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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Geography was pretty much the only thing we had going for us. That and amazing leadership.

The biggest asset, aside from being a port on a great location, was the right alliances, and foreign countries being the island being let mostly alone, and you not having valuable resources, plus the desire of the rich in countries around the area to use the island as a tax haven of sorts (and later, as their comfy home away from home).

Yew would have been thrown out of office in a week and some "coup" would have been organized if some big foreign power has special interests in the area and wanted him gone.

And if the island had resources like oil or such, it would have been invaded, occupied, "liberated" by some new traiting politician friendly to the outside, every second year.

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the forming of those relationships, vision to form a tax haven and ability to stay in power by managing relationships between foreign powers to not experience a 'coup' is precisely leadership

It's leadership depending on the benevolence of outside factors, which is based on their strategic interests and what they want from you.

Doesn't work if you're just a land with resources to plunder and they have no interests in seeing you thrive, but the contrary.

Works even less if you have other ideas about your governance, trade, and allies that suit you, to what powerful countries taking an interest in your area want you to have because it suits them.

But if you don't have resources for them to covet, your existence fits a purpose in their plans, and you don't get too independent but always keep their preferences in mind, yeah, you can then apply leadership to make things better.

It's just leadership in much easier circumstances than elsewhere.

> Yew would have been thrown out of office in a week and some "coup" would have been organized if some big foreign power has special interests in the area and wanted him gone.

There was significant interest from foreign powers doing just that, look up Operation Coldstore and the history of communist insurgency in Singapore.

Operation Coldstore was kind of the opposite to the above: Yew and foreign "allies" taking out pesky left-wingers and pro-worker representation.

but there was heavy foreign influence and support on the left-wingers and pro-worker representation, from the communist bloc

There was also heavy support for them from the local population and workers.

And of course the right wingers not only had "heavy foreign influence and support" on their side too (the whole country was established under heavy western influence and at its "benevolence"), but they also crushed them, undemocratically with the help of that foreign influence and support.

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