tim's experiment

I don’t like to rain on anyone’s funeral parade, but am I the only person in Hong Kong who thinks the posthumous adulation of Lee Kwan Yew is grossly excessive?

We are, since great antiquity, urged to say of the dead nihil nisi bonum. A pleasing convention. Also the passage of time lends a certain patina to the great figures of our youth, even if they were not particularly popular at the time. Most English people now look back in sorrow rather than anger at Harold Wilson, for example. Aged rabble rousers like Tony Benn are treated as national monuments as they enter their dotage, and earn praise from surprising quarters when they finally pop their clogs.  Longevity itself commands respect, so that people who have never liked a Cliff Richard song still concede that the lad has had an extraordinary career.

Having said which, I do not recall Mr Lee as one of the great figures of my youth. In fact from a safe distance, and seen through the sort of independent media he did not allow in Singapore, he appeared as an obnoxious little despot, bullying those he could bully and fawning on those he could not. Appreciation of his successive electoral successes was diminished by the amount of cheating and fixing going on. A slightly loony air was added to the story by warnings about chewing gum, tourists being refused admission if their hairstyles were unconventional, and scientifically illiterate concerns that the stupid were breeding more quickly than the intelligent. I do not know if it was ever true that you could be jailed for failing to flush the loo in Singapore, but it is significant that this was widely believed.

It is interesting that Mr Lee inspired so much praise, even when he was alive, from other political leaders, but this is a symptom of a phenomenom first identified, I think, by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He observed that over every gathering of international leaders hovers the odour of an Orwellian pigsty, and that the pigs have an instinctive fellow feeling for each other based on their shared love of power, however obtained. Mr Lee was, of course, not much more than a puffed-up Mayor by international standards, but he made up for this by virtually achieving power for life.

In some ways he reminds of those Renaissance princes who ruled Italian cities and followed the principle enunciated by Machiavelli that it is better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. Success is getting safely into your grave without being overthrown or invaded, with bonus marks for passing the job on to your eldest son.  Mr Lee would perhaps not mind being compared to Lorenzo the Magnificent. But where are the artistic masterpieces?

Mr Lee’s economic achievements seem a bit oversold. Other Asian entities managed to combine dramatic growth with a measure of civilisation and even democracy. He can be credited, perhaps, as an early observer of the fact that if you want foreign investment the easiest way is to provide international business with what it likes in a foreign country: a functioning phone system and a workforce with no rights.

The idea that Singapore is now a first-world country holds up if you look at per capita GDP. If you look at living standards it doesn’t. I read an interesting piece of research the other day by a Singaporean writer comparing his country with Norway, which happens to be similar in population, GDP, and the size of its sovereign wealth fund. He found that 80 per cent of Singapore’s population earned less than a cleaner on the statutory minimum wage in Norway. The Singapore people paid more in tax and compulsory savings than the Norwegian street sweeper, and got less for it. In Norway, to start with, education and health care are free.

Singapore does, on the other hand, have a surprisingly large number of millionaires. It’s a paradise if you’re rich, but most of the population isn’t. The fact that the Lee family is on the up-market side of the distribution makes it less acceptable, in my view.

I realise that some of the adulation now being bestowed on Mr Lee’s ghost comes from people who would like to recruit him as an early supporter of the view that Chinese people were so traumatized by four centuries of being ruled by foreign emperors that they have neither the ability nor the wish to rule themselves. If a Western person said this it would be an example of prejudice and discrimination. If a Chinese person says it then it’s a legitimate yearning for strong government. This is the political counterpart of those sexual tastes which run to leather straps, chains and whips. And in both instances, the enthusiast envisages himself as the one with the whip.