Q: "Good evening, Senior Minister Lee. I’m Zhou Yi from NTU. May I pose a question? Which will be the direction for Singapore, is it will be a localisation, Asianisation or globalisation? And how will Singapore treat relationship with China? Thanks."

Mr Lee: "You’ve not stated what your status is. What are you studying?"

Q: "My course is triple-E studying in NTU; -- Electric and Electronic Engineering. Thanks."

Mr Lee: "I think if you had listened a little bit carefully towards the end, the ERC report which I quoted, said that we have to become a cosmopolitan city which is linked up to China, to India, to the region and to the world beyond. In other words, if we confine ourselves only to Singapore -- localisation -- then we’ll go back to the fishing village from whence we sprang, and there are only 120 people who could live off Singapore, and I wonder if we can even support our 120 people because we have destroyed all the fishing grounds around us. So there is no choice but to move forward and there is no choice for the rest of the world too, because as you build on your discoveries -- scientific, technological, discovery of other countries, you find you can improve your standard of living, your quality of life by exchanging goods, products, services.

"Now, when that came to an end suddenly in Japanese-occupied Singapore, because their ships were being sunk by Allied submarines, Singapore just shrunk. There were no medicines, no textiles, we took tablecloth and turned them into trousers and shirts. No rice because rice was imported from Thailand and even the junks were being sunk and we started planting tapioca and sweet potatoes and lived a very unhealthy life. So it was a lesson to me in very practical terms of what it means by that simple concept -- division of labour.

"The world has achieved this standard of living and large parts of the world are enjoying a standard of life never before ever enjoyed in its history because advances made by certain groups in certain countries rapidly improved the

well-being of others. So somebody discovers a drug to solve, let’s say, Alzheimer or Aids. First to benefit will be the drug company to recover part of its R&D and to give profits so that other people will invest in other pharmaceutical companies to continue more research, but eventually, the whole world benefits. So whether it is us or any other country, there is no choice but to plug in into what is going on in the most developed places and hoist in the benefits.

"After the war, it was fashionable for many newly independent countries to try and become self-sufficient. There were several theories around at that time advanced by Latin American economies to say that if you allow these multinationals in, you’re being exploited by them, they exploit your natural resources, your labour and so on, and you are then impoverished. So, they started trying to own their own steel mills, their own petrochemicals et cetera, and they did not succeed. We tried that route and made our own toothpaste, mosquito sticks and a few other simple products and decided if we continued along that path, we would all die of starvation.

"So we decided, let’s do the practical thing. If this company is the world champion in this product, it’s going to beat other companies, well, let’s get them here, 100 per cent owned by them, they make use of us, we educated our people who became factory floor operators, then supervisors, then accountants, then managers, engineers and that’s how we got here. By the late 1970s, the others around the region decided that we were right and they started copying us. Now, China has decided, yes, it is right, so they are sucking in all the investments that’s coming to East Asia -- 70 per cent of all the investments coming to East Asia now is going into China -- and it’s the fastest way to learn to develop your own capabilities and your infrastructure and later on, the capital to buy more machines and invent new ones. So, whether it’s localisation, regionalisation or globalisation, you come back to, how many links can you forge with the rest of the world and make yourself relevant to the most number of people in this world, and if you do that, you’ll succeed."

Q: "Yes, thank you. And for the second question, how do you think the relationship between Singapore and China should be?"

Q: "Sorry, we would like to restrict each student to just one question only to give as many students as possible a chance to ask questions. Thank you very much."

Q: "Okay, thanks."

Q: "Alright, we thank the gentleman here for waiting. Please carry on."

Q: "Good evening, Senior Minister. I’m Dong Wei from NTU, third year student in Material Engineering. I got a question about NGO, non-government organisation. As we all know, being the catalyst of the change, NGO is playing very important role in the current world by contributing to the society, providing creative feedback to the government and facilitating the growth of private sectors. So my question is, how does government support NGO and what kind of perspectives you would like to share with us? Thank you very much."

Mr Lee: "I have always believed that NGOs were spontaneous organisations of very civic-minded people who get together, organise themselves for a cause which they passionately believe in. If you want to look to the government to go and give you money to develop some interests of your own, then I think we’re starting at the wrong end of the stick. No, it’s not the business of the government to go and form NGOs. They form themselves, some are useful, some are more useful than others, and so the world goes on."

Q: "Okay, thank you very much."

Q: "Yes, the gentleman over there, please?

Q: "Good evening, Minister. My name is Maslasios Hendrianto, I’m now in my final year, I’m an NTU student and I’m taking Mechanical Engineering course. My question is, I actually have several questions. Would you allow me to put forward all the questions, sir, from different topics?"

Q: "I’m sorry, could you let us know where you’re from again, which course and can you restate your question, please?"

Q: "Okay, let me introduce myself again. My name is Maslasios Hendrianto, I’m an NTU student and I’m now a final year student taking Mechanical Engineering. I actually have four questions from four different topics, would you allow me…"

Mr Lee: "Ask one at a time."

Q: "Alright, thank you, sir, thank you. First issue would be from energy. Now, at our current state, since Singapore is greatly dependent on fossil fuel, now, since now fossil fuel is still at around US$20 and US$30 per barrel, it is still affordable. Now, for the future, let’s say 50 or a century, when the fossil fuel, when oil prices gone up to probably US$70-80 per barrel, has the Singapore government come up with something in backup because I understand that the government of Singapore is not looking to nuclear energy to 40 or 50 years’ time?"

Mr Lee: "Can I ask whether you are a Singaporean?"

Q: "No."

Mr Lee: "What are you?"

Q: "I’m an Indonesian."

Mr Lee: "You’re an Indonesian?"

Q: "Yes."

Mr Lee: "Thank you. This is not a peculiarly Singapore problem, this is a world problem. Since the beginning of this century, the world has been increasingly dependent on oil as a source of energy. It’s driven the car, it’s driven the aeroplane, it’s driven power stations and it’s replacing coal as the energy source which started off the industrial revolution. Coal started off the industrial revolution in Britain some 200-plus years ago. It’s an exhaustible source which will one day end. So, it’s not just Singapore, the price goes up and down and there are many theories about this which, I think, we need not concern ourselves with but let us believe that sooner or later, this oil dries up. Does the world then, as we know it, come to an end because without energy, your machines won’t move, your aeroplanes won’t fly and everything else will come to a halt. What take its place?

"Well, the theory that they are working on is first to cut down the necessity for oil, there are other sources of energy which they can make use of -- coal, tar in Canada; wind power, tidal power, solar power -- and you can eliminate the use of oil for even motor vehicles. They are going now into mixed battery and oil and eventually completely battery which means you just plug in on the power station and you can run your car. Finally, the oil runs out, then what? Because they have not discovered something which you can put into an aeroplane which will make it fly. I don’t think it will fly on a battery.

"The human mind is sufficiently ingenious to find some answer and I believe long before that moment arrives, somebody would have discovered some way to get around this problem, otherwise, we’re all dead. Many will die, but eventually, I ask myself, what is the most, the greatest danger to humankind? I think the human being because we have so conquered nature that we are interfering with its capability to sustain itself. Earth warming is a problem, storms in Europe where you never had storms before in northern Europe, droughts in many countries. Whenever there is a El Nino or El Nina, it is the result of indiscriminate growth and use of fossil fuels which is in turn the result of massive increases in population. So, it is a contradiction that all societies face.

"As long as we were fighting nature without the capability to control nature so decisively, then you can proliferate and you know, you have families with 13 children, 14 children, 15 children, and five or six survive, but in today’s medical capabilities, if you look at our infancy survival rate, it’s about 98-99 per cent. So, every child born, however defective, however inadequate, maybe never completed its nine months in pregnancy, will be sustained in life, and this is spreading worldwide, Western science goes into underdeveloped countries and sustains a way of life and a way of reproduction which had been settled in a different medical era.

"So, you have a Catholic Church and the Muslims saying, "God will cater, don’t worry, just produce". That’s what Mao Zedong said to the Chinese people and they soon discovered it was untrue. Marx will not solve the problem, so they suddenly reduced it to one child per family which will lead to very serious consequences in a few years as they will not have enough young people to work and keep the economy going to feed the old who will now live longer with all these medical discoveries. Well, I don’t how this will work out but it’s not just energy. The energy problem arises out of man’s ingenuity and man’s innate instinct to proliferate. Whatever he does, he fills up occupied space, that is the end result is from one million Singaporeans in 1940, we now have four million. Is it sustainable? I don’t know. I don’t think it is sustainable indefinitely.

Chairman: "May I invite you to take your seat, please?"

Q: "Can I finish my question first?"

Chairman: "I am sorry. I promise you, if we have sufficient time later, you will have opportunity to ask the remaining three questions."

Q: "Thank you".

Chairman: "The gentleman in yellow, I believe."

Q: "Good Evening Senior Minister. My name is Choong Chee Huei from NTU, Mechanical and Production Engineering, Fourth Year. As we know, Singapore don’t have much resources to rely on and we did rely on our neighbours like Malaysia and Indonesia. Recently there is heated debate or discussion between Singapore and its counterparts in Malaysia, do you think that Malaysian government really wants to negotiate or they just have their regular exercise to get political stake for the next coming election?"

Mr Lee: "Your guess is as good as mine".

Chairman: "We’ll take a question from the upper level."

Q: "Good evening sir. I’m Tze Yang from Civil Engineering, Year 2. My question is regarding foreign talent in Singapore. With regards to recent high profile exits from Singapore companies such as SGX and NOL, do you think the government needs to re-examine the foreign talent policy and has the effect of foreign talent been considered such as whether they are integrating with the locals and whether they are loyal to Singapore? Thank you."

Mr Lee: "Well, let me say that the policy cannot change. If we change that policy, we undercut our capability to grow and to expand. If you look around the cities of the world, you’ll find in every city, a concentration of good minds and capable people, high energy levels and they are not people who come from that city alone. New York has what, 14-15 million, very few of the people at the top were born New Yorkers. They’ve come from all over America because that is the financial centre of America. London draws its talent from 60 million Britishers throughout the whole of Britain plus massive number of Americans, Europeans and others who go there and do business because it is the biggest financial centre in Europe. It does international business. You look at Shanghai and people, when I was a little boy, I didn’t understand this. They tell me Shanghainese are very smart people. As I grew up, I discovered it’s because the smartest are the only ones who survive in Shanghai and they have come from 300-400 million people from that Yangtze Delta. So it is the apex of a wide population pyramid."

"When we started in 1959, my first cabinet of 10, there were only two of us who were born and bred in Singapore. The other eight were born and bred in Malaya, in Ceylon, in south China and abroad. So it was a big catchment from whence the talent came. If we now confine ourselves and in politics we have to confine ourselves to Singapore citizens, I am choosing or I have chosen ministers who now come from a small talent pool of Singaporeans. If you go to the South China Sea, you’re going to catch big tuna, you go to Sentosa Lagoon, you think you’re going to get many big tunas? Shanghai today, or Shenzhen an even more vivid example, from zero, a fishing village and agricultural village some 12 years ago, has now some 5 to 7 million people and some of the best graduates from around China, working on a whole host of programmes. They speak Gudonghua, not Cantonese because they’re not Cantonese, they’ve come from all over.

"We confine ourselves to Singaporeans, we get rid of the.. there are 4 million in Singapore, 1 million are foreigners. You get rid of that 1 million foreigners, you will be unemployed. Many of you will not find the jobs but of course because you have the vote, you’re telling the government, "Me first" but does it make sense? Do you think that it’s been the job of my colleagues and myself, more my colleagues now than myself, to create prosperity for foreigners or to create prosperity for the people who elect us and who we have to look after? The more talent we draw into Singapore at all levels, to make up for what we haven’t got, the more we will thrive."

"You may feel discomforted when you are missed for a promotion or for a job which you think is yours but is that the wise conclusion that you can come to? Let me put this in a very simple way. With NOL, we started off with Singapore talent but who taught us how to run a liner line? We had a Captain Said, a Pakistani. He came here and helped us form NOL. Then we grew. We were competing against regional competitors, so our management, our capabilities, we could match them and win. We grew and became big. When you have to compete against world players, K K Lines, Evergreen, APL, Maersk, we were not big enough but we had enough resources. We bought APL, became bigger but you’re meeting world class management who understand the shipping industry, good minds and a good team. How do we do it?"

"In many fields, we are now facing world class competitors. Let me put Tanjung Pelapas into perspective. We are not competing against an ordinary management. Maersk is a world class player and we have got to have world class players in PSA to match Maersk or you’re done for. When NOL took over APL, we had to look for people with experience to run a worldwide shipping line. We had Fleming Jacobs. He brought in a team. He did well for one, two years. He did not do so well afterwards but all shipping lines are hurting because there’s over capacity. Why did they remove Fleming Jacobs? I don’t know because this is left to the board. But let me put it in a very simple way so that you will understand why we must continue to do this."

"If we are playing in the Southeast Asian Games, maybe we’ll win in ping pong or win in badminton. When you go to the Olympics or even the Commonwealth Games, that’s already a different level of competition. And because of transportation and communication technology, so decisive now that anybody can enter any field, we have world players now coming in. You take Singapore Airlines -- we grew because we had local airlines to compete against, lower wages. As we grew, our wages went up and now our pilots are paid almost the same wages as British or Australian pilots and they stay in the same class hotels. So that wage advantage is already gone, not so big.

"At the lower levels, yes, we have an advantage against Australian and British workers in airport services, et cetera but that’s catching up. So in the end, do you have a management that is effective, far-sighted and decisive as the best in the game. Can you get it out of 3 million people? Every year, when I was Prime Minister and I do it some times even though I’m not Prime Minister, I will go through the list of people we have chosen on scholarships to go abroad. We have 20 years ago, 60,000 Singaporeans born each year. Let me tell you from experience, to find 60 world class players out of that 60,000, one a thousand is not easy. Now, we are producing 40,000 children a year. Without immigration, we’ll be in very severe trouble. We have two income families, women want to postpone getting married, they want their careers. Having got married, they want to see the world. We are not able to sustain our society.

"The lifestyle is changing so fast that we are out of sync with our future. Fortunately because of our small size, we can make up but not in all fields and we see that in National Service. We have to automate more and more because each year’s cohort is smaller and smaller. And if we depend only on Singapore talent, I say today Singapore cannot be sustained. It’s as simple as that. If we do not attract, welcome and make talent feel comfortable in Singapore, we will not be a global city and if we are not a global city, we will not count for much. It’s as simple as that. The days when we could be a regional city, that’s over. Modern transportation and communications -- you either play in the big league or you’re not a player.

"You look at the speed with which Shanghai is coming up. You look at the problems Hongkong is facing because of Shenzhen and Shanghai and you ask yourself "How do we overcome this?" I say, "Get talent here. Make this different from all other cities. Yes, we are majority Chinese but we are not going to be a Chinese city. We are going to be a cosmopolitan city. Yes, we speak Chinese too but we work in English, we are part of the modern world. If you don’t accept that, if you don’t understand that, then you will not understand what you are going to come up against in the future."

Q: "Thank you very much, sir."

Chairman: "We’ve taken questions from several gentlemen. Is there a member of the fairer gender who would like to speak to the Senior Minister? The lady at the back?"

Q: "Evening SM Lee. I am Chen Chi Wen, Year 2 Business student from SMU. I have a question regarding the recent US possible tax cuts of around 600 billion dollars. How would this affect Singapore’s economy in the future and what measures will the government do to deal with this issue?"

Mr Lee: "What about the 600 million dollars?"

Q: "George Bush administration, he’s intending to have 600 billion tax cuts on consumers and some share dividends."

Mr Lee: "Oh yes, yes. The US tax cuts proposed by the Bush administration. Is that the question you’re asking?"

Q: "Yes sir."

Mr Lee: "Well, I don’t want to express an opinion on a subject which is now an issue between the Democratic and the Republican party and you would have seen that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr Greenspan, has already expressed an opinion which is contrary to that of the Bush administration. He doesn’t think a booster tax cut is necessary. He thinks that a dividend double taxation and dividend is a good thing. It will be good for the American economy in the long run because you encourage more investments into the equity business. If I were a Republican, I would be in favour of the tax cuts. Whether it’s needed or not, why not just put a little bit more money in and make everybody happy for the next elections in 2004. If I were a Democrat, I’d say "No, stop it. You’re wasting public funds but in fact you’re helping yourself and I don’t want you to do that. I want to win and I want to beat you." So you choose."

Q: "Thank you sir."

P: "The lady at the microphone, thank you for waiting."

Q: "Good evening SM Lee, sir. I am Sharizlin Sharif, a first year student studying Economics at Singapore Management University. I believe that as leaders of our future generation, most of us would like to find out what motivated you and gave you conviction to have led your community in uncertain times?"

Mr Lee: "Sorry, I didn’t catch the …"

Q: "Okay, what motivated you and gave you conviction to have led your community when times were bad?"

Mr Lee: "Well, it’s a very difficult question to answer because there is no simple cause which I can explain in one or two minutes. I think first, you have to decide what you want to do with your life. You live once, you die once. For my colleagues and myself, we went through a traumatic experience, of seeing the world that we were brought up in crash at a very impressionable age. In 1942, I was just reaching 19 and the world that I knew, just blacked out. We were under Japanese Occupation and I can tell you it’s an unnerving experience. You then ask yourself "Why has he got the right to do this to me?" By that, I mean the Japanese. I don’t know. I’ve written all this up in my memoirs. Maybe you ought to read it, saves you a lot of trouble. So, I’m trying to summarise in about one, two minutes, what I’ve written out in two, three chapters.

"To cut a long story short, we decided that we ought to be masters of our own destiny, that we shouldn’t be governed by the Japanese or the British, that we should govern ourselves and having gone into the political arena and got rid of the British, we then found ourselves facing an enormous communist machine, which was going to gobble us up. We fought them, we out-manoeuvred them. We got into Malaysia and we found that they wanted to dominate us too. So eventually we found ourselves out on our own. We could not walk away. It was a responsibility which we could not dodge. We had to make this place work even if it cost us our lives and we had to inspire the people to work with us and make it work and they did. But it was also a tougher generation because when you are living, large numbers of us were living in attap shacks and with zinc roofs instead of attap because zinc became cheaper than attap and hotter too, you either fight or you give up and they decided to fight and they had the guts and gumption and the ingenuity and we made it. Now the baton has been passed. It’s 12 and a half years since I stepped down. It’s working fine and I think each generation, you’ve got to find the people who feel that this is a responsibility that they cannot dodge.

"When you have a settled society with a long history, my experience was that of Britain because I studied the British system, I lived there for several years, and there was what was known as the establishment -- families, people who felt they had to look after the people, the system. So whether you are the son of a soldier or a general, you join the army because that’s your job, a country needs an army, or you join the civil service or the foreign service. And if you go to the ancient universities, you will know that they have that sense of self-importance, inculcated sense of self-importance. They know that the future of Britain depends upon how they discharge their responsibilities. They’re elite, selected from the best that all British schools could produce to fight for 1,000-2,000 places in each university. We have to do that. That’s why if you don’t feel that, then I say there’s no future for you, for Singapore.

"You have been able to get into a university, you’ve been able to live this kind of life because this society gave it to you. If you were born in India or China, yes, they have a great future but they’ve had a very bad past and a present is quite a tough life for most of them. At the end of the day, the test is whether you feel, having been educated, you should take your chances and get the best job in the safest place in the world and opt out, or that this is your people, this is your society, they sustain you and it is your job to make sure that they have a future and if you want to know what moved us? Well, somewhere along the way, we decided that we owe it to ourselves that we live up to this obligation and my friends and I have never regretted it."

Q: "Thank you, sir."

Q: "Before the gentleman at this microphone asks his question, can I invite all students who are interested to ask questions to come forward to the various microphones and queue. I’ll call on you in turn. Gentleman, please."

Q: "Good evening, Senior Minister Lee, my name is Nazri. I’m a final year student from the School of Computer Engineering, NTU. The Economic Review Committee has highlighted the importance of entrepreneurship in driving Singapore’s future economy. Do you foresee entrepreneurship being another pillar of the Singapore economy just like manufacturing and services? Thank you."

Mr Lee: "I don’t think you can classify entrepreneurship as another pillar of the economy like services or manufacturing. Entrepreurship is a certain current, a certain force in society that produces new goods, new services, new ideas that people want to find valuable. Will it become an important source? I think it is going to take time because we are already changing mindsets, changing cultures. We are less entrepreneurial than, say, Hongkong. And there’s a history behind it. Hongkongers were by and large people who fled from communist China at the end of the Second World War, 1945 and then 1949 and then the communists took over. The British had no votes given to them. Their job was to maintain law and order, you scramble, you make a living, I just maintain law and order, and you try your best. So whether you are a hawker or a restaurateur or maker of plastic flowers or whatever, you do your best to survive, and many of them who are already born or made entrepreneurs from Shanghai, from the coastal provinces, the towns of the coastal provinces of China. In Singapore, we came in and we had to look after the place, having voted for us, they said, "Please find me a job", which the Hongkonger never asked of the British government. You just find a job. If you haven’t got a job, that’s too bad, you better go back to China.

"So they developed that approach to life that nobody owed them a living whereas the Singaporean believes that the government owes them a living, like the government owes you a place in university and so on. So the government hands out Economic Restructuring Shares and gives you rebates on your rents and your SNC charges but that’s the way in which we develop but that is not the way we go forward. If we want to go into the next phase, and this is the result of my having had 30, 40 years of seeing how other societies work, and I have come to a very unhappy conclusion that unless we change mindsets, we are not going to prosper as well as we otherwise can. In other words, we must get more of our bright and capable and energetic to take chances with their lives and make a breakthrough. How do you do it? You all become entrepreneurs? No. Very few can become successful entrepreneurs but many have to try.

"I don’t know if you read an article in the Sunday Times just last week about a food seller who became a big importer and exporter of fruit. I got to know him. So I told the Straits Times and the Zaobao, I said, "Cover his life story". I knew him as a young boy in Kreta Ayer helping Goh Keng Swee with his elections. He used to make a living selling fruit, cut fruit, and they are perishables, and he knows he’s got to sell it by the end of the day or he has made a loss. If you haven’t read it, read it. His father died when he was aged nine and he had umpteen brothers and sisters to support, and he worked his way up. Today, his fruit business span from Shandong, China to Sichuan to Chile, you name it, every country, he’s either importing or exporting fruit from. That’s a real entrepreneur and he did not attend any courses but I read him and I’ve read about entrepreneurs and he is a real one. Every challenge, he puts in an extra effort and overcomes come in. And he nearly went broke with the Asian financial crisis and he recovered. Do we need more of him? Yes, I think we do. Will we have more of him? Yes, I think we can. How? We change our mindsets, we change our educational approach, we make venture capital available to fund such people with bright ideas. When your venture capital, investing in California, out of 10, eight may fail, two will succeed, then you make up for all your other failures, and that’s entrepreneurship. But it’s not the same as services and industry. You have to invent, innovate and do something which other people find useful and want and pay for it. Next question."

Q: "Sorry, before I introduce myself, I just wanted to say that it’s a great honour to be asking you a question in person. I was really hoping to ask you one question. Yeah, I’m Anar, I’m from the School of Computer Engineering and I’m studying in NTU, second year. It’s just a coincidence that just a question before was about entrepreneurship. Actually this question has been bothering me for some time. A lady that I know, she was telling me a month back that her son did not get in this, I believe, there is a gifted students stream for primary students, so her son did not get in there, and after, now, I mean, university and then the university level, we have so many entrepreneurship courses, technopreneurship has been... an emphasis is laid on it and even right now, you were talking about changing mindset so that the entrepreneurial spirit is actually a part of us and it need not be forced. So, what I was thinking was at the age of seven when you classify a kid as gifted and non-gifted, you’re branding the kid forever. From personal experience, I know I did very bad in my primary school and now, I’m doing what people say it’s okay, it’s good. So, I feel that when you brand a kid at the age of seven when, they say, that’s what I’ve read that, till the age of 12, brain is still developing. But by the age of seven, you tell a kid he is no good or you’ve asked him to accept the fact that he’s not gifted, I think we do not get the best from the kid. Instead of.. probably there is enough local talent, but maybe the system is not bringing out the talent, maybe at the age of seven, the imagination is dying, their creativity is dying, so there is no point we can get it out in university level. So, I just wanted to ask you that, do you think it has a direct implication on the future?"

Mr Lee: "Can I ask where you’re from?"

Q: "I’m from India."

Mr Lee: "Yeah, which part of India?"

Q: "I’m from a place near Mumbai, Bombay."

Mr Lee: "You’re from Bombay? Were you born there?"

Q: "No, I wasn’t born there, I was born from a place near Bombay, I was born in India."

Mr Lee: "Were you born in Gujarat?"

Q: "No, I wasn’t."

Mr Lee: "How did you get here? Are you on a scholarship?"

Q: "Yes, I’m on a scholarship here."

Mr Lee: "Is it an SIA scholarship?"

Q: "Yes, it is."

Mr Lee: "Congratulations. Are you going to stay here?"

Q: "No, I mean, I’m here for..no, I said "no" because I was laughing at..I’m here for four years now and I plan to complete my university education, then after I plan to work here as well."

Mr Lee: "Then you would decide?"

Q: "I think so."

Mr Lee: "Alright. I don’t have to answer you, you have answered yourself."

Q: "Sorry, sir, but I really thought that it’s a problem which should be considered."

Mr Lee: "Sorry? It will take too long, the argument is something which we cannot resolve. I believe you are what you are and very often, there’s very little that polishing can do to make you different. We have to educate large numbers of people in the most efficient way and if you have mixed ability classes, you are going to have a lot of wastage because the level at which you pitch your lessons will have to be at the medium, so you’re holding back the bright and you’re not satisfying or not coping with the weak. So, we have found, from practical experience, that if you can segregate them and they’re all learning at the speed at which they can learn, you make more progress. Whether you call that branding or whether you call that a practical way to make the most of finite resources, I leave to you. If you are a king, as a king of England once had, he had one-to-one tuition of all his children, one on one. That’s ideal but that’s not possible in the real world. In the real world, we go to huge classes, then you have computer aids, textbooks, tutorials, maybe five or six with one tutor and you learn at the best speed you can given the circumstances. I went to a very ordinary school in a semi-rural area, it never held me back."

Q: "Thank you very much."

Q: "Good evening, Mr Lee, I’m a Chinese student studying in NIE. Every year, your Singapore government brings hundreds of Chinese scholarship students to NTU and NUS. May I know your opinion to this and your expectations to our overseas students?"

Mr Lee: "Are you from Singapore or China?"

Q: "From China."

Mr Lee: "Where from?"

Q: "The city of Harbin."

Mr Lee: "Harbin?"

Q: "Yeah, in the north."

Mr Lee: "How did you get here?"

Q: "By plane."

Mr Lee: "Who arranged for you to get on that plane?"

Q: "I’m on scholarship here."

Mr Lee: "Well, let me explain. What was your final question?"

Q: "My final question was your opinion to your government brings so many Chinese scholars here and what’s your expectations to our overseas students."

Mr Lee: "Well, you heard my explanation just now about talent and the base, right?"

Q: "Yeah."

Mr Lee: "Today in Singapore and for several more years, we are able to offer to our neighbours in Asean and our neighbours in India and China better educational facilities than their country can offer them. We are looking for able, hardworking people who will make the best of the opportunities we intend to give them and then hope that maybe 50 per cent of them may decide to work and stay here. But it is your choice at the end of your stay, after you graduate, whether you do or you leave. You will have to do your calculations but I believe that there will be a significant percentage who may find it of value to stay here.

"In the first 100 years of our history, we were the centre for education in the region. And as I explained in the beginning, when I formed my first government, eight out of 10 of my ministers were not born here. Now, if I can create a situation where some 20, 30 years down the road, if out of 20 ministers, a prime minister has about five who were not born here, that’s not a bad result. So, I hope that out of a few hundreds that you have from India, China and the region, some hundreds will stay behind and make Singapore a better place. How long have you been here?"

Q: "Three months."

Mr Lee: "How much?"

Q: "Three months."

Mr Lee: "Three months."

Q: "Yeah."

Mr Lee: "How did you speak so good your English?"

Q: "Thank you."

Mr Lee: "Did you learn it in Harbin?"

Q: "Yeah, but just a little."

Mr Lee: "Congratulations. I’m very impressed with your level of teaching of foreign languages in Harbin."

Q: "Thank you."

Q: "Senior Minister has kindly consented to take two more questions. We’ll take one from here and one from the other level."

Q: "Good evening, Senior Minister, my name is Janice and I’m from NUS, Year Two Arts and Social Sciences. My question is, what do you think of young women carving out a career for themselves in politics, perhaps as a future prime minister of Singapore?"

Mr Lee: "We’re looking for bright, energetic, dynamic women who are prepared to spend a lot of time not looking after their families and themselves but looking after their constituents, and we found a few. It’s not easy. We’ll probably find more in the next elections or my colleagues will, my younger colleagues. And I suppose in due course of time, one of them will be enough of a leader to want to make a bid for the leadership, so it will happen. Maybe you ought to give it a try."

Q: "I’ll think about it. Thank you, sir."

Q: "Good evening, sir. My name is Serene. I’m from the School of Communication and Information, NTU, I’m in second year. I actually have two questions -- one about culture and the other one about terrorism. Perhaps you would like to make a choice, sir?"

Mr Lee: "The choice is yours."

Q: "Okay, let’s talk about terrorism. We know from the papers and such about the seemingly impending war on Iraq and JI and pressures from other countries in the region. So, how threatened should we be as the future generation?"

Mr Lee: "Well, it’s not going to go away. The threat will be hanging over many societies for quite some time. This is the outcome of a process that has been going on for three, four decades where large numbers of Muslims feel that they have been marginalised. There are voluminous books that have come out to explain all this but in short, as a result of a certain desire to sort of square the accounts first in the

Middle East. Muslim nations like Iran encourage terrorism in Lebanon as a weapon of choice. So they had the Hisbollah, way back in the 1970s, you remember they blew up an American marine base near the airport in Lebanon? You remember that Reagan had to pull out his troops after that? So they found that a useful weapon to intimidate and to force withdrawals of the Americans from the Middle East.

"Then came the Afghan war and the Americans, together with the Saudis funded large number of guerrillas who went there on a jihad to fight the Russians. They fought the Russians, the Americans provided the technology, Stinger missiles and provided the arms through Pakistan. In the end, the Russians had to withdraw but in the process, in those 10 years, they trained several thousand Muslim foreign legion, well indoctrinated, know how to make bombs, know how to ambush, know how to kill and driven by a deep religious conviction that this is the way they will end up in heaven, doing jobs, the duty that God wanted them to do.

"Now, they can’t win, it’s not possible because they haven’t got the weapons to defeat the Americans or the West but they can cause deep sense of insecurity, kill hundreds if not thousands of people, if they get hold of weapons of mass destruction but they need to be funded, they need to be organised and it will be a long and slow process but I think the Americans and the West and eventually all the countries that are not in favour of this, will dry them out of funds and of breeding places and it’s not going to happen in one, two years but I think it could happen in 10, maybe 15, definitely 20 years because they cannot win but they can cause a lot of unhappiness and a lot of damage."

"As I said just now, it may look superficially as a contest between Muslim extremists versus the West but in fact, at its core, it is a fight between Muslim extremists and Muslim rationalists because one version of Islam says: "This is the way we will become great" and I believe they’re wrong. They will not become great. They will become great and they will revive their own ancient cultures when they master science and technology and modern knowledge and you will not do that if all you want is how to make some primitive biological or radiological or some chemical weapon to kill people. That’s not going to win you your place in the modern world. How long will it take to put them down? I don’t know. Depends upon their efficacy, the efficiency with which intelligence services work with each other, dry them out of funds. That’s the crucial element. Without money, they can’t move but that will take some time."

Q: "Thank you sir."

Q: "Good evening sir."

Chairman: "We’ll just take one last question from that gentleman over there please."

Q: "Good evening sir, my name is Wai Mun, I’m a fourth year Computer Science student from National University of Singapore. Taking a look back in the past 10 years, we realise that a lot of Taiwanese businessmen have decided in their own best economic interests, that they want to go ahead and invest and put the core of their businesses in China. We have examples from computer companies and from food holdings like "Won Won", for example, and what we see is a hollowing out of the economy in Taiwan. Flash forward 10 years and we take a look at what is happening in Singapore and there’s a desire for all of us to pursue the second wing and we have companies moving into Malaysia, companies moving into China, into India and this brings forward two very interesting if slightly different worries: First of all, are we going to see a situation where in the next 10 to 15 maybe 20 years, Singapore experiences the same kind of hollowing-out that Taiwan is experiencing now because of China? And secondly, how do we as a society, come to reconcile the fact that on the one hand, we have individual Singaporean businessman who do extremely well in various industries in China, Malaysia, India and other places in the world and on the other hand, that the Singapore economy isn’t necessarily picking up despite the achievements of these individuals, some of whom may never bring their money back into Singapore?"

Mr Lee: "Well, let me say that it is a very pertinent and a profound question. There is no way that we can escape this dilemma. It’s not just Taiwan, Hongkong, Korea, Japan that’s going to China and hollowing-out their lower end and in the case of Hongkong, almost the total industrial sector has been pushed over to the Pearl Delta and in the case of Taiwan, even the high tech, their wafer fabs, not the very large ones but middle technology has gone into China.

"What is the future for them? Well, I think they have got to find newer products, more value-added, which the Chinese have not got and which they will not push over to China for sometime. But it is a process which every country, every developed country goes through. The Europeans who built the industrial revolution, exported their industrial revolution and they developed America, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, large parts of the world. Latin America - they exported capital expertise because returns are always higher when you go to another country, cheaper land, cheaper labour, cheaper resources and more consumers but in the long run, you survive by going to higher value-added but not always. And you have been insightful enough to see, that yes, Taiwanese who have gone to China are doing extremely well -- getting wealthy, reinvesting in China maybe bringing something back to Taiwan but the Taiwanese are now facing high unemployment. We are also at risk.

"Yes, we have successful entrepreneurs in China. They’re doing well. When they start, they will bring with them some of their managers, financial officers, supervisors to get their project started but after a while, the Chinese are cheaper to employ. It’s just like the MNCs coming here. They come with Americans or Britishers or Japanese or Germans and after a while, they send the expensive ones home and employ Singaporeans. So it is a process that’s been going on throughout the world and we’ve got to find a way to move into areas which have not moved into China and cannot move into China."

"Now, much of those areas will be personal services. Personal services you can’t export but we have to stay in manufacturing because I think if we go all into services, we’ll be like Hongkong, in a very dangerous and exposed position and now they’ve got large unemployment because they have large numbers who did not finish their schooling, their tertiary education or even secondary education and cannot be retrained and that’s part of our problem. If we lose all our low end manufacturing and we’re unable to get our people to go and make beds in hotels, or flip hamburgers, then we are going to face structural unemployment in a big way. I think it’s a difficult problem to resolve.

"We are starting a continual education and training scheme which we hope will get at least 30 or maybe 35 per cent of these people retrained and therefore employable and a higher job. For the rest, well they have just got to take service jobs - flip hamburgers, go and make beds in hotels or use some cleaning machines and clean up the institutions. It’s a hard world and the hardest part that is as we move into this more entrepreneurial system, the gap between those who are successful and those who are not will widen. And that’s another problem, which will be one of equity, not easy to resolve. You tax, you’re too successful, too much and they may leave and they’ll find some way to dodge but if you don’t have some equalisers in education, health services, housing and basic opportunities, then you’re going to have a very unhappy, not an underclass because I don’t think we have an underclass but those who are not quite so successful. Your three-roomers and your two-roomers will be very unhappy and that’s a problem we have to resolve but if we go and solve that by the way the communists resolved it -- all equal iron rice bowl and the whole economy flops."

"So the more entrepreneurial you are, the more successful the whole society is but the greater the differences between the successful and the less successful. There’s no way we can resolve that. It’s like that the world over. But you have asked a very important question, which we have been asking ourselves. Thank you."

==========