COMMENTARY Asian values behind
Singapore son's rise By Gary LaMoshi
HONG KONG - Despite well-publicized signs that
Singapore is loosening up by allowing dancing on bars,
funding performances that include the f-word, and even
legalizing chewing gum (for medicinal purposes,
available from pharmacists) under pressure from United
States trade negotiators, writer Alfian Sa'at contends
little has changed.
"Remaking Singapore" - the
government's campaign to encourage creativity among the
island's 3.8 million citizens - "is nothing more than
Re-branding Singapore," he claims. According to Sa'at,
the list of restrictions on freedom of expression
recently grew. "Dynasty and nepotism - definitely
taboo," warns the enfant terrible of Singapore's
literary scene on the eve of the good son rising to the
office of prime minister.
Singapore celebrates
National Day on August 9. In future years, perhaps in
connection with its campaign to increase the birth rate,
August 12 may come to be known as Family Day. On that
date this week, Lee Hsien Loong, the oldest son of
Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, takes over
from Goh Chok Tong to become the island nation's third
prime minister.
The younger Lee was elected to
Parliament following a military career that saw him
reach Brigadier-General by the age of 32. After his
father stepped aside in 1990, Lee warmed up for the
prime minister's job by serving as finance minister and
central bank governor. He's expected to cede at least
one of those posts in the new Cabinet.
Current
Prime Minister Goh has been tapped to succeed Lee Kuan
Yew as senior minister, which Lee calls the "number two"
post. The elder Lee promises that, whatever title he's
given, he will continue to exercise significant
influence and speak out on key issues, privileges still
denied average citizens in this state created in Lee's
own image.
The party line is that Lee Kuan Yew
discouraged his son from joining the political fray.
That's another dubious tale from the Singapore myth
machine. That mechanism's greatest achievement is
perpetrating the lie that Singapore ranks among the
freest economies on earth (See Singapore's
capitalist myth November 7, 2002).
It
probably feels like a free enough economy for the Lee
family. In addition to his key economic posts, the
incoming prime minister's wife, Ho Ching, chairs
Temasek, the state investment corporation that scratches
acquisitive itches at home and abroad using the Finance
Ministry's checkbook, while his younger brother, Lee
Hsien Yang, heads SingTel, the state-owned telecom
company that is spreading its wires around the globe.
That's not just a nanny state, it's a socialist family
business.
Lee Kuan Yew deserves praise for
raising Singapore from a down at the heels harbor town
cut loose by Malaysia into a modern economic showplace.
Based on that success, Lee and his People's Action Party
could have dominated the political scene fair and
square.
Instead, Singapore's leadership
developed the bad habit of using the apparatus of
government to stifle opposition. But trusting in the
judgment of others isn't in Lee's nature. Neither is
humility for this man whose success in tiny Singapore
has led him to offer prescriptions of the world at
large, the equivalent of getting 100% on a spelling test
and thinking that is sufficient to practice medicine.
Before the economic crisis, Lee lectured the
world about what he called Asian values. At the center
of these Asia values was the appealing notion that
Asians - except some very special ones named Lee, for
example - sacrificed individual aspirations for the
greater good of society. After drinking some of this
Kool-Aid before I moved to Hong Kong a decade ago, my
discovery of real Asian values was a great
disappointment.
Rather than a heightened sense
of responsibility to society at large, I've noticed
precisely the opposite. East Asians generally show
little consideration for people around them, whether
it's rampant spitting in Hong Kong, complete disregard
for other vehicles by motorists, bicyclists and even
pedestrians in Bali, or simply the unwillingness to help
a bewildered visitor without a product or service to
sell him. Asians raise indifference - as opposed to
outright rudeness, as practiced in my native New York -
to an art form.
This bewildered visitor couldn't
understand the contradiction between Lee's Asian values
and Asian behavior until an Indonesian friend came to
the rescue. Of course we sacrifice for the greater good,
she explained, but that greater good extends no farther
than our own clan. The closer the connection, the more
we'll sacrifice, so we'll do the most for our families,
then perhaps our friends. But without some personal
connection, we couldn't care less.
That
understanding of Asian values makes Asian behavior much
clearer. For example, it puts the Asian economic crisis
of the late 1990s and the ineffectiveness of subsequent
reforms into a sensible perspective. Crony capitalism
wasn't the result of some structural or legal deficiency
that can be fixed through restructuring or stricter
regulation, it was, and is, a natural consequence of the
government and its business supporters becoming a clan
unto themselves. Until governments stop playing a
leading role in national economies, the problems
underlying the crisis will persist.
Asian values
explain the widespread acceptance of Indonesia's
disgraced former president Suharto turning his children
into business tycoons, and why families loll down a
crowded sidewalk as if they own it. Most of all, Asian
values explain why, even with a population that he
declared was prepared to sacrifice for the greater good,
Lee Kuan Yew fashioned Singapore into a restrictive
society that proscribes choices narrowly.
When
he takes office on Thursday, Lee Hsien Loong will become
the fourth ruler in East Asia currently occupying their
father's old post. He'll join Philippine President
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Indonesian President Megawati
Sukarnoputri, and North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il,
whose dead father remains head of state. The younger Lee
is the first to reach the top while his
predecessor-father remains on the scene.
So
instead of worrying about taboos and restrictions on
freedom, let's celebrate Lee Hsien Loong's ascension as
a grand triumph of Lee Kuan Yew's celebrated Asian
values. They've always been a family affair.
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