Poonte bro, Very well thought counter-points from Lee Kuan Yew's book. But as always, I have my own counter-points and questions regarding some of the points you made on your post- "First of all, even before we talk about Singapore's success, we have to draw a clear line of facts: NEPAL IS NOT SINGAPORE, AND KING G IS NOT LEE KUAN YEW. Nepal obviously lacks strategic geographic advantages that Singapore enjoys; and let's face it, King G is not even close to Lee in terms of being an extremely altruistic, visionary leader. " Nepal is not Singapore and the King is not Lee. Agreed. However, going by the same argument/reasoning, Nepal is not England or the US either! So, if you think the Singaporean model is not a good fix for Nepal, the the American or any other model is not a good fix either. Maybe we should invent our own system based on our own cultural-religious-social structure/system. Afterall, Lee did the same thing. He came up with his own East-Asian-Confucian value based system. If you take household-kinship (social strtcutre) as a basis for governmnet, then Lee was not wide off the mark. Given the close-knit structure of the Chinese, Indian and Malay communities' social structure that focuses more on holistic/collective approach than the Western "individualistic" approach, Lee based his PAP's policies, and from the founding of the country to this day, PAP has been winning elections. "Analyzing Singapore's remarkable success, I still firmly believe that it had a lot more to do with it's strategic geography that with what kind of government it had. Located at the heart of booming trade between the US and Asia -- with open and wide access to the sea, Singapore could not have helped but be swayed by the benefits of this unique trend. Furthermore, Singapore's smallness, both in terms of land and population, also must have played a key role in overwhelming the population with huge flow of cash from ANY trade initiatives. " I disagree on this. Based on my understanding of the book, I see it more as i) He capitalized on the American/western fear of communism. He became an important ally of the west in its campaign to restrict communist expansion in the East/South East Asia. ii) He ruled with an iron fist. He could implement his policies without any opposition whatsoever. Of course, all of his policies were good and there was no need for any opposition, but if you look at it carefully, it was a one man show. He had the final word on everything- from choosing the President to developing housing projects. iii) Singapore just didn't benifit from the trade, he had to make Singapore benifit from it. he had to perduade the US and other governmnets and companies for investment. he had to create the conditions necessary for the foreign investors to invest in Singapore, and he did it by changing the laws and interestingly enough, by planting trees! [Its in the book] "Nepal, on the other hand, which is obviously at a disadvantage not only with mountaineous land-locked geogrpahy, but with a huge population which is ethnically very diverse, has it's own unique set of tremendous difficulties that Singapore didn't have to worry about.' Although Singapore is small, it too has diversity. It has Chinese, Indian and Malay communities, and after the founding of the city state, the Malay community and the Chinese community fought with each other. Also, all these communities were living in their respective ghettos and were not dealing with each other. It was Lee who forcefully evicted them from their respective ghettos and had them move to the govt. hosuing projects, in whcih they were forced to live alongside the others. he created unity, it did not come with the independence "package". "Back to Singapore. Again, form whatever I have read from the book, I can further argue that Lee Kuan Yew was NOT a total authoritarian either. Yes, he suppressed the communists, but he did not suppress all opposition. And he did not ban the press -- he only made the press pay very heavily if they diseminated wrong information. I can perfectly live with that. Yet again, I have yet to finish the book and learn more. of course, it must be noted here, though, that Lee's self description of his success in Singapore cannot be without his personal biases either. " Well, we both can read the same book but arrive at different conclusions. My understanding of the book is quite different. I see him more as a mild-authritarian leader or a benevolent dictator. He didn't allow dissent, and he really cared about the people. At times he employed rather harsh measures such as limiting the circulation of Time and the Wall Street Journal because they called him a dictator/authritarian ruler. Other times he had people sent out of the country for disagreeing with him. He and he alone had the total control and executive power of the state. Everybody else had to play along. He didn'yt leave them with any other option. Even today the Strait Times, Singapore's largest selling newspaper (although I am not quite sure, but my guess is its the only daily there) is not free to publish wahtever it wants. It has to go through censorship. Last eyar there were talks to allow teh Strait Times and other media some freedom but nothing constructive has happened in this regard. The media is still tightly controlled by the government.