I got to know Vice Premier Li Lanqing when Chairman Jiang Zemin put him in charge of matters connected with the Suzhou Singapore Industrial Park.  I found him approachable and practical in sorting out problems that we had to overcome in the early years. 

Through all those years in the 1990s, I did not know that he was a man of many talents.  I was pleasantly impressed when he sent me two books he had published in 2004, one in English entitled “Education For 1.3 Billion” describing his 10 years experience as the Vice Premier in charge of education reform and development, the other in Chinese was his “The Classical Music of Europe”.  I discovered that apart from his other talents, he is an accomplished singer, a pianist and has a deep knowledge of European musicians and composers and, the history of European music of the past 300 years.  Besides his politics in his younger days in the communist youth league, and his engineering work in an automobile factory, he is also a cultured and cultivated man who handles a brush gracefully, and that he also carves seals.  He is a classical Chinese “junzi”, “a renaissance man”, with broad intellectual interests, accomplished in both the arts and the sciences.  

His magnum opus was his 10 years in charge of education. His aim was to give every willing student the chance to learn, and through education achieve China’s rejuvenation.  Of all the many things done by the leadership under the Chairmanship of Jiang Zemin, nothing will have a more fundamental and lasting impact on China’s future than the rebuilding of the educational system, after the setbacks of the Cultural Revolution.  A whole generation had been lost to education.  As the Chinese saying goes, it takes one year to plant grains, 10 years to plant trees and 100 years to plant a man (一年树谷, 十年树木, 百年树人).   Educating a man is a slow but most important process.  To rebuild the education system after the disastrous devastation of the Cultural Revolution was a considerable feat.  And he expanded primary, secondary schools, technical institutes and universities.  These graduates helped China’s phenomenal progress in the last decades.  The key persons who stimulate and inspire students to acquire knowledge, and to learn independently are their teachers.  They were demoralised during the Cultural Revolution.  Vice Premier Li explained at length how he set out to make the teaching profession again respected and admired. 

Vice Premier Li Lanqing’s book, translated from Chinese into good English, covers a wide spectrum of China’s education system.  China needs one common language (putonghua), spoken and written throughout the country so that the country can move as one and be governed effectively.  He quoted the historical precedent in Qing dynasty that recognised this as a crucial need.  However close to the heart a dialect may be for each community, for a country to move forward as a people, all must speak and write one common language. 

In 1965 my task in Singapore was to educate about 2½ million.  At that time, China had about 700 million, about 350 times as many Singaporeans.  But although our population was small, it was a complex task, to get 2½ million people, 75% of whom are Chinese speaking with 8 major dialects, 15% Malays and Indonesians who spoke more than six different languages and dialects, and Indians who spoke over ten different languages, to learn to speak and read one language.  During British colonial times, our children went to separate schools that taught in different languages - Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English.  During a period of strong nationalist sentiments after the end of colonialism, to get people to give up their mother tongues and learn a foreign common language, that of the previous imperial power, was not easy.  We chose English for practical reasons.  To make a living, Singapore had to be relevant to the world, and, most important of all, to be fair between our various races.  No single race gained any advantage over the other when we chose English. 

Over 47 years, we have made English our common working language, but at the same time, we taught and used our mother tongues as the second language.  It has not been easy and many difficulties remain to be solved.  Because the language of government, business, tourism and international communications, even within ASEAN, is in English, the roles of our mother tongues have been lessened.  It is difficult when using a foreign language not to lose touch with our own different cultures and histories.  Fortunately, technology has made the problem easier to solve.  Through trade and travel, we have easy access to people who speak our original mother tongues in Indonesia, India and China.  So we hope in this way 4 million Singaporeans can keep alive their separate mother tongues and basic cultures, although our language environment makes English the dominant language of our lives.   

In concluding, let me commend Vice Premier Li Lanqing’s books to all those interested in education, music and the arts.  They are well written in Chinese and elegantly translated into English.  They contain much wisdom and scholarship.  It has been a privilege for my wife and me to have known him and his wife over these years.  It gives me great pleasure to be able to speak today at the launch of his 5 books and to commend them to Singaporeans.

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