Remembering Mr Lee Kuan Yew

- With what you have learn about golden age of Tang Dynasty, reflect on the things you have learnt about LKY and how Singapore can be seen to be at its own version of the “Golden Age”.

This week, I have learnt about the golden age of China during the Tang Dynasty. During the period, Tang dynasty was rich in arts and culture such as poetry, music, opera and painting. Their famous painting, "山水画”, also known as landscape painting, are very well known, even until today. Famous poetry from the Tang Dynasty like Li Bai (李白), Bai Juyi (白居易) and Du Fu (杜甫) are known by many people up till today too. That was China's golden era, what about Singapore?

Our founding father of Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew had unfortunately passed away on 23 March 2015. Upon receiving this news, the whole nations were down. I believe most of us are saddened by this sudden news. But why are we? Most of the Singaporeans would know of Mr Lee's contribution to Singapore, even us, the younger generation who did not experience the transforming of Singapore from 1965 up till now. However, we had learnt and heard of Mr Lee in primary school and even more when he passed away.

With Mr Lee's contribution, Singapore is currently on its golden age. As the first prime minister of Singapore, he reinforced the importance of multiracial, incorruptibility, meritocracy and self-resilience. With these 4 main principles, Mr Lee transformed Singapore from a Third World country to a First World country. When many people then thought he was going to fail to develop Singapore, Mr Lee succeeded.

Meritocracy is a value system by which advancement in society is based on an individual’s ability, performance and achievement, not by wealth, status or ill-gotten means. With this system, Singapore government had become effective as people governing Singapore has the true ability unlike the past where positions were only given to their kin. Therefore, an effective government brought us to where we are now.

After British had handed over in 1959, Mr Lee, as the first prime minister of Singapore, had worked hard to build a clean and incorrupt Singapore, thus CPIB is established. It enforced anti-corruption laws, investigated cases thoroughly, and brought offenders to justice. With this, CPIB brought reputation and people did not dare to commit crime and thus Singapore succeeded in becoming a clean and incorrupt city, therefore, Singapore's system can be effective without corruption and could prosper.

Mr Lee also fought for a multiracial country as Singapore consists of many different races. Hence it is important for Singapore to be racially harmonious and work together as one. Because of this Singapore became self-independent after the failing of merging with Malaysia. With this there would be no riots like the past and therefore Singapore is now a peaceful and harmonious country.

A self-reliance country means one of a "community helping one another and progressing together" and not "it's every man for himself". Mr Lee encourages people to reply on their own efforts instead of handouts. Because of this key factor, Singapore is capable of solving the problems we faced in the past 50 years.

Besides that Mr Lee also stressed a lot on the importance of education and made education compulsory. With that, he established the bilingual system and encouraged people to stop communicating using dialects. 4 schools were then chosen for being the SAP schools back then in the 60s and River Valley High School is one of the schools. Without Mr Lee, I would not be here, studying in RV and having such a good education system, comparing to other countries. Mr Lee also established good technologies, like NEWater and desalination, and now, we do not need to depend much on Malaysia for water resource, which was once a problem. With self-reliance, Mr Lee solved the problem of having a lack of resource for water.

We all have our own versions of the Golden Age for Singapore, whereas for me, I think it is when there is meritocracy and each and every one of us have equal right and we all live in harmony regardless of race and religion where happiness, prosperity and progress for the nation are achieved.