Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore's People's Action Party and served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990, building one of the developmental state's clearest cases of rapid economic growth under close government direction, with per capita income rising from 443 dollars in 1960 to over 6,600 dollars by the mid-1980s. His government also detained political opponents without trial under internal security law and used defamation suits against opposition politicians, limits on organized opposition that its own defenders and critics both treat as part of the model rather than separate from it.