Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew Has Died

From Quartz:

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, the 91-year-old founding father of one of Asia’s smallest but most powerful economies, has died. The former prime minister, who had been in the hospital for over a month with severe pneumonia, leaves behind a city-state whose current success is built on policies he put in place decades ago.

Lee led Singapore from a colonial backwater under British control to one of the world’s most thriving financial centers, and he did so with a tight grip on power. He has been criticized for instituting wide-reaching censorship, limiting civil rights, discriminating against gays and migrant workers, and generally maintaining a one-party autocracy for almost half a century.

Lee was able to maintain that autocracy, though, because of the huge popularity of his People’s Action Party, which captured most—if not all—of the seats in Singapore’s parliament in the country’s history as an independent republic...

...That’s because Lee engineered one of the world’s most impressive growth stories—one that everyone from American Republicans to Chinese communists have both openly envied. (“Benevolent dictatorship has never looked so good” one columnist wrote of the Singapore in 2012.)....MORE