Ong Teng Cheong

In August 2017, a mountain range located in south eastern Kazakhstan near the Kyrgyz border, was named Ong Teng Cheong peak.

The Ong Teng Cheong Student Activities and Leadership Training Centre was opened in his alma mater Hwa Chong Institution on 21 March 2007.

Ong died in his sleep from lymphoma at the Singapore General Hospital on 8 February 2002, at the age of 66.

Ong died in his sleep from lymphoma on 8 February 2002, at the age of 66, at the Singapore General Hospital at about 8:15pm Singapore Standard Time (UTC+08:00) after he had been discharged from hospital a few days earlier.

The Ong Teng Cheong Professorship in Music was launched by National University of Singapore on 2 October 2002.

Ong decided not to run for a second term as president in 1999 partially because of the death of his wife. He was succeeded by S. R. Nathan.

Ong was appointed as Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 1998.

Ong resigned from the PAP and his political positions before contesting in the 1993 presidential election as an independent candidate and won. He was sworn on 1 September 1993 as the fifth president of Singapore. He decided not to run for a second term as president in 1999 partially due to the death of his wife.

Ong's political career spanned 21 years. He was a Member of Parliament (MP), Cabinet minister and Deputy Prime Minister, before he resigned to become the first elected President of Singapore in 1993.

Ong became Singapore's first elected president in 1993 and was ex officio appointed Chancellor of the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University.

However, soon after his election to the presidency in 1993, Ong was tangled in a dispute over the access of information regarding Singapore's financial reserves. The government said it would take 56-man-years to produce a dollar-and-cents value of the immovable assets. Ong discussed this with the accountant-general and the auditor-general and eventually conceded that the government could easily declare all of its properties, a list that took a few months to produce. Even then, the list was not complete; it took the government a total of three years to produce the information that Ong requested.

The Singapore Institute of Labour Studies, which opened in 1990, was renamed the Ong Teng Cheong Institute of Labour Studies in March 2002. It was later renamed as the Ong Teng Cheong Labour Leadership Institute.

In January 1986, Ong sanctioned a strike in the shipping industry, the first for about a decade in Singapore, believing it was necessary as "[the] management were taking advantage of the workers". However, he did not inform the Cabinet beforehand out of fear that the Cabinet would prevent him from going ahead with the strike. Ong recalled in a 2000 interview in Asiaweek: "Some of them were angry with me about that... the Minister for Trade and Industry was very angry, his officers were upset. They had calls from America, asking what happened to Singapore?" Minister for Trade and Industry Tony Tan, vigorously opposed Ong Teng Cheong's decision to sanction the strike, being concerned with investors' reactions to a perceived deterioration of labour relations or an impact on foreign direct investment needed for jobs creation. Ong Teng Cheong viewed the strike as a success: "I had the job to do... [the strike] only lasted two days. All the issues were settled. It showed the management was just trying to pull a fast one."

His first political appointment came just three years later when he was appointed Senior Minister of State for Communications. At that time, Ong pushed for the development of the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), the largest construction project in Singapore's history. During his tenure as Minister for Communications, Ong was a proponent and advocate of the Mass Rapid Transit system. He was subsequently appointed Second Deputy Prime Minister in 1985.

Ong made many grounds in repairing the strained relationship between the unions and the government where Lim had failed. After a few months as secretary-general, "he confronted the rebellious leadership of UWPI" where "they quickly reversed their opposition to house unions", and in 1985 the Triennial Delegates Conference endorsed the government's push for house unions. Barr writes, "Ong had a mastery of institutional power".

In 1983, Ong succeeded Lim Chee Onn as Secretary-General of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC). Historically, the non-communist trade unions, led by the NTUC, have had a "uniquely cosy relationship" with the PAP government in "a tripartite system" and were key political allies to the PAP's securing of power in the 1960s. Though in 1982, Lim Chee Onn, still the secretary-general, had "proclaimed effusive[ly]" that the "PAP and the NTUC came from the same mother—the struggle with the communists and the colonialists," the relations between the unions and the government had become more strained by the 1980s.

A former member of the governing People's Action Party (PAP) and Ong served as Chairman of the People's Action Party between 1981 and 1993, after Toh Chin Chye stepped down from the position. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Kim Keat SMC between 1972 and 1991, and Toa Payoh GRC between 1991 and 1993. He also served as Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts between 1978 and 1981, Minister for Manpower between 1981 and 1983, and Deputy Prime Minister between 1985 and 1993.

Ong's political beginnings started when he got involved in the grassroots activities in Seletar and was then introduced to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. The People's Action Party (PAP) subsequently fielded him as a PAP candidate contesting in Kim Keat SMC during the 1972 general election.

Older grassroots union leaders had been excluded from decisions in the top NTUC leadership, which, by the analysis of Michael Barr, had come to be dominated by de facto appointed PAP technocrats foreign to the grassroots labour movement. Lee Kuan Yew felt that Lim, although his "protégé", was not "progressing well" in the "process of meshing in the [elite] scholars and the professionals with the rank-and-file union leaders" in NTUC, causing "increasing disquiet" among the grassroots union leaders. Lim himself had been preceded by Devan Nair, founder of the NTUC and a well-known democratic socialist member of the PAP's Old Guards, and Phey Yew Kok, a powerful union leader who was instrumental in convincing Chinese unions to join the NTUC during the 1970s, but had been forced to resign in 1980 and fled the country in a corruption scandal.

In 1967, Ong joined the Ministry of National Development (MND) as a town planner. After four years of civil service, Ong resigned in 1971, and started his own architectural firm, Ong & Ong Architects & Town Planners, with his wife.

In 1965, Ong received a Colombo Plan scholarship to pursue a master's degree in urban planning at the University of Liverpool and graduated in 1967.

Upon graduation, Ong worked as an architect in Adelaide, Australia, and married Ling in 1963. Ong and his wife occasionally recite Chinese poetry and verses they learnt during their younger days.

Although striking was prohibited and trade unions were barred from negotiating such matters as promotion, transfer, employment, dismissal, retrenchment, and reinstatement, issues that "accounted for most earlier labour disputes", the government generally provided measures for workers' safety and welfare since the 1960s and serious union disputes, with employers were almost always handled through the Industrial Arbitration Court, which had powers of both binding arbitration and voluntary mediation. However, the grassroots leaders in the unions had become increasingly worried about their marginalisation in Singapore politics. Peter Vincent, President of the NTUC from 1980 to 1984, stated that PAP technocrats should "remain in advisory positions [in the NTUC] until they have gained the respect of the union movement". In response, Ong "increased the levels of consultation with his colleagues in the NTUC" and "reversed the trend of excluding grassroots leaders from the upper reaches of the NTUC".

In 1956, with the help of his father's friends, Ong ventured abroad. Those years were to shape both his beliefs and passions. Ong studied architecture at the University of Adelaide along with his childhood sweetheart and future wife, Ling Siew May. Both Ong and Ling met each other during a Christmas party while they were still studying in secondary school.

Ong graduated with distinctions from The Chinese High School (now part of Hwa Chong Institution) in 1955. Having received a Chinese-language education, Ong saw little opportunity for advancing his studies in the University of Malaya, as English was the university's language medium.

Ong Teng Cheong GCMG (Chinese: 王鼎昌; pinyin: Wáng Dǐngchāng; 22 January 1936 – 8 February 2002) was a Singaporean architect, union leader and politician who served as the fifth president of Singapore between 1993 and 1999. He was the first president in Singapore's history to be directly elected by popular vote.

Born on 22 January 1936 in Singapore, Ong was the second of five children from a middle-class family. His English-educated father Ong Keng Wee, felt that the Chinese language was important if one ever want to become successful in business at the time and thus sent all of his children to Chinese-medium schools.