One Man's View of the World

by Lee Kuan Yew

I think in China social mobility is still there. It’s not a stratified society in this sense. If you take Britain, which I happen to know well, every generation produces a top of the crop and the top rises and they marry each other and they stratify at the top. And their children, because of both genes and educational opportunities, stay at the top. China will take a long time to reach that situation. Singapore is in danger of reaching that situation sooner than expected because of our rapid educational advances. So people are rising very fast, taxi drivers’ children go up to university, boys marry girls, both from hawker backgrounds or taxi driver backgrounds and when they marry, they stay on top, and then the genes plus the educational opportunities that they give their children create that stratified class. It happens with every society. Then finally, there’ll be enough dissatisfaction, the ground will say, “All right, let’s reshuffle the pack of cards.” That’s how the communist revolution took place. Kuomintang got overthrown. Now a communist elite has emerged. But well, we have not reached that position yet.