All in the Familee. A first hand glimpse of dynastic politics in Singapore.

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Lee's son to become Singapore PM in August
By John Burton in Singapore
Financial Times
Published: July 18 2004 20:52 | Last Updated: July 18 2004 20:52

Lee Hsien Loong, the son of modern Singapore's founding father, is set to become
the city-state's new prime minister next month in only the second handover of
power since independence in 1965.

With the long-ruling People's Action party firmly in control, Mr Lee, 52, could
govern for about 15 years since the nation's leaders have normally retired in
their mid-60s.

Mr Lee seems likely to adopt a more authoritarian stance than his predecessor,
Goh Chok Tong, who presided over a period of relative liberalism after becoming
prime minister in 1990, including a more open approach to entertainment venues
and the partial relaxation of the ban on chewing gum.

Mr Lee's policies "will be somewhere in between those of his father and Mr Goh",
said a political analyst.

However, critics have warned that the city-state needs to loosen social controls
if it wants to become a regional hub for services in response to increased
manufacturing competition from low-cost countries such as China and India.

Mr Lee has long been groomed to take the top post, which critics say has been
turned into a dynasty since his father, Lee Kuan Yew, led Singapore between 1959
and 1990.

The elder Mr Lee remains a powerful political force by holding the advisory post
of senior minister.

The government insists Mr Lee's assumption of power reflects his "exceptional"
qualifications.

Educated at Cambridge and Harvard universities with first-class degrees in
mathematics and public administration, Mr Lee became an army brigadier-general
at the age of 32 and has since held all of the nation's top economic posts.

The appointment of Mr Lee is likely to lead to a significant cabinet reshuffle
that will bring in a new generation of officials, although Mr Goh said on Sunday
he might remain in the cabinet.

It is unclear whether Mr Lee will retain his posts of finance minister and
central bank governor.

Mr Lee and his father also head the Government of Singapore Investment Corp,
which manages more than $100bn of the nation's foreign reserves.

His wife, Ho Ching, is executive director of Temasek Holdings, the powerful
state investment group that owns most of Singapore's leading companies,
including Singapore Telecommunications, where his brother is chief executive.

Unlike the popular Mr Goh, Mr Lee is seen as aloof by the public. "I know that
some Singaporeans are uncomfortable with [his] leadership style. [His] public
persona is that of a no-nonsense, uncompromising and tough minister," Mr Goh
said in announcing his successor a year ago.

Mr Lee warned in January that he was prepared to "rebut or even demolish
[political critics]", otherwise the government would "lose its moral authority".

The new prime minister has said his top priorities include attracting foreign
direct investment and reversing the city-state's plummeting birth rate.

Mr Lee is also expected to pursue bilateral free-trade pacts with a number of
countries.

Mr Lee takes power as the economy is expected to record its best performance in
four years. But unemployment remains stubbornly high by local standards at 4.5
per cent.

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Control the press and you control the minds of the masses.

http://archives.cjr.org/year/95/6/singapore.asp

November/December 1995 | Contents
singapore's grip

by Charles P. Wallace
Wallace served until recently as the Southeast Asia correspondent for the Los
Angeles Times. In May, he was told by the Singapore government that his work
permit would not be renewed beyond February because several of his articles
about Singapore "were not balanced or accurate."
As regular readers of William Safire's New York Times column well know, the
commentator frequently turns his pen on Singapore's authoritarian government.
His July 10 column, for example, was headed "Honoring Repression," and said
Singapore's leaders "represent old-fashioned European totalitarianism."

In an unusual twist to the tale, Safire's fans outside the United States never
got to see the column because it was not published in Safire's usual op-ed spot
in the International Herald Tribune, the Paris-based newspaper owned jointly by
The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company.

The IHT has stopped printing articles critical of Singapore since it was hit
with a libel suit by the country's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, along with
Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and Lee's son, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsein
Loong, over a fleeting reference in an editorial-page piece to "dynastic
politics" in Singapore. In August, a Singapore judge awarded them $678,000 in
damages plus their legal fees.

Many countries have tried to control how they are portrayed in the media, and
some, especially developing countries, have succeeded partially by muzzling
their domestic press. But none has succeeded so well with the outside world's
media as Singapore, a tiny island nation of only 3 million people situated at
the tail end of the Malaysian peninsula. Through court cases, libel suits,
restrictions on circulation, and limitations on reporters, the Singapore
government has been able to intimidate some of the world's largest media
organizations, which would never accept such restrictions on their home turf.

What alarmed many press observers in the West about the IHT case was that the
newspaper, which has a worldwide circulation of 190,000 and prints 17,000 a day
in Singapore, offered no defense against the libel charges and abjectly
apologized. "I think it is scandalous" says Stephen Barnett, a law professor at
the University of California at Berkeley. "I think the IHT should instead get
out of Singapore. They need to consider their readers worldwide who get a
compromised form of journalism."

A statement issued by the co-chairmen of the IHT, Katharine Graham of the Post
and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger of the Times, said their newspapers had defended the
principle of a free press on numerous occasions and that it is "ludicrous" to
think they would set a different standard for a newspaper they own jointly. "But
we publish in countries that have different laws and different standards and, on
occasion, we face the kind of problems presented in Singapore," the statement
continues. "We will work to resolve these problems in the context of free and
responsible journalism."

The IHT libel case was the second attack on the paper by Singapore this year. In
January, a Singapore judge held the paper's publisher and Asia editor in
contempt of court for publishing an op-ed piece by Christopher Lingle, an
American academic then working at the National University of Singapore. Lingle
had written that some Asian regimes, which he didn't name, rely "upon a
compliant judiciary to bankrupt opposition politicians." The newspaper still
faces a libel suit over this case, as well.

Readers in the West may wonder what all the fuss is about. Apart from the
occasional diatribe by Safire, Singapore receives generally high marks in the
Western media for its level of economic development and low corruption. But the
government takes an entirely different perspective; in fact, Prime Minister Goh
listed attacks by hostile Western media as the second gravest threat facing the
nation in his annual National Day rally speech in August. The Western media are
considered important and potentially destabilizing in a country with a high
level of literacy in English, one where, by comparison, the local press is
openly pro-government .

Pressure on foreign publishers stepped up in 1986 when Singapore adopted a
strict newspaper publishing law that gave the government the right not only to
ban certain publications, such as Playboy, but to restrict the circulation of
foreign-owned newspapers as economic punishment for unfavorable coverage.

Soon after the law was adopted Time magazine and The Asian Wall Street Journal
had their circulations cut by 90 percent in Singapore -- the Journal's second
most important market in Asia, Time's fifth -- for refusing to publish
long-winded letters from the government replying to critical articles. Soon the
government slashed the circulation of another Dow Jones publication, the Far
Eastern Economic Review, from 9,000 to 500 copies a week -- a cut that amounted
to nearly a fifth of its total circulation -- for not publishing a reply to
coverage of the arrest of Catholic activists. When the Review announced that it
was pulling out of Singapore as a result, the government printed a pirate
edition of the magazine.

Dow Jones & Company finally reached a settlement with Singapore last year, and
the circulations of both publications have been allowed to rise, although limits
are still set by the government -- currently 7,000 copies for The Asian Wall
Street Journal. "We don't consider ourselves back to normal," says Urban C.
Lehner, the editor of the Hong Kong-based daily. "We'd prefer the market to set
the circulation."

Far Eastern Economic Review, meanwhile, has recently accepted a condition in
which its Kuala Lumpur correspondent visits once
a month.

"There are no two ways about it, the news media have been intimidated through
their pocketbook," says Francis T. Seow, a former solicitor general of Singapore
now living in Boston. "They are now more wary about the sensitivities of the
Singapore government."