Lee Hsien Loong
Lee Hsien Loong was prime minister of Singapore from 2004 to 2024, twenty years, the third, Lee Kuan Yew's elder son, the Cambridge mathematics wrangler and brigadier-general who had been a minister since 1984 and deputy since 1990. He ran the city-state through its richest years. The two casino resorts opened in 2010 that doubled tourism, the population grown from four million to nearly six by immigration that became the grievance of the election of 2011, the party's worst at sixty per cent, the answer to it in the Pioneer Generation package and the housing built faster. There was the financial crisis of 2008 that the reserves absorbed, the pandemic that was handled well in the city and badly in the migrant workers' dormitories. There was the Trump-Kim summit hosted in 2018, and a foreign policy of being China's friend and America's partner and telling each so. He also had the quarrel with his brother and sister over their father's house at Oxley Road, which he had wanted preserved and their father wanted demolished, fought in parliament and on Facebook, and which his brother's wife was disbarred over. He was born in Singapore in 1952, took a starred first in mathematics at Trinity, Cambridge, where his tutor said he would be a fine mathematician and he said his country needed him elsewhere, served in the army to 1984. He was elected that year. He was trade minister, deputy prime minister, chairman of the Monetary Authority and finance minister from 2001. His father, in the cabinet as minister mentor until 2011, was the presence everyone measured him against. His first wife died in 1982 after the birth of their second child, and his second, Ho Ching, ran the state investor Temasek for seventeen years, which was noticed. The elections of 2015, after his father's death, and 2020, in the pandemic, gave the party sixty-nine and sixty-one per cent. The succession he planned for a decade went wrong once, when the chosen heir Heng Swee Keat stood aside in 2021, and then right, when Lawrence Wong took over in May 2024. He stayed as senior minister, the position his father and Goh had held. The family's hold on the country ended with him, which he says is the point.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Singaporean
- Roles: prime minister, politician
