Lee Kuan Yew Dies: Singapore's Founding Father

Singapore's per capita GDP surpassed Britain's in 1993, a statistic that would have seemed like fantasy fiction when Lee Kuan Yew took over a swampy, impoverished colonial port city in 1959. When Lee died on March 23, 2015, at age 91, he had governed Singapore for 31 years as prime minister and remained the dominant force in its politics for two decades after that. No other leader in the 20th century oversaw a more dramatic economic transformation of a single nation. Lee took power over a city-state with no natural resources, no military, and no hinterland. Singapore had been expelled from the Malaysian federation in 1965, and Lee wept on television at the announcement, calling it "a moment of anguish." He then spent the next three decades proving that a disciplined government could turn geography into irrelevance, building Singapore into a global financial center through strict rule of law, zero tolerance for corruption, mandatory bilingual education, and aggressive courtship of multinational investment. His methods were authoritarian by any Western standard. Political opponents were bankrupted through defamation lawsuits. The press was tightly controlled. Chewing gum was banned. Lee made no apologies, arguing that Western-style liberalism was a luxury that a tiny, multiethnic nation surrounded by larger powers could not afford. He called his philosophy "Asian values," and it became a template studied by leaders from China to Rwanda. The results were difficult to argue with. Singapore's GDP per capita rose from $500 at independence to over $55,000 by the time of Lee's death, surpassing the United States. Life expectancy, education, and public safety ranked among the world's best. Whether his model could survive without him was the question he left behind.