LION CITY

A comprehensive look at the sleek city-state that strongman Lee Kuan Yew forged into a model society of authority and order.

In his first book, Vasagar, former Singapore and Malaysia correspondent for the Financial Times, fashions an engaging narrative that is both historical and personal; his father lived in Singapore, and the author often visited as a child. Vasagar notes that in order to understand the “forest of glass and steel” that Singapore has become in recent decades, one must grasp both its colonial and breakaway history. Today, he writes, “Singapore is not just a centre of modern Asia…but something bigger—an Asian city state around which the modern world, seeking illumination, revolves.” Established as a British settlement in 1819 by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, it is one of the few places in the world where colonial statues still stand and its British founding is still celebrated. The author delineates the city’s remarkable geography and history, including its occupation by the Japanese in 1942 (it was returned to Britain at the end of World War II). That tumult shaped future leader Lee’s worldview. He was repulsed by the barbarism of the Japanese occupier,” writes Vasagar, “but quietly admired the rarity of crime under Japanese rule.” The author chronicles the communist insurgency against the British in the 1950s and the merger with Malaya, which ended in 1965 when Singapore became a sovereign island nation with Lee at the helm. Over the next decades, Lee pursued “a mix of coercion and cajoling” for both business and society, with an emphasis on meritocracy and fear of communism, and Vasagar insightfully examines the recent and current “ruling elite,” demonstrating their lack of tolerance for crime and squelching of free speech. Among the other “Asian tigers”—South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—Singapore is held up as a great economic success but often at the cost of personal liberty.

An accessible, ground-up journalistic study well suited to those who know little about this enigmatic republic.