Catholic church bells sounded across Singapore last Sunday to herald the funeral of the dynamic city-state’s founding father. The man who drove Asia’s fastest-growing economy was often misunderstood by both his liberal critics and his authoritarian defenders Few statesmen, in Asia or beyond, can have made such a big impact on the world from so small a country as Lee Kuan Yew, who died on 23 March at the age of 91. He was the last surviving leader of the anti-colonial struggles from the 1940s to the 1960s, on a par with General Aung San of Burma, President Suharto of Indonesia or Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya. Yet, like Mahatma Gandhi in India or Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Lee Kuan Yew transcended the story of his country’s birth to become an exemplar, a paradigm of how al