Singapore’s first family reached something of a truce on Friday, promising that if they couldn’t stop fighting over the future of Lee Kuan Yew’s Oxley Road home, they could at least agree to keep the family feud offline and behind closed doors.
“My sense is that the Lee siblings may realize that the rather public private feud is heading nowhere, and that generating more acrimonious exchanges on social media would hurt rather than help their cause, with their father’s legacy becoming collateral damage,” Tan Ern Ser, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, told The New Paper.
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And thus ended what was possibly Singapore’s most-exciting political fight in years. The city-state prides itself on presenting an orderly and business-like face to the world. The wealthy city-state has historically been an oasis of stability in an often turbulent part of the world, the kind of place where the sidewalks are clean (or, you know, are actually sidewalks), the MRT runs on time (and actually exists), and major international corporations feel safe setting up shop.
So imagine how shocking a public dispute between Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his two younger siblings—Lee Hsiang Yang and Lee Wei Ling—would be for the region. The Facebook fight was reported by media outlets worldwide, with some online calling the whole thing a MediaCorp remake of House of Cards.
Let’s get the specifics out of the way. Lee Kuan Yew is Singapore’s founding father, a figure who is revered for raising the Lion City “from the third world to the first” in one generation. But before he died, the elder Lee told his children that he wanted his modest bungalow on Oxley Road demolished. The elder Lee had no love for the kinds of cults of personality common elsewhere in Southeast Asia. So it was better to tear the whole thing down, he concluded.
But after LKY’s death, his eldest son PM Lee announced plans to turn his father’s home into a site of national importance. That sent into motion a three-week-long Facebook fight that had PM Lee’s younger siblings alleging some pretty serious claims of abuse of power and nepotism at the prime minister and his family. It was the kind of stuff you rarely see in print in Singapore, or even abroad. The city-state has sued the New York Times for even implying what Hsiang Yang and his sister Wei Ling were openly saying on Facebook and to the press.
PM Lee fired back with a video of his own. Then the whole thing eventually made it before Singapore’s parliament where Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong recently accused the prime minister’s siblings of trying to drag down their brother, and possibly Singapore’s reputation with him.
“From what Lee Hsien Yang and his wife are freely telling many others, it is clear that their goal is to bring Lee Hsien Loong down as PM, regardless of the huge collateral damage suffered by the government and Singaporeans,” Goh said at parliament.
Now the family has promised to lower their sabers and take the fight offline for a while. But does that mean Singaporeans are going to stop talking about the Oxley Road dispute? Probably not. Why? Because it’s about so much more than a house.
This dispute was really about the role the Lee family continue to play in Singaporean politics. And it’s a sign that in a nation where one family has played such an important role, personal disputes like this can take on the air of national importance pretty quickly.
PM Lee’s siblings accused him of harboring political ambitions for his son Li Hongyi—an allegation the prime minister steadfastly denies. (Even Li Hongyi himself says the whole idea is untrue). They accused his wife Ho Ching of playing an outsized role in the governance of the city-state. And the siblings said that PM Lee only wants to preserve LKY’s home as visible reminder of the Lee family’s importance in the Singapore story.
But why does this matter so much? Because the allegations of nepotism leveled by the younger Lee siblings cut to the core of the city-state’s founding ideals as a meritocracy. Your track record, not your family name, is supposed to matter in Singapore. So when Hsiang Yang and Wei Ling claimed that PM Lee was trying to set up a political dynasty, the allegation threatened to undermine a core tenant of the Singaporean system.
LKY was a proponent of what Singaporeans called “compassionate meritocracy.” Here’s LKY talking to the New York Times in 2007:
We knew that if we were just like our neighbors, we would die. Because we’ve got nothing to offer against what they have to offer. So we had to produce something which is different and better than what they have. It’s incorrupt. It’s efficient. It’s meritocratic. It works.
The system works regardless of your race, language or religion because otherwise we’d have divisions. We are pragmatists. We don’t stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let’s try it and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology.
So the first family may hold numerous critical positions in Singapore, but they are also incredibly accomplished with the kinds of CVs that would make any job recruiter salivate. Why shouldn’t they hold these positions? And LKY argued that his son succeeded him as prime minister not because he was a Lee, but because he was the best candidate for the role.
Here’s LKY in his 2005 book The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew:
“We run a meritocracy. If the Lee family sets an example of nepotism, that system collapses. If I were not the prime minister, he [Lee Hsien Loong] could have become prime minister several years earlier.”
But the critics of the current administration and the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) tell a different story. They argue that family does matter in Singapore. And so does race. The country is coming to terms with its “Chinese privilege“—a system where the ethnic Chinese majority set the standard and therefore the terms of success. This privilege is real. How do I know? Because I benefitted from it.
Let me get this out of the way first: I am a diehard LKY fangirl. And why shouldn’t I be? I have so much to thank him and the PAP for. I moved to Singapore from my family’s home in Indonesia to attend high school thanks to a scholarship program that gave me free meals, free housing, and a free education.
This education helped me get into Harvard University, where I am still a student. And the Harvard-MIT connection put me in touch with the créme de la créme of Singaporean society: President’s scholars and even some of PM Lee’s children. Singapore likes to put its smartest people in government and a lot of the city-state’s brightest go to Ivy League schools in the United States. So there’s a good chance that a lot of my classmates might become the next generation of leaders in Singapore.
But being a part of this system also taught me something about privilege. Most of my fellow Indonesian scholarship awardees looked suspiciously like me, meaning they were ethnically Chinese, but from a country where we represent only a tiny percentage of the population. And my classmates were the cream of the crop, the upper echelon of a very small place. They were friends, lovers, and eventually spouses. Their kids would be equally privileged, and thus the cycle continues. Meritocracy is great and all, but what happens when the system feeds a cycle of greatness that keeps the same names at the top of the list?
It’s a conversation I am not entirely comfortable having. I totally recognize how much I owe the government of Singapore and the PAP. I have nothing but respect for the Lee family and the city-state itself. But it’s still an important conversation to have, right? And if it takes a Facebook fight over LKY’s old home to bring it to the surface, then so be it.
During the open debate at parliament, Nominated Parliament Member Kuik Shiao-Yin urged Singaporeans to welcome the whole issue as the start of a larger conversation over the city-state’s future.
“This Oxley Road saga is painful but there are many thoughtful commentators who don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing,” she said. “If anything, a deeper and more open conversation about how political power works in Singapore may be just what our system needs to truly grow up as a post-Lee Kuan Yew democracy.”
So lets get talking.
Alice is a writer-anthropologist currently living in Boston. Her passion is over-analyzing her personal experiences and turning them into opinion writing.
