Lee Kuan Yew once survived a wartime screening by asking to fetch his clothes
During Japan's occupation of Singapore, a young Lee Kuan Yew was pulled aside with a group of Chinese men, talked his way into another night in the dormitory, and slipped out past a different guard. The others were likely executed. He later ruled Singapore for three decades, turning it rich while tightly restricting dissent.
Lee arrived on 16 September 1923, the eldest child in an English-speaking Peranakan Chinese family; a westernised grandfather who had served as a purser on British ships chose the name Harry. His father, a Shell storekeeper, gambled and had a nasty temper, and Lee credited his mother with keeping the household together. At Raffles Institution he started badly but in 1940 topped the Senior Cambridge exams across the Straits Settlements and Malaya. At the prize ceremony he met Kwa Geok Choo, the only girl at the school, later his wife.
War interrupted his studies. The British surrender in February 1942 shattered, in his words, assumptions of English superiority. After escaping the Sook Ching roundup, he learned Japanese, monitored Allied radio for the occupiers' propaganda department and, on the black market, sold a tapioca glue called Stikfas, whose logo later decorated his wedding cake. He emerged convinced that neither the Japanese nor the British had the right to push Singaporeans around.
At Cambridge he read law at Fitzwilliam, married Kwa secretly at Stratford-upon-Avon and graduated in 1949 with a Starred First. Back home, he represented nearly fifty unions against the colonial authorities without charge and made his name defending student editors charged with sedition in 1954. That year he co-founded the People's Action Party, which won power in 1959 and made him Singapore's first prime minister. He led the island into Malaysia in 1963; racial and ideological tensions led to its expulsion and independence in 1965.
Over 31 years in office he pushed meritocracy, multiracialism, anti-corruption and massive public housing, and Singapore became one of the four Asian Tigers. His rule is also widely described as an illiberal democracy: press and assembly were curbed, opponents faced defamation suits and detention without trial, and from 1968 to 1981 no opposition sat in Parliament. He defended this with his belief in Asian values. After stepping down in 1990 he stayed in cabinet until 2011 and died on 23 March 2015, when about 1.7 million people paid their respects.
Source: Lee Kuan Yew
