'Old friends' meet on last leg of PM's China visit

PM Lee meets China's third- and fourth-ranking leaders in Beijing

- Tan Dawn Wei

In 1993, then 41-year-old Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was the guest of honour at an international debating competition held in Singapore.

He chatted and joked with participants, including those from the winning team representing Shanghai's elite Fudan University, and the professor who led them to victory.

That professor was a fresh-faced 38-year-old Wang Huning - who is today the fourth most powerful leader in China and the man behind the country's most important political theories of recent decades.

On Friday, as now Prime Minister Lee sat across from the soft-spoken bespectacled man in a cavernous room at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, he told Mr Wang that President Halimah Yacob had reminded him they had met three decades before.

"I looked up the records and was very happy to find an old photograph of us together after the finals of the last debate," said PM Lee to Mr Wang, who chuckled.

"I hope you'll keep it as a memento of our friendship and good cooperation."

Mr Wang had met Madam Halion Diamah in 2019 when she was in Beijing for the Conference logue of Asian Civilisations.

PM Lee told Mr Wang that Singapore had worked with successive Chinese leaders over many years.

"Our leaders, both old and new in Singapore, are ready to work with China to continue to strengthen our bilateral relations which are deep and strong, and will still broaden and deepen, and have broadened and deepened even under the difficult conditions of Covid-19," he said.

Calls of "old friend" rang out in another huge room at the Great Hall earlier, when PM Lee met Mr Zhao Leji, China's third-ranking leader.

Mr Zhao is ranked third in the Politburo Standing Committee the pinnacle of power - after President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.