Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong Singapore National Day Speech

[beijingwalker]

Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong Singapore National Day Speech

 

[beijingwalker]

His Mandarin is way way better than most Chinese southerners his age.

 

[Mista]

His Mandarin is way way better than most Chinese southerners his age.

His father sent him to Chinese-medium schools and he had his first 12 years of education in Chinese. LHL spent another year in Singapore to transpose his academic knowledge from Chinese to English, before heading to Cambridge and topping his cohort.

Spoiler

In 1971, Lee studied mathematics in Cambridge University’s Trinity College. Two years later, he graduated top of his class, becoming the first senior wrangler ever from Singapore. A senior wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge and is one of the greatest intellectual achievements attainable in Britain.

He finished the Math Tripos in 2 years instead of 3, having been exempted from the first year of the Tripos.

That’s not all; Lee scored a comfortable first. He earned 31 alpha questions—which are questions where distinctions are given for the best answers—and the student who came in second scored a distant 19.

Senior wranglers like PM Lee have gone on to play leading figures in the world of mathematics, physics and other fields. So it came as a surprise—to his tutor especially—that Lee turned down a career as an elite academic to focus on military and politics.

Choosing His Country Over Academic Fame
Young Lee explained in a letter to his tutor that he “will never be a mathematician.”

“A mathematician really has little say in what goes on in the world around him, in the way things are going on in the country. This does not matter at all in a large developed country like Britain, but in Singapore, it would matter very much to me. “It does not mean I have to go into politics, but an important member of the civil service or the armed forces is in a position to do a great deal of good or harm. I would prefer to be doing things and perhaps be cursed by other people than have to curse at someone else and not be able to do any more.”

According to Mathematics Professor Bollobas who taught Lee Hsien Loong while he was a student in Cambridge, this was what he had to say about his student:

"I certainly taught him more than anybody else in Cambridge. I can truthfully say that he was an exceptionally good student. I’m not sure that this is really known in Singapore. “Because he’s now the Prime Minister,” people may say, “oh, you would say he was good.” No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the first, but the gap between him and the man who came second was huge."

"I think that he did computer science (after mathematics) mostly because his father didn’t want him to stay in pure mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and professional, but he was also very
inventive. All the signs indicated that he would have been a world-class research mathematician. I’m sure his father never realized how exceptional Loong was. He thought Loong was very good. No, Loong was much better than that. When I tried to tell Lee Kuan Yew, “Look, your son is phenomenally good: you should encourage him to do mathematics,” then he implied that that was impossible, since as a top-flight professional mathematician Loong would leave Singapore for Princeton, Harvard or Cambridge, and that would send the wrong signal to the people in Singapore. And I have to agree that this was a very good point indeed. Now I am even more impressed by Lee Hsien Loong than I was all those years ago, and I am very proud that I taught him; he seems to be doing very well. I have come round to thinking that it was indeed good for him to go into politics; he can certainly make an awful lot of difference."

In those days dialects are the norm and Hanyu Pinyin hasn't come out yet so his pitch and pronunciation isn't perfect, even though he's very well-versed in Chinese vocabulary, proverbs and history.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=2425181620877863

Later on dialects are discouraged and Hanyu Pinyin is introduced, and therefore younger Singaporeans have a better environment to learn Mandarin with proper pronunciation.

Many mainland Chinese thought that 林俊杰 and 孙燕姿 are from China. I take that as a complement in the sense that our bilingual policy has been successful and our Mandarin pronunciation is good enough to blend into China. Mandarin has successfully replaced different dialects as the lingua franca and established a common identity among Chinese Singaporeans.

You compare this to younger HK artistes such as 邓紫棋 or 王嘉尔 who I can straightaway tell they are from HK lol. Language is one major reason why I think HK's youth feel unfamiliar and distant towards mainland China today.