08:16
Tieng Anh Vui
IN FRONT of an audience including an array of serving and retired world leaders, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, delivered a eulogy on March 29th at the funeral of his father, Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister from 1959 to 1990. The outpouring of praise and grief told the younger Mr Lee yet again what big shoes he is filling. Cabinet meetings from 2004 to 2011 would have given a similar reminder. His father sat as “minister mentor”, and his immediate predecessor, Goh Chok Tong, as “senior minister”. Lee Kuan Yew was not there for fun. His son recalled his promise—or, to his successors’ ears, threat—to intervene if he felt his legacy was in danger: “Even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up.”
Other national leaders have similarly treated their retirements as partial or even provisional. China’s Deng Xiaoping is perhaps the most striking example. What is unusual about Singapore is that it was formalised. Lee Hsien Loong said other countries’ prime ministers had told him they could not imagine governing with two predecessors in the cabinet. But, he said, it worked—as indeed it seemed to. And that may offer lessons for other Asian countries where elder statesmen have been awkward to handle.
One is that, since political power and influence often accrue to individuals rather than their office, it may be better to try to institutionalise elder statesmanship, giving former leaders an official role, rather than leaving them to snipe from the outside. In power, leaders build up networks of loyalists that do not disappear the moment they stand down. And in many Asian countries, age itself commands respect—among the general population as well as among politicians—for the wisdom it allegedly brings. It can be very hard for serving leaders to flout the wishes of their elders. Better to formalise and circumscribe their role.
In his eulogy, Lee Hsien Loong made clear that his father’s continued presence in the cabinet was not friction-free. Ministers would sometimes urge Lee Kuan Yew to “soften” the tone of his speeches, to make them “less unyielding to human frailties”. Yet the arrangement avoided the mismatch between power and office that has proved problematic in China. On paper, the most powerful leader in the history of the Chinese Communist Party was neither Mao Zedong nor Deng, but Hua Guofeng, Mao’s immediate successor. He was, for a while, chairman of the party, prime minister and, as chairman of the party’s military commission, in effect commander-in-chief of the army. No other Chinese leader has combined all these roles. Yet in retrospect Hua, who died in 2008, was a transitional figure between two far more powerful leaders, Mao and Deng.
Although he was long China’s most important political leader, Deng himself never ran either the party or the government. In 1989, as students were massed in Tiananmen Square, Zhao Ziyang, the party chairman, told the visiting Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the party had decided Deng was still the arbiter on most important questions. China’s people and the outside world had not been informed of this. But that Deng held ultimate sway had been assumed anyway. Resigning from his final official leadership post in 1990 did not change anything. When Zhao was sacked because of the protests, Jiang Zemin, who succeeded him, had to struggle against the perception that he was an ornamental “flowerpot” in a party whose real decision-makers were Deng and other octogenarian “immortals”. Yet after he was succeeded by Hu Jintao, Mr Jiang too came to be seen as a force behind the scenes. In consolidating his own power, partly through a concerted drive against corruption, Xi Jinping, China’s current leader, has taken aim at loyalists of both his predecessors.
It is not just in China that former leaders can prove to be a nuisance to their successors. In Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister from 1981 to 2003, has made trouble for both his two successors, despite having played a big part in picking them. He turned against Abdullah Badawi after a poor electoral showing in 2008 and against the incumbent, Najib Razak, after an even worse one in 2013. Commanding the respect and loyalty of many on the right wing of their party, the United Malays National Organisation, Dr Mahathir is still a serious threat to Mr Najib.
In neighbouring Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, the much-revered 87-year-old king, also has some of the qualities of an elder statesman, being seen as above the day-to-day political fray yet an important source of advice and legitimacy. For that reason the prospect of his death seizes the Thai elite with something approaching panic. Having exploited the king so that he plays a bigger and more decisive role than the mainly symbolic one envisaged when absolute monarchy ended in 1932, Thailand’s rulers naturally fear instability when he dies.
Going quietly
On his death Lee Kuan Yew was widely (and misleadingly) described as almost the sole architect of Singapore’s success. Yet he had ensured that his own going caused no disruption. Nor did his long withdrawal from political leadership. And that, for his generation, was one of his most remarkable contributions: quitting office voluntarily in the first place.
In Timor-Leste, Xanana Gusmão has just copied him, standing down as prime minister while staying in the cabinet. But it was not common among 1960s independence leaders or Asian autocrats. In China it took death to end Mao’s long and often violent reign, in 1976. Of the five leaders of the founding members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations in 1967, all but Lee Kuan Yew departed amid chaos on the streets. Nowadays orderly leadership transitions are more common, even in China. Singapore has managed two, thanks partly to Lee Kuan Yew’s role in picking and grooming his successors. As for the succession to the next generation, that, oddly for such a far-sighted leader, is a problem he has left for his son to solve.
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