Lee Hsien Loong - Reinventing the heir 

IN Singapore, where newspapers are self-avowedly supportive of the government, the media often puts the city-state's leaders on a pedestal. But in January, when authorities decided to relax their requirements on schoolchildren learning Mandarin, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put himself forward as a different sort of model--one of vulnerability.

In a speech prominently reported in local newspapers, Lee, the eldest son of Singapore's founding father, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, admitted he'd almost failed Chinese in secondary school, and that his teachers had diplomatically told him to pursue a different subject. "I think Lee admitting he'd had almost failed made an impression and helped them with that policy," says one local academic. "A lot of people really went, 'Wah! Him too!'"

Lee, known popularly as "BG Lee" because he's a brigadier-general in Singapore's armed forces, has always commanded attention and interest. Long considered the country's prime minister-inwaiting, he's been publicly in the centre of everything from military preparedness to financial liberalization. But this was different. It was one of several instances in recent months when Lee has let down his personal guard and made strides to show a softer side.

The Asian crisis has shown the importance of limiting political hiccups by clearly signalling a political transition before it happens. And in recent months, Singapore has begun to lay out the groundwork for its next shift, which is widely expected to see Lee, 47, promoted to prime minister, surrounded by a team of 40-something politicians now taking greater roles in the government. In December, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said that his biggest task between now and the next election, due by 2002, is to put a team in place to fill the next government. And Lee, in an interview, says--carefully--that he's ready: "I think if the MPs have confidence and the electorate supports it, I will give it a good try."

The promotion probably isn't imminent. Goh has said he intends to contest the next election. Lee himself talks of how well the "team"--Goh as prime minister, with help from himself and Lee Kuan Yew--is working. But he's clearly looking readier than he ever has. He has also talked about the sensitive matter of his health, a question since 1992 when he was diagnosed with lymphoma--cancer of the lymph nodes--and underwent chemotherapy. (He says his doctors don't expect the cancer to recur.)

Who is the man that Singapore appears ready to elevate? Lee has been in the public spotlight for so long--son of the country's founding father, a future leader, a man placed in key positions of prominence--that you'd expect Singapore observers to have a solid handle on his personality. He's grown up in Singapore's most prominent family, been widowed and remarried--his first wife died in 1982--and through it maintained a privacy that has kept Singaporeans interested, but at a distance. Abroad, he's viewed with some suspicion. Officials in Malaysia and Indonesia recall the difficult relationships they have long had with his father.

One thing is clear: The younger Lee is likely to be a skilled economic manager. In the past two years, he's led a widely hailed liberalization of Singapore's financial industry that, more than any other policy, bears his personal stamp and gives indications of his approach, his intellectual ability and his political muscle to shepherd through serious changes.

For that campaign, he brought in private-sector officials, Singaporean and foreign, and sought out a range of opinions. Then he took things further. "We'd send up a set of recommendations, and they'd come back from his office with all sorts of questions about why we didn't ask for this or ask for that," recalls one executive who participated in the committee. At the same time, he's willing to take down the walls protecting local banks and companies. "I think the multinationals see him as a very good friend of international business," says Zulkifli Baharudin, Singapore-based vice-president of American logistics firm Circle. "Some small, local firms may find him to be a very strict parent."

His reputation is coloured by his father's authoritarianism and his own stern, sometimes dismissive parliamentary speeches. But he's shown a pragmatic side when it comes to economic reform. In the early 1990s, when Lee headed the influential Ministry of Trade and Industry, Singapore spooked the financial community by hauling in several officials and financial professionals after a key economic statistic was published before its release. Yet, when Lee took over the Monetary Authority of Singapore in 1998, he surprised many by hiring an economist involved in the ministry case, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, to head the authority's bank-supervision bureau. "If you want an indication of the man, it's the fact that Tharman is where he is," says one top finance-industry identity. "There's a divide between politics and the practical application of it."

Lee has taken another tack by smoothing out some of the rough edges on a personality that in his younger days struck many as prickly. "In the body language, it's very obvious that he comes across warmer, more sincere, more willing to listen to people," says Chia Shi Teck, a local businessman who has run, unsuccessfully, in parliamentary elections.

In Singapore, the younger Lee still clearly hasn't garnered the affection commanded by the country's two prime ministers--his father and Goh. Speak to Singaporeans about the younger Lee, and you'll get one of two reactions. There's the respect for successful economic management: One young monetary-authority employee speaks admiringly about his intellect and charisma. A former civil servant recalls an irreverent and funny man who laughs a lot and on occasion wears mismatched socks. But there's also the lingering concern that his leadership may be tougher and less responsive than Goh's.

Up to now, Lee's political career has been meteoric, punctuated with some remarkable adversity. He entered politics in 1984, at the age of 32, and just a year later was promoted to head the important Ministry of Trade and Industry. He was deputy prime minister at 38--officially second deputy at the time but clearly leader-in-waiting. In the early 1990s, both his father and Goh spoke overtly and directly about how he would one day take over.

In 1992, news broke that Lee had been diagnosed with lymphoma. Lee underwent chemotherapy but he didn't drop from public view. Instead, he gave press conferences with doctors and consented to be photographed during treatment. On one occasion, when reporters visited him in the hospital, he lifted his hospital gown to show the electrodes applied to his torso for a test--to the consternation of his aides. One civil servant calls the openness about his illness "one of our greatest public-relations coups," because it helped forestall dire rumours about his condition.

Seven years later, is he kinder and gentler? Perhaps. He says the government can't legislate away social change: Young people are more Westernized, have greater access to information, and won't accept the social restrictions they once did. "We are not a museum," Lee says. "We are plugged in and switched on. So as the world changes, we also have to evolve." He says today's Singapore is "a Singapore which the new generation identifies with in a way they wouldn't if it were the same as it was in 1990," and tosses off the name of the Backstreet Boys, a mild pop band that his sons listen to.

But watch out if you're politically involved, because Lee, like most of his colleagues, sees no quarter for compromise. He defends the lawsuits which government leaders, including himself, have lodged against opposition politicians. "I think it generates the right type of debate that we want to encourage," is his explanation of the lawsuits. "We want politics to have a certain tone, a certain dignity, a certain integrity and uprightness."

Still, many figure that Singapore can't go back to the authoritarian style of Lee Kuan Yew. "Goh Chok Tong has allowed him to move away from his father," says Chua Beng Huat, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, who says Lee Hsien Loong's government will be more like Goh's regime than Lee Kuan Yew's.

Lee dodges questions of his relationship with his father, whom he still consistently refers to as "the senior minister." Still, the two are close. Lee's family dines with his parents weekly, and when the senior minister was learning to use a computer to write his recently released memoirs, he once telephoned his son to come help him retrieve a file he'd inadvertently lost. His son did.

But while Lee speaks widely about lessons he's learned from his father, he also acknowledges differences. "His formative experiences are very different from mine," he tells the REVIEW. Growing up in a more peaceful Singapore than his father did means "you spend more time worrying about how to make things better rather than thinking very soberly about what can go very disastrously wrong."

If he's to step up to the prime minister's job, Lee still has hurdles to overcome. The weight of his father's tumultuous career, and his own inexperience in diplomacy, leave many in Southeast Asia wary. In June, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad angrily responded to a Singapore newspaper editorial calling for "renewal" in the Malaysian political system: "Look at the team in Singapore. It hasn't changed very much, has it? Somebody has been PM longer than I have. And I don't have a son waiting to succeed me."

In the past two years, Lee has made a burst of visits to New York, London and other financial centres, but hasn't been to Malaysia or Indonesia. "He doesn't seem to want to play that role," says Shahrir Samad, the Johor Bahru division chief for Malaysia's United Malays National Organization. "He'd like to play the wider stage." Adds Razak Baginda, director of the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre, a Kuala Lumpur think-tank: "It's one of those 'on the one hand, on the other hand' types of things. Very articulate, no doubt extremely intelligent, but on the other hand very arrogant, very condescending."

If the time comes to succeed, he'll likely be helped by the fact that politics in Singapore is a fairly predictable affair, very much dominated by the ruling People's Action Party. "For the man in the streets, who is going to be the next prime minister?" businessman Chia asks. "It's going to be the PAP. Who is going to be head of the PAP? It's quite clear that Lee is going to be the man."