ABSTRACT
Besides his discourse on fraternal business networks, Lee Kuan Yew has also elaborated a thesis on how cultural differences between societies are reflected in their capitalist performance. Lee has long formulated a theory of “hard” versus “soft” societies by reworking older colonialist themes that deployed terms such as Asiatic, Oriental, and Mohammedan as evaluative racial categories in relation to modern society. The British and other Europeans had defined Malays as “indolent” and “lazy” while celebrating the “softness” of their culture in contrast to the “hardworking,” “acquisitive,” and “brutish” Chinese immigrants (Alatas 1977).16 In the 1960s and 1970s, as prime minister, Lee began a campaign to build a “rugged society” in Singapore, both to forestall hostile forces in the surrounding Malay world and inculcate behavior and norms that would make Singapore a modern capitalist society. This instance of what Don Nonini calls “reflex modernity,” or the techniques whereby a postcolonial state reworks old colonialist themes to its own benefit, is also conspicuous for its gendered imagery of hard virility versus soft femininty (see Heng and Devan 1995; Ong 1995). Lee’s rugged society model contrasted a disciplined, achieve-ment-oriented work ethic compared to the “soft” society of the Malays. Lee remade the colonial image of ethnic Chinese into a positive one based on Confucian values of hard work and frugality that were on a par with Western concepts of individual striving and meritocracy (“rugged individualism”). Such a postcolonial reconstruction arose in part from a subaltern opposition to colonial racism. By the 1970s there was an element of righteous vindication when Lee visited Cambridge University, his alma mater, and chided the British for their decline in productivity and civility. Indeed, the Singapore vision of modernity soon dropped the Western value of individualism and focused more explicitly on the assumed links between Confucian values and the rise of Asian industrialization.
