I disagree with you on this.
Outwardly, LKY on the world stage did successfully pull off a balancing act between east and west. As one of the first advocates of fostering ties with an emergent "Communist" China, he may seem pro-Chinese but that is quite far from the truth. What he did was simply a good statesman does, he picked the best course of action that the small, nascent city needed to survive and prosper in a very hostile situation. He made bed with both east and west equally cos Singapore could benefit from both.
Within Singapore however, he was definitely never pro-Chinese. LKY is Peranakan
While Peranakans are of originally of ethnic Chinese origin, culturally they are not Chinese. They have their own evolved culture blending local Malay systems with their own Chinese heritage to the point that they neither consider themselves Malay nor Chinese but Peranakan. My own experience may be extreme but I have "family" that is Peranakan and their viewpoint is rather dismissive of anything Cina (Malay word for Chinese often used in a derogative manner) or Melayu for that matter. They quite view themselves as a race apart from either.
LKY inherited a nation that was largely Chinese and he was acutely aware that he himself was anything but Chinese. He never learnt Chinese as a Peranakan child but rather English and Malay. For him to win votes with the largely Chinese population, he had to appear as one of them - so he learnt Chinese and Hokkien (the predominant immigrant group in Singapore) and used that in Speeches.
Aside:
That is my pet peeve with democracy in it's base form. The winning of votes is all theatre catering to the common denominator. What LKY did do well was, once in office, he and his cabinet were actually capable and pragmatic in what was actually required to build a modern nation. Singapore could be said to be lucky to have him BUT back to why I say he was never pro-Chinese.
Homogenising the Chinese population to one lingua franca makes sense. But in the promoting standard Mandarin, he also crushed all dialects. In the space of two generations, Grandchildren lost the ability to speak to their grandparents as the former was educated in standard Chinese whilst the grandparents could only speak dialect. Nanyang immigrant culture was largely low income, low education and low social strata and as such, largely tradition and oral. When you drastically cut off that transmission by making the next generation unable to communicate with the previous, you are very much diluting their culture unless someone makes the effort to translate and transition the richness of the culture from one generation to the next ... and no one really did so officially. This plays into LKY's hands domestically as it made these rootless Chinese more accepting of him as one of them rather than actually focus on his Peranakaness as being really not one of them.
The other action with a big impact is that Singapore under LKY, got rid of all Chinese schools. This is big as it homogenised successive generations of Chinese children via a central curriculum devoid of race and cultural education. For perspective, Malaysia and Indonesia Chinese both allowed Chinese language schools to be retained. These served as bastions of Chinese culture in a minority setting as these schools actively sought to reinforce what was lacking in the society they were set in.
Diluting the Chinese-ness works in Singapore and PAP (the ruling party) favour as it reduced friction with the vastly Malay majority neighbours and made the significant Peranakan business and political community less conspicuous.
That this made it easier for western culture to make inroads is besides the point. The base reason is not inherently anti-Chinese but for political expediency and survival.
