One Man's View of the World

Singapore has to take the world as it is; it is too small to change it. But we can try to maximise the space we have to manoeuvre among the big “trees” in the region.

This is the biggest difference between Lee Kuan Yew’s attitude and the typical American attitude. Americans in general believe anything is possible - and why shouldn’t they? For two centuries they’ve managed to impose their vision of the world onto everyone else, succeeding more often than not.

For 5,000 years, the Chinese have believed that the country is safe only when the centre is strong. A weak centre means confusion and chaos. A strong centre leads to a peaceful and prosperous China. Every Chinese understands that. It is their cardinal principle, drawn from deep-seated historical lessons.

[sic]

Some in the West want to see China become a democracy in the Western tradition. That will not happen.

This element of realism underpins all of his writing. There is no wishful thinking here. It also shows how new the western world view is compared to China’s rich and ancient history.

[S]imilar protests are happening in other parts of China every day. Some think these incidents are evidence of a weakening Chinese state. But the truth is that none of these incidents are allowed to escalate into national movements. The Wukan incident shows this. The Communist Party sent no less than a deputy party secretary of Guangdong to mediate and to restore order.

[sic]

[T]hroughout the rebellion, Wukan villagers were careful to declare on their banners that they supported the Communist Party, but were opposed to corrupt local officials. This has been a common strategy taken by Chinese protestors for thousands of years. They know that opposing the central authority means certain annihilation. So they oppose wrongdoing by local officials while declaring loyalty to the centre.

Also known as good tsar, bad boyars. This phenomenon is everywhere. It’s why Trump supporters continue to laud him while opposing everything his administration does. They do not view it as his fault - and it gives the leadership in both cases a convenient out.

Americans are able to come as close as 12 miles from the Chinese coast and look in. China will eventually be able to push the Americans out of the 12-mile limit. Then it will aim to push them out of their 200-mile exclusive economic zone and prevent the Americans from spying within 200 miles of its eastern seaboard.

These days are going to end very soon.

After all, it’s not a new power – it’s an old power that’s reviving. And I believe it is China’s intention to be the greatest power in the world.

Yup. If the China-India conflict has shown anything, it’s that like any hegemon it wants nothing less than absolute domination.

At the moment, the lives of ordinary people are getting better. Why should they want a revolution? They know that a revolution could cost them all the progress they have achieved since Deng Xiaoping opened up the country.

As long as China continues to grow, no revolution will happen.

[N]othing moves in China without guanxi, or relationships. You develop relationships by giving gifts, gradated in accordance with the importance of the person you are cultivating. Across the board, everybody wants to develop a guanxi with somebody higher up, and the official higher up wants to have a guanxi with somebody higher up still.

[sic]

The Communist Party has called its struggle with corruption a “matter of life and death” for the party. Can it control corruption? It can try to keep hands clean at the very top levels. However, The New York Times on 11 November 2012 traced US$2.7bn in the hands of the Wen Jiabao family. I do not see them being able to control corruption at the local level.

This is a fundamentally cultural issue. What the west labels are corruption is just simple good business practice in China. Very, very interesting perspective.

The Chinese have not accepted this, just as they have not accepted that when you sign an agreement, it’s final. For them, when you sign an agreement, it’s the beginning of a long friendship, and from time to time, as friends, you have to sort out whether one of you is making too much money and may need to cough up more.

I just had never even considered operating in this type of way. I have to admit it’s very foreign to me.

Mao was a great man who got China back on its feet.

Wild statement.

I only had the opportunity to meet Mao at the end of his career, when he was not at his best. There was a lady who first had to translate what he said in his Hunanese accent to the interpreter, who then translated it to English. I saw only a shadow of the legendary man.

And still you think he was a great man. Very interesting.

Deng deserves most of the credit for putting China on a different trajectory. When he wanted to open up, many Old Guard leaders were opposed to it. But he was a strong-willed character. He brushed them aside and went ahead and did it. Without him, the turnaround would not have happened so fast, because he was the only one with the Long March credentials to override the doubters.

I agree with this completely.

Chinese leaders do not broadcast their future plans before assuming office. They prefer to keep their heads below the parapet.

This makes it very hard to predict exactly which way China will go.

The Chinese know that they need another 30 to 40 years of peace to catch up with the rest of the world. They have come to the conclusion that if they stay on course, avoid upsetting the existing powers and make friends with everybody, they can only grow stronger and stronger.

The ultimate reason why a revolution will never happen; as long as there is hope that the continued trajectory is “fine”, why upset the apple cart?

[U]nlike how it was with US-Soviet relations, there is at present no bitter, irreconcilable ideological conflict between the Americans and a China that has enthusiastically embraced the free market.

I wonder if he would change his mind now - this book was published over a decade ago in 2013.

I don’t see America ever going to war with the Chinese to keep Taiwan independent. It doesn’t pay. You can fight and win the first round. But are the Americans prepared to fight, and fight, and fight again? Are they eventually prepared to pay the price that China is willing to pay over Taiwan? Remember that no Chinese leader can survive if Taiwan is lost under his watch.

I actually agree with this - and as TSMC invests more into the US and opens factories domestically, the incentive only declines even further. It’s a very sad state of affairs for the Taiwanese, but it feels inevitable to me.

The future of Taiwan is not determined by the wishes of the people of Taiwan. It is determined by the reality of the power equation between Taiwan and China and whether the Americans are prepared to intervene in the situation.

Yup.

[T]he Americans more or less benign. They are not out to squeeze you. Yes, they want everybody to be a democracy but they don’t try to force it down your throat. The Chinese are not interested whether you run a democracy or you’re despotic. They just want you to comply with their request. It’s a totally different approach. They do not believe in evangelising their form of government and have you adopt it. It’s a different way they think of their role.

This is the reason why I fear America losing its hegemony so much. The Chinese will not be so forgiving.

I do not believe the western provinces can ever be as prosperous and advanced as the coastal and riverine provinces. Take the United States. The East Coast and the West Coast are more populous and prosperous than the inland, with the exception of Chicago. But Chicago has the St Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, so ships can sail in. The geographic advantages of being near the sea cannot be fully overcome.

This is extremely similar to Thomas Sowell’s argument for why even if talent was evenly distributed and even if opportunities were equally present, the simple fact that geography is not uniform everywhere means that we can never have equality of outcomes. It is simply inevitable that wealth will be unevenly distributed.

[I]f they allow free migration, the cities will all be swarmed. So they are trying to find solutions. They are trying to get the local authorities to accept some responsibility over the migrants, because the cities cannot grow without the labour.

This is fascinating. I’ve heard of limiting immigration into the country but never at the provincial level.

The lowest hanging fruits in the Chinese economy are also running out. Adjustments will have to be made to the overall economic strategy to ensure that growth can be sustained over the next few decades.

Interesting.

An even more pressing issue China faces is what to do with its state-owned enterprises that are less efficient. Here, China faces a fundamental problem of personal motivation. They are trying to get officials to be more like private entrepreneurs. That will not work because, unless you are holding on to 20 per cent of the shares, and you live with the fear that the stock market could crash on you, you won’t wake up and do something about it. Your salary goes on. Whether the business goes up or goes down, you just get your salary.

Incentives rule the world. Nice to see that even the CCP can’t get around that.

There’s a basic assumption in America that things will turn out all right. That’s how their economy grows – by domestic consumption. Eventually, that’s the way China must go. But how do they make that transition? Poor people still behave like poor people even when they are getting rich.

“Poor people still behave like poor people” hit me very hard. Indians suffer from this as well. It’s why risk-taking is a near impossibility in India. If you get even a decent job everyone pushes the message down your throat that you should be so grateful; stop dreaming big and settle. Eventually, that is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Thucydides famously wrote that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

This is Singapore’s philosophy in a nutshell. Stay under the radar and don’t make enemies of the strong.

I, too, feel some sense of regret at this shifting power balance because I see the US as basically a benign power. They have not been aggressive and they are not interested in capturing new territories. They fought in Vietnam not because they wanted to capture Vietnam. They fought in Korea not because they wanted to capture North and South Korea. They were fighting wars for a cause, and the cause then was anti-communism. They wanted to prevent the world from becoming more communist. If they had not intervened and held out for so long in Vietnam, the will to resist communism in the other Southeast Asian countries would have dissipated, and Southeast Asia might have fallen like dominoes in the face of a red tide. Nixon bought time for South Vietnam to build up and fight on its own. The South Vietnamese did not succeed, but the extra time bought enabled Southeast Asia to get its act together and to lay the foundations for the growth of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean.

Interesting. I’m not sure if I agree, but I do also regret the shifting power balance.

[T]here was a big uproar among their netizens, who asked how dare I say that when I am a Chinese. They are hypersensitive. And even after I pointed out to them that I never said “conscribe”, they were not placated.

The netizens are insanely sensitive.

We were lucky to have been governed by the British because they left behind the English language.

I agree with this - same story for India. They were brutal, of course, and they killed far too many. But on net (accidentally) it is possible that English was the big win for India.

[I]n 1965, a group from the Chinese Chamber of Commerce came to me to lobby for Chinese to be chosen as the national language. I told them: “You would have to fight me first.” Nearly five decades have elapsed and history has shown that the ability to speak English and to communicate with the world has turned out to be one of the most important factors in Singapore’s growth story. English is the language of the international community.

Yup. It is just objectively true that Chinese is a harder language to learn. It’s so common that even native Chinese speakers forget how to handwrite characters for example. It’s called 提笔忘字 (character amnesia). Most people will simply not learn Chinese if it is not their native language. It’s why Korea dropped Chinese characters and adopted an easier system. The international language will be one composed of letters (may not have to be English), not characters.

[T]he Americans’ key advantage – their dynamism – will not disappear. America is, by far, the more creative society. And the fact that the Americans are having an internal debate about whether or not they are declining is a healthy sign. It means they have not become complacent.

I worry about our dynamism these days.

[T]he US is a more attractive society than China can ever be. Every year, thousands of bright and restless immigrants are allowed into America, settle and become successful in various fields.

Someone tell this to the modern Republican party. Insane how quickly we’re forgetting our lessons.

[O]ther nations will eventually have to adopt parts of the American model of attracting talent to fit their circumstances. They will have to go looking around for talented people to build up their enterprises. That is the final contest. This is an age in which you will no longer have military contests between great nations because the nations know that they will destroy each other if they do that. But there will be economic and technological contests, and talent is the key ingredient in those contests.

And yet, America under Trump is so quickly willing to throw this away.

That is why I am in favour of sending students on scholarships to Britain instead, because I am sure they will come back. In the UK, you do not stay behind because you are not welcome. And because the economy is less dynamic, there are fewer jobs for you.

James Dyson agrees.

I speak from experience. I have struggled for 50 years and today, although I speak the Chinese language and can write it in romanised form, the pinyin, I still have not grasped idiomatic Chinese. And that is not for want of trying.

Exactly. Chinese is incredibly difficult to learn.

China becoming dominant in the future will not change the basic fact that Chinese is an extremely difficult language to learn. How many people have gone to China, stayed there, and done business there other than Chinese and the Europeans or Americans who become China specialists?

Yup.

Every centre believes it is as good as any other, and all it needs are money and talent, which can be sourced. Nobody feels compelled to obey Washington or New York.

[sic]

[T]here is a certain diversity in society, a competitive spirit that throws up new ideas and new products that survive the test of time. China, of course, takes a completely different approach. The Chinese believe that when the centre is strong, China prospers. There is a certain de rigueur attitude, a demand that everybody conforms to a single centre.

The difference between American and China summarized extremely succinctly.

If you want the competitiveness that America currently has, you cannot avoid creating a considerable gap between the top and the bottom, and the development of an underclass. If you choose instead the welfare state, as Europe did after the Second World War, you naturally become less dynamic.

Completely agreed. The best argument against the welfare state. As long as we are not making anyone worse off, inequality by itself has never been a compelling argument for me. It is still pareto efficient.

America has a culture that celebrates those who strike out on their own. When they succeed, they are admired as talented entrepreneurs and accorded the social status and recognition they rightly deserve. When they fail, it is accepted as a natural intermediate stage, necessary for eventual success, so they pick themselves up and start afresh.

Agreed.

America does, however, have other grave problems of long-term consequence that may not be attracting the political debate they deserve. One of their biggest challenges is education.

[sic]

Having elite universities is well and good, but you cannot be concurrently churning out illiterate or near-illiterate students from your elementary and high schools. It is this group that America might be failing through a neglect of basic and technical education.

Completely agreed; hopefully the changes in Mississippi inspire other states to follow suit or at least inspire federal action. California on the other hand seems to think that advanced classes are ‘racist’ because other races could not possibly achieve advanced results. You tell me which is more racist.

If I had been in their position, I would bomb the daylights out of Afghanistan so it can no longer be a sanctuary for terrorists. But to send boots on the ground – how do you then get them out without loss of lives and prestige?

This seems a little insane. America cannot - will not - do this because we have standards for our military. We do not accept civilian losses, and terrorists weaponize this. To brazenly say that you would simply commit genocide seems to ignore how many new terrorists that would create as a result. It seems overly simplistic.

When the Japanese Army occupied Singapore during the Second World War, they captured the soldiers but left the police and the administrators in charge because they knew they needed their help to govern the place. Even British heads of power, water and gas were not disposed of. The Americans wanted to build a government from scratch in Iraq and democratise an ancient people. The former is near impossible, the latter is simply impossible.

I agree here. Stop trying to change other countries and their cultures; it it too difficult. The reality is that not all cultures are created equal. Leave them to their culture.

[T]he Chinese have the wiser foreign policy approach. They do not believe it is their business to change the system. They deal with a system as it is and get whatever advantages they can out of it, without entangling themselves.

I agree here.

[T]he bomb assures mutual destruction. It works only with rational people. I’m not sure in the Middle East there is enough of the rational to hold back the impetuous.

LOL.

What do you get, then, when a motley crowd tries to march to a single drummer? You get the eurozone.

This guy is dropping bombs on everyone.

The obvious solution is for the Europeans to accept fiscal integration. The European Central Bank becomes the Federal Reserve, and instead of different finance ministers, you have one to supervise the budgets of all the eurozone countries.

Eurozone seems doomed; I agree with that.

Laws and policies, unfortunately, do not change as easily as global circumstances do. Entitlements, once given, are notoriously difficult to take back.

[sic]

If welfare spending had simply stagnated at a certain level, the situation might still be under control. Instead, such spending has a tendency of growing over time, not just in absolute terms but also in terms of its share of a nation’s total income.

This is why well-meaning socialists always doom a society.

If the social security system is designed so you get the same benefits whether you work hard or lead a more laid-back lifestyle, why would you work hard? The spurs on your hinds are not there.

[sic]

The European model has created a class of people who have grown used to the subsidies and therefore lack a strong work ethic.

You’ve poisoned an entire generation of people and doomed them to indolence. It is an incredibly sad thing to see.

Having watched the British as they were implementing some of their policies in the 1950s, I decided that that was the way to ruin.

[sic]

[I]ndividuals take responsibility for their own lives, with some government help. I believe that if we adopt the European system, we will have much less dynamism in our economy. We will pay dearly for it.

This is the way.

Nobody can deny that their choices have resulted in kinder societies, with less of an underclass and a smaller gap between winners and losers when compared to America. But it has come at a price.

[sic]

I write more in sorrow than in derision about Europe’s inevitable decline. I do not want to run Europe down. The Europeans are a very civilised people.

I agree.

Japanese society tried its best to hold back the tide and to keep the women economically reliant on the men for as long as possible – but failed. In one or two generations, women abandoned the role they played in the old society.

[sic]

Unlike the Swedes, who have made it possible for their women to have babies and careers, many Japanese companies still convert the women who leave to give birth into temporary employees.

[sic]

Singapore’s problem with low birth rates is not dissimilar from Japan’s. But there is one key difference: we have shaded our problem with immigrants. Japan has been remarkably intransigent about accepting foreigners.

Lee Kuan Yew is very concerned about lowering birth rates. It impacts Singapore especially because they need a healthy population and a standing military to defend themselves against Malaysia and others.

[I]f I were Japanese, I would seek to attract immigrants from ethnic groups that look Japanese and try my best to integrate them – Chinese, Koreans, perhaps even Vietnamese. And in fact, such a group already exists within Japan. There are 566,000 ethnic Koreans and 687,000 ethnic Chinese living in the country. Speaking perfect Japanese, they are fully assimilated to the rest of society in their ways and habits and long to be accepted as full, naturalised Japanese citizens. Indeed, many were born and bred in Japan. And yet, Japanese society has not accepted them.

[sic]

[O]ne has to consider another group that has been rejected: pure-bred ethnic Japanese from Latin America, also known as nikkeijin.

[sic]

Finally, in 2009, at the height of the economic crisis, the government offered unemployed nikkeijin a one-time resettlement fee to return to Brazil.

[sic]

…the Japanese government must have believed in the possibility of success before they implemented the policy. Even they had underestimated the level of intolerance.

Yeah Japan is doomed. Nothing is going to reverse the declining population at this point.

Japan is so homogeneous that young Japanese who have spent time overseas, usually because their parents were sent abroad to work as expatriates, have a difficult time adapting when they return, even if they had studied in Japanese schools.

Yikes.

Demographics determine the destiny of a people. If you are declining in population, as a nation, you are declining in strength.

Agreed.

Baby bonuses are not going to turn things around. Government incentives to have children have only had a very limited effect wherever they are implemented, because the problem is not money but changed lifestyles and aspirations. Even in places where these incentives are making a difference, such as in France or Sweden, the process is slow and extremely costly.

It is a cultural, not a monetary, thing. Money will not induce people in general to have more children.

China does not want to see reunification by war or peace. China treats North Korea as a buffer state. A reunified Korea will be one dominated by the South, with American troops possibly being allowed to go all the way up to the Yalu River.

China has a huge incentive to not unify Korea. But America is now throwing away South Korean good will. At every turn, Trump has ruined America’s global presence. Truly the worst president in history by a long margin.

The North Koreans believe that going nuclear is vital to regime survival. They do not trust the Chinese completely because they saw how quickly the Chinese reached out to the South Koreans when they wanted South Korean technology and investments.

Yup.

I put myself in the shoes of the North Koreans and I would make the following calculations: the Chinese will put pressure on me, but it is not to their benefit to see me fail. So why should I listen to the Chinese?

This is the skill of Lee Kuan Yew. He’s able to quickly put himself in anyone else’s shoes and play out the game theory on a rapid level.

Koreans are among the toughest of all the peoples in their region because Korea was where the invading hordes of Mongolia stopped. They had trouble crossing the waters to invade Japan and many just settled in Korea. And so, the Koreans have the blood of the most aggressive warriors from Central Asia.

He’s also a strange geneticist who believes these attributes are extremely strongly inherited. These are not politically correct believes - but they may be true.

The results of these fundamental differences between India and China are quite apparent. One country gets things done. The other talks incessantly but seldom finds the will or ability to get up and go. India simply does not have the same push or the singleness of purpose that you see in China.

I agree here.

At the macro level, the caste system freezes the genetic pool within each caste. Over many years, this has had an isolating impact on the overall intelligence of the people. In ancient China, a bright official could marry multiple wives and spread his genes around the country each time he gets a new posting. If he retires, he often settled in Suzhou, for the mild micro-climate, and had several wives. A Brahmin, on the other hand, cannot marry a non-Brahmin without falling down the social ladder. If the caste system did not exist, the Brahmins would have spread their genes and there would be many more half-Brahmins around India.

Again, he’s a very strong proponent of genetic determinism. He wants the good genes spread all throughout society.

[D]emocracy is no magic potion. It does not solve all problems for all peoples. China would not have got to where it is today if it had been run as a democracy.

Agreed.

[T]here are certain fundamental forces at work in societies – especially those with long histories – that do not change easily. India is trapped by the almost unchangeable realities of its internal composition and the persistent grip of the caste system.

India will never grow quickly until it gets rid of it. But people are hard to change.

Singapore and Malaysia have chosen two entirely different ways of organising our societies. But we have each come to the understanding that there is no need to try to influence the other to your own point of view. We cannot change them. They cannot change us. We just coexist, separately but amicably. What is important for Singapore is that we develop and maintain a strong military force to protect our sovereignty. As long as we have a Singapore Armed Forces capable of fending off an aggressor, we will be left alone.

Yup.

The biggest problem with the two-party system is that once it is in place, the best people will choose not to be in politics. Getting elected will be a dicey affair. Fighting campaigns will also tend to become unnecessarily uncivil, even vicious.

Agreed. Almost all of our politicians are mediocre.

[T]he difference between Singapore and those countries – that is, America and Britain – is that they will continue to do well despite an average government, but we will not. This is a small country with no natural resources and in the middle of a region that has been volatile historically. Special leadership is required here. [sic] If Singapore gets a dumb government, we are done for. This country will sink into nothingness.

America can survive a Trump or two. Singapore cannot.

I am convinced that even super-size monetary inducements would only have a marginal effect on fertility rates. But I would still go ahead and offer the bonus, for at least a year, just to prove beyond any doubt that our low birth rates have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents. They are instead the result of changed lifestyles and mindsets. And if there is little we can do by way of incentives to persuade Singaporeans to have more children, then we have to be realistic and ask ourselves what other options we have to prevent this society from disappearing within a few generations.

He views this as the primary threat Singapore faces as a country (and rightfully so).

When immigrants understand that they are a much smaller group compared with the local population, they tend to want to assimilate with locals and blend in to the existing culture. If the integration process is not completed in the first generation, it will be completed among their children. But when a critical mass of immigrants is reached, there is often a desire in them to want to assert themselves and to remain distinct. Indeed, if the number is large enough, they may even be able to force changes onto the local culture.

I agree. It’s important to only allow immigration when there is a pressure of assimilation. Otherwise you simply get anarchy.

I am opposed to too much interference with the free market. This distorts incentives and creates inefficiencies that are much harder to root out later. The minimum wage is one example of that. A far better approach would be to allow the free market to run its course and achieve the most optimal outcome in terms of total economic output before having the government step in at the end of that process to tax the rich to give to the poor.

Preach.

But we have to be careful that we do not increase taxes too much or the rich who have the means to move out of Singapore would do so. We may be able to retain some of those from the older generation because they have already sunk roots here. But if you are young and talented and the world is beckoning, the temptation to leave would become irresistible.

If only someone could have told Norway.

When the flurry of excitement over the so-called Arab Spring is finally over, the world will probably come to the stark realisation that nothing much has transformed the governance in that region.

He was completely right.

On top of not having any prior experience in representative forms of politics, the Middle East also lacks vital social factors that form the foundation on which democracy must stand.

The Middle East will never be a democracy. I agree here.

We are legally equal, and morally so as well. This concept necessarily precedes the development of actual democratic practices and institutions. It has to gain acceptance not only in intellectual or progressive circles but throughout society. What we see in many parts of the Middle East, however, are tribal or feudal systems. In Saudi Arabia, tribal leaders bring gifts to the king once a year. Like in ancient China, the king gives them more valuable gifts in return. The loyalty held by ordinary people is to the tribe – not to the nation, for no nation exists, and certainly not to fellow citizens. [sic] …democracy will not emerge because the basic unit in the polity is not the citizen but the tribe.

It’s not just Arabs - many other cultures have this same flaw. They will never be fundamentally democratic.

[T]hey have insisted on keeping women in the background. Arabic society in general is male-dominated. They have refused to allow women to be educated equally and to become as productive as men in society – precisely what is needed for the potential of these countries to be unlocked and for their economies to become modernised.

[sic]

[Women] are denied entry into prestigious courses, such as the sciences, engineering or law, and are expected instead to take up more traditionally “female” occupations like teaching. Even when they do make it out of the educational system as equals, the labour force participation rate for women in many Middle Eastern countries trails that for men by a large margin…

The main thing holding Arab nations back is how uninvolved the women are.

You accept the world as it is, and find the best way of maximising your fortunes as a society, or you are left behind by the relentless pace of change found everywhere else. The world cannot possibly stop spinning for your sake.

Yup. Apply this to everything. You may think nuclear energy is bad, but China is not going to stop getting virtually unlimited free electricity because you were irrationally afraid. You may think AI is bad, but China is not going to stop building AI just because of that.

We have to take care of our own problems first. Stability is provided for by a strong military, to ensure that we are left alone. Otherwise, there is nothing to prevent hordes of people marching across the Causeway. In the two years when we were part of Malaysia, the whole railway track was filled up by squatters from Malaysia. They built shanty huts because it is an urban area and facilities are good. So, when we broke off, we cleared the Malaysians out. It is not our burden.

Agreed.

The earth can only hold so many people without serious damage to our habitat and to biodiversity. How do we put a stop to the relentless growth? The key, in my view, lies in educating women – which causes them to want fewer children. The sooner we are able to do this, the sooner we will have a less populated world.

Save the planet by having fewer kids, but doom Singapore by having fewer kids. Which do you want?

In the long run, I believe many countries will slowly begin to find nuclear energy more attractive.

I certainly hope so, especially with all the new demand for AI.

I walk on the treadmill three times a day – 12 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes after lunch and 15 minutes after dinner.

As a walking treadmill fanatic, you cannot imagine how gratifying this was to read.

[D]octors and relatives of the patient believe they should keep life going. I do not agree. There is an end to everything and I want mine to come as quickly and painlessly as possible, not with me incapacitated, half in coma in bed and with a tube going into my nostrils and down to my stomach. In such cases, one is little more than a body. I am not given to making sense out of life – or coming up with some grand narrative on it – other than to measure it by what you think you want to do in life. As for me, I have done what I had wanted to, to the best of my ability. I am satisfied.

The ultimate mic drop.

In the end, my greatest satisfaction in life comes from the fact that I have spent years gathering support, mustering the will to make this place meritocratic, corruption-free and equal for all races – and that it will endure beyond me, as it has. It was not like that when I took office.

These ideals are the best we can hope to instill in any place.

Usually I read biographies of interesting people.

Unsurprisingly, he is an avid reader. The great ones always read.

Mao (Zedong) would have been a disaster if he had lived on because he believed in a state of constant revolution.

His opinions on Mao are a whirlwind.

And I mockingly told him: “If you take the facts under consideration, you are not really honest people. You maintain that you are communists, but in fact, you are much more Confucianist.” And in a way he was shocked. And it took him a few seconds, and then he came up with the following answer. Just two words: “So what?”

[sic]

No, he faced reality, because for me, a leader of a small little island, to tell him it is you we are afraid of – my neighbours and I – not the Russian bear, I expected bluster back. But instead, he paused and asked me quietly: “What do you want me to do?” He is a big man.

This is his conversation with the then head of the CCP Deng Xiaoping. It takes a great man indeed to, in the moment, reflect and instantly evaluate whether the criticism being thrown at him is valid or not.

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My website usually tries to be apolitical, but it’s basically impossible with this type of book and this type of biography. This book was a fascinating look into the Chinese point of view from a somewhat neutral observer. It’s also filled with politically incorrect statements (I didn’t even include what LKY thought of George Soros!). But the key messages I completely agree with: accept the world as it is and work within it. Try to truly identify which aspects are changeable and which are not. Do not get so caught up in what is not changeable that you cannot achieve your mission.