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Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

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Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#141

Post by swyx »

rayiner wrote: post #129
RivieraKid wrote: post #110

I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?

The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic polici…

as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#142

Post by ljsprague »

ggm wrote: post #100
jabedude wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was How do you compare Powell's "racism" and LKY's views on race and intelligence? By nearly all definitions of racism, Yew was a racist as well

Interesting. I assumed he wasn't. Bad assumption. I don't think he gave a "rivers of blood" speech but that doesn't let him off the hook. Maybe the difference was LKY got to be in control and Powell just got to watch from the sideline.

Have you considered the possibility that Enoch Powell was right?

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#143

Post by mytailorisrich »

quickthrowman wrote: post #118
mc32 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. This happened mostly in Indonesia Burma and Malaysia and not so much in the Philippine islands. Malaysia in particular instituted pretty harsh laws to make Chinese suppress their Chinese identity and also curtailed their economic potential by implementing in practice expropriation and barring the Chine…

> In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. I’m not super familiar with Chinese history, but this jumped out at me. How were other countries jealous of Chinese people during the decade of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Famine, death, destruction, etc. Am I misunderstanding something?

It means success of ethnic Chinese in South East Asia. In Malaysia, Thailand, etc or even Indonesia, ethnic Chinese tend to be more successful in business circles compared to 'locals'.

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#144

Post by mc32 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #118
mc32 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. This happened mostly in Indonesia Burma and Malaysia and not so much in the Philippine islands. Malaysia in particular instituted pretty harsh laws to make Chinese suppress their Chinese identity and also curtailed their economic potential by implementing in practice expropriation and barring the Chine…

> In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. I’m not super familiar with Chinese history, but this jumped out at me. How were other countries jealous of Chinese people during the decade of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Famine, death, destruction, etc. Am I misunderstanding something?

I was referring to the Chinese diaspora who had left China over decades and even centuries -they had become successful in SEAsia and were often responsible for commercial progress in those places. The sixties were times of conflict all over the world and in SEAsia the Chinese diaspora in those countries found themselves the targets of the frustration of “natives”. I say natives though the Chinese diaspora was born and raised in those countries but were easily identified as being “foreign” in those places.

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#145

Post by rayiner »

swyx wrote: post #141
rayiner wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic polici…

as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience

I’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty.

A better comparison might be Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln’s view of free markets combined with an interventionist government. But we don’t really have a neat label for that. In the U.S., free markets get conceptually lashed together with individual rights and limited government.

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#146

Post by chillacy »

itsthecourier wrote: post #24
epolanski wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a proper democracy, the same party has ruled since the founding of the country. There are severe restrictions on speech, assembly, press and important legal and political barriers for the opposition parties. It is very easy to land in front of a tribunal for defamation or similar for expressing dissent or accusing the government of corruption. The truth is that Singapore has been lucky that Lee Kuan Y…

Trump is testing the limits of USA democracy every day, just from the top of my mind: top lieutenants worth 5%+ ownership in Thether holding company, Ivanka's husband with the Saudis, Ivanka herself in the ONU, shameless plugs of crypto tokens and cards in the podium after elections, pardons for criminals democracy failed America

I think a reading of Roman history shows the failure modes of a senate so often that I wonder if it was ever supposed to work more than a few hundred years.

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#147

Post by rayiner »

jabedude wrote: post #94
ggm wrote: post #3

Weaponised the court system to repress union backed opposition, despite having been engaged with the union movement in his early years (as I understand it) It is a kind of workers paradise. If you're well behaved and don't shout you get a good education, health system and housing. 95% owner occupied is pretty damn good. Huge dependence on south Malaysia migrant workers shuttling over the bridge every day, so it's "ho…

> If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was How do you compare Powell's "racism" and LKY's views on race and intelligence? By nearly all definitions of racism, Yew was a racist as well

By what definition was LKY “racist?” He presided over growing prosperity for a multi-ethnic country of Chinese, Malays, and Indians. I’d submit that, if LKY fits within your “definitions of racism,” that’s not a useful definition.

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#148

Post by JadeNB »

socalgal2 wrote: post #132
JadeNB wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property. I think that this sounds good and is a sensible hypothesis, but it's far from clear to me that the corollary of prosperity for those without property is true in practice.

Why? Do the riches cities have the poorest poor or is it generally the richest cities have the both the richest poor and the most support for them.

> Why? Do the riches cities have the poorest poor or is it generally the richest cities have the both the richest poor and the most support for them.

I don't know. Do you? If the latter answer is correct and it's backed up by quantitative evidence, then I guess that I have to accept at least some form of the corollary, although there are still games that one can play with measurement (for example, it's possible that being numerically richer in those richer settings can still result in poorer overall quality of life).

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#149

Post by ux266478 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #66
ggm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bitter pill to swallow for many because a more liberal sense of multiculturalism in AU and UK allowed enclaves to emerge which have now become intensely divisive where a less open "multiculturalism but conform to our norms" might have avoided.

Singapore is an enclave that emerged because of multiculturalism in Malaya caused by mass immigration from China, actually.

It would be more appropriate to say it emerged (as a sovereign nation) because of anti-multiculturalism, to be perfectly clear. Otherwise, it would still be a part of Malaysia.

Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)

#150

Post by teleforce »

BurningFrog wrote: post #113
teleforce wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers") What nonsense, colonizers do not live and settle there for thousand of years. Would you called majority Japanese now a colonizers since the originally come from Korea/China and before them they were people there? >Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque. Albuquerque was the first European colonial who conquered Malacca in the early…

Here is a piece of history trivia. Not trying to have an argument. > they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman The Ottomans didn't exactly close the Silk Road, but they made it harder and more expensive to use it. But the major reason for the maritime routes taking over the cargo traffic was that it's much more efficient to sail to Asia with your cargo than to walk it on camel…

>So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.

This new route discovery actually significantly increased the importance of Strait of Malacca and Singapore, not decreasing it.

Actually even before that important turning point event, the European already knew about about the importance of Strait of Malacca including both the metropolis Malacca and Singapore/Temasek. The is one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".

To say that Singapore was an obscure fishing village is disengenious by the colonial powers and those believing this wicked narrative are in denial.

My once top comment about this "elephant in the room" has been downvoted to oblivion, but hey c'est la vie. There's a very popular saying, "you can fool some people all of the time, and all people some of the time, but you simply cannot fool all of the people all of the time".

There's also a narrative that if the tea via land it's called chai and if if the via sea it's called tea [1].

The Ottoman controlled both the land and sea route to Europe creating the trading bottleneck from the European perspective for many centuries to the far East, they never close it. Thats's why both Dutch and British created their very own East India Companies about the same time around 1600 CE as the vehicles to trade in Asia once they found the new trading route around Africa to Asia. Due to their highly profitable business endeavour, their governments willingly become the side-kick colonizers for their new companies and becoming complicit to wrestle and overcome any countries that refused to their own unfair business arrangements, terms and conditions including trading monopolies.

[1] Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea (317 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16129454

[2] Dutch East India Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

[3] East India Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

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