make yourself relevant

MM Lee in his Q & A Session at NTU Students' Union (9th Ministerial Forum) at Nanyang Auditorium on 18 February 2003, said that :

"..we have to become a cosmopolitan city which is linked up to China, to India, to the region and to the world beyond.

In other words, if we confine ourselves only to Singapore -- localisation --

then we'll go back to the fishing village from whence we sprang, and there are only 120 people who could live off Singapore, and I wonder if we can even support our 120 people because we have destroyed all the fishing grounds around us.

So there is no choice but to move forward and there is no choice for the rest of the world too, because as you build on your discoveries -- scientific, technological, discovery of other countries, you find you can improve your standard of living, your quality of life by exchanging goods, products, services.

"Now, when that came to an end suddenly in Japanese-occupied Singapore, because their ships were being sunk by Allied submarines, Singapore just shrunk.

There were no medicines, no textiles, we took tablecloth and turned them into trousers and shirts. No rice because rice was imported from Thailand and even the junks were being sunk and we started planting tapioca and sweet potatoes and lived a very unhealthy life.

So it was a lesson to me in very practical terms of what it means by that simple concept -- division of labour.

"The world has achieved this standard of living and large parts of the world are enjoying a standard of life never before ever enjoyed in its history because advances made by certain groups in certain countries rapidly improved the well-being of others.

So somebody discovers a drug to solve, let's say, Alzheimer or Aids. First to benefit will be the drug company to recover part of its R&D and to give profits so that other people will invest in other pharmaceutical companies to continue more research, but eventually, the whole world benefits. So whether it is us or any other country, there is no choice but to plug in into what is going on in the most developed places and hoist in the benefits.


"After the war, it was fashionable for many newly independent countries to try and become self-sufficient. There were several theories around at that time advanced by Latin American economies to say that if you allow these multinationals in, you're being exploited by them, they exploit your natural resources, your labour and so on, and you are then impoverished.

So, they started trying to own their own steel mills, their own petrochemicals et cetera, and they did not succeed. We tried that route and made our own toothpaste, mosquito sticks and a few other simple products and decided if we continued along that path, we would all die of starvation.

"So we decided, let's do the practical thing. If this company is the world champion in this product, it's going to beat other companies, well, let's get them here, 100 per cent owned by them, they make use of us, we educated our people who became factory floor operators, then supervisors, then accountants, then managers, engineers and that's how we got here.

By the late 1970s, the others around the region decided that we were right and they started copying us.

Now, China has decided, yes, it is right, so they are sucking in all the investments that's coming to East Asia -- 70 per cent of all the investments coming to East Asia now is going into China -- and it's the fastest way to learn to develop your own capabilities and your infrastructure and later on, the capital to buy more machines and invent new ones.

So, whether it's localisation, regionalisation or globalisation, you come back to, how many links can you forge with the rest of the world and make yourself relevant to the most number of people in this world, and if you do that, you'll succeed."

Note:
The things MM Lee said meant something, although some may not like his style. There are something we could learn from the history of yesterday and applied ourselves in the new economy, beyong 2000's: stay relevant or be obsolete.

In the end,we have only two choice, and time is not on our side as we are aging nations. We needed to sprint to stay ahead, a step of ahead of others. There are price to pay. There are always equilibrium: you have to return what you take from others.