China’s great love affair with Singapore's first PM, Lee Kuan Yew

The tributes for Singapore’s founder-leader Lee Kuan Yew, who passed away on Monday morning aged 91, have come from far and wide. That Lee’s charisma and influence extended way beyond the small city-state whose fortunes he dramatically altered is clear from the long list of world leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, set to attend his funeral.

Lee, who was Singapore’s founder-prime minister for three decades, grew into a global statesman: Asian leaders frequently sought his advice on transforming their economies, while Western leaders and CEOs lined up to get a slice of the booming Singapore economy.

Perhaps nowhere else was Lee’s influence more evident than China, a country with which he had a unique relationship. Lee was ethnic Chinese, and his ancestral home in a mountainous village in southern Guangdong province, near Meizhou, has in recent days seen crowds of visitors pay their respects. There is considerable pride in China about his southern Chinese roots.

More than that, Lee’s extraordinary success in transforming Singapore from a poor agricultural trading post into a first-world economic powerhouse had tremendous influence on China’s own growth story. Between 1960 and 1984, Singapore grew at a stunning annual nine per cent average. In 1960, China was in the middle of a disastrous famine that claimed at least 30 million lives, a result of Mao Zedong’s misguided Great Leap Forward campaign that forced farmers to abandon their fields and make steel in an attempt to rival the Soviet Union. Until 1976, even as Singapore boomed, China was roiled by Mao’s decade-long Cultural Revolution that would claim millions of lives.

When Deng Xiaoping rose following Mao’s death and grappled with how to transform a country on the brink of ruin, one of the people he turned to was Lee Kuan Yew. The Singapore government has a fascinating account of Deng’s September 1978 visit to Singapore, where he was greeted on arrival by a confident Lee.

Over two days that November, Deng and Lee had discussions for close to six hours. Much of their talks focused on Singapore’s experience – and what China could learn. Lee arranged for Deng to visit the Singapore Housing Development Board – later a model for China’s own massive urban housing projects that have helped, along with more controversial restrictions on internal migration, every major Chinese city avoid the emergence of the sprawling slums that have characterised urbanisation in almost every other emerging economy. Deng, during his visit, also visited the Jurong Town Corporation to learn of Singapore’s success in rapid urbanisation.

As the Singapore government notes, the visit “sowed the seeds for the replication of the Singapore model of industrial development in China”. This model was not only about ideology – Singapore played a very concrete role in the economic reforms Deng unleashed, especially in the 1990s. In 1994, both countries jointly set up an industrial park in Suzhou – an idea of Lee’s – that would become a model for the sprawling economic development zones that China built using investment from overseas. The Suzhou park continues to boom: last year, its GDP accounted for $ 32.5 billion.

What probably appealed most to post-Mao Chinese leaders like Deng was Lee Kuan Yew’s famous disavowal of ideology. Lee often said his government and party were “ideology-free” – an approach that appealed to the Communist Party of China following the trauma of Maoism. As Lee once told the New York Times, his only ideology was: “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.” That pretty accurately characterises Deng’s own experiments of reforms that transformed China’s economy in the 1980s and 1990s.

Singapore’s “nanny state” – and its famously harsh penalties for misdemeanours such as littering and chewing gum – have been mocked in the West. Singaporeans, however, often complain that Western criticism has been unfair, not giving due credit to the city-state’s economic – and social – achievements, turning the corner of a past once defined by poverty and racial disharmony. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta puts it (http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-postmodern-leader/2/), “The West loved to hate [Lee], not because he was repressive, but because he managed to create an attractive version of soft authoritarianism. He stood his ground and, in doing so, questioned the very hypocrisy at the heart of so many established democracies”.

China, for its part, has been, to put it mildly, selective in adopting the Lee model. Many Chinese Communist Party officials see the Singapore model – economic liberalisation coupled with firm limits on political freedoms – as a future that China should embrace. China does, however, have far to go on many fronts – most notably on curbing corruption in government and making bureaucracy efficient, arguably Lee’s greatest successes. The CPC is a vast party with 80 million members. Maintaining discipline within its ranks has been an uphill struggle, with rampant – and unchecked – corruption a far cry from the Singapore experience, as well as a source of rising public anger in China today.

Today, few would describe the CPC’s governance as “soft authoritarianism”, as much as China is a freer place than in the days of Mao. President Xi Jinping, who took over in March 2013, has made clear that the CPC in his charge will only reinforce, not dilute, its political control – the experiments of local-level political opening up that were on the agenda a few years ago under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have not found mention in official communiques in many months.

Xi’s party is attempting a tightrope walk of a different kind – a hard authoritarianism, whose curbs on political expression go far beyond today’s Singapore on perhaps every measure (as evident in the recent detention of five women’s activists for the “crime” of raising awareness on sexual harassment http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/24/dispatches-china-thumbs-its-nose-women-activists), coupled with the economic opening of the kind Lee Kuan Yew championed.

Today, it is only China’s progressives who openly advocate for the Singapore model as one possible outcome of a peaceful political evolution. Others argue that a country as vast as China cannot be run as efficiently as Lee's city-state was. That, in itself, underlines how far away the mainstream opinion in the CPC is from embracing meaningful political reforms that will bring in genuine transparency and check the party's power.

Xi, at least, seems to have taken one Lee Kuan Yew lesson to heart. Over the past year, he has brought down hundreds of officials, including high-ranking former leaders, in an unprecedented corruption crackdown that has won popular support. But if Xi is to truly emulate Lee's legacy, he will have to be bold enough to bring in political reforms that will transform government into a transparent, corruption-free bureaucracy - reforms that the party continues to resist.