9) Chinese Heroes

1) Lim Kit Siang


First elected Member of Parliament for Kota Melaka in 1969, Lim Kit Siang is one of the most senior members of the august house.

Apart from 1999 – 2004, Kit Siang served as MP in various constituencies in four states: Bandar Melaka (1969 – 1974); Kota Melaka (1974 – 1978); Petaling Jaya (1978 -1982); Kota Melaka (1982 – 1986); Tanjong (1986 – 1999); Ipoh Timur (since 2004). He also represented Kubu, Melaka (1974 – 1982); Kampong Kolam, Penang (1986 – 1990); and Padang Kota, Penang (1990 -1995) as state assemblyman.

Being the fearless voice of the people inside and outside parliament and state assemblies, advocating their aspirations and hopes, he was repeatedly politically persecuted by his opponents in the ruling class.

In 1969 Kit Siang was detained under the Internal Security Act for 18 months. Ten years later he was convicted of five charges under Official Secrets Act for exposing an inappropriate arms deal between the government and a Swiss company. He was again a victim of the Internal Security Act in Operation Lallang in 1987 and was held without trial for 17 months.

Kit Siang first emerged on Malaysian political scene when he was National Organising Secretary of the DAP from 1966 to 1969. At the same time he was also entrusted to edit the party’s organ, the Rocket. The course of the political landscape changed when he was promoted to Secretary-General in 1969 after being acting SG for a short period during a turbulent period in the country’s history. He led the party in that capacity until 1999 when he was elected Party Chairman.

From 2004 on he was tasked to lead the party’s parliamentary caucus in the newly-created position of Chairman of the Central Policy and Strategic Planning Commission. Kit Siang is currently the DAP Parliamentary Leader since August 2008. He published 34 books since 1978.

2) Lee Kwan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew towers over other Asian leaders on the international stage, yet he comes from one of Asia's smallest countries. A champion of Asian values, he is most un-Asian in his frank and confrontational style. Lee loves Singapore but has relatively few close Singaporean friends or confidants. He is a man of great intelligence, with no patience for mediocrity; a man of integrity, with an relentless urge to smite opponents; a man who devours foreign news but has little tolerance for a disrespectful press at home. What really sets this complex man apart from Asia's other nation-builders is what he didn't do: he did not become corrupt, and he did not stay in power too long. Mao, Suharto, Marcos and Ne Win left their countries on the verge of ruin with no obvious successor. Lee left Singapore with a per capita GDP of $14,000 (it's now $22,000), his reputation gilt-edged and an entire tier of second-generation leaders to take over when he stepped down in 1990. 

Lee now basks in the wisdom of seniority, a latter-day Doge whose views continue to be sought by statesmen and commentators who travel from all over the world to pay court to him in Singapore. It is difficult to view Lee on his own, distinct from Singapore. James Minchin, who wrote one of the most balanced biographies of Lee, titled the book No Man Is an Island: A Study of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. But in many ways Lee is the island, embodying in his character all the insecurity, vulnerability, emotional detachment, arrogance and restless energy that also characterize Singapore. His life has shaped and been shaped by the small territory at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula that he made first into a country, and then a rich country. He had few interests outside his work. He did not even keep a diary--To do so would have inhibited my work, he comments drily in the preface to his autobiography. His legacy is Singapore, no more and no less.

 He cried at its inception, in a televised press conference the day the enforced separation from Malaysia was announced in 1965. His emotions were more under control the day in 1990 when he stepped down as Prime Minister, but still he could not pry himself loose entirely, and the job of Senior Minister was created for him. For Lee lives by the conflict theory of management: you either dominate or are dominated. He knows all about being dominated, both under British colonial rule and, more brutally, during the Japanese occupation. In his memoirs he relates how he was slapped and forced to kneel in front of a Japanese soldier for having failed to bow to the man while crossing a bridge. 

When it became Lee's turn to dominate, he used the full force of his personality, and the law, to fight his opponents. Some ended up in jail or bankrupt. Contradicting Lee became synonymous with being disloyal to Singapore, so hermetic was the identification between man and principality. His ancestors were Hakka, the Chinese tribesmen who migrated from northern China to Fujian and have a reputation for pugnacity and clannishness. Lee was a third generation Straits Chinese, however, and grew up speaking Malay, English and the Cantonese dialect of his family's maid. Ever the pragmatist, he was later to teach himself Japanese, Mandarin and Hokkien as the political situation in Singapore required. During the Japanese occupation of Singapore he worked for a Japanese government propaganda department--although it has long been rumored that he was secretly passing intelligence to the British. His education was English, first at Singapore's Raffles College, where he studied English with mathematics and economics. 

Then it was on to Cambridge, where he learned English law and English self-assurance, deftly taking a double first in the former and a double helping of the latter. He disliked the English while admiring their way of doing things--he had similar if more extreme feelings about the Japanese--and after Cambridge he ditched the Anglicized Harry Lee for his original Chinese name, though many of his English friends continue to use it to this day. This complicated amalgam of Chinese instincts and English training came back to Singapore in 1950 to start practicing law, but he quickly found his true vocation in the tumultuous politics of the time. Fists flying, he immersed himself in a world of communists, labor organizers, gangsters and intelligence operatives, emerging in 1959 as Prime Minister--with his enemies all knocked out of the ring. That was the way he would keep things throughout his political life. 

While flooring any political challenger who dared to climb through the ropes, he set about building one of Asia's economic Tigers with relentless energy. He courted multinational investors to upgrade the economy from mass manufacturing to high-tech industry. He built the region's finest infrastructure of airport, port, roads and communications networks. He established a public housing system and the Central Provident Fund savings pool that gave every citizen a stake in the system. 

He virtually abolished crime--and jukeboxes--and developed Asia's best health and education systems. Lee's penchant for control extends to his own physical environment. He admits to being very sensitive to heat and humidity, has hailed the air-conditioner as one of mankind's great inventions, and likes to live his entire waking life at 22 degrees C (reduced to 19 degrees C at night while sleeping). On the rare occasions when his grand plans have failed to come off, the circumstances were usually beyond his control. He was one of the first to recognize China's potential under Deng Xiaoping's reforms. But he also learned how treacherous it is to deal with the mainland--his dream project to combine Singaporean know-how with Chinese labor in an industrial park in Suzhou foundered on the very rocks of corruption, nepotism and avarice that he had warned about all his life in other contexts. 

But even as he obsessively pruned, trimmed and weeded the Garden City, Lee would never shed his lifelong sense of insecurity, his feeling that it could all be taken away with one uncontrollable spasm of social upheaval or regional chaos. Because of Singapore's size, its paucity of natural resources and the nature of its neighbors, Lee knew he could never fully be master of the island's destiny. Perhaps this in the end is what helped to prevent Lee from becoming too autocratic, providing him with a small taste of humility every time he looked at a map and saw that the creation of one of Asia's most brilliant statesmen was, in the words of a much lesser man, just a small red dot in Southeast Asia.

3) Lim Guan Eng

Born in 8 December 1960, Lim Guan Eng, Member of Parliament for Bagan, State Assemblyman for Air Puteh.
He is the 4th Chief Minister of the State of Penang, he is also the Secretary-General of the Malaysian Democratic Action Party (DAP).
DAP completed a clean sweep of all 19 Penang state seats it contested in the 12th Malaysian General Election. He is married to Betty Chew Gek Cheng, State Assemblyperson for Kota Laksamana. They have four children.

Lim Guan Eng attended the La Salle Primary English School in Petaling Jaya and later the Batu Pahat Montfort Primary English School. For secondary education, he went to Batu Pahat High School and Malacca High School. He graduated from Monash University, Australia in Bachelor of Economics and was a qualified professional accountant by 1983. He was the president of MUISS (Monash University International Student Society).

Prior to joining politics he was a bank senior executive. In 1986, he was elected as MP for Kota Melaka, by defeating former Malaysian football captain Soh Chin Aun with a majority of 17,606 votes.
In October 1987 , he was detained in ‘Operation Lalang’ under the inhumane Internal Security Act(ISA) , he was released after 18 months on April 1989.

His political life becomes more active since then. He was elected as DAP Socialist Youth (DAPSY) chairman 1989 and 1992. He was re-elected as MP for Kota Melaka for a second and third term in 1990 and 1995 respectively. In 1995, he became DAP Deputy Secretary-General.

Lim was arrested by Malaysian police in 1994, following his criticism of the government’s handling of allegations of statutory rape of one of his constituents by former Chief Minister of the state of Melaka, Tan Sri Abdul Rahim Thamby Chik. Consequently, while the Attorney General decided not to charge Rahim Thamby Chik, Lim was charged under Section 4(1) (b) of the Sedition Act 1948 for causing ‘disaffection with the administration of justice in Malaysia’. Lim was also charged under Section 8A (1) of the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 for ‘maliciously’ printing a pamphlet containing allegedly ‘false information’ because he had described the alleged rape victim as an ‘imprisoned victim’ because she was initially detained by Malaysian police without parental consent for 10 days.

After a series of appeals, Lim was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. He was, however, released after 12 months on August 25, 1999. Due to his incarceration he was disallowed from standing for election to public office for a period of 5 years, and he was therefore ineligible to contest in the 2004 Malaysian General Election.

In May 2004, Lim Guan Eng was elected as Secretary-General of DAP.
On 8 March 2008, Lim contested in the Bagan parliamentary seat and Air Putih state seat in the 2008 General Election. He won the Bagan seat, defeated Song Choy Leng (BN) with a majority of 22,070 votes, and the Air Puteh seat beating Tan Yoke Cheng (BN) with a 4,061 vote margin.

Lim garnered the second highest number of votes (620) from delegates at the party’s 15th National Congress on August 23rd, 2008. The result was a vindication of his leadership in leading DAP to its biggest electoral win in the 12th general election on March 8th, 2008.

He has sworn in as the Chief Minister of Penang on March 11, 2008. Since then, he has been initiating the system of governance based on the principles of ‘Competency, Accountability and Transparency’(CAT) and with a soul as one that adopts an ethical and moral leadership that professes and gives faith, hope and love.

4) Mao Tze Tung

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 - September 9, 1976), also transliterated as Mao Tse-Tung (in the now less commonly-used Wade-Giles transliteration), was a Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led China's communist revolution following decades of civil war.
Until his death, Mao retained his unquestionable place in the Politburo of the Communist Party of China since 1943 and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China since 1945.

As a prominent leader and a veteran having fought many battles, Mao, during the Chinese Civil War, led the Communist Party of China (CPC) to a series of victories that drove the Kuomintang (KMT) and its troops to the island of Taiwan.

On October 1, 1949, at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, Mao announced the establishment of the People's Republic of China. From the 1950s onward, Mao pursued his ideals for a strong and prosperous China, endeavoring to rebuild a new functional government and relieve the poverty of the peasants that made up the majority of population in China. However, it has been argued that movements such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution greatly hamstrung China's development, leading to economic hardship, social turmoil and starvation. Although the exact figure is disputed, it is widely believed tens of millions died as a result of such policies.


After Mao had seized power over mainland China in 1949, a personality cult was developed to deify Mao as, for example, the Grand Helmsman and Saviour of China, which increased his domination of the Communist Party of China and the government.


5) CHIANG KAI SHEK :  YEAR October 31, 1887–April 5, 1975

The only person capable of at least uniting the China by defeating the Warlords and put up a decent resistance against the advancing Japanese during WW2.

6) Lei Feng mostly active during the 1960's

Accomplishments: His name is in every Chinese schoolbook. His deeds were magnified as an effort by the authorities to instill good morals into every school child. No matter whether or not he was really good, his shadow looms over every Chinese kid who contemplates doing evil. Uncle Lei Feng is an inspration for all!  

7) Qian Xuesen YEAR : 1911 ( a living hero !!!)

A scientist who was a major figure of space programs of USA and PRC.
During World War 2 served in the US Army as Liutenant Colonel and helped US to design and develop ballistic missile. He cofounded Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1944 with Theodore von Karman.
Goddard Professor of Caltech. One of leading rocket scientists in the US pre 1950
After being deported due to red scare program of McCarthy in 1955, after confined in house arrest for five years he established Instute of Mechanics and trained Chinese engineers. Then he
fathered Chinese rockets. Qian was responsible for Dongfeng and Silkworm missile design and development. Qian research is the basis of Long March rockets which successfully launched the first Chinese manned spacecraft Shenzhou V in 2003.
Qian was awarded Caltech`s Distinguished Alumni in 1979.

8) Yuan Longping
Born 1953.
2004 recipient of the World Food Price.

Created hybrid rice and helped make the People's Republic self-sufficient in grain production. Could be named as the person that led the opening of Chinese bio-technology and agricultural advancements. Now we're into the era of Super-Rice.