Below is an excerpt from the journal [Beyond Technocracy: The culture of elite governance in Lee Hsien Loong’s Singapore] by Dr Michael Barr
The full journal can be found here: http://www.griffith.edu.au
Chapter 7 - Lee Hsien Loong
The new Prime Minister’s curriculum vitae reads as an exemplary case study of the way that personal power, personal connections and related social advantages lubricate the meritocratic system. Lee Hsien Loong was born in 1952 as the eldest son of two brilliant solicitors, one of whom was to become Prime Minister. His economic position was comfortable without being wealthy (at least not in his early life), but more importantly he had the immense advantage of being born into an English-speaking Chinese household. Even without other considerations, this made him part of a small privileged elite in the Singapore of the 1950s because the Chinese were the dominant ethnic group and English was the language of the colonial elite.
After independence in 1965, his father successfully set out to make English – his own family’s first language – the dominant language of the Republic and the prime language of education. Lee, however, was not content with his children being just monolingual. Even at this early stage Lee Senior had developed a fixation with what he would later call the “cultural ballast” provided by one’s “mother tongue”, and he sent Hsien Loong to top Chinese-medium schools (Nanyang Primary School and Catholic High School) so he could also master Mandarin. Yet despite this immersion in a Chinese-language environment, Hsien Loong was failing his Mandarin, so his parents arranged for private tuition. This enabled him to barely pass his A Levels. His relative mastery of Mandarin was to put him in good stead since, unbeknownst to anyone else, his father was later going to place bilingual Chinese (English and Mandarin-speaking) at the apex of the political and administrative elite. As if this was not enough of an advantage, just as Hsien Loong finished his senior years of school, as if on cue the first of the Junior Colleges (JCs) opened to offer elite students a specialist study and tuition environment to prepare for university. It is barely conceivable that this is a coincidence, but it remains a fact that Hsien Loong was in the first intake of the first JC, National Junior College (NJC), where against all common practice he was allowed to sit for the Cambridge A-levels in two stages.
He matriculated with A1s in pure and applied maths and an A2 in physics in 1969,74 and then returned as a part-time student to sit for the full set of examinations and improve his matriculation results, presumably to get a head start in Cambridge. On the strength of his 1969 results alone he was one of eight winners of the prestigious President’s Scholarship in 1970, and also won a Public Service Commission scholarship to Cambridge to study mathematics.76 After attending NJC, he also voluntarily began his National Service while waiting to depart for Cambridge, even though, as a scholarship winner, he could have deferred. As “luck” would have it, his decision to start his National Service early served him well. While doing his National Service the Ministry of Defence initiated a system of SAF Overseas Merit scholarships and Lee was in the inaugural group of five men to win one for his study in Cambridge.
Upon his return to Singapore in 1974 the SAF initiated a scholarship and leadership programme for serving officers. Unsurprisingly, Lee Hsien Loong was in the first intake.79 All in all, Lee made good use of his study opportunities while he was in the SAF. From 1971 to 1974 he studied at Cambridge, where he graduated with Double First Class Honours in Mathematical Statistics and Mathematical Economics and a distinction in a Diploma in Computer Science. After a mere three years working as a regular officer in the SAF, he was posted to Fort Leavenworth, USA, where he studied at the US Army Command and General Staff College from 1978 to 1979. Upon completion of these studies he stayed in the US for another year as a Mason Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, graduating in 1980 with a Masters in Public Administration. By this stage he had risen to the rank of Major in the SAF, despite having only served for about three years on operational duty. Despite his inexperience he was made Director, Joint Operations Planning Directorate from 1981 to 1982, and then became Chief of Staff (General Staff) from 1982 to 1984, by this time having risen to the rank of Brigadier-General.80 The SAF did not get very good value out of their investment, however, for Lee Hsien Loong left the SAF to run for parliament in 1984.
I have no precise knowledge of the operation of favouritism during his military career, so we can only speculate about the importance of his family name in his rapid and comfortable rise through the ranks, risking not much more injury than a paper cut.81 On his entry into politics, however, there is less need to speculate. Many months before the announcement of his entry into politics, civil servants in the Housing and Development Board (HDB) were told that their job was to prepare the ground in Ang Mo Kio constituency for an Army officer who was going to retire soon and enter politics at the upcoming election. In this case the business of “preparing the ground” involved ensuring that the creation of the first Town Council (another first for Lee Hsien Loong) went smoothly. Zulkifli Baharudin, an officer in the HDB, was put in charge, and apart from the administrative work of setting up a new municipal authority, he oversaw and engaged personally in door knocking, talking to hawkers and shop owners, making sure everyone was happy. Zulkifli says that this was his first political education and his first “real contact with the constituency”. He said in interview that even without knowing that it was Lee Hsien Loong who was being parachuted into the electorate, the work was given a high priority because the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) “was going to fight the election on the basis that it is best able to manage and lead a new municipal entity”.
A few months before the election he was told that the new Member of Parliament was “the son of Mr Lee”. After that, the work intensified, and he remembers it as the hardest working period of his life. Lest anyone is left with lingering doubts that the selection of Lee Hsien Loong’s constituency for the first Town Council might have been an arbitrary selection, it is worth noting that the next assignment given to Zulkifli was setting up the second Town Council in Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s electorate, Tanjong Pagar. It is doubly significant to this study of personal power, patronage and special opportunities that having proved his worth and – it was assumed – political reliability, Zulkifli was later invited to stand for Parliament as a PAP candidate. The unofficial secondment of a team of civil servants into working for the re-election of the PAP government in an election is not extraordinary in itself. Entire ministries routinely devote their resources to the PAP during General Elections. I have interviewed two other civil servants who have worked in two different ministries who each took part in election work on behalf of the PAP during the 1991 election. One (in the Ministry of Information and the Arts) was involved in a ministry-wide exercise of monitoring and managing the press on behalf of the PAP. The other (in the Prime Minister’s Office) was part of a team of civil servants who attended political rallies and reported on mood and responses among the crowds. This was a comprehensive exercise that involved overtime, scheduled shift work, taxi vouchers and full use of the civil service infrastructure. Another interviewee who was campaigning for an opposition candidate (Chee Soon Juan) during the 1996 elections was followed during his waking hours by two people he presumed to be ISD agents (from the Ministry of Home Affairs).
The exercise was carried out without any serious effort at subterfuge, so the primary purpose of the exercise was presumably intimidation rather than surveillance. The dedication of civil service resources on behalf of the PAP is therefore considered routine within the civil service, but the significant feature of Zulkifli’s story is the special treatment accorded “the son of Mr Lee”, even by the standards of PAP candidates. And make no mistake. At that stage of his career, Lee Junior’s handling of his constituency was so clumsy that he would have been in trouble without this help. He tried to approach his early “walkabouts” like a military inspection, allocating a set time to each floor in each block and expecting his constituents to fit in to his schedule.85 Not that you would have known that from reading the press reports at the time. The press at the time brimmed with adulatory reports about the PAP’s new candidate for Ang Mo Kio, beginning with reporting the occasional political speech that he was allowed to make while he was still a serving officer in the army. From there Lee was catapulted into test after test set by his father, all of which he “aced”, riding on his energy, intelligence and problem-solving ability.
At this point it is worth noting that he really is intelligent and hard working. His path through life was cleared by family connections, but family connections are not sufficient to win a double first from Cambridge University, or to hold down very senior positions in a highly professional army. He did these things and then went on to do more as a Minister. His first Regional Outlook test was to tackle the recession of the mid-1980s as the Chairman of the Economic Review Committee. From there he went from strength to strength. He had a dream run through the sensitive and powerful Trade and Industry and Finance ministries and became a Deputy Prime Minister in 1990. His progression was interrupted only by a cancer scare that set back his succession to the premiership by a few years. Without belittling the scale of his achievements, it is important to note that he had an immense advantage over and above his innate “talent” in that he had much greater freedom to act than any other member of Cabinet apart from his father. Whereas his more experienced and more senior Cabinet colleagues had to take tiny, incremental steps to unwind any of Lee Kuan Yew’s initiatives, from the start Lee Hsien Loong was fearless in striking down sacred cows, beginning with the Central Provident Fund.
He could afford to be. He could live up to the mantra, “change it, improve it and build on it” with a freedom enjoyed by almost no one else in the country. As Prime Minister (and even as a disproportionately powerful Deputy Prime Minister) he was also able to invite others into his aura of autonomy, though their autonomy is heavily circumscribed because it is dependent on his patronage. Current beneficiaries of Lee’s largess include the “rising stars” he has been nurturing in Cabinet – especially Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Khaw Boon Wan. Thus Lee’s mantra is a circumlocutious cry of self-legitimation that is personified in Lee Hsien Loong himself and his father. Others may share in it only insofar as their education and “talent” allows, and insofar as they have been socialised into the world of the elite.
Chapter 8 - Conclusion
The Singapore system of elite governance is truly a remarkable beast. Under the legitimating ideology of meritocratic elitism it delivers an effective and thoroughly modern style of technocratic governance that is nevertheless riddled with distortions and failings that threaten to make a mockery of the basic principles of its legitimacy. Worse, some of these distortions – notably the exercise of personal power and the operation of privilege and connections – are intrinsic to the operation of the system to the point where the legitimating ideology starts to look like a threadbare cover for the perpetuation of a dynasty. And yet the system works. There is enough talent in the dynasty and enough truth in the myths of meritocracy, elite governance and pragmatism to ensure that the city-state is in safe hands, and that it is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. If the reality were allowed to stray too far from these ideals then the whole system would degenerate into crony politics – and that is not going to be allowed to happen. The imperfections and distortions create some insecurity and tension, but these are not fatal to the system. The ruling elite clearly believes that they are an acceptable price for peace, prosperity and a smooth, if imperfect system of elite regeneration.
Dr Michael Barr
* Michael D. Barr is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Studies Review. A historian by training, he came to Flinders University from The University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology where he held postdoctoral research fellowships. He is a recipient of the 1999 Asian Studies Association of Australia’s President’s Prize for the best Australian PhD in Asian Studies in 1998.
His latest book, The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence, was published by I.B.Tauris and New Asian Library in February this year.