The Lees of Singapore

Dynasty as reality

Singapore runs on the myth of the meritocracy: the most talented rise to the top. It just so happens that a disproportionate amount of talent seems to run through Lee Kuan Yew’s extended family. This, at least, is the official explanation to account for inconvenient facts about the concentration of positions of power in the hands of the Lee family. I refer to the fact that until May 2011, there were two members of the Lee family in the Prime Minister’s Office (then Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) and both the country’s sovereign wealth funds – the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and Temasek Holdings – were helmed and run by members of the Lee family. Up until 2011 the GIC had been chaired by Lee Kuan Yew with Lee Hsien Loong as Deputy Chairman (now Lee Hsien Loong is Chairman and Lee Kuan Yew until his death was a ‘Senior Advisor’), and to this day Temasek Holdings’ Executive Director and CEO is Lee Hsien Loong’s wife, Ho Ching, while Lee Hsien Loong’s cousin, Kwa Chong Seng, only stepped down as Deputy Chairman in November 2013. Lee Kuan Yew’s other son, Lee Hsien Yang, persistently refused to enter politics, or even to sustain a career in the mainstream civil service or the Singapore Armed Forces. If he had entered the civil service or stayed in the Army we have Lee Kuan Yew’s candid assurance that he would have risen to be the head of whichever institution he chose to favour. ¹² Instead he went into the Lee dynasty’s version of the commercial sector: flitting from one government-linked company to another, routinely earning seven-figure incomes.

He was Chief Executive Officer of Singtel for 11 years before moving to the drinks company Fraser and Neave, immediately after Temasek Holdings took a major share in the company. ¹³ Upon Temasek selling out of Fraser and Neave, Lee Hsien Yang lost his position on that board, but was subsequently appointed to the board of Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce is not, of course, a government-linked company, but it is one of the major suppliers to the Singapore Air Force and it has made Singapore its base in Asia, so it needs to maintain close relations with the Lee government. ¹⁴ During his post-Singtel career Lee Hsien Yang has also been doubling as head of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (appointed in 2009) as part of his father’s push to revamp the aviation sector. ¹⁵ Various uncles, nephews, cousins and in-laws also hold other significant positions in a clutch of GLCs, in academia, in regulatory boards and statutory boards. ¹⁶

This is not a complete description of the family connections, but it is sufficient to confirm the centrality of the Lee family in the corridors of power – and to alert the reader to keep an eye on the grandchildren: most notably Lee Hsien Loong’s son, Li Hongyi, who has made his mark in the Army by publicly criticising his superior officer to the Minister for Defence and to several hundred other people via a group email, for which he earned no more than a reprimand; ¹⁷ and Lee Hsien Yang’s son, Li Shengwu, who has been a star performer at Oxford University through his primary and post-graduate studies. ¹⁸

The Lee brand; brand Singapore

The story of Lee Kuan Yew’s successful campaign to place himself at the centre of Singapore’s history and make himself the ideal Singaporean was a project of relatively recent vintage. Early efforts at hagiography, such as Alex Josey’s volumes on Lee from the 1960s and 1970s, ¹⁹ were not part of a concerted campaign. Indeed when pro-government authors writing as late as the 1980s were looking for a focus for their praise, Lee was a principal figure, but they generally wrote stories of collective achievement and heroism rather than ones of the rise of the super-man. ²⁰ This situation changed dramatically during the 1990s as a new founding mythology of Singapore called ‘The Singapore Story’ was created around the person of Lee Kuan Yew by the Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Education (MOE). ²¹ Not coincidentally, this project foreshadowed the release of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs, which were also called ‘The Singapore Story’. ²²

Since this high-profile beginning, the official focus on Lee personally has been so obsequious that one wonders that the beneficiary did not cringe, at least a little. Singapore now boasts of a Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, a Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, a Lee Kuan Yew Endowment Fund and a Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism. Arms of government have offered so many awards named after Lee that one suspects that they might have been struggling to find variations on the theme. There is, for instance, a Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship (Public Service Commission), a Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal (Nanyang Technological University), a Lee Kuan Yew Award (Temasek Polytechnic), a Lee Kuan Yew – Step Award (Singapore Institute of Technology), a Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Visitors Programme (Lee Kuan Yew Endowment Fund), a Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize (Urban Redevelopment Authority), a Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition (Singapore Management University) and a Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize (Temasek Holdings via the Singapore Millennium Foundation). Beyond such conventional laurels, there is a small assortment of international points of recognition: a Lee Kuan Yew Fellows Program that funds students from all parts of Asia to study at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asian Studies at the Brookings Institution (which receives financial support from Temasek Holdings and engages in joint projects with the National University of Singapore); a Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship at the University of Birmingham (which has several partnership agreements with Singapore educational institutions) and; a Lee Kuan Yew Conference Room in the International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Arundel House in London. The rather immodest title of Lee’s book – Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World ²³ – should not raise an eyebrow, but news of a video-song on YouTube and a musical and a movie dedicated to Lee show that his fans are still capable of surprising us. ²⁴

Despite Lee’s protestations to the contrary, this litany leaves it beyond doubt that he was happily cultivating a cult of personality. Furthermore, even a passing inspection of the tone and content of the accolades makes it clear that there is little, if any, distinction between a tribute given to Lee personally and one to Singapore – an outcome that was consciously encouraged by his decision to subtitle his personal memoirs ‘the Singapore Story’. It is in the voluminous collections of tributes by world figures to Lee personally in his various books that the blurring of the lines between Lee and the nation he ruled is at its most overt. This leads to my suggestion that the Lee brand and the Singapore brand are – or at least have been to date – linked inextricably.

The Lee Hsien Loong story

Yet for all the evidence of a cult of personality centred on Lee Kuan Yew, without at least one succession to the next generation we could not speak of a dynasty as such. Hence it is necessary that we move on to a consideration of Lee Hsien Loong. The details of Lee’s succession began emerging in 2006 with my research on the extraordinary steps that were taken to position Lee Hsien Loong as an inevitable candidate for prime minister. ²⁵ Lee Kuan Yew publicly satisfied himself that this task was accomplished, having asked in his 2011 book, Hard Truths, ‘Look, who could better him – mentally, in political experience, in linguistic abilities? Nobody’. ²⁶ The succession is a sensitive point because it goes to the heart of the linkage between brand Lee and brand Singapore. While Lee Kuan Yew was alive it was intolerable for either Lee to hear the suggestion that Lee Kuan Yew engineered the rise of his son to the prime ministership because both the Lee brand and the Singapore brand rest secure only while it is presumed that he rose entirely on his own merits in a political system that is entirely merit-based. Both brands are at risk if the idea takes hold in the public space that Lee Hsien Loong rose because he is his father’s son. Lee Hsien Loong’s pugnacious defence of this principle on American television in 2010 outlines both the family and the national myth and demonstrates the seriousness with which the fiction is maintained:

The whole of our system is founded on a basic concept of meritocracy.… And if anybody doubts that I as prime minister am here not because I am the best man for the job but because my father fixed it or my wife runs Temasek because I put her there and not because she’s the best woman for the job, then my entire credibility and moral authority is destroyed.… So if there’s any doubt that this is so, and people believe that I’m there because my father fixed it or the whole system is just make-believe, then the system will come down. ²⁷

Without revisiting material that has already been well aired, an outline of the case for the privileging of Lee Hsien Loong can be put in a few paragraphs. From the age of three, Lee Kuan Yew and his wife set out to equip each of their children with the languages that would enable them to rule and/or thrive in the Singapore he envisioned for the future ³⁰ (though admittedly at a time when he could not have been confident of being able to deliver on his vision). In the case of Lee Hsien Loong his father went further and insisted that he also learn Malay in the Jawi (Arabic) script and Russian – in the mistaken expectation that it would be a language of the future in Asia. ³¹

The developments that took place at the end of Lee Hsien Loong’s schooling are of particular interest and they centre on the odd fact that he did his Higher School Certificate (HSC) in both 1969 (at Catholic High School) and 1970 (at National Junior College – NJC). ³² (NJC was the first of a new model of well-endowed pre-university ‘junior colleges’. It opened in 1970, just in time for Lee Hsien Loong to be in the first intake). He took this path despite the fact that he had already won a President’s Scholarship on the strength of his 1969 results. ³³ He then delayed his tertiary studies yet again so that he could begin his three years’ National Service in the Army (despite having the option of deferring National Service). Doing his National Service made him eligible to apply for the inaugural round of the Singapore Armed Forces Overseas Merit Scholarship (SAFOS), and he was one of the five winners in 1971. This launched him on his Army career (and ultimately his political career). He returned to Singapore and completed his National Service obligations just as his father was introducing an advanced scholarship programme for SAF officers and returned scholars – Project Wrangler ³⁴ – and he was off to Cambridge again for further study. Upon his return he was fast-tracked through the officer corps of the Army, finishing as Brigadier-General before entering politics in 1984.

We can safely say that Lee Hsien Loong did rather well out of his decision to repeat his HSC and then not to defer his National Service, but we are asked to believe that he received no privileged treatment due to his father’s position as prime minister in the process. We will consider more recent aspects of his career later in this article, but for the moment I would like to focus on his transition from school to the military.

Coming of age at the Lees’

At this point the list of coincidences that the official scenario asks us to accept stretches credulity beyond breaking point. Lee Hsien Loong seems to be particularly sensitive on the matter of his matriculation – a sensitivity borne of the tension between the reality of dynastic privilege and the meritocratic myth at the heart of both the family brand and brand Singapore. Much of the significance of this episode for the purposes of this article is not so much in the fact of the privileged pathway that was laid out for Lee Hsien Loong (which is not remarkable in itself), but the hitherto success in burying the embarrassing details, and the reluctance to publicly acknowledge the favouritism. Remarkably, despite the fact that it was publicly known and officially acknowledged that Lee attended both Catholic High School and National Junior College, it is apparent from my interviews with opposition politicians in January 2011 that it was not generally known either that Lee had extended his schooling by a year or repeated his HSC – and the revelation came as a shock.

The occlusion of this part of his life is all the more remarkable since it is a family trait, begun by Lee Kuan Yew and perpetuated by Lee Hsien Loong, to routinely draw upon folksy accounts of family history and experiences to illustrate and even determine policy. Indeed Lee Kuan Yew’s decision to send his sons to Catholic High School, a Chinese-medium school, has featured large in his public discourses about the importance of mother-tongue education. ³⁵ Yet it was only very recently – in 2012 – that Lee Hsien Loong acknowledged that he had repeated his HSC, and it is doubtful if even this statement would have been forthcoming if the story had not entered the public domain in 2008 when it was published in an academic book that was readily available in Singapore. ³⁶ Until then the fragmented account of the episode was lying unread and unknown in the microfilmed archives of The Straits Times newspaper, and usually obscured in his curriculum vitae by a generic reference to having ‘completed his schooling in Singapore’ ³⁷ or having been educated at both Catholic High School and National Junior College, but never with a mention of having sat for the HSC in both schools. Only rarely is there an acknowledgement of the exact years in which he attended the two institutions, or the presentation of the level of detail that shows in one place that he received matriculation-level scholarships in different years. ³⁸ On his Facebook page Lee Hsien Loong has obscured the details of his education to the point where it is implied that he was attending Catholic High School and National Junior College at the same time. ³⁹

The reason for the reticence about repeating the HSC is surely not that anyone might think Lee Hsien Loong is dumb. That would be an absurd suggestion that could be laughed off without a second thought. No, the reason is clearly that it exposes the chronology outlined above, which in turn raises serious questions about privilege and special treatment. Lee Hsien Loong’s only public account of the end of his schooling appeared appropriately as a contributed chapter in one of his father’s books. ⁴⁰ In the spirit of fair dealing, I repeat his account, almost in full:

After graduating from Catholic High School, I spent an extra year at National Junior College redoing the HSC in the English stream. It was partly to do new subjects which might prove useful later, particularly Economics. But the main reason was because I was a year younger than my cohort, having entered primary school a year early, and so was still too young to be called up for National Service. After the extra year, I could do National Service and then go to university. I needed to do it in this sequence because National Service was then still new. If I had gone to university first there would have been some doubt whether I intended to serve. But this way showed quite clearly that National Service applied to everyone, and nobody was exempt, even if his father was the Prime Minister.

In National Junior College, I enrolled for Chinese as a principal level subject in the HSC examination. I was not satisfied with my C6 in Comprehension and Essay Writing.

The politics of privilege

There are sensible political reasons for discouraging coffee shop talk about the privileges accorded to members of the Lee family, but the more substantive basis of the family’s sensitivity goes to the points that Lee Hsien Loong made in his interview with Charlie Rose, and which have been cited above:

You are where you are because you are the best man for the job and not because of your connections or your parents or your relatives.… So, if … people believe that I’m there because my father fixed it or the whole system is just make-believe, then the system will come down.

Lee Hsien Loong’s entry into university and the military was not, however, the final or necessarily the most crucial point of dynastic succession. After all, even without his father smoothing the way, Lee Hsien Loong would have been at least a credible candidate for top office if he had been willing to do the hard work of fighting his way up a hypothetical political system with a more level playing field. In this study of the Lees as a dynasty, the means of Lee Hsien Loong’s rise into parliament and his subsequent rise to the premiership are of even more immediate interest and arguably of more relevance. His entry into parliament has already been subjected to a considerable amount of attention and so I offer just a brief one-paragraph summation, sufficient to establish the continuation of the pattern identified in the previous section. Of more significance is the account immediately following of the ease with which the dynasty was able to see off the only serious challenge to its pre-eminence to date – Goh Chok Tong’s challenge in the 1990s. This latter account is of interest mainly for the demonstration it gives of the extent and security of the dynasty’s hold on power.

Upon his retirement from the Army as a 33-year-old Brigadier General, Lee Hsien Loong’s path into parliament was smoothed for him by a team working in the Housing and Development Board (HDB) under the direction of Zulkifli Baharudin, who was a senior officer in the HDB. This team ‘worked the ground’ for him and enabled him to weave a story as a successful administrator who built the first of Singapore’s new Town Councils. ⁴³ Lee was successfully elected as the member for Teck Ghee and became a Deputy Prime Minister in 1990, a few months before Goh Chok Tong was appointed Prime Minister.

Goh Chok Tong was appointed as a stop-gap prime minister while waiting for Lee Hsien Loong to gain the experience necessary to be a credible replacement, but Goh had his own ideas and set out to reduce the power of the Lees and build his own power base. ⁴⁴ Goh’s plans were given an unexpected fillip when Lee Hsien Loong was diagnosed with cancer in November 1992. Goh used the years following Lee’s diagnosis to build his own networks of patronage and reciprocity in the civil service and the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs). Central to Goh’s putsch was the highly secretive Directorship and Consultancy Appointments Council (DCAC), because it was charged with making almost every appointment at board and executive level across almost every GLC. ⁴⁵ It was housed in the Ministry of Finance and was chaired by the Minister for Finance – which in the 1990s meant it was chaired by Finance Minister Richard Hu, a Goh loyalist.

Goh spent the first half of the 1990s building his networks in the institutions of power, but in 1996 he just stopped: he gave up at the first point at which he would have been required to challenge the dynasty directly. In his make-or-break moment, Goh broke – without even trying. The turning point was an episode in which a publicly listed company, Hotel Properties Limited, offered million-dollar discounts to Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Hsien Loong, their wives and other relatives as part of a ‘soft launch’ of a condominium development. ⁴⁶ When this episode became public knowledge Goh passed up the chance to submit the case to the Corrupt Practices and Investigation Bureau (CPIB). Instead, he and Finance Minister Hu conducted their own ad hoc investigation and on the basis of this, Cabinet cleared the Lees of all wrong doing. ⁴⁷

The institutional fallout was almost immediate: over the next couple of years Goh’s networks in the GLCs were quietly swept aside. Both the institutional roles and the personnel of the DCAC and the government’s two major GLC holding companies were overhauled, leaving Lee family members and Lee loyalists (notably S Dhanabalan) in charge. ⁴⁸ The power to appoint board members and non-executive directors of GLCs was transferred from the DCAC to Temasek Holdings, at the same time (1996) that S Dhanabalan was appointed Chairman of Temasek Holdings. A year later Lee Hsien Loong’s first cousin, Kwa Chong Seng, was appointed Deputy Chairman of Temasek Holdings (1997) and his wife, Ho Ching, was appointed Executive Director and CEO of the Singapore Technologies Group, which is the Temasek-owned holding company for defence-related GLCs. These changes were followed very soon by sweeping changes to the leadership of the GLCs in late 1997 and 1998. ⁴⁹ In 1998 Lee Hsien Loong himself was appointed Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and S Dhanabalan became Chairman of the DCAC (while continuing as Chairman of Temasek Holdings). When Lee Hsien Loong became Minister for Finance in 2001 he resumed direct control of the DCAC, and when he ceased being Minister for Finance in 2007 he retained control of the DCAC by shifting the entire institution from the Ministry of Finance to the Prime Minister’s Office – since by this stage he had been prime minister for three years already. ⁵⁰

The passing of Lee Kuan Yew

The long-awaited accession of Lee Hsien Loong into the prime ministership in 2004 notionally marked the successful inheritance of the mantle by the son. We could stop there, but with the death of Lee Kuan Yew on 23 March 2015 we have the opportunity to take our analysis further. In terms of straightforward politics and the exercise of power, the younger Lee had already been prime minister for 11 years at the time of his father’s death, and by the most conservative estimate he had already stepped out of his father’s long shadow by May 2011 – when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong forced Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew to step down from Cabinet following the elder Lee’s unhelpful interventions in the 2011 General Election campaign. The dynastic succession may have already been firmly established before Lee Kuan Yew’s death, but the death of the patriarch in a Chinese family business is always a time of risk. In Singapore’s distinctive system of regime legitimation elections are the ultimate test of political success. ⁵¹ There is no pretence that elections are free or fair, but they are the essential ingredient in conferring legitimacy on the country’s authoritarian ruling elite, a form of governance characterised by Andreas Schedler as ‘Electoral Authoritarianism’. ⁵² Despite the reality that there is no chance of the government changing hands, a poor election result for the party can damage a prime minister and a poor showing in his own constituency can do significant damage to his standing and authority – as it can to any minister. ⁵³

This makes the 2015 General Election particularly significant since it was not only the first election since the death of Lee Kuan Yew, but it also followed a series of electoral setbacks for the government that began in 2006 (the first election after Lee Hsien Loong became prime minister) and which showed no overt signs of slowing as Singapore entered the 2015 election cycle. Over the previous four years, the party had lost an unprecedented number of seats to the opposition, seen nearly two-thirds of Singaporeans vote against its favoured presidential candidate in an island-wide vote and watched agog as the prime minister apologised on national television for a series of policy and administrative failures. ⁵⁴

If the 2015 general elections had gone very differently, with continuing slippage of the PAP vote and the opposition picking up a handful more seats, then I would now be writing about the decline of the Lee brand and the troubles ahead for the Lee dynasty – but this was not how GE2015 played out. As we now know, the electorate rewarded the government handsomely in 2015, giving it a 10 per cent swing in its favour, taking its support up to 70 per cent. But for what was it being rewarded? Most of the failures that contributed to the setbacks of the last few years were no more than half fixed, so we can say with confidence that the electorate was not rewarding the party for its recent record. ⁵⁵

Tellingly, in his final rally speech of the campaign, the most rousing claim that Lee Hsien Loong could muster was: ‘We are making progress. Work with us’. ⁵⁶ This is the stuff of securing and reinforcing a vulnerable constituency, not that of a 10 per cent swing towards the government, but this observation does not take into account the spectacular optics of the six months leading up to the General Election – all of which built on and strengthened the Lee brand. The week-long mourning period following Lee Kuan Yew’s death was marked by an extraordinary outpouring of a mixture of grief, respect, adulation and spectacle. Hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans lined the streets and queued for up to eight or nine hours each to show their respects. His image was projected onto buildings, stuck onto cars and sold as figurines. Newsreels of his old speeches going back to the 1950s seemed to be on a near-continuous rolling loop on local television, shared with contemporary tributes. (They were not literally on a rolling loop, but it seemed that way.) The funeral itself was no less spectacular and it was followed months later by the extravaganza of the SG50 celebrations, which linked the adulation of the older Lee to the living presence of the younger one.

Eugene Tan, Bridget Welsh and I have all independently suggested that the drive behind the swing to the PAP was a ‘flight to safety’, ⁵⁷ but I suggest that it was something more than that: the safety to which Singaporeans were flying was the safety of the Lee brand as much as or more so than a flight to the government or the PAP as more generic entities. If confirmation of this was needed, it came a week before the first anniversary of Lee Kuan Yew’s death, when the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY) issued guidelines regulating the use of the former prime minister’s name and image, explicitly saying that they ‘may be used for purposes of identifying with the nation’. ⁵⁸

This move confirms (if confirmation were needed) that the Lee brand is more important than either the PAP brand or Lee Hsien Loong’s personal following, and has become so thoroughly integrated with brand Singapore that the two are, for the foreseeable future, inseparable. Lee Hsien Loong is damaged goods, which can be seen from watching a video of either his apology during the 2011 election or his ghastly performance at the final election rally of 2015 (both referred to earlier), along with several other apologies he has made in the years in between. ⁵⁹ Yet he is, nevertheless, a Lee of Singapore and carries the burdens and the considerable benefits of being a Lee. Time will tell whether someone from among the third grandsons steps up to continue the dynasty, but there should be no doubt that the choice is theirs to make. The most likely candidate for future leadership in Lee Hsien Loong’s son, Li Hongyi. If Li Hongyi should set his sights on filling his father’s and grandfather’s shoes, it would be a brave punter who would bet against his success. The simple reality of this scenario being credible, whether or not it comes to pass, confirms not just the reality of the dynasty, but its extraordinary power within its tiny fiefdom.