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though repressive of political rights, have adhered to his grand
strategy of seeking natural resources anywhere in the world, wherever
they can find them, caring not with which despots they do business,
in order to continue to raise the economic status of their own people.
These Chinese autocrats govern in a collegial fashion, number many
an engineer and technocrat among them, and observe strict retirement
ages: this is all a far cry from the king of Saudi Arabia and the
deposed leader of Egypt, sleepy octogenarians both, whose skills for
creating modern middle-class societies are for the most part
nonexistent.
Park Chung Hee, in the 1960s and 1970s, literally built,
institutionalized and industrialized the South Korean state. It was
Park Chung Hee’s benign authoritarianism, as much as the
democracy that eventually followed him, that accounts for the
political-economic powerhouse that is today’s South Korea.
Then, of course, there is the founder of current-day Singapore, Lee
Kuan Yew. In 1959, Lee became prime minister of what was then a
British colony. He retired from that post over thirty years later
(though he continued to exert significant power until very recently).
As the British prepared to withdraw in the 1960s, Lee attached
Singapore to Malaya, helping to form Malaysia as a bulwark against
Indonesian expansionism. When racial tensions between ethnic
Malays in the Malay Peninsula and ethnic Chinese in Singapore
made the new federation unworkable, Lee seceded and the
independent city-state of Singapore was born. When Lee assumed
power, Singapore was literally a third-world malarial hellhole beset
by ethnic tensions and communist tendencies; it was barely a country
in any psychological sense and it certainly could not defend itself
against powerful neighbors. Lee turned it into a first-world
technological dynamo and transportation hub, with one of the highest
living standards worldwide, and with a military that is among the best

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