Previously in series:

Growth & Redistribution

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Race, Language, and Uncomfortable Questions

Here's a tricky governing problem for you.

Imagine your country had historically encouraged a minority group to segregate into lower income communities with poor living conditions.

Picture, too, that that minority group had historically underperformed in school compared to others.

Say that your country had faced large-scale riots in the 1960s over concerns about perceived government discrimination and oppression.

To spice things up, let's add that they're the country's indigenous people, and that they speak a different language and practice a different faith than everybody else in the country.

...and that initially, they formed the vast majority of the military and the police force, and the majority in your much larger neighbor country. It's hardly going to mirror other countries exactly, after all.⁽¹²⁾

How do you ensure justice for them and for all citizens?

Singapore has its advantages over other countries, true. It's... what was the quote?... "a single city with a beautiful natural harbor right smack in the middle of a fantastic chokepoint in one of the biggest trade routes in the world." ¹

But demographically, it's complicated, to say the least. 75 percent of Singaporeans are Chinese. Of that majority, about a third speak English at home, half speak Mandarin, and the rest speak other dialects. They split between Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and irreligious. 15 percent are Malay, and almost all of them speak Malay (90%) and practice Islam (99%). Another 7 percent are Indian, and they tend to speak Tamil and practice Hinduism, but there's a long tail of other languages and faiths. That's after 50 years of coming together. To pull one example of the past, in 1957, 97 percent of Chinese Singaporeans spoke a language other than English or Mandarin at home.

What LKY did to ensure his country's economic prosperity was remarkable and prescient, but where he truly cements his legacy and confounds expectation, in my eyes, is the way in which he handled the most sensitive issues around race and language.

The Malaise of the Malays

Let's return to the governing problem introduced at the start of this section, the complex situation of Malays in Singapore. Assuming absolute power, how do you get a nation to stop self-segregating, particularly when a minority group you're not a part of is concentrated in a slum?

A month after independence, LKY promised the 60000 Malays living in shanty huts in one area that "in 10 years all their shacks would be demolished and [the area] would be another and a better 'Queenstown,'" then their most modern housing. ⁽²⁰⁷⁾ Rather than approach them himself and create a sheer top-down push around difficult decisions like replacing mosques, he spoke privately with Malay members of parliament (MPs), got buy-in from the Muslim governing body of Singapore (MUIS) to allow an old wooden mosque to be demolished, and set up a building fund for the MUIS to build replacement mosques. Compensate homeowners, give them priority in new housing estates, take the 40 families who refuse to vacate to court... done.

...and then, when he realized that people would naturally re-segregate, he got the support of minority parliament members to create race-based quota ceilings for government apartments so that people would have no choice but to intermingle.

You should be used to the pattern by now. Every solution on the table, go for the most direct and efficient way to achieve a goal, push forward regardless of decorum. That part's predictable. What I found more compelling was his emphasis on working with and through minority government members each time he worked with minority communities.

Which raises the question: how could he guarantee he would have minority representatives, given that citizens would naturally prefer MPs who empathized with them, spoke their language, so forth? What's the most Singapore way to solve that particular problem?

That's right, snap your fingers and merge constituencies into clusters of three or four, require candidates to run as groups, and mandate that each group include at least one minority candidate. After all, LKY reminds readers with what sounds like a shrug, "To end up with a Parliament without Malay, Indian, and other minority MPs would be damaging. We had to change the rules." ⁽²¹⁰⁾ To quote /u/lunaranus: "For an American politician this kind of change would be the legislative achievement of a lifetime. For LKY it was Tuesday."

So that's segregation taken care of. Is there another, more controversial issue to bring into focus?

"To have people believe all children were equal, whatever their race, and that equal opportunities would allow all to qualify for a place in a university, must lead to discontent. The less successful would believe that the government was not treating them equally." ⁽²¹⁰⁾

I'll let that quote speak for itself.

Again, though, the interesting part isn't the blunt diagnosis of problems. The interesting part is the solution. He privately gathered Malay community leaders together, provided them the test results, and promised them the government's full support as they sought solutions. Every time a Malay-focused issue came up, he emphasizes, he would consult with his Malay colleagues and get their input and buy-in. This approach upset some of his senior ministers, one of whom he mentions "was a total multiracialist [who] saw my plan not as a pragmatic acceptance of realities, but as backsliding." ⁽²¹¹⁾

I'll keep his own wording for his response to the concerns:

While I shared [the minister's] ideal of a completely color-blind policy, I had to face reality and produce results. From experience, we knew that Chinese or Indian officials could not reach out to Malay parents and students in the way their own community leaders did. The respect these leaders enjoyed and their sincere interest in the welfare of the less successful persuaded parents and children to make the effort. Paid bureaucrats could never have the same commitment, zest, and rapport to move parents and their children. ...On such personal-emotional issues involving ethnic and family pride, only leaders of the wider ethnic family can reach out to the parents and their children. ⁽²¹¹⁾

In the end, the Malay leaders formed a government-assisted council to help struggling students with extra tutoring in evenings, and the government provided funding for them and a group of Muslims who wanted to approach the same objective more independently of government. Indians and Chinese community leaders followed with their own similar associations not long after.

As of 2005, Singaporean Malays have shrunk, but not closed the gap with other Singaporeans, and leapfrogged most non-Singaporean students in educational outcomes.

LKY's handling of these issues is one reason I see it as futile to place him on a traditional US-style left-right axis when looking at his decision-making. His approach blends traditional, family values and blunt realism easy to associate with the right with a determination to work with affected minorities and concern for their welfare that pattern-matches more clearly to the left. That mixture of familiarity and foreignness in his approach, and that tension between traditional and progressive values, is one reason this work was so refreshing for me, coming from a US background.

When he discusses Chinese schools and the transition to English education, he reveals more about his personal life than anywhere else, and some of that mix begins to make sense.

Chinese schools, English language

Lee Kuan Yew describes his education, in English-language schools and then overseas in England, in mixed terms: "deculturalized," textbooks and teachers "totally unrelated to the world [he] lived in," "a sense of loss at having been educated in a stepmother tongue," "not formally tutored in [his] own Asian culture... not belonging to British culture either, lost between two cultures." ⁽¹⁴⁵⁾

He talks about his decision to send his children to Chinese schools to give them a firmer footing in their own culture, and talks about his appreciation of the "vitality, dynamism, discipline, and social and political commitment" in those schools. English-language schools, on the other hand, "dismayed" him with the "apathy, self-centeredness, and lack of self-confidence" in their students ^(149). Later, he speaks with regret about Western media and tourism eroding "traditional moral values" of Singapore's students, about how "the values of America's consumer society were permeating Singapore faster... because of our education in the English language." ⁽¹⁵³⁾

But they had a common culture to build, an English-centric business world to look towards, and a need for unity in their armed forces and elsewhere. So English, as LKY tells it, was needed as a common language, his concerns and those of his countrypeople aside. In Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools, he mandated English courses. In English schools, he mandated the teaching of mother tongues. Malay and Indian parents shifted quickly to English schools, but Chinese parents were less satisfied and a hard core of resistance formed.

In this issue, again, some of the reasons for LKY's success as Singapore's leader become clear. At times, he opted for simple authoritarian solutions: arresting newspaper managers for glamorizing communism, deporting Malaysian leaders of student demonstrations, removing a union leader who "instigated his fellow students to use Chinese instead of English in their examination papers." ⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ But then he talks about how his English education allowed Malays and Indians to see him as Singaporean rather than a "Chinese chauvinist," and how his "intense efforts to master both Mandarin and the Hokkien dialect," and the experience of his children in Chinese-speaking schools, let him relate to and be accepted by the Chinese-educated ^(149), and it becomes clearer that something more than authoritarianism was at play.

That sensitivity became critical when issues with Chinese-language education came to a head. Students in the Chinese language Nantah University--the flagship symbol of Chinese language, culture, and education, fundraised and built by the Chinese community--struggled to find jobs. He describes the decision to switch the university and most Chinese schools to English in conflicted tones, emphasizing that he could speak with authority and "[maintain] the political strength to make those changes" primarily because he had sent his children to Chinese schools.

It bears repeating that Lee Kuan Yew is pretty dismissive of a lot of Western traits. He cites Japan approvingly as a culture able to "absorb American influence and remain basically Japanese," with their youth "more hardworking and committed to the greater good of their society than Europeans or Americans" ^(154). In an effort to preserve the best in Chinese schools and retain that sort of cultural influence, he set aside the top nine Chinese schools as selective institutions, admitting only the top 10 percent of students.

So--did LKY successfully lead his country to a new common language while preserving culture? Sort of. Even now, the policy has had mixed impact, and LKY sounds more torn here than in any other part of the work:

Bilingualism in English and Malay, Chinese, or Tamil is a heavy load for our children. The three mother tongues are completely unrelated to English. But if we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a living. Becoming monolingual in English would have been a setback. We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence about ourselves and our place in the world. ...

Hence, in spite of the criticism from many quarters that our people have mastered neither language, it is our best way forward. ⁽¹⁵⁵⁾

Later in life, LKY expressed regrets about his insistence on bilingualism: "Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you’re deceiving yourself."

I had a Singaporean friend a while back who sometimes joked that you could tell she was Singaporean because she spoke bad English and bad Chinese. I wasn't in a place to judge the truth of that, at the time speaking no Chinese myself, but there was a hint of sadness behind the joke that stuck with me and comes to mind with LKY's eventual hesitance around the policy. Since then, I've expended a lot of effort on learning Chinese myself, and the same distance between the languages is clear and discouraging. It's a tough problem, and I don't know that there was an ideal answer in a society as multicultural and multilingual as Singapore's. I get the sense from this section of Singapore, at least in LKY's eyes, sometimes reflecting his own torn feelings, between languages and between cultures.

Still, Singapore made it through the shift and has developed a strong culture and its own satisfying twist on English, so it would be unfair to mark the policy as a failure overall. To find a true failed policy, we need to turn to a different topic.

The limits of tweaking culture

A paraphrasing of Lee Kuan Yew to the Malay community: I am not one of you, but I will listen to you. I will ensure you have equal opportunity to the rest of our citizens. I will push to allow you proportional representation. Every step of the way, I will listen to you and your leaders when deciding on policies that affect you. When I need you to make changes in sensitive areas, I won't enforce it top-down and bureaucratically, I will approach your trusted family and community leaders and ask them to take charge.

The same, for the Chinese community: I recognize your fears about your culture being lost if your language fades. I lost it myself, educated in foreign schools and a foreign language, and have since fought to regain it. It is a priority for my children. I love the best parts of our culture and want to preserve them. Understand that the only reason I am asking you to make a difficult transition away from it is because that is what our country needs in the world as it stands.

It's in light of those two cautious, thoughtful, empathetic approaches that this third story frustrates me so much.

Singapore, more than any other country in the world, is facing a birthrate crisis. Current numbers place its fertility rate at 1.14, lowest in the world. It's a pressing issue, tricky and multifaceted, one reflective of trends around the world. It's also deeply sensitive, tied into people's sense of self-determination and autonomy, their most personal goals, and a whole lot else. Further complicating it is the uncomfortable reality that education and birthrate typically have an inverse correlation. As of Singapore's 1980 census, "the tertiary- [and secondary-]educated had [a birthrate of] 1.6, the primary-educated, 2.3, and the unschooled, 4.4" ^(140).

Lee Kuan Yew noticed the issue, because he noticed every issue. He also noticed that women tend to prefer "marrying up", men "marrying down", because of course he did, how a lot of the country's graduate women were remaining single, and how that could impact his nation's future talent. So, how did a leader who relied so much on his ability to inspire trust react to the challenge?

I decided to shock the young men out of their stupid, old-fashioned, and damaging prejudices. ⁽¹³⁷⁾

That's right, by telling everyone they're stupid and trying to strong-arm a change:

On the night of 14 August 1983, I dropped a bombshell in my annual National Day Rally address. Live on both our television channels, with maximum viewership, I said it was stupid for our graduate men to choose less-educated and less-intelligent wives if they wanted their children to do as well as they had done. ⁽¹³⁵⁾

In the comment thread of my first review, /u/Greenei pointed out that LKY sounds "like a nerdy, rationalist, technocratic dictator. Disregarding society's irrational feelings, speaking the truth plainly, and changing your views with new evidence." I agree. In this instance, though, it's easy to see in him the caricatured side of that image: a stubborn insistence that everyone be convinced by a waterfall of pure facts, eagerness to phrase those facts in the bluntest possible way, and deliberately apathetic to the role emotion plays in changing minds.

Genetic influences on intelligence remain just as controversial as they were in LKY's day. To avoid getting caught in those weeds, I'll proceed assuming he was entirely correct. Given his track record, it's not a stretch. Even granting that, even granting the difficulty of the problem, I can't help but feel his approach was dead wrong.

First: Provide preferential school selection for children of graduate mothers who have at least three kids. He mentioned expecting nongraduate mothers to be angry at being discriminated against. Instead, graduate mothers rose up against the change, saying things like:

"I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that some miserable financial incentives will make me jump into bed with the first attractive man I meet and proceed to produce a highly talented child for the sake of Singapore's future." ⁽¹³⁷⁾

Next: Establish a government matchmaking system to "facilitate socializing between men and women graduates" ^(138).

Finally: Support both of the above with repeated reminders of statistical analyses, genetic research, assertions of cultural prejudices, and round condemnation of misleading but politically correct Western writers.

The results were predictable. Western media, of course, rose up against him. His party, famously leading an effective one-party state, lost 12 percent of the vote in the next year's election. Half his cabinet condemned his decisions. Only those who already saw the same issues he did--the "hard-headed realist[s]" in his cabinet ^(140), R. H. Herrnstein--really stood by him. Eventually, he gave up on the policies and rested his hopes on immigration instead.

It's easy to look at the whole saga and conclude that he was pushing against impossible trends that not even the most prescient could avoid, ready with a bluntness and willingness to speak hard truths as a lonely, brave Cassandra. That certainly seems to be his portrayal of his approach. But I can't help but feel that, in this case, all he accomplished was poisoning the well for every future attempt to address the real problems he identified. While it's impossible to say whether another approach would have succeeded, this one emphatically did not.

Conclusion

One of LKY's greatest strengths that comes through as I read the book is his relentless determination to follow the facts where they lead. Just as important, though, is leading others to follow those facts. In some incredibly sensitive situations, like when he helped his Malay citizens and led the charge towards English as a common language, he did a fantastic job of this--not just by leading with his head, but by demonstrating good faith and doing what it took to build genuine trust with others.

But no leader is perfect, and it's as instructive to learn from failures as from successes. When people feel misunderstood, insulted, or attacked, it doesn't matter how sure you are of the facts. They will withdraw and entrench. LKY admits to his own impatience here: "Intellectually, I agreed... that overcoming this cultural lag would be a slow adjustment process, but emotionally I could not accept that we could not jolt the men out of their prejudices sooner." ⁽¹⁴¹⁾

As someone with my own tendencies in the same direction, I feel inclined to translate: I knew I was making a mistake, but they were wrong!.

Interlude Three

One of my favorite small moments from the book comes when LKY discusses the process of greening Singapore. As he points out, "Singapore's size forced us to work, play, and reside in the same small place, and this made it necessary to preserve a clean and gracious environment for rich and poor alike." ⁽¹⁸¹⁾ From their independence in the early 60s, they made planting trees and cultivating greenery a priority. When LKY noticed some planted trees were dying off, he presented the quintessentially Singaporean solution of a government department "dedicated to the care of trees after they had been planted" ^(175).

The best bit, though, comes when he mentions how a friendly competition started among Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines all got involved. In LKY's telling:

No other project has brought richer rewards to the region. Our neighbors have tried to out-green and out-bloom each other. Greening was positive competition that benefitted everyone--it was good for morale, for tourism, and for investors. It was immensely better that we competed to be the greenest and cleanest in Asia. I can think of many areas where competition could be harmful, even deadly. ⁽¹⁷⁷⁾

Greening is the most cost-effective project I have launched. ⁽¹⁷⁸⁾

As for the results? Judge for yourself.

Next in series:

The pathway to power