This essay reassesses Lee Kuan Yew’s most consequential claims about China as presented in Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013), evaluating them against global developments up to January 2026. While several of his strategic judgments—particularly regarding China’s long-term ambitions and state capacity—have proven broadly prescient, others now appear incomplete, overstated, or constrained by assumptions that no longer hold. Taken together, this analysis does not seek to validate or dismiss Lee’s views wholesale, but rather to situate them within a changed international context, distinguishing enduring insights from those that require revision or more nuanced interpretation.
Predictions That Are Still Broadly Accurate
China’s Sustained Drive for Primacy in Regional and Global Power
Lee Kuan Yew argued that China’s leadership ultimately seeks preeminence in Asia and, in time, a leading position in the world. Developments through early 2026 strongly support this assessment. Far from being rhetorical, this ambition has remained a consistent organizing principle of Chinese state strategy, shaping policy priorities across economic planning, technological development, diplomacy, and security.
At the ideological and strategic level, the concept of “national rejuvenation” culminating around 2049 continues to anchor Beijing’s long-term vision. China’s leadership frames this goal not merely as economic prosperity, but as the attainment of comprehensive national power, encompassing technological leadership, industrial self-sufficiency, military capability, and cultural influence. Recent planning documents, including the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), reinforce this trajectory by prioritizing advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, green technologies, and strategic autonomy from Western supply chains.
Institutionally, China has steadily worked to reshape the international environment in ways that reflect its interests and reduce dependence on Western-led systems. Through mechanisms such as BRICS+, the Digital Silk Road, and expanded engagement within APEC and the Global South, Beijing has promoted parallel platforms for finance, standards-setting, and development cooperation. These efforts do not replace existing institutions outright, but they dilute Western dominance and expand China’s capacity to set rules and norms.
Regionally and sectorally, China’s actions further underscore its aspiration for leadership. Persistent assertiveness in the South China Sea, deepening influence along Belt and Road corridors, and aggressive competition in high-technology domains all signal an unwillingness to accept a subordinate role in Asia or the global economy. Taken together, these patterns confirm Lee Kuan Yew’s judgment as accurate in intent: China continues to pursue a long-term strategy aimed at becoming the foremost power in its region and a central, if not dominant, force in the international system.
Strategic Restraint: China’s Deliberate Avoidance of Direct Confrontation with the United States
Lee Kuan Yew maintained that China would refrain from a direct military challenge to the United States until it achieved clear technological and economic superiority. Developments through early 2026 largely validate this judgment. Despite intensifying rivalry, Beijing has consistently acted to manage escalation, favoring patience and long-term positioning over open confrontation with the prevailing global military power.
In the security domain, China has relied heavily on so-called “gray zone” tactics to advance its interests while avoiding war. In the South China Sea, incremental actions—often described as “salami-slicing”—have allowed China to expand control through coast guard operations, maritime militias, and legal-administrative measures rather than overt military force. This approach alters facts on the ground while staying below the threshold that would likely provoke a direct U.S. military response.
Economic considerations further reinforce restraint. Deep trade and financial interdependence between China and the United States functions as a powerful stabilizing constraint, sometimes characterized as a form of “mutual assured economic destruction.” Although strategic decoupling has advanced in select sectors, the scale of remaining economic ties continues to raise the costs of direct conflict to levels both sides seek to avoid, encouraging competition short of war.
Nowhere is this balancing act more evident than in the Taiwan Strait. While military pressure, signaling, and diplomatic friction have intensified, Beijing has stopped short of initiating open hostilities. Instead, China has combined deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and strategic ambiguity, aiming to shape long-term outcomes without triggering a catastrophic confrontation. Overall, China’s behavior aligns closely with Lee Kuan Yew’s assessment: rivalry with the United States is real and growing, but for now it is being managed deliberately below the level of direct armed conflict.
China Will Not Become Western-Style Democracy
Lee Kuan Yew’s assertion that China would not evolve into a Western-style liberal democracy has been strongly reinforced by political developments in recent years. Rather than converging toward pluralism, China has moved decisively in the opposite direction, consolidating a governance model centered on centralized authority, political discipline, and regime continuity under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Under Xi Jinping, power has become increasingly concentrated at the top of the party-state system. Institutional checks within the CCP have weakened, term limits have been removed, and ideological conformity has been strengthened. These political shifts have been accompanied by the expansion of sophisticated surveillance technologies, data-driven governance, and social management tools, all of which enhance the state’s capacity to monitor society and preempt dissent rather than accommodate competitive political participation.
Beyond its borders, China has also promoted its governance approach as a viable alternative to Western democratic models. Often described as “consultative authoritarianism,” this framework emphasizes economic performance, social stability, and elite-led consultation over electoral competition. Through development assistance, technology exports, and diplomatic engagement, Beijing has increasingly normalized this model internationally. Taken together, these trends confirm the accuracy of Lee Kuan Yew’s judgment: China’s political future is being shaped not by democratic convergence, but by the refinement and projection of a distinctly non-Western system of governance.
Predictions That Are Inaccurate, Oversimplified, Or Outdated
The Limits of China’s Growth: Debunking the Double-Digit Myth
Lee Kuan Yew predicted that China’s economy would sustain double-digit growth for decades, projecting momentum in the range of 10–15%. While this expectation reflected the remarkable expansion of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, recent trends show that such growth rates have proven unsustainable. By the mid-2020s, China’s economic expansion had slowed markedly, with annual GDP growth declining from roughly 5.25% in 2023 to an estimated 4.6% in 2026.
Several structural headwinds constrain the economy’s capacity to maintain high growth. Demographic shifts—including an aging population and a shrinking workforce exacerbated by the legacy of the One-Child Policy—have reduced labor supply and domestic demand. The real estate sector, once a primary engine of investment, has been destabilized by crises at major developers such as Evergrande and Country Garden, further slowing economic momentum. Consumer spending, historically a driver of growth, has weakened in response to these pressures, limiting domestic sources of expansion.
These factors collectively suggest that China faces the classic middle-income trap: early rapid growth cannot automatically translate into decades of sustained, double-digit expansion. While China remains a major economic power, Lee’s long-term forecast has not materialized. The country’s growth trajectory is now moderating toward more realistic, lower percentages, reflecting demographic, structural, and cyclical constraints that make extended periods of double-digit growth unlikely.
China’s Military Expansion: Challenging the Budgetary Constraint Assumption
Lee Kuan Yew predicted that China would refrain from a major military buildup to avoid financial overextension, suggesting that the cost of competing with the United States would act as a natural limit on defense ambitions. However, evidence through 2026 indicates that this assumption has not held. Far from restraining its forces, China has undertaken extensive military expansion across nearly every domain, reflecting a long-term strategy of power projection and deterrence rather than financial caution.
China’s official defense budget reached approximately $247 billion in 2025, with projections for 2026 exceeding $540 billion and annual growth rates of 5–7%. These figures likely understate actual expenditures, which include off-budget investments, research and development, and Military-Civil Fusion initiatives that link defense capabilities with broader industrial and technological planning. Investments target a modernized nuclear arsenal, a rapidly expanding navy including aircraft carriers, advanced missile systems, and improved force projection capacity—all signaling an ambition to challenge U.S. influence regionally and globally.
Crucially, China has avoided the financial collapse that Lee anticipated by integrating military development into the broader economy. The Military-Civil Fusion strategy ensures that defense growth leverages industrial capacity, technological innovation, and economic resources efficiently, mitigating the risk of immediate bankruptcy. In practice, this means that Beijing can pursue a robust military modernization program while maintaining macroeconomic stability. Overall, China’s behavior demonstrates that the expectation of restrained defense spending as a fiscal check has proven inaccurate, with military expansion continuing to be a central component of state strategy.
Reassessing China’s Innovation Prospects: From Predicted Deficit to Global Leadership
Lee Kuan Yew argued that China’s creativity and innovation deficit would persist, suggesting that censorship, centralized control, and cultural factors would limit the country’s capacity for scientific and technological breakthroughs. While this assessment reflected concerns about systemic rigidity and information control, recent developments show that China has achieved remarkable progress in several high-tech sectors, challenging the deterministic assumptions of his analysis.
China now leads the world in electric vehicle production, next-generation telecommunications (5G/6G), artificial intelligence, robotics, and biomedicine. Policy-driven innovation strategies, including large-scale research programs, talent initiatives, and strategic industrial planning, have produced notable achievements such as the DeepSeek-R1 AI system, WuDao 3.0 cognitive architecture, and advances in quantum computing and biotechnology. These accomplishments demonstrate that centralized control has not prevented high-impact innovation, and in some cases has accelerated it by directing resources toward priority sectors.
Moreover, mechanisms once thought to constrain creativity—most prominently the “Great Firewall” and other digital restrictions—have not prevented China from dominating global green-tech supply chains, patent filings, and intellectual property leadership. While structural and cultural factors may still influence the types of innovation that emerge, the narrative of an unavoidable innovation deficit is no longer accurate. China’s experience shows that even under a controlled political environment, targeted policies, industrial coordination, and scale can produce globally competitive breakthroughs, making previous predictions about a persistent innovation gap outdated.
Rising Urgency: China’s Calculus on Military Confrontation with the U.S.
Lee Kuan Yew argued that China did not immediately need to confront the United States militarily, framing the U.S.-China rivalry as a “long wait” during which Beijing would consolidate economic and technological strength. While this assessment captures the strategic logic of restraint, developments through 2026 suggest that China’s sense of timing is shifting. Demographic peaks, slowing economic growth, and domestic pressures have contributed to a perception in Beijing that opportunities for asserting regional dominance may be limited, creating a heightened sense of urgency.
This changing calculus is evident in China’s increased military assertiveness. Drills around Taiwan and the Philippines, more frequent South China Sea incursions, and high-profile exercises in the Taiwan Strait reflect a willingness to signal resolve and test strategic thresholds without initiating full-scale war. These maneuvers indicate that, while China may still avoid direct confrontation with the U.S., it is no longer content with a purely patient posture, instead leveraging coercive tools to shape its immediate security environment.
At the same time, Beijing’s approach remains cautious, calibrated to avoid triggering catastrophic conflict. Military and diplomatic signaling, combined with selective displays of force, underscores that China does not yet seek a direct clash with the U.S., but the window for prolonged restraint may be narrowing. The “long wait” framing thus underestimates current assertiveness: China balances strategic patience with an emergent urgency that could accelerate regional tensions and raise the risks of miscalculation.
Predictions That Need Qualifying Nuance
China’s Enduring Stability Amid Structural Pressures
Lee Kuan Yew predicted that China would remain stable and avoid collapse, a judgment largely grounded in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ability to maintain centralized control and manage social expectations. While this assessment remains partially accurate, the mechanisms underpinning stability have evolved, and the old formula of guaranteed economic growth in exchange for political compliance—the so-called “Social Contract”—is increasingly under strain.
Structural pressures now weigh heavily on the economy and society. Persistent deflation, high youth unemployment, rising debt levels, and technological bottlenecks challenge the capacity for rapid growth, weakening the traditional basis for popular acquiescence. The CCP has responded by emphasizing coercion, surveillance, and careful political management, rather than relying solely on economic performance to maintain legitimacy. Social stability is increasingly engineered through administrative control, propaganda, and legal mechanisms, rather than automatic economic satisfaction.
Despite these pressures, China’s political system has avoided collapse. Governance remains strong, and elite cohesion within the CCP continues to prevent major internal fractures. Yet stability is more fragile and complex than Lee’s original framing suggested, relying on adaptive management and coercive tools as much as on economic promise. In this sense, while the country continues to avoid systemic collapse, the nature of that stability is nuanced and contingent, reflecting a blend of control, strategic foresight, and managed risk.
Regional Unease: Neighboring Responses to China’s Growing Dominance
Lee Kuan Yew predicted that China’s neighbors would be uneasy about its growing influence, and developments through 2026 largely confirm this assessment. Countries in Southeast Asia face a delicate balancing act, navigating between economic engagement with Beijing and security ties with the United States. The result is a complex web of hedging, where caution and pragmatism coexist with varying degrees of dependence on China.
The Philippines and Vietnam exemplify this dual approach, maintaining robust trade and investment relationships with China while deepening defense cooperation with the United States to counterbalance Beijing’s regional assertiveness. By contrast, Cambodia and Laos have increasingly aligned with China, reflecting both economic incentives and political ties, illustrating that not all neighbors respond uniformly to Chinese dominance.
This nuanced dynamic underscores that regional unease does not translate into outright opposition. Many countries simultaneously benefit from Chinese investment and trade while remaining wary of political and security risks. The pattern confirms Lee Kuan Yew’s judgment: China’s rise generates concern and strategic caution among neighbors, but responses are heterogeneous, reflecting both hedging strategies and growing economic interdependence.
Predictions Most Outdated or Directly Contradicted: China’s Evolving Trajectory
Several of Lee Kuan Yew’s forecasts regarding China have proven outdated or directly contradicted by developments through 2026. One of the most notable misjudgments was his expectation of sustained double-digit economic growth. While Lee anticipated growth rates of 10–15% for decades, China’s economy has slowed considerably, with GDP expansion hovering around 4.6–4.8%. This deceleration reflects deep structural constraints, including demographic decline, rising debt, and limits on domestic consumption, all of which have curtailed the momentum that fueled earlier rapid growth.
Another prediction that has been contradicted concerns China’s military posture. Lee suggested that the country would avoid direct competition with the United States due to cost concerns. In reality, China has undertaken an extensive military buildup, encompassing nuclear modernization, naval expansion, advanced missile systems, and the integration of military-civil fusion strategies. These investments indicate a willingness to assert strategic influence while carefully managing economic and fiscal risks, contrary to the restraint Lee anticipated.
Lee also assumed that China’s innovation capacity would remain limited by cultural and institutional factors. However, this view has proven overly deterministic. China now competes globally in advanced technology sectors, including artificial intelligence, robotics, electric vehicles, green energy, biomedicine, and quantum research. Government-led innovation programs and strategic industrial planning have enabled breakthroughs that would have been considered unlikely under Lee’s assumptions about systemic innovation deficits.
Lee expected China to adopt a cautious approach to global assertiveness. While he foresaw careful engagement, Beijing has increasingly demonstrated proactive and sometimes confrontational strategies. This includes assertive diplomacy, military drills in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea operations, and efforts to create alternative international institutions outside Western-dominated frameworks. Collectively, these developments illustrate that some of Lee Kuan Yew’s predictions—particularly those concerning growth, military restraint, innovation, and assertiveness—are now outdated or directly contradicted by China’s evolving trajectory.
Summary & Implications
Lee Kuan Yew’s analytical framework—emphasizing China’s strategic ambition, cautious tactics, and systemic limits—remains a valuable lens for understanding the country’s trajectory. Yet many of his specific predictions have been overtaken by reality: economic growth has slowed, military expansion has accelerated, and China’s technological and innovation capabilities have outpaced expectations. At the same time, several core insights retain relevance, including China’s long-term ambition, its avoidance of direct confrontation with the United States, and the persistence of authoritarian governance. Overall, while Lee’s observations provide a critical foundation for analysis, the rapid pace of geopolitical, technological, and economic change under Xi Jinping underscores the limits of projecting past trends without accounting for China’s state-driven dynamism and adaptive policymaking.
References
- Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World. Lee Kuan Yew. The MIT Press, 2013.