Goh Chok Tong
Goh Chok Tong was prime minister of Singapore from 1990 to 2004, the second, the six-foot-two civil servant and shipping executive whom Lee Kuan Yew's younger ministers chose among themselves in 1984 and whom Lee, who had wanted someone else and said so, accepted. He governed the fourteen years between Lee's rule and Lee's son's in a style he called kinder and gentler and the country called consultative. There were the town councils, the nominated members of parliament, the elected presidency, the Medifund and Edusave and the upgrading of the housing estates as an election reward. There was the Asian financial crisis of 1997 ridden out with the reserves intact, and the SARS epidemic of 2003 contained in three months with quarantine and thermometers. There were the free-trade agreements with the United States and Japan, and the casinos he opened the way to, all while the People's Action Party kept every seat but two or four. He was born in Singapore in 1941 to a Chinese family from Fujian, lost his father at ten. He studied economics at the University of Singapore and Williams College, and ran Neptune Orient Lines, the state shipping line, from 1973 before being recruited to parliament in 1976 as one of the second generation Lee was collecting. He held trade, health and defence and was first deputy from 1985, with Lee's son Lee Hsien Loong as his own deputy from 1990, which was the arrangement. The election of 1991, the first he led, lost four seats and thirty-nine per cent of the vote to the opposition, the party's worst until then. The answer was the sharper edge of 1997, when he told constituencies that voted the wrong way that their lifts would be upgraded last. He also had the foreign policy of a small state in a bad neighbourhood, with Malaysia over water and land and Indonesia over the haze and Habibie's little red dot. He made Singapore the region's first friend of China's WTO entry. He handed over in August 2004 and stayed as senior minister until 2011. He was the emeritus senior minister after that, chaired the Monetary Authority, and left parliament in 2020 after forty-four years in the same seat.
- Lived: 1941 CE – ?
- Nationality: Singaporean
- Roles: prime minister, politician
