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李光耀: 备受争议的新加坡国父(4)

来源:可可英语 编辑:Kelly   可可英语APP下载 |  可可官方微信:ikekenet

Since we're living in a world where Singapore clearly didn't implode into ethnic violence.

我们生活在一个世界,这个世界中新加坡没有发生种族暴力。

There's not much point in us structuring this chapter like a narrative following Lee Kuan Yew, as he struggles to make miracles happen.

当李光耀光耀努力创造奇迹的时候,我们把这一章按照叙事讲没有太大的意义。

Instead we're going to dive into the details of Lee's rule without regard for chronology.

相反,我们将深入研究李光耀规则的细节,而不会按照年代去讲。

So you can see for yourself how he held his city-state together.

因此,你可以亲眼看到他是如何将他的城邦团结在一起的。

One of the biggest issues the young country faced was his ethnic cocktail, one of which had already produced two notorious race riots.

这个年轻的国家面临的最大问题之一是他的种族复杂,这个问题已经引发了两次臭名昭著的种族骚乱。

With so many Chinese, Malayan, Indians all crowned together, Singapore was always going to be multicultural.

随着如此多的华人、马来亚人和印度人一起被认可,新加坡将永远是一个多元文化的国家。

But Lee surprised everyone by how far into that he leaned.

但李光耀出乎所有人的意料,他没有偏向哪个群体。

Rather than favor one language or culture over the other, Lee's solution was to embrace aspects of all of them.

李光耀的解决方案不是偏袒一种语言或文化,而是包容所有语言或文化的各个方面。

Chinese, Tamil and Malay were all made official languages, with English promoted as the lingua franc were to bind them together.

汉语、泰米尔语和马来语都成为官方语言,英语被推广为通用语言,将它们联系在一起。

The calendar was stuffed with public holidays for all the major religions with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Chinese celebrations sprinkled throughout the year.

日历上挤满了所有主要宗教的公共假日,基督教、穆斯林、印度教、佛教和中国的庆祝活动贯穿全年。

Perhaps most surprising though was housing policy.

不过,或许最令人惊讶的是住房政策。

Underly the Housing and Development Board or HDB became one of the most powerful government department.

不出所料,住房和发展委员会(简称HDB)成为最有权力的政府部门之一。

Eventually building homes for around 80 of Singaporeans.

最终为大约80%的新加坡人建造了住房。

This is important, because many HDB blocks were given strict ethnic quotas intended to reflect the demographics of the country at large.

这一点很重要,因为许多住房和发展委员会街区都被赋予了严格的种族配额,以反映整个国家的人口结构。

In other words, an enforced multiculturalism that Lee intended to stop the formation of ghettos.

换句话说,一种强制的多元文化主义,李光耀想要阻止犹太人区的形成。

Another big issue was poverty.

另一个大问题是贫困。

If like me, you grew up long after Singapore became a byword for well-ordered and freakishly clean.

如果你和我一样,在新加坡成为井然有序和异常干净的代名词很久之后,你才长大。

It can be hard to imagine the state it was in Lee assumed power.

很难想象李光耀掌权时的状态。

The people were poor, the streets were dirty, tracts of land still scarred by war damage, half of the population was functionally illiterate.

人们贫穷,街道肮脏,大片的土地仍因战争而伤痕累累,一半的人口是文盲。

As one popular travel magazine of the era sniffed "utter filth and poverty. One must see with his own eyes to believe it."

正如当时一本流行的旅游杂志所说的那样,“绝对的肮脏和贫穷。一个人必须亲眼看到才能相信是这样。”

Fast forward to 1990 and Singapore would be the second richest nation in Asia.

快进到1990年,新加坡将成为亚洲第二富有的国家。

So how did this happen?

那么这是怎么发生的呢?

What potent ideology did Lee seize upon to transform this small tropical island?

李光耀抓住了什么强大的意识形态来改变这个热带小岛?

The answer, none.

答案是没有。

Grafted onto a European or American understanding of left and right, the great Singapore experiment can be laughably hard to quantify.

结合欧洲或美国对左派和右派的理解上,新加坡的伟大实验可能很难量化,这是可笑的。

The finance in the free market were embraced along with low corporate tax rates and all sorts of incentives for international businesses to base themselves there.

自由市场中的金融受到了欢迎,同时还有低公司税率和各种激励措施,鼓励国际企业将自己的总部设在那里。

At the same time though, Lee never forgot the lessons he'd learned from at Lee's labor government in Britain.

然而,与此同时,李光耀从来没有忘记他从李领导的英国工党政府中学到的教训。

Certain sectors such as housing were dominated by powerful state monopolies with a level of government intrusion into people's lives that would give most conservatives a heart attack.

某些行业,如住房,由强大的国有垄断企业主导,政府对人们生活的干预程度会让大多数保守派人士心脏病发作。

Most famously this came in the form of social improvement campaigns.

最著名的是以社会改善运动的形式出现。

A hard-bitten realist.

顽固的现实主义者。

Lee didn't trust his fellow humans not to be gross so he employed a carrot and stick approach to stop citizens from doing everything from spitting or chewing gum to fly tipping and failing to flush the toilet.

李光耀不相信他的人类同胞不会变得很恶心,所以他采取了胡萝卜加大棒的方法来阻止市民做任何如吐痰、嚼口香糖随意吐、不冲厕所的行为。

In this case, the stick was quite literal. Those who acted crude in public could be sentenced to not just fines, but also caning.

在这种情况下,大棒是字面意思。那些在公共场合表现粗鲁的人不仅会被判处罚款,还会被处以鞭刑。

Yet for all it's weird mishmash of what we consider right and left, it's hard to deny that these methods worked.

然而,尽管这是我们所认为的右翼和左翼的奇怪的大杂烩,很难否认这些方法是有效的。

Poverty rates plummeted, literacy skyrocketed, the city became cleaner richer and more orderly than the British could have ever dreamed.

贫困率直线下降,识字率飙升,城市变得更干净、更富裕、更有秩序,这是英国人做梦也想不到的。

Back when we did our geographic video on Singapore itself.

回到我们制作关于新加坡的地理视频的时候。

We talked and wonder about how such ideological opposites such as Margaret Thatcher could both visit and come away thinking.

我们交谈着,想知道像玛格丽特·撒切尔这样的意识形态是如何既思考又脱离思考的。

I want to do that.

我想知道。

Yet despite his own professed lack of ideology in a weird way.

然而,尽管他以一种奇怪的方式宣称自己缺乏意识形态。

You can see a consistent logic to Lee's decisions.

你可以看到李光耀的决定有一个一致的逻辑。

A champion of what he called Asian values,Lee believed in putting the health of society above the rights of the individual, no matter who those individuals were.

作为他所谓的亚洲价值观的捍卫者,李光耀将社会健康置于个人权利之上,无论这些人是谁。

That meant coming down on corrupt government officials like a ton of angry bricks.

这意味着像一吨愤怒的砖头一样打击腐败的政府官员。

It meant ensuring a high-wage economy for everyone in the public sector and creating a compulsory saving system for health care.

这意味着确保公共部门每个人都有高工资的经济,并为医疗保健创建强制储蓄制度。

There's a reason millions mourned when Lee Kuan Yew died in 2015.

2015年李光耀去世,数百万人哀悼是有原因的。

And that's because he faced a future where Singapore could have easily been poor or corrupt or just really really divided.

这是因为他面临的未来是,新加坡可能很容易变得贫穷或腐败,或者真的非常分裂。

And instead he created a safe stable and wealthy society.

相反,他创造了一个安全、稳定和富裕的社会。

But that doesn't mean it was all a utopia.

但这并不意味着这一切都是乌托邦。

It's time for us to take a quick look at the darker side of life in Lee's gleaming metropolis.

现在是时候让我们快速了解一下李光耀领导的这个闪闪发光的大都市生活的阴暗面了。

One marked less by great strides in living standards more by creeping authoritarianism.

这个国家的生活水平没有大幅提高,更多的是缓慢的威权主义。

重点单词   查看全部解释    
certain ['sə:tn]

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adj. 确定的,必然的,特定的
pron.

 
narrative ['nærətiv]

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n. 叙述,故事
adj. 叙事的,故事体的

 
quantify ['kwɔntifai]

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v. 定量,表示份量,称量,量化

 
corrupt [kə'rʌpt]

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adj. 腐败的,堕落的
vt. 使 ...

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illiterate [i'litərit]

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adj. 文盲的,无知的
n. 文盲

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embrace [im'breis]

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v. 拥抱,包含,包围,接受,信奉
n. 拥抱

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violence ['vaiələns]

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n. 暴力,猛烈,强暴,暴行

 
intended [in'tendid]

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adj. 故意的,有意的;打算中的 n. 已订婚者 v.

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assumed [ə'sju:md]

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adj. 假装的;假定的

 
transform [træns'fɔ:m]

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vt. 转换,变形
vi. 改变
n

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