One of the frequent themes in Mr Lee Kuan Yew's speeches is "Asians care more about good government than democracy", which is unfortunately rather vague since the meaning of "good government" is vague. Note he did not use the term "efficient government" because efficiency is double edged - a government could be very efficient in squeezing money out of the people, or in suppressing dissent. A good government has to be efficient at doing good things but we again need to define "good".
In some other speeches, LKY was more specific - that developing the self-discipline of the citizens has to come before democracy. There is no doubt recent events in various Asian countries have born out what he says, in particular Taiwan. However, LKY's statement was still too vague and therefore easily misconstrued: self-discipline is not the same as obedience to authority. In fact, it is more applicable to the people in authority than those under it. The lack of self discipline displayed by Chen Shuibian and his family members and associates in Taiwan, and not quite as seriously, by Mahathir in Malaysia, not only have great impact in themselves, it also sets examples that make it harder to ask the ordinary people to show self-discipline.
In other words, self-discipline first has to prevail among the members of the elite, that they should use their power and wealth with restraint, that they should be scrupulous in their methods to acquire power and wealth. Further, only with awareness for the need for self-discipline would they be in a position to establish relevant monitoring and prosecution systems to impose discipline on the whole society.
A society in which the elite thinks that discipline applied only to others and not themselves soon finds that even the most efficient monitoring system would break down as the people in charge of enforcing discipline lose confidence about whether they can apply the same rules to everyone, and then learn to twist the rules to gain benefit for themselves. In other words, failure of elite members to apply self-discipline soon corrupts the whole society.
