13-04-2023, 12:01 PM
Read with an open mind. Nothing should be yaken for granted.
OPINION
FARAH STOCKMAN
*He Made His Country Rich, but Something Has Gone Wrong With the System*
_April 12, 2023_
"But now, eight years after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is at a crossroads. It’s being run by his eldest son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who leans heavily on his father’s legacy. Elections for the largely ceremonial post of president are expected in September and parliamentary elections are due by 2025. The prime minister’s potential successor has already been picked. But the ruling People’s Action Party has never looked so vulnerable.
Critics say Singapore is becoming more like a plutocracy, in which well-paid yes men with the right connections to the Lee family rise up the ranks. Today, Singapore is a place where forklift operators can face jail time for taking one-dollar bribes but executives from the Singaporean conglomerate Keppel — who paid millions in bribes, according to the U.S. Justice Department — got off with “stern warnings.” (Officials in Singapore have said that they didn’t have enough evidence to take the case to court.)
The trouble is that the system requires someone like Lee Kuan Yew at the top — strict and charismatic, as Michael Barr, author of “Singapore: A Modern History,” told me. “But no one who has that political skill would ever rise to the top today because that person would be regarded as a threat,” he said.
Perhaps the clearest sign that something in Singapore has gone wrong is the fact that Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son and one of his grandsons say they are now living in exile, fearful that they would be arrested if they ever returned.
“My uncle doesn’t want competing claims to legitimacy,” Lee Kuan Yew’s grandson Shengwu Li told me over a cup of tea in Cambridge, Mass. “Authoritarian systems don’t survive by taking chances. If they think there’s a 5 percent chance I’ll be a problem for them, they want that to be zero.”
The irony is that Mr. Li, a 38-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard who was just awarded a top honor in his field, doesn’t have political ambitions. Soft-spoken and cerebral, he says he’s happy working on his theorems in a place where nobody gives him special treatment because he’s related to Lee Kuan Yew. After 10 years studying at Oxford and Stanford, he got used to certain freedoms.
Lee Hsien Yang, Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son, says he has been fighting to honor his father’s wish not to have a cult of personality built around the house. But he says his elder brother, the prime minister, wants to preserve the house as a national monument to bolster his own political legitimacy. Lee Hsien Yang spoke out publicly against his brother, only to get hit with an investigation. Eventually, he fled the country, like his son. It seems to be an example of what Kenneth Paul Tan, a Singaporean professor of cultural studies, calls the “politics of evermore sophisticated bullying.” At its core, the fight isn’t about a house or a will. It’s about the future of Singapore.
“The institutions in Singapore, whether it is the judiciary, the civil service, the army, the institutions of higher learning, have all gradually come under direct control in a way that stifles independent thinking and challenge,” Lee Hsien Yang told me. Lee Kuan Yew would solicit different views and occasionally change his mind, he said. “Today, the Singapore authorities no longer have people who would challenge the system to say, ‘Here’s my view. I don’t think you are doing the right thing.’ They are too well-paid.”
Lee Hsien Yang and his son Shengwu Li avoided politics for most of their lives, but since the feud over the house burst into public view, both have voiced sympathy for the political opposition, lending the legitimacy of that crucial family name. Yet their ability to help the opposition has been curtailed by the accusations against them. The episode has exposed the cracks in Singapore’s celebrated system. If Lee Kuan Yew’s son and grandson can feel compelled to flee, what can happen to ordinary people?
Political scientists weren’t sure that Singapore’s highly successful system would outlast Lee Kuan Yew. By the end of his life, even the great man himself spoke of preparing for the day when his party would lose power. That’s the thing about benevolent autocracies: They tend to expire. They either cease to be autocracies — as happened in South Korea and Chile — or they cease to be benevolent."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opini...cracy.html
OPINION
FARAH STOCKMAN
*He Made His Country Rich, but Something Has Gone Wrong With the System*
_April 12, 2023_
"But now, eight years after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is at a crossroads. It’s being run by his eldest son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who leans heavily on his father’s legacy. Elections for the largely ceremonial post of president are expected in September and parliamentary elections are due by 2025. The prime minister’s potential successor has already been picked. But the ruling People’s Action Party has never looked so vulnerable.
Critics say Singapore is becoming more like a plutocracy, in which well-paid yes men with the right connections to the Lee family rise up the ranks. Today, Singapore is a place where forklift operators can face jail time for taking one-dollar bribes but executives from the Singaporean conglomerate Keppel — who paid millions in bribes, according to the U.S. Justice Department — got off with “stern warnings.” (Officials in Singapore have said that they didn’t have enough evidence to take the case to court.)
The trouble is that the system requires someone like Lee Kuan Yew at the top — strict and charismatic, as Michael Barr, author of “Singapore: A Modern History,” told me. “But no one who has that political skill would ever rise to the top today because that person would be regarded as a threat,” he said.
Perhaps the clearest sign that something in Singapore has gone wrong is the fact that Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son and one of his grandsons say they are now living in exile, fearful that they would be arrested if they ever returned.
“My uncle doesn’t want competing claims to legitimacy,” Lee Kuan Yew’s grandson Shengwu Li told me over a cup of tea in Cambridge, Mass. “Authoritarian systems don’t survive by taking chances. If they think there’s a 5 percent chance I’ll be a problem for them, they want that to be zero.”
The irony is that Mr. Li, a 38-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard who was just awarded a top honor in his field, doesn’t have political ambitions. Soft-spoken and cerebral, he says he’s happy working on his theorems in a place where nobody gives him special treatment because he’s related to Lee Kuan Yew. After 10 years studying at Oxford and Stanford, he got used to certain freedoms.
Lee Hsien Yang, Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son, says he has been fighting to honor his father’s wish not to have a cult of personality built around the house. But he says his elder brother, the prime minister, wants to preserve the house as a national monument to bolster his own political legitimacy. Lee Hsien Yang spoke out publicly against his brother, only to get hit with an investigation. Eventually, he fled the country, like his son. It seems to be an example of what Kenneth Paul Tan, a Singaporean professor of cultural studies, calls the “politics of evermore sophisticated bullying.” At its core, the fight isn’t about a house or a will. It’s about the future of Singapore.
“The institutions in Singapore, whether it is the judiciary, the civil service, the army, the institutions of higher learning, have all gradually come under direct control in a way that stifles independent thinking and challenge,” Lee Hsien Yang told me. Lee Kuan Yew would solicit different views and occasionally change his mind, he said. “Today, the Singapore authorities no longer have people who would challenge the system to say, ‘Here’s my view. I don’t think you are doing the right thing.’ They are too well-paid.”
Lee Hsien Yang and his son Shengwu Li avoided politics for most of their lives, but since the feud over the house burst into public view, both have voiced sympathy for the political opposition, lending the legitimacy of that crucial family name. Yet their ability to help the opposition has been curtailed by the accusations against them. The episode has exposed the cracks in Singapore’s celebrated system. If Lee Kuan Yew’s son and grandson can feel compelled to flee, what can happen to ordinary people?
Political scientists weren’t sure that Singapore’s highly successful system would outlast Lee Kuan Yew. By the end of his life, even the great man himself spoke of preparing for the day when his party would lose power. That’s the thing about benevolent autocracies: They tend to expire. They either cease to be autocracies — as happened in South Korea and Chile — or they cease to be benevolent."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opini...cracy.html
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