about lee kuan yew

Huntington wrote:

Until the late 1970s relations between staunchly anticommunist Singapore and the People's Republic were frosty, and Lee Kuan Yew and other Singapore leaders were contemptuous of China's backwardness. As Chinese economic development took off in the 1980s, however, Singapore began to reorient itself toward the mainland in classic bandwagoning fashion. By 1992 Singapore had invested $1.9 billion in China and the following year plans were announced to build an industrial township, "Singapore II", outside Shanghai, that would involve billions of dollars of investment. Lee became an enthusiastic booster of China's economic prospects and an admirer of its power. "China," he said in 1993, "is where the action is." Singaporean foreign investment, which had been heavily concentrated in Malaysia and Indonesia, shifted to China. Half of the overseas projects helped by the Singaporean government in 1993 were in China. On his first visit to Beijing in the 1970s, Lee Kuan Yew reportedly insisted on speaking to Chinese leaders in English rather than in Mandarin. It is unlikely he did so two decades later