Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore Story

One man more than any other is associated with Singapore’s remarkable 20th-century success. Who was Lee Kuan Yew, and how did he do it?

Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew speaks in Fullerton Square, Singapore, 18 December 1984. Alex Bowie via Getty Images.

On the north bank of the Singapore River is an eight-foot-tall statue of a man striking a stately pose, arms folded, gazing into the horizon. Stamford Raffles stands – according to the plaque attached to the plinth – on the ‘historic site’ where he first landed as an agent of the British East India Company on 28 January 1819 and, thereafter, ‘with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis’. Raffles – who is officially recognised as the ‘founder’ of modern Singapore – had a strong conviction that the tiny trading outpost he founded at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula would fulfil a destiny larger than its physical size. He was right. But he was not a nation-builder. He visited Singapore just three times, spending slightly more than nine months on the island across a period of three years. After founding the outpost, he spent most of his time elsewhere, in neighbouring Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies). If Raffles boasted of Singapore as his ‘child’, it is fair to say he was an absent father. The story of Singapore’s ascent from ‘Third World’ to ‘First’, following its forced separation from Malaysia in August 1965, happened under the watch of another visionary, Lee Kuan Yew. In September 2023, Singapore celebrates the centenary of his birth. Reflecting on his life and achievements a few years before his death in 2015, Lee told a group of assembled journalists: ‘I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There’s nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.’ Lee believed this: his 1998 autobiography was titled, simply, The Singapore Story. Since his passing, Lee has been honoured as the nation’s ‘founding father’.

Rise during fall Lee grew up in a comfortable, but not rich, English-speaking Chinese family. His parents, brought together in an arranged marriage, belonged to the colony’s majority Chinese community. Like any Singaporean child, Lee mingled with children of other ethnicities and played with Malay friends. The eldest of four children, the young Harry Lee – his anglicised first name was added by his grandfather who admired the British, but later dropped by Lee – was a gifted student. Coming first at the Senior Cambridge examinations in Singapore and Malaya in 1940, Lee decided to study law in London. The Second World War precluded this and, with Britain at war, Lee accepted a scholarship to study at Raffles College, the colony’s leading tertiary institution in the arts and sciences. There, he became the college’s best student in mathematics, but not in English or economics, which were topped by another student, Kwa Geok Choo, Lee’s future wife. War had torn Europe apart and was creeping towards Singapore. On 8 December 1941, the sleepy city was awakened before dawn by the blare of air-raid sirens to the stark realisation that Britain was now at war with Japan. With classes cancelled, Lee volunteered as a medical auxiliary. Less than three months later, he watched with bewilderment the rapid collapse of British Malaya, as demoralised British and Commonwealth troops beat a desperate retreat to their island citadel of Singapore, only to see their much vaunted ‘impregnable fortress’ fall on 15 February 1942. The brutal Japanese occupation lasted for three-and-a-half years and profoundly affected the trajectory of Lee’s life, and that of the city. The occupation was very hard on the city’s inhabitants, especially its Chinese population which was suspected of being anti-Japanese. Before the invasion, many overseas Chinese had openly supported China in its prolonged war with Japan. The victorious Japanese army, which had fought in China, now sought revenge. Like many other Chinese men, Lee was ordered to report to a ‘screening centre’. Many of those who complied were loaded onto lorries and executed. Lee asked to leave the line in order to return to a friend’s dormitory to collect his belongings.

He hid there and never returned. Had the Japanese guard refused his request, Lee could have been among the estimated 5,000 to 50,000 Chinese men who were unfavourably ‘screened’ by the Japanese and who perished in the Sook Ching (‘purge through cleansing’) massacre. ‘I will never understand how decisions affecting life and death could be taken so capriciously and casually’, he later reflected.

Japanese troops in Singapore following the fall of the city in 1942. Lee Kuan Yew narrowly escaped death during the Second World War occupation and the experience profoundly shaped his view of Britain. Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo.

Before the war, Lee had considered himself apolitical. But the war – and the Japanese occupation – destroyed the myth that the British were a superior and invincible people with an inherent right to rule Asians: ‘In 70 days of surprises, upsets and stupidities, British colonial society was shattered, and with it all the assumptions of the Englishman’s superiority.’ In his memoirs, Lee described being slapped and forced to kneel for failing to bow to a Japanese soldier. Lee’s experience of British failures destroyed his reverence for them; his experience of Japanese brutality led him to abhor them. As he later wrote, he emerged from the war ‘determined that no one – neither the Japanese nor the British – had the right to push and kick us around’. After the war, Lee left Singapore for England to read law at the London School of Economics. Disliking London, he moved to Cambridge University. By the time he graduated in 1949 with a double first with starred distinction, he was a changed man. While his stellar achievements at Cambridge gave him confidence in subsequent dealings with British officials, his experiences in England also forged a deeply anti-colonial sentiment. He never forgot Britain’s blunders during Singapore’s fall, nor the class and colour prejudices he encountered in Britain. Inspired by socialist ideals, he befriended political leaders in the British Labour Party and even campaigned on behalf of one of his Cambridge friends, David Widdicombe, a Labour candidate. His growing political involvement in England caught the eye of Singapore’s Special Branch, which added Lee to its watch list.

In 1950, Lee delivered a parting speech to the Malayan Forum, a London-based discussion club founded to deliberate the future of Malaya. Lee spoke of how returning Malayan students, schooled in British institutions, could lead the fight for independence and oversee a smooth transfer of power. Upon returning home to begin his legal practice, the 27-year-old law graduate found a city still reeling from the aftermath of war, battling a rising communist insurgency, and shuffling uneasily toward an uncertain post-colonial future. Party time Since 1948, a mainly Chinese-led communist insurgency, cloaked as an anti-imperialist revolt, had established itself across Malaya and Singapore. In Malaya, British troops battled communists in a jungle war that would last another 12 years. In Singapore, the city’s mostly Chinese population made it a major target for communist subversion. Lee considered joining a political party but none suited his left-wing, anti-colonial convictions. Because of the communist insurgency, only pro-British, right-wing parties such as the Progressive Party had survived. In response, Lee assembled a group of like-minded English-educated activists who met in the basement dining room of his bungalow at 38 Oxley Road to ponder the merits of forming a party. Lee’s roles as barrister and would-be politician soon became inseparable as he took on cases, often pro bono, of unionists, civil servants and student groups who had got into legal skirmishes with the colonial government. High-profile cases brought him public attention and he became a sought-after legal adviser. Contact with the leftist Chinese students he represented opened his eyes to the dynamism and anti-colonial potential among Singapore’s Chinese-educated population, which the communists had been working on for decades. Ever pragmatic, Lee formed an alliance of necessity with the communists to gain access to their mass base.

Lee Kuan Yew surrounded by supporters of the People’s Action Party following their victory in the September 1963 Singapore elections, held five days after the formation of Malaysia.

Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo.

On 21 November 1954, ahead of a legislative assembly election the following year, Lee and his group launched the People’s Action Party (PAP), committed to using ‘every constitutional means’ to hasten the end of colonial rule in Malaya. Lee’s ‘men-in-white’ – identified by their all-white party uniform to symbolise incorruptibility – duly elected him as their Secretary General. At the PAP’s first election in 1955, Lee’s token team did well, winning three of the four seats it contested, and Lee became de facto opposition leader in a shaky coalition government helmed by the Labour Front. In the legislative assembly, Lee attacked colonialism and called for its swift demise. But the PAP was not united. Split within, a pro-communist faction, sceptical of the effectiveness of constitutional methods, advocated the use of united front tactics, and even violence, in toppling the colonial government. The internal power struggle ended after Lee expelled the pro-communists in 1961. The splintered group formed the Barisan Sosialis (Socialist Front) and remained a troublesome thorn in the PAP’s side into the late 1960s. In 1959, the PAP, campaigning on a pro-independence agenda and a detailed plan to solve bread-and-butter issues, won a spectacular landslide victory to form the government of self-governing (but not yet independent) Singapore. Lee became its founding prime minister, an office he retained until 1990. Since 1959, the PAP has won every general election on the island. Malay or Malaysian Under Lee, Singapore became independent twice, once by choice, once not. Lee’s goal had never been an independent Singapore; he wanted a free Malaya that included Singapore, which had been constitutionally detached from the peninsula as part of controversial British postwar plans to reconstitute its Malayan dependency. Britain feared that Singapore’s inclusion would unbalance Malaya’s population in favour of the Chinese. The island’s separation was to have serious repercussions for its future. Lee did not believe that tiny Singapore could survive on its own, or that the British would grant the colony freedom when communists were waiting to take power.