Our chief diplomat to the world
By Tommy Koh, Published The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
MR LEE Kuan Yew was the most famous Singaporean in the world. For nearly half a century, he personified Singapore to the world. During his long tenure as Prime Minister (of independent Singapore), from 1965 to 1990, he was the principal architect of Singapore's foreign policy.
Later, as senior minister and minister mentor, he continued to give his successors valuable advice on our external relations. It would not be wrong to say that he served as our chief diplomat to the world.
Singapore is a very small country. However, it enjoys a role and influence in the world not enjoyed by other countries of similar size. A British newspaper once wrote that Singapore punches above its weight. This is due to three factors: our record of domestic achievements, our skilful diplomacy and the Lee Kuan Yew factor.
Why was Mr Lee so greatly admired by foreign leaders? Because of his intellectual brilliance, his power of analysis and judgment, his eloquence and charisma, and his willingness to share his candid and disinterested views. His longevity also gave him an advantage as he evolved from being the brilliant Prime Minister of Singapore to being a wise elder statesman.
Mr Lee travelled extensively on behalf of Singapore. He befriended and earned the respect of many foreign leaders, in government, business and academia. He had an impressive global network. For example, he was respected by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, German leader Helmut Schmidt, French leader Jacques Chirac and Japanese leader Kiichi Miyazawa. He knew and was respected by every American president, from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. Two of America's thought leaders, Dr Henry Kissinger and Dr George Shultz, are among his many admirers.
One of the greatest honours the United States can confer on a foreign leader is an invitation to address a joint session of the US Congress. I will never forget Oct 9, 1985. On that beautiful autumn day, Mr Lee addressed a packed joint session of Congress.
At that time, the protectionist tide was running strong in the US body politic. In his speech, which received several standing ovations, he explained why it was in the strategic interest of the US to continue to support free trade and open economies. The senator sitting next to me, Mr Edward Kennedy, confided in me afterwards that he was not previously aware of the linkage between free trade and US strategic interests in the world. The speech did help to stem the tide of protectionism in the US Congress.
Mr Lee's enduring contribution to Singapore's foreign policy can be summed up in the following seven principles.
1 PRAGMATISM
First, our foreign policy is based on pragmatism and not on any doctrine or ideology. The scholars who have written that Singapore's foreign policy is based on realism are mistaken. If it were based on realism, we would not have attached so much importance to international law or to the United Nations. Our constant lodestar is to promote the security and prosperity of Singapore.
2 SELF-RELIANCE
Second, we rely, first and foremost, on ourselves. Believing that the world does not owe us a living, Singapore did not seek foreign aid from the developed countries. We did not want to develop a dependency mentality. Instead, we concentrated our energies on attracting foreign investment and creating jobs for our people. We started building up our armed forces and introduced national service in order to develop a capacity to deter aggression.
3 ACCEPT REALITIES
Third, we accept the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. We have no illusions about the world. We take a clinical attitude towards facts and realities. This does not mean that we are passive and fatalistic. Not at all. We have been extremely proactive in taking the leadership to form such groupings as the Forum of Small States and the Global Governance Group. We know that we live in an unfair and dangerous world. We know that small countries will always be vulnerable to the pressures of bigger countries.
4 ASEAN'S CENTRALITY
Fourth, Singapore has a fundamental commitment to Asean and to making South-east Asia a region of peace and prosperity. Singapore is a strong supporter of Asean integration and is working closely with our partners to ensure the success of Asean's transition from an association to a community by this year. We took an active part in drafting the Asean Charter and support Asean's ambition to become a more rules-based institution. Singapore strongly supports the central role which Asean plays in the regional architecture. We will do everything within our power to ensure that Asean remains united, independent and neutral.
5 ASIA-PACIFIC COMMUNITY
Fifth, Singapore is committed to the vision of building an Asia-Pacific community. Singapore wants a balance of power in the region and welcomes the positive roles which the US, China, Japan, India, the European Union and Russia play in the political, economic and cultural lives of the region.
Singapore supports trade liberalisation and regional economic integration through both the Trans-Pacific Partnership, under the aegis of Apec, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Singapore supports dialogue, confidence-building and cooperation via institutions such as the Asean Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit.
6 BE A CONTRARIAN
Sixth, Singapore should not be afraid to defy conventional wisdom. During the 1960s, Singapore welcomed foreign investment by multinational corporations when the rest of the Third World viewed them as the purveyors of evil. Singapore was not afraid to be criticised by its Asean partners when it decided to negotiate a free trade agreement with the US. Singapore was willing to welcome the US military presence in the region when it was forced to leave the Philippines.
7 BE A GOOD GLOBAL CITIZEN
Seventh, Singapore should try to be a good global citizen. Within Asean, Singapore has played a leading role in trying to narrow the gap between the old and new members. Singapore maintains training centres in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam to train the government officials of those countries. Under the Singapore Cooperation Programme, run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore trains 7,000 government officials from other countries annually. To date, Singapore has trained 80,000 government officials from 170 countries.
Ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh, 77, is an international lawyer, a diplomat and a former law faculty dean
The world will miss Lee Kuan Yew
By Henry Kissinger, Published The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
LEE Kuan Yew was a great man. And he was a close personal friend, a fact that I consider one of the great blessings of my life. A world needing to distil order from incipient chaos will miss his leadership.
Lee emerged onto the international stage as the founding father of the state of Singapore, then a city of about one million. He developed into a world statesman who acted as a kind of conscience to leaders around the globe.
Fate initially seemed not to have provided him a canvas on which to achieve more than modest local success.
In the first phase of decolonisation, Singapore emerged as a part of Malaysia. It was cut loose because of tensions between Singapore's largely Chinese population and the Malay majority and, above all, to teach the fractious city a lesson of dependency. Malaysia undoubtedly expected that reality would cure Singapore of its independent spirit.
But great men become such through visions beyond material calculations. Lee defied conventional wisdom by opting for statehood. The choice reflected a deep faith in the virtues of his people.
He asserted that a city located on a sandbar with nary an economic resource to draw upon, and whose major industry as a colonial naval base had disappeared, could nevertheless thrive and achieve international stature by building on its principal asset: the intelligence, industry and dedication of its people.
A great leader takes his or her society from where it is to where it has never been - indeed, where it as yet cannot imagine being. By insisting on quality education, by suppressing corruption and by basing governance on merit, Lee and his colleagues raised the annual per capita income of their population from US$500 at the time of independence in 1965 to roughly US$55,000 today.
In a generation, Singapore became an international financial centre, the leading intellectual metropolis of South-east Asia, the location of the region's major hospitals and a favoured site for conferences on international affairs.
It did so by adhering to an extraordinary pragmatism: by opening careers to the best talents and encouraging them to adopt the best practices from all over the world.
Superior performance was one component of that achievement. Superior leadership was even more important. As the decades went by, it was moving - and inspirational - to see Lee, in material terms the mayor of a medium-sized city, bestride the international scene as a mentor of global strategic order.
A visit by Lee to Washington was a kind of national event. A presidential conversation was nearly automatic; eminent members of the Cabinet and Congress would seek meetings. They did so not to hear of Singapore's national problems; Lee rarely, if ever, lobbied policymakers for assistance. His theme was the indispensable US contribution to the defence and growth of a peaceful world. His interlocutors attended not to be petitioned but to learn from one of the truly profound global thinkers of our time.
This process started for me when Lee visited Harvard in 1967 shortly after becoming Prime Minister of an independent Singapore. Lee began a meeting with the senior faculty of the School of Public Administration (now the Kennedy School) by inviting comments on the Vietnam War.
The faculty, of which I was one dissenting member, was divided primarily on the question of whether President Lyndon Johnson was a war criminal or a psychopath.
Lee responded: "You make me sick" - not because he embraced war in a personal sense but because the independence and prosperity of his country depended on the fortitude, unity and resolve of the United States.
Singapore was not asking the United States to do something that Singapore would not undertake to the maximum of its ability. But US leadership was needed to supplement and create a framework for order in the world.
Lee elaborated on these themes in the hundreds of encounters I had with him during international conferences, study groups, board meetings, face-to-face discussions and visits at each other's homes over 45 years.
He did not exhort; he was never emotional; he was not a Cold Warrior; he was a pilgrim in quest of world order and responsible leadership. He understood the relevance of China and its looming potential and often contributed to the enlightenment of the world on this subject. But in the end, he insisted that without the United States, there could be no stability.
Lee's domestic methods fell short of the prescriptions of current US constitutional theory. But so, in fairness, did the democracy of Thomas Jefferson's time, with its limited franchise, property qualifications for voting and slavery.
This is not the occasion to debate what other options were available. Had Singapore chosen the road of its critics, it might well have collapsed among its ethnic groups, as the example of Syria teaches today. Whether the structures essential for the early decades of Singapore's independent existence were unnecessarily prolonged can be the subject of another discussion.
I began this eulogy by mentioning my friendship with Lee. He was not a man of many sentimental words. And he nearly always spoke of substantive matters. But one could sense his attachment.
A conversation with Lee, whose life was devoted to service and who spent so much of his time on joint explorations, was a vote of confidence that sustained one's sense of purpose.
The great tragedy of Lee's life was that his beloved wife was felled by a stroke that left her a prisoner in her body, unable to communicate or receive communication. Through all that time, Lee sat by her bedside in the evening reading to her. He had faith that she understood despite the evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps this was Lee Kuan Yew's role in his era. He had the same hope for our world. He fought for its better instincts even when the evidence was ambiguous. But many of us heard him and will never forget him.
WASHINGTON POST
Dr Henry Kissinger is a former American politician who has served as national security adviser and secretary of state under several US administrations.
A man of exceptional intellect and perception
Mr Lee had strong views but could be persuaded to change his mind
Richard Hu, 88, served as Finance Minister from 1985 to 2001
The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
IN THE lead-up to the 1984 General Election, after I finally agreed to enter politics, Kuan Yew invited me to his office at the Istana.
It was a spartan room, which reflected the character of the man. He did not believe in spending money unless it was absolutely necessary. The room was just plain, except for some books.
In the Cabinet room, one floor below his office, the table has been there for as long as I remember. The cloth covers of the armchairs were finally changed three or four years before he retired. He had previously refused to.
It got to a point where his colleagues were embarrassed that visitors might think the Singapore Government had no money. But to him, these things mattered little.
His primary interest was in making sure the economy grew and the people benefited.
Kuan Yew was relaxed in that first meeting. He wanted to allay any lingering concerns I had about entering politics and to make me feel comfortable about taking the leap. That meeting marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted three decades, including 17 years as Cabinet colleagues.
I had heard a lot about Kuan Yew before that, of course, but from actually interacting with him, I found him to be a man of exceptional intellect and perception.
He had what I would call helicopter qualities - the ability to rise above the masses and look at things from a higher perspective, to not get confused by the forest.
As a lawyer, he had not received formal training in economic and financial matters. But he more than made up for it with an acute mind with the ability to calculate implications, as well as by reading widely.
He also had a strong intuitive sense on the principles of ma-croeconomics and how nations moved up. He agreed with Dr Goh Keng Swee early on that it was important to have an open economy that attracted the investments of multinational corporations. Later on, he could see that low-cost countries were moving up, and I consequently worked with him to grow our services sector in order to stay competitive - financial, legal, business services and so on.
He had a vision of how Singapore was going to create jobs and stay one step ahead of other developing countries and he was not afraid to try different strategies. They turned out to be extremely successful.
After I entered politics, Kuan Yew and I would meet regularly for one-on-one lunches. He had simple eating habits. There would be soup - usually vegetable soup - followed by fish or steak. He loved a good steak - about 120g, lean with all the fat cut out. Finally, there would be fruit. He was convinced about the benefits of antioxidants in fruit.
His favourite fruit was pomelo and he would say to me: "You eat it too. It's good for you."
He was a health nut. He would swim or cycle daily and kept telling me during our lunches that I should be exercising to keep fit, so I would last longer.
In this environment, he was quite friendly. We would discuss the issues of the day: policy matters, primarily financial ones, as well as international developments. One thing he did not discuss with me, though, was domestic or electoral politics.
He discussed this with other ministers because he knew this is not my area. I was never much interested in politics in the partisan or electoral sense. He understood that and kept me out of it.
Other than these one-on-one lunch meetings, our discussions mainly took place during Cabinet meetings and during the annual Budget meeting between the Finance Minister (after I took up this portfolio in 1985) and the Prime Minister.
I would prepare a paper laying out the important tax changes in the Budget. Because tax issues were very sensitive, we did not want to discuss them openly, even at the Cabinet level. For example, if we were going to increase petrol or tobacco taxes, any leak would be very problematic.
The role of Finance Minister in Singapore is relatively straightforward, unlike in other countries where finance ministers have to fight with central bankers because one side wants to spend and the other side wants to control.
Because the issues were less complicated, Kuan Yew and I rarely found ourselves in disagreement or having to debate an issue very vigorously, except on one issue: whether we should internationalise the Singapore dollar.
This debate happened in the 1980s. The big international banks at the time wanted greater access to the Singapore dollar, which they saw as a strong and stable currency - almost as strong as the US dollar and more familiar to people in this region. They proposed to Kuan Yew to allow the Singapore dollar to be borrowed for use in large amounts outside Singapore - say, to fund Indonesian development projects.
A few years before this, these banks proposed that a US-dollar offshore market be established in Singapore. We allowed this and it worked very well. It was the first step in our move towards developing Singapore as a financial centre. Those banks saw the internationalisation of the Singapore dollar as the logical next step.
As chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, I, together with the MAS leadership, was totally opposed to this proposal. We felt that once borrowing outside Singapore was allowed, there would be pressure on the mint to print more money, in excess to the GDP requirements in Singapore. Over time, if more and more foreign entities held large quantities of Singapore dollars offshore, a mischievous speculator with enough resources would, in theory, be able to undermine your currency by selling down and then buying back.
This was in fact what happened to the British pound at one point and, later, to the Thai baht during the 1997 financial crisis.
Keng Swee, who had retired, supported my view on this issue. But it took a lot to bring Kuan Yew round. He asked if we could allow some internationalisation to happen initially, and then to gradually build up. I maintained that once you opened the door, it was difficult to stop it.
There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the two of us. He was a night burner who worked into the wee hours of the morning. Often, he would think nothing of calling me up at midnight to ask me about a particular detail or to get me to elaborate on a certain point.
In the end, we were able to convince him that Singapore could become a financial centre without internationalising our currency - by developing other financial services in parallel that could provide just as good benefits, if not better.
What I learnt from this exchange about Kuan Yew was that he could be persuaded. On many issues, he had strong views and would try to dominate. Often, I saw him challenge proposals put forward by ministers at Cabinet meetings. But he was never so locked in to a particular view that he could not change his mind.
Multiracial S'pore on the world stage
S. Jayakumar, 75, consultant, Drew & Napier, was an MP from 1980 to 2011, a Cabinet minister from 1984 to 2011, including Deputy PM from 2004 to 2009 and Senior Minister from 2009 to 2011
The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
MR LEE Kuan Yew had a strong view on how we should conduct ourselves on the international stage and how we wanted others to perceive Singapore.
He had many views in this regard, but let me single out one aspect which made a great impression on me - that we should always get others to view us as a multiracial country.
Once, after he came back from an overseas visit, he asked at a Cabinet meeting who was the Transport Minister. Turning to him, he said he had just come back after a long flight on Singapore Airlines (SIA), and among the in-flight service crew, there were no Malays, Indians or Eurasians.
He asked the minister to convey feedback to SIA that foreigners travelling on the national carrier would form an impression of Singapore. It was not good that the in-flight crew were all ethnic Chinese. He said SIA should do its best to have Malays, Indians and Eurasians.
In a similar vein, he would from time to time comment on Cabinet memoranda from ministers seeking approval to send delegations to represent Singapore at important international conferences. He would turn to the minister who put up the Cabinet paper and ask about the list of officials proposed for the delegation. He would say: "Look, they are going to represent Singapore, right? Surely your ministry can find a good Malay or Indian officer to be included?"
Often, the minister would withdraw the memorandum and resubmit later an amended delegation list. His determination to portray abroad Singapore's multiracial aspect had a profound impact on me.
'The greatest Chinese outside mainland China'
Robert Kuok, 91, is chairman of the Kerry Group, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate with varied interests ranging from property to palm oil
By Li Xueying, Hong Kong Correspondent, In Hong Kong, The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
ON HIS regular visits to Hong Kong, Mr Lee Kuan Yew observed that when people there failed in business, they blamed themselves or bad luck, picked themselves up and tried again.
He wondered how to encourage that entrepreneurial spirit among Singaporeans, and would put the question to powerful businessmen he met there. South-east Asia's richest man, Mr Robert Kuok, remembers how he responded to Mr Lee: "I told him, you have governed Singapore too strictly, you have put a straitjacket on Singapore. Now, you need to take a pair of scissors and cut it."
The Malaysian tycoon would sometimes invite other Hong Kong businessmen to meet Mr Lee, who was always ready to talk politics.
But on his last trip, in May 2012, Mr Lee was more subdued. His wife had died, and he visited another old friend, media mogul Run Run Shaw, who was ill. Mr Lee sat quietly by Sir Run Run's wheelchair, saying little but patting the centenarian's knee from time to time.
"He had grown far more mellow," recalled Mr Kuok in an interview at his Deep Water Bay home in March 2013. It was a different side of a man he had known for seven decades.
They were born 20 days apart - Mr Lee on Sept 16 and Mr Kuok on Oct 6, 1923 - and met in 1941 as students at Raffles College in pre-war Singapore. "We're both pigs, born in the Year of the Pig," Mr Kuok said with a laugh, referring to the Chinese zodiac sign.
Did that make them stubborn? No, he said. "Greedy. See food, eat. See power, grab." From Hong Kong, Mr Kuok presides over an US$11.4 billion (S$15.4 billion) family business empire that spans the Shangri-La hotel chain to logistics to being the world's biggest processor of palm oil.
He said they were not especially close in school. Harry, as the young Mr Lee was known then, already had a reputation for pugnacity. "He was combative, wanting to win every argument. Not someone you would take an immediate great warmth and liking to," said Mr Kuok. And because Harry was "intellectually a cut above the average", there was "a slight feeling of superiority" about him. He did not mix much, though he did attend the college's annual fancy dress ball in 1941 in Malay garb complete with a songkok. Mr Kuok went as a Mandarin.
On Dec 8 that year, their lives were disrupted when the first Japanese bomb landed, bringing World War II to Singapore.
Mr Kuok returned to Johor Baru, where his parents ran a shop selling rice, sugar and flour. By the time he returned to Singapore in 1955, he had established a sugar refining business that would be the foundation of his fortune and earned him the title of Malaysia's Sugar King.
Mr Lee was a lawyer and rising politician, and a founder of the People's Action Party.
They would meet occasionally and Mr Kuok found Mr Lee "still pretty curt", but now he was obsessed with Singapore. In 1970, Mr Kuok received a call from the Istana inviting him to the Prime Minister's Office. Mr Lee wanted his views on Malaysia, saying his analyses were more down-to-earth than the official briefings he received. These meetings occurred regularly till 1973 when Mr Kuok moved to Hong Kong. After that, they met mostly when Mr Lee visited Hong Kong.
"Over the years, he shed a lot of his stiffness," he said, though they did not agree on everything.
"Politically, I did not share all his views," revealed Mr Kuok, citing as an example the benchmarking of ministerial pay to the private sector.
He thought Mr Lee was too obsessed about Singapore. "He wanted to talk about politics all the time. There is more to life than politics. To me, there is more to life than business."
Yet it was Mr Lee's single-mindedness that made Singapore thrive, Mr Kuok acknowledged, and it helped that he possessed "all these strong leadership traits - an intimidating attitude, presence of face and body".
"He was very sure of himself, resolute, even ruthless. But he turned Singapore into a model nation, put in place a government that cared for its people, and made sure that others would not bully Singapore," he said. "The greatest Chinese outside the mainland is Lee Kuan Yew."
To his Chinese tutor, he was a 'gentle lion'
Koh Hock Kiat, 54, is the former director of the Confucius Institute at the Nanyang Technological University
The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
I STILL remember clearly the first Chinese lesson I conducted for Mr Lee Kuan Yew.
It was a rainy day in 2006. Even though I was well-prepared, I was slightly nervous as I stepped into the Istana to make my way to his office, where the lesson was to be held.
Mr Lee, after all, was Singapore's founding father. Many viewed him as a stern man, not to be crossed, a "shi zi" (lion), as some would say in Chinese.
My nervousness was very quickly dispelled. As a student, he was humble and easy-going. He never hesitated to ask questions, and these were not just about Chinese language and culture.
He wanted to know too what I thought about issues like China and its rapid rise.
He also never stood on ceremony. Once, we did a lesson at the Singapore General Hospital because he was hospitalised there. He was in good spirits and appeared in a shirt and shorts.
I always began lessons by asking him how he was. This lightened the mood and was a good way for him to warm up before we moved on to converse about other topics.
Often, the topics were related to current affairs. We would read news articles or commentaries in Lianhe Zaobao or in newspapers from China and Taiwan, and then discuss them.
We stopped from time to time if he needed to clarify the meaning of a word or a term, or if there was a pronunciation that he had to go over a few more times.
But otherwise, we let the conversation flow freely to mimic as far as possible a natural conversation he might hold with his Chinese-speaking guests.
I enjoyed these conversations immensely as they often provided a glimpse of a side to Mr Lee that I would come to admire very much.
His sentimentality was quite evident, for example, when he recalled, with much nostalgia, his friendship with Chiang Ching-kuo. He would talk about the two stone lions he had received as a gift from the late Taiwanese leader and remind us of how Chiang had generously acceded to a request to allow the Singapore Armed Forces to train in Taiwan.
He also treasured memories of his days in Britain. When I e-mailed him one year to wish him well on his birthday, he replied in a long e-mail that he was dining in a restaurant in London.
It was a restaurant he had been to as a student and which he liked a lot. It had not changed at all, he wrote with much delight.
With age, Mr Lee spoke more slowly and softly than he used to.
But whenever he began talking about an issue related to Singapore's survival or well-being, he would become excited, his tone moving up a notch.
Discussing Singapore transformed him into a young man, I remember thinking to myself.
Mr Lee's interest in the Chinese language is well-documented. It dates back to the 1950s, shortly after he entered politics.
In his later years, however, he showed a desire to learn more, not just of the language - for conversational and speech-making purposes - but of Chinese culture as well.
He wanted to talk about Chinese geography and the cultural significance of various sayings and art forms.
I have always believed in an approach to learning Chinese that balances linguistic skills with cultural knowledge.
For me, this shift he made in his later years was evidence that he had matured in his journey as a student of Chinese.
When Mrs Lee passed away in 2010, our Chinese lessons were put on hold. It would have been understandable if Mr Lee had decided then to permanently set aside the classes. But remarkably, within a month, he chose to resume lessons, and at a normal frequency, no less.
Even in the later years, when his health did not permit for lessons to be held as frequently, he never completely gave them up. Sometimes, when he got tired, he would ask to rest for 30 minutes before resuming the lesson.
There was a determination and a fighting spirit in him that I saw, not just in the learning of Chinese, but in other areas of his life - such as in his refusal to allow his security officers to aid him in walking.
But above all, I remember Mr Lee most fondly for the kindness he never failed to show to the people around him.
Twice a year, he would host dinners for his Chinese teachers, security officers, doctors and nurses to show his gratitude. When his books were published, he would autograph a copy for each of his Chinese teachers.
Often, he would also return from his overseas trips with gifts for us. When the Chinese leader Hu Jintao gave him some pu'er tea, he gave it all to us - after asking us to explain the significance of the tea - along with a teapot, which was a gift from another official.
And so, even though for many Singaporeans the thought of Mr Lee will continue to bring to mind images of a forbidding lion, for those who had the privilege of interacting with him at close quarters, he was a gentle and compassionate lion.
Journey with a master teacher
Alan Chan Heng Loon, 62, is the chief executive of Singapore Press Holdings. He worked in the Government for 25 years, holding posts such as permanent secretary and principal private secretary to then Senior Minister Lee.
The Straits Times, 25 Mar 2015
IN 1994, I was called up for an interview with Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who was looking for a new principal private secretary.
He looked at my CV and said: "Chan Heng Loon, you don't qualify. That's the end of the interview."
I was shocked and said: "Mr Lee, may I know why I am not qualified?"
He said: "Your Chinese is no good. You only got a C6 for your Chinese. Therefore, you are not good enough to be my principal private secretary."
I told him that I had always been very proud of my command of the Chinese language and that this O-Level result had been a huge disappointment. I had, after all, been among the 10 per cent who passed the preliminary exam at Raffles Institution.
He said: "Ten per cent?"
I said: "Ya, O-Levels, I don't know what happened."
Then he started quizzing me on what I read. He was surprised that I had started reading Nanyang Siang Pau at the age of seven and that I read every copy of the Yazhou Zhoukan, Asia Weekly.
After about 30 minutes, he said: "Okay, you go and take the written exam." And I was selected.
Just one week after I became his PPS, I followed him to Taiwan where he met its leaders.
The discussion lasted from 10am to 10pm. I was taking notes. Mr Lee told me to give him the minutes the following morning - verbatim. I stayed up that night to write the minutes, and when he read them the next morning, he said: "Alan, you passed."
In 1994, Mr Lee tasked me to help him monitor the progress of the Suzhou Industrial Park project.
I also had to carry his messages to Chinese officials and convey their responses back to him. The Chinese used to laugh and call me "yu chai da ren" (the royal messenger).
During my stint as Mr Lee's PPS, the liberalisation of the financial and banking sector was also in the works. Almost every other evening, he would meet 10 bankers and quiz them on a specific topic. If he liked a banker's proposal, he would tell the man: "Write me a paper on this. Elaborate on the points."
I had to send the paper to the other nine bankers for comments. So for every paper that came in, there would be nine others as well. I had to sift through this information and organise it for myself - and sometimes I found myself lost in it. But he could read all 10 papers, distil the ideas and tell me which ones were worth pursuing.
He wanted the maximum possible opinions on a particular subject.
I was by Mr Lee's side when he met Fang Chuang Pi, the former underground leader of the Malayan Communist Party in Singapore, better known as "The Plen". The meeting took place in 1995 in Diaoyutai, China. Mr Fang had a bag with him that, out of courtesy, we didn't search. There could have been anything inside that bag, though I believe it was probably just a tape recorder. Still, throughout the conversation, while I was taking minutes, I was actually watching that bag very, very closely. The two men knew and respected each other. But there was something Mr Fang asked for that Mr Lee could not grant. So it's a bit of a regret.
Mr Lee kept his ears close to the ground. At about 11 or 12 o'clock on a Saturday, he would say: "I'd like to visit a three-room flat in XYZ precinct at 4 o'clock."
<span style="fo