Conversation with SM Lee Hsien Loong at the 2024 Edwin L. Godkin Lecture

Professor Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University: Thank you very much. Great address and taking us into so many different arenas. When I look at the performance, I am stunned for what has happened over these 20 years. I look at the transition that is just occurring as you handed the baton to Lawrence Wong, whom I am proud to say is another former Mason Fellow, a distinguished graduate of the Kennedy School. So far so good, but he performed very well in the previous jobs that he had had an opportunity to either perform in. On the basis of his record, we were able to make a transition.

If we imagine Dean Weinstein is now having a strategic review here of the School as we think about our next stages in the future. And if you were offering a thought or two about how we would train next generations of leaders, who were trying to produce a track record somewhat more like your own – improvement in citizens’ lives, improvements in citizens’ income, improvements in citizens’ safety, improvements in citizens’ health, improvements in citizens feeling about whether the society is going in the right direction or the wrong direction, cohesion or otherwise. Again, this would be a textbook – maybe you will write this textbook as your next assignment – but give us some of the headlines.

SM Lee Hsien Loong: Well, first focus on what you have been very good at doing which is to understand, analyse policy options, policy implications and ideas to do things better. How can governments run better? I think you put a lot of emphasis on that, and I have found what I learnt in the Kennedy School, in those areas, very valuable to me.

Beyond that, it would be very useful to have an understanding of how organisations work – how you can fit into a big organisation and how you can actually translate idealism and energy and ideas into actions and results. A lot of young people start off idealistically. They want to change their world. They think that things can be done better, and they are right. But when you go into an organisation and you find that it is big and stodgy and a lot of people are older than you, and a lot of people say they know more about it than you, and a lot of people have other thoughts and priorities than you, how are you going to fit in and be the change as the slogan has it? It is quite hard. You need some patience, wisdom. Grey hair helps some, but too much grey hair can be a problem. But to understand how such organisations can be made to work, I think is very useful. Governments often have many such organisations – in every government.

Thirdly, to understand the international environment because – the Kennedy School is not a school of foreign policy – every country operates in an international environment including the United States of America, and you need to know what the tensions are, what the interests are. What are transient and you hope that will blow over with another administration or another foreign leader? What are long-term trends which have to be seriously dealt with and may need change of mindsets, which are quite fundamental? I think if you are going to go into government, that is another area which is important.

The last area, which maybe is capstone, is you need to understand some politics. How do you get into a position where you are able to make things happen in the country? If the political leadership goes wrong – if you have a good civil service, it can keep going okay for quite a long time to come; if you never have had a good political leadership and you have a strong civil service, you can go okay as long as it is straight and level, and you do not fly into a crisis; if you are in a crisis and you must switch off the autopilot and take hold of the controls, you have a problem.

Actually, our model is that the political leadership has to understand what it is to govern – it is not just for you to make speeches, it is not just for you to be the PR face, it is not just for you to read the script which you have been drafted. You have to write it, decide the content, set the direction, and make it happen. How to get into such a political situation may or may not be possible in every country, but to understand how politics works, and therefore how within that environment, public officers can make a contribution. I think it is important, probably the most important of all.

Moderator: Let me stay with that topic for a second, because I know that both you and your father were always a little reluctant to quote, offer lessons or clues from Singapore. You have often said, this is a continuous journey in which you earn your keep every day, and you are grateful for what has been accomplished, but you do not take anything from granted, and you do not think anything is permanently accomplished. But still, if I remember when Nazarbayev became president of Kazakhstan, and for whatever reason he asked me some thoughts about Kazakhstan. I said I would go try to talk to Lee Kuan Yew, your father, which he ultimately did. I would go study what happened there. In the case of Rwanda, I had a similar opportunity to have a conversation with Kagame early on when he began. I said, I would go talk to Singapore and see what happened in Singapore.

Part of the fun that I did with this report card was an article last summer imagining that rather than just the two choices Americans had between the Republican and the Democrat, maybe we had a third choice that we would sub-contract the government to you for four years, or maybe the British as they go through their revolving door, to see if we can get the Senior Minister to spend four years running Britain, and see how that works out. If you were to go to Nicaragua, Guatemala or Tanzania or somewhere, is there enough transference or enough possibility of adapting the lessons? If one of our students goes back home to whichever country they have come from and decides to make whichever country as successful as Singapore.

SM Lee: You can imagine that at different levels. For example, if you want to design a pension system, we have one which is funded, which is solvent, which meets a range of needs, retirement housing, health care, provides for longevity risks. It does not sing and dance, but it meets the needs of 80% or more of our population, and then we have other schemes to top up for the rest. If you want to design a pension system, well, you can look at ours and you can imagine how pieces of that can apply in your system.

If you want to design a healthcare system, we have one. It is not fully government operated. There is a private hospital sector. The government part is not operated as a department. There are hospitals which are non-profit but have to break even. There is choice, but at the same time, we nudge you in certain directions and set certain public expectations and norms, and we are grappling with issues which you are too. For example, how to keep medical insurance under proper control, which is an insolvable problem. You can learn and study our experience and see what is doable in your system. There are also unique things to Singapore, so that is one of the reasons why we hesitate to say that we have got your solution, because we do not necessarily even have our own solution for all the time.

For example, in housing – why were we able to do public housing, which covers 90% of the population? Because when we started out, a lot of the land in Singapore was owned by the estates of wealthy people who had died – businessmen, traders from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. They had bought up big chunks of Singapore, in those days the land was not so expensive. It had become their estates, and it was going to be tied up for so many generations until those “life in being plus twenty-one years” as the legal term says, and the government says “No, we are going to develop a country. You are going to benefit. It is a windfall. We will take this. The country will benefit.”

We acquired the land. The government acquired large chunks of land from the estates – the dispossessed were not the poor. Because we had the land, we could plan, we could clear, we could build, and we could house the population. You cannot easily do that. I mean in South Africa, for example, are you able to expropriate the whites? It is a completely different political situation. You may or may not be able to do exactly what we have done, but this is how we have made our public housing work, and we hope that you will learn something from it.

At the politics level, I do not know that it is transferable. As I tried to explain, it has worked like this in Singapore because of the path we took, because we had gone through this crucible of fire, and that generation understood that our backs are to the wall, we will make this work.

But more than that, there was one happenstance. After we became independent, the opposition, which was a left-wing opposition, decided that they would declare this a sham independence, that they would boycott Parliament. They vacated their seats, the PAP expanded, filled the whole space of politics, and therefore established dominance which it has to be able to keep and make use of, to good purpose now for more than half a century. I do not know if you start on a nation building process, you will have a good fortune to have such an outcome from big struggles, or to have an opponent which will make such a mistake.

Moderator: The path dependency that you, Zeckhauser and I were talking about last night, is a big lesson. There is not an easy transference with respect to that domain. Can we take you on COVID. For those that are interested, we will have these slides up somewhere. COVID hit the world. This is like a test for everybody. Massachusetts is about the size of Singapore, roughly. We have a lot of coastlines. If I look at the number of deaths from COVID between Singapore and Massachusetts – I pointed this out to Charlie Baker when he was the governor here. He did not appreciate this very much. Tell us how Singapore dealt with COVID so much more successfully than Massachusetts?

SM Lee: I do not have a specific comparison with Massachusetts, but I can tell you what we tried to do. We saw it coming. We knew we could not avoid it. If you are at the end of the world like New Zealand, they could close themselves off for quite a long time, and they get on pretty well. It worked for quite a long time, and it tided them over – they had time to get vaccinated and prepare. But we knew it was going to hit us soon, and we could not just shut ourselves down. We are a global hub, and if you shut yourself down, you constrict the economy. We will starve.

So, what do you do? We watched, we calibrated. We set up a working committee which oversaw the process, and then Minister Lawrence Wong was put in charge of the committee and coordinated the ministries. It is not a Ministry of Health problem, it is a national problem – trade and industry, Ministry of Manpower for jobs, public health, your Ministry responsible for community development, because you have to get community activities organised. We put all this together, and oversaw it through a working committee, which was multi-ministry, and everybody chipped in. Then, we calibrated our response as we went along. Eventually we had to have quite tight borders, but we tried hard to hold it off. I think in retrospect, we probably held it off a bit too long, and we probably should have been tighter a little bit earlier, but this is after the fact.

We expected the bugs to come in. It did. In fact I was going home from Davos when I got the message to say, “You got the first case”. I said, “Not a surprise”. We were prepared for this. We took it as it went on. We watched other people lock down. We said, “Do we have to lock down?” We watched the numbers. They wiggled up, they wiggled down. We said, as long as I can survive and try to hold off the lockdown, as long as we can.

After two months, the numbers started creeping up, because people were coming home. We were quarantining them, but there were leaks, and in particular, it leaked into the foreign worker dormitories. That worried us a lot, because it is a communal living, and if it spreads in the dormitories, that is one thing. If it then comes out from the dormitories into the population, unvaccinated and vulnerable, and many of them aged, that is a big problem.

We watch the trends every day. The numbers tick up today, somebody will tell you – “That is because we work extra hard to catch the bugs. Tomorrow, the numbers will go down”. After three days of times 1.5, times 1.5, times 1.5, I said, “We do not believe this. We better move”. They said, “We have not reached 100 cases a day”. I said, “I am not waiting”. So, we closed down.

Fortunately, after two months, we got the situation in the dorms under control. We got the situation in the general public and the population under control. We reopened. We reopened schools, reopened jobs. We kept safe distancing going for a long time more. Because people trusted us, and we said “Please, no visitors, or no more than so many in the public eating places.” For some time, the public eating places were closed. They generally complied, and it helped to slow the bug down.

Meanwhile, we said let us get ready for vaccinations. It does not exist, but the vaccines will come. The first in line will not be me, because the US, the Europeans, those who make it, will make sure they are first in line, but I will not be last in the queue. So (we) booked the vaccines. Booked multiple, over ensured. Some may fail, some may work, but be there and make sure you have the access. We booked the vaccines. I think we started talking about this in April-May 2020. Vaccines became available to everybody's astonishment within a few months. By the end of the year, we had our first vaccines, and we were starting to vaccinate our population. Fortunately, we cued them. We said, old folks first, vulnerable ones first, first responders first, then by age group, take your time. We do not have a crisis because numbers are under control.

First in line was me, on television. I had every confidence it was a good vaccine. It worked for me. It worked as a gesture and people came willingly. There was no fear. We had some anti-vaxxers. Fortunately, we were able to keep their numbers down and effectively rebut them. We were able to tide over until enough of our people were vaccinated, so that by the time Omicron came and overwhelmed all efforts to shut down, we were in a stable position, and we could open up.

The key thing is not that nobody died, because that is impossible. Or that the economy was not affected, that is also impossible. But that we were able to manage it so that you did not lose your jobs – I had resources to keep your pay going when your employer could not pay you. You did not go to hospital and find no oxygen and no bed. You did not have to scramble from place to place with a tube looking to top-up, patient gasping, dying. You did not have to queue up to be cremated, which happened in some places. We came through, minus a trauma, for which thanks be to the Lord.

At the end of this, we came out. It was a great relief. We wrote a white paper analysing what we could have done better, sooner, cheaper, more effectively. We published it. We debated it, preparing for the next pandemic, which one day will come, and we watch every new bug carefully. We published it online. If you are interested, you can find it somewhere on the internet.

Moderator: It is a very good read. Also, the extent to which your government maintained the confidence of your citizens, the ways in which you explained it and sustained the confidence puts you in a much better position for the next round. We have about a dozen students eager to ask questions. Let me start with this gentleman. Please introduce yourself briefly and present a short question.

Dwight Hutchins: My wife and I spent a decade in Singapore. We just left a year ago. So we lived through COVID and a couple of things struck us. One was that all of the ministers you had were super confident and into the details of their ministries and running them like clockwork. That was very impressive, the depth and the partnership with the American business community – I was the chairman of the American chamber. The partnership there that grew FDI. You could feel that the country was united in that sense. What we saw with COVID was you taking leadership, taking the first jab, being on television every night explaining to the people what was going on. The taxi drivers and everyone on the streets were listening to your every word. It was impressive. I think that that you digging deep, and saying that we are going to protect our elders first and foremost, created a sense of national unity that, as we just went through an election, we question. I am curious, how did your country take people from very different cultures and bring them together and make them Singaporean. We were there when Lee Kuan Yew died and someone commented that it must have felt like when George Washington died. So what did you do?

SM Lee: We spent a long time doing this. Partly, it was policies. We made sure that lives improved for all. Not just that we had a prosperous economy, but that there were good jobs for a wide range of the population. We educated people and tried to imbue them with some sense of values, what used to be called civic education, an understanding of where Singapore fits in with the world. It is partly going through crises together, and we have been through several in the past half century. Whether it is oil shocks, whether it is the Asian Financial Crisis, whether it is the Global Financial Crisis more recently, or a decade ago, SARS. Those not in Asia might have forgotten about SARS, it was another COVID virus which hit us in 2003.

There is a foundation of confidence, trust and mutual obligation between the government and the public which you have to build on in a crisis. You have to be there. In February 2020, as the cases started to grow, I happened to be having my Chinese New Year dinner with my community leaders at the government house. That evening, they were about to listen to me, but they were spreading amongst themselves over WhatsApp photos of toilet rolls disappearing from supermarket shelves.

There was a panic, because people were not sure what was going to happen, whether we were going to lock down; what we were going to be short of, rice, toilet paper, food, everything! And I was about to speak to our community leaders, our people on the ground who would have to help us hold the ground. I told them: Do not worry, we will take care of this. There will be food. There will be supplies. You will not have to eat army rations, and tomorrow I am going to do a broadcast to the nation and explain to them what is coming to the extent that we know and how we must prepare ourselves.

The next day, I made a broadcast. I did not speak every day, otherwise people would stop listening to me. But I made over three years about 20 broadcasts, probably less than that, at critical moments to reassure people that we are there, we are there for you, this is what we know, this is what the risks are, this is what we have to do together. One of the most telling broadcasts was when we locked down, and I had to say, “Don't worry, you will be safe, and we will take care of all of you, including all the workers in the foreign worker dorms.” It made a big impact on them. I think it made a big impact on their parents and families back home in India, in Bangladesh, in China, and all the places they came from. It was not so obvious that it was going to be deliverable, but it was something which we had to try our best to do, which we did.

Teressa He: My question is more about promoting versus regulating innovative industries. For example, Singapore is one of the first countries promoting and formulating cryptocurrency.

SM Lee: We are not promoting cryptocurrencies. That is a misunderstanding.

Teressa: ...Regulating crypto policy and actually invest as a government. So I want to understand more about how you form policy to make judgment as a country before there is a clear picture or validation system of the new industry.

SM Lee: Hopefully, you are well advised by people who know more about it than you. Hopefully, there are examples of how it has worked out elsewhere, and we can see which worked, which did not and we can follow them. For example, we did that with cigarette smoking. We scanned the world. Every time somebody has a new and draconian measure, we say how can we level up to them? Warning messages, horrible photographs, plain packaging; and now people are talking about generational bans, so that beyond a certain age you will just stop smoking. We will try and level up to them. Same with social media.

But in an unfolding situation, in a crisis like COVID-19, you can have all the experts’ advice, but you are operating in the fog of war. You must be prepared to make your own judgement based on incomplete information and contradictory advice. People will say it is safe; people will say it is not safe; people will say it is unproven. I need to do so many more control trials. By the time I finish them, the battle is over. So you do have to have an informed judgement and be prepared to say, “I have heard all this advice. This is what we will do. I am taking responsibility.” For that, you need people who have seen crises before and have some sense of what the issues are, in your team.

Jay Ong: As a citizen, I just want to say thank you so much for what you have done for our country, and I am very excited to see what you do next. As a young person, I think, not just in Singapore but everywhere, there is a larger generational divide based on different beliefs and normative values. What my ah ma values is very different from what I value. What perspectives do you think young people are lacking nowadays and how do you think young people can also try and bridge that conversation?

SM Lee: I think you are much more prepared for the new world than we are, because it is a completely different set of challenges, and you are growing up attuned to them. I mean, you do not know a pre-internet age. The future is going to be connected in one way or the other, despite bifurcation, despite people nearshoring, reshoring, and trying to disconnect chunks of the world. Even in North Korea, people get news somehow or other.

For the new world, the young will be growing up as digital natives, much more prepared for it than my generation can start to be now. We are trying our best not to be swamped and left behind and to keep up. But to be ahead, you have to be a young person. What you do need to know is that certain things which your parents believe, or your grandparents believe are actually true and remain true. The world has completely changed, but race, language and religion remain fundamental, driving activistic forces which are very powerful. That there are big countries and small countries, and Singapore is always going to be a small country. That we have different ways of making a living, but we will always have to make a living. And our neighbours will always be bigger neighbours than us, whom we will do our best to make friends with.

I once had a visitor from Mongolia. He said to me that we have a law in our country that you are forbidden to change your geographical neighbours. I said, we have the same law. They have got Russia and China as their best friends. We have Indonesia and Malaysia as our nearest neighbours and good friends, and it is going to be like this for all time. We are different from them. They are different from us. We can benefit from them, and they can benefit from us. But there are also differences in perspective, which are quite deep seated, because we are just strategically in a different situation, and we have to be able to manage the issues.

I think young people particularly have to understand this. It is not so easy to do, and it is not so easy to understand. Every few years, we have a panel on how we can do things better, and somebody will say why don't we work harder to make friends? I say, yes, we will continue to work very hard to make friends and continue to work harder. But this is a challenge, which is one of those which I talked about; how to get along and hold our own while being able to maintain mutually beneficial relations with others whom we have to live with and who have to live with us. That is internationally.

Domestically, you also have to understand that some laws cannot be repealed, particularly the laws of economics.

Qi Xuan: This is a question about Taiwan. Hopefully it is not so spicy. Singapore has always been trying to keep peace and facilitate the dialogue between the two sides across the Taiwan Strait, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, Taiwan. Do you view the possibility that the PRC using war to reunify with Taiwan will increase in the next Trump presidency, considering he is more flexible in negotiation? If so, how will Singapore react to try and keep peace between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, as she always did in history.

SM Lee: First of all, we have never tried to keep the peace. We have always prayed for peace. There is a big difference! It is beyond our powers. We wish both sides well. We are friends with both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and we hope that they will be able to have a stable, peaceful relationship, and any changes will happen peacefully and in a way which is acceptable to both sides. It has become more complicated over time. I do not know how it will evolve in the next four years, but this is a dynamic which has longer than a four-year horizon. And I do not believe the views which are sometimes expressed to say 2028, or some year like that, is crucial, and therefore something is about to happen in the next term of the US government.

Benjamin: You have spoken on multiple occasions on how Singapore is compared to a Garden of Eden. I was curious as to what strategic steps did you take during your term of government to ensure that we continue in this state. Looking ahead, for Singaporeans as well as for people looking to live in or partner Singapore, what are some of the things that you would encourage them to focus on, to ensure that Singapore continues to grow.

SM Lee: It depends mainly on us. I say Garden of Eden because it is a state where you are in, which, once you have left, you cannot come back again. I try to explain to you why where we are is highly path dependent, and dependent in particular on what happened in the first few years of our nation building journey. Because we have been able to build on that and maintain that we have stayed in the Garden of Eden for more than one generation. If you go back to Genesis, that is kind of a contradiction in terms. But in Singapore, we have been in the Garden of Eden beyond Adam and Eve.

The way to stay there is to continue to have good government, continue to have good policies, continue to get new generations of capable and committed people into government to lead the population, and to have the population well looked after, at the same time understanding the realities of what our stability and prosperity depends on, and how we need to work together to keep it like this. Of course, you also have to understand that it is quite unusual for it to be like this. If you break from this, and you go to become a normal country, you will have the problems which normal countries have, and you cannot come back to where you are again, ever.

I have tried to do that, I think, over 20 years, pursued all kinds of policies. I have brought in every election, new teams of members of parliament, new potential ministers, tried them out. Some have stayed on, some have gone on to other illustrious careers and kept the team up to date to the best of my ability and been able to hand over the country stable, in good order, to a team ready to take over. Now they have to do it and keep on doing in the same way.

But nothing is forever. Nobody can say, here is a formula, and it will work for, never mind eternity, but even for the next 50 years. There is no such formula. But if you ask me, between buying insurance in case you fall out of the Garden of Eden and investing in this so that it continues to work well. I say, do not spread your bets. Focus, make sure this works. We can, we have done it before, and if you keep on making it working, all of the troubles in the world, we will not be immune from them, but I think we can keep ourselves safe from them.

Moderator: Unfortunately, we have come to the witching hour. I apologise for the many other questions that would have been asked. I think the proposition that Singapore has worked miraculously over these decades, and as I look to its future, if it were a stock and you were talking about buying it long or short, it would certainly be long on Singapore. I would say the leadership that has been chosen to take it to the next level, including Lawrence Wong, whom the Senior Minister has mentioned, is somebody who has demonstrated also great capacity. So Singapore has been blessed with extraordinary leaders, both as the prime ministers, and also in the government at many levels. It has got a degree of, I think, as you could hear from the Senior Minister’s comments, determination and pragmatism that we could all aspire to.

So let me just say we should all join in thanking and welcoming back and looking forward to welcoming you back many times, one of our most distinguished graduates, Mr Lee.

SM Lee: Thank you.

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