Lee Kuan Yew: Sage model for China

BEIJING: Singapore’s population is less than 0.5 percent of China’s, but its founding father Lee Kuan Yew wielded significant weight with the Asian giant as model, adviser, critic and geopolitical realist.

Lee, who died Monday at 91, was a British-educated ethnic Chinese who mixed stern government with free-market economics, and turned the former colonial entrepot into one of the region’s wealthiest—and most disciplined—countries.