Why Lee Hsien Yang's Singapore isn't ours

It must be odd to hear someone badmouth Singapore when all of us can't wait to land at Changi Airport and start our Diwali-to-Christmas shopping. But when the someone badmouthing is Lee Hsien Yang, younger son of Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew, you hold on to your buffet ticket at Raffles Singapore just a wee bit tighter. Lee is no classic offspring of famous, 'beloved' leaders - like Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Stalin who defected to the US - who bitches his family out and settles abroad, in his case, seeking political asylum in London in 2022 and being granted it this year. He was a former brigadier-general, and former CEO of state telecom conglomerate Singtel, not a founding father's Cambridge-educated socialist son.

'What's sad is Singapore puts out this facade which is very shiny and it says we are very good with rule of law, we have developed society. And yet at the core, we retain these repressive measures. And many of them did come from the time my father was prime minister and from the time it was a British colony,' he said in an interview this week. That's serious discontent and criticism. So how come our Singapore and Lee's Singapore don't, um, match? Answer: our idea of a free society in non-Western countries may be different from the same idea in a Western country. Something that Lee Hsien Yang doesn't get.