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.