Statesman, founding Prime Minister of Singapore.
1923–2015 · Singapore
Install Lee's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install lee-kuan-yewInstalls 3 skills from Lee, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Lee was born in Singapore on September 16, 1923, into a wealthy English-educated Peranakan family of Hakka Chinese descent. English was his first language. He attended Raffles Institution and was top of his class in the 1940 Senior Cambridge examinations. He had begun studies at Raffles College when the Japanese invasion of Malaya halted everything. The Japanese Occupation of 1942–1945 was the defining trauma of his youth: he narrowly escaped the Sook Ching massacre of ethnic Chinese and watched the British surrender 130,000 troops to a numerically smaller Japanese force. He later wrote that the experience taught him that power, not law, decides who lives and who dies. After the war he sailed to Britain, studied law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, graduated with a starred First-Class Honours, and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1950.
Lee co-founded the People's Action Party (PAP) in 1954 and led it to victory in the 1959 election, becoming Prime Minister of Singapore at age 35 — the youngest in the Commonwealth. Singapore merged with Malaysia in 1963 but was expelled on August 9, 1965; Lee broke down in tears on television. He was 42 years old, leading a tiny island of 1.9 million with no natural resources, no army, and uncertain water supply. Over the next three decades he attracted multinationals through low taxes, English-language education, and rule of law; built corruption-free government via the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau; created mass homeownership through the Housing & Development Board (HDB) and Central Provident Fund (CPF); and enforced multiracialism and meritocracy. Singapore went from a GDP per capita of $516 in 1965 to over $80,000 today, one of the highest in the world. He stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990 after 31 years and continued as Senior Minister and Minister Mentor.
Lee's wife Geok Choo, his partner of sixty years, died in 2010. He died on March 23, 2015, at age 91. Over a million Singaporeans lined the funeral route in the rain. He is among the most studied and emulated nation-builders of the twentieth century: Deng Xiaoping sent successive Chinese delegations to Singapore to study his model, and figures from Henry Kissinger to Margaret Thatcher to Bill Clinton sought his counsel. His doctrine of pragmatic, results-tested governance — “Does it work? Let's try it. If it doesn't work, toss it out.” — remains influential in policy circles and in private-sector leadership alike.
Frameworks distilled from Lee’s life, packaged as Claude Code skills. Each skill is invoked with a slash command and grounded in the primary biographies listed under References.
/lee-kuan-yew:lee-kuan-yewStrip ideology. Run small reversible experiments. Steal what works. Pay competitively AND prosecute without exception. Think in decades.
Source: From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew
/lee-kuan-yew:pragmatist-testStrip ideology. Ask only: does it work? Define 'works' with measurable specificity. Kill what isn't producing.
Source: From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew — The pragmatist doctrine across his three decades as Prime Minister
/lee-kuan-yew:incorruptibilityPay competitively AND prosecute without exception. One lock without the other fails.
Source: From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew — Chapters 13–15 — the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau
Install in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install lee-kuan-yewBring Lee’s frameworks into your terminal. One install registers every guide’s skills.
Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for Lee.
Lee Kuan Yew · 1998
Lee's account of Singapore's founding through 1965 — the British colonial years, the Japanese Occupation, merger with Malaysia, and the traumatic separation.
Lee Kuan Yew · 2000
The sequel covering 1965 onward. Source for the HDB housing program, the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, and the pragmatist doctrine.
Lee Kuan Yew · 2013
Lee's late-life assessment of geopolitics and Singapore's place in it — the U.S., China, Japan, Europe, Southeast Asia, and small-state survival.
“We are pragmatists. Does it work? Let's try it.”
“We are pragmatists. Does it work? Let's try it, and if it does work, fine. If it doesn't work, toss it out.”
“I was never a prisoner of any theory. What guided me were reason and reality.”
“A man who owns his home has a stake in the stability of his country.”
“If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana.”
“Democracy is a means to good governance, not an end in itself.”
“I have never been over-concerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew
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