By John Pomfret


CENSORS are deleting and rewriting parts of the second volume of memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, delaying the book's publication in China, publishing sources in China and Singapore said.

Lee's book, The Singapore Story" was published in Singapore last September and in Taiwan and Hong Kong in October.

China is in the midst of a crackdown on independent views. Several newspapers have been closed, and newspaper editors have been warned not to publish controversial stories before a major Communist Party congress scheduled to be held a year from now.

But the censoring of Lee's memoirs has struck some Chinese academics as odd.

Lee has been a friend of China's for 20 years, and the Singapore that he helped forge was a model for many Chinese Communists. But Lee's tendency for straight talk has apparently riled someone in Beijing.

Zeng Huijie, an editor with the Chinese Foreign Language Press, said her firm was rewriting parts of the book before publishing it.

"The mainland version will be very different from the Taiwan version," she said. "Some of his political opinions may not be accepted here by the authorities, so they are changed in many places."

Asked if Lee made the changes himself, Zeng replied: "No, we did it."

Lee ruled Singapore for 30 years until stepping down in 1990. In his second volume, covering the last decades of his career as an Asian leader, Lee writes at some length about China. For the most part he commends Beijing, but at one point he argues that communism hurt China. While he praises former leader Deng Xiaoping and current Communist Party boss Jiang Zemin, he is critical of top party official Li Peng.

Lee is also critical of the way China handled a Singaporean government- backed investment in the Chinese city of Suzhou. After Singapore invested in an industrial park, the local government immediately decided to build one almost next door.

An editor at the Lianhe Zaobao publishing house, which published Lee's book in Singapore, said there was no time frame for the publication of the second volume in China.

"They needed to vet the book carefully this time," he said. The first volume was published in China a month after the September 1998 Singapore publication date.

China was a slightly more relaxed place then, said a Chinese academic.

At that time, only sections pertaining to Lee's work to suppress communism in the 1950s and 1960s were deleted, the Singapore editor said. He said Lee or a representative would look over the rewritten manuscript before it was published in China.

"They have to delete things to suit their country," the editor said.