By Jia Cheng

Lee Kuan Yew, the man who came to symbolize Singapore since its independence, stepped down from the country's cabinet Saturday, ceding the leadership to his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, after more than half a century.

"After a watershed general election, we have decided to leave the cabinet and have a completely younger team of ministers to connect to and engage with this young generation in shaping the future of our Singapore," the Xinhua News Agency quoted Lee and Singapore's former senior minister Goh Chok Tong as saying in a joint resignation statement.

Lee, 87, has been known as minister mentor and served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990, while Goh has held the position of senior minister since 2004. Both won Parliament seats in the recent election.

"Lee has led Singapore to economic prosperity when he was in power," Cheng Bifan, a researcher of the Asia-Pacific Research Institute at the China Institutes of International Studies, told the Global Times.

Close cooperation on economy and trade between Singapore and many powers, such as Japan, China, and Western countries, has brought a lot of benefits to the country's development, he added.

The move comes one week after the parliamentary election, which saw opposition parties make their most effective challenge yet as the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) suffered from its worst election result since independence.

The ruling PAP, which has been in power since Singapore became an independent state in 1959, won 60 percent of the vote, its lowest-ever tally down from 66.6 percent in 2006, Xinhua said.

Agencies contributed to this story