dangerous region. I mean, pestilence, malaria, typhoid. Here in Singapore, we'll create a first-world oasis out of this island. It was a third-world island. I will create a first-world condition in the third world to first, so that they will base their, their break camp here and then venture out. And when they're sick, they'll come back. And their precious equipment will be left here." So we had first-world standards of infrastructure, roads, airport, seaports, communications, health, schooling, personal and public security. Later, we added concerts, theaters, etc. But the basic was first-world. That was easy. The hardware. The difficult part was getting the population has been behaving like a third-world to start behaving like the first one.

That's what I want to know. How did you do that? Well, people used to make fun of us because the foreign correspondents came and watched us start these campaigns on television and ministers saying, "Stop spitting, stop littering." We had them by the month, you know. Let's do it differently. You can't do silly things like you did before because you've got, you want to be host to first-world guests. So you can't be peeing all over the place as you did in the old squatter villages. But there were a few who were still troublesome. So they will pee into the lift just to be a nuisance to their neighbors. So we installed in the lift special sensitive instruments that will stop the lift the moment you do that, and you apprehend them. But, yeah, it's funny, but it worked. But it's real. Then they were smart. They opened the lift door and peed from the outside in, and you caught nothing. You see how wicked they are. So we installed a camera that will catch them from the outside. Yes, into. And so it went on. But it improved. I'm not saying we are there, but if you want tourism, you've got to have clean public toilets, right? And we didn't have that. So we had to go on the campaign says, "Flush it, you stupid man. You owe it to the next chap, or you may be the next chap." It took it took some doing. We're not there yet, but we are getting there. We still have people with mobile phones at concerts that go "cring" and making sure to stop that.

You also have one of the highest rates of capital punishment. Yes, that's for drugs. That's for drugs. Yeah. We are because you think drugs deserve to be treated with the maximum punishment? If we could kill them a hundred times, we would because you'll destroy whole families. It's it's terrifying to see because you are you are then drug dependent. You steal, you cheat, you rob your own parents. I mean, it's it's soul-destroying. And they come in knowing that death if they are found with these goods on them. But the rewards are so great. You don't. They try very, very unusual people. Women from Africa, big mummies come to sell clothes. And in between the clothes are kilos of heroin. You say, "If you bring heroin into Singapore, you hang." Anything beyond 10 grams, you hang. Below 10 grams, maybe. If you were convicted of bringing in more than 10 grams of heroin, you have you hang. That's right. After a jury trial? Yes, of course. No, no jury trial. Judge. Judge. Judge listens to the evidence presented. Yes, of course. And if he says you're guilty, you hang. You hang. And they still come. Unbelievable.

Would you believe capital punishment is a deterrence or not? Uh, without capital punishment, our drug trafficking rate as a drug center would quadruple or quintuple because you're right on the passage. Yes. And our internal consumption would go up by a multiple of ten.

Do you believe in the idea of a free press? I believe in truth. Truth. That's different, isn't it? And I don't believe that the press should be crusading and putting a spin on things. I think they should print the story and editorialize, pontificate separately, and not skew it with the headlines and the sub-headlines and putting it in the inside pages.

Do you believe if someone said Singapore, yes, this modern state, city-state, that pretty much escaped most of the Asian economic crisis that plagued Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia? You were relatively compared to them immune? Yes, not immune, but our damage was collateral. We had lent them money, and we had lost money. Yeah. And when money was pulled out of the region, they pulled it out of Singapore too.

You seem to believe not in the individual, but in the state. You seem to be much more of a statist than someone who's such a fan of free markets. That's a profound difference in the core philosophy between the American and the Chinese. That is a reflection of your history. You came over in the Mayflower. You were seeking religious freedom. So much so that you refuse to allow it to be taught in the schools. You believed in the individual as the creator of all things. And you, you captured the Wild West. I mean, on horseback. New Town, Main Street, U.B. Mayor, I am Sheriff, you're a saloon keeper. We build a gold rush town, or cattle, or whatever it is. You have been immensely fortunate and successful. Two world wars left Europe in the shambles, and you emerged as the undamaged technological and industrial power. China has a completely different kind of checkered history. Four thousand to five thousand years of ups and downs, long periods when there was no gardens, anarchy, warlords. I once had a Chinese mate when I was in Beijing working my game shoulder. And we were talking. And I said, "During the war, Japanese time, what currency did you use?" I said, "You said Japanese currency if it's in Japanese-controlled areas, or other currencies in other areas." How many currencies? "Two, three, 14 or 15, depending on which warlord's area you're in." So why have they survived in spite of anarchy, disaster, floods, famines? Because there was a social network independent of government that sustained them. The immediate family, the extended family, the clan. You owed them an obligation. You cannot turn them away. That's how they survived. I would be lost to believe that in Singapore, you will never have anarchy, that there will always be a government that would provide for social security. That has been your experience. I'm not sure that would be a Singapore experience. I think we are safer if we keep those family bonds, those traditional life raft systems, not dependent on the state, which places the emphasis on family, extended family, and then the government, and not the individual at the expense of the family and the state, which is the American system. So you have Bill Gates, John Chambers of Cisco, or you, you look up Forbes or Fortune or whatever, enough 50 of the best and the brightest and the wealthiest. That's your experience. That's not China's experience. That's not our experience. Yes, we also now want to try and get our little Bill Gates going, but in the context of keeping our society solid so that we will survive as a people.

You have never been occupied. You have only had one civil war, quite a traumatic experience. So you will never understand what it is. I've been occupied by the Japanese three and a half years. It didn't represent me. There was no human rights. The first thing I saw two days after they came in when I went out to sort of buy some food, what? Two human heads on a pole outside the tallest building in Singapore. And Chinese characters to say, "If you are not well-behaved, you will end up here." I thought to myself, if only I had a camera here. Was this modern 12-story building, highest in Singapore then, and this medieval scene? So the Japanese never talk of human rights because they understand their brutality, their cruelties they inflicted on fellow Asians whom they came to so-called liberty. These are realities. And why did they succeed? Not because of individual Japanese heroism, but because as a group, they were a powerful force, and they still are.

You, in fact, believe that it is not impossible that they may once again be a powerful military force with ambitions that could lead them to war? I wouldn't say exactly with ambitions, but I'm quite convinced that they can become a very powerful military force. And if cornered again, the way they were in 1941 with an oil embargo and no exports, rather than curl up and die, they'll fight. It's in the nature of the culture of the people. They are not people who are gonna lie down, curl up, face the wall.

Would you fear the Japanese more than the Chinese with the Americans around? I fear neither. Why? Because I think that's a balance. The United States will, the United States together with Japan will be able to balance China. And that's the way you see the future? I think so. The strategic balance between the United States and Japan on one hand, and China. Absolutely. I don't think the Japanese would be wise to go it alone, and they know it. I don't think the United States alone can take China and Japan. So if Japan and China, which is culturally unlikely ever to happen, if they got together, that's coupled for the massivation.

What do you regret most so far? There's a, it's a pile of game, really. So many things to regret. You could have done something better. But I regret most the years we spent building up the momentum for Malaysia and breaking it off in less than two years. It never got a chance. It would, if there was a stronger prime minister in Malaysia who was prepared to give a more equal balance to the various peoples in Malaysia, the story might have ended differently, and it would have been better for all of us. Because Singapore combined with Malaysia and all that that would have meant would have given you a much more powerful point of leverage. No, not for me. I don't mean you, but for, but for the people. They would have had a better life.

Have you had a moment in which you say, "Listen, all these world leaders, boy, if I could have, and maybe this is it. If I could have written, painted on a broader canvas, think of the things I could have done." You know, I said once, because all these go ahead, I had thanks up into dinner once in November of 1978. Foreign part of my speech, I said, "I wondered what would happen if Deng Xiaoping was born in Singapore and I was born in China." He looked like a scan. I said, "I'm quite sure that Deng Xiaoping would be running Singapore. I'm not sure Lee Kuan Yew would have got halfway up the heap because you would have had, I would have had so many bribes, so many toughs, so many conspiratorial groups that would have just knocked me down. It's a greasy pole. Uh, you'll get there as much by luck as by merit, really. I mean, well, for the first generation, will will he impose his will on the body? For Deng Xiaoping, it was will and the group of people, generals and other party stalwarts who preserved him from Marcus Jones' ranker for a chance. I mean, it was luck. Foreign scratched him here, Chelsea Young he scrapped in, and he had to make a choice. And he chose Johnson, men from Shanghai, party secretary, because he kept Shanghai quiet without using force, but not allowing the students to run the place. That was pure luck. But of course, he's staying there and staying on top. That's not luck. That's real leadership skills within the confines of the Communist Party elite."

What do you think your strongest deal is? In my context, capacity to persuade my people to do tough things. Do you really? Yes. Otherwise, they wouldn't have changed. My new had I had a Chinese or base in China, not transplants in Singapore, I may not have succeeded. You try making them stop spitting in China. I've done it in Singapore. I think it probably was the capacity to grow. Your capacity to grow? Well, yes. You got to learn all the time. Yeah. You understood that you could not stand still, and you understood that you had to learn from history or be, or the Santana said to repeat it. Yeah. And keep on learning all the time. You'll never stop. The day you stop learning, that day you're dead.

You and I had a conversation once about about a whole range of leaders, and you said to me, "The man that you most admired of all the people you'd ever met was..." That's what you told me. Admired you too, because he sent Chinese, 30, 40,000 of them to Singapore to figure out what you were doing. Am I right? Yes. What was it you were doing that he wanted to see? He was astonished when he came for the first time in 1978 to tell us to prevent Vietnam from invading Cambodia because they're doing it on behalf of the Russians. Then he found a Singapore which was contrary to what he was given in his brief. Yes. He found a prosperous, orderly society, everybody owning their own homes, and with a job. So I said, "How did you get there?" I said, "We educated our people. And look at all these companies. Americans, Japanese, Europeans. They bring technology. They train our people. We learn how to do things. And because we are cheaper, after a while, we become general managers and company managing directors, and we learn how to do that and become surprised to them." So he said, "Oh, you made use of capitalism to build an a more egalitarian society. Everybody owns their home. I will do the same." And he did. He did. He did. He went back and you collect 12 special economic zones, Shanghai, Xiamen, and so on, the coastal studies, and they succeeded. So he was the greatest man you ever met? Because, no, you understood because of the results. It changed the nation. And therefore, he's a member of the Old Guard. He fought in the Long March. He chased the KMT out across the Yangtze. He led that. He was a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Yes, but he was realistic. He knew the system was not working. He knew that they were going to end up down in the deep hole. And he decided against the, against all the advice of his fellow old guards, that we will change. Any of the brains and the power to pull it off? Yes. And when he tried to stop him in 1992 from going too fast, he went down to Shenzhen and said, "Learn from all countries in the world, and most of all, learn from Singapore. The order is good, and they are very prosperous society."

What's the most important change and most significant change in your way of thinking about the world over the last 20 years? The impossible can happen. I never thought that the Soviet Union will improve so easily. And I never thought that the Chinese would abandon a communist system and then and move into the free market. It's already, it was unthinkable 20 years ago. Both has happened. The world has changed. And it's not clear exactly how it's all gonna. No, it is not exactly clear when it will happen exactly, but that it will happen. Now, in the long term, 50 to 100 years, yes. And the center of gravity is shifting to Asia. Must be because the population is there. The talent pool of 1.3 billion people plus the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and the others. It can match Europe and America. But that talent pool was inert. Did not have science and technology. Did not care about science and technology. But now everything that you do, Asia is doing. You're going to stem cell research. We are going to the same sources. Tanya, Singapore has to go into it in order to get into a field where the Chinese cannot compete with us. When the Chinese are in it, in a very big way. They are watching you. And whatever you do, say, "Oh yes, we will do that." We are far behind, of course. But given time, they're going to catch up. They're enormously curious. They are enormously curious. No, just curious. They're enormously ambitious to catch up. For good reasons and for good ends, that you must ask them. But I think the reason is they have to. They have a sense of frustration that they were down for so long. Let's make it now. Here's our chance. Yeah. The United States has to, uh, encourage them. No, you don't have to encourage them. You just got to understand that. Yeah. Look, they don't want to be an honorary member of the West. Unlike Russia, they're quite happy to be Chinese and to remain as such. So when you tell them, "You ought to do this, you ought to do that," they say, "Yes, thank you." And in the back of their minds, "We have lost 35,000 years." Have you? [Laughter]

Is there a different Chinese attitude about the future than the United States? They do not believe that what works for them can work for other people. If you want to try my system, go ahead. But I have special circumstances that allowed me to build up the system. I'm not interested in changing regimes. I deal with you as you are, or the education what they are, travel leads, or whatever. When we maintain good relations, I need your oil, I need your resources, let's do business. There's no evangelistic urge to change things. Is America, you think, a proselytizing country? They, they want to sell their values, and they believe in their values. There's always has been and always will be the kind of missionary zeal. That the world can be made a beginner and a better place if everybody becomes like America, which I don't think it can be. But as if you want to try, or go ahead.

Some people look at China and they say, "There's been no Google formed in China. There's been no Facebook developed in China. No Microsoft developed in China." And that says something about their educational system. Partly the educational system, but partly because there's a very tight control to the top. They do not like the established order to begin career. It was working fine. Leave it. And anybody is something good will borrow it and test it out. Why take the risk? Their attitude, "Let's play safe." If you let 1.3 billion smart guys, romantic, you have your chaos. And they are capable of thinking up new things. I give you an example. Uh, I go on the computer for translations now in the Chinese and vice versa. Yes, and it's all done free. The Chinese have done it. It's going to end is sequel. In Siku, it's about right. You can do wonders with it. And there are many such things. You can, anything you want to do on the internet, there's no need to go to Google. You can go to Baidu. And you do. I do. Is a Chinese search engine? Yeah. The large one too. They own 60-70% of the Chinese market. That's right.

What did you think of what they Chinese did to Google? Well, they didn't want Google to overcome a vehicle for subversion. The spreading of ideas inimical to the stability of the state.

Do you think they're too paranoid? The Chinese fear of any government is one, it is chaos. Yes. As a huge country, and you cannot control everything. You cannot micro-control it. So you just say, "Stop it."

Let's talk about Singapore. Um, so you agreed to sit down with seven or eight journalists from The Straits Times, a well-known newspaper here in Singapore, and said, "I'll talk about anything." And then they published this book. Did you do that because you were worried that the young people did not understand Singapore, and you want to make sure you got to them? Yes, I think I'm worried that they believe that we have arrived, and we've been going on so far enough that we can go on autopilot. Yeah, it's not possible. So what are you worried about? The base is a very narrow one. Yes, 700 and something square kilometers. And we've built this 100-story edifice. Yes. And you keep that base steady. They might be able to go up to 150, right? They will tinker around and believing that is for forever. It might come from leaning down. So please remember, this base is narrow, and so margins for of error are small. To make sure when you reach a decision, you've got a fallback.

Some people say that Singapore has crystallized the question: "What price for prosperity and security?" Yes, that's the question that you have. And how have you done that? First, to make sure that there is no step instability. We're at the different races live together peacefully, different religions not clash, just the disparate income groups, uh, mingled in the same makes us stay. So this, no ghettos. And we can go around Singapore. I challenge you to find a ghetto. Address the rich and the poor, other than super-rich owned private homes, they're all living in one million same shops, same playing field, same schools. So it's a level playing field for everyone. The most important is schooling, health, housing. You know, that has been achieved. And that has used to be maintained. I've also had to put restrictions on the tendencies for clan for people of the same race together. You don't want them living in ghettos. No, they gather together. So police will get together, Indians will get the other signs, they'll get together. And just tower blocks. They never got a problem. So every block you have a quarter that reflects the percentage of the population of these various races. So you, well, in Italy, you have your neighbors or Chinese, Indians, or Malays. On your children have got to know them. Robin say go up and down the same lift, go to the same schools. So it's a, a structural device, a social device, the social structure that forces you to understand the different races and make you coexist together.

Where did you get these political ideas of yours? Well, I watched them after two or three riots. Well, after two, three riots. Yeah, yeah. They were riots. They were, you know, enclaves, and they were poor and dirty, no sanitation. This was before '65 or after '6? No, no, before 1964, '65. Right. So you began to form the ideas that you thought you would like to see Singapore become before Malaysia and 1960? Oh, yeah, indeed. And that we hope you could make Malaysia the same society with the Malays dominant that we got turfed out. Now they've got a serious problem because the Chinese and the Indians are separate from them. Go to separate schools. Chinese go and learn Chinese, learn Malay. They live in different places. They got desperate communities. Or we have one community, one. I'm not saying we are one nation yet, but we are one society.

And you have made speeches, including in this year, promoting the idea of the kind of social cohesion of multiple parties from multiple? Yes. Without that, without that, you get no progress. If you're fighting each other all the time, how can you get progress? Worry that is in fact, um, there is more political discourse among the young. That it will lead to racial politics? No, they can have all the discourse they like. But race, language, and religion, please, tread carefully. Tread carefully. You know, that these are sensitive issues, and they don't want the rest of a homelessness. Now, I said in that book that I think that Malays, they're Muslims, these people should be relaxed and eat together with the others. And it created a fire story that your son said the Prime Minister differed with you. That's right. So were you right, or was your son right? It has to be right because into the Prime Minister. But, but you ask the average person in the street. But I, what I've said is true, and they would say, "You're awesome."

Were you born of well-to-do family or what? We were poor. Okay. You went to Cambridge to law school. Yeah. Did you then think that you wanted to go into politics? Yes, because I saw no reason why the British should run the place. I competed with them. I knew them as a society, and I think given the chance, it would do better because we know the people better than they do. So you've joined and be part of an anti-colonialist, yeah, People's Party. And we've done better than universities ever did because we mixed up the people and combined. The British kept us segregated from a time. Stanford Raffles built the place. He marked out areas. Chinese live here, Malays live there, Indians left there, Arabs live here in the 19th century. They were very disparate peoples, and he didn't want riots. So we segregated them. But I've got to make one society out of this people. I got again to understand each other, even if they don't like each other. And that's why you think it's fragile? Yes, of course. It's not, it's not inside. It's not in the DNA yet. It's enforced by sheer living conditions, physical living conditions, and everyday intermingling. Same school, same playing field, same shopping centers, same neighbors.

When you're at Cambridge, you, you met and married your remarkable wife, who died in October. She was a political partner of yours in a sense? Yes, she edited and listened and helped you with the speeches and everything else. Yeah, she corrected my house. Then there are busy. I dictated. I feel corrected. And in fact, she actually raised a family too. Yeah. You, you have described yourself as a kept man. Which I was, because she was earning more money than I did as a lawyer. Yeah. She was with you in 1965 when you actually cried on television? Yeah. What were you crying about? I cried because an idea, an ideal, was shattered. That you could have a non-racial society in Malaysia and Singapore. And we had already made moves and mobilized a large part of the population there, Chinese, Indians, and families understanding and working for a Malaysian Malaysia. And you talked us out. That was the end of our enterprise. And so you were crying over the anguish that what might have been couldn't be? Yeah. And I had to leave behind all the people that mobilized. They were left leaders.

Did you dream it could be what it is today? Not in the actual form it is, because the farms have been the physical landscape has been the result of technological improvements imported from outside, as the globalized village that allowed us, you know, to have Arena Sands and, uh, ballet and all that, all the rest of it. But like we have an intermingled population, one society, that was planned. That was the aim. It's it's still work in progress, but we should continue that work.

Someone said that you built a first-class oasis in a third-world region. And they, you've been praised for your efficiency and incorruptibility, but you have been accused by human rights groups of limiting political freedom and intimidating through libel lawsuits. How can you intimidate to reliable lawsuits? It's ridiculous. Lawyers will tell you, it's either a libel, in which case I can win the case, but it's not a liability. Is a judge will throw it out, and I have to pay damages. But you are rather, you're prepared to be a litigious fellow. Yeah, rather than have to knock him down politically, I go to court and says, "I'm here. Cross-examine me. As the plaintiff, I'm saying that what you said was a packet of lies. Here I am now. Put me to cross-examination."

You have also said that while you might have done things in retrospect that you shouldn't have done, you always did them for honorable reasons. From time looking back, other things which I think I might have done better, like like not forcing the pace of getting people to change their languages. You know, we made English the language. Yeah. We were speaking in multiple times. Like Dr. Bieber, yes, Chinese speaking 78 dialects, speaking three, four Indonesian dialects, Thomas four, five, and English was mattering a very bad form of English. Is this why you against what they call Singlish? Yes, I said, um, you still are, even though the youth sort of have their own language. No, it's, you, you want a language which you can communicate to with the world easily. And if you speak your own patois English, you're disadvantaging yourself. I once went to Jamaica for a Commonwealth conference, and I'll never forget this. They took over an American holiday resort to houses. So all the cooks and so on, good cooks. The body spoke in a quaint accent. So I went out to watch the fishermen bring the fishing. So I asked him, "What kind of fish?" I said, "Damn spreads." I said, "What's that?" "Damn spreads." Oh, the express. Okay. Well, that was the result of an amalgamation of many African dialects with the slave masters' language. No, we inherited the English language of the British. They decided in this multiracial society to make it the working language, and Chinese, Malay, Indian, whatever the second language.

Are you worried today about the declining birth rate? I think can be done about it. Nothing. It's a lifestyle change. The women are educated. They're completely independent. They don't marry until they are in the late mid-30s. As late childbearing, here's my impression. Yeah. That you, because you have shown results, believe that the prime minister became senior minister, became, uh, minister mentor, knows best what's and feel strongest about what's good for Singapore? It worries most about threats against it. Yeah. What is best? I don't see Singapore continue to thrive and to prosper. And if you don't reproduce yourself, and you have migrants overwhelming the local population, we haven't got that yet today. The migrants are only 30 percent. And I think we should never allow them to become near 50. Then they will change us. We want them. So what would you do to make sure they don't become 50 percent? Just make sure the numbers are kept down. So how would you do that? Immigration restrictions. Yes. Is that what it's going to come to? Just take in the high quality people. Those who are tertiary educated. Education.

Do you worry a bit though that Singaporeans, because of all this prosperity, are becoming a bit soft? No, not soft. They're becoming self-centered, or taking for granted. Well, they're hard-working, hard-driving, enjoy life, travel, have a good time. They work hard and they play hard. They're not going soft. You have said, with respect, that they, they don't feel the spur in their height. That's because I don't think it's necessary to strive anymore. So we're already here. We have arrived. Our standard of living won't go down. Just leave it. And so what's your message to them? When they say that this needs more than an autopilot, they run into storms, they run into air pockets, and the pilot and your co-pilot and the spare pilots will be on board, and passengers must be alive and awake and alert. I sent you a word. I'm worried because if we, if they, the new leaders and the population as a whole, do not realize the small base on which this is built, and they take liberties with it, we could go down quickly. Spiral down. A vicious circle down quickly. Yes. Standards of living will go up. Confidence will disappear. Investments will disappear. So your legacy is that you have presided over, encouraged, led this prosperity. You're developing legacy. As you want to make sure? I want to make sure that this place always commands confidence. Confidence brings in investments and brings in talent. With investments and talents, we will prosper. And that confidence should never be jeopardized by riots, civil commotion, strife of any kind. Strife of any kind. Yeah. Not necessary.

Can I, can Singapore, will Singapore have candid under what you want to see a true democracy, American style? Yes. No. What's an American style democracy? Your First Amendment says you can't say anything in your life. Yes, you can't have that. You cannot say anything you like about religion, race, and culture. They are forbidden. They are sensitive. Forgot issues. They will cause a stir, and you're in big trouble. So that's the price you pay for prosperity and security? No.

Do you wish you'd have a bigger fishbowl to to achieve your miracle in? Did you? This is a small island. It's 40 minutes from one end to the other. It's very difficult to have a little piece of jade and crafted beautifully. What is it that makes you this strategic thinker that people come to for advice? No, first, I do not believe people come to me for to seek advice. They come to me to bounce ideas and just to test them out. What is it? You have experience. I'm 88. I've lived long, and I've not forgotten my mistakes.