Transcription
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not sure what the subject I'm supposed to speak about is. Just legacies of leadership.
I was once asked to give the inaugural lecture at the Kennedy School in Harvard on a series called leadership. I had not thought about the subject. I think I know what a leader is, having met many in my life, both political leaders, military leaders, corporate leaders. But as there were going to be several authors of books on leadership who would be at the Kennedy School, I decided it might be wise for me to read what they have written and what it's all about. So I looked them up on Google. Enormous volumes. Just to review or summarize one of them will take me half an hour, if not more. So I will just try and encapsulate what I think they all mean by leadership. It is the ability to persuade, to convince, to persuade people to follow a course of action which you believe is good for them and will achieve something which they would desire.
Now, there are different kinds of leadership. One is where you are not in a hierarchy and you have to be supported or elected. That's a different kind of leadership. The other is where you are the three-star general or a four-star general and everybody has got fewer numbers of stars or other pips on their shoulders or stripes, and they just have to follow you. But even then, you require certain qualities to be able to inspire confidence that when you order them to do something, they know that you have thought it over, that it is doable, that they are not being, as the American phrase goes, recklessly put in harm's way.
Leadership varies with time and circumstance. The subject I know best is what constitutes political leadership. If you read the present media, you say that the world is bereft of great leaders. Uh, there was no Winston Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin or Charles de Gaulle in my lifetime. They were great men. I lived my truest, my most impressionable years when they made massive decisions that decided the shape of the post-war world. What did they have in common? Ability to communicate. Most of all, Winston Churchill. I heard him on radio when Britain was looking as if it was going to be captured. And I heard him, and it was a rousing, indomitable, defiant speech that galvanized the people, bought the British time, I think inspired his RAF pilots, and so they won the Battle of Britain. Bought time. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. America came into the war, and the rest was history.
The one who I would admire most after Churchill in my lifetime would be Charles de Gaulle. Uh, I don't know French, but I read of him, and he saved the honor, the amour propre, of France because it was a captured, defeated country. But as France went down, he, he left, went to London, adopted by Winston Churchill, and he broadcasted. But he was never Churchill's protégé. He was the most irascible, difficult, uncontrollable leader of the Free French forces. But he was a leader. Years later, I read his biography, not in French, but in English, a translation, and I was fascinated. Here was a man whose country had been captured, who was able to wear his uniform and try and form Free French forces with whatever remnants of French troops or airmen or sailors who escaped. And when the Americans landed in North Africa and they were in Algiers, Algiers was then part of Vichy France and was captured. He went up to the French general in charge, and guarding the French general were American troops. You went out. He went in and says he berated the man and says, "You are a general of France. Why do you have American troops guarding you?" His impudence. Without the American troops, he was a puppet of the Germans. But he had that courage, that spirit. And he went back to France, and the Americans and the British decided it would be good for France and for them that the French Free French forces would liberate Paris. They having sacrificed the majority of their forces at Normandy, and he gave France, the French people, an alibi. So whenever they are accused of having collaborated with the Germans, he was evidence of the spirit of resistance. That's a very great man. And when France collapsed in a series of revolving doors, he came back in 1957, got himself properly elected by the legislature as adopted as the president, changed the constitution, and governed France and restored what he called was grandeur.
Do you have such people today? But do you need such people today? If you look around the world, you see what kind of leaders do you need? If you look at China, without Mao, Mao Zedong, maybe China would not have been so easily liberated, as they call it, and the KMT defeated, and the People's Republic pronounced on the 1st of October 1949, and they said the Chinese people have stood up. But had he continued, I think China would have been in a parlous condition. So fortunately for China, the man he rusticated, Deng Xiaoping, came back from the wilderness, pushed aside Hua Guofeng in 1978. He visited Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore to persuade us to combine with China and stop Vietnam, the Cuba of Southeast Asia of the Soviet Union, and they were about to attack Cambodia. I had the privilege of meeting him, meeting him, talking to him for three days. And he is, in my lifetime, the most impressive man I have ever met. Small, barely 5 feet, stood erect, tremendous aplomb. A man of few words, but carefully thought, every few words carefully thought out. He spent one hour after all the ride from the airport back to the office and to his, uh, villa. We met in the afternoon, and I think one hour plus translation because I never deal in any negotiations in Chinese without a translation because I will be at a disadvantage. So it took nearly two hours, and I noticed his interpreters did not take notes, but they gave almost verbatim correct explanation, translation of what he said. So my surprise was that he made the same spiel in Bangkok, in Kuala Lumpur, and this was the third rehearsal. So the translators knew it by heart. When he finished urging us why we should combine and stop Vietnam from imperiling the rest of Southeast Asia, it was about half past six. I said, "Would you like me to respond now, or would you like to rest, have dinner, and when we are fresh tomorrow, we can talk?" He thought I wanted to have time to think about what he had said, which is partly true. So, like, we'll have dinner. So we spent the evening talking and says, "You must come to Beijing again. I'm sorry I wasn't there when you came. I was kept out of the capital. I went there and I, in May 1976, to meet Mao Zedong, and he wasn't there. But I said, "Never mind. Come again." I said, "When China has stabilized and growing, I will come again." So, "Oh, that will take a very long time. Come now." That's a very forthright man.
So I decided the next day, and I'll come straight to the point. I told him, "You have explained to me why we should all combine in Southeast Asia and join you in blocking the Vietnamese who are wicked and wanted to capture Cambodia. Now, I will tell you what my neighbors want to do. They want me to join them and confront you, not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is thousands of miles away, and the Soviet Union has no broadcasting station egging, urging, agitating communist parties in Southeast Asia to overthrow their governments. You are from your radio stations in South China." I did not know then that the radio stations were not in Yunnan but in Changsha in Hunan, which we later discovered. He said, "And as long as you are doing that and sending them money to buy arms and doing all these things, it's most unlikely that I'll be able to persuade them to join you." Having met Hua Guofeng in Beijing in a long encounter, I had expected a blustering reply because Hua Guofeng, he, he captured me after sending me off to the Great Wall. I went to the Great Wall. Then they gave me lunch after the, at the Ming Tombs. Feel hot, dusty. I downed beer. Then I arrived back at the guest house at Diaoyutai. I said, "Meeting." Oh, as was regular. Having had to deal with communists in Singapore, I knew exactly what they were up to. They first made me tired. Then they say, "Now we'll have a meeting." So I said, "Okay." Right. I said, "I'll wash up first." Went up, cleaned up, freshened up, drank a lot of Chinese tea, sat down and listened to him. I said, "Now I have something very serious to talk to you. I hear you are in military alliance with Taiwan." I said, "Oh," he says, "Yes, your troops are there." So he went on a great speed. He says, "But Taiwan belongs to China." I said, "Yes, we know that. But the de facto control is with the Nationalist government, and I have to go there and deal with them." So this is, is a very serious matter. I said, "We are not training with the Taiwanese troops. We are not in alliance with Taiwan. We're just training by ourselves because we are so small. If we fire our artillery, guns, they go 20 miles, we're already across our border. So we have to go somewhere." I said, "I decided to counterattack." I said, "By the way, you told me yesterday that communists never interfere in the activities of other countries. Why are you giving arms and support to the Malayan Communist Party to overthrow the Singapore government?" So he was not briefed on this. So his foreign minister wrote up a long note for him. He just pushed it aside. He knew there was no chance his reading it, mastering the facts, and then arguing with me. So he pushed it aside. Says, "Never mind. But let me tell you this, whatever communist fight, they will win." So I had expected Deng Xiaoping to tell me something like that. He paused. He closed his eyes, looked at me, and said, "What do you want me to do?" I took a deep breath and I said, "This man can do business." Said, "Stop it. Change your policy. Then we'll join you and stop the Vietnamese." He paused. He said, "Give me time." And it took 18 months before I met him again in Beijing, and he said, "We have told them they must stop. We have closed down the radio stations. We are not giving them any more support."
Now I've read Chin Peng's book. Chin Peng was the leader of the Communist Party in Malaya, and he's written up, or he gave an oral biography to a Daily Telegraph correspondent who's retired and has written up his side of the story. And in it, he explained that Deng called him up and told him, "I'm very sorry, Lee Kuan Yew has told me that if you don't close down your station, then the Khmer Rouge will lose his seat in the United Nations, and then we'll be in trouble." So, according to Chin Peng, he did this quick calculation. Said, "Well, this is the answer. Must be yes." So he says, "Oh, can we go on till another year?" So he says, "No, you must stop now, as soon as possible." So he says, "Can I take away the equipment?" He says, "Take everything you want." But Chin Peng says, "They were so heavy and big, how could he take it to the jungles?" So I think they must have given him some money, and he bought portable Japanese equipment. But that was a leader. He did his calculations. He decided this was in China's interest to stop Vietnam. He had to cut his communist comrades. Can't be helped. But he cut it in a way which was different from the Americans. When the Shah of Iran was ousted and he was traveling around the world looking for medical treatment, he had a lot of trouble getting permission to go to America to get treatment. A Chinese with long experience, 5,000 years of knowing how to make friends and allies, and you never know day after tomorrow you will need them, made sure that they did not leave hostile to him, hostile to China, so set them up, good luck, good wishes. And every time any communist leader of the Malayan Communist Party is ill, he goes to China for treatment, free of charge. That's leadership. But without him, had Mao's policies carried on, I think China would be in the position of the Soviet Union. It would have imploded. And that's the end of the story. It did not implode. He did not listen to the advice given, gratuitous advice given, why he should democratize and so on. Glasnost, Perestroika. He did it his own way. First, a few free trade zones, then successful expansion, then privatize or lease out the farms. And in 1992, he went on a southern tour. Deng said, "Press on." And today, 2005, you have the phrase "peaceful rise of China," "helping China." That's real leadership. He listened to all the sincere advice given to him by Americans and Europeans, decided what was good for China, and stuck to it. And I think the present leadership in China, not cast in a heroic mold, because you don't want to fight America. You don't want to fight the Soviet Union. You want peace. You want quiet. You want to be friends with ASEAN, even with the Japanese, if it's possible to grow. And every year you grow stronger. Your economy grows, your technology grows, and there's a spin-off eventually on space, submarines, etc. And you extrapolate this 10 years, 20 years, and you see the gap between Japan and China will narrow. The gap between America and China will begin to close. Then say 2030 or 2040, then they say, "Anti-sec succession law," let's talk. And you must talk. So it's a matter of time. I think it shows a certain, uh, patience, a certain realistic appraisal of their present position. A certain recognition that an unnecessary collision now would derail the whole, churchy, peaceful rise, helping China. So they have a leadership that's geared to achieve that. So, in other words, leadership depends upon the mood of a people at a given time, the situation the country is in, and the policies that those, the set of leaders must achieve to advance and promote the interests of the people and of the country. Uh, in Singapore, I lived through turbulent times. It was life and death whether Singapore could make the grade on its own after it's cut off from Malaysia, from there, from Malaysia. But by 1990, when I stepped down, that was not the issue. The issue now is, can Singapore continue to upgrade its people, educate, train, innovate, upgrade its economy, revamp itself, and have a leadership that inspires a younger generation, no longer deprived, widely traveled, comfortable in their homes, knowledgeable of the outside world, but with still fire in their bellies to achieve? It requires a different leadership. I can't do it, and it's up to the next generation. So, so it is with every country. As you see in Japan, you have Koizumi who've decided quite clearly that Japan is going to be a normal country, that the Self-Defense Force will become a full-fledged defense force. He sent troops to Iraq. He's come out explicitly with the Americans that Taiwan is a crucial issue of peace and stability in that concerns the US and Japan. Does it reflect the wish of the Japanese people? Probably yes, because I think they're somewhat uneasy about the kind of relationship that will develop between them and China as China continues its phenomenal growth and in 20, 30 years will overtake Taiwan and will overtake Japan. So leadership depends on time, place, circumstance, the needs of a people, and a group of leaders or a leader who's able to articulate what they, what he thinks will be good for them and will bring them forward. What you want in Hong Kong, I don't know because I don't live here. But I think apply what I have said. Look at your circumstances, look at the possibilities, and say, within this framework, what can be achieved for the maximum benefit of the people of Hong Kong. And good luck to you.
Thank you, >> Minister Mentor. Thank you very much for your very touching speech. And my name is >> Why is it touching? >> Touching is because you shared a lot of experiences with us which we didn't have the opportunity to experience the same thing. And my name is Ler. I work for City Group. I have a question. You have spoken very highly of Mr. Deng Xiaoping. And certainly, we believe that he has transformed China that no other other man has ever done. But if you were in his position, would you have done anything different than what he had done for China? How, how can I answer that question? I never, I was born in the wrong time. I was born in the wrong place. I never went on the Long March with him. I never commanded whole armies that crossed the Yangtze River and chased the KMT troops out of China. What can I say?
>> We have another question. The gentleman to my right, >> Uh, Minister Mentor Lee, I'm Stuart Winchester. I work with AllianceBernstein Investors. I'm most obliged to hear, um, what would be the most difficult decision you had to make in your life, and if you could tell us a little bit how you came to making that decision. I have answered this question so many times. Briefly, it was the decision to leave Malaysia. We spent so much of our lives, political lives, bringing about the merging of Singapore with Malaya. If you don't know the history, Singapore was part of the Straits Settlements. Penang, Malacca, Singapore. They were British colonies. Then the rest of Malaya were nine Malay states. At the end of the war, the British decided that they would have to give up Malaya, but they wanted to keep Singapore. So they put Penang and Malacca into Malaya, formed the Malayan Union, and there were protests by the Malays that didn't want equal citizenship. So they became a Federation of Malaya, and Singapore became a colony. We spent many, many years to bring about a reunion of the territories because that was our hinterland. We get our water from Johor. So to cut our ties, even though they promised us water for 100 years, and to have no hint of land, and at a time in 1965 when there was confrontation from Indonesia, that means we are on our own. How do we survive? But if we had stayed on, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, then very princely man called Tunku Abdul Rahman, said there will be blood in the streets because what we wanted was equal citizenship with special rights for the Malays. What they wanted was a Malay Malaysia, and politics run on communal lines. In other words, Malays form one party, Chinese and Indians form separate parties confined to racial groups. We could not accept that because that means perpetual division. So when we left, it was a painful decision because in order to bring about change, we had to galvanize Malays, Chinese, Indians, Dayaks, all across Malaysia, and to quit and leave them in a different equation in which they are disadvantaged because with us in it, it was 40% Chinese, 40% Malays, 20% others.
>> I am Mrs. Jenny Lee. Born in Hong Kong, went to Hong Kong University, taught English part of the time in America, lived my five year, five years out of the last 12 years in Singapore. Now I'm working for my husband who is sponsoring summer programs for mainland Chinese students to come to Hong Kong to mix with Hong Kong university students, plus some US students, plus some Singapore students, in order to nurture leadership in the young generation. Last year, for instance, we went to Singapore for the last two weeks of our program, and we had 14 of the N US best students with us. Now, I have great respect for your leadership. I'd like to ask you, what are the legacies, bad or good, of leadership that you are living in Singapore with? I, I think it's best left for history to judge that. Uh, I did my best in the circumstances I was placed in. Uh, it was not a, uh, 10 out of 10 performance. I would say I did not fail, otherwise there wouldn't be a Singapore. But how well I succeeded will depend on how, uh, history students reviewing the records will decide whether I missed chances which I should have taken. I don't think when you do a job, you should be too concerned with history. I didn't keep a diary because it will distract me from what has to be done. Uh, some people or some leaders keep a diary for the purposes of, uh, writing their memoirs or having, uh, PhD students do research on what they have done. I mean, American presidents, when they retire, have libraries. They put all their papers there and get students to study them. I didn't keep a diary. So, when I had time to do my memoirs, I had to assemble a team, collect all the bits and pieces of notes I made, my appointments, diaries which my secretary kept, and piece the story together in retrospect. I would say that in life, you do your best, and if your best is not good enough, nothing can be done. If it's good enough, well, you leave something decent behind. Uh, you're doing a good job trying to foster understanding across races, across cultures. Uh, it's not a new idea. There are many programs, uh, Fulbright scholarships, Marshall Plan scholarships, Rhodes scholarships. At the end of the day, I think the world will have, whether we survive in a multipolar world, which I think will come about, whatever, uh, the wish of the Americans to remain a sole superpower. I think it's, they may remain for 50 years, maybe 60 years, but by the end of this century, it will be a multipolar world. That'll be the US, that'll be China, that'll be Europe, maybe not a military power, but definitely an economic power and a separate power in foreign policy because it's quite clear to me that the Europeans are going to be a different, uh, center of thinking about what the world should be. Uh, it's the French and the Germans who are setting the pace. But I think more and more the other Europeans will realize that yes, they need the Americans against contingencies in other parts of the world, and in case Russia becomes aggressive once again, but it will draw together, and even the British, over time, will find themselves more European than they really want to be. And there'll be India, and if you believe the, uh, economists, that's Brazil and a few other countries. So it'll be a very different world. And if, if they produce kind of leaders who understand that you need, uh, accommodation in this kind of an interrelated, interlocked world, then maybe institutions may evolve to allow this kind of coordination and cooperation.
I was interested to read, uh, a report from our mission in Beijing. Uh, I'm supposed to go to a forum in Boao later this month or later next month. This is March, in April, uh, to talk about the kind of future China sees for itself. And it's been carefully thought through, a very well-crafted, well-thought-out series of concepts which shows that they want peace, which shows that they want 40, 50, if not more, years of quiet to develop. And the points in Chinese style, they put it as 3-2-1. Three are the three big problems China faces: uh, environmental problems, energy depletion, uh, population and growth. Two, how they have to be different from other countries that grew as major powers, for instance, Germany or Japan, which in order to grow, needing resources, developed empires or developed spheres of influence to reach out to resources. So, China has decided it must have a policy where she cooperates with the people who have the resources and trade and acquires those resources in a cooperative relationship. So, she's buying up companies in Brazil, Argentina, even Australia, mines, and so on. Uh, it's well-crafted and well-thought-through. In other words, they understand that if they embark on the same policies which previous great powers have taken, there will be conflict, and they may never arrive. So I take that as an optimistic sign of what they want. But whether that is what they can achieve is a different matter because this generation that does this thinking and is imbued with these thoughts is a generation that went through revolution. There are men in their 70s who went through the Cultural Revolution, paid bitterly for all the mistakes they have made, and know that to transform China, it is a task for generations, not a task for 10, 20 years, uh, to educate the people, to get the western provinces and the northwest up to the same levels as the coastal provinces, or at least less of a disparity, will be immensely difficult. And that they are not going to go back to either Han China or Tang China where they were the sole power as far as they were concerned, the known world they dominated, they were the only world. Yes, Rome existed at the time that Tang existed or or Khan existed, but they were not in conflict. But they know now that they live in this very interrelated world of instant communications and swift transportation. So I would take it as a, a hopeful sign that there is deep thinking at the top and a desire to find a peaceful way for themselves to grow. But whether that will be achieved, I don't know.
Mr. Mentor Lee, we just have one last question if you would. The gentleman I promised, uh, on the left, if you could make it as quick as possible because we're already overrunning. >> Yes, my name is Alex, Alex Young, and I'm a street fighter helping my family to, uh, looking for investment opportunity outside Hong Kong. So, actually, the, uh, Chief Executive of Macau has just did only one good thing, is to liberalize the, uh, monopoly business in casino. So I'm would like to know whether your new direction about the casino business, uh, in Singapore, in order to push the economy ahead. Thank you. >> I wasn't allowed to ask that question. Well, this is a, this is a judgment call for a younger generation of leaders to make. It's a different Singapore from the one that I governed. Uh, I am dead set against gambling. I don't believe you get rich by gambling. Uh, the only kind of gamble I've ever indulged in was during the war when I was a, a stretcher bearer for the Medical Auxiliary Services. So at night, when we had to stand by air raids and so on, as fellow students at Raffles College, we played poker. But that's not a game of chance, that's a game of psychology. I don't like games of chance. And I watched the Japanese allow gambling farms during the occupation. I don't know, they must have had it in Hong Kong, too. It was a good way to keep the people, especially Chinese who are very fond of gambling, keep them occupied. So the different forms of gambles, and one particularly popular one was to count by four pantani. So you have a beautiful long stick, bamboo, and you got a croupier who puts a bundle of beads, and it goes four, four, and you guess whether the last remains is one, two, three, or four. I watched it, fascinated. The skill, the excitement. I never punted because I was a mathematics major. So I knew the law of chances. If you put the same money on one, two, three, four, you will not get your money back. So it's a math game. The banker must win. You put $1 on each, you win, you get $3.50. He's taken 50 cents. So, win or lose, he wins. You have lost. But we now live in a porous world. I've got two ships that come in every every day. And many of them sail nowhere. They just sail outside territorial waters. And in fact, one of our entrepreneurs runs such a cruise ship. And he told his friend who told me, he says, "It's a math game. He wants to have the casino on land. He says the ship goes out for three days. The man loses his money in one day. After that, you're feeding him the next two days for nothing. So, less of the casino on land, he loses his money, he goes home to eat. No. If he's going to lose his money on board the ship, or he goes to Batam, which is about half an hour by ferry, or he goes to Genting in Kuala Lumpur, which is about 40, 30 minutes by air, and another half an hour. Well, why not have one in Singapore? And we've got, uh, really marvelous, uh, integrated resorts like Las Vegas, where according to the proposals, the casino is only a very small part of it. No more than 30 to 40%. The rest are conventions, hotels, uh, theme parks, water parks, all sorts of beautiful things. I mean, you have Harrah's, you have, uh, uh, Sands, you have Wynn, and they are big players. I mean, is, uh, is on the Dow Jones, SEC quoted. Singaporeans are divided into two groups. The older generation are like me. I, I sat down at one dinner over the Chinese New Year, and they were all my age or about my age, and I went around the table. They all opposed, except one, and that one ran a casino in Queensland. But the young have said, "No, no, great deal." So what? So the man who ran a casino told me, he says, "I said, I read somewhere that in Australia, after they had casinos, there were more suicides." He says, "Yes, that's only in the first few years. After that, it levels off. People know you can't win, and you've got all kinds of support groups that tells you, may there are people who have got this kind of gene like an alcoholic has a special gene where you, once you start drinking, you can't stop. You, the gene gets stimulated. So similarly, the thrill of win or lose in a few minutes, in a few seconds, gives an enormous surge. Well, if you've got that gene and you lose money, that's too bad. So, so the, my colleagues have thought of a very effective way to ring-fence. They use the word ring-fence. So, if you decide that your family member is likely to have that gene, you can apply, and he will be barred from the casino. So he's saved. But that doesn't stop him from going on the cruise ship, or going to Batam, or going to Macau, or going to Kuala Lumpur. It's a tough call. But, uh, as I've said, leaders are for certain times in certain places. My job is that of a mentor. I am not a Prime Minister. My son is. Has made me a mentor, just to remind everybody that I'm not in charge.
Hey everyone, what you just watched is a rare recording from March 2005. Lee Kuan Yew speaking in Hong Kong at an event hosted by City Bank on the theme of leadership and legacy. He was 81 years old at the time, having already stepped down as Prime Minister, serving as Senior Minister. A bit of context first. Lee Kuan Yew was the founding father of Singapore. A man who took a tiny city-state with no natural resources, no hinterland, freshly expelled from Malaysia, and turned it into one of the most prosperous economies in Asia. During his tenure, Singapore's foreign policy was widely admired for its balance and precision, navigating between great powers without taking sides, without making enemies, surviving and thriving on sheer strategic intelligence. That background gives his observations on leadership a weight that most scholars simply don't have. Here are a few things worth reflecting on after watching this.
First, the decline of Western leadership. In his speech, Lee talked about the great leaders of the Second World War era: Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle. He described de Gaulle in particular with genuine admiration, a man whose country had been defeated and occupied, who went to London with nothing, no army, no government, and held it together through sheer conviction and force of will. That kind of leader, he suggested, was rare even then. Twenty-one years later, looking at the West today, that kind of leader has nearly disappeared entirely. Britain cycled through four Prime Ministers in three years, each one more chaotic than the last. The United States has oscillated between a President whose cognitive decline became impossible to ignore and another whose decision-making appears driven entirely by impulse and emotion. François Hollande has spent years proclaiming European strategic autonomy, yet consistently falls in line with Washington when it matters. Among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the leaders who have demonstrated the highest level of strategic coherence and long-term vision are those of China and Russia. That's not a political statement, that's an observation.
Second, on Deng Xiaoping, Lee said something extraordinary in this speech. He said Deng Xiaoping was the most impressive person he had ever met in his lifetime. Not the most impressive politician, not the most impressive Asian leader, the most impressive person of anyone he had ever met. He backed that up with a remarkable firsthand account. In 1978, Deng visited Singapore. The two men talked for nearly two hours. Lee looked him in the eye and told him directly, "Your radio stations in southern China are broadcasting to communist parties across Southeast Asia, inciting them to overthrow their governments. As long as that continues, I cannot persuade my neighbors to join you in pushing back against Vietnam." He expected a combative response. Instead, Deng paused, closed his eyes, and said, "What do you want me to do?" Lee said in that moment he realized this is a man you can do business with. Eighteen months later, Deng kept his word. The stations went silent. That assessment coming from Lee Kuan Yew carries real weight. He met world leaders across decades. The fact that Deng stood alone at the top of that list tells you something.
Third, on the pace of China's rise. In 2005, Lee predicted that the gap between China and the United States would begin to close somewhere around 2030 to 2040. The direction was right. The timeline was far too conservative. China's progress has exceeded what virtually anyone anticipated. From being the world's factory floor to leading in electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and space technology, the transformation has been extraordinary. At the same time, the West's relative decline has accelerated faster than most observers expected. In 2005, the idea of an eastward shift in global power was still a minority view. Today, it's hard to argue otherwise.
Fourth, a few moments from the Q&A worth noting. Someone asked him, "If you had been in Deng Xiaoping's position, what would you have done differently?" His answer was immediate. He said, "I was born in the wrong time, the wrong place. I never went on the Long March. I never commanded armies across the Yangtze River. What could I possibly say?" He simply declined to answer on the grounds that he wasn't qualified. That kind of honesty is rare, and it takes a certain kind of confidence to say it in public. Someone asked him about the hardest decision of his life. He said it was the decision to leave Malaysia. And then he said something that stayed with me: "I bear that burden to this day." A man who built one of the great success stories of the 20th century, sitting there at 81, saying he still carries the weight of that choice. That's not performance, that's real. Someone asked him about gambling. He said he was firmly against it, not on moral grounds, but because he understood probability: the house always wins. Using mathematical logic to explain a life principle, that's very much who he was.
Fifth, on Singapore's leadership after Lee, someone asked him what legacy he was leaving behind in Singapore. He said, "Best to let history judge." He did his best. It wasn't a perfect performance, but he didn't fail. Otherwise, there would be no Singapore. He said, "In life, you do your best, and if your best is good enough, you leave something decent behind." Modest, but not falsely.
So, that brings us to the question of what's happened to that legacy. One of Lee's most important contributions was a framework for small state survival: Stay balanced between great powers. Don't antagonize anyone unnecessarily. Be useful to everyone, and let strategic intelligence substitute for size. That approach kept Singapore relevant and respected through the Cold War and beyond. That framework is now under pressure. In November 2025, Singapore's current Prime Minister, Lawrence Wong, made remarks at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum about China-Japan tensions. He noted that Southeast Asian nations had moved past their historical grievances with Japan, that surveys showed Japan to be the most trusted major power in the region, and that he supported a larger Japanese role in regional security. From a foreign policy standpoint, those remarks were a significant departure from the Lee Kuan Yew playbook. Small states navigating great power competition don't volunteer opinions on sensitive historical and security issues. They don't appear to take sides. Lee's Singapore never stepped into that kind of minefield. Wong's comments broke with that tradition and prompted serious questions among observers about whether Singapore can still maintain the kind of precise diplomatic balance that defined the Lee era. Lee Hsien Loong, to his credit, was a step below Lee Kuan Yew, but still a highly capable leader. The gap between Lawrence Wong and Lee Kuan Yew is considerably wider.
Finally, a broader reflection. This speech was delivered in 2005. Looking back from 2026, many of Lee's judgments have been confirmed, some more completely and more quickly than even he anticipated. His assessment of Deng Xiaoping, his reading of China's strategic patience, his vision of a multipolar world – none of it has aged poorly. He was a genuine thinker, not driven by slogans or emotion, but by clear-eyed analysis and long-term perspective. The speed at which Western leadership has unraveled and the thoroughness of that unraveling may well have surprised even him. As for Singapore's future, that remains to be seen.