Lee Kuan Yew - the man who would not have taken on 'thankless' Hong Kong job
In the last few decades, Lee Kuan Yew was not only the architect of the Lion City, but also an adviser to Chinese and British politicians, as well as a visionary on politics in Hong Kong and on the mainland.
Indeed, in the last few decades, Lee Kuan Yew was not only the architect of the Lion City, but also an adviser to Chinese and British politicians, as well as a visionary on politics in Hong Kong and on the mainland.
Apart from receiving an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Hong Kong in 1970, it is believed that Lee visited British colonial Hong Kong governors regularly, and met Margaret Thatcher before she started her dialogue with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping on Hong Kong's future in the early 1980s.
Before the 1997 handover, Lee met Tung Chee-hwa, then chief executive in waiting, in Hong Kong shortly after he said in an interview that Tung should scrap the last British governor Chris Patten's reforms in Hong Kong to win China's confidence.
Shortly after Tung stepped down in 2005, Lee told a leadership luncheon in Hong Kong that the city needed a "street fighter" chief executive to avoid mass confrontations.
He said: "Mr Tung was too nice a man, not sufficiently young and nimble. He wasn't a street fighter."
"In the Hong Kong situation, with people out in the streets, you want a street fighter. Then you can avoid this kind of confrontation," he said, in a reference to the mass July 1 protests of 2003 and 2004.
On Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, then acting chief executive who went on to govern Hong Kong until 2012, Lee said: "Maybe he [Mr Tsang] will learn some of the tricks. I am not sure if he wants to be a street fighter."
Tsang's seven years in office proved that the former chief secretary was not the kind of leader Lee had in mind, as Tsang was believed to be regarded by some Beijing officials as being too "weak".
On the chief executive's role in general, Lee once described it as "a thankless job".
"You have a master in China. You have subsidiary masters in Hong Kong," he said.
That was the reason, according to Liberal Party founder Allen Lee Peng-fei, that Lee told him he did not want to rule Hong Kong.
"[Lee said he] wouldn't do it well because his master will be in Beijing," Allen Lee said.
During the same lunch in 2005, Lee Kuan Yew said: "Beijing has no intention of allowing Hong Kong to be a pacesetter or a Trojan horse.
"If you try to influence the course of events in China by examples and say this is a better system, I would think that is not likely to win enthusiastic support."
