“GIANTS OF ASIA:CITIZEN SINGAPORE” by Tom Plate

When I visited Singapore, I did not know about Lee Kuan Yew.
The only things I knew were that it was a country with the Mussulman population predominantly, the economic growth was right and that the women were encouraged to work, and they did it.
And evidently, I knew that you could go to jail if you threw chewing-gum on the street.

Only when I bought the book written by Tom Plate (from a beautiful local bookshop), I understood that the man who built country-city Singapore into success is Lee Kuan Yew. Hence, the surname for him: FATHER of modern Singapore.

Through sheer intellect and will power, Lee Kuan Yew built a country considered by many a model for economic growth, has little or no corruption, is visionary in digital technology and delivers an excellent education and life for its citizens.

Tom Plate: “Tiny or little titan, you have to admire the way small Singapore, being two-thirds Chinese, became the smarty-pants tutor in the re-education of DENG (Deng Xiaoping, the successor to Mao Zedong), the master rebuilder of massive China. This tutorial role has been an immensely positive factor in Singapore’s prestigious rise in Asia- and one of a number of important factors in China’s lusty embrace of a kind socialized capitalism.”

Lee Kuan Yew: “The ideas that Deng Xiaoping formed, if he had not come here in the 70’s and seen the Western multinationals in Singapore producing wealth for us, training our people so as a result we were able to build a prosperous society, then he might never have opened up…opening the coastal Special Economic Zones and that eventually led to the whole China opening up by joining the World Trade Organisation.”

Lee Kuan Yew: “For many Americans, however, helping China get on its feet after centuries of relative sleep and seeing it wake up with a roar is disconcerting.”
“Why do you want the communists to succeed? Well, even some of my own officers told me, look, why do we teach them and then they will outdo us and then we are in trouble?”
“So, I told them, this is a chance for us to get a foot in China at a time when they don’t know how to do it. But they’ve got so many bright fellows and they are going to go all around the world, and you can’t prevent them from coming to Singapore with a camcorder and taking pictures and studying us. So, we might as well do this for them; make a great impact on them and the leadership.”
“Now we have a foot in China. And so we have got a joint committee that meets once a year, their vice premier and our deputy prime minister.”

Tom Plate: “Lee Kuan Yew thinks, by and large, Chinese people work harder than many nationalities or ethnicities (though not more than the Japanese). In fact, he suspects the 21st century will be a Chinese or Asian one.”

Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2010