Quick note: I have migrated to Substack because its just easier to host things here and hopefully, it forces me to write more.

I just published an interview with my one of my favourite economists of the 21st century- Ha-Joon Chang.

Full Transcript can be found here:

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Ha-Joon Chang On Why We Need To Rethink Our Current Economic Order

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4 days ago · Keith Yap

I’ll be honest — getting Ha-Joon Chang on the show was one I’d wanted for a long time.

There are economists who are technically brilliant but impossible to read. There are others who are accessible but not very insightful.

Prof Chang is the rare third thing: someone who has done the serious scholarly work — decades of it — and can then sit across from you and explain why the global economy is organised the way it is, in language that doesn’t require a PhD to follow.

In a field that often prizes jargon and mistakes it for rigour, Prof Chang has an uncanny ability to communicate profound insights simply.

His mission, as I read it, is essentially one of myth-busting.

Here are three myths he has busted:

• The myth that unadulterated free markets are the natural and superior state of economic organisation.

• The myth that the countries preaching liberalisation got rich by following their own advice.

• The myth that financialised capitalism — where corporations exist primarily to return cash to short-term shareholders rather than to build things — is a sign of a healthy economy rather than a symptom of a broken one.

He does this not with polemic but with data, with history, and stories. This has made his books a joy to read.

Oh- by the way, I am giving a copy of his book - 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism to a lucky subscriber.

To boost your chances, you can do (any/all) of the following:

• Reply this email with a 5 star rating of my podcast on Spotify/Apple or wherever you get your podcast

• Reply this email with why you want a copy of this book!

• Write about a learning you had from any of my podcast episodes on your favourite social platform (tag me!)

Also, since I have you here…

If you want something accessible, fun and light - please read Edible Economics!

The premise is disarmingly simple: each chapter uses a different food to illuminate an economic concept.

For example, I loved how he used coconuts as a way to dispel the myth of the lazy tropics - where tropical countries are poor because the ‘natives’ lie beneath a coconut tree and wait for coconuts to fall, rather than trying to actively grow or, better still, make things.

(I will not spoil the book here)

Without further ado, my three takeaways from this week’s episode.

1. The West Was Never a Finished Story

The big idea from this conversation is that we are living at the end of ideological monotony.

For most of the post-war period, there was a dominant model: the assumption — often unspoken, but deeply embedded — that the American way of organising an economy was simply the correct one.

Free markets, limited government, unrestricted capital flows.

But as Ha-Joon Chang argued, that story becomes much less convincing once you look at the evidence.

Neoliberalism promised faster growth and delivered the opposite.

World per capita growth fell from roughly 2.8% annually during the mixed-economy era to 1.4% under neoliberalism.

Sub-Saharan Africa's average income in 2020 was only 6% higher than what it was in 1980.

And if we look at the countries who truly succeeded in development in the 20th century - they reveal a truth about economic development: active industrial policy often achieved rapid development by combining markets with strong state direction.

The lesson is not that markets do not matter.

It is that markets alone rarely explain development.

This is not to diminish what America built.

To become the world’s preeminent superpower in under two centuries is a remarkable civilisational achievement.

But remarkable is not the same as optimal.

The more useful distinction is between admiration and assumption.

We are not at the end of American power. We are at the end of American exceptionalism as an unchallenged premise.

2. Singapore Understood This Early

Chang’s comments on industrial policy brought me back to Ooi Kee Beng’s intellectual biography of Dr Goh Keng Swee, In Lieu of Ideology — a book I’d recommend to anyone trying to understand how Singapore actually works.

(See my interview with him here if you’d like)

Dr Goh understood something that mainstream economics took decades to fully absorb: an open and integrated global market is an opportunity for states to fast-track development.

But this does not mean a government should step aside.

It means the state has to be deliberate about how it shapes the economy — courting investors, building institutions, and concentrating effort where the returns are highest.

Here is an excerpt from Prof Ooi’s book- that explains why Dr Goh saw manufacturing as the leading industry that Singapore ought to take a bet on-

In short, industry would modernise and enrich. The general raising of the technological level of the countries, the spread of modern systems of production and management, all these, in the calculations of the planners, would not only generate economic growth but also help to bring about a rapid transformation of social attitudes, more consistent with the needs of modernising societies

Selection was only the beginning.

Singapore via EDB (the Economic Development Board) had to help make those industries viable through infrastructure, coordination, incentives, and institution-building.

That logic is closely aligned with what Prof Chang calls effective industrial policy: targeted sectors, coordinated support, and public inputs that no single firm can provide alone.

Dan Wang calls China - an engineering state because he has come to understand that modern China is unusually focused on solving problems through engineering, industrial capacity, infrastructure, and technical expertise.

My only rejoinder is that Singapore got there first (albeit on a much smaller scale)

3. Wealth Is Not the Same as Health

The U.S. spends far more on healthcare than peer countries, but it does not convert that spending into better outcomes. In 2024, the U.S. spent 17.2% of GDP on health, compared with an OECD average of 9.3%.

Yet U.S. life expectancy was 79.0 years, while comparable wealthy OECD countries averaged 82.7 years.

Singapore is the sharper contrast here.

Singapore’s health expenditure is about 4.5-5% of our GDP and yet our life expectancy is 83.9 years.

To make a crude comparison, we spend about 1/3 of what the US spent on its healthcare and on average we outlive them by 5 years!

The broader point in my view is not that money does not matter.

It is that beyond a certain level, how wealth is organized matters more than how much wealth exists. Who benefits, how resources are distributed, and what institutions convert spending into outcomes all matter enormously.

And that is really what Prof Chang is inviting us to consider when we engage in the world of economics.

Til the next one,
Keith

Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean economist and one of the most widely read critics of neoliberal orthodoxy working today.

He is currently a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

He is best known for his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, published in 2010, which challenged the foundational claims of free-market economics with rigorous historical and empirical argument.

His earlier work, Kicking Away the Ladder, demonstrated how today's rich countries used protectionism and industrial policy to develop — before turning around and telling developing nations to liberalise.

Chang's research spans developmental economics, the history of economic thought, and the political economy of globalisation.

He has been a vocal proponent of what he calls "non-mainstream" economics: not a single doctrinal school, but a pluralist approach that draws on institutional, Keynesian, and developmentalist traditions to analyse how economies actually grow and change.

In this conversation, Chang offers a sweeping critique of neoliberalism's track record on growth and inequality, a dispassionate assessment of Donald Trump's industrial policy ambitions, and a pointed analysis of the AI boom as a speculative bubble shaped by concentrated wealth rather than genuine demand.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Trailer
1:08 Introduction
1:54 Growing Up in South Korea's Economic Miracle
4:36 Why Ha-Joon Chang Is Not "Heterodox"
4:58 The Gwangju Massacre and the Limits of Neoclassical Economics
10:45 How the Neoliberal Turn Happened
18:32 The Real Cost of the Free-Market Experiment
25:20 Why Singapore Works
29:58 Trump's Industrial Policy: Will It Work?
37:50 The Three Elements of Good Industrial Policy
40:54 The Right Lessons From China
44:44 How Bad Is Inequality in the US?
53:18 The AI Bubble
58:36 AI as Public Infrastructure
1:00:48 How to Build a More Just World
1:06:14 Closing

This is the 86th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

See below for the full transcript :

Keith 00:01:08

Today I have the privilege of speaking with Professor Ha-Joon Chang. He is best known for his work on developmental economics and his critique of neoliberal economics. I read his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, and I’m surprised that a book written in 2010 still holds so much weight in 2026.

To thank you all for your support, I’ve decided to gift a copy of this book to a lucky subscriber. All you have to do is sign up for my newsletter at ykeith.com, and I’ll notify the winner through the newsletter.

With that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Professor Ha-Joon Chang.

Before we start, I’d like for you to share with us what got you interested in the world of economics.

Ha-Joon Chang 00:01:54

I was born in 1963 and grew up — I don’t remember much before the age of six or seven — basically in the 1970s, when South Korea was growing at ten, twelve percent per year. New industries were springing up, people were moving into modern apartments. It was a time of great achievement, but also of huge social upheaval.

As usually happens in developing countries at the early stage of economic development, you had people moving from the countryside into the cities, illegal settlements growing, and developers hiring thugs to beat up residents with police complicity. It was a very harsh time, even as living standards were rising.

At the time, most Korean industries were in labour-intensive sectors working on paper-thin margins. Some factories would refuse to have a canteen so they wouldn’t have to give workers an extra toilet break.

It was a period of enormous economic and social change, and I just wanted to understand it. When you’re fourteen or fifteen, you don’t know how to do that. My father was working at the Ministry of Finance at the time — he didn’t push me in any direction — but he said, “Have you heard of something called economics? This might be useful in helping you understand what’s going on.”

So I went to university and realised this was what I wanted to study: to understand how my country had evolved, why some other countries were not doing as well, and why so many developing countries are structurally held back by the global system against their will to develop. I never looked back.

Keith 00:04:36

You are quite a heterodox economist. A lot of people who look at your work say you’re someone who isn’t really mainstream. I’d like for you to give me a sense of when that moment of disillusionment with mainstream economics — neoliberal economics — first emerged, even as a young academic.

Ha-Joon Chang 00:04:58

I actually don’t use the word “heterodox” myself if I can avoid it. What is heterodox depends on your point of view. If you’re a member of the Greek or Russian Orthodox Church, the guy in Rome is the heterodox one. I try to say “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” rather than “orthodox” and “heterodox,” because orthodox and heterodox imply a doctrinal position. Mainstream and non-mainstream is simply a description of who is more dominant.

I became interested in these so-called heterodox ideas as soon as I started studying economics. As I said, there was a huge social upheaval going on. A couple of years before I entered university, there was a second military coup. We had the first coup by General Park in 1961 — he imprisoned and tortured many people, but his army never shot civilians. The second military government, which took power after General Park was assassinated by the head of his secret police, committed a massacre in my father’s hometown of Gwangju. They killed thousands of people. This story was later written as a novel by Han Kang, the Korean Nobel Literature Prize winner — the English title is The Human Acts.

So many of my friends were deeply upset and wanted to understand what was happening. And then you entered the classroom and there were professors talking about marginal utility, general equilibrium, and regression analysis. I just couldn’t take it seriously.

What these teachers were saying was essentially: things might get out of whack for a while, but they’ll always return to equilibrium. Whatever exists, exists because it has to. But step outside the classroom and there were plainclothes policemen on the university campus. I just couldn’t take that seriously.

More fundamentally, studying economics, I realised you need a more dynamic approach. Neoclassical economics, however much people have tried to make it long-term oriented, has limits — because it starts from the assumption that we do not question the underlying distribution of power, income, and wealth. It then tries to make society better using something called the Pareto improvement: you cannot call a social change an improvement unless it makes someone better off without making anyone worse off.

That’s a noble ethical principle, but if you take that attitude, there are very few changes you can make — especially in the early stages of development, when you really need to change things like the distribution of land through land reform, when you need to redistribute power so that more forward-looking capitalists can take the lead. In that kind of situation, neoclassical economics becomes very weak.

It also has no real theory of production. All it says is that there is a relationship between different combinations of inputs and outputs — that production happens when you combine abstract quanta called capital and labour, and something comes out at the end. There’s no story about power struggles on the factory floor, about how people learn skills, about how production organisations develop. It’s a very static theory — very good for looking at static market exchange, information asymmetry, short-term things, but not useful for the long term.

So I wanted to study different things, and here I am.

Keith 00:10:45

There was a time in the post-war era where active state intervention, high taxes, and managed trade were considered perfectly normal — part of every state’s policy toolkit. And then something shifted. There was this huge wave of neoliberalism, and an almost default switch to free-market economics where any form of state intervention became seen as wrong.

Even in Singapore, I recall that when we were negotiating the free trade agreement with the US, the American government was very much against the idea of a sovereign wealth fund actively operating in equities markets. How did that transition actually happen, in your view?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:11:42

To understand the transition, you have to go back to the 1920s and 1930s. Capitalism was spectacularly failing during that period — the Great Depression, mass unemployment, class struggle that produced on the one hand the Russian Revolution, and on the other the rise of fascism. After the Second World War, people recognised that they needed a more equitable society to ensure stability. They needed what was then called a mixed economy, because they understood that the free market on its own doesn’t work.

Many countries nationalised enterprises. Many imposed controls on financial markets. Many started using industrial policy. This was the situation in the rich capitalist economies. At the same time, a wave of decolonisation swept through the 1950s and 60s, and the developing countries that had been forced to operate under free trade and free markets during colonialism realised this was getting them nowhere. They wanted to do things differently.

So for roughly thirty years — between 1945 and 1975 — you had a world where wide-ranging state intervention was accepted as normal, even in capitalist countries. In Britain, until the 1970s, something like 15% of GDP was produced by state-owned enterprises. Countries like France, Finland, Norway, Germany, and Italy all used various forms of industrial policy.

At the foundation of all this was a class compromise: workers would cooperate with capitalists to raise investment and productivity, and capitalists would reward them. During this period, productivity growth and wage growth were almost identical.

But by the 1970s, the weaker parties had become too strong, if I may put it that way. Many trade unions started pushing for further redistribution, and developing countries came together calling for a New International Economic Order. The leading capitalists grew very upset and wanted to turn the clock back — to create a world where they faced no constraints on making money.

People don’t realise this, but during this thirty-year period — sometimes called the golden age of capitalism, or in France, the Trente Glorieuses — the top income tax rate in the United States was 92%. Even until the 1970s it was around 70%. Then Ronald Reagan brought it down to 40%, and his successors brought it down further.

The capitalist interest saw an opportunity in the rise of inflation, the oil shock of the 1970s in the rich countries, and then the third-world debt crisis of the 1980s, and pushed back massively.

The reality, of course, was more complicated. By the 1990s, if not the 1980s, almost all countries had moved in a more free-market direction — but it was a very mixed picture. In the US and UK they went all the way to the right; in many European countries the backbone of the mixed economy was maintained, the welfare state was preserved.

And Singapore — well, you might have free trade and welcome foreign investors, but 90% of the land is owned by the government, 85% of housing is provided by the Housing and Development Board, and over 20% of GDP is produced by government-linked enterprises. It’s a very mixed economy.

So if you look at countries in detail, you see these variations. But overall — especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc — the idea that free markets, free trade, and free movement of capital would make everyone better off took hold. And of course, we know now that the outcome has been rather disappointing, to put it mildly.

Keith 00:18:32

If you want full access to the transcripts of every episode, just head over to ykeith.com and you’ll get full and free access. Now back to the show.

In this book, and in another book called Kicking Away the Ladder, you showed that rich countries used protectionism and industrial policy to develop — one thinks back to the early 1800s United States, where trade protection was at an all-time high. But now they’ve told everyone else to liberalise. That seems to be the Western establishment mode of thinking.

I’d like for you to share with us what the real cost to the global economy has been — especially to developing countries that took the free-market approach of opening everything up and privatising completely.

Ha-Joon Chang 00:19:21

The biggest lie propagated by neoliberal economists is that neoliberalism saved the world. Their line of argument is that it unleashed entrepreneurial spirit, that countries started growing faster. Yes, it may have increased inequality, but if a country wants to tax and redistribute, it can. If a country stands by while inequality rises, that’s their choice.

But the truth of the matter is that neoliberalism has been spectacularly bad at delivering economic growth. And that was their central promise.

During the period of the mixed economy, the world economy was growing at about 2.7 to 2.8% in per capita terms. In the next forty years of neoliberalism, it has grown at only about 1.4 to 1.5% per year. Growth collapsed, especially in developing countries.

In the 1960s and 70s, per capita income in Latin America was growing at 3.1% per year. In the next forty years, it fell to 0.8%. In sub-Saharan Africa, per capita income was growing at 1.6% during the 60s and 70s. In the next forty years, it grew at just 0.3% per year. That means that by 2020, the average income in sub-Saharan Africa was only 6% higher than what it was in 1980.

The underlying dynamic is simple. It led to a collapse in investment. In order for an economy to grow, you need real investment — but today when people talk about investment, it’s all financial investment, much of it speculative. Investment rates fell across the world — except in China, which is why China has done so much better than other economies.

And what little investment there was went poorly coordinated, because industrial policy had been abolished. You might create a big industrial park, but then there’s no accompanying investment in roads and rails, so you face added costs if you want to export.

The numbers are there if you care to look, but they are not told. Many developing countries, as a result of this kicking away of the ladder — rich countries using the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 90s to force these countries not to use the protection, subsidies, and regulation on foreign investment that had made the rich countries themselves wealthy — experienced what is known as premature deindustrialisation.

This concept was developed by my former teacher and later colleague at Cambridge, the Chilean economist Gabriel Palma. Processing enormous amounts of statistical data, he showed that developing countries since the 1980s began experiencing deindustrialisation — a declining share of manufacturing in the economy — well before they had reached the level of development at which this process began in today’s rich countries.

In Brazil, for example, in the mid-1980s the manufacturing sector accounted for 35% of GDP. Today it’s barely 10%. At Brazil’s income level, this shouldn’t be happening — deindustrialisation is what you see when you become very rich and services naturally rise as a share of the economy. But at Brazil’s level of income, it shouldn’t start yet. And this is why Brazil has been struggling to grow. It has basically lost its engine of growth.

Keith 00:25:20

Singapore — I’ve had the chance to speak with some of our early economic architects, and the big lesson I’ve taken away is that they were very embracing of free trade and free capital flows, but very persistent about state intervention — industrial policy, as some would call it. You had civil servants actively scouting for the best land on which to put factories. What we have today — one of the world’s largest petrochemical facilities, even though we don’t produce a single drop of oil — is the result of deliberate industrial policy planning.

Ha-Joon Chang 00:25:58

Absolutely. Singapore is the ultimate example of why you should not be driven by ideology when designing economic policy. When I take new PhD students, I tell them to read about Singapore and ask them to give me one economic theory — it doesn’t matter which: neoclassical, Marxist, developmentalist, Keynesian — one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore’s success. There is no such theory.

Singapore is the outcome of very pragmatic choices, not bound by any ideology or any particular economic theory, which led the country to choose what was best for it.

Singapore was initially developed as a trading port by the British Empire. It would have been foolish to abandon that position as one of the main trading hubs in Asia by adopting protectionist policies. So you adopted free trade.

But with pure free trade, it’s very difficult to develop your own manufacturing capabilities. So you started courting foreign companies to come and set up shop in Singapore. But unlike most other countries, what you did very well was to work with these companies so they could actually develop capabilities locally. Typically what happens — Sri Lanka is a classic example — is that foreign companies come in, local workers assemble high-tech products, but they only earn wages. When wages rise slightly, the companies move on because there’s no reason to stay. Singapore recognised that shouldn’t happen and worked with foreign companies to develop local capabilities.

Subsequently it also recognised that if you leave all productive enterprises to foreigners, you lose economic sovereignty. So you started creating state-owned enterprises — in semiconductors, steel, ports, and so on. And unlike some who believe state-owned enterprises should not operate according to market principles, Singapore made sure these enterprises respected commercial principles and became internationally competitive.

So you ended up with, from any mainstream economic point of view, a very peculiar mix. One that shouldn’t work in theory. How can you have an economy where 90% of the land is owned by the government and over 20% of GDP is produced by government-linked enterprises, alongside free trade and all the things free-market economists advocate?

Keith 00:29:58

There is this comeback of industrial policy, most clearly illustrated by President Trump, who is imposing tariffs and talking about bringing jobs back to America. On the surface, reindustrialisation sounds sensible. I have two questions. First: what are the core elements of successful industrial policy? What does it take to industrialise successfully? And second: is what President Trump is doing actually economically sound in terms of reshoring manufacturing to the US?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:30:36

What Donald Trump is trying to do is essentially give protection from superior foreign competitors and subsidies to help American enterprises raise productivity behind the wall of protection. At the most abstract level, this is the very principle behind the economic success of nineteenth-century Britain, then the US, then Japan, South Korea, and so on — known as the infant industry argument.

Interestingly, the argument was invented by the very first Treasury Secretary of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, who argued that American manufacturing industries are like children — industries in their infancy. We need to nurture and protect them until they can grow up and compete with better-established firms from Britain and Europe, just as we protect and nurture our children until they can compete in the adult labour market. Country after country used this principle to raise their economies from a poor agrarian base to a highly industrialised status.

So Trump is essentially trying to apply this not to infants but to geriatric industries. It’s like trying to give a second chance to your 45-year-old son who has run the family business into the ground. The hope is that you protect these enterprises and then they’ll invest and grow.

It’s not going to work. Period. For two reasons.

First, American corporations do not invest. If you look at the data produced by the American economist Bill Lazonick — sometimes working with my Korean friend Professor Chang Sup Shin at the National University of Singapore — American corporations have given away 90 to 95% of their profits to short-term shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks over the last thirty years.

We learn in economics textbooks that the stock market is a way of aggregating household savings and channelling that money to productive enterprises. It used to work like that. Not anymore. With financialisation, these companies are not just not investing — they are borrowing money and selling assets to give money to shareholders. During the 2010s, General Electric distributed 313% of its profit to shareholders. There’s no money to invest.

So unless Donald Trump can force the American companies receiving this protection and these subsidies to stop doing stock buybacks — if not stop paying dividends — and instead invest that money to raise productivity and ultimately international competitiveness, this is not going to work.

Second, even if he could do that, he needs a proper industrial policy. The current approach is essentially random. You shouldn’t protect every sector equally — that’s absurd. You should target certain sectors, concentrate support there, and make sure the targeted sectors are coordinated with each other. These are exactly the kinds of policies Singapore, Korea, and China have been very good at. What Trump has is not industrial policy. It’s just saying: we’re going to protect you, see what you can do. You cannot do it that way.

Trump instinctively knows that American companies are not going to invest, so he’s been twisting the arms of Korea, Japan, and some European countries to invest in the United States. Korea has promised $200 billion, Japan has promised $550 billion over the next ten years. So he’s succeeded to an extent. But the problem is that the United States is so big it cannot be rebuilt with other people’s money.

Back in 1950, the US produced 60% of world manufacturing output. Today, even though we think China produces everything, it still produces only about 30%. The US has fallen to 16 or 17%. Even if Japan, Germany, and South Korea were to relocate one-third of their respective manufacturing production to the United States, my back-of-envelope calculation suggests this would raise the US share from 17% to just above 20%. He cannot rebuild the American manufacturing sector with other people’s money. The money has to come from within — but the companies within are not interested.

Keith 00:37:50

So a good industrial policy, in your view, involves a few targeted sectors and good coordination within those sectors. What else does a policymaker need to think about to implement good industrial policy?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:38:03

You have to design an incentive system. You cannot do it like central planning, but you have to push companies not to become lazy but to raise productivity — which requires investment in R&D and worker training.

Around these sectors, the government also needs to provide collective inputs that individual enterprises, however large, would find impossible to supply on their own: infrastructure, skilled workers, a good education system, a worker training system, export marketing services — things like that.

And then of course you need to find a way to mobilise long-term finance, whether through government-owned development banks or through reforming the stock market so that long-term capital is rewarded. Some countries, for example, have tenure voting, where if you hold a share for longer you get more votes. It’s very marginal at the moment, but you could intensify the system — give higher dividends to long-term shareholders. In the United States, the average period of shareholding is less than one year. You cannot expect people who own shares for less than a year to be committed to the long-term future of a company. This is why they want instant gratification — give us the money, give us more money than you earn, borrow, sell your assets. Companies have turned into ATMs.

So: targeting, providing collective inputs, and mobilising long-term finance in different ways. These are the three most important elements of industrial policy.

Keith 00:40:54

Earlier you mentioned China, which represents a very significant paradigm shift. There’s this term in popular culture now — “China-maxxing” — where people look at China’s industrial policies and technological progress over just the past ten years with a kind of awe, and in some cases see it as something to emulate. From your perspective as someone who has studied development and industrial policy, what are the right lessons to draw from the Chinese experience — bearing in mind that it’s still a very unique economy that may differ from a smaller, mid-sized economy like ours?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:41:32

At one level, China is so unique that the only country that could possibly emulate it is India — we’re talking about countries with 1.4 billion people and vast territory.

But at another level, what China has been doing is exactly what other economically successful countries have done: making sure that infant industries are protected and promoted, and only then opening those sectors to foreign competition. That principle is there.

If you look at history, all countries have done it differently. Singapore is the most unusual case, but even within East Asia: Taiwan relied very heavily on state-owned enterprises, as did Singapore. Japan had hardly any. Korea had a few — somewhere around the international average.

Japan and Korea had very strict regulation on foreign direct investment. If you wanted to invest directly in Japan or Korea, many sectors were closed off; even in open sectors you couldn’t hold a majority share; you had to sign up to local content programmes; you had to agree to technology transfer arrangements over time. Singapore didn’t formally have those restrictions, at least not in the same way.

China actually didn’t have as many formal restrictions as Japan or Korea — not because it didn’t want them, but because it had such a huge internal market that it had enormous bargaining power. It didn’t need to do it formally. It could simply say: well, if you want to come here, it’s not a requirement, but it would be very nice if you did these things. And foreign enterprises would comply because who can resist the temptation of 1.4 billion people with rapidly growing incomes?

So all these countries have done it differently, and in that sense it’s not unusual that China has done it in its own unique way — because every other country has also done it in its own unique way.

Keith 00:44:44

In the very free-market world that I think we live in — especially in the US and UK — if you take the more free-market orthodoxy to its logical conclusion, you naturally get increasing concentration of power, resources, and capital among the business elites. Can you talk about how serious the inequality problem really is? Because one might argue: yes, there’s some inequality, but we’ve driven huge technological and economic progress. The average consumer today has far more access to goods and services than previous generations. So why should one concern themselves too much with this issue?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:45:34

When people look at the United States, they get overawed and think it’s a great country. It may have a higher per capita income than most other countries — Switzerland and Norway are higher, but the US is above most. Yet the quality of life that this income actually delivers is visibly lower than in other comparable rich economies, partly because the income is so badly distributed.

Look at real indicators of quality of life, not just the money. The fact that the US has $80,000 per capita income doesn’t mean everyone has $80,000. There are families struggling with $50,000 in household income.

Take life expectancy — probably the most fundamental indicator of human welfare, since your life chances are what matter most. Life expectancy at birth in the United States is 78 years. The average for rich countries is 84 years. Americans on average live six years less than people in comparable parts of Europe — a life expectancy you’d find in Central European countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, countries with less than $30,000 per capita income. So if this income level delivers six years fewer of life, there is clearly a serious problem.

18% of Americans live in poverty. The rate is 6% in Denmark, 8% in France. Of course, this is relative poverty — poor by the standards of others in the same country — and these Americans are not poor by the standards of poorer countries in Asia and Africa. But still.

Every social indicator you look at — social mobility, homicide rate, incarceration rate — the US performs very badly. It spends something like 18% of GDP on healthcare, and yet has the worst health record in the rich world, where the average spending on healthcare is ten to eleven percent of GDP.

At a low level of income — the kind I grew up with — economic growth and higher incomes are a matter of life and death. If your economy grows one or two percentage points faster, fewer people literally die. People can eat another bowl of rice. They can heat or cool their homes a little more. They can go to the hospital or at least the pharmacy to get medicine. They don’t have to watch their children die at age one or two. At that level of income, faster growth absolutely matters.

But there’s no evidence that beyond a certain income level — I’d say around $20,000 to $25,000 per capita — there is any correlation between income and people’s welfare or life satisfaction. So why are we so fascinated by a country that, with $80,000 per capita income, fails to take care of its own people? What is the point of that high income when people are unhealthy and unhappy?

And this is why we have Donald Trump. American voters — especially in the so-called Rust Belt areas, which once had very high standards of living and healthy communities built around world-class enterprises — have seen all of that disappear. These people are desperate. In the US, you cannot even go to a hospital if you don’t have a job, because health insurance is tied to employment rather than citizenship.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and others like him are working very hard to become trillionaires. And these voters are saying: enough. We want a better life. And along comes someone like Trump who says: the way to get it is to kick out immigrants, give more money to the rich, be nasty to our allies, make them invest in America, and keep their exports out.

The US as it is today is exactly the consequence of neoliberal policies that created this huge inequality. America was always more unequal than European countries, but it was not this unequal before.

Keith 00:53:18

Looking at the way AI is developing now — in the US especially — you have this huge boom where AI is absorbing an enormous share of capital. The Magnificent Seven are concentrating more and more capital even within the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq. Is this a sign of unsustainable wealth concentration? What’s your read?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:53:54

I think at the moment it’s a huge bubble, caused partly by this inequality. Because what you have to bear in mind is that, unlike democracy, the market is one dollar, one vote. It will do whatever the people with the most money want to do.

This is why, during the pandemic, when literally millions of people were dying because they lacked basic things like plastic covering and face masks, Bezos and Musk were having a private space race. How crazy is that? But that’s the market for you.

The AI boom, at the moment, is basically a repetition of that pattern. Simply because these individuals with literally trillions of dollars at their disposal somehow decided this is the future.

This bubble is likely to burst. I don’t know when, but it will — because they are building data centres and developing programmes well ahead of actual demand. It’ll end in tears. But the danger is that we might end up destroying what is genuinely useful in AI in the process. The development of AI should have been more regulated and more deliberate, because it is a big public infrastructure — like railways or the air traffic system. It’s not something only one group of people uses, or only a few industries use.

In the same way that many countries have government-owned railways, AI is a sector that could be in public ownership. I say “could” because even with railways, if you regulate well you don’t have to have public ownership — Japan has a state-owned rail company, but most of its rail is privately owned and has an excellent record of punctuality and safety, because the government regulates it very strictly. So I’m not necessarily saying AI should be taken into government ownership. But it needs to be regulated for the benefit of the broader society.

There’s also the question of competition with the Chinese approach to AI. The American approach is, essentially, a hoax. They talk about artificial general intelligence, about the day when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Some say it will destroy humanity. It’s grand talk, very good for massive speculative investment.

The Chinese approach treats AI for what it is and what it should be, in my view: a highly advanced version of an abacus. A calculator. A way to mechanise our mental labour. They are focusing on more practical applications. In my view, in the long run, that approach will win. In the short run, of course, the American approach looks like it’s going to sweep the world because so many tech billionaires are betting on it. A lot of them will end up in tears.

Keith 00:58:36

I really appreciate that perspective, because even the tech CEOs in the US position these tools as utilities — as almost public utilities. So if that’s the case, could you make the argument that you treat them as public utilities in the way you regulate and produce them?

Ha-Joon Chang 00:59:01

You should, yes. Especially because AI can also generate false information. People are already worried about AI’s tendency to hallucinate and to make things up. The World Bank recently produced a major report on industrial policy, and a former student of mine — now a professor in Portugal — had to write to the World Bank because they had made up a reference under his name: an article that didn’t exist, listed as published in a journal that doesn’t exist. The AI had apparently harvested a good quote from him, couldn’t quite find the source — it may have been something he said at a conference — and simply fabricated the reference.

When AI has the potential to spread false information even without anyone actively manipulating it to do so, you need strict regulation. You cannot say it’s just a random occurrence. AI can shake the fundamental fabric of society by making it impossible for people to know what is true and what is not.

Keith 01:00:48

I’d like to end on a more positive note. If you were to share with us — in brief — your prescription for how we can improve the world we live in, to move towards a more just and equitable society, what would it be?

Ha-Joon Chang 01:01:03

Two things. One can talk at the level of philosophy and ethics, and one should also talk about more concrete actions.

At the more philosophical level: we have to stop believing in this simplistic model of the world used by mainstream economists, where everyone is selfish and rational. Human beings are very complex. I have a textbook called Economics: The User’s Guide, published in 2014, in which I devote a whole chapter to exactly this. We have multiple motivations. Self-interest is one of them, but it’s not the only one. We are sometimes altruistic.

A former professor of mine, the Italian economist Ugo Pagano, once told me that the biggest challenge for people who believe in rational, selfish individuals is to explain how a man who wouldn’t even clear the dishes after dinner at home would take a bullet in a war for his comrade. That’s how complex we are. We have to recognise that we have multiple motivations, that we are sometimes rational but only in a limited way, and sometimes not at all.

We have to build a system that rewards the better sides of human beings: honesty, cooperation, solidarity, trust. We have to build institutions that encourage these things.

Unfortunately, the world is moving in the other direction. We are building a system on the premise that everyone is out to enrich themselves, that we cannot trust anyone, that we have to verify and surveil everything. And in doing so, we are creating a world where people think increasingly in individualised ways, making it harder and harder to have a meaningful society.

At the practical level: we have to create mechanisms that encourage long-term commitment — especially for developing countries, but also for countries like the US. Without long-term commitment to machines, technologies, particular forms of organisation, and finance, you cannot develop capabilities.

The problem with those who believe in shareholder capitalism is that they often think: what’s wrong with moving money around all the time? Money is money. If I take money out of General Electric today, and it does well five years later, I can always put my money back in. The world doesn’t work like that. It takes decades to build successful productive enterprises.

Samsung may be one of the leaders in semiconductors today, but it started out as a trading company exporting fish and vegetables to Japan during the colonial period in the 1930s. Then it got into sugar refining, textiles, then basic electronics, before setting up a semiconductor company that lost money for a whole decade — and even then had to be massively subsidised by the government.

If you destroy these enterprises once, you cannot build them back. This is why long-term commitment matters.

Keith 01:06:14

On that note, Prof, thank you so much for coming on. May we encourage more people to think long term.

Kishore Mahbubani is one of Asia's most prominent public intellectuals, a former diplomat, academic, and author whose career spans decades at the intersection of geopolitics, philosophy, and statecraft.

He served as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations on two occasions and as President of the UN Security Council, before becoming the founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, a position he held for over a decade.

He is the author of several widely read books on the shifting global order, most recently Has China Won?, which examines the structural logic of US-China competition and has been read and cited by senior officials on both sides of that contest.

In this conversation — filmed live in front of an audience of young leaders curated with the National Youth Council — Mahbubani ranges across the Iran-Israel war and the misreading of Persian civilisational logic, the structural weaknesses of multilateral institutions and who is actually responsible for them, the enduring miracle of ASEAN in the world's most diverse region, and the iron law of geopolitics that makes the US-China contest essentially mechanical.

He closes with a characteristically optimistic verdict on Singapore's place in history and what the next generation of leaders must understand to navigate the crossfire that is coming.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Trailer
1:08 Introduction
1:42 Singapore's Sixty Years of Peace
3:05 The MacDonald House Incident
5:00 How Singapore Repaired Relations With Indonesia
7:46 The Iran-Israel War
8:48 How Israel Sold Trump a Quick War
11:27 Why Iran Didn't Surrender
12:26 The Strait of Hormuz as a Weapon
14:38 Gaza and the Two-State Solution
16:00 How Gaza Damaged the West's Standing
18:26 Israel's Military Dominance Won't Last Forever
21:09 How Young Singaporeans Should Read the Crisis
21:42 Don't Get Emotional — Get Rational
23:24 Who Actually Weakened the UN
24:09 The Hypocrisy of Western Complaints About the UN
29:30 How Singapore Can Use Multilateral Platforms
31:56 The Iron Law of US-China Competition
33:57 How China Found Its Weapon
36:02 ASEAN's Imperfections — and Why That's Fine
39:37 ASEAN Outgrew the EU
42:09 Q&A
43:17 The Case for the UN Veto
45:15 Why the UK Should Give Its Seat to India
47:30 Sunrise vs Sunset Organisations — BRICS and the G7
52:15 ASEAN's Limits — and Its Quiet Power
56:02 The Long-Term Fallout From the Iran War
58:20 Is International Law a Sunrise or Sunset Trend?
1:02:46 Singapore's Founding Realist Principle
1:04:32 The Malacca Toll, the UAE, and the GCC
1:09:32 One Piece of Advice for Young Leaders
1:10:04 The Singapore Miracle in World History
1:13:00 Prepare for the Crossfire
1:13:51 Closing


This is the 84th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 01:08:00

To help us make sense of the coming chaos, we have a man who has helped build Singapore as a trustworthy and reliable partner in the world. He is a diplomat, scholar, and one of the most clear-eyed strategic thinkers Asia has ever produced. Some have called him the muse of the Asian century. This conversation that I'm about to share with you was filmed live in front of an audience of young leaders, curated together with the National Youth Council. We're glad we can share it with you online today.

Kishore 01:42:00

First of all, thank you very much for having me here, and thank you for spending an evening with me. I hope you don't find your time wasted.

On geopolitics and where we are in the world today, one thing I want to emphasise is that many Singaporeans don't understand that the almost sixty years of peace and prosperity Singapore has enjoyed makes this country very unique. In 1965, when Singapore became independent, the British left behind multiracial colonies in every corner of the world. If you travel to South America, you have Guyana — a multiracial colony left behind by the British. You have several in Africa. You had Sri Lanka in South Asia. You had Cyprus in Europe. You have Fiji in the South Pacific.

Go and check every country I've mentioned — every single one has experienced some kind of trauma, either internal or external, as part of its history. The thing that surprises me is that Singaporeans are not even aware of how unique and how remarkable our record is.

A couple of years before we became independent, during Konfrontasi, a bomb went off a few doors away at MacDonald House. That bomb had a very important impact on Singapore's history. As you know, we caught the two Indonesian marines responsible. Singapore, believing in the rule of law, put them on trial and determined they should hang. President Suharto asked for clemency. We said no. The Singapore embassy was burnt. As a result, relations between Singapore and Indonesia started off on a very sour note.

I mention that because the logical consequence of that incident could have been what you see today between India and Pakistan, between Israel and its neighbours, between Japan and China — all those kinds of enduring hostilities. But why didn't relations between Singapore and Indonesia go in that direction?

The answer is that our founding leaders were geniuses. Absolute geniuses. I say this with some confidence because I've actually met many world leaders. I can say with great confidence that our founding leaders were far superior to most world leaders in their ability to make tough decisions for Singapore.

Going back to the MacDonald House incident — we could have had decades of suspicion with Indonesia. But fortunately, we had a very smart ambassador there, Lee Koon Choy. He told Mr Lee Kuan Yew there was a very simple way of resolving this. Follow Javanese tradition: go to the graves of the two marines who were hanged in Singapore, sprinkle flowers, and their souls will rest in peace.

Something as simple as that, brilliantly done at the right time, closed a very painful chapter and allowed us to build and transform that relationship. Today, you live in a world where countries cannot even say sorry to each other or talk to each other. That is why you have this incredible amount of discord in the world.

The reason you have had these exceptional decades is because brilliant minds worked very hard to plant the right seeds for Singapore. Because they planted the right seeds, the right plants emerged. We have deep roots today. There are invisible trees above us that are actually protecting Singapore.

One simple example: when was the last time our region saw a major war? 1979 — that's 47 years ago. Why? Because there is an umbrella called ASEAN that was created, built over decades and decades. That's why you are enjoying the peace.

I mention this because many Singaporeans are not even aware of ASEAN, and those who are aware of it read what The Economist says, what the Financial Times says, and rubbish it. Because the Anglo-Saxon media rubbish ASEAN, Singaporeans rubbish ASEAN. In doing so, they are shooting holes in the umbrella that is protecting them. We must find out what is giving us this peace, and then cherish it, protect it, and nurture it.

Keith 07:46:00

The last time we spoke, about a year ago, the world was surprisingly less turbulent — which is ironic, because at that time I thought Liberation Day and the tariffs represented the worst things could get. Apparently, you can always sink to a new low.

I want to bring us to a current theatre of conflict: the Iran war. As we understand it now, the war is in a fragile pause. Large-scale airstrikes have eased, but the ceasefire is shaky, and in some cases has already been violated. The Strait of Hormuz remains a critical pressure point that Iran is using as leverage. Negotiations remain unresolved.

One of the points you've made in previous interviews is that the US has fundamentally misread Persian civilisational logic. I'd like you to explain what that actually means.

Kishore 08:48:00

On Iran — I call it the Israel war, because the conflict is fundamentally between Iran and Israel. Israel, as is well known, has significant influence on the United States and has been able to bring the US along with it. I hope some of you may have read the article in the Straits Times today by their London correspondent Jonathan Eyal, which is worth reading. For the first time, it argues, public opinion in the United States is turning against Israel. That would be one of the more self-defeating things Israel has done — alienating its strongest constituency.

In this war, both sides have made strategic mistakes. In Israel's case, for example, there is a very detailed New York Times account of a meeting — one nobody has challenged — that took place a few weeks before the conflict started. Prime Minister Netanyahu went to Washington, gave President Trump a briefing, and said this would be quick and easy: decapitate the Iranian leadership, the regime will collapse, we declare victory and go home. That is almost exactly what he said.

He told President Trump they had to move fast because there would be a day when all the top leaders would be gathered in the open at a particular venue. And sure enough, Israeli intelligence performed remarkably. They knew exactly where each nuclear scientist would be, at what hour, so they could eliminate him at the precise time and place. Mossad's performance was extraordinary.

So President Trump believed what Netanyahu said. This would be an easy war — a quick, short engagement, which is what Trump prefers. He does not like long wars. And then he discovered that Iran is not Venezuela.

The reason Iran is not Venezuela is because Iran represents one of the oldest, strongest civilisations in human history — Persian civilisation. The Persians have been fighting wars for three thousand years. They have had many near-death experiences from invading hordes, seen the country destroyed, and revived. It is a very hardened civilisation.

The decapitation strike, rather than weakening Iran, gave it a powerful burst of energy. Iran said: now I will respond. And they responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz — something they had long wanted to do, and which has caused the entire global economy to suffer.

What has helped Iran enormously is that President Trump's main concern is the November midterm elections. If oil prices remain high, if inflation increases, if food prices go up in the US, Republicans under Trump will suffer enormously. The Iranians are sophisticated enough to understand that very well.

Even though the Iranians took a severe military beating — the Israelis and Americans could bomb any part of Iran and Iran couldn't stop them — most countries in that position would have found the temptation to surrender very strong. Iranians didn't surrender. Instead, they were able to retaliate very effectively.

I think both sides have underestimated each other. There is now a recalibration going on as both sides try to understand exactly where they stand. Nobody can tell you what will happen in the next few days, because President Trump will surprise us — and at times will surprise himself. He will do things he would never consider doing today. He is a very difficult man to predict. You could go in either direction: escalation, or a declaration that the war is over. Nobody knows which way it will go.

Keith 14:38:00

It feels like reality is becoming a reality show.

The other thread I thought was worth exploring — partly because of our relationships with both the US and Israel — is the question of Gaza. The World Bank has estimated that Gaza needs approximately $71.4 billion over the next decade to recover from two years of war, and that seems to be the floor, not the ceiling. As the war continues, that bill will only grow.

When I was reading the book on Singapore's fifty years of relations with Israel, former Foreign Minister George Yeo pointed out that Henry Kissinger always argued that grand solutions were not possible, and that one should take small steps that open up possibilities and let history find its course gradually. That was in reference to the two-state solution, which Singapore has consistently advocated for. But the paradox to me is that as time has passed, that solution seems further and further away — almost to the point of structural impossibility. Is that diagnosis too grim?

Kishore 16:00:00

You want me to make the crowd even sadder? Even before we talk about reconstruction, the living conditions of the millions of people in Gaza is absolutely awful. They don't have shelter. Forget schools, forget hospitals — they don't have shelter, and they often have difficulty finding food. They are among the most miserable people on the planet.

What happened in Gaza has damaged the standing of Western countries in the eyes of the rest of the world, because those countries always said they oppose violations of human rights, they oppose genocide. But when Gaza came along, they kept absolutely quiet. That has damaged them enormously.

I want to emphasise that none of this condones the terrible attacks Hamas made on 7 October when they killed so many people. That was wrong. We condemned it. But you still have to respond proportionately and in accordance with international humanitarian law. Most of that law has been violated in Gaza. And the European countries that used to lecture Singapore about human rights kept absolutely quiet — as did many of the leading human rights advocates in the United States. That is the impact Gaza has had.

As for the two-state solution: the current Israeli government no longer believes in it. They are pursuing what amounts to a one-state solution, and that will not work. There is no way to remove five or six million Palestinians. A solution must be found for them.

The tragedy is that none of Israel's friends have given it honest advice about how to manage its future. Israel is today, without question, the most powerful military force in the Middle East — its capabilities are stunning, given a population of only five to seven million citizens. Even Egypt, with a population of eighty to ninety million, would lose a war with Israel tomorrow.

But because they have these capabilities today, they assume they can remain militarily dominant forever. In that belief, they have not studied history. No power remains dominant forever. There are 1.4 to 1.5 billion Muslims in the world who have become very angry. Right now they are weak and cannot exert themselves — but that will change at some point.

It is wiser for Israel to make peace while it is incredibly powerful, when it can secure the best possible terms, rather than to drag this out and wait for a day when things may have changed. As a friend of Israel, I am advising them: stop walking towards a cliff. Turn around and find a peaceful solution.

Keith 21:09:00

If you ask the average Singaporean — and I speak to my friends, my Muslim friends tend to be more aggravated, but even friends who are not particularly religious feel this is a humanitarian crisis at the very least. In that context, as a young Singaporean, many don't even see the possibility of viewing Israelis as partners, for example. What would your advice be to them — how to read the situation without being too emotionally stirred?

Kishore 21:42:00

The one big lesson I learned from Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, and Rajaratnam is this: when it comes to geopolitics, if you have a contest between someone who is rational, cool, and calm, and someone who is emotional, the rational, calm person always wins. So when it comes to geopolitics, do not become emotional. Calculate everything in a very cool, calm, rational fashion.

The world will remain a mess in many parts. We cannot fix all of it. We have to accept what is happening, live with it, try to manage it, and be thoughtful where we can. I am glad Singapore has sent humanitarian supplies to the Palestinians. I think we should send more — that is something concrete we can do.

Beyond that, we are far too small to fix a problem like Israel and Palestine. I find it helpful to have private conversations with Israeli friends and Palestinian friends and share my thinking on how they might find peace. But we cannot become too starkly involved. And that principle applies not just to Israel and Palestine — it applies to any conflict in our region. The Philippines and China, India and Pakistan: those are not our fights. We have to let them figure it out.

Keith 23:24:00

One of your theses is that when Singapore cannot affect change directly, it uses and leverages multilateral institutions. But over the past two or three years, those institutions — the WTO, the World Health Organization, the UN — have only become weaker. There seems to be a structural decline under way.

Where do you think the future of the UN lies? I know you are an optimist, but from the way things appear, it seems increasingly pessimistic for multilateral organisations. I'm happy for you to give us a hopeful note, though.

Kishore 24:09:00

This is a perfect example of Singaporeans having their minds captured by the Anglo-Saxon media. The media rubbishes the UN, so we rubbish the UN too — forgetting that small states survive because of something called the United Nations.

Before 1945, it was perfectly acceptable for a powerful state to conquer its neighbour. The UN Charter changed everything. It said: from now on, any state that invades and occupies a neighbouring state pays the price, with the international community saying no, that is wrong. That fundamental turn in human history has benefited Singapore enormously.

You should also understand why the UN is performing badly. Not because something is wrong with the organisation itself. It's because the great powers want to weaken it. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union disagreed on everything, they agreed on one thing: the UN must be kept going. But the one criterion both applied when selecting a Secretary-General was that he must be spineless. When an organisation is forced to pick spineless leaders, of course it will be weak. But who made it weak? The great powers made it weak.

One of the most interesting exchanges I personally witnessed was in the mid-1980s. Our then-Foreign Minister Mr Dhanabalan was speaking with US Secretary of State George Shultz. Shultz was complaining: look at the UN, it's so weak, badly managed, wasting money. Dhanabalan said, "I agree with you. The UN is very weak. Why don't we now pick a very dynamic, entrepreneurial person with courage and integrity to run it?" And Shultz blushed. He knew. It was the United States that had been picking these weak Secretaries-General.

It's not like the Catholic Church. When the Catholic Church selects its leader, they look for the strongest individual, someone with high integrity and moral courage — and that person becomes Pope. For the UN, if you have integrity and moral courage, you are disqualified. I mean, this is absurd. The Western countries weaken the UN, then they complain the UN is weak.

And remember: the UN is a voluntary organisation. You don't have to join. You can quit any time. Tell me — how many countries have quit the United Nations? Why hasn't any country walked out? Why hasn't the United States? Clearly there is something very valuable and precious in it. So why are we Singaporeans rubbishing it when it is clearly not in our national interest to do so?

We should expose the hypocrisy: these countries weaken the UN and then protest that it is weak. This is just one area of what I would call a very profitable hobby of mine — collecting examples of Western hypocrisy. If you know of some good ones, please email me. I'll put them in my next book.

Keith 29:30:00

I think you've helpfully distinguished between the diagnosis and the cause. The UN is weak — but the cause is clear. Given what is at stake, though, and given that Singapore is a price-taker when great powers decide who leads these institutions, I'd like you to show us how Singapore can actually use these platforms to help create a better world.

Kishore 30:21:00

We should be like Dhanabalan. He said directly to George Shultz: why don't you pick a strong Secretary-General? We should be able to say that clearly and directly to the Americans, to the Russians, to everyone, because those are simply the facts.

At the end of the day, the nature of world history did change in 1945. Yes, countries have been invaded since then — Vietnam invaded Cambodia, the US invaded Iraq. International law has been broken. But just as in domestic law — in Singapore, murder is banned, yet murders still happen — what matters is how violations are handled. And the fact is, most countries overall still respect the principles of the UN Charter. That is something we should celebrate.

Keith 31:30:00

So it goes back to your earlier point about ASEAN — that sometimes you don't appreciate how good things are until you see how bad things can become. Even then, we tend to underappreciate the value these institutions bring. Do you see an off-ramp coming, or do you think this is just a pause and things will get worse in the near and medium term?

Kishore 31:56:00

The US-China relationship is complicated, which is why I wrote an entire book on it — Has China Won? I'm very glad that fairly senior people from both China and the United States have read it and called it a fair and balanced account, because it tries to explain both perspectives.

There is no question that the US-China contest will accelerate over the medium term. That's a given. Because of that iron law of geopolitics — going back 2,000 years — the world's number one power will always push down the world's number one emerging power. It's mechanical. So when you listen to American officials, they are determined to stop China. Determined.

And if they're determined to stop China, what should China do? Say it won't grow? The Chinese can't do that. They have to keep growing their economy, growing their middle class. This contest is locked in.

Nobody anticipated what happened this year. When the United States raised tariffs on China to 145%, the Chinese found a weapon to retaliate with. They cut off the supply of rare earths and magnets. The US discovered very quickly that its economy cannot function without them. And this is an example of Trump being very pragmatic — he said, OK, I can't push them down on this one, I have to compromise. Trump lowered the tariffs. China restored supplies of rare earths and magnets. And so you have a détente — a brief détente, but a very brief one. This is temporary. Both sides will still find ways to gain advantage.

The contest will carry on. If they can avoid the worst-case scenario of a direct war, that is all we need. We should work to ensure they don't go to all-out war. I think that can be prevented.

That is also one reason I wrote Has China Won — because many people fall into a kind of passivity: we can't do anything about it. But if you write something reasonable and people read it, you can actually influence policy. The Trump administration read the book and responded well to it. Don't just say you can't do anything about it.

Keith 36:02:00

I read The ASEAN Miracle. I think the miracle dimension is undeniable. But there are two familiar critiques. First, that ASEAN member economies often compete for the same foreign investment rather than complementing each other — so you don't get the kind of regional development that comes with genuine integration. Second, that ASEAN countries have not really helped develop one another. As Parjit Agarwal from Indonesia has pointed out, only two of the ten ASEAN member states have reached developed status — Singapore and Brunei — with Malaysia catching up.

A less-discussed point, which I think you've raised, is that ASEAN countries tend to be too silent and polite in the face of great-power rivalry, when in fact they should be doing more to de-escalate — because China is a geopolitical reality we have to live with, and if the US wants to leave, it can.

My question is: how do you strengthen ASEAN to be better equipped to maintain competition without confrontation?

Kishore 37:28:00

ASEAN is a very imperfect organisation — incredibly imperfect. But when you measure organisations, who do you compare ASEAN with? The only fair comparison is with other regional organisations among developing countries. And a very simple question: name me one organisation of developing countries doing a better job than ASEAN.

Go to Latin America — Mercosur: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. In ASEAN, leaders meet every year and talk to each other. In Mercosur, the leaders of Brazil and Argentina don't talk to each other. What is going on in Africa? The Gulf Cooperation Council? Look at the internal divisions there. South Asia? The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation hasn't met in ten years. And then there's the European Union — which is supposed to be the gold standard for regional cooperation, and in some ways is, because there is zero prospect of war between EU member states. But if you want to meet the most depressed young people in the world, go to Europe. Europe is becoming a wonderful museum for the world. ASEAN is not a museum. ASEAN is growing.

In the decade from 2010 to 2020, these poor developing countries in ASEAN contributed more to global economic growth than the entire European Union. No other region can match ASEAN's growth. So when you try to turn this imperfect body into a perfect one, you'll destroy it. Don't try to make it perfect. Leave it as it is. ASEAN is like a crab — two steps forward, one step back, one step sideways. That's how ASEAN moves. Because if you try to take an imperfect organisation and force it to be perfect, you'll destroy it.

Enjoy the imperfect regional organisation you have — because all of you can sit here tonight without worrying about a bomb coming through those windows. That is because of ASEAN.

And I want to be serious when I say this: every morning I wake up, I worship ASEAN. This organisation has been so brilliant in taking the most diverse region on planet Earth and keeping the peace. There are 700 million people in ASEAN — 250 million Muslims, 150 million Buddhists, 150 million Christians, Mahayana Buddhists, Theravada Buddhists, Chinese, Communists. Tell me one place in the world where you have Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians all living in peace with each other. So what ASEAN has done — taking this hugely diverse region and delivering peace and prosperity — is an act of miracle.

Do we thank ASEAN for this miracle? No. We join The Economist and we rubbish it. That's what Singaporeans do.

Keith 42:09:00

On that note, I'd like to move to questions. Although we rubbish it, I think we see it for its imperfections — and the Singaporean in us always strives for perfection. They always joke: when you get 90 on the exam, your mum asks, why not 91? Why not 92? It's in that spirit — not rubbishing, but hoping for a better future. And the lesson I take away is: don't try to turn a crab into a tiger.

I'd like to start with the top-voted question from the audience. And if you have questions, please raise your hand so we can get the mic to you.

Audience Member 1 42:46:00

Thank you for the candid conversation. I have a slightly contrary view on the United Nations. First, there's a structural problem with the Security Council veto — the ability to block resolutions. And second, who or what serves as the policeman for the world? Is that the direction of travel you think the UN could move towards to be more effective?

Kishore 43:17:00

Two good questions — one on the veto, one on being the policeman.

On the veto: the politically correct answer is that vetoes are bad. In theory, in any country, we believe every citizen should have one vote. If one citizen could veto the entire country's decisions, we would never allow that. So internationally, we should also say all countries are equal.

But the founders of the UN were much more brilliant than we are. They saw clearly what happened to the UN's predecessor, the League of Nations. Why did the League of Nations die? Because its most powerful member, the United States, left. So the founders asked: how do we anchor the great powers in the UN? Make sure they don't quit? Because if they quit, the UN becomes useless. The founding fathers gave the veto precisely as a mechanism to ground the great powers and keep them inside the tent.

The veto also serves to ensure that the UN does not make decisions to enforce sanctions on the United States, for example. You cannot fight the United States directly — the UN would die. So the veto was a brilliant structural solution.

The only mistake the founders made was that it was designed for the great powers of 1945. This is 2026. Those are no longer the great powers of the world. And that is why I wrote a column — which I was surprised the Financial Times published — arguing it is time for the UK to gracefully hand its seat to India. The reason is straightforward: in the year 2000, the British economy was 3.5 times larger than India's. Today, India is larger than the UK, and by 2050 India will be four times bigger. Strictly speaking, the UK should give up its seat to India. I'm surprised no Indian leader is calling for this — I'm trying to help them out.

So the veto should remain, but it must be transferred to the great powers of today. That is the change that needs to happen.

On the policeman: when the great powers collaborate, the UN does a brilliant job. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a brief period when Russia, the US, and China were getting along reasonably well in the Security Council. Suddenly, all kinds of long-standing conflicts disappeared — including the Cambodian conflict. So when the UN doesn't function, it doesn't mean something is wrong with the UN. It means great-power relations are bad. If tomorrow — improbably — the United States and China fell in love with each other, the UN would come roaring back. Everything would happen at the UN again. It all depends on the great powers.

Keith 47:30:00

This next question is about Singapore joining BRICS, and I want to link it to a broader question about sacred cows. When you become as successful as Singapore has, certain precepts become doctrinal truths. You've argued that Singapore should take a fresh look at BRICS and find ways to participate in it. But Donald Trump — and many American leaders — see BRICS as a rival to US-led institutions. How does one make that shift in a multipolar world? Could we see Singapore embedded in BRICS in the future?

Kishore 48:20:00

In this world, there are sunrise organisations and sunset organisations. It is clearly in Singapore's interest to join sunrise organisations and not sunset ones.

The G7 is a sunset organisation. When it was started, it genuinely represented the most powerful economies in the world — a meeting of peers, where the Europeans could speak to the United States on a level playing field. Today, a G7 meeting is like a meeting of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Dwarfs have no say. The Europeans have become dwarfs — I'm not exaggerating. They can have no real impact on what G7 does. And the G7's share of global GNP, decade by decade, is going down. They're not growing.

BRICS's share of global GNP is rising. BRICS is clearly a sunrise organisation. It has got lots of challenges — most significantly, its two biggest members, India and China, don't get along very well. That is a problem. But they have found ways of getting along well enough to keep BRICS going.

I'm not advocating that Singapore join BRICS outright — we are too small and it would be complicated — but we can find ways of working with BRICS. There is also the OECD, which represents mostly Western states: there is no reason why Singapore can't join the OECD while also working with BRICS. We should look for multiple options, and do so slowly and carefully.

The critical point is this: the countries of the world are mostly operating peacefully and trying to find peaceful ways of growing and developing. We should increase our connections with as many countries as possible, not focus only on Western countries.

Audience Member 2 50:58:00

Thank you for your sharing. My name is Clarence. I was previously a trade negotiator for ASEAN, so I can relate to the energy of working within that structure.

My question is on ASEAN. Given the Thailand-Cambodia conflict and Trump's positioning as a kind of go-between, do you feel that ASEAN was in any way derelict in the job it should have been doing? My second question: with the US tariffs, we saw ASEAN countries coming together in one sense, but ultimately negotiating individually with the United States. Is that a sign that when the stakes are truly high, each country will defend its own interests without regard for the collective organisation?

Kishore 52:15:00

I am glad you experienced the imperfections of ASEAN as a trade negotiator. It's important to remember that when Singapore first started trade negotiations, our Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance was Mr Ng Tong Dao — a very impatient man. He went to Indonesia thinking he could get something done within 24 hours. He realised very quickly that in ASEAN, you wait a few years. The answer will be yes eventually, but don't rush.

You've identified two imperfections, and you're right on both counts. On the Thailand-Cambodia dispute: ASEAN didn't intervene in the latest round. But in the previous dispute, the Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa did go in and try to help Thailand and Cambodia find a resolution. We didn't do that this time around, and I'm glad President Trump intervened. Any leader who pushes for peace is doing the right thing.

But here is the thing about ASEAN's imperfection in that case: if ASEAN had not existed, the war between Thailand and Cambodia could have escalated very quickly — more troops deployed, more soldiers killed. Instead it was brief and restrained. Why? Because there was very strong informal peer pressure from ASEAN countries — private phone calls, quiet appeals to please stop. That peer pressure helped restrain the conflict. Now, can you imagine doing the same with Iran and Israel? There is no such peer pressure. They don't belong to any common organisation. That is the difference.

On ASEAN countries negotiating individually with the United States on tariffs: there is no choice. Our economies are very different. We cannot agree on one common package to present to Washington because our needs are different. It is actually good that all of us are finding our own solutions, as long as those solutions don't damage our neighbours — and they don't, because all of us are simply trying to get the best possible deal from the United States.

But please also remember: take the long view. We have had administrations in the past that paid less attention to ASEAN and ASEAN relations went down. Then they were replaced by administrations that valued ASEAN — like Barack Obama, who grew up as a child in Indonesia and speaks Bahasa Indonesia. He knew where ASEAN was. So you have to learn patience. Don't get frazzled if one or two years are difficult. Things will change.

Keith 56:02:00

There's a question about the precedents being set by the Iran-Israel war. If we zoom out — the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz, the fighting in the Middle East — what are the longer-term fallouts that you foresee? Developments that will reshape the world in ways that many people are not paying enough attention to?

Kishore 56:31:00

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a clear violation of international law under the UNCLOS convention, and Singapore's position stating this is correct. But at the same time, if you want Iran to behave as a responsible stakeholder in the global system and observe international law, you also have to be willing to say that the attack by the United States and Israel on Iran is a violation of international law. You can't tell one side to respect international law and tell the other side it's perfectly fine to violate it. The merciless bombing is itself a massive violation. So we must call on all parties to respect international law if we want to find a solution.

Keith 57:57:00

Is this going to be a world where international law is increasingly disregarded, treated as secondary to national interest? Because historically, great powers have never really let international law constrain them when they feel their interests are at stake. Do we see that spreading — not just among great powers, but any state that decides it can pursue its interests regardless of international law?

Kishore 58:20:00

My answer to that — forgive me if I sound repetitive — is to ask a simple question: is international law a sunrise trend or a sunset trend?

Let me put it to a vote. How many of you think international law is a sunrise trend? Raise your hands.

[Audience response]

OK, how many say it's sunset?

[Audience response]

Clearly a vast majority. I belong to the minority — I say it's sunrise. And I say it's sunrise for a very simple reason. Watch decade by decade: are most countries complying more or less with international law? This is a factual question, a measurable one.

The first and most fundamental violation of international law is invading your neighbour. That trend, over the long term, is going down. There are 193 countries in the world. How many are complying with international law? How many are violating it? The good news is the vast majority of 193 nations are complying. It is by far a sunrise tendency, because most countries do so for sensible reasons — it is in their interest to respect international law because it keeps them at peace.

Of course, there will be massive violations from time to time, and it is always the great powers who violate international law. So it is up to the rest of us — the non-great powers — to tell them: please behave yourselves and respect international law.

On the long-term trend, the world is actually becoming a better place, partly because policymakers around the world are becoming more educated and more aware of the costs and benefits of going to war. All the recent wars have again reminded us of the futility and stupidity of war. One of my life missions is to increase the forces that delegitimise war. Small states should speak out more strongly on this. That is why I launched the Asian Peace Programme. And yes, some of my Singaporean friends said to me, Kishore, why are you wasting your time? But if you have that cynical attitude, you will never improve the world.

Audience Member 3 1:02:25:00

There's a real chance that US security deterrence in Asia is weakening. Iran is a middle-sized power — but what are the implications for Asia if the US is now the biggest disruptor of the global system rather than its guarantor?

Kishore 1:02:46:00

The one thing I learned from our founding fathers is that they were realists of the highest order. If you are powerful, we will deal with you.

In the Cold War, we were much closer to the United States. But even then, we were never anti-Soviet Union. I personally accompanied Mr Rajaratnam to Moscow in 1976 — exactly fifty years ago — and we met with the legendary Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Mr Rajaratnam told Gromyko: we are anti-communist at home — and it's true, Singapore is anti-communist domestically, we jailed communists — but we are not anti-communist in our foreign policy. We welcome American naval vessels in Singapore. We welcome Soviet naval vessels in Singapore. We don't take sides.

The same principle applies between the US and China today. We will be friends with the US and friends with China. We will not take sides. This is not our fight.

And fortunately, we don't have to make this decision alone. We are in ASEAN. All ten ASEAN countries broadly agree: we want to be friends with both the US and China. We are not going to choose. All ten of us agreeing makes it a reasonable, defensible position. That is one of the protections we have in this geopolitical context. It is what our founding fathers would have done, and it is what we are doing.

Audience Member 4 1:04:32:00

Earlier this week, the Indonesian Finance Minister raised the idea of imposing a toll on the Strait of Malacca — we've seen the situation with the Strait of Hormuz, and there was pushback from Singapore. What were your immediate thoughts? The Indonesian Finance Minister also suggested the revenue could be split three ways between Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Is this a viable solution?

And a related question: how do you compare Singapore's position to that of the UAE in the current situation, given that US alignment is making some Gulf states vulnerable? And how is the GCC reacting to what Iran is doing?

Keith 1:05:15:00

Let's gather those three questions together and then we'll take the answers.

Kishore 1:06:21:00

Three questions: the Indonesian Finance Minister's toll proposal, whether Singapore is like the UAE in some ways, and how the GCC is responding to Iran.

The Indonesian Finance Minister — that is easy to answer. He has withdrawn the proposal. The matter is closed. I am not even sure whether it was serious or a trial balloon. But it is a very good example of how countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore respect international law, and why it is in their interest to do so. Indonesia is a huge archipelagic country. It is very much in Indonesia's interest to see the archipelagic principles embedded in international law protected and not weakened. So Indonesia has enormous vested interests in upholding international law.

On Singapore versus the UAE: I would say our positions are quite different, because we are not directly involved in any bilateral conflict. Iran explained its strikes on US bases as a response to attacks on Iran, but to be completely candid, they went beyond that. When a country is fighting for survival, you have to expect it to do desperate things.

Which brings me to the GCC. The genius of ASEAN is that it maintains good relations with all its big neighbours — India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia. We have good relations with all of them. The GCC must copy ASEAN on this. You must have good relations with all your neighbours, whether you like them or not. That is irrelevant. They are your neighbours. You have to live with them.

There is only one fact I can guarantee you with certainty: Iran will be a neighbour of the GCC not for the next ten years, not for the next hundred years, but for the next thousand years. If you have a thousand-year neighbour, learn to get along with it.

Keith 1:09:32:00

On that note, I have one last question as we wrap up. People call you the muse of the Asian century — not a title I gave you, but one that has been given to you. You've been influential not just in the public space, but in rooms where decisions are actually being made. Today we're in a room full of young, striving leaders trying to make their way in the world. If there is one piece of advice you would give them, or one bet you think they should be making today, what is it?

Kishore 1:10:04:00

One piece of advice is very difficult, but I would say this: despite everything I've said, be optimistic.

I am actually optimistic about the future. The reason I try to analyse every flaw in the international system is to identify what needs to be fixed. At the end of the day, consider what Singapore has achieved. When I grew up in the 1960s, our per capita income was $500. Now it's $94,000.

And I want to emphasise something to all of you, just in case you didn't know: no other country anywhere in the world, at any point in human history, has grown as fast and as comprehensively as Singapore has, in the years that Singapore has done it. We are number one in world history. We should be celebrating that fact.

Singaporeans are not even aware of this. It's stunning. You are living in a country that, by any millennial standard of human achievement, has done something miraculous. And yet we wake up every morning mourning all kinds of small things that don't work, fixating on all kinds of problems. Which is bizarre.

I have lived in Cambodia when it was being shelled every day. I have lived through war, I have lived through poverty, I have seen the other side. So I can see clearly what we have achieved — because I've been there, I've crossed over to the other side. And so I understand what a miracle we have today.

Every miracle is the result of amazing hard work and amazing genius. If we hadn't had our founding fathers — Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, Rajaratnam — I can tell you, they were real geniuses. And the proof is simple: why hasn't any other country done what Singapore has done? No other country has. We must understand that special contribution — understand what it was about the genius that created this Singapore — and ensure we capture it, preserve it, and let it survive another sixty years.

Keith 1:13:00:00

So what is that one thing we should capture in a bottle and carry with us wherever we go? I already know "worship ASEAN" is one answer, and the Singapore miracle is another. But what is the one thing you hope will stay with us as we go forward in the world today?

Kishore 1:13:16:00

I guarantee you that the geopolitical tensions in our neighbourhood will grow, because the US-China contest will accelerate and Southeast Asia will become an arena in this great-power competition. We will be caught in the crossfire. That is a given. The question is: how do you start preparing now to protect yourself from that crossfire? Because it's coming.

So life won't be boring.

Keith 1:13:51:00

On that note, thank you Professor Mahbubani for making the time for us.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review. Once again, thank you for tuning in to The Front Row Podcast.

The following is a series of transcripts from an interview series I did at a SuperAI event.

I hope you find the transcripts useful :)

Dr. Dean Ho is currently Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Design and Engineering, Director of The Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and Director of The N.1 Institute for Health (N.1) at the National University of Singapore.

His central argument is that medicine has always been built on population averages — and that this is no longer sufficient. With AI and digital twins, he believes we now have the tools to treat every patient as a sample size of one.

The conversation spans three registers: oncology (a blood cancer patient who entered the trial at eighty and is still thriving four and a half years later); commercialised drug combination design (Kyan's 91% predictivity vs a competitor's 52%); and personal healthspan

(Dean ran an IRB-approved trial on himself tracking sleep, gut, metabolism, and supplementation).

The through-line is a simple but radical idea: a single annual health snapshot tells you almost nothing. Dynamics — how your body changes hour to hour, day to day — is where the signal lives.

DEAN HO

Keith 00:00:00

One of the biggest innovations in AI today is the ability to collect our own personal data and translate that into actionable insights that can actually improve our healthspan and longevity. Let me give you an example with cancer. What if I told you that many patients who don't respond to treatment aren't actually non-responders — that the truth is the dose was wrong, and not personalised to them? And that with artificial intelligence, they could actually receive proper dosages based on their body's specific response to a drug?

Would that change the way you think about medicine today? This is the problem that my guest, Professor Dean Ho, has been trying to solve. Professor Dean Ho is a researcher at NUS, where he heads up the N-1 Institute and is building a platform called Q8.ai. He is essentially asking the question: what if we stopped treating patients based on population averages and started treating them as a sample size of one — could we then truly personalise healthcare?

If you want a peek into how the artificial intelligence revolution could change the way we think about health today, and possibly tomorrow, this conversation is for you. My conversation with Dean took place at a community event jointly organised by SuperAI, CARTA, Singapore Global Network, and myself. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Prof Dean Ho 00:01:31

I want to give a short talk about what we are doing to use data for real-world applications. We used to focus exclusively on oncology, but we have since moved into longevity, healthspan, and what many know as biohacking.

When we talk about living well, I go back to the very beginning. An overarching ethos of our work is that we are stories, not snapshots. Everyone in this room has probably been to a physical exam once a year. Your doctor hands you a PDF — a bunch of numbers, some of it essentially GPT'd back to you — and then you don't look at that PDF ever again until another one arrives a year later. In conventional medicine, we define "longitudinal" as one of these PDFs once a year for ten years. But as I'll show you shortly, our biology changes far faster than that. The best dose of a drug for you today could be very different even a few hours or a week later. If we only get one PDF per year, we miss all of that. We are stories, not snapshots.

On AI: in any AI panel or keynote you attend, you can do a drinking game. Every time you hear "garbage in, garbage out," take a shot. But I think we owe ourselves more depth than that. If you collect a single data point from a billion people — vertical scale, enormous breadth — but I've just told you that we change over time, then no AI can tell you the story that moves forward. It cannot capture that acute change. We have to think more deeply.

If we are indeed stories, then we must remember that terms like "optimal," "precise," and "personalised" describe dynamic processes. They are not static. No regimen can truly be optimal and remain so indefinitely.

Let me give you a real-world use case. A patient came to us with a rare blood cancer — maybe one case in Singapore every three to five years. We hear a great deal about digital twins. We do develop them for patients, but contrary to how most people think about AI and big data, we use only that patient's own data. Nobody else's data influences any other patient. Once we build this curve — this twin — we can adjust doses dynamically.

In oncology, the standard approach is this: you give every patient the highest possible dose until they stop responding. If a patient doesn't respond, you switch them to something else, and you keep going until they exhaust all options and move to end of life. For this particular patient, whenever he received the maximum dose, his cancer markers worsened. Before switching him to a new drug, our clinical trial allowed us to test different doses and track how his markers changed — which is how we build the curve.

As part of the trial, we were permitted to recommend a lower dose, but we were lowering the dose not for toxicity — which is common in cancer treatment — but for efficacy. We were the first to do this in the world. Fifteen years ago, when I proposed this to oncologists, I was shown the door. They told me it would be illegal, that it was wrong. Now, some of those same oncologists have to read about how to do this in their societies' annual education materials. It took fifteen years, but whenever we dropped the dose for this patient, the efficacy returned. High dose — no response. Lower dose — response.

This study was planned for twelve months. The patient entered the trial at around eighty years old, already quite frail. As of last September, he had been with us for four and a half years. He is still with us, and not only is he doing well — he is thriving. He is around eighty-four and a half years old. His cancer markers are the lowest they have ever been over the entire course of the trial. The patient himself has asked to remain on it.

Healthy people are very efficient at becoming unhealthy. We told ourselves we would keep helping cancer patients — that has not stopped, we have about ten clinical trials running. But healthy people accelerating toward illness is a separate and urgent problem. So we launched a trial where I became the test subject.

What is unique about this trial is that it is double IRB-approved. If you run a trial, you can either document things casually and post on social media, or you can submit to an ethics board. This required two ethics board protocols and additional MOH approval, because it had never been done here before. I believe it is the first human trial in history where the professor is the test subject in an interventional study — meaning the trial involved algorithms driving supplementation, fasting, sleep, fitness, the whole picture.

I never intended this to be the outcome. People often say that the only reason it worked for me is that I have some superhuman level of discipline. My parents would totally disagree with that. And if I truly had that discipline, the "before" photo would not have existed in the first place.

On the question of stories over snapshots: the chart showing my metabolism over the course of a single day illustrates the point. In the Delta trial last year, I did fifty-two blood draws — not one per week, but clustered: sometimes four in a week, sometimes none. I pricked my finger about a thousand times. I tracked markers that you cannot get from a standard clinical lab. This is ethics-regulated, deep phenotyping — well beyond what you typically see on social media.

On sleep: I was at Brian Johnson's home about two years ago. He is a friend — a genuinely kind person. We did discuss sleep. I used to sleep at one in the morning. Now I sleep at around nine-thirty. It took time to re-engineer that. Sleep is probably one of the hardest habits to change, but our team specialises in helping people see their dynamics. When you can see the immediate benefits of a single good night's sleep, it is far easier to sustain better habits than when you are waiting a year for a PDF.

On gut health: I ran twenty-four gut tests last year. There is a marker called Fusobacteria. It is linked to colon cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver disease. It is quite prevalent in the population. You do not need zero — but you do not want too much. After twenty-four tests, Fuso has never shown up in my results, not even at trace levels. We are trying to understand why. I do not know yet, but too many people are sharing gut test results on social media without understanding that their Fusobacteria may be elevated — and that they need to do something about it.

I published a paper on myself a couple of years ago, and the full Delta trial — sleep, gut, deep metabolics — is currently in peer review. Stay tuned.

One final acknowledgement: why is longevity personal to me? Some of you may know my wife. She is a two-time tumour survivor — brain and spine — and her illness came after we moved to Singapore. It was during her recovery that I found myself going in the other direction. I was staring at the ceiling one morning thinking: if I stay on this trajectory, my kids may not live as long as they could — one parent with serious health challenges, another becoming seriously unhealthy. People ask me all the time: your study is an N of one — what does that mean for the rest of us? The Delta workflow is designed for a much broader population. Everyone has their own Delta. That is why we named it that way.

Something that moved me: after I shifted my sleep to nine-thirty, my kids started sleeping at around the same time — earlier, in fact. Their friends, aged eleven and thirteen, are messaging them at three or four in the morning. Those messages are muted now. When you can see your habits helping other people, and then see them benefitting, your own adherence improves. It is a communal effort.

And yes — I did eat those ice cream cones. Balance matters. But when you can see your data in action, remarkable things can happen, especially when you move beyond looking at one snapshot of your health once a year.

Keith 00:13:25

We have some time before the next session, and I thought it would be useful to pick up on a few threads from Dean's talk. You will have noticed that Dean does not have a Singaporean accent — and that is intentional context. When people think about biomedical R&D, they tend to think Boston, or they think China. Singapore has quietly carved out a niche in advancing medical innovation. So I want to start by asking: what is it about Singapore's medical ecosystem that enables this kind of N-equals-one research — research that is perhaps less common elsewhere?

Prof Dean Ho 00:14:07

I am originally from LA, so when I start saying "dude" during the Q&A, you will know for sure.

What matters right now in the AI and digital medicine space is defining what impact actually means. I got to know Singapore well before I moved here in 2018 — I had been flying in regularly for five or six years before that. What I found is that you can collaborate with clinicians anywhere in the world, but when you combine exceptional clinicians who also carry a much higher patient load and who have a genuine tolerance for trying things differently — and then you add a regulatory agency that is ten minutes away and able to meet five days after you reach out — that is unprecedented. The accessibility of the key stakeholders who can bridge an idea all the way to patient benefit is, I think, going to save lives. That is why I am here.

Keith 00:15:23

You mentioned regulation. Can you elaborate on that specifically in the context of AI healthcare? What were some of the friction points you experienced in the US versus what you found in Singapore?

Prof Dean Ho 00:15:40

The most ironic example: about two and a half years ago, I was in a four-hour face-to-face meeting with Rob Califf — who was FDA Commissioner at the time. About six months after that, I was doing a fireside with his predecessor. The irony is that I had to move to Singapore to actually meet two FDA commissioners — and my colleagues back in the US do not even know the current commissioner's name. That is the bottom line.

Being at the leading edge of regulation, being in a place where the ecosystem is built to attract people from around the world who can help it thrive — that is what I mean. That is unprecedented.

Keith 00:16:22

Another thread I want to pull on: we have been conditioned to trust the randomised controlled trial. We optimise for the population average. Your thesis is that combining AI with digital twins allows us to personalise medicine down to an N of one. What is actually broken about the old system — what is so insufficient about it — that demands this kind of intervention?

Prof Dean Ho 00:16:51

Medicine is built on averages. That is the whole concept, and there is nothing wrong with it. The randomised controlled trial is designed to let you determine, with certainty, what a good dose is on average for a population. It is a robust, well-established system.

But at the time it was designed, we did not have the ability to track dynamics. We could not understand how people evolve during treatment the way we can now. You do not have to scan someone ten times a day — there are better ways to assess change.

Here is the problem: if you recruit patients into a trial, one patient gets a low dose, another a middle dose, another the maximum. But we have demonstrated that some patients respond better at lower doses. If the patient on the maximum dose does not respond, they are out of the trial — and you will never know whether a lower dose would have worked for them, because you never tried it. An average approach is suitable, but it is imperfect. It tells you nothing about what happens to that individual person tomorrow, or the day after. We have to do better.

Keith 00:18:12

If we take what you are doing now — N-equals-one personalised treatment — what are the actual bottlenecks to scaling it to a thousand people, or a hundred thousand? What are the structural barriers in the medical system?

Prof Dean Ho 00:18:28

I do not think the bottleneck is the medical system. It is not the doctors, it is not the nurses, it is not the infrastructure. It is people — meaning mindset.

Ten years ago, when I would describe this approach to doctors, the response was: "That's a case report." A case report, for those unfamiliar, is a technical term for a one-off. Someone comes into an emergency room, they have run out of standard options, they try something unconventional, it works. It may never happen again in human history. N-equals-one is different — it is systematic, it is calibrated.

But here is the contradiction: ask any of those same doctors whether they want medicine to be personalised, and every single one will say yes. Then ask them about N-equals-one and they say it is a one-off. At some point, you have to decide — are we going to truly personalise medicine, as we say we will? Or are we going to use the word performatively and stop short of the potential we actually have?

It is not the technology. We are our own biggest barrier. But we are getting there. It has taken a decade, and we are getting there.

Keith 00:19:48

My pushback — as someone on the street — is that these are highly trained people. They have been through medical school, they understand health outcomes. What explains the inertia if the use case is this compelling?

Prof Dean Ho 00:20:04

I think doctors, at heart, know there is probably a better way. I asked one of the doctors collaborating with us why he joined our trial. His answer: the doses I give are based on data from twenty or thirty years ago. He had seen patients do better at lower doses and could not explain it. His attitude was simply: if you can guide us toward something better, help us — help us help the patients.

Keith 00:20:40

You have given us the patient example. You are running multiple trials. Can you give us a sense of the economics — is it expensive to scale this? And roughly how many patients have come through the programme?

Prof Dean Ho 00:20:54

For the dosing algorithm, we have treated several hundred patients. For the combination design — where the algorithm recommends which drug combinations to use — it is several hundred more, with exceptional outcomes.

For the patient on screen, we saved him approximately $10,000 per month on his treatment, because for that particular drug, using less means spending less. We have not fully costed the approach itself, but the trajectory is clear: this will save both the healthcare system and patients money.

Keith 00:21:30

Can you give us a sense of the other live use cases — beyond that one patient, what other cases are you seeing where this kind of treatment has made a meaningful difference?

Prof Dean Ho 00:21:44

Part of this is now commercialised. Full disclosure: I am a shareholder in the company — Kyan — which is the combination design platform. We have treated hundreds of patients across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and now the US.

To put the numbers plainly: the positive predictivity of our drug recommender for blood cancers is around 91%. When we say a drug will work, it works 91% of the time. Our negative predictivity — arguably even more important — is also 91%: when we say a drug will not work, that prediction holds 91% of the time. Our nearest competitor, who has treated roughly half the number of patients we have, sits at around 52% on both metrics.

There are patients who have exhausted seven lines of therapy — patients who, by every conventional measure, should not still be with us. For some of them, finding the right combination means identifying one option out of a trillion possibilities. We have had patients who were a week from hospice care who are now back home. Some are in full remission. Some made it to transplant. It is not a one-off. This is commercialised, and it is helping people.

Keith 00:23:20

I want to bring it back to the personal, because I want to wrap this segment by speaking to the majority of people here — those who are healthy, trying to figure out how to engage with longevity. Not everyone is going to prick their fingers every day, not everyone is going to run a trial on themselves. The only other doctor I know who experimented on himself was Dr Octopus from Spider-Man, and I hope your outcome is rather more positive.

Prof Dean Ho 00:23:47

There you go — I appreciate that.

Keith 00:23:49

For the rest of us, not in that experimental space — what practical advice can you give on how the average person can take more ownership of their healthspan and longevity?

Prof Dean Ho 00:24:08

First: even having collected as much data on myself as I have, I believe there is genuine merit in not over-quantifying your life. I do not collect data on myself to the same degree I did last year. But there are meaningful signals you can track without great difficulty.

Many of you wear a wearable. In the Delta trial, I wore three simultaneously. One of the simplest and most revealing markers was resting heart rate first thing in the morning, as a function of the previous night's sleep. Sleep well for one night and your resting heart rate goes down. Sleep badly and it goes up. It flips with remarkable consistency. It is one of the easiest indicators of how you are actually doing.

Sleep is one of the hardest things to improve, and there is a persistent tug-of-war in the medical community about it. My doctor friends will sometimes say: "Dean, it is too late for me — my resting heart rate is already too high to sleep earlier." But the causal arrow runs the other way: good sleep is causative of a lower resting heart rate. It is rare to find a correlation-causation pair that clean. I tell my friends — kindly, because they are my friends — do not use the resting heart rate argument as a reason why it is too late. That is confirmation bias working against you. And if a patient asks you about sleeping earlier, what will you tell them if you will not do it yourself?

A hundred years of behavioural science data tells us that healthier doctors have healthier patients, healthier parents have healthier children, and healthier leaders have healthier teams. When you think about the simple things that will move the needle for you, remember that other people are watching. For the grandparents in the room — there is even a looser but real connection: healthier grandparents tend to have healthier grandchildren.

I had lunch with a friend last week — a very healthy sixty-three-year-old. He brought his medical records for me to look at. I said: you are in excellent shape, I'll bet your grandchild is too. He thought about it. His granddaughter, he told me, sees him eating fish — so she only eats fish. She sees him cycling every day, so she just asked for a trampoline. When he made that connection, his eyes lit up. And what mattered beyond the granddaughter was what that realisation did for him — the reinforcement it gave his own habits.

Technology is important, but if you want to improve the health of a million people, you do not have to put technology in the hands of a million people. You may only need to reach fifty to a hundred thousand. If they can stick with it, and if you can quantify and amplify the ripple effect, good things can happen.

Keith 00:27:49

Let me give you the final word. If everyone goes home tonight and tries to sleep ten minutes earlier — which may be ambitious given that we are still here — what is the one piece of practical advice you would leave them with?

Prof Dean Ho 00:27:55

We are probably going to be here until nine, so the timing is a little optimistic.

Keith 00:27:58

Fair enough. But if you had one thing to tell them — one concrete action they can take charge of — what would it be?

Prof Dean Ho 00:28:06

Just one. If you already sleep well — great, we will find something else to work on. But for those who genuinely struggle with sleep: move your sleep time earlier by ten minutes. Ten minutes, seven days, try it.

There are published studies — plenty of them — showing that even one week of micro-adjustment to sleep timing will improve your health markers. For some people, resting heart rate drops noticeably in seven days. For others, total sleep duration actually lengthens when they micro-adjust by ten minutes. The shift is small enough to not feel disruptive, but meaningful enough to be measurable.

I'll leave you with one finding. A study was conducted on a small group of healthy twenty-five-year-old males. They were sleep-deprived for seven days — meaning five hours of sleep per night. After seven days, their testosterone had dropped by 25%. That is a larger decline than the average reduction over an entire lifetime. The researchers chose that demographic specifically because the marker would rebound. But it illustrates what is happening when you are pushing through on four or five hours.

Watch your Netflix. Just move it ten minutes earlier. Give it a go. And when you feel slightly better, move it another ten. You owe it to yourselves.

Keith 00:30:00

With that — let us all sleep ten minutes earlier. Thank you, Dean.

Sau Sheong Chang is the Chief Technology Officer of GovTech Singapore, the government agency responsible for Singapore's national technology infrastructure and digital public services. In this role, he oversees the development and maintenance of platforms that underpin daily life for millions of Singaporeans — from SingPass, the national digital identity system, to Parents Gateway, CDC vouchers, and the Culture Pass.

Sau Sheong brings an unusual combination of deep private-sector experience and long public-service commitment to his work. He began his technology career at the National Computer Board in 1997, left in 1999 to found his first startup, and spent the intervening decades in startups and large technology companies before returning to public service — first as one of the earliest Smart Nation Fellows, and subsequently as a full-time GovTechie.

In this conversation, recorded at a community event co-organised by SuperAI, Carta, and Singapore Global Network, Sau Sheong speaks candidly about Singapore's 40-year arc of digital transformation, the buy-versus-build dilemma at the heart of government technology strategy, GovTech's adoption of AI tools including Claude Code for classified systems, and what the AI disruption actually looks like from inside one of the world's most advanced digital governments.

Keith 00:00:00

Singapore is one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world. When you use government services — whether paying your taxes, registering a company for your first startup, or applying for grants — the process is surprisingly painless. If you are a Singaporean in the know, your mind will immediately think of SingPass. This humble little app is what we use to verify our identity on almost all the important transactions we make.

But what doesn't get talked about is the army of public servants building and maintaining all of these services at the backend. I had the chance to speak to Sau Sheong. He is the CTO of GovTech Singapore and the man in charge of developing our national tech stack. He also happens to be one of the leading practitioners of AI in government and product building.

If you want to get a sense of what AI governance in Singapore actually looks like from the inside — from a practitioner's perspective — this is the conversation for you. The following conversation took place at a community event that SuperAI, Carta, Singapore Global Network, and myself jointly organised.

I hope you enjoy this. I managed to speak to this gentleman called Mehran Gu — I'm not sure if you've heard of him — he has this book called The New Geography of Innovation. His central thesis is that if you look at different countries across the world, there are distinct clusters that promote technological innovation in unique ways, and Singapore was one of his examples. He argued that in Singapore, the public service is leading in digital innovation — and that this is actually quite uncommon globally.

So I wanted to ask you, from your experience at the frontline: what makes Singapore unique in its ability to deliver public services at scale through digital means, efficiently and with excellence?

Sau Sheong 00:01:58

Hi everyone. First of all, very high praise from Keith — I'm not sure I actually live up to it. It's really a team effort. I'm not personally responsible for all the CDC vouchers you receive. And every time you can't log in to SingPass, please don't call me. Though SingPass does have 99.99% reliability, so I think we're doing pretty well.

To answer your question — it might take a little while — let me start with some background about myself. I joined GovTech about three years ago, but I've actually been part of this tech journey since long before GovTech existed. I was with the National Computer Board back in 1997, so some of the people in this room were probably not yet born at that point.

Believe it or not, Singapore's journey in digital transformation — what was called computerisation at the time — started in 1981, through an agency called the National Computer Board. That organisation evolved into the Infocomm Development Authority, and then, about ten years ago, became GovTech Singapore.

I was part of the NCB team working on computerisation for the Singapore Sports Council, which was then embedded within the old National Stadium. I mention this because Singapore started very early. It wasn't a fluke that we became good at technology. The computerisation project launched in 1981 and continued through different phases over the decades.

The very DNA of the Singapore government has technology built in — and I think that is one of the core reasons we perform better than many other countries. When I interact with my peers in other governments, the difference becomes clear. In most countries, technology is provided by external suppliers and vendors. In Singapore, we literally have government agencies in charge of technology. We have more than one — in fact, we have three: NCB was the oldest, then D-Star, and more recently, HGX. For the healthcare cluster, there is also Synapxe. So we are genuinely serious about technology and how it underpins our operations — and that seriousness isn't new.

Keith 00:05:45

There's another part of the secret sauce that I've come to realise from speaking to friends in government and overseas. One of the distinctive things about Singapore is that talented people — especially in technology — actually choose to work in government. Someone like yourself is a good example. You don't see this very often elsewhere in the world. I've spoken to friends in the US who say that, given a choice, they would never seriously consider being a civil servant as a software engineer.

Whereas in Singapore, GovTech is hiring world-class software engineers. Can you help me understand that a little more — how does the government position itself as an employer of choice for top tech talent?

Sau Sheong 00:06:33

We have a very good marketing team and a very good recruitment team — none of that is my doing. But we do go beyond our shores. We actively seek out Singaporeans who have worked abroad and try to bring them back to contribute to this effort.

I myself left NCB in 1999 to do my first startup. I spent many years doing startups and working in big tech companies, and I came back to public service because I felt a genuine pull to serve the nation. That is something we actively sell to candidates. When they see what we have built, when Singaporeans see our successes, many of them want to be part of that. They want to contribute to real impact.

If you've spent years doing commercial work, very often your contribution ultimately translates to one thing: revenue, shareholder value. In the Singapore government, you're contributing to the country itself. You live here, your family is here — this is your home. That strikes a chord in a lot of people.

We're also open to different forms of contribution. People can join at all levels, and we have a programme called Smart Nation Fellows for more senior practitioners who want to contribute for a defined period, in areas that match their expertise, without a long-term commitment. The Smart Nation Fellowship is a tool we use to encourage broader participation.

I was actually the second Smart Nation Fellow when the programme started. And many Smart Nation Fellows do eventually join GovTech as full-time staff, because they find — as I did — that building something with real value for the country carries a very different meaning from building something to increase shareholder returns. That, I think, is the real secret.

Keith 00:09:44

Can you give me an example of a project you were particularly proud of — something that felt like a genuine feat, and where you had to overcome real obstacles to get there?

Sau Sheong 00:09:54

There are many I could talk about. You mentioned SingPass earlier — it's actually quite an old product. Last year was its 20th anniversary. It started as a common login application for government systems and evolved into what it is today. The road was bumpy, but it has become something many Singaporeans are genuinely proud of. When I get introduced as someone who worked on SingPass, I see people light up — Singaporeans abroad especially seem to identify with it.

Beyond SingPass, if any of you have children in school, you've likely used Parents Gateway — an MOE system that is actually developed by GovTech. The government paid leave system is another. CDC vouchers, the recently launched Culture Pass — all GovTech. Many of the systems that underpin daily life in Singapore were built by GovTech or by GovTech teams embedded within the agencies.

Of course, none of these came without challenges. Developing the product is one thing — getting it rolled out is never straightforward. But that's part and parcel of any serious project.

The real satisfaction is putting something into the hands of citizens that makes a tangible difference to their everyday lives. That's the thing that is genuinely valuable.

Keith 00:12:32

You wrote an essay — a 37-minute read on Medium — that I'd recommend everyone here read. It explores the buy-versus-build dilemma that governments face: do you purchase software from external vendors, or do you build it yourself? And you tied this to the AI moment, specifically how large language models have dramatically lowered the cost of building and iterating on products.

I'd like you to elaborate a little on this. How does GovTech's AI strategy inform the way you decide what to build versus what to buy?

Sau Sheong 00:13:20

This is genuinely complex, and to explain it properly would take days. But let me try.

Government overall has more than 2,000 systems. Within GovTech itself, we run around 70 systems — most of them platforms, like SingPass, that power many other systems. We build a lot, but it is impossible for us to build everything for the whole of government. Inevitably, some systems are bought as commercial off-the-shelf products, and others are commissioned from system integrators.

For a long period — during the NCB and IDA era — outsourcing was the norm, as it was across the industry broadly. You reduced your own manpower requirements, you stimulated the external technology industry to grow, and there were real benefits to that approach. But over time, serious problems emerged. Government started losing its own capabilities. When the systems you've outsourced are peripheral, you can cope. But when they become core to what it means to operate as a government agency — to deliver the services the government exists to provide — losing that capability is a serious problem.

Part of the reason GovTech was established was to rebuild those internal capabilities and recover that ownership. There has since been a significant push towards modernisation and capability-building.

So is the answer simply "build"? No — because we will never have the manpower to build everything. The real question is: what is the strategy for deciding what to build versus what to buy? You need to capture the systems that matter most. But what counts as "most important" shifts over time as operations evolve.

Our response has been a platform strategy. We control the core layers of the most critical systems, and we engage suppliers to build applications on top of those platforms. We also push for standardisation so that suppliers work to common standards, making it easier to switch between them if needed.

As for AI — it is true that AI has made it substantially easier to build. But that doesn't mean we're going to rebuild SAP or Oracle. Systems that are deeply embedded and carry decades of institutional functionality are not candidates for replacement. The targets are the systems that were simply built on top of whatever was available at the time — those are the ones we want to change, to build properly on our own platforms, in ways that allow both our internal teams and our vendors to move quickly.

Keith 00:18:39

Can you talk more about AI adoption within GovTech specifically — the considerations you and the organisation have when adopting AI? I assume the calculus is quite different from the private sector. You probably place a much higher premium on security and on ownership. So how does that shape the way you integrate AI into your workflows?

Sau Sheong 00:19:05

It's not a trivial question, because what AI is capable of is changing almost daily. Just last night, Anthropic announced Claude and also announced managed agents. Many assumptions we held about what we should or shouldn't be doing have shifted as a result. When Manus was announced and shown to be capable of identifying vulnerabilities in systems years old, a lot of people in cybersecurity suddenly woke up.

So I'll offer this disclaimer: I don't want to give the impression that what I say here is authoritative or definitive, because it may not be true tomorrow.

That said, within government, many of the considerations around AI adoption are not so different from the private sector. There is significant pressure — coming from the Prime Minister's office — to drive adoption across agencies, and GovTech is expected to be at the forefront of delivery, and to deliver fast.

For me, and for GovTech, the most critical application is AI in software development. We've had a developer productivity programme running for about two years, providing AI tools to our engineers. Our earliest tool was GitHub Copilot. We subsequently added Codeium — which became Windsurf — and GitLab Duo, which is popular because we're heavy GitLab users.

Over the past year, the landscape has shifted considerably. Claude Code has become the dominant tool for software development, with Cursor also widely used and OpenAI's Codex entering the picture. Yesterday, in fact, we officially launched the use of Claude Code for classified systems. For unclassified systems, developers already had access to a range of tools. For classified systems, yesterday we issued credits to all our developers to use Claude Code up to a defined token threshold — with the ability to request more if justified. We're monitoring uptake, and it is ramping up well.

The next question, of course, is whether the investment is actually delivering. I've interviewed several teams who are early adopters, and the results are striking. Three separate teams reported productivity multiples — five times, ten times, one person even said thirty times. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret the thirty-times figure, but the direction is clear.

What's happening beyond software development is also significant. The Ministry of Education, for example, has been rolling out AI tools for teachers, students, and general productivity — tools to help teachers mark more efficiently, tools to help students learn mother tongue languages. Other agencies are adopting AI across their operations as well. There's quite a bit happening.

Keith 00:24:54

We're approaching the end of our time together. There are real trade-offs to be made — GovTech has a finite pool of talent and many ministries to serve. How does GovTech prioritise where to deploy that talent, so that the benefits of AI adoption are felt broadly across government?

Sau Sheong 00:25:15

We look at it across a few dimensions.

The first is scale: how many agencies need the same thing? Case management is a good example. It's one of the most common use cases across government — many agencies process cases and need a system to manage them. Rather than build the same thing repeatedly, we build a common platform and engage suppliers to build applications on top of it, adapted to each use case. So the first parameter is breadth: how many agencies and use cases does this address?

The second parameter — and this one is less obvious — is agency willingness to work with us. It sounds ironic, but some agencies prefer to commission their own external developers rather than work through GovTech. That's not optimal, because you end up with the same application replicated multiple times, which is a poor use of public funds. So we have to bring agencies on board, engage them, and get them to collaborate. Without that cooperation, we can't build centrally and deploy broadly.

The third parameter is value. The scale parameter captures breadth, but sometimes a use case has limited reach yet enormous value. Even one agency, one use case, can justify significant investment if the underlying impact is large enough.

In fact, there is a system we work on that processes around a trillion dollars of value annually for Singapore. That is clearly worth participating in, regardless of how many agencies are involved.

Keith 00:28:35

I have one final question for you. There are a lot of younger people in this room, and there's a lot of AI anxiety out there. My sense is that part of what's driving it is that knowledge work is being disrupted in a way many people haven't experienced before. As someone who leads a technology organisation and has been through multiple waves of disruption — in both the public and private sectors — how would you advise younger people to think about AI and their careers?

Sau Sheong 00:29:06

It's a question I get often. And I'll be honest: the real answer is that I don't know, because all of this is genuinely new. But I do have a sense of what's happening, because I engage with it every day.

The anxiety is real, and you are right to feel it. This technology is disruptive — not in the sense that it destroys things, but in the sense that it can multiply individual productivity so significantly that fewer people are needed to do the same work.

I speak primarily to the software industry, which I've been part of for 31 years. But I see this playing out across many industries. I have a close friend who is a legal officer in the public sector, and the legal industry is being disrupted just as profoundly — except that many in that field may not yet fully appreciate it. Software engineers understand it because they face it every day.

How do you deal with it? The industry's response has actually given me a lot of comfort. Rather than collapsing, I've seen it adapting — sometimes going down wrong paths, but ultimately moving in the right direction.

There's also an important asymmetry between senior and junior engineers that people often miss. The assumption is that senior engineers benefit most from AI because they know the technology deeply, and AI amplifies their existing capabilities. That is true. But senior engineers can also become fixated on the processes and workflows they've used their entire careers. They use AI to do the same things faster — which is impressive — but they don't always question whether those things need to be done at all.

Junior engineers, by contrast, often don't carry that baggage. They look at a problem and ask: why am I doing any of this the old way? And they find entirely different approaches that turn out to be far more efficient.

I'll give you a concrete example. I spoke to a team of senior engineers who had adopted AI tools and were getting ten times productivity improvements — genuinely impressive. Then I spoke to two junior data scientists, aged 25 and 28. They are data scientists, not even software engineers. They told me their productivity was roughly thirty times what it was before. They had simply skipped entire categories of assumptions about how the work should be done.

So my message to junior people is: don't despair. You have an edge that is not obvious. And to senior people: the edge is real, but only if you're willing to question the foundations of how you work, not just accelerate what you already do.

I'm actually quite comforted by what I see in the tech industry. My worry, honestly, is for the other industries — the lawyers, the people whose training doesn't naturally equip them to understand and adapt to what's happening. Whether they'll navigate this as well, I genuinely don't know.

Keith 00:34:13

With that — thank you, Sau Sheong.

Sau Sheong 00:34:16

Thanks, Keith.

Dimitra Taslim is seasoned tech investor and currently, serves as a Venture Partner at Granite Asia.

Before Granite Asia’s spinout and rebrand from GGV Capital Asia, Dimitra was part of the investment team at GGV Capital, where he helped source and support investments across emerging Asian markets. His work at Granite Asia reflects the firm’s broader thesis of supporting ambitious Asian founders through long-term capital, operational support, and access to cross-border networks.

Dimitra brings a blend of investor and operator experience. Prior to venture capital, he worked in private equity and growth investing in London, and also founded a digital wealth startup. His background gives him a strong focus on execution, operational scale, and founder-market fit — especially in businesses solving infrastructure and productivity challenges in Asia.

One of the biggest lessons VCs have learned in the past five years is that Southeast Asia is far more fragmented than anyone wished it was in the 2010s.

Today I'm speaking with Dimitra Taslim, a venture partner at Granite Asia, one of Singapore's and the region's leading venture funds. He has been investing across Southeast Asia and greater Asia long enough to know how to separate signal from noise.

In the context of the coming AI revolution, how should we make sense of Singapore's place? Where are the new opportunities for us to grow? I think you'll get a better sense of that after my conversation with Dimitra.

The following conversation took place at a community event that SuperAI, Kata Singapore Global Network, and myself jointly organised. I hope you enjoy it.

Keith 00:00:56

I wanted to start with the AI thesis and the geopolitical positioning of investments. If we use Jensen Huang's famous five-layer cake of AI to explain who comes out on top globally — you have the US and China competing at different layers — where does Singapore fit in? I'd like to get your view on where Singapore sits in this global contest for AI supremacy, and where we can truly make a difference in our startup ecosystem. Maybe you can start by explaining what the five-layer cake is.

Dimitra Taslim 00:01:27

The five-layer cake was made very famous by Jensen Huang. He said that AI is like a five-layer cake, and the layers are: energy, chips and hardware, infrastructure, models, and eventually applications.

Let me go layer by layer.

At the energy level, China is leading by far. China installs and produces more solar panels than the rest of the world combined. They make the best wind turbines in the world and have some of the best technology for harnessing and optimising renewable energy. So China is well ahead in terms of a sustainable future for AI.

On chips, the Taiwanese and Americans are probably a few generations ahead. They want to believe they are ten to fifteen years ahead of China, but I actually believe that with 1.4 billion people rowing the boat in the same direction, it's quite extraordinary. I'd say the Chinese are sub-ten years behind, and they'll reach two-to-four nanometre hopefully sooner than the Americans expect.

Infrastructure is interesting — it covers everything surrounding a data centre, not just the racks, but also energy efficiency and location. In the future of inference, you need data centres that are smaller and closer to the grid, possibly in city centres where latency is critical. For pre-training, you can use a data centre further away, somewhere cheaper. Singapore may play a small role here.

The foundation model layer is a different matter. If you're not at the bleeding edge — which really means the US and China — it's very hard to compete there.

Then you have applications. But what's emerging now is an interesting sixth layer sitting between foundation models and applications: agents. And I think Singapore should look closely at this. Our strengths — location, ports, logistics, warehousing, banking — create a significant orchestration opportunity. In an agentic future where situational intelligence and contextual knowledge matter, building things for specific verticals is where Singapore may have a real role to play.

Keith 00:03:56

I'd like you to elaborate a bit more on that sixth layer. If you think about Singapore's inherent advantages — even something like the Iran conflict makes you realise, as a Singaporean, how fortunate we are to have a certain level of energy sufficiency despite having zero natural resources. Can you say more about why Singapore has a unique advantage in that intermediate layer?

Dimitra Taslim 00:04:28

Firstly, thank you to the first generation of leaders for giving Singapore Inc. such a good name — people still want to do business with us and provide us energy to this day, when some countries are struggling.

To answer your question directly: we have to amplify our strengths. As our dear mentor George always says, Singapore's biggest arbitrage is cultural arbitrage.

Here's a quick example. Asia is the factory of the world, and Singapore is quite advanced in manufacturing and robotics. If you wanted to build an operating system for the factory floor, you could leave all the agent-building to the Americans and the Chinese. The Americans might be very good at building CRM and ERP agents. The Chinese might be very good at building inventory management and warehouse management agents. If you then wanted to build an agentic orchestration layer for the factory floor, which country is better placed to get the APIs from the Americans, get the APIs from the Chinese, and put it all together into one layer that has the best of both East and West? I don't think there's a better country than Singapore to do that.

The Americans might build incredible agents on certain things. The Chinese might build incredible agents on other things. But who is the middle layer that orchestrates the best American agents with the best Chinese agents? I don't think the Americans are as good at IMS or WMS as the Chinese are, and I don't think the Chinese are as good at CRM or ERP agents as the Americans. But somebody needs to be in the middle to orchestrate all of this together, especially when the APIs are closed.

Our advantage is never going to be in pure innovation. It's going to be in orchestration, arbitrage, integration, and the translation layer between East and West. That's what we have to do.

Keith 00:06:34

There was an analogy I was thinking through with a friend: if you think about all the different frontier labs, Singapore looks closest to something like Perplexity — you're able to plug into different models and still be a very valuable player in the industry, even if you're not one of the big frontier labs. Does that resonate?

Dimitra Taslim 00:06:53

Exactly.

Keith 00:06:58

The flip side of this is something many of us in this ecosystem have come to realise. Singapore has traditionally positioned itself as the gateway to Southeast Asia. For the past decade, there's been a thesis that if you have a market of 750 million Southeast Asians in one of the fastest-growing regions in the world, you could approximate it to a common market — perhaps not at the same magnitude as the US, but with some form of parity. That explained a lot of the large influx of venture capital in the past decade.

You're someone unique in that you were doing VC in the US before coming back to Singapore. I'd like you to help me understand some of the hard lessons you've learned deploying capital in two different markets. What has the past ten years taught us about Singapore and Southeast Asia, sometimes the hard way?

Dimitra Taslim 00:08:06

Let's start with a bit of venture capital history 101. Does anyone know how venture capital was invented?

It was invented off the coast of Nantucket, when captains of ships would visit coffee shops in Massachusetts and say, "Look, I'm putting together a crew. I'm going to go out and hunt a big whale. The seas are stormy, the waves are massive, my boat could capsize at any time. But if I don't die and I catch a whale, I could feed an entire village for a year — the flesh, the blubber for soap, the skin for leather." When they came back with a whale, they'd make investors rich and say, "But I need some operating expenditure while I'm out at sea, and when I return, you can have 80% of my profit."

The first firm to take that whaling model and apply it to company building was actually KKR. They said hunting for a good company is like whaling. They took that two-and-twenty model from the coffee shops of Massachusetts and applied it to building companies. So inherently, the economics of venture are whaling economics: you need big outcomes.

But here's the problem: whales only swim in big bodies of water. The body of water here seems large, but it's really about ten different ponds. And the whale can't jump from pond to pond. Each pond has a different culture, different race, different consumer preferences. The old adage that Southeast Asia is one monolithic, homogeneous market is very untrue. It doesn't lend itself as well to whale hunting. You do get some whales, but not at the frequency you'd see in China or the US.

So one of the things I've had to adapt coming back is understanding how to operate in a far more fragmented market.

The second thing is deal flow quality. In the US, the quality of deals at the top of the funnel is generally very high. If you and ten other friends across the top venture firms are all looking at the same deal, it becomes incredibly competitive at the bottom of the funnel — a really strong founder might get ten term sheets from big-name firms and has to pick one. It's a founder's market. In Southeast Asia, you may not see the same density of highly compelling deals at the top of the funnel, but if you're a good-quality name, your chances of winning at the bottom of the funnel are very high. Unlike the US, where there are firms that have been around for thirty to forty years with original founders' names still on the door and very strong brands.

Then there's exits. In the US, the old saying "buy high, sell higher" really works because the secondary market is so liquid. In fact, in the US, the biggest risk-taker is arguably the first-to-third joiner at a company, because the secondary market is so liquid that founders can sell their shares to the next investor even without a primary round — they derisk very fast. In a market that liquid, with an IPO market that's mostly open, it's great for investors. You don't have that here. So adapting to that — thinking carefully about exit paths, focusing on fundamentals far more than narrative — has been one of the big challenges.

Keith 00:12:42

Can you give an example of what that pivot towards fundamentals looks like? When you're looking at founders you'd put money into, what are the filters?

Dimitra Taslim 00:12:54

The US and China are just so deep. If I meet someone in New York working on something — say a vertical-specific e-commerce play — after two weeks of work, I'll find two more teams doing something similar in San Francisco, three in the Midwest, two more in New York. The same in China: if I speak to someone in Shanghai, there's probably someone doing it in Beijing, Chongqing, Wuhan, somewhere else. The market is so deep that when you analyse companies and think about competitive-adjusted returns, it's a very different calculation.

Here, if I meet a strong founder in Jakarta and do my work for two weeks, I'm unlikely to find anyone else doing something similar in Bandung or Sumatra. So when you find something really great here, you have to act fast. Very likely there are very few competitors. But that can cut both ways — in the US, you never really miss the boat, because there's almost always a second mover. If you missed Uber, you got into Lyft. If you missed Meta, there was Snapchat and others. Here, you don't have that option. If you have conviction, you have to move.

So there's a sense of urgency, a focus on fundamentals, and a rigorous check for fraud — which is far more prevalent here than in the US. You have to do the work that other people don't want to do.

I'll give you an example. I was looking at a coffee company once. They claimed to be selling a certain number of cups per day. So I sent two of my friends' kids — a sixteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old — to their busiest location. One counted cups from 8am to 2pm; the other from 2pm to 8pm. When I extrapolated that count across the number of stores they claimed to have, the actual figure was 30% below what they'd stated.

You probably won't need to do things like that in the US, but here you simply cannot take claims at face value. You have to do the work.

I'll give you another example. When I was looking at e-commerce in Southeast Asia in the early days, there was a lot of what they call GMV fraud. One type is triangular fraud. Say Keith is on Shopee and picks something from page one. I'm the merchant on page one, but I'm actually sourcing the item from a merchant on page ten and drop-shipping it to Keith, who never reaches page ten. In the worst case, that single transaction can be counted three times. That's triangular GMV fraud. You don't get that kind of thing in the US. I don't know whether it's inherently a higher-integrity market or just a reflection of socioeconomic maturity. But there's a lot of fraud here, and you have to do your due diligence.

Keith 00:16:40

We have to come to the topic of AI. One of the challenges in Southeast Asia when it comes to AI adoption is that the cost of labour is still relatively low compared to the cost of technology. In the US, the economics make sense because labour is expensive — you can make the case that using something like Cursor or Perplexity could save you headcount cost. But in our region, it's harder. So it seems like Southeast Asia is naturally going to be a late adopter. Where do you see the real opportunities in this AI revolution for our region?

Dimitra Taslim 00:17:28

It really depends. We're not at a stage yet where our blue-collar workers are particularly well paid, so if there's any labour replacement happening, it's probably going to be on the white-collar side first.

But here's an interesting example. I recently went to Shenzhen and met a company making Level 4.5 autonomous vans — the kind you see delivering packages here. Almost fully autonomous, with LiDAR and camera technology. They're selling these vans at around 40,000 RMB, which is roughly 6,000 to 7,000 US dollars. A van driver in China earns about 1,000 US dollars a month. So if you're a logistics operator, you break even on the driver's salary cost in seven months. This thing doesn't take holidays, doesn't need insurance, never complains about too much work, and operates 24/7.

The Chinese government has stepped in to throttle the rollout because they're worried about job security, but it's a completely different story in the US, where both white-collar and eventually blue-collar jobs are getting disrupted.

What I find most remarkable is the cost of tokens. The cost curve is unlike anything I've seen before. Two years ago, per million tokens was maybe around fifty cents. Today it's around seven cents. Going back three or four years, it was even higher. That's a 100x fall. You can compare it to the cost curve of solar, or the internet, or the steam engine, or mobile — there's nothing quite like it. At some point, it may be cheap enough to change the equation entirely for our region.

Keith 00:19:54

Going back to Singapore and Southeast Asia — if you look at the map, only two countries in the region have reached developed-world status: Singapore and Brunei. The rest are still developing, with per-capita income under 10,000 US dollars and electrification and cost-of-living still catching up. So the downstream implication might be that AI won't be a transformative force for most of the region for quite some time. Do you agree with that? And if so, should investors based in Singapore simply be looking to deploy capital in the US and China instead?

Dimitra Taslim 00:20:41

I think the framework is fairly simple. Break it into white collar and blue collar.

White-collar workers in Southeast Asia's metro cities — Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok — are pretty highly paid. When you adjust the cost of AI against human cost inclusive of insurance, PTO, and parental leave, AI is definitely in the game in terms of competitiveness.

On the blue-collar side, this is where the cost curve of industrial robots — and eventually humanoids — really comes into play. That's the physical manifestation of AI. If you can make industrial robots at scale, cheap enough, powered by AI, and model the total cost of a blue-collar worker including guaranteed bonuses, insurance, sick days, accuracy rate, and performance rate, you may well be in the money. It'll probably start with higher-value-add manufacturing rather than agriculture, but it will come. At some point the Chinese will manufacture robots cheaply enough that leasing one becomes more palatable for a factory than hiring a worker.

Keith 00:22:25

So from a venture investing perspective, you'd deploy capital into those frontier technologies and do so in the US?

Dimitra Taslim 00:22:30

Absolutely.

Keith 00:22:36

There's a related question — and it does sound like a somewhat doomer scenario. You're painting a picture of massive disruption across the board. As someone who's been in this industry for ten to fifteen years, how are you thinking about the changes happening within the venture industry itself? How are firms reconfiguring their teams? And what advice would you give to someone entering the space today?

Dimitra Taslim 00:23:07

I don't know if I'm the right person to give advice, honestly — I think I'm probably guilty of part of what makes this hard.

Sometimes I ask an analyst or associate to do something, and the work comes back below the standard I expected. I might make an offhand comment like, "Maybe I'll just do this on AI." And you can see them spring into action: "No no, don't worry, I'll do it, I'll do it better." So I can sense the anxiety.

I graduated post the Global Financial Crisis, and the biggest challenge I faced was entering the labour market at that moment — I ended up doing a master's just to delay it. I really feel for young people today. It's scary and exciting at the same time. Scary because there are so many variables that it's hard to focus on what really matters. Exciting because the future is literally in the palm of your hand.

Here's how I'd frame it. Say you're in charge of CRM data entry on a sales team. You spend hours every day going through Slack, Salesforce, and WhatsApp messages trying to eliminate duplicate entries. It's consuming your time. You come to me one day and say, "Dimitra, I spent the weekend on Claude Code and found a way to automate most of my job. I now have 50% more time." There are only two outcomes: I fire you and cut your salary by 50%, or I say, "Well done — here are more important responsibilities." Which do you think is more likely? If I'm a good boss, I'm going to think: I have to keep this person. I have to give them more to do.

So the fear of using these tools — the worry that they'll replace you — is, to me, utterly irrational, especially if you figure out how to use them well. Lean into it. Don't fear it. Get ahead of it. If you can do something genuinely impressive and you're open about it, any good boss will keep you and give you more.

Keith 00:25:58

Let's open the floor to questions. Feel free to raise your hand.

Audience Member 00:26:15

There's a lot of talk about AI and how quickly it's moving. From an investor's perspective, how do you tell if a company is going to be durable versus just something that's riding the current models — given that AI has that risk of disrupting itself?

Dimitra Taslim 00:26:34

That's such a good question, and it's genuinely hard.

If you look at past platform shifts — from the steam engine to mainframe to PCs, the internet, desktop to mobile, and on-premise to cloud — they've all had meaningful friction. Moving to cloud required extra cybersecurity work, data privacy consultants, and integration costs. Moving to mobile meant buying iPads and handheld devices. There was always an adoption cost, an integration cost.

This one is different. This is an API-based platform shift. If I'm a brand and I get an engineer to pipe ChatGPT into my Zendesk, I can have automated customer service in two days and probably let go of a few outsourced agents in the Philippines. In software terms, the time-to-value is extremely fast.

But that same quality — the very low friction — also means it's highly democratic. Every brand can do it. Which means the competitive moat from adoption alone is thin.

There's another dynamic too. Unlike past platform shifts, it feels like every big tech CEO today has a copy of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma on their desk. They missed desktop to mobile. Some missed on-premise to cloud. This time, they're saying: I cannot be disrupted. I have to disrupt myself. I have to move faster. So not only is adoption happening bottom-up — everyone is using these tools to build more efficient companies — but top-down, the incumbents are more nimble than they've ever been. They're watching for ants that might grow big and looking to acquire them early, like what Meta is doing.

Where that leaves the balance between durable startups and those that get acquired or crushed, I genuinely don't know. But my best guess is that acquisitions will happen younger and faster than in previous cycles.

Keith 00:29:39

I'd like to come back to the Singapore and Asian advantage. You travel extensively across the region — what cultural patterns do you observe in how different markets are adopting AI?

Dimitra Taslim 00:30:14

Something interesting has happened in the past year. The Chinese started out very loudly positioned as an open-source ecosystem — "we are open, we share everything." But recently, look at Qwen and Zhipu AI: they've gone closed-source. Why? Because you have to pay the bills. Open source is great for building community and distillation, but if you can't monetise through the model layer, you close it.

Previously you had this polarised dynamic: the West was closed-source, frontier, "we're the best, we don't do distillation." The East was open-source and collaborative. Now the Chinese who were doing distillation are closing up too, because they have to monetise. So I think at the model layer, at least, you're seeing convergence.

At the application layer, though, the cultures are still very different. Let me give an example. In the US, if you're Zoom and I'm Slack, we might say: "I do video, you do messaging. Let's be frenemies — we open our APIs to each other, you don't come on my turf, I don't go on yours, we each do what we do best." In China, if you have one foot in my communications layer, I will destroy you. I will build up and down, left and right, and do everything until you're gone. That very gladiatorial, vertically integrated mindset — build the complete stack — is very Chinese. It's very different from the American approach of connecting through APIs. Very different cultures.

To return to your broader question about Singapore's role: I'm not sure it's entirely a choice. Going back to Jensen's five-layer cake — where else can Singapore play? Can we do energy at scale? Can we build leading-edge chips at two nanometres? Infrastructure, potentially — floating data centres, maybe data centres in space at some point. Foundation models? You'd need to throw a hundred billion dollars at it. Applications? Possibly, but I don't think we have the scale of market to win there.

So I don't think it's out of choice. I think the only layer where Singapore can genuinely play is orchestration — taking the best of East and West and putting it together into a workflow operating system for the verticals we're strong in: ports, banking, warehousing, logistics. I don't see any other layer where it's remotely possible to be at the bleeding edge alongside China and the US. The money is just too large.

Audience Member 00:33:48

Given the pace of AI and assuming Moore's Law continues, which frameworks or ways of thinking do you find most useful?

Dimitra Taslim 00:34:08

I've been thinking a lot about this.

When Google came out, their stated vision was to organise the world's information in a way that is universally accessible and useful. When Google got really good at it, there was a step-function reduction in the value of human ability to gather information.

With AI, and assuming Moore's Law continues, I think the curve is more like a massive decay — where the marginal value of human textbook intelligence asymptotes to zero. In that reality, what matters more? Human intuition. Commercial judgment. Empathy. Resilience. Adaptability. Those traits become far more important.

The consensus view — and I want to be clear this is a consensus, not a contrarian position — is that AI will amplify capitalists and technocrats at the bleeding edge in China and the US, while labour in the Marxist sense gets hyper-compressed. I don't know exactly what happens to labour in the short to medium term. In the long term, I hope for a Jevons Paradox: that this abundance actually causes people to do more, take on more, create more.

But I do think it's making building startups far easier. So people should try to be builders.

One framework I found really useful was recently put out by Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha from Sequoia. After Dorsey let go of a large number of people, they co-wrote a piece arguing that in the future, companies will have essentially three types of people: individual contributors who own a specific part of the operating system; problem solvers who are given a challenge and go solve it; and what they call player-managers — people who can build things but are also managing across systems. Very different from today's hierarchical structure. A lot of middle management in the future could be replaced, because today the middle manager's value is that they hold information from above and below and act as a gateway. In the future, you can build systems that do that. If your only value is being an information conduit, that role is at risk. I'd strongly recommend reading their article — it's a useful lens for thinking about what role you want to build for yourself.

Audience Member 00:37:20

Where do you see Europe in this dynamic between China and the US?

Dimitra Taslim 00:37:34

My view is that Germany actually has more in common with China than most people would expect.

Look at monetary policy. The West is currently telling China to print more money — there's deflation, you're dumping cheap goods on us. But China looks at Western money printing and thinks: if I solve all my problems by printing money and people get addicted to that, I don't want to end up there. It's very much like post-war Germany, where there was a deep belief in industrial economics, scientific rigour, and a focus on patents. Post-war Germany generated more patents than any other country until Japan caught up. China is focused on the same model.

So there are real parallels. And I think China has more in common with Europe, on certain dimensions, than it does with the US.

Europe's situation is going to be very interesting. I think Europe has a chance to play a role more like Singapore's — but it's stuck between ideology and pragmatism. The pragmatic side says work with Chinese supply chains, because that's the only way your auto industry and others survive. But your ideological alignment is with the Anglo-Saxon world. How Europe navigates that tension will be, I think, the defining question of this decade for the continent. I hope Europe does well, because I love Europe.

Keith 00:39:49

There's an economist called Keyu Jin who wrote a book called The New China Playbook. Her central point was that China has always looked towards Germany in its developmental path — including how students are trained, the heavy emphasis on science and technology. That resonance is not coincidental.

And actually, the former Foreign Minister George Yeo, who I interviewed recently, was alluding to this same point about geopolitical multipolarity. In that same vein, hopefully Europe starts to carve out its own path. He had a very interesting conversation — I recommend checking it out — with the then-president of STG, Alexander Stubb, where the core thesis was: how could Europe better understand China? What are the misunderstandings Europeans hold? He pointed to a deep historical connection between Europe and China, and his favourite example was Matteo Ricci. I'd encourage you to look that interview up.

On that note, I'd like to thank Dimitra for sharing his perspectives today. Thank you so much for coming down and giving your time.

Dimitra Taslim 00:41:25

Thank you.

Professor Lily Kong is President of Singapore Management University (SMU) and one of Singapore's most distinguished geographers. A professor by training, she built her academic career studying the intersections of culture, religion, and urban space, with a body of work that spans both rigorous scholarship and practical policy relevance. She has published extensively and has, more recently, turned her attention to the future of higher education — producing a series of public lectures and a book that make the case for reimagining the university in an era of rapid technological and demographic change.

As SMU President, Kong leads an institution of some 13,000 to 14,000 students that has become known for its emphasis on entrepreneurship, interdisciplinarity, and applied learning.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
0:26 The Geographer's Lens
3:21 Prisoners of Geography: Singapore's Hard Truths
7:29 Smallness as Strength and Constraint
8:52 Eastern vs Western Universities: Singapore's 50-Year Journey
12:49 Why Research and Innovation Are Under-Valued
15:48 Research That Changes Lives
18:15 Demographics Is Destiny: The Ageing Society
19:41 The 60-Year University
23:17 Rethinking How Universities Deliver
28:08 AI and the Accelerating Half-Life of Knowledge
29:21 What Universities Must Do in the Age of AI
35:51 Integrating Mind, Body, and Soul
36:37 Why Campus Life Matters More Than We Think
39:53 Reimagining the Humanities
43:35 Is the University a Scam?
48:31 SkillsFuture and the Lifelong Learning Challenge
51:46 What Lily Kong Is Telling Policymakers
53:46 Advice for Fresh Graduates

This is the 80th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 00:00:00

Today I am joined by one of Singapore's most iconic geographers, the President of Singapore Management University, and someone who has not only published a series of lectures online but also written a book about reimagining higher education in today's more turbulent world. With great privilege, I welcome Professor Lily Kong onto The Front Row Podcast.

Prof Lily Kong 00:00:23

Hello, Keith. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Keith 00:00:26

I'd like to start with the origins of the university. Perhaps it might be useful to first understand your background as a geographer. What is it about the lens of a geographer that would help you understand education differently from, say, a historian or an economist?

Prof Lily Kong 00:00:46

Geographers are very expansive in our approach to things. As an undergraduate, I studied geography and took courses in population geography, economic geography, transport geography, geomorphology, and hydrology. You can see immediately that it straddles the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. In that sense, it's very expansive and very integrative.

Critics will say that geographers are imperialistic — another word used is "adjectival." What they mean is: put a word in front of geography and the phenomenon becomes geography. Put "economic" or "urban" in front of it, and it becomes geography. The implication is that geography encroaches on many different disciplinary areas.

I take a different view — and other geographers do too — which is that this actually allows us to see things from very many different perspectives and to draw in insights from other disciplines. By nature of the discipline, we are integrative. We bring different perspectives to bear on a phenomenon. I think that is genuinely helpful today for two reasons.

First, as a scholar, we increasingly recognise that interdisciplinarity is so important, and geography has well prepared me for that. Second, it is actually very helpful for me as a university leader, allowing me to recognise the value of different disciplines and to intentionally — and the word is intentionally — bring different disciplines to bear on particular subject areas.

If we are interested in ageing or in sustainability, that is going to require multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives: climate science alongside climate history alongside sustainable and green finance. These are all different disciplines, but brought to bear on a particular phenomenon. As a university president, my geography background has really positioned me well to appreciate this integration and interdisciplinarity.

Keith 00:03:21

I'd like to press a little bit on this question. There is Tim Marshall's book about being prisoners of geography — the idea that geography, to a certain extent, influences policy behaviour. That's where the "geo" in geopolitics comes from. If geography does not dictate destiny, it influences it very seriously.

As a Singapore university leader, what are some hard geographic truths about Singapore that bear significantly on the way our education system is created?

Prof Lily Kong 00:04:02

That's a really good question. I've thought often about this notion of being prisoners of geography, and I think it's very real. Singapore's own existence could be framed within that context — the fact that we are a tiny island, bereft of natural resources, located in the heart of a predominantly Malay Muslim community. Those are geographical realities and imperatives. And just as they influence but do not determine Singapore's future and survival, so too do those factors influence how education, and higher education in particular, plays out.

As an example: the fact that we are heavily reliant on human capital — having no natural resources — means that Singapore's leaders have placed a great deal of emphasis on education. When Lee Kuan Yew first led a PAP-dominant Singapore, emphasis was placed on three things: housing, education, and healthcare. Education has always had very strong government support because of our geography.

Then there is the question of how geography influences how education is developed and defined. Here, our smallness has been both a constraint and a strength. A constraint in the sense that we always think: we are so small, we must plan. Some would say Singapore is a hyper-planned society — we plan to the last degree how many graduates we must have from which disciplines.

In that sense, we have succeeded in ensuring that our human capital responds to economic needs. But when we over-plan, driven by the view that we are small and must maximise our human resource, we over-plan. And in this day and age, where knowledge boundaries are much more fluid, it is very difficult to say we want this many civil engineers or this many lawyers, because of the fluidity of knowledge boundaries. So this geography that has influenced the ways in which we plan — and perhaps over-plan — is both a strength and a weakness at the same time.

Keith 00:07:29

There's an interesting parallel here. The beauty of being small is that you can scale up really fast. I was talking to some FinTech leaders previously, and some of them commented that if you look at the e-payment landscape a decade ago, Singapore was actually quite laggard in some regards — but the beauty of being small is that you can accelerate and catch up very quickly. Within a few years, you can leapfrog the rest, because you have the resources of a state but the size of a city. So it's a constraint, but also an amplifier.

Prof Lily Kong 00:08:01

Absolutely. Smallness is both a real strength and a setback. I think about that in the context of my own university: the fact that we are around 13,000 to 14,000 students, compared to universities of 30,000, 40,000, or 50,000. I see that as a real strength. That sense of community, that ability to bring everyone along together — it's a real parallel to Singapore. But at the same time, smallness can be a drawback, because you don't have that same pool of talent that you find in far larger societies. In any situation, the same fact can be a double-edged sword.

Keith 00:08:52

Another thing about Singapore is that we seem to synthesise really well both East and West. In your earlier lectures, you talked about the idea of Western universities versus Eastern universities — the European model of a self-governing institution, like a state within a state, versus more Chinese traditions of an imperial academy focused on training civil servants.

One of my past guests, Pak Gita Wirjawan, pointed out that if you look at modern university successes — in terms of generating a surplus of human capital — Singapore stands as a leading example. He said that within ASEAN, the Singapore education model is highly aspirational, because it was able to attract billions of dollars of FDI. I'd like you to comment on how Singapore universities succeeded over the past 50-plus years of independence, and perhaps some of the limitations or constraints we are facing now.

Prof Lily Kong 00:10:12

Lovely to hear Pak Gita's name — he is a friend of SMU and used to sit on one of our advisory boards.

Over the last 50 years, Singapore universities have evolved considerably. There was a time when we were a one-university town — much like a one-horse town. Everyone who was a graduate was a graduate from that one university. That was a period when a great deal of effort was put into developing human capital to feed economic needs.

When Singapore invested heavily in engineering and technology, the University of Singapore established an engineering school in direct response to what Singapore needed at the time. That is a very clear example of how the university responds to the needs of society by producing the kinds of human capital required at that moment. Things have changed significantly since then.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it became apparent that universities needed to contribute not just by producing workers, but by ensuring that new knowledge is produced. Research became really important, and research universities became the model for Singapore universities to strive after.

Then came a recognition that research in itself is not enough — that it is important to translate that research into usable ends, whether through innovation and entrepreneurship, or through research that informs public policy, business policy, and practice. The evolution over time is a reflection of the maturation of Singapore society and of the universities themselves.

Keith 00:12:49

It's interesting you say that, because I think in public discourse today — especially given the economic anxiety around jobs — the dominant frame seems to be centred on universities as a means of generating employment. We still seem somewhat under-indexed on their value in creating innovation, new research, and IP. Why do you think that's the case?

Prof Lily Kong 00:13:20

Keeping the balance is really important to me. There is a danger — as we have seen in many universities around the world — where research takes over and too little attention is paid to the educational endeavour. Something is lost when that happens. So at my own university, I am deeply committed to ensuring we keep the balance: education matters, but education not just in terms of producing workers — education for the whole person. That is one balance. The other is between education, research, and enterprise and innovation.

Now, why is it that people in Singapore do not necessarily think as much about research, innovation, and enterprise? I think it is a reflection of the history of universities. For the vast majority of people my age and older, the university was principally a means to a better career. When I went to university in the 1980s, only about 10 per cent of the population attended. People went because it was a ticket to a better job. So the framing and the connection were very much about employment.

It is only in more recent years that the government has recognised that investment in research — and in turning that research into IP — is important. As the government recognises this shift, the population usually follows behind, because societal change needs to happen, investments need to be made, and the value of research and entrepreneurship from universities needs time to demonstrate its effect. Then people begin to recognise it.

Keith 00:15:48

If you enjoy this show, please check if you're subscribed. Every subscription matters and really helps us grow this show to serve you. Thank you so much for the support. Now back to the show.

As an aside — SMU is known for its entrepreneurial students and stands as one of the leading universities in Asia-Pacific. Have you seen any research and innovation that has excited you in recent years?

Prof Lily Kong 00:16:15

There are two ways of responding to that. There is research that leads to new innovations, which then lead to new enterprises that create jobs and make life better for people. Examples of that would often be in the medical or tech space.

To cite cases beyond the Singapore context: the mRNA technologies that underpinned the COVID vaccines were worked on for some years before being turned to immediate, useful purpose. Or take the humble seatbelt — it emerged from research into accidents, into how to design interventions that prevent harm. These are innovations that came largely from the Western world, but they illustrate how lives get changed through research.

The other part of the answer is that it's not necessarily about new technologies or new medicines — it is also about research into entrepreneurship and innovation itself. I have a colleague doing a research project on what makes good entrepreneurs. Another is studying why there are so few women entrepreneurs. Those kinds of studies can help unlock entrepreneurial potential once we begin to understand what circumstances actually support and encourage it.

Keith 00:18:15

What comes to mind immediately is the significant public good that universities generate, which often goes unspoken. The seatbelt example is a good illustration: you needed researchers with an intellectual pursuit that had real-world applications, and the result generated enormous public benefit that no corporation alone would have taken on.

This brings me to a big question that's been forming in my mind. There are significant mega-trends reshaping the world as we speak. One of the more striking points you have raised — and one that doesn't get enough attention — is the ageing society. Our TFR has reached a new low at 0.87, and we are also living longer than ever before. That creates new economic constraints. If anything truly shapes our destiny, it may be demographics. Demographics truly is destiny.

How should we understand the extension of our lifespans in the context of higher education today?

Prof Lily Kong 00:19:41

I really appreciate that question — it is a subject close to my heart, and there are many dimensions to it.

With the advances in public hygiene, nutrition, and healthcare, people in Singapore and in several parts of the world are living longer. I have written about living a hundred-year life, and it is not that distant a reality. Two scholars at London Business School have made their calculations: if we are to maintain a reasonable standard of living after retirement, we will probably have to work until age 80.

If we are to work until 80, and we graduated at 22 or 24, that is another 55 to 60 years of working life. What makes us think that the knowledge and skills we acquired 50 years ago will last us that long? They will not. Universities therefore need to think of our roles in a 60-year relationship. I call it the 60-year university — walking 60 years with individuals, and rethinking how we deliver programmes and what we offer.

For someone in a four-year undergraduate degree, learning the foundationals and developing critical thinking skills is really important. Once you are in the workforce, you need skills and knowledge that allow you to pivot quickly. So what kinds of formats — bite-sized, short courses — should we be putting out? How regularly should people be coming back? Do we leave it to individuals to decide? Do we work with corporations to structure training for their employees? Do we offer alumni a subscription model, allowing them to return regularly?

The concept of the university and the format through which we deliver needs to be rethought radically. No university in the world has done that yet. We are having those conversations within my university right now. There was a recent article in Forbes about precisely this — it talks about university as a service. The university is not simply a place you attend for four years and then return to occasionally as an alumnus. The university remains a place of service to alumni for the next 60 years.

Keith 00:23:17

In terms of these preliminary conversations, how are you rethinking these concepts? For example, as our productive years extend, the half-life of our knowledge is decreasing — what we learned in the past becomes irrelevant at a faster rate.

Prof Lily Kong 00:23:41

These are all preliminary thoughts and still in discussion — we have not yet decided which way to go. But the collective wisdom of my colleagues — and I want to genuinely credit them — has been very generative.

One colleague, our incoming Vice President for Professional and Continuing Education, suggested thinking about it in the same way we think about medical check-ups. Up to a certain age, we all go for regular check-ups. Some areas call for a deep-dive review; others just need an annual blood test. A colonoscopy might be done every five or ten years. There are different kinds of check-ins for different needs.

His analogy was: should we have people come in for regular, periodic check-ins — to identify shortfalls, to assess new developments in their field that they want to avail themselves of? Can the university be the location for those check-ins, helping individuals understand where their strengths and gaps are, and then guiding further development?

A second idea concerns the people who are not currently re-skilling or upskilling, even though opportunities exist. Evidence suggests two barriers: they do not know what to do, or the imperatives of the workplace mean they simply do not have the time. How do we respond to both?

For those who do not know what to do, the regular check-in mechanism helps identify their gaps and guide them toward relevant programmes. For those who do not have the time, how do we work with employers to show that letting employees re-skill is a medium- to long-term gain, not a short-term loss?

One approach we are already using to some extent is to make training project-oriented rather than didactic. We have a pedagogical approach at SMU called SMUX — undergraduates and postgraduates work on real-world projects with partner organisations under faculty advisement. Why not extend this to continuing education, where the projects are drawn directly from the individual's own workplace? That way, when an employer asks who will cover the work during two weeks of training, the answer is: the employee is still doing the work, because the training project is the work project.

This SMUX-style pedagogy could be extended — and we have already started using it to good effect. The question is how to scale it.

Keith 00:28:08

I spoke to a number of people in the spin-off space, particularly those working in university spin-off labs, and that seems to be some of the inspiration behind that approach — pairing someone technical from the startup world with industry experts who can identify the right use case. That seems to be a very effective model for generating enterprise value.

On top of that, there is this idea that our knowledge half-life is not just depreciating — it's depreciating at an accelerating rate, because of AI. We think about generative AI today, which has generated significant economic anxiety. For younger people like myself, entry-level roles used to be the gateway to better training. But now that seems to be disappearing as organisations seek to leverage AI and downscale. In that landscape — where knowledge is no longer the key bottleneck — how do universities adapt?

Prof Lily Kong 00:29:21

I see university education in an expansive way. One thing worth noting is that the focus of universities has actually narrowed compared to schools. Schools tend to see whole-person development as quite important — character education, physical education, art, music. By the time we reach university, we have narrowed dramatically to cognitive learning: knowledge and thinking skills.

I think that needs to change. Especially because, as you say, information has become ubiquitous — though knowledge is not ubiquitous in the same way. You need to help young people learn how to turn information into knowledge: how to make sense of what you encounter online, through MOOCs, social media, or abundant material available digitally — and to apply it to a specific situation. That cognitive work cannot be taken for granted, even with AI.

Beyond that, whole-person development needs to come back to universities. Being more human — everyone says this when we talk about AI. But what are we actually doing about it in universities?

Building resilience is really important. Giving young people the creative room to explore and think out of the box is really important. What is AI? AI is trained on existing knowledge. What we need is new knowledge, new perspectives, new insights. Creativity, resilience, integrity, ethical judgement — all of these are outside the immediate domain of knowledge acquisition. The traditional classroom approach is very limited in cultivating these qualities.

So how do we create environments that stretch students in ways that ChatGPT or DeepSeek cannot simply answer? For example, creating environments where young people do the kind of work that first- or second-year lawyers used to do — because by the time they enter the workforce, AI can already handle that work. Why not create those environments within university, so students learn to do that work before moving on to the higher-order work?

I firmly believe that at this point in time, AI is benefiting people from my generation more than the younger generation. Why? Because we have had to go through the difficult work of reading and synthesising. We have the experience that gives us tacit knowledge — so when generative AI throws up an answer, I have a suspicion that something is not quite right. Younger people, who have not yet had that depth of experience, may not. How can we reasonably expect them to question AI when they have not yet built that foundation?

For me, therefore, the task is to create environments of deeper experience within a shorter time during university years.

There is also a second dimension. If we are going to live a hundred years, we do not want to spend 30 or 40 of those years in ill health and without friends. Cultivating in young people the ability to make and keep relationships is critically important — otherwise, we risk dying lonely.

And physical health: nutrition, healthy living, physical activity — none of this really appears in university. We tend to think that after primary or secondary school, physical education is a thing of the past. But it is not. I genuinely believe that universities are the place where we cultivate these habits. It is as much about forming habits through doing as it is about understanding why they matter. We should be running seminars and workshops for young people on these dimensions. When I was young, I took it for granted — and I now regret that.

Keith 00:35:51

It seems you are making the case that university is where we have the integration of mind, body, and soul. One could even argue this from a utilitarian perspective: if you are a state or a government, you are incentivised to invest in it because you can keep downstream costs low. I had a conversation earlier on with Minister Ong, who made the point about healthier ageing — that if you solve upstream problems, you save a great deal on mitigation and generate better health outcomes at a lower cost. And I think there is something to that: that your most formative years in university should be the time to invest in all of this.

Prof Lily Kong 00:36:37

Absolutely. Investing at the younger age, so that we understand why this matters and develop habits that we carry forward. The other thing — and I feel passionately about this — is the question of why our TFR is so low. We are not getting enough marriages, and when people do marry, they do not necessarily have children.

Part of the answer lies in cultivating the right context for young people to meet one another and form relationships. I am an advocate for the position that when we fund a university, it is not just about classrooms. It is about the sports field. It is about the dance hall. It is about student residences. All the things that make for healthy ageing, positive relationships, and a healthy marriage rate come from those contexts — not just from the lecture theatre.

We are short-sighted and wrong if we say we will only invest in lecture theatres and seminar rooms.

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It is almost ironic that until the age of 18 there is an obsessive focus on physical health, and then once you enter university it becomes a free-for-all — a huge drop-off that seems quite paradoxical.

There is also another paradox you touched on with AI. Beyond what you earlier described — the difficulty of articulating tacit knowledge — there is the Moravec paradox: the idea that AI cannot act in the real world, and there remains a fundamental limit to what artificial intelligence can do. You are essentially making the case that we should invest in being more human. What does a new model of humanities education actually look like in this day and age?

Prof Lily Kong 00:39:53

I was hugely encouraged about ten years ago when I joined SMU. I noticed that the business school capstone was centred on the humanities, and I thought — how did that happen? One of the professors explained to me that he believed many leadership lessons, including business leadership lessons, can actually be observed in the classics. He wanted his students in the capstone to draw on classes in leadership and team-building, ethical business, literature or history, and then say: what lessons have you learned, and how do you apply them in business?

In the humanities, there is a great deal of applicability that we are not tapping sufficiently. Studying literature is not just about practical criticism — though I think it is one of the most useful skills I learned in junior college. You learn to deeply read a text, to take apart its meaning. Those skills are transferable to any job. But beyond utility, studying the humanities is about understanding humanity. And humanity needs to be understood whatever field you are in. If you are a business leader and need to read your competitor, that is part of it. If you are a political leader reading Sun Tzu or Machiavelli — these are texts from the humanities that help shape the human individual each of us is.

I think drawing those lessons to light makes people recognise the value of the humanities in living their lives.

Keith 00:42:25

It's interesting you say that, because I was a humanities student, and one thing I realised as I explored history and economics was that you develop a deep capacity to empathise with a person's or character's motivations — and it is surprising how often that plays out in real life. There is a reason people say that life sometimes models itself after fiction.

Prof Lily Kong 00:42:50

It shapes our values in ways we may not realise at the time. For me, one of the classics that has really stayed with me is To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch's idea of climbing into other people's shoes and walking around in them — that is empathy. That phrase has stayed with me and my friends for the best part of four decades, and it shapes how we think about who we are and how we respond to situations.

Keith 00:43:35

So far we have had a broadly optimistic reading of where universities could take us. But there is an idea that has been gaining traction in recent years — that universities are, in some sense, a scam. I mean that with some hyperbole, but the argument is essentially about the sheepskin effect: that much of it is signalling — demonstrating compliance — rather than genuine capability formation.

Layer on the economic anxieties of today — geopolitical instability, US-China decoupling, increased competition for high-value jobs — and you have middle-class aspirations across the world that looked to universities as a ticket to a better job, and are no longer seeing that delivered. Singapore does not suffer from the tuition inflation that we see in the West. But the anxiety exists here too. And this year, 74.4 per cent of our graduates were able to find full-time employment within six months — a decline. How are you thinking about how universities should adapt to ensure this uncertainty does not become disillusionment?

Prof Lily Kong 00:45:09

Maintaining trust in universities is really important. We have seen it decline in the United States. Pew Center polling shows that trust in institutions has fallen broadly, and trust in universities has declined alongside it — for several reasons. One, because of growing graduate debt. Two, because people feel they got a degree and still could not find a job. Three, because of the extreme ideological positions taken on some campuses.

Closer to home, in Taiwan and China, youth unemployment is higher than the general average — and that speaks to how well education is preparing people for the workforce. Trust declines accordingly.

In Singapore, employment rates are still good for graduates and polytechnic graduates combined, which accounts for a significant majority of each cohort. Whether this year's decline is the start of a long-term trend or a reflection of a difficult period — time will tell.

What must universities do? It is imperative, critical, that universities pay attention to the value they provide. That value must operate on two levels: immediate employability, and lifelong relevance.

On immediate employability: as AI makes entry-level roles redundant, how do we prepare young people to enter at what was previously the third- or fourth-year level of a career? That shift needs to happen in our curriculum and pedagogy.

On lifelong relevance: if someone graduates ten years later, faces a block in their career, and does not know where to pivot — and if the university steps in to help, and they see genuine value in that help and successfully make the pivot — then trust in universities will lift. The relationship is no longer just about the point of employment. It is about value across the longer arc of a life.

Keith 00:48:31

When you talked earlier about the university-as-subscription idea, it resonated with me. In Singapore, the government is already doing a great deal to promote lifelong learning through SkillsFuture credits. But the challenge is that the sheer volume of choices can be overwhelming, and quality control is inconsistent. I think if SkillsFuture credits were channelled more directly to universities, people would feel more reassured — they would know the quality, and they would feel supported. But another challenge is that people find it hard to step away from the intensity of the marketplace. How else should universities be reaching out to actively engage people to return and continue their education?

Prof Lily Kong 00:49:36

We have made a start and seen some progress, but I think we need to think harder about how to accelerate it.

One thing we have done is open up career advisory to alumni — permanently. The career office in a university should not be only for graduating students. We have expanded that service and put in more resources for alumni to return. And that connects to the check-in idea I mentioned earlier: you come back, you speak to the career office — which should be scanning the changing landscape, understanding shifting skills needs and emerging opportunities — and it can offer advice tailored to your existing experience, identify your gaps, and recommend relevant training programmes. Even if we don't have those programmes, we should be honest enough to say: for this, you need to go to another university.

Those regular check-ins should be paired with advisories for training. And then the last piece is placement — and that is the most difficult, because universities are not really placement agencies. We need to work with bodies like Workforce Singapore or with professional placement firms. That whole loop needs to be closed, and universities can play a significant part in it.

Keith 00:51:46

What are some of the ideas you are surfacing to policymakers — the things you are saying we should do more of?

Prof Lily Kong 00:51:57

I am making a bid for more residential space — and I dislike the word hostel. It is not just a roof over people's heads. It is a residence, a residential college, where community is built. That is one bid.

A second is continued support for lifelong learning. In the same way that undergraduates receive subsidies to attend university, SkillsFuture has been supporting working adults coming back — and my bid is that we must continue and expand that.

A third bid — and this is less about employability and workforce than about something I care about deeply — is upliftment and enrichment for older people for its own sake. I wrote about this in a recent op-ed. When my late mother received a letter informing her she had $500 in SkillsFuture credits — she was about 89 years old — she was delighted. She said she could learn how to cut hair. She was never going to become a hairdresser. But the joy on her face told me something important: we cannot put an expiry date on curiosity and learning. If there is some way to support older people in continuing to learn — for upliftment, for a sense of self-respect and value — we also go a long way, in a very utilitarian sense, towards keeping older people healthy.

Keith 00:53:46

One last question. Knowing everything you know, sitting where you are — what is one piece of advice you would give to a fresh graduate entering the working world today?

Prof Lily Kong 00:53:56

Don't panic — because the human qualities are going to stand you in very good stead, even in the face of AI. And use your university years to cultivate your humanity.

Keith 00:54:17

With that, Professor Kong, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to The Front Row Podcast.

Prof Lily Kong 00:54:19

Thank you so much, Keith.

Professor Selina Ho is Vice Dean (Research and Development), Dean's Chair and Associate Professor in International Affairs, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She researches Chinese politics and foreign policy.

Specifically, she is interested in how China wields power and influence via infrastructure and water disputes in Southeast Asia and South Asia. Her work stands at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations.

Her book, Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia, is considered to be a definitive text on the Belt and Road Initiative in the region.

If you are interested in her latest research paper - "Elite Perceptions of a China-Led Regional Order in Southeast Asia" - you can download it here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/18681034241294093#table2-18681034241294093

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 — Trailer
00:52 — Introduction
01:21 — Why Southeast Asia Matters to Both Superpowers
04:25 — Will Trump Turn His Back on the Region?
09:41 — The Fear of US Abandonment
14:17 — How Southeast Asia Actually Sees China
18:37 — Chinese Influence vs. Chinese Dominance
21:37 — Wolf Warrior Diplomacy In China
29:11 — The Belt and Road
33:47 — When China Owns Your Power Grid: The Laotian Lesson
37:44 — China Wants Regional Dominance
40:16 — How ASEAN Elites Actually Respond to Chinese Influence
43:06 — What Regional Decision-Makers Really Think
47:31 — ASEAN Centrality
51:52 — Why ASEAN Is Strong on Trade and Weak on Security
55:15 — Building an ASEAN Identity
01:00:19 — What Singapore Should Do With Its 2027 ASEAN Chairmanship
01:01:46 — Advice For A Fresh Graduate Entering The Working World

This is the 79th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 00:00:52

Southeast Asia is a region of interest to both the US and China. But what exactly is our value proposition to them?

Selina Ho 00:01:29

Southeast Asia has been described by many as the battlefield for supremacy between the US and China. It is considered the front line in their competition, and there are good reasons for it. Our value add is in two key areas.

The first is that we are the fastest-growing region in the world. Africa is also growing quickly, but Southeast Asia is growing very rapidly. Some have described this as the Asian century. We are a key hub for manufacturing, services, and infrastructure. We have some of the fastest-growing economies, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and we have a relatively young population. I must caveat that because while we are still relatively young, all our countries are facing ageing societies. We know that about Singapore, of course, but it is a broader regional challenge that few people are aware of.

We are also a key node for global supply chains, and we know how important that is now in terms of value for superpowers trying to diversify and reduce reliance on any single country. We are China's largest trading partner and a very important economic partner for the United States. We are a vital hub for semiconductors, particularly Singapore, and a source of critical minerals. All of these factors are important in the competition between the United States and China.

The second reason we are important is that we sit at the intersection of two great oceans — the Pacific and the Indian — which means we are where the vital sea lanes of communication are located. The Malacca Straits is extremely important for the shipping of goods and energy supplies for both China and the United States. And if you want to control the seas, as is important for American naval supremacy, you need access to this part of the world.

So economically, strategically, and in terms of sea lanes, Southeast Asia is extremely important.

Keith 00:04:25

My immediate question is that if you look at what President Trump is doing, there seems to be an increased focus back on his hemisphere — mainly Europe and Latin America. Will Southeast Asia once again be pushed to the background, despite the importance you've outlined?

Selina Ho 00:04:42

The interesting thing is that with US attention on the Middle East now, especially with what is going on with Iran, and the turn back to Latin America with Trump's declaration of what amounts to a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, you might imagine Southeast Asia is not that important. We have always feared this. It is not the first time we have worried about the US turning away from us.

The big question for all of us in the region, especially for US allies, has been what happens with US presence after the Cold War. In the 1990s, we grappled with whether the United States would stay, what would happen to its naval bases, and whether allies would be abandoned — especially Japan, which probably worries the most. There was a drawdown in US presence right after the Cold War. The naval bases in the Philippines were gone, and there were problems with bases in Japan as well.

So this is not the first time we are facing this kind of problem. It has always been a struggle for allies in the region to try to keep the US engaged. In political science, when we talk about alliances, we call this the fear of abandonment.

Now, for the rest of us who are not allies, it is not to say that we do not need the US. We do, because the US plays a very vital role as a security guarantor in this region. There is a reason why we want the US here. We want all the major powers in the region as a way to balance each other out. We are mainly composed of smaller states. I would not call Indonesia a smaller state, but it is relatively weaker compared to the great powers. We want all the powers in the region so they can balance each other off.

The US presence balances several things. It maintains freedom of navigation in places like the South China Sea. It is a security guarantor for Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. There is always a fear of China, and US presence serves as a form of guarantee and balance.

Economically as well, some people think we look at China as our most important economic partner. But we often forget that the largest source of foreign direct investment is actually the US. The US is our largest foreign investor in Southeast Asia. We look to the US for economic benefits and security cooperation. We exercise extensively with the US through multilateral exercises like Cobra Gold and Super Garuda Shield. Singapore has a bilateral arrangement. We are not an ally, but we are an important security partner.

So if the US were to turn away from us, it would be a great cause for concern. It would mean less stability for us.

But I want to say that despite what President Trump is saying, the alliances are still intact. US presence in the region has not actually gone down. During the Biden administration, there were enhanced defence agreements with allies — the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Australia. We had QUAD, AUKUS, and ORCAS. These show that the US is staying in the region.

We might fear that the US is turning away, but institutionally, the alliance system is very much intact and alive. There is a lot of talk about the US moving away, going back to its traditional backyard of Latin America and Europe. But we have to look at the effects on the ground, and the alliance system is really still very much in place.

Keith 00:09:41

Going forward, will it actually be stronger or weaker? Especially when one considers the domestic pressures the US faces and the argument that it should focus more at home.

Selina Ho 00:09:58

You will see the US focusing at home, but look at its actions right now. I think it is quite amazing — and I say amazing in a slightly horrified way. Sometimes I look at its actions in Venezuela and Iran and I have a very conflicted attitude towards them.

On one hand, these kinds of interventions are horrifying. But at the same time, the efficiency with which the US military is able to move into these areas demonstrates that its strength is still very much intact. So while one might think the US is turning inwards, I think it is turning inwards in terms of trade. It is turning away from globalisation and international institutions. But when it comes to security interventions and maintaining what it considers world peace and stability, the US is still very much out there.

I would say we should take different slices of what the US is trying to do and judge each one on its own terms.

Keith 00:11:20

That is a very important nuance.

Selina Ho 00:11:22

There were some polls on whether there is domestic support for US action in Iran, and they showed very little support. So when it comes to certain types of foreign policy, the Trump administration has not always followed what Americans want, but has followed its own path with its own reasoning. Different stakeholders within the American political establishment have their own agendas, and they are not necessarily always aligned.

This is something that is really quite interesting — how the administration does not always follow domestic sentiments. While wanting to appeal to Americans, I think they have their own considerations, especially when it comes to security matters and foreign policy.

Keith 00:12:19

What are those considerations, in your view?

Selina Ho 00:12:23

One thing I find interesting about Trump — and I want to caveat that I am not an American foreign policy specialist — is that he wants to be number one. He wants America to be number one in the world. It has something to do with pride, American pride, and America's place in the world.

So it is very unlikely that despite all the talk about cooperating with China, Trump will cede space to China or to another power. He wants to always be winning. He will make deals, but he will make sure the deals are always in America's favour. I think all these different interests within the establishment somehow become aligned when it comes to security and foreign policy issues.

Keith 00:13:18

You mentioned this idea of fearing US abandonment. It reminded me of something Ambassador Bilahari spoke to me about in a previous episode, where he discussed the change in the litmus test around American presence in the region. In the past, when US military presence was very large in Singapore, we would hear protests from our Southeast Asian neighbours. But when we renewed our partnership in 2019 with Prime Minister Lee and President Trump, there was almost nothing. He attributed it partly to a failure in Chinese foreign policy.

So where is this fear actually stemming from? If we take the view that China has risen and ascended, does it really pose a serious security threat to the region?

Selina Ho 00:14:17

The way we look at China is very mixed. We see China quite differently from how the West sees it. China is good for the region because it has been an economic boon, especially after the 2000s. The economic interdependence, access to markets, investments in infrastructure, the trade we have with China, the Belt and Road Initiative — all of these have been good for our economies. Obviously, there is now a mixed picture with China's overcapacity, but the region as a whole has benefited economically from China's growth.

Now, there is still this distrust of China. For every single country in the region, there are differences. There are historical legacies that we worry about. Vietnam, for example, has historical memories of Chinese invasion many years ago. Some would say that Vietnamese nationalism is built on anti-Chinese sentiments. That is not to say the relationship is no good — it is complicated, but they are able to resolve their problems and keep relations stable, primarily because they have party-to-party relations. A lot of problems are solved behind the scenes.

That contrasts with how Vietnam handles the South China Sea dispute with China as opposed to how the Philippines handles it, which is far more confrontational, with no real back channels for negotiation. Historical ties matter and colour the perception of whether we see China as a security threat.

The Philippines has territorial disputes, which is why it sees China as a threat and has enhanced its defence treaty with the United States, working closely with Japan and Australia on the regional security architecture.

There are also racial considerations. If you know the history of racial problems in the region, particularly with the Chinese presence during early nation-building efforts, you see that anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia were actually quite recent. There is a fear of Chinese influence. This is understandable because every country in Southeast Asia is still engaged in nation-building. It is an incomplete project. When you think about our histories as independent nations, it is recent. All these considerations come into play.

There is recognition that China is good for us in many ways, but we also fear Chinese dominance. I think the region is accepting of Chinese influence — we see it as inevitable because China is our largest neighbour. Chinese influence is inevitable, acceptable, and in some ways beneficial because it brings economic gains.

But I do not think the region is comfortable with the idea of Chinese dominance. First, I think it is in our DNA to value diversity. We have always welcomed all the major powers into the region because diversity means a balance of power — each of these powers balances the others out.

Second, the US is still a very important economic partner. It is the largest foreign investor and our security guarantor. The US cannot be excluded, and we cannot have Chinese dominance to the point where the US is no longer in the region.

Third, we guard our sovereignty very carefully and very jealously. Any threats to that sovereignty are something we will always resist. And there is the anti-Chinese sentiment that still exists in the region, especially now with newer arrivals of Chinese labour in certain countries. There is pushback from local populations.

But to be fair, the Chinese have been responding. I just went to Laos recently and brought a group of students there. We always talk about Chinese labour in Laos, but in the last few years, the Chinese have actually been training Lao workers, especially for running the high-speed railway — the subject of my book, Rivers of Iron. They have been training workers not just in soft skills like services, but also in technical skills and engineering, so they can run the railway themselves. Chinese workers who initially manned the stations and worked on the trains are now slowly being replaced by Lao workers. To be fair, the Chinese have been listening to the region.

Keith 00:20:30

When you talk about diversification, it reminds me of an idea that Engagement Ujawan from Indonesia talks about. If you conceptualise our relationship with the US and China, we get a lot of access to financial capital through the US — FDI, for example. From China, especially for developing countries, it is access to technology at a much cheaper price. Seventy per cent of US capability at thirty per cent of the price. That need for diversification is what would enable further development, especially in the developing world.

I would like to get you to focus more on China's foreign policy outlook. You have previously described Chinese policy as both assertive and insecure at the same time. Many of us are not really trained in foreign policy terminology. So let us break it down. What does it mean for China's foreign policy to be insecure, and then we can discuss its assertiveness?

Selina Ho 00:21:37

When I described it as insecure and assertive, that was during the period of wolf warrior diplomacy. Since then, there has been a toning down. China has not been as strident in the way it speaks out, probably because it realises it was counterproductive. From the outside looking in, the wolf warrior diplomacy made China look belligerent. Great powers would not want to appear belligerent. Coercion is one of the most costly ways of trying to get things to go your way, and it seldom works.

So wolf warrior diplomacy has gone away primarily because it does not work. The second factor is that the Chinese economy is in trouble now, so there is less room for chest-thumping. The insecurity stems partly from economic problems, especially the real estate crisis, which will take a long time to resolve. It was also a time when the regime was doing a lot to consolidate power — anti-corruption campaigns, purges — and the insecurity partly stemmed from that.

You could see this insecurity and assertiveness coming together, but I think it is less so now. Wolf warrior diplomacy has gone away. China has realised it is counterproductive. They still face internal problems, without doubt, but the leadership is in a consolidated position now.

One more point: you see this same insecurity-and-assertiveness dynamic happening with the United States too. The US is afraid of its own relative decline. It is afraid that China, its peer competitor, is charging ahead while it is falling behind. That is why you see language like "they have been cheating us" and "now it is time for payback." This is the language of an insecure power.

It stems from a place of insecurity — the feeling that you are falling behind, so you need people to pay up. You become less generous, more calculative, and you tend to lash out. Power transition theories tell us that when a power is in relative decline, or perceives itself to be, it may do things like start a war. I am not saying either China or the US will do that, but there is always that desire to cling to power so it does not decline further. This insecurity-and-assertiveness paradox can coexist.

Keith 00:25:23

I wanted to ask more about this idea of insecurity. China's assertiveness has toned down, as you pointed out, but there is a sense that China remains insecure in its outlook.

Selina Ho 00:25:43

There are many aspects to it. If you want to go back historically, one thing that China — like Tsarist Russia — has always worried about is the security of its borders. Historically, they have always needed to fight what they called the barbarian hordes. The security of borders is natural for continental powers with huge, long borders. That is a good reason why the Great Wall of China was built — to keep out the hordes.

Currently, China has settled most of its border issues with its neighbours, except for maritime borders. That is why you see what is happening with the South China Sea. The other unresolved border is with India — there are ongoing low-level conflicts, primarily because China is worried about its borders.

During Mao's time, he tried to move the biggest economic assets inland, away from the coast, because that is where China's greatest vulnerability lies. The Americans are there, Japan is there, and China has been attacked from the sea by Japan before. The worries have always been on the eastern seaboard. The western side is different because the Himalayas serve as a natural barrier, though the dispute with India persists.

With Southeast Asia, what we are looking at right now are the borders with Myanmar and Laos, where all the scam operations are happening. China is reacting and intervening because it is about the security of its borders and its citizens being trafficked and defrauded.

What I am saying is that this insecurity, both historically and currently, stems from this idea of border security. There are other reasons for insecurity, but it would take a long time to unpack them all.

Keith 00:28:33

That gives us a high-level sense of where the insecurities stem from. If you contrast it with the US, which is often described as relatively secure — friendly neighbourhood, the largest power, two oceans — then the flip side would be to ask why China would be insecure when it is by far the biggest economy and biggest power in the region.

Selina Ho 00:29:11

Long borders and other major powers in what it considers its backyard — all of that is going to be something it is concerned about.

Keith 00:29:31

You talked about China's rise in the region and the mixed effects we are now seeing. One example is the BRI, which has improved interconnectivity, but there are trade-offs. I would like you to help us understand what those trade-offs are, because I think they remain under-appreciated in public discourse.

Selina Ho 00:29:56

The BRI comes with a lot of opportunities but also a lot of risks for recipient countries. The opportunities are clear — China provides loans, aid, and grants for infrastructure development, something the region desperately needs. The poorer parts of the region do not have the money for it. I keep coming back to Laos because it is the most obvious example.

The need for connectivity and infrastructure is real, and the BRI is one of the best answers that has been provided. The Pan-Asia Railway, which my book Rivers of Iron is about, was an idea conceived in Southeast Asia, by Southeast Asia itself. But we did not have the money to build it. When China grew richer in the 2000s, it could export its technology and capital. That is when the Pan-Asia Railway, or at least one part of it, was realised — in Laos and also with the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia.

Now there are trade-offs in terms of risk. There are risks to the environment from some of these infrastructure projects, risks to local communities, and risks of Chinese influence. There is a reason why countries like India are not part of the BRI — they do not want that connectivity to China because China is a threat to them. Railways have historically been used to transport troops, so there is that element. Vietnam, although a signatory participant of the BRI, has been more cautious about Chinese projects because they bring in Chinese workers, create strain on the social fabric, and enhance Chinese presence in a country that has traditionally been wary of invasion from the north.

There are also trade-offs to sovereignty. Let me give the example of Laos. I want to be very clear — I do not agree with the description of what China is doing as debt-trap diplomacy, as in purposely going out with a strategy to trap poor countries into debt. I think debt distress is a consequence, and probably an unintended one, of some of these projects, because eventually some poor countries will have difficulties repaying.

The Lao state-owned enterprise for electrical transmission, called EDL, went bankrupt. It was not China's fault. A Chinese state-owned enterprise, Power Grid, came in and bought shares, and now it owns ninety per cent of this national enterprise responsible for electricity transmission for the entire country. That is a vulnerability. When your state power grid is held by an external party, it can be used as leverage. I am not saying China will do that, but it is a trade-off in terms of sovereignty. These are key installations, and if you allow a foreign party to control your electricity grid, it impacts your sovereignty.

So there are trade-offs — sovereignty, cultural impact, environmental impact. But at the same time, there are gains. That is why there is this mixed attitude towards China: appreciation for the economic benefits, but also wariness about the influence China can wield within the domestic context of countries.

Keith 00:35:15

If you look at the Laotian example, what would be the way out? Could they buy back or renationalise their power grid? What is the endgame?

Selina Ho 00:36:27

The concession the Chinese company agreed to is twenty-five years. The question is whether Laos can get it back. It does not have the money. Laos's credit rating from Moody's is C-plus, which means it is essentially in default. It is a highly indebted country, and not just to China, although China holds the majority of its debt.

If you do not have the financial capacity, the resources, or the ability to develop your human capital, then this is the problem a country like Laos faces. It is trying to graduate from being a least-developed country, but it faces enormous challenges along the way. It needs help from others.

Keith 00:37:22

In Chinese rhetoric, they say they do not want to become a hegemon or follow the US model of regional hegemony. But as you have pointed out, China very much seeks to shape a Sinocentric order in Southeast Asia. Can you speak more on that?

Selina Ho 00:37:44

I can, because primarily I am saying this is what all great powers do. They want to secure their neighbourhood. If you are a power with very long borders, you want to secure your surroundings. It is the same thing the United States does with the Monroe Doctrine. It is the same thing Russia is doing now in Europe. It is the same way India behaves in South Asia. You do not want a potential adversary to gain a foothold in your backyard.

China wants regional dominance, and this is not the first time I have said it — I have said it in several publications. It is China's traditional backyard. It wants to ensure its security. It wants the region to take its interests into account when making decisions, especially on foreign policy. And it does not want the region to take sides with the US at China's expense.

But I want to caveat this by saying that this is what all great powers do. I am not singling out the Chinese. This is very normal great-power behaviour. Of course, it is not acceptable for those of us in the region who are smaller or weaker powers with our own sovereignty to safeguard.

We see some of this playing out through the BRI, which enmeshes countries in a set of strategic economic relations with China at the centre. There is also the creation of alternative institutions like the AIIB, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation in the Mekong region, and the Xiangshan Forum, which is seen as a competitor to what China perceives as the Western-centric Shangri-La Dialogue. All these alternative institutions are another way of staking a claim on the region and building a security and economic architecture centred on China.

Keith 00:40:16

How has the region responded to that kind of Chinese approach?

Selina Ho 00:40:19

ASEAN has eleven members, so everyone reacts very differently. In an effort to understand this, my co-author and I conducted a survey of how regional elites — decision-makers, policymakers, leaders — perceive Chinese influence and whether the region is becoming China-led.

The survey showed that across the six countries we surveyed, more than fifty per cent of respondents said ASEAN is more influential than either China or the United States. Overwhelmingly, more than eighty per cent said they identify most with ASEAN rather than with China or the US.

There is a sense of regional identity and a desire to build up ASEAN so it can be a stronger organisation standing at the centre of the region. That is why there is so much talk about ASEAN centrality and unity. This is what smaller states do — they come together and coalesce in a regional institution to gain strength in numbers.

There is a sense that we need to take care of ourselves, that we need to use ASEAN more effectively to counter imbalances and deal with great-power rivalry. In that sense, it is going to be very important for Singapore in 2027 when we chair ASEAN. I expect the foreign ministry to have a very robust programme to strengthen ASEAN.

Keith 00:42:45

I would like you to speak more about the methodology. Why was this survey needed, as opposed to the existing literature on ASEAN? What was the gap?

Selina Ho 00:43:06

There is actually no study out there that examines how elites in the region view Chinese efforts to establish a Sinocentric regional order. If I am right that China wants regional dominance — and I am pretty sure I am right — we need to see how elites actually react to it.

Why is it important to survey elites? Because elites are the decision-makers when it comes to foreign policy. Most citizens are interested in bread-and-butter issues, meaning domestic politics is more important to them, and domestic policies are shaped more by public opinion. But in the case of foreign policy, traditionally policymakers have the room to make decisions. Obviously, there are cases where foreign policy cannot be immune from public opinion — Gaza is one that has galvanised public opinion all over the world, including in Southeast Asia and Singapore. But where it does not involve such sensitive issues or require mobilisation of resources, foreign policy is essentially the purview of elites.

The survey focused on elites from six countries: Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. These six are what I would call least-likely cases — least likely to want a China-led regional order. Some have declared independent foreign policies, like Malaysia and Indonesia. Others are US allies, like Thailand and the Philippines. Thailand has significant Chinese influence, but it is still a US ally. Singapore is an important partner to both China and the United States.

The logic is that if these least-likely respondents show strong support for a China-led order, the study gains a lot of validity. As it turned out, respondents overwhelmingly looked to ASEAN rather than China to be the centre of the region.

The survey used quota sampling. The best surveys use random sampling, but we chose quota sampling because we needed specific types of elites. Across the six countries, on average about a third were policymakers, roughly two-thirds were business leaders, and a small proportion were academics and other types of elites. The average age was about thirty-four, and on average respondents had about twelve years of working experience. Most had university education. So they would qualify as elites, and that is how we ensured the survey was robust.

Keith 00:47:18

When people talk about ASEAN centrality, is it more of a hedging statement? How should we understand ASEAN centrality in context?

Selina Ho 00:47:31

To me, ASEAN centrality and unity is aspirational. But I think the region would be worse off without ASEAN, so the critiques are a bit unfair. We were never meant from day one to be like the EU. ASEAN was never supposed to be legalistic, based on formal institutions, laws, and rules. It was based on the idea that countries can come together and have a platform to talk to each other.

A lot of things happen behind the scenes. We have not seen conflicts primarily because a lot is resolved informally. This informality works well for the region because we are so diverse. If we were more uniform, we might have something more legalistic, but our diversity requires room to play out. Hard and fast rules would be very difficult to implement, accept, or make work.

Without ASEAN, the region would be worse off. That is the counterfactual. But as we enter the twenty-first century, ASEAN needs to change, primarily because the threats have changed and morphed. There are far more existential threats now. During the Cold War when ASEAN was born, the threat was nuclear war. The existential threats today are many — climate change, public health crises, pandemics. Climate change is a massive threat that requires action from many countries.

ASEAN as a whole is not well placed to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century. We do very well in certain areas. In a recent piece I wrote for Foreign Affairs with my co-author from Brazil, titled "How Multilateralism Can Survive," what was obvious was that where ASEAN countries really excel is in trade. We have been extremely innovative, and for good reason — trade is the lifeblood of Singapore and the region. We are all small, open economies. Without trade and globalisation, we would all be in serious trouble.

We have come up with innovative approaches. We moved forward with our Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Many of us are members of the CPTPP. Singapore just launched something called FITP — Future of Investment and Trade Partnership. The idea is to innovate ways of maintaining open trade and reducing barriers. Singapore's initiative now has sixteen members, and the concept was to bring these innovations up to the WTO level, because the WTO is completely defunct now.

At the regional level, we are working on these issues to keep trade going. But we deal very poorly with security matters. We cannot do anything about Myanmar. We were quite helpless when the border dispute happened between Thailand and Cambodia. We are not good at security. We need to do more in terms of conflict prevention and mitigation. I do not think we can do resolution — that requires hard laws, and that is not in ASEAN's mandate. But we can do more to prevent conflict and strengthen the security realm. We are doing very well in trade and economics; we need to do more in security.

Keith 00:51:52

But intra-ASEAN trade remains low.

Selina Ho 00:51:58

Very low. I think that is a pity, because there is competition among ASEAN countries. The economies are too similar, and this has to be resolved. There is a lot of potential. The idea was that RCEP could help push this along, but RCEP is still in its early days and we need to beef up inter-regional trade.

Keith 00:52:28

I have a follow-on question about the security component. Why are we so weak in this area, especially given that the genesis of ASEAN was actually in response to wanting to ensure our own security as a region?

Selina Ho 00:52:50

There are territorial disputes among us. Several ASEAN states are claimants in the South China Sea dispute. On the mainland especially, borders were artificially created as historical legacies of colonialism. Before the colonisers came, people moved across borders and did not consider themselves as belonging to a particular state.

Economics is something we can all agree on — we all want prosperity, so that is an area where we can move forward. But security is too difficult because there are territorial disputes, historical issues, and security touches on the sovereignty of nation-states even more than economic issues. Southeast Asian nations guard their sovereignty very tightly.

I should share a little about a project that has been given a large grant by the Social Science Research Council in Singapore. It is about regional resilience. We need nation-states to think broader than national resilience. That is how we think about our countries — we guard our sovereignty and focus on national resilience, worrying only about our own borders. But we do not think about regional resilience: how to build it collectively, not just in trade and economic growth, but also in dealing with security matters and the forces that could fragment the region. Especially amid great-power rivalry, we need to be resilient and stay together. This is a project we are about to launch.

Keith 00:55:16

I have always thought that at the grassroots level, there has been a challenge with creating an ASEAN identity. Part of it is attributed to the unresolved systemic security issues you have pointed out. But at a cultural and personal level, we just have not had the kind of ASEAN construction project that the EU has been through. My friends from Europe talk about the Erasmus programme, where the EU Commission sponsors people from Italy to study in Germany, from France to study elsewhere. There is this cultivation of a cross-border, pan-European identity. In ASEAN, we just kind of accept that everyone is different and leave it at that, and engagement happens mostly at the policymaker level.

Selina Ho 00:56:19

Singapore does a lot in this area. In our secondary schools, we have ASEAN scholars. We offer scholarships with no obligations to very good students from regional countries to study in our secondary schools and universities. This is a public good, a regional public good, which in the long term will pay back to us. People may not understand that, but it will benefit us because you build a generation of very good people — whether they end up in government or the private sector — who will remember their time in Singapore and the friendships and networks they built.

NUS now has ASEAN fellowships and scholarships aimed at getting really good people to study at NUS or collaborate with us, with a focus on Southeast Asia. You can see all these pieces coming together to build ASEAN identity and resilience. It is slow and will take time. Nation-building projects take time; regional-building projects take even longer. But that does not mean we should do nothing. We have to start somewhere.

Keith 00:57:51

Would the reverse be something we need to work on as well — sending Singaporeans into other parts of ASEAN more actively?

Selina Ho 00:57:57

I think this is something NUS is looking at. There is a reason why I bring my students to Laos — it is part of getting to know our own region. We have something at the Lee Kuan Yew School called LKYSP in Asia, where we bring students from the various graduate programmes to one country in Southeast Asia to learn about public-policy-related issues. For me, I bring my students to understand Lao foreign policy, because nobody knows Laos.

Laos is a fascinating country with all the challenges of a small state. Very few countries face what they face — surrounded by five much bigger countries along their borders and being completely landlocked, with no access to trade via the sea. How do they survive? Those are the questions.

Through these kinds of projects — and NUS's main campus has its own programmes sending students to other parts of Southeast Asia — we are building understanding. In some secondary schools, there is a Regional Studies Programme where students learn another language from the region and study these countries. While the exchanges are not as robust as our programmes with the West, Europe, the US, or East Asia, there are ongoing interactions at both the institutional and student levels, so that we all understand Southeast Asia better.

Keith 01:00:04

Singapore takes the ASEAN chair in 2027. You alluded to it earlier and mentioned your expectations. What should Singapore actually do in that one year of chairmanship? How can we move the needle?

Selina Ho 01:00:19

One thing I am aware of is that Singapore really wants to have regional projects that most countries can work together on. We are very interested in doing something about climate, in dealing with technology, and in the maritime domain.

The most recent thing I have heard is that we are hoping to get nations to act together to deal with the scam pandemic, which is a very real issue and a transnational challenge. It is considered a project that could bring even rivals together. The US and China are both affected by scam operations — citizens being scammed, trafficked, and worse. There are synergies to be found. These are some of the areas we are thinking about. I am not from the foreign ministry, so I do not know the exact plans, but these are some of the areas being explored.

Keith 01:01:41

If you have one piece of advice for a student entering the working world today, what would it be?

Selina Ho 01:01:46

You need gumption, you need passion, and you need traction. Traction means you need to keep up the momentum. Do not look at the state of the world and think there is nothing you can do. That is not the right way to deal with the challenges ahead, because the world is yours. In the future, it will all be yours, and you are the ones who will have to deal with the problems coming your way.

There has to be a sense of urgency in going out and trying to make the world better — for yourself and for the generation after you. You must have a never-say-die attitude, that determination, that willingness to work hard. I think that is true for every generation, and it is the best advice I can give.

Keith 01:02:53

Never say die, work hard, and always pursue traction. I think that is very good advice. With that, Professor Selina, thank you so much for coming on.

Selina Ho 01:03:01

Thank you very much, Keith. It has been an honour and privilege to be on air with you.

Keith 01:03:05

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you are on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to The Front Row Podcast.

Zheng Yu Huang is a technology executive, entrepreneur, policy adviser, and author whose career spans Silicon Valley, the Obama White House, and the US-China policy arena.

He is the author of Rethinking China: Challenging Our Economic Assumptions and Opportunities for Lasting Prosperity, as well as Lifelong Learning: Six Classes After Harvard Graduation, published in Chinese.

Huang holds a BS in Industrial Engineering, a BA in Economics, and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

After Stanford, Huang joined Intel Corporation, rising to Managing Director — one of the youngest to hold that title.

He subsequently served as a White House Fellow under President Obama, becoming the first person of mainland Chinese origin to hold that distinction, as well as a Special Assistant to the Administrator of the US Agency for International Development.

During his fellowship, he led an interagency task force to restore Haiti's telecommunications infrastructure following the 2010 earthquake.

After leaving government, Huang founded a financial services data firm that grew to 300 staff across seven offices, reaching a valuation of $100 million.

He later served for four years as President of the Committee of 100, the prominent Chinese American organisation co-founded by IM Pei and Yo-Yo Ma.

In this conversation, Huang draws on that breadth of experience to challenge what he argues are dangerously flawed assumptions underlying current US policy and the pivots US administrations need to consider.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Trailer
00:55 A Drive-By Shooting on My First Month in America
5:29 Why America Is Still the Land of Opportunity
9:24 Negotiating IP With Beijing at Intel
16:27 What the White House Fellowship Taught Me About Power
23:49 When US-China Relations Broke
27:49 The Consequences of Getting Your Assumptions Wrong
33:14 Why Southeast Asia Is America's Blind Spot
34:41 The Real Reason the US Pivoted to Securitisation
35:43 The China Shock Was Never Really About China
41:15 The $600 Billion Number That Isn't Real
46:26 How the China Initiative Destroyed Innocent Lives
52:59 Compete or Cooperate? The AI Question
58:03 What History Tells Us About US-China-Taiwan
1:00:57 What China Gets Wrong About America
1:06:10 Focus on Results: A New China Strategy
1:08:32 America's Real Domestic Challenges
1:11:59 One Final Piece of Advice

This is the 81st episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 00:00:55

You were a migrant who came from Shanghai and moved to the US, navigating a dual identity — first as an ethnic Chinese immigrant, and subsequently as an American citizen. I'd like for you to unpack a little more about your experience growing up in the US.

Zhengyu 00:01:17

I arrived not speaking a word of English. About a month into the move, my dad was studying during the day and working at night as a motel manager. My mom and I would bring him soup — this was downtown LA.

I remember one night, walking to his workplace around 10 or 11 PM. The streets were deserted. We walked past a hotel, and out came a gallantly dressed couple who had clearly just been to a party. They were maybe four or five paces ahead of us, and we thought, great — some company for the walk.

Then I heard a car screech by. As it turned the corner, I heard what I thought were firecrackers — growing up in China, you play with firecrackers, especially at Chinese New Year. Then the woman was lying in a pool of blood, and the man was screaming for help. That was my first drive-by shooting.

My mom and I ran as hard as we could. When our bodies finally gave out and we stopped to catch our breath, I thought to myself: this is a brave new world. So different from everything in my first ten years. I must really understand it.

I think I've carried that perspective ever since. I've been to about 92 countries, and every time I go somewhere, I try not to assume what that place is about — I try to figure it out. That stems from being an immigrant. I had to understand and make a life in this brave new world, make a home for myself. And that is, I think, the story of so many immigrants who came to America and, in that process, contributed to its growth and success.

Keith 00:03:49

I'd like you to elaborate a little more on what kept you in the US — what made America appealing enough that you decided to call it home. Earlier you mentioned the drive-by shooting. Why didn't that push you away?

Zhengyu 00:04:06

I've been to over 90 countries and lived in five. And I must confess: America still seems like the place where, regardless of where you're from, if you work hard and pursue your dreams and passions, you have a chance to make it. This is why Elon Musk didn't found his companies in South Africa, where he's from. This is why Eric Yuan started Zoom in Silicon Valley. The list goes on.

Even though for many people the American dream may be fading, I saw it — I bear witness to it. And the second thing is a genuine sense of helping each other. America is known as individualistic, very much out for oneself — but I can look back on everything I've accomplished and think of all the people who helped me along the way. None of them asked for anything in return. They helped because they could, and they were willing to take a risk on a young man. I'm very grateful for that. In many senses, America is still that land of opportunity.

Keith 00:05:29

You went to Stanford and rose to become one of the youngest managing directors at Intel. One of the early milestones in your career was negotiating an IP transfer with the Chinese government. I'd like you to pull back the curtain a little. What was that experience like? Because I think it sets up the frame for understanding technology transfer to China in the earlier years of the US opening up.

Zhengyu 00:06:06

We were negotiating with multiple agencies within the Chinese government — the lead agency being the Ministry of Information and Technology — at the vice minister level, which is where the real work gets done.

In one meeting, I had with me a senior vice president visiting from the United States. He spoke at length. The first thing the Chinese officials said was: "You Americans don't understand what's going on in China. You don't understand us."

After he finished, I said: "You're right." And I explained that Intel has never charged intellectual property fees on any technology. We produce enormous amounts of IP — in microprocessing, in wireless — but we've never charged for it, because we believe technology should be global, shared, and that its benefits should go to consumers wherever they are. And we believe that China also wants to be a technology leader. In 3G alone, China paid over $100 billion in IP fees — a number slated to grow significantly in 4G.

I had prepared this response because I had heard the same complaints many times. After I finished, the government official paused, then turned and said: "You're Chinese. You understand what I'm talking about."

The fact is, I was representing an American company. All I had done was articulate that I understood the Chinese perspective — not that I agreed with it, but that I understood it, and that our intentions took their concerns into account. That was probably the biggest lesson: at some point, you don't have to agree with somebody, but showing that you understand makes an enormous difference in bridging the divide.

Keith 00:08:55

That was really about going to the table, understanding their interests, and finding a win-win solution.

Zhengyu 00:09:07

Exactly.

Keith 00:09:08

You were also a White House Fellow.

Zhengyu 00:09:10

Yes.

Keith 00:09:11

For those of us in Southeast Asia and Singapore, we might not be entirely familiar with the programme. Could you explain what the White House Fellowship is, and what your experience was like serving under President Obama?

Zhengyu 00:09:24

The programme was started by Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War era, when many young people were protesting against the government. Johnson's idea was: what if we invited perhaps ten of the most promising young leaders in America to spend a year in the White House, with full access to the most senior people in American government, and then send them back into all parts of American society? By understanding government, whatever they chose to do later, they would be better equipped to engage with it. Every year, roughly ten to twelve people — usually in their mid-thirties — are selected.

I was fortunate to be selected in what I believe was the second year of President Obama's term. One story I can share: we had multiple meetings with the president, and in one of the first, we sat in the Roosevelt Room. It's a long table; the president sits at the head, and the back of each cabinet secretary's chair bears their name — because when a secretary retires, that chair is typically given to them as a token of appreciation.

I asked President Obama a question: "Mr President, what has been your biggest realisation since taking office?"

He paused for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds — which feels like a very long time — and I worried I had offended him. But when he spoke, he said: "The people around this table — the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, has a Nobel Prize; the Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, served perhaps thirty or forty years in various capacities in Washington; the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was First Lady. Everyone at this table is probably smarter than me in their respective area."

"But the second thing I know," he continued, "is that every issue that comes to my table is genuinely unsolvable — because if it were solvable, one of these very smart people would have already solved it. So my role as president is to gather all the wisdom around me and make a decision on something that seems intractable, in a way I believe is correct, in order to push the matter forward."

That stayed with me. So many of the challenges America grapples with today — racial inequality, wealth inequality — have been around for decades. They come to every president. The best any president can do is gather the wisest counsel available, make a decision they believe is right, and advance the agenda a little further.

Keith 00:13:29

Were there other crucial lessons from your year in the White House?

Zhengyu 00:13:35

When the Haitian earthquake happened — around January 2010 — roughly 250,000 people died. Because of the longstanding relationship between Haiti and the US, the American government was invited to assist with search and rescue. Because of my background at Intel in telecommunications, I was put in charge of an interagency task force to restore the telecommunications network. This was critical: many people were still trapped in the rubble with mobile phones, and that network was the primary way to communicate with survivors and direct the delivery of food, water, and essential supplies.

The task force brought together about ten different agencies, including the FCC and FEMA, and I had a one-star general seconded to the group. I was working until three or four in the morning every night.

One night, leaving around 3 AM, I stepped outside into the bitter Washington cold. The sky was pitch dark, but clear enough to see the stars. And it struck me: public service means something. In DC, people say "thank you for your service" — not just for your leadership, but for your service. That night it hit me. The best we can do for the world is to be of some service to others.

And the US government — it's like a giant elephant. Generally it doesn't move much. If a fly lands on it, the elephant swats its tail. But if you get it truly moving, it becomes a formidable force.

Keith 00:15:55

You have been quite critical of some of the core assumptions underlying US policy towards China — arguing that they are not merely flawed, but actively harmful. When did you first start recognising that this was a serious problem, and that the US-China relationship had fundamentally fractured?

Zhengyu 00:16:24

I became president of the Committee of 100 just a couple of days after the start of COVID. By way of brief background: the Committee of 100 is a nonprofit organisation founded about thirty years ago by prominent Chinese Americans such as IM Pei, the noted architect, and Yo-Yo Ma, the celebrated cellist, among others. The story goes that IM Pei was good friends with Henry Kissinger, and over dinner in New York one night, Kissinger said: "US-China relations are on the up. Chinese Americans — you have the cultural background and linguistic skills to play a critical role." And so the Committee of 100 was formed with two purposes: to advance Chinese American inclusion, and to foster a more productive US-China relationship.

It is a member-based organisation of roughly a hundred people — you might know Gary Locke, former ambassador to China, or Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo, among others. I served as president for about four years.

In one of my early meetings at the State Department, a senior official said to me: "Mr Wang, you have to understand — the relationship between the US and China has fundamentally changed. And you as Chinese Americans must take a stand." That statement made clear to me that after roughly forty years of engagement, the US strategy towards China had shifted from engagement to competition and confrontation. And unfortunately, Chinese Americans were the only people in America who looked Chinese. In many ways, we found ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place.

Keith 00:18:43

You are right to frame this as a shift from competition to confrontation — and I think that distinction matters enormously. You can compete without entering an escalatory spiral of confrontation. One of the core intellectual arguments in your work is that the assumptions driving US policy towards China are not just incorrect, but harmful. Why, in your view, does the Yellow Peril trope remain so persistent — and why has anti-China sentiment become, in some respects, almost unanimously bipartisan?

Zhengyu 00:19:36

Let me answer in two parts. The first is that this pivot in US strategy happened about ten years ago, and my book was written precisely because, after a decade, the results are in. I spoke to more than 300 leading experts on US-China relations in the United States and Europe, and I examined the data and evidence to assess whether this pivot has made American businesses more competitive, made America more secure, and advanced American interests and values around the world — three goals on which virtually all Americans agree.

And the truth is, all the data and evidence suggest otherwise. The strategies pursued over the last ten years have not yielded the results intended. Which then leads to the question: why not? And this brings me to a principle I learned at Harvard Business School — GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. If your assumptions are wrong, no matter how much resource or talent you apply, you will still get bad output.

One of those underlying assumptions — unspoken but persistent — is the trope of the Yellow Peril. What is the Yellow Peril? It dates back more than a hundred years: the belief that a yellow horde from Asia is coming to take over America, destroy Western civilisation, and destroy the American way of life. Consciously or unconsciously, this persists today — and it clouds judgement. It underpins fear-based policy. And as we know, human beings almost never make good decisions when they are afraid.

Keith 00:22:48

I spoke with Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institution about America's involvement in wars, and he made the point that America often continues to be a great power in spite of itself — that many of its military involvements, from Vietnam to Iraq, were ultimately mistakes. We are seeing something similar play out now with the assumptions underlying US involvement in Iran. I'd like to use that as a frame. What do you think are the assumptions that are currently wrong in US policy towards the Middle East — and what does that tell us about how America understands powers that seek to challenge its dominance?

Zhengyu 00:23:50

Let me give you clear examples from the past. We entered Vietnam on the false assumption that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow — the so-called domino effect. South Vietnam did fall. Southeast Asia did not. We entered Iraq on the assumption that there were weapons of mass destruction. There weren't. We went into Afghanistan on the false assumption that defeating Al-Qaeda required defeating the Taliban, which proved not to be the case. And in Iran, the intervention proceeded on the assumption that the regime was imminently developing a nuclear bomb — which, according to virtually all experts, was not true.

These are the kinds of assumptions that, when wrong, provide a disastrous foundation for any military expedition.

How does this apply to China? Today, we are already at war with China — a tech war, a trade war, a currency war, a media war. Every form of conflict, in fact, except a kinetic one: a direct military confrontation between the two largest economies on earth, each with nuclear weapons capable of devastating the other. And we are dangerously close.

Most people do not fully appreciate what a Taiwan contingency would actually involve. Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan has no capacity to defend itself without the active military participation of the United States. To put this in context: Taiwan has a population smaller than the city of Shanghai. Its GDP is smaller than Shanghai's. It has no realistic prospect of defending itself against China — all it could do is prolong the time before the United States intervenes.

And yet most discussions stop there, without asking what happens in the actual conflict. I went and found the answers. Many war games have been conducted, most classified, but some public. The ones in which America wins the first engagement — and it does not always win — project losses in the first two to three weeks of perhaps two aircraft carriers, a dozen warships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Roughly half the total American losses over ten years in Iraq. In two to three weeks.

And then I always ask: what happens after the first battle? No expert believes China would simply concede after a single engagement. The conversation then turns to escalation: does the United States strike the Chinese mainland — where most missile batteries, naval bases, and weapons production are located? And if it does, does China then strike American military bases or the American mainland? At that point, how quickly does this approach nuclear exchange?

I have to tell you — when I pressed experts on those scenarios, they literally stopped talking. The scenarios are too frightening to contemplate.

For me, the conclusion is clear: if we fully understand not just the possibility but the potential consequences of war, then we must ask very precisely what we are fighting for. If there is a real risk of this going nuclear, then what, exactly, justifies that? And I have not yet heard a compelling answer.

Some say we must defend Taiwan because it is a democracy. But the United States did not intervene militarily in Ukraine, which is also a democracy. Others say we must fight for Taiwan's semiconductor dominance. I worked in semiconductors for seven years. That argument is nonsensical — if the US wanted to deny China those assets, it could simply destroy the fabrication plants. The idea that we must go to war to protect them makes no sense.

The most coherent argument I've heard is that if the United States fails to defend Taiwan, it may lose the trust of Southeast Asia. That may be true. But if that is the concern, then the answer is to deepen our engagement with Southeast Asia now, before any conflict — not to prepare for a kinetic confrontation. And instead of deepening that engagement, the United States has largely pulled away. China and Southeast Asia are each other's largest trading partners. The US is falling far behind on economic and broader engagement with the region.

What troubles me most is that the American media discusses this potential conflict constantly, without helping Americans truly understand its consequences — and without asking whether, given those consequences, the underlying justifications hold up.

Keith 00:31:51

When you talked about Taiwan, one thing I've observed is a profound asymmetry in commitment. When I speak to friends on the mainland, Taiwan is almost an existential red line — it touches something at the core of Chinese identity, and the emotion around it is intense. When I speak to American friends, the issue is often framed as a tool for constraining China, and when you press them, many are not deeply committed to it at all.

Given that asymmetry, and given your point that the US needs to deepen its engagement in Southeast Asia — what would that actually look like in practice? What policy recommendations would you make to a Washington decision-maker?

Zhengyu 00:33:13

Southeast Asia is on track to become one of the world's four largest economic blocs over the coming decades, with one of the largest, most dynamic, and best-educated young populations globally. Even today, you are seeing a remarkable supply chain forming across the region, serving not just the United States but advanced economies worldwide.

If the United States were to identify the key regions it must engage beyond the usual interlocutors — the EU, China, India — Southeast Asia is the obvious answer. It is, frankly, a no-brainer.

And here is what I find important: every person I have spoken to in Southeast Asia understands that China is here. China is not going anywhere. China has 1.4 billion people, the world's second-largest economy, and is every Southeast Asian country's largest trading partner. But every person I've spoken to also wants the United States to have a meaningful role — both because America has genuinely extraordinary things to offer in terms of innovation, market access, and institutional capacity, and because an American presence provides a useful counterbalance to China.

The United States has an open invitation to deepen its engagement across the region — economic, cultural, educational, diplomatic. What I see instead is a strategy almost entirely focused on military deterrence, carried out without the attendant integration across all other domains. That is an unfortunate imbalance, and a costly one.

Keith 00:35:43

Why do you think there has been this persistent shift towards securitisation? What caused it?

Zhengyu 00:35:59

The United States is going through profound internal change — trying to make sense of how the promises that generations of Americans believed in can be renegotiated in a world transformed by AI, by globalisation, by rapid technological disruption. And in that process, as throughout American history, it is always tempting to blame a foreign group. Whether it's Mexicans, Chinese, or Indians — fear is an effective way to mobilise voters, and externalising a domestic problem is politically convenient for people on both sides of the aisle. It doesn't solve the problem, but it works as a short-term strategy.

My book examines China's entry into the WTO and what became known as the China shock. I spoke to the economists who authored that research, and to pretty much all the scholars who have studied its effects on US employment. They found that yes, perhaps a million manufacturing jobs were lost as a result of China joining the WTO. But the part almost nobody discusses is that roughly the same number of jobs — perhaps more — were created in its wake. The difference is that those jobs were created largely in coastal, high-skill, high-mobility regions of America. The people most hurt were those who were less mobile, less educated, and concentrated in specific geographies — the middle of the country, the south.

The China shock, properly understood, is not a story about what China did to America. It is a story about the concentrated costs and distributed benefits of globalisation. And without addressing that directly — without real, concerted strategies to help the people most affected — even if you removed China from the equation entirely, you would still face fierce competition from India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and others. The US economy has shifted from manufacturing to services. If you call a service centre today, you're speaking to someone based in India, the Philippines, or Malaysia — not China — because that part of the economy has moved.

Without honestly confronting the effects of globalisation, this problem will persist. Politicians find it easy to say: here is the villain, if we block them, your problems go away. Tariffs and bans are simple answers. But the right answer is harder — investing in helping American workers migrate to better opportunities, building resilience against the structural effects of globalisation. That work is unglamorous, and it takes time. But done well, it would actually help people.

Keith 00:40:17

I've read the research as well, and I think one thing often missed is that the outsourcing of manufacturing and the emergence of global value chains — which Singapore benefited from enormously — were already underway two decades before China entered the WTO. Perhaps it was the sheer scale of China that brought the trend into sharper relief, but the underlying dynamic was already there. So when people draw the wrong conclusions from the data, as you say, it tends to cause more harm than good.

This brings me to the specific issue of the $600 billion IP theft figure. You have been quite direct in arguing that this number is not merely wrong but actively harmful. Help me understand: where did it come from?

Zhengyu 00:41:39

I heard politicians — including presidents and presidential candidates — use that figure constantly: $600 billion stolen annually by the Chinese from the United States. Being an engineer by training, I was genuinely curious about where that number came from. It is an enormous figure. I asked every expert I could find. Almost nobody could answer. I got blank stares — as if asking the question was somehow impertinent.

I finally tracked down someone who explained it. The number originates with the OECD, and it is a rough estimation: typically about two to three per cent of national GDP is estimated to be lost to IP loss globally. The US economy at the relevant time was about $20 trillion. Three per cent of $20 trillion is $600 billion. But IP loss has many categories — the largest being counterfeit goods: fake Nikes, fake watches, and so on. All of that rough global estimate was attributed to China. That is how you arrive at $600 billion.

When I dug further, I found some rigorous, credible think tanks that had actually analysed how much is genuinely stolen from the United States by Chinese actors. Their estimate: roughly $30 to $40 billion. Now, $30 to $40 billion is still a significant number. But it is 96 per cent smaller. The magnitude matters enormously.

Here is why. If you believe the $600 billion figure, then there must be a vast spy network — countless operatives inside the United States stealing at that scale. And on the basis of that assumption, the Department of Justice launched the China Initiative in 2018 — the first law enforcement programme ever targeted at a single country. The FBI director at the time said they were opening one new China case every ten hours.

So then you ask: who do you actually target? There were not that many spies. But the most visible and accessible targets were Chinese American academics, who for four decades had been actively encouraged by their universities to engage with Chinese counterparts — precisely because of their language skills and cultural knowledge. Everything they did was public, posted on the web, and it instantly became suspect.

The China Initiative ensnared thousands of Chinese American scientists. The MIT Technology Review conducted a comprehensive analysis of all the cases brought under the initiative. They found that none of those cases — essentially zero — involved economic espionage. The cases fell apart on shoddy evidence. But in the meantime, thousands of people's careers and lives were destroyed. Many Chinese American scientists left the United States. Some went elsewhere in the world. A significant number went back to China.

Consider the context: there is a great deal of talk in the United States about winning the AI competition with China, because AI is genuinely transformational. I agree. But transformational technological leadership — in quantum computing, nuclear fusion, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, space technology, as well as AI — depends above all on talent. China today produces six times as many STEM graduates as the United States, and fifty per cent more STEM PhD students. The United States can only compete by attracting the world's best talent, including from China. Instead, it has driven away some of that talent. That is, quite simply, shooting ourselves in the foot.

Keith 00:47:24

I was struck by the human costs you described in the book following the launch of the China Initiative — people whose lives were genuinely shattered, who went through extremely dark periods. It is easy to discuss geopolitics and economics in the abstract. The real and tangible harm to individual lives is something we cannot afford to overlook.

Zhengyu 00:48:01

In my role at the Committee of 100, I had the opportunity to meet many of these scientists, and their stories are heartbreaking. Most academics are not wealthy. When they were arrested by the FBI, their universities — fearful of the reputational and legal implications — often fired them immediately. The cost of mounting a legal defence against the federal government is staggering. Many of these people lost their jobs, were publicly branded as suspected spies, had to sell their homes, and borrowed money to cover legal fees. And even those who won — who had their charges dropped — often struggled to find work afterwards. Careers, and lives, were destroyed. It is deeply sad.

One example I include in the book is Sherry Chen. She worked for the US government and had won multiple awards. She was arrested after a trip to China, accused of being a spy. When the case was examined, there was plainly no substance to it, and it was dropped. But instead of retreating into private life — as most people in her position would understandably do — she kept fighting. She wanted justice and restitution.

I met with her and asked why she was putting herself through it. She said: "I'm not doing it for myself. I'm doing it for everyone else. Justice needs to be served — not for me, but for all of us."

Because she persisted, a subpoena uncovered something remarkable: a rogue group within the Commerce Department had been systematically surveilling Asian American employees on the assumption that there was a vast Chinese spy ring operating inside the government. This was directly traceable to the $600 billion figure — if you believe that number, a massive internal operation to identify and stop spies follows almost inevitably.

That rogue surveillance operation was exposed as a result of her fight. And she ultimately became one of the first people to receive not just an apology from the Commerce Secretary, but approximately $1.4 million in restitution for the pain and suffering she endured.

She walked a very long road. But speaking to people like her makes me believe that courage is real, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Keith 00:52:06

Her story goes right back to the GIGO principle you mentioned earlier. Catastrophise the number — $600 billion — and extreme responses become not just justified but necessary. The same logic, incidentally, operates in other historical contexts: inflate the scale of a threat, and you create the conditions to treat the other side as an enemy that must be eliminated at all costs. That kind of thinking is dangerous.

The other question I wanted to raise is this: when you talk about the tech war, is it actually a war in the sense people imagine? From where I sit in Singapore, the US and Chinese approaches to AI look genuinely divergent. China's model appears to be oriented around integration and open source — make it affordable, make it accessible, embed it everywhere. The US model is about frontier capability — pushing the envelope as hard as possible. That divergence shapes the startups being formed, the investments being made, the innovation ecosystems on each side. So is this really an existential contest, or do we need to re-examine the assumptions underneath that framing?

Zhengyu 00:54:06

We do have to compete — there is no question about that. But consider the framing more carefully. From an American perspective, China is a genuine threat. The question is not whether China poses challenges, but what kind — and of what magnitude. To borrow from meteorology: if it is a Category Five hurricane, you evacuate. If it is Category One, you close your windows and stay home. The problem today is that, because of the hysteria surrounding China, everything is treated as Category Five. And the responses become unmeasured and disproportionate — often hurting America's own interests and values.

When people say this is an AI war, when they say it is existential, they are, once again, playing to fear. And so the responses become disproportionate.

My view is this: the US and China will compete in many of these domains — and must. But in many of these same domains, they must also find ways to cooperate. You have to do both simultaneously. Why? Because AI, for all its promise in terms of productivity, also carries real risks of harm — particularly if you take seriously the possibility, as Jensen Huang does, that AGI is already here or imminent. The United States and China working together to govern the most consequential effects of AI would be critical. Because ultimately, we are the same human species.

The same applies to climate change, to nuclear proliferation, to a range of challenges that will require active collaboration between the two largest powers on earth. None of that precludes competition. Competition is fine — even healthy. The question is whether competition devolves into conflict. As you noted at the outset, those are different things. The goal must be to compete without allowing the competition to become something that destroys both sides.

Keith 00:56:53

There was a period when the US and Chinese economies were deeply integrated. If you speak to the first generation of Chinese tech entrepreneurs, many of them hold Americans — especially in business and innovation — in very high regard. And the first wave of foreign capital that underwrote Chinese technology companies was largely American. A great deal of Chinese technological growth was, at its foundation, underwritten by American capital. That seems to be almost entirely forgotten today — not just in the US, but in China as well. Some of my friends there, as they become more nationalist, have developed a sense that America is simply out to get them. I tell them: many of your biggest tech companies were funded or given their public market liquidity by American investors. It was a genuinely win-win relationship. Things were not always as they are today.

Zhengyu 00:58:03

History is endlessly fascinating. You can see something similar with Taiwan. For a long time, China's largest source of foreign direct investment was not the United States or Europe — it was Taiwan and Hong Kong. At the height, Taiwanese companies operating in China accounted for about fourteen per cent of all tax receipts. Foxconn was China's largest private-sector employer. Today, there are still over a million Taiwanese business people living and working in China.

A number of serious scholars — and I engage with some of them in the book — have argued that China's economic rise would not have been possible without the active participation of Taiwan. And as you noted, even before manufacturing migrated to China, it first went to Taiwan. I remember flying to Taiwan regularly because all the ODMs — the manufacturers of computers and mobile phones — were headquartered there. It was Taiwanese companies that then built out facilities on the mainland.

There is simply so much interaction and interdependence across the US-China-Taiwan triangle that people have chosen to forget — because they have convinced themselves that this is a zero-sum contest, a you-or-me situation, rather than recognising that throughout history, working together has produced better outcomes for everyone. In the fifty years since US-China normalisation in 1972, we have seen unprecedented prosperity on all sides — and unprecedented peace. Before 1972, there were actual Taiwan Strait crises involving live ammunition and real fighting. Since 1972, nothing of the kind.

We would do well to remember what history offers. It does not repeat itself exactly — but, as someone astute once noted, it does rhyme.

Keith 01:00:16

Given your perspective as someone who has moved between both worlds and understands China deeply — let me flip the question. What do you think the average Chinese citizen most misunderstands about America today?

Zhengyu 01:00:57

I have come to agree with several senior DC policymakers who say: all policy is ultimately domestic. In China, there is a tendency to interpret American actions as deliberate attempts to contain or undermine China — without fully appreciating that many of those policies are primarily driven by domestic political pressures and concerns. The same is true in reverse: Americans often attribute expansionist or malicious intent to Chinese policy without recognising how much of it is driven by internal imperatives.

If you look beneath the surface, both countries share remarkably similar underlying challenges. Ageing populations. Youth unemployment. Income and wealth inequality. The disruptions of rapid technological change. The list goes on. And I think it is those commonalities — not just cultural similarities, but shared problems — that could form the basis for a more honest relationship, rather than one defined by projected fears and assumed intentions.

Keith 01:02:52

So Chinese counterparts would benefit from extending some of the same empathy and interpretive generosity to American policy that you're advocating Americans extend to China.

Zhengyu 01:03:02

Absolutely. And this connects to something I explored in the book — a study by Harvard professors on the question of intentions. A great deal of geopolitical thinking is premised on assumptions about what the other side intends. Some American policymakers believe China intends to surpass and replace America as the dominant power. Many in China believe America intends to contain and ultimately bring down China.

The Harvard research — which aligns with my own experience, and I suspect with yours — is that human beings are genuinely terrible at accurately reading other people's intentions. We almost always assume the worst in others and the best in ourselves. And in reality, most of the time, people do what they do because of their own circumstances and pressures. If something they do happens to benefit you, it is probably incidental. If something harms you, it is probably not targeted. We are just not very good at recognising that.

This is also why I argue in the book that we should construct policy that protects and advances our interests regardless of what we believe the other side's intentions to be — rather than calibrating our entire strategic posture around an assumed, and likely inaccurate, reading of those intentions.

Nobody actually knows what President Xi truly thinks. And for that matter, nobody truly knows what President Trump thinks — despite him having been in the public eye for decades, Americans remain almost evenly split on the question. If that is true of someone so extensively documented, imagine how unreliable our assessments of a leader operating in a very different system must be. The answer is to have well-constructed policy that protects our interests in any scenario — whether the other side turns out to be friend or adversary — and to stop making grand assumptions about intent.

Keith 01:06:10

If you were advising Washington policymakers today on a rethink of China strategy, what would you advocate?

Zhengyu 01:06:21

That is, incidentally, the title of my book — Rethinking China: Challenging Our Economic Assumptions and Opportunities for Lasting Prosperity. It is available now, and for those who want to go deeper, you can visit RethinkingChina.us, where you can download the first chapter for free and sign up for updates.

If I were to distil the recommendation into a single phrase: focus on results. Ultimately, results are what matter. Rhetoric and intentions, however sincere, are secondary. In DC, I believe that virtually everyone I met genuinely wants America to succeed. But we know the old saying: the road to ruin is paved with good intentions.

After ten years, let us stop debating intentions and rhetoric. Let us look at the results. Have the policies made America more economically competitive? Have they made America more secure? Have they advanced American values in the world? The data suggests the answer across all three is no. That should be enough to prompt a genuine rethink. If the results are not there, we need to be open to adjusting course. If they are, double down. But intellectual honesty requires looking at what has actually happened.

Keith 01:08:13

You alluded earlier to the importance of getting domestic conditions right. As a technologist and bridge-builder, what do you see as the most pressing challenges within the United States itself that policymakers should be addressing?

Zhengyu 01:08:32

The world is changing so rapidly, across so many domains, that America's systems may need to be updated to keep pace. The primary system, for example, structurally rewards extreme positions — if you are a moderate, you tend not to survive a primary. You end up with an increasingly bifurcated political field. Can that system be reformed? Yes — smart people are actively working on it, including through innovations like ranked-choice voting. This is one of the reasons I remain cautiously optimistic about America: it retains the capacity to reinvent itself. Simply calling yourself a democracy is not enough. You have to continuously innovate the democratic machinery itself.

The other issue is the role of money. Running for Congress today costs perhaps five to ten million dollars. A Senate race in a large state can exceed a hundred million. Presidential elections routinely cost billions. When you are constantly fundraising, you are constantly making commitments — and that shapes what you are able to do once in office. Campaign finance reform is not a simple problem, and I know many very intelligent people are grappling with it.

But again, these are internal issues. No external actor is going to solve them for America. That work has to be done by Americans. And I believe, if done well, it will come out stronger for having done it.

Keith 01:11:36

My final question: drawing on everything you have experienced — your time as a managing director at Intel, your White House Fellowship, your work running your own firm and building bridges — what is the single piece of advice you would give to a new graduate entering the working world today?

Zhengyu 01:11:59

Time moves extraordinarily fast. I have spoken to people far more accomplished than I am, and even they say the same thing: it went by in an instant. We each have one life. However long it is — seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred years — it will feel like it passed in a moment.

The promise I have made to myself, and try to live by, is this: I want to reach the end with no regrets. I may not be able to control every outcome — some things are simply beyond my reach. But I can control whether I pursue the things that truly matter to me.

My advice to a younger person is: have no regrets. If there is something you genuinely want to do, ask yourself — if I don't do this, will I regret it in ten, twenty, fifty years? If the answer is yes, then you have to do it. You cannot live with regret. And at the end, there is nothing we can take with us. The only thing we can say at that last breath is: I lived without regret.

Keith 01:13:34

On that aspirational note — Z thank you so much for coming on.

Zhengyu 01:13:38

Thank you.

Professor O'Hanlon is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and Director of Research in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. His newest book, timed to coincide with America's 250th birthday, called "To Damn Mighty Things," was an interesting read for me as it helped unpack the growth of America as a nation, then industrial power, and eventually superpower.

In today's conversation, we talk about America's evolving defence strategy from its birth in the Revolutionary War all the way to the Iraq War. I hope you'll find this conversation as illuminating as I did.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 — Trailer & Introduction
01:37 — Grand Strategy vs. Defence Strategy: What's the Difference?
06:50 — George Washington's Guerrilla Instinct: How the Revolutionary War Shaped America
11:45 — The Founding Fathers Were Not Minimalists
15:10 — The War of 1812: Punching Up at the World's Number One Power
18:50 — Was America Ever Really Isolationist?
21:10 — The Uncomfortable Ethics of American Expansion
30:15 — How World War II Made America a Superpower
32:55 — Three Wars That Built a Nation
34:30 — The Cold War Was Scarier Than We Remember
37:45 — Vietnam: America's Worst War — and Why Lee Kuan Yew Still Defended It
40:20 — The Cold War Was About More Than Containing Communism
42:30 — The End of the Cold War: Triumph or Anxiety?
46:05 — 9/11, Fear, and the Road Into Iraq
49:30 — The Paradox of American Power: Winning the Grand Game While Losing the Wars
51:20 — Nixon's Art of Losing Without Admitting It
53:35 — Iraq: What Went Wrong and What Didn't
55:15 — Trump Through a Historical Lens: A 19th-Century President in the 21st Century
56:40 — If You Had 15 Minutes With Trump, What Would You Say?

This is the 78th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 01:36

There is a lot of interest today in geopolitics and grand strategy, but you make a very clear distinction between understanding grand strategy and defence strategy. Can you help us understand that distinction?

Michael O'Hanlon 01:53

First of all, Keith, thanks for having me on. It's great to be speaking with friends in Singapore. We in the United States have just great admiration and appreciation for Singapore as a polity, as an economy, as a security partner. So it's just great for me to be speaking with you tonight.

Grand strategy is the big idea for how you keep yourself safe and ideally also powerful. It is the most conceptual, most far-reaching, most sweeping idea that guides overall security policy. It may or may not be explained in any official document. You may have to figure it out by looking at how a country behaves, not just what it says.

For example, in the United States, for the first half of our history, our grand strategy was expansionism. We wanted to make this country bigger and more powerful. We also believed we had a form of government that had never been seen before on earth, one that was worthy of being expanded and covering the whole continent.

To give one more example, in the Cold War, the grand strategy was containment. Push back against the Soviets, push back against the Chinese Communist Party when they wanted to try to spread their idea of governance around the world. That's the big idea.

The defence strategy or military strategy is what you do with your armed forces to back up your grand strategy. How big is your military? Where does it choose to fight, or where do you decide as a country to have it fight? Which countries do you ally with? Which kinds of weapons do you buy for the possibility of future warfare? All the elements of the nitty-gritty of how you build a military and how you commit it to fight in certain places. That's defence strategy.

So grand strategy is the big idea. Military strategy is how the armed forces support that grand idea with the military instrument of national power.

Keith 04:04

Why do people conflate the two often in American public discourse when it comes to America's military involvement overseas?

Michael O'Hanlon 04:11

I'm not sure how many people lose a lot of sleep over this issue, because political scientists try to be very precise with their terms, but most normal people and most normal politicians don't really insist on using that kind of language.

The term grand strategy is sort of a grand term. It's a fancy word. It's not really a phrase we use a lot in normal conversation. Military strategy is a word you hear quite a bit, and it covers everything from how you fight a certain war to how you prepare for a possible future war or how you try to prevent that future war.

Political scientists sometimes try to explain these terms very clearly, and some of them say that grand strategy is just how you try to make your country safe. But in the United States context, that's not a good enough definition, because for the first half of our history, our goal was not just to be safe. It was to be more powerful and bigger, to cover more of the territory of North America, and to have the resource base to build a military that, if we wished, could do other things and bigger, mightier things.

In that sense, there are at least three definitions out there and it's confusing. One is how do you keep yourself safe. One is how do you keep yourself safe and powerful. And the third is how do you guide your overall foreign policy — not just defence, but economics and diplomacy.

I think that last definition is too big and broad and not specific enough to really be very useful. And the first definition does not do very well at explaining the United States. So I settle on this definition of grand strategy: it's how you try to keep the country secure, but also how you try to make the country powerful militarily. That's the way I think about the term.

Keith 06:22

I wanted to quote this from page 13 of your book. You said the Revolutionary War was the main existential struggle in American history. The very creation of the United States hinged on its outcome. Only in the Civil War, which threatened to divide the country in two, and then World War II, which had the potential to rip the entire planet apart and perhaps even lead to a direct attack on the US mainland if Hitler had realised his greatest dreams — so here we see three wars that shaped America. Maybe it might be useful before we jump into the present to go back to the start, to the Revolutionary War. You describe it as an existential struggle. Can you tell me more about how the Revolutionary War shaped America's outlook towards defence strategy?

Michael O'Hanlon 07:10

That's a great question and I look forward to responding to that. Let me also say there were a couple of other wars that were important for the United States because they involved our expansion into a great power.

One of those was the US-Mexico War of 1846 to 1848, where we wound up with the entire southwest of the United States. Previously that had been Spanish and then Mexican, and we essentially forced Mexico to give it to us. And of course also all the battles over the centuries against Native American tribes who were here before the United States was ever present. This raises a lot of difficult ethical issues, but in terms of the expansion of the country, those battles were crucial as well.

But you're right, the Revolutionary War was the war that gave us our independence. I think at a military level, the most interesting part of the Revolutionary War legacy to me is that George Washington figured out how to change from fighting a traditional open field battle kind of conflict against the British. He realised pretty soon he was going to lose that, especially in New York City in 1776, and he had to be more of a counterpuncher. He was one of the modern world's original guerrilla warfare experts — not quite guerrilla warfare in the sense of Ho Chi Minh, but he tried to counterpunch and avoid the battle in many cases rather than engage in it.

George Washington realised defending New York, defending any given city like Philadelphia, was not really essential. He could afford to lose those cities temporarily as long as the army stayed intact and still had resources to keep punching and punishing the British. That led to a couple of big victories, for example in Saratoga in 1777.

Then France joined the American side. Without France, I'm not sure that the United States would have won that war. But France, always at war with Britain throughout this whole period, joined once they realised the United States had an idea for how to fight the British that might just work.

It was counterpunching. It was an alternative to open field battle. It was a little bit like guerrilla warfare in some cases, although Washington was willing to have big fights with the British if he had the right circumstances and conditions. Fascinating conflict militarily and obviously crucial to the country's independence.

Keith 10:05

You spoke about the early republic leaders like Washington and Jefferson. They were almost allergic to a standing army of sorts. I think you alluded to how Washington, when he stepped down from power, voluntarily stepped down as president and was happy to wash his hands of future military engagements. So the question would be, where does this sort of assertiveness come from if the founding fathers didn't really have that strain in them?

Michael O'Hanlon 10:42

I love George Washington just like almost every other American. But Washington himself was ambitious in the sense that, yes, he stepped down from the presidency after two terms and he set a great example and became a magnificent influence on our future politics.

But as soon as he won the Revolutionary War in 1783, he set off to the west of the United States. At that time, the west was not very far west. It was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He rode there on horseback, then took a boat down the Ohio River. He was interested in bringing Ohio, which was then part of the Northwest Territories, into the United States and building a big canal from the Ohio River to the Potomac River, creating this broader eastern United States that went well beyond the original colonies.

Washington was not content just to have our independence. He wanted to expand our territory, and this was more or less accepted by everybody at that time. It was not a debate. There were other debates that were very vigorous, and the early decades of the United States were not always happy and not always peaceful. Remember the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, for example. In the early 19th century, there were a lot of very ugly political engagements. But everybody pretty much agreed we needed to go west, needed to keep expanding. That started with Washington and others of his generation.

In that sense, Washington was not a minimalist. He did not want to be the general forever. He did not want to be the president forever. But he wanted the United States to keep growing.

Keith 12:40

On page 23, you talk about how Washington stayed true to the idea that the federal government needed to be strong enough to hold together and protect the union. Was it that once you achieved a union, a United States of America, you needed to draw down militarily? Or did the expansionist train continue even after him? Help us understand a little bit more about America's expansionist tendencies in those early years.

Michael O'Hanlon 13:06

There were a lot of things going on in those early years. Some people considered the United States to be a plural word — that this was a confederation of 13 states, and the states were the most powerful. They had collectively decided to fight the British and collectively defeated the British, but their main loyalties were to their own states. We saw this again 80 years later in the Civil War, where the South felt that states' rights were more important than federal rights.

In those early years in the 1790s, with Washington as president and Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury, the United States decided to behave more like a single unified country. All the debts of the different 13 colonies were brought together under federal control. The federal government assumed responsibility for those. The federal government imposed its own taxation policy on states, even where some places like Pennsylvania, with the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, did not really want that kind of federal influence.

Washington, Hamilton, and later John Adams were instrumental in creating this sense of a single unified country. That was not really solidified until 1865 with the end of the Civil War and the defeat of the Confederacy. But it was fascinating to watch how, for the early decades of American history, some people really wanted the individual state to have the centre of power in our system, while others thought that the federal government should be ultimately the arbiter and the most powerful part of the government. Obviously the latter won out, but only really with the Union victory over the Confederacy in 1865.

Keith 15:07

I now have to move on to this seemingly unimportant war, but a war that you talk about quite often — the War of 1812. You describe it as powerful evidence in support of your main observation about America's strategic character, which is its highly assertive and self-confident nature. It picked a fight with the world's number one power at the time, which was Britain. Why was the War of 1812 so important in understanding America's strategic character today?

Michael O'Hanlon 15:38

First of all, for friends in Singapore and everywhere else who may be watching this show, it is fascinating. The American national anthem was written during the War of 1812 — "The Star-Spangled Banner" — and you probably watched some of our athletes singing it at the Olympics. It's a famous song.

But if you ask Americans what the War of 1812 was about, most of them cannot tell you. I know this because I've been giving a lot of speeches about my book and I sometimes ask people who feels like they understand that war, and hardly ever does anyone raise their hand — except in Baltimore, Maryland, where the Star-Spangled Banner was written close by. That's where the British assault on the United States sort of ended in 1814, leading to the negotiated settlement of 1815.

Basically, the War of 1812 reflected an American assertiveness because we thought the Brits were being a little bit mean and unfair in the way they would impose tariffs on us, because we still wanted to trade with France. France was ruled by Napoleon. Napoleon was trying to conquer all of Europe and Britain didn't like that, understandably. But we said we're not part of that war; we're going to trade with whoever we want. So Britain started imposing tariffs and also stealing some of our sailors from ships to put on British ships through the policy of impressment. Those were the causes of the War of 1812.

But what I say is that psychologically, the real cause was American confidence and assertiveness and a desire not to put up with this kind of treatment, even by the world's number one power. You might have thought that after winning the Revolutionary War, we would be content to leave Britain alone, not look for a rematch, not try to have a second fight with the world's number one military power. But we decided that we would prefer to fight them rather than put up with mistreatment.

That led to the War of 1812, which really resolved nothing. Ultimately, it was essentially stopped three years later with none of the underlying issues resolved. Britain did stop taking our sailors and putting them on British ships, but for the most part, the territorial gains were insignificant on either side. Nobody really won. Yes, the British burned Washington DC, but we just fled back into the hinterland just like we had in the Revolutionary War. Britain was not going to be capable of dominating the whole United States, so they didn't really win the war because they took Washington or torched the White House.

It was sort of an inconclusive war, but it reflected this American assertiveness that I think is pretty strong in our national character and was always pretty strong in our national character.

Keith 18:48

Despite this strong and consistent assertiveness in America's national character, there seems to be a trending view that America was actually relatively isolationist. Naturally, my question is, where did this stance or belief come from?

Michael O'Hanlon 19:03

The simplest answer is that now in today's world, we Americans think of our natural borders as the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and Canada and Mexico, because we're used to that. All of us were born when that was already true. But that was not the original condition of the country. Those were not the original borders.

The original United States was a small piece of land along the Atlantic seacoast of North America, stretching from today's New England down to Georgia, not even including Florida. We pushed west and roughly quintupled the size of the country in the next century — magnified our territory by five or six times.

When we look back on it, we Americans think those are the natural borders of the country. So we don't even think of this first 125 years as being a period of assertiveness. We think of it as consolidating our territory. But talk to the Mexicans, talk to the Spaniards who were in Florida, talk to the Native Americans. They will understand better than we sometimes do ourselves that the United States was pushing them off land they previously controlled.

That's why I say the United States — I think we're a very good country. I think it's good that we became powerful and big because it helped us have the resources to win the World Wars, to prevail in the Cold War. I think we've been a generally positive force for world peace and international stability. But we did not become big through any kind of minimalist approach to foreign policy. We were pushing and expanding and looking for new opportunity from the very beginning of this country's founding.

Keith 20:56

As an aside, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about how you grapple with these questions of history, especially when we learn that a lot of the history was actually written in blood, especially of its less powerful neighbours.

Michael O'Hanlon 21:10

In the book, my book is a history of defence strategy. In a sense, I don't really have to answer your question about the ethics, because what I'm trying to describe is what happened and what strategies were guiding this behaviour.

But I acknowledge — I don't want to completely ignore the important ethical issues. There are some very tough ethical questions to wrestle with as an American. I have friends who are Native Americans and I have friends who are Mexicans. To go through our history and justify everything we did to push and expand our territory is not really going to work with them. It's not going to seem credible.

I can't go back in time and change any of that. I would acknowledge that the expansion of this country under a new system of government the world had never seen allowed us to have the resource base to defeat the Nazis and the Tojo government in World War II and prevail in the Cold War. In the grand scheme of things, over 250 years of American history, I think we've had a lot of beneficial results from this expansion of the United States into a continental power and ultimately the world's number one superpower throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

But that's not to say it was all done in a proper and ethical manner. I think you can really debate the ethics of this.

Let me make one more point. Taking land from Native Americans was a sad chapter in our history, just like having slaves in the first 80 years of our country was sad. But with Mexico, it's interesting that Mexico inherited the American Southwest from Spain. Mexico became independent in 1821 and had very little control of territories that are now California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. They had a claim to it based on the fact that Spain had stolen or taken that land.

So the idea that the United States would simply defer to Mexico inheriting this land from Spain in what was a big imperial conquest from a previous century — I'm not going to feel too bad about that. I think the United States was a more natural country to control the current southwest than Mexico or Spain. I'm not going to lose too much sleep over the fact that the United States expanded in the Southwest in a way that was at the detriment of Mexico.

Our battles against Native Americans — they trouble me. I can't really justify those. If I could go back and redo the history, I would try to find a way to share the land with the Native Americans much better than we did.

If I could make one other comment — today's China likes to say that it's basically peaceful, that it has a Confucian ethic, that it hasn't been launching foreign wars for a long time, and that in the 19th and 20th century, China was a victim of European and Japanese aggression. All that's true. But let's also remember that China became a continental power by conquest a long time ago. Both China and the United States had grown into these giant countries because they were willing to use military force against their neighbours. It's a reality of human history we're just going to have to accept. We can't change it, but we should be aware of it.

Keith 25:28

I was wondering if you personally had to grapple with these questions as you were writing the book, because I can't imagine going through 250 years of history, a lot of it being bloody, without it stirring some thoughts within yourself.

Michael O'Hanlon 25:42

You're right. I think when you're thinking about history, it's good to wrestle with some of these ethical issues. Even if you know you can't change the past, and even if you know that maybe the overall good was greater than the overall bad, it's still worth reflecting on the nature of human beings and human government.

If nothing else, it should remind us all that we are all capable of making mistakes. I think that should be sobering in a world where the great powers are all pursuing their own advantage and where Russia's attacking Ukraine and China's flexing its muscle in the Western Pacific. We all need to be aware that everyone's capable of making a mistake, and sometimes the goal should be to try to walk back from the brink rather than to have a great showdown.

Keith 26:34

I was just struck by how impressive America's rise was from its birth to today. It's only been 250 years and it's emerged from one small European-sized country and become the world's leading superpower. I think that's very impressive, but you can only understand the scale or the rapidity of its rise when you take a step back.

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The full question I had was actually about the uneasy relationship or dichotomy between grand strategy and defence strategy that you pointed out in the early 1900s, where America was going through a relatively isolationist interlude but at the same time was building a lot of capabilities — be it military institutions or industrial capability.

Michael O'Hanlon 27:35

There are a couple of periods within this time. When you go to the late 19th century, the United States is becoming one of the world's dominant industrial powers. We had a lot of thinking at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, with Alfred Thayer Mahan, a great writer, arguing that the United States should take advantage of this moment and become one of the world's great naval powers. That debate continued.

But we also continued to believe that Europe's ground wars were sort of stupid and unnecessary and not wars that we should allow ourselves to be dragged into. So yes, we wanted to be a world-class naval power. We did not really want to be a world-class ground force because we didn't want to use that military to fight wars over borders in Europe. That seemed unimportant to us.

It's understandable for a while why we didn't want to get into World War I, why Woodrow Wilson thought it was a silly war — a war of imperialist, jealous powers. I think Wilson was right about a lot of that. But unfortunately, as time went by, we realised that maybe Germany was the bigger problem and really needed to be dealt with. Then of course in World War II, Germany was the huge problem and definitely needed to be defeated.

But between World War I and World War II, we decided we didn't want any of this. All the progress we had made with our navy, we basically dismantled a lot of it. We no longer tried to compete with Japan in the Pacific. We tried to pretend that World War I was a war that happened by mistake, that we should never have gotten involved. We allowed the Europeans and our own military-industrial complex to drag us into that. The presidents of the 1920s and early 1930s just tried to say, "Let's just ignore all that."

So that was the great isolationism in American history. It was interesting because in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, we were building up this big navy because we wanted to be a great global power. But in the 1920s and 1930s, we decided to ignore that and just hope we could not be bothered with Asia or Europe any longer. Of course, that proved to be a great mistake.

Keith 30:10

World War II — that's the moment where America became truly a superpower. Its industrial capability matched its ambitions as a power. How did American military leaders and political leaders see themselves being involved in the war as it progressed?

Michael O'Hanlon 30:33

In 1935 and 1937, the United States Congress passed neutrality acts that prevented us from even helping Britain and France with their military modernisation. We couldn't even sell them weapons, even as Hitler was rising in Europe and starting to do terrible things.

Then by the late 1930s, Hitler starts attacking countries. In 1939, it's Poland. In 1940, it's France. In 1941, it's the Soviet Union, after attacking the Balkans. At this point, we're starting to wake up, but not completely. We're still hoping maybe we can stay out of it.

The best single indication I can give you is that in 1940 — remember, 1940 was the year in the spring when Hitler conquered France as well as Belgium and Norway, and revealed just how sinister his goals were — that year, the United States passed a law to allow for military conscription, drafting young men to join the army. But in the summer of 1941, Hitler had already attacked the Soviet Union as of June. We had not yet had Pearl Harbor — that was December. In the summer of 1941, the US Congress had to decide whether to continue the draft, and it passed by one vote.

At this point, we had started to provide weapons to Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, but we still wanted to stay out of it. We did not want to get involved directly. So those are some of the big milestones: the 1935 and 1937 neutrality acts, the 1940–41 conscription policy, and then Lend-Lease in 1941 that started to help us provide weapons to our friends.

But it was not until the Pearl Harbor attack, and then Germany deciding to declare war on the United States right after that, that we really realised we could not stay out of this war.

Keith 32:54

It might be useful to take a step back and put these three wars into context. The Revolutionary War established that America would exist. The Civil War proved that you could have total industrial-scale warfare without the country collapsing on itself. And World War II really transformed America into not just an industrial power but a foreign military superpower. Is that the right understanding?

Michael O'Hanlon 33:22

Yes, but I would also add the US-Mexico War of 1846 to 1848, because that created the size and scale of the country — together with all the individual battles against Native American tribes throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that contributed to the control of this entire big resource base.

Originally, the United States was sort of the equivalent of another European country in size, population, and scale. If that had remained the case, we could never have played the role we did in the 20th and 21st centuries. So it required the expansion, then the Civil War to reconsolidate the country, and then the industrial revolution to give us the kind of economic, scientific, and industrial power that we brought to bear.

It's all those things together. But yes, I would otherwise say you're exactly right. That's the way to think of our history. We're into a new phase now and who knows where this one is going, but ever since the 1940s, the United States has thought of itself as a global power — as the global power.

Keith 34:30

Another interesting point you made was this idea of looking back at the Cold War with rose-tinted glasses or having a certain nostalgic view of that period. But you pointed out that during the early stages of the Cold War especially, it was actually very terrifying. There were a lot of difficult decisions being made. You made this point about President Eisenhower, where he was the president who had to resolve some serious military quandaries, and some of the solutions he proposed were going to be extremely violent or costly.

Michael O'Hanlon 35:12

Think of it this way. Douglas MacArthur — who I think was not a very great general, but maybe I'm unusual in that opinion — in the Korean War, he was fired because he threatened nuclear attack against China. He wanted the United States to attack China on the mainland and maybe use nuclear weapons. Of course, it was not his job to have that opinion because he was a uniformed military commander, not a politician. But it was seen as outlandish and he was fired.

Then Dwight Eisenhower becomes president and he proposes the same kind of idea to try to force China to negotiate an end to the Korean War. This is a very calm guy, the hero of World War II, and yet he is threatening nuclear attack. He did it again over the Taiwan Strait crisis in the 1950s.

We had a period which was very tumultuous, very unsettled, very scary, and we sort of got through it. Then we had Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then we had the Vietnam War, which was extremely scary to people of my generation — well, actually, people just a little bit older. I was still a kid during the Vietnam War, didn't really understand it, but it affected the country profoundly.

The United States in the 1950s and 1960s was a very unsettled place. This notion that we somehow had a very clear sense of purpose in the Cold War and we were all working together and didn't really disagree with each other — that's not true. It was tough and it was scary.

Then the 1970s, we felt defeated in many ways by the loss of the military campaign in Vietnam, by the oil price shocks, by the stagflation of the Carter years, going into the 1980 failed Iranian hostage rescue mission. That whole period was unhappy.

The United States in these Cold War years was not some great bastion of happiness, power, strength, and consensus. We were often fighting with each other and we were often very scared about what was going to happen next in the world. I don't think the Cold War mellowed out until the mid-1980s. That was the first time when Gorbachev came to power and we were starting to ratchet back.

Keith 37:48

I remember there were a few interviews of Lee Kuan Yew talking about the US role in Vietnam. It was deeply unpopular in Southeast Asia, the American presence. But I think he was one of the huge defenders of American involvement because it was essentially a public good — it provided for regional security to a certain extent.

Michael O'Hanlon 38:18

I hope that some American military men and women who served in that period listened to your comment, because for our country it was a disaster. It was the worst war we ever fought in our whole history. It was a war that maybe we should never have fought in the first place. It was a war that we fought very badly. It was a war that tore us apart internally, and it was a war that we lost.

But you're right, there might have been some additional effects that were in some cases not all bad. At least we showed the Soviet Union and China that we would push back even in a place like Vietnam, which for the United States is very far away and not really at the centre of geopolitics.

My own view is we should not have fought that war. But because we did, and because a lot of American men and women — especially men, but also women — lost their lives, served their country, and came home traumatised in many cases, I do want them to know that there may have been some broader benefits to this conflict, even though I think it was still a bad idea.

Keith 39:26

I think his comment was that having fought the war, it wasn't a complete failure.

It might be useful to also elaborate a little bit more about America's role in the Cold War, where you pointed out it wasn't just about containing the Soviet Union, which although was crucial in its Cold War strategy. You pointed out it was containment plus building an alliance structure, building multilateral institutions. So what about America's Cold War strategy remains misunderstood today, and how should one actually understand America's defence strategy during that period?

Michael O'Hanlon 40:16

In this period, we wanted to contain the communist threat, but we also wanted to strengthen the underlying democratic community — and not just pure democracies, but countries that had elements of democracy, like Singapore, that still wanted to play by the rules and be contributing and fair-minded members of the international community.

We realised we needed to strengthen that group of nations in order to buttress our position vis-à-vis Moscow and Beijing. So there was a positive side to the grand strategy in addition to the negative side of pushing back against communist expansion. The positive side endured even after the Cold War ended.

Now, President Trump is calling into question a lot of those precepts and principles, and we'll see where the United States goes next. But I think the Cold War grand strategy was not just about fighting communism. It was also about building a community of market-oriented, fair-minded, pro-human rights countries that, in varying degrees of democracy, still wanted to better the condition of their own people and work together to build a more prosperous planet.

Keith 41:35

If you look at America's formula throughout the Cold War to the end of it, it wasn't just containment but also actively building partnerships and alliances, however imperfect they may be. We think about the multilateral institutions — the IMFs, the World Banks, the United Nations — and their crucial role in upholding American primacy.

Naturally, the following question I had was, when you reached the end of the Cold War, there was this idea by Francis Fukuyama about the end of history, where America's unipolar moment had become a new norm. How real was this impression?

Michael O'Hanlon 42:27

I think back to the end of the Cold War. That was 1989. I was 28 years old. I had just finished graduate school. I had just arrived in Washington. It wasn't a bad period in US history.

But one of the ways to understand where our collective mindset was is to think back to a famous book written then by Paul Kennedy called "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." Ironically, this book was written throughout much of the 1980s, published in 1987, and became popular in 1988 and 1989, just as the Cold War was ending. It basically said the last 500 years of history should tell the United States that we are probably now on the decline and other countries are probably going to surpass us.

At that point, we were worried about Japan and Germany — two of our friends, two of our allies. It wasn't so much that we resented their success. We worried about ourselves. We didn't think we had the same prowess, the same ability to reach the new frontiers of technology and manufacturing that we had had in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Even though the Vietnam War was terrible in the 1960s, we reached the moon in 1969. The 1960s are a fascinating period of almost strategic schizophrenia in the United States. We were still feeling very good about our capabilities, but we were fighting this war in a place we wished we weren't, dividing the country.

By the 1980s, even though Ronald Reagan ultimately made the country feel better about itself and strengthened the military and helped win the Cold War — and when you look back, it seems like it must have been a wonderful time — Paul Kennedy's book captured the moment almost better than anybody else. He was saying, "I think we're in decline, like Britain in the early 20th century or other great powers in previous periods."

So there was never this moment of triumphalism. There really wasn't. If you look at the economic trend lines, it's really in the 1980s and 1990s and thereafter where American manufacturing was declining, the American middle-class dream was becoming less realistic, people no longer felt that their kids were going to have a better life than they had. We started to have this polarisation in American society to some extent between the white-collar and the blue-collar workforce. That was really already starting to happen in the late 1980s.

When I look back on my life, I don't really see any period where the United States was fundamentally happy and content. We were always anxious about something.

Keith 45:26

As America entered into the Iraq War, you were one of the earlier commentators that pointed out that a war in Iraq was going to be much more protracted, bloodier, and violent than people thought. There was a Washington consensus at the time that viewed America as going to achieve a swift and decisive victory. Can you speak a little bit more about the concerns you had about America entering the Iraq War, and what were the underlying motivations that pushed US involvement into the Middle East?

Michael O'Hanlon 46:01

9/11 was scary in the United States. I know you saw a little bit of this in Indonesia in the same period — in 2002, I believe — and of course Pakistan contributed to an attack on India in 2008 that had a little bit of the same feel. But both of those attacks, in Bali and in India, were 200 people killed. The United States was 3,000 people killed in one day.

This was a huge shock. The United States felt vulnerable. We didn't know who had nuclear weapons, if al-Qaeda could get its hands on nuclear weapons, if Manhattan would be threatened. I was in Tokyo the day of the 9/11 attacks. It happened in the nighttime in East Asia, the morning in the United States. I remember I couldn't sleep that whole night because I was in a hotel in a skyscraper.

Then I started to think that East Asia was not really part of this fight, except maybe Indonesia and the Philippines. But my point is simply to say that for the United States, this was really scary. We realised we were the target and we spent a lot of the next few years trying to figure out how to make sure a 9/11 never happens again. We had a lot of good ideas for how to do that and also a lot of bad ideas. We made a lot of mistakes, especially in Iraq.

But we were doing it primarily out of fear. I don't think we were doing it primarily out of arrogance. It was primarily out of fear that it could happen again and be even worse next time. That was a defining moment in American national security policy. It really played out for the next 10 to 20 years.

Really only Donald Trump changed that, because when he first ran for president in 2015, he told Republicans that they had supported these big wars overseas too much. It was a mistake. We needed to focus more on our own defence and get out of these long, protracted conflicts. It was sort of stunning that Donald Trump could take the Republican Party away from George W. Bush and people like that and turn the Republicans into more of a stay-at-home, focus-on-the-Western-Hemisphere party, because we had sort of overreacted to 9/11 and then maybe overreacted in the other direction 10 or 15 years later.

Keith 48:53

Here's a quote from your book. You said that the paradox of American power is that since 1945, the nation has developed and implemented the most successful grand strategy in the history of civilisation, even as it continued to struggle on the battlefield — meaning it lost a lot of wars that were pretty much inconsequential, but from a grand strategy level, it was relatively successful. Naturally, I have to ask, what were the lessons from the Iraq War that one should actually learn?

Michael O'Hanlon 49:27

It's sort of like Vietnam. The first lesson is try never to fight this kind of war again. We're not very good at it. When you're done with it, it seems less important than it seemed at the time. We could actually afford to lose these wars, which makes you wonder why we fight them in the first place. Why would we want to spend so many of our resources and lose so many American lives on conflicts that turn out to not be that important? So that's one lesson.

But another lesson is these wars tend to happen anyway, even if you decide you don't want to be part of them. And a third lesson is that actually showing resoluteness in places around the world helps us convince friends like Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Western Europe, and Middle East allies that we are a dependable partner. Because if we would fight for Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq, of course we would fight in defence of more important allies or more strategically important partners.

Obviously, Iraqis and Afghans and Vietnamese are very important and great people, but in terms of their significance for the global economy or for the United States, they are less crucial than Japan or Western Europe or South Korea, Australia, or Singapore. In a sense, we are signalling that we're very committed to stay engaged in the world, and that's an important message to send.

I still wish we had found a way to do it without these terrible, protracted, bloody conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — especially Vietnam and Iraq. Those are the two that I think are the most troublesome for most Americans.

Keith 51:14

Why did the US perhaps still continue to venture there? Was it because of this fear, as you pointed out?

Michael O'Hanlon 51:20

It's worth going back to study the Nixon presidency, because I think Richard Nixon was one of our most flawed presidents but also one of our most brilliant. He realised when he ran for president that we did not really need to win the Vietnam War. We could even afford to lose it. But he developed a whole strategy for losing the war without really admitting we had lost it.

He bombed in Cambodia and in Hanoi. He tried to have the Paris peace talks give a certain amount of cover to our withdrawal. Then he opened up the relationship with China. He was doing a lot of different things all at the same time. He did not want to admit that we had lost. He wanted it to look more complicated and to have other positive things happening at the same time.

I'm not supportive of his bombing of Cambodia or some of the other things he did, but the overall strategy was complex and fairly well thought through. He realised as an American president it was not going to work politically at home, and maybe not internationally, to just accept a defeat. You had to wrap it up in a broader strategy.

It took him four years to do that. By the time he finished, he had been impeached. A very complex American president. He will always be one of the most controversial and complex presidents in our history. But I think that shows just how much we wanted to make a change but also not do so quickly or in a way that was admitting defeat. We wanted to find a way to wrap it in a broader new strategy.

Keith 53:26

With the benefit of hindsight, what would your post-mortem of America's involvement in the Iraq War be?

Michael O'Hanlon 53:34

One thing about Iraq is we were not ready for that kind of fighting, because the US Army had decided it didn't want to be ready for that kind of counterinsurgency. Vietnam's lesson was: don't prepare for it and maybe you won't have to do it. That was the wrong lesson.

Luckily, in Iraq we had better commanders than we did in Vietnam, especially David Petraeus. We had a more humane way of fighting that focused more on protecting civilians. Ultimately, we found a way to limit our involvement. We were not quite as preoccupied with Iraq as we had been with Vietnam.

Iraq was still a very unfortunate experience, but it was not nearly as bad as Vietnam. We ultimately extricated ourselves with some hope that Iraq as a nation will move forward in a positive way, but with far fewer casualties and far less of a blow to our overall national esteem than Vietnam caused.

Keith 54:44

We sprinted through 250 years of American history and understood America's growth and development as a superpower all the way to the end of the Cold War. I wanted to ask you, if you look at someone like President Trump today and we take a historical lens, consulting the American history you've unpacked in your book, how should we understand and interpret President Trump's strategy in this new era?

Michael O'Hanlon 55:11

It's hard to make sense of President Trump in one final question. But what I would say is that he reminds me of a lot of our 19th-century presidents at the time of American expansionism. He doesn't really fit very well in the 21st century or even most of the 20th century.

He is not isolationist. He wants to be involved in everything. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. He is not like our 1920s and 1930s presidents — Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge — who were content to just focus on the United States. He is very global. He wants to have a hand in every part of the world. He also wants to expand the country's power and maybe even its territory, like many 19th-century presidents.

I am not a supporter of President Trump, but I do see echoes of his behaviour coming out of the 19th century.

Keith 56:18

The last question I have for you is slightly different from the one I ask every other guest. I'm going to ask you this: if you were in the room today with President Trump and you had 15 minutes with him and you could pitch him on how he should conduct foreign policy, what would your pitch sound like?

Michael O'Hanlon 56:38

I sort of like the way he's handling China overall. Maybe the tariffs aren't always perfect, but he wants to maintain a positive rapport with Xi Jinping at the same time that he's pushing back against certain Chinese policies. I like that.

I also like the fact that he's become a much clearer supporter of President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people. I would encourage him to go further and actually have policies that back up Ukraine, including new American aid packages for Ukraine and tougher economic punishment on Russia.

I would encourage him to keep trying to make peace in the Middle East and to challenge Israel and promote a two-state solution with the idea of a Palestinian state someday, and to do that with the kind of energy that he is capable of providing.

I would encourage him to stop picking fights with our European allies. I think that's weakening deterrence and stability in Europe. It was very scary last month when he seemed to want to take Greenland militarily. That was frankly ridiculous. That's the single most anxiety-provoking and concerning policy of his to me. I would ask him to discard that way of thinking.

Venezuela, Mexico — these are complicated issues. I don't want to get into them case by case right now. But I would say he's doing okay with China, he's doing better with Russia, but let's remember the importance of allies and friends. And definitely don't pick these fights inside NATO the way that he's been doing lately.

Keith 58:30

With those illuminating insights, Professor O'Hanlon, thank you so much for gracing the show. Always welcome to have you back again.

Michael O'Hanlon 58:38

I would enjoy that. Thank you very much.

Keith 58:42

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms.

George Yeo is a former Singaporean Cabinet Minister whose distinguished career in public service spanned twenty-three years. Between 1988 and 2011, he held several senior portfolios in the Singapore Government, most notably serving as the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2004 to 2011, as well as the Minister for Trade and Industry and the Minister for Information and the Arts.

After retiring from politics, he transitioned into the global business arena, where he served as the Chairman of Kerry Logistics Network for several years.

Today, he continues to contribute his expertise as a Senior Adviser to both the Kuok Group and Kerry Logistics.

Beyond his business interests, George Yeo is a prolific intellectual and a bridge-builder between civilizations. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a member of the Board of Trustees of Berggruen Institute.

His commitment to interreligious dialogue is reflected in his long-standing service to the Vatican, where he served a member of the Council for the Economy under Pope Francis.

A widely respected voice on geopolitics and Asian history, he recently authored the acclaimed three-part series, George Yeo: Musings.

He remains one of the most insightful commentators on the evolving relationship between the East and the West and the future of international cooperation in a multipolar world.

00:00 Trailer & Intro
01:13 Rome to Today: World Orders Explained
03:30 Why Global Stability Is Gone
05:45 The New Power Poles
08:00 AI and the Fragmented World
10:51 Making Decisions in Chaos
13:00 How to Learn Today
16:30 Why the West Sees Thucydides
19:00 Understanding Other Civilisations
22:00 How Trust Works
25:41 How To Understand China
28:00 Trump as an Agent of History
31:24 What Drove the MAGA Phenomenon
34:00 Can America Heal Itself?
39:23 The US Dollar's Uncertain Future
43:00 Gold, Bitcoin & Fiat Money
46:19 Gaza, Singapore & Staying Neutral
49:40 The Diplomat's Deal
51:51 Why Long-Term Thinking Wins
53:15 Taiwan: Will There Be War?
57:00 Cross-Strait Politics & What's Shifting
59:18 What Singapore Must Become
01:02:30 Singapore's Lesson
01:04:42 Balancing Global and Local
01:06:18 Lessons From Public Service
01:08:18 The Taoist View of Existence
01:09:02 One Piece of Advice

This is the 77th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 00:00:44

I had the privilege of speaking with George Yeo, Singapore's former foreign minister and one of the most astute geopolitical analysts of today. In this conversation, we unpack the coming global multipolarity and figure out how small states like Singapore can survive in this global disorder. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

You once alluded to the three-body problem as an accurate description of what the coming multipolar world will look like. I wanted to get your sense of why this specific analogy — and perhaps sketch out for us how we should feel when this coming multipolar world arrives.

George Yeo 00:01:26

If it's a unipolar world, like what it would have been for people living around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire, there is a certain stability and certainty about life. You conform, and if you're a Roman citizen, you get certain privileges. If you are difficult, you get smacked down, and life went on. Trade flourished. Of course, it can't last, because it leads to corruption and all the excesses of the Roman Empire.

If you are in a bipolar world, like during the Cold War, there was a certain stability maintained by a nuclear arch where each side could destroy the other completely. It was stable because each had a counter-strike capability. A whole theory developed around nuclear warfare which maintained an arc of stability during the period when both the US and the Soviet Union were equal military matches for each other.

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, for a brief moment we were back to a unipolar world, and a certain hubris infected American thinking. The neocons started nursing almost untreatable ambitions about US dominance in the world. It's very ahistorical, because the world doesn't stay still.

I remember Lee Kuan Yew saying, when the Berlin Wall fell, that the ice has cracked — meaning it's a glacier, and now the ice has cracked. That's just the beginning of further cracking, the development of which would be difficult to predict, but which follows a certain direction.

In a sense, we're seeing the world still cracking, and there's no going back to a unipolar world. However strong China becomes, it will not dominate in that way, and that's not how it sees itself. It's a subject I've talked about repeatedly — China is a universe unto itself. The rest of the world can disappear. It has really no wish to dominate the entire world, because that makes the whole job of internal governance infinitely more difficult. Governance is difficult enough with a homogeneous population. If their population were to become heterogeneous the way Western society has become, then all that Confucius and Mencius have bequeathed onto the Chinese people would become almost impossible to follow.

So we can't avoid the world becoming multipolar — with China as one big pole, the US remaining a very big pole, and Europe separating but becoming a pole unto itself.

Whether Europe can become a unified pole — this is the European experiment. We don't know. It's never existed before. Ever since the fall of Western Rome, many have tried to unify Europe.

But I often say, in an affectionate way, that the European peoples are tribal nations. They're passionate about being Portuguese, German, Bavarian, Dutch, or Croatian. And you say, "Well, come together." They've tried many times and always failed politically, but they are held together by a certain sense of all being inheritors of Greece and Rome, and most importantly, the Christian inheritance, which really unified Europe.

Now they've said religion should be set aside. Prince Charles talks about being not only the head of the Anglican Church but embracing all religions, which is a very humanistic thing to do. But it cuts into the very core of the European construction, which is a Christian basis giving it a civilisational quality, even though the constituent elements are tribal nations.

So Europe will be a kind of pole unto itself. After the Second World War, it was kept in place. But with Trump now, and with the Ukraine war not getting anywhere, there is a recognition that Europe must find its own future. Will it be a unified future? We don't know. But it's going to be a big drama in Europe.

Then in other parts of the world, you have India. India is too big to be anybody's sidekick. It's growing organically. It will become the world's second biggest economy later this century — I think that's a certainty, because of the size of its population, growing sometimes because of government, sometimes despite government. At the surface you'll find all kinds of excitement, but if you go down to the villages, to the countryside, to the smaller cities, they're all growing. Infrastructure is improving, people are getting more educated and connected. You can't hold them back.

So we now have a world with many poles — China, Europe, America, Russia, which will not be subjugated by anybody. People have tried in the past, to their grief. There's India, there's Brazil in South America, which represents a different vision from that of the north. Whether Brazil can become economically powerful, we don't know, but it certainly has a strong sense of itself. And then Africa — Africa doesn't belong to anybody. It belongs to Africans. It's three times the size of China, it's got over 50 countries, and they're all finding their way to the future with varying results.

It's going to be a messy world. So when I use the three-body metaphor, I'm saying that with just three bodies alone, the mathematics is impossible. With multiple poles like the period we're entering, there will be no stability. It'll be a kind of continuous movement — the ice continuing to crack — and people having to live with each other.

I don't think anybody can dominate everybody else. Some will try. There will be a lot of friction at the margins. Each pole will now develop its own character against the others. And even within each ice floe, technology — and now we have this AI revolution — is creating a lot of internal fissures. So there'll be further cracks.

We may find new collaborations, because the first stage is a breakdown of hierarchies into smaller and smaller pieces — fragmentation. But then the fragments are linking up in a kind of neural network configuration, made possible by the internet, by air travel, by drones, and so on.

So we're entering uncharted territory. No historian, no philosopher can anticipate it. It will be a world first empirically experienced and felt, and then philosophers and historians will rush to catch up and make sense of what's happening — and perhaps find a chance to give the evolution some direction.

This is what I meant when I said we're entering a kind of three-body, multi-body world.

Keith 00:10:53

You don't have the sense of certainty that existed in the past. Even at a micro level, the decisions you make — where to study, what kind of career to pursue, what kind of company to go to — it all seems harder than before.

George Yeo 00:11:07

Yes. I think it's a moment in history. It's like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey — marking the end of an old epoch and the beginning of a new one, where that monolith appears and the orchestra strikes up that famous strain. And it begins, first, with violence.

So what is this world we're entering? At one level, there are new freedoms. We're no longer tied to a particular configuration because of where and when we were born. We can travel. We are connected. Money flows. We need not be trapped in any particular jurisdiction.

So patriotism — old-fashioned patriotism — is weakening. It will still be important, but there'll be new tribal affiliations, new religious affiliations. All of us, like a node in a network, will be tied to multiple nodes, not just to the one above and the ones below.

It affects countries, companies, families, and individuals. So what do I do? Will AI replace me? Do I become obsolete? I no longer have to learn how to code because AI will do the coding. How do I add value? What does life mean in this world?

There's a lot of questioning, and it's important to question. Because if you don't question and you think you know — you are definitely wrong. But if you think you're not sure, if you're confused — that's a very good start, because it begins a process of searching, of asking the right questions.

Keith 00:13:08

You take AI, you ask any question, and it pops out abundant answers. We don't trust everything, so we check multiple AI sites. What's your approach to navigating that?

George Yeo 00:13:22

Let's put it this way. You can put a child in the British Library, surrounded by all the knowledge of the world. Will all that knowledge go into the child's mind by osmosis? No. The key is: how does the child decide which book to access? The ability to identify what is useless, what is obsolete, what is interesting — and then hunt it down and read it — that is something no AI can teach the child.

And maybe in the world we're entering, this is the kind of education we need for ourselves. It's not about getting more knowledge. There's already too much knowledge, too much information. It is about what should be subtracted from that haystack. Which drawer do I go for?

I find myself no longer trusting any media outlet. I don't read newspapers. I don't have a go-to source of information. Instead, I say, "Oh, this subject looks important — the Japanese election, Ishiba just had a big victory. What does it mean? Whose analysis do I read?"

I can try to read some Japanese sources, but I don't read Japanese, so that's difficult. The South China Morning Post is not bad for Northeast Asia. If I want a particular point of view, I may want to read Chinese sources or Western sources. And then I think back — what is Japan in its history, in relation to its neighbours, to China, to America? If I were Japanese, what would be my deep desires, which prompted them to vote strongly for the LDP and for a fairly right-wing set of objectives?

Then you begin to form a view of what's happening. It takes time. If I happen to have a Japanese friend, there's an opportunity to learn — but don't depend on just one friend. Know from which standpoint your friend is giving his views. Is he young or old? Right-wing or left-wing? Then meet another, and another. After a while, you form a view.

So the process of learning is very active. It requires you to access diverse sources, to meet people, and to be intensely curious — not judging them, but seeking to understand why they hold a certain point of view, why they have certain hopes and fears.

Keith 00:16:26

You've alluded in other lectures to the fact that the West is very fond of the concept of the Thucydides Trap, and the way they see great power relations today isn't necessarily the multipolar view. They have this view that the US will dominate its part of the world as a regional hegemon, and China will become a regional hegemon in this part of the world. The question I've struggled to grapple with is: why is this thought so persistent?

George Yeo 00:17:07

You cannot escape your own history, because your history is embedded not just in your conscious mind but in your subconscious and unconscious. When we wake up every day, we can't begin at zero to decide how we relate to one another or what we do. Every day is just a delta upon what we inherited from yesterday.

Every human being who exists has embedded in him all the memories of his past. So if you are a Western student, you learn your own history — Greece and Rome, Judeo-Christianity, the Peloponnesian War, Napoleon. It is natural that you should view the present and the future in the terms you grew up with.

For East Asia, the dynamics of the Peloponnesian War might have occurred during weak periods — like between the end of the Han and the beginning of the Sui dynasty. Right now I'm watching a series called Nirvana in Fire, which marks the transition between the end of the Tang and the establishment of the Song. During such periods, kingdoms view each other in a very suspicious, paranoid way, which may hearken back to the Peloponnesian War.

But these are only brief periods in Chinese history. The rest of it is just internal governance. Foreign relations mattered only in periods when the realm was weak, and then external forces opportunistically came in to take advantage. So it's a very different view.

In Indonesia, in Japan, in Vietnam, you can't understand your own history without reference back to China and the great cycles of Chinese history. But no such equivalence existed in the West. In the West, at every period of history, religion played a role — particularly Christianity. And it's very difficult for the Chinese people to understand this, how religion can play such a role in human society. So they go to St. Peter's, they take photographs, they try to remember the names of popes and saints, but they find it baffling.

There's nothing to be surprised by. Each views the world through the prism of his own past.

Keith 00:20:29

But if we are prisoners of our own history, how then does one understand each other?

George Yeo 00:20:36

It's important not to see your own experience as universal, and to accept the possibility that there are other ways of viewing that same reality.

I found it interesting that Xi Jinping, when he met foreign leaders recently, said that China is like a big elephant, and different people feel different parts. One should continue to assemble these different perspectives together to form a view of the real China — which is probably too big for any one person, including even Chinese leaders, to fully comprehend.

This exercise requires humility. It requires a recognition that there are many things you don't know and that you should try to find out. Hold back the temptation to judge, to close the loop and say, "No, it must be this or it must be that." Just suspend judgment. Understand the reality, understand the dynamics, and gradually crystallise in your own mind a model of what the reality is — accepting that at any one time the model is imperfect and probably needs newer versions to replace it.

If our Western friends can see that of China, and if China can see that of the West, then they say: "Oh, now I understand why you said those things. Now I understand why you did those things." And then maybe, because we have a better grasp of the dynamics — you know, if you know yourself and you know the other side — you can strike better deals. Because there are things which are important to you but not important to me. I offer them to you. And in return, there are things which are important to me but not important to you. You offer them to me. Then it's win-win.

That is the kind of world we should be entering. And it requires a greater humility from each side about itself, and a greater willingness to accept that there is an internal logic to the way the other side behaves.

When I was in India recently, I had a session organised by an old friend. An Indian industrialist said, "Oh, I don't trust the Chinese. They will cheat you."

I had the same thing in Hong Kong and China — said about India. I said, "How could it be that the Chinese cannot be trusted? If the Chinese cannot be trusted, how can there be a Chinese economy? If India cannot be trusted, how can there be an Indian economy?" But each has its own system of trust. And when you don't understand it, you jump to the conclusion that they're cheats. And therefore, there's no room for negotiation.

But if you say, "Oh no, trust for them operates in this way" — a contract, yes, is very important, but litigation is frowned upon because it already represents a rupture. The essence of a contract should be a relationship. Whereas in the British legal tradition, a contract once signed is sealed. However the world changes after that, you're bound by it — and suing is almost commonplace. Don't take it personally.

I remember once: my brother was a doctor in Boston. My father went there for a cataract operation and it did not go well, and he became partially blind as a result. My American brothers who had immigrated said, "No, we should sue." My brother from Singapore, who had recommended the doctor, said, "How can you sue him? He did it as a favour to us, and these things happen."

The other brother said, "No, that's nothing personal — they all have insurance. You're just a statistic, and when it turns the other way, they just sue and get their claim."

I, being the youngest, watched this conversation with some interest. I said, "Wow, this reflects the perspective of two different worlds."

Keith 00:25:44

If you want full access to the transcripts of every episode, just head over to ykeith.com and you'll get full free access to each transcript. Now, back to the show.

To understand a country as big as China, you need to touch the elephant. And you've intimated how the system of trust in China works. I thought it would be useful to get your sense of what are some of the things you feel strongly about regarding China today — things that you think more people should better understand, that perhaps remain underappreciated or understated.

George Yeo 00:26:18

Singapore is between and between. My mother came from China. She spoke no Mandarin, no English throughout her life. My conversation with her was in limited Teochew. She spoke some Malay in the marketplace and some Cantonese, but that was it. And somehow we were able to communicate. Looking back, I thought it was a very low level of communication — but she had the greatest influence on me, because there are things which are passed on not just by words. There are things which exist on other planes.

Two brothers died young, so the family converted to Catholicism. So I grew up in the Catholic tradition, and I take a deep interest in the Catholic Church and the history of the Church in Europe.

In a sense, I'm not unusual for Singapore. We live here, rooted in different civilisations, and therefore we sense how each views the other. We try to benefit from that — sometimes we can arbitrage, but sometimes we try to be peacemakers and say, "Look, the reason they are reacting this way is because of this, that, and the other."

In Europe, the greatest minds in European history have always wrestled with the idea of God and the afterlife. Even when they become kings and emperors, they seek the blessing of the Pope. All of Europe is reflected in the Vatican, in one way or another. During the seven years I worked for Pope Francis, I got to know the Vatican a little. I came to understand how intricate it is, and how in that microcosm all of Western civilisation finds its reflection.

In China, what is spiritual and religious is understood differently. The objective is not to gain entry into paradise. The objective is to bring paradise to the earth. So the greatest minds in China will not engage in science, mathematics, or engineering — they will engage in governance. In how human beings should relate to one another, as individuals and in families, in order that there will be peace and everybody can live a good life.

These are two very different intellectual and philosophical traditions. Both have their truths. Each can gain much by learning from the other — which may well be the next phase of human history.

Keith 00:29:47

In this configuration, there is this relatively new power — a new empire — which was the US. When thinking about the US, I remember you made this comment that Donald Trump is an agent of history, which I don't think is a mainstream view of how people see him. I'd like for you to help us understand what you mean by that — when you say that Donald Trump is actively fast-forwarding history.

George Yeo 00:30:13

The cracking of the ice is a phenomenon much larger than any human being or group of human beings. You can't stop the ice from cracking. But you can make it crack faster. You can make it crack in certain directions, by human agency.

In a sense, Trump is doing that. By his egregious behaviour towards the Europeans, he is deepening a fissure which was already there, turning it into a cleavage, and eventually there will be some separation. So even if there were no Trump, it would have happened. It might have taken another 10 or 20 years. But Trump is going around with sledgehammers, hitting the ice. In certain places he will achieve nothing. In other parts where fissures already exist, he may well accelerate the division. That's what I meant.

Keith 00:31:24

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Mr. George Yeo and his wife, Mrs. Jennifer Yeo, set up the Viva Foundation for Children with Cancer to eradicate the scourge of cancer for every child, regardless of their geography. They've moved the needle by funding paediatric cancer research, improving medical care, and enhancing education opportunities for these children. The best way you can help is to either volunteer or donate. You can go to ykeith.com/viva and see the opportunities I've personally created where you can find ways to contribute meaningfully. Alternatively, you can scan the QR code here to donate. Help us win the fight against cancer for children — and together we can make a better world. Thank you so much for considering these opportunities. Now, back to the show.

What drives this force that causes someone like Trump to emerge?

George Yeo 00:32:34

It is driven by the internal dynamics of American politics.

The US was created by Western civilisation. It was a daughter civilisation of Europe — stripped of all its trappings and restrictions, transplanted onto a new continent. It flourished. It's like you have an old bonsai, trapped in a pot, its roots cramped into one another. And suddenly you break the pot, you free up the roots, and you transplant it onto fertile land, with sunshine and water. It is the same tree, but now it grows — and it grew and grew to become the greatest power on earth.

Then the demographics changed. From the 1950s onwards, white Americans started taking liberties with themselves. You had the Vietnam War, the counter-culture movements. Because people were no longer prepared to work as hard, you brought in migrants. Those on Wall Street encouraged it, because that's how they made money — you outsource, you bring in cheap labour. And those among you who couldn't work as hard? It's okay, you buy them off.

Then the quality and nature of the society began to change. Values changed. The Vietnam War quickened this process. There was a kind of Reagan restoration, but things were already moving.

Increasingly, they felt a loss of confidence in themselves. Then you had the Obama phenomenon, which was remarkable. No one in Asia had believed that Obama — a Black man — could become president. But he did, for two terms. I had Republican friends who shed tears over how profound that was. But it led to disappointment, in the sense that this had not made their problems go away — it had made them worse.

So this dissatisfaction with what had happened in America created the MAGA phenomenon, and that created the phenomenon of Trump. Trump is the result of a deep current in American society. He reacted against many things which had gone on for a long time. It's a little reactionary, because it hopes to go back to the past. But I don't think it's possible to go back to the past. You have to find a new, creative solution to the problems you now have.

Those new ideas have not yet emerged in America. So right now, it's almost a contest as to whose version from the past should apply to the future.

It's the biggest drama in the world today — what's happening within America. And unlike China, which can tear up its constitution and still remain China, or France, which is now into its fifth republic, you tear up the American constitution and it's finished. I don't think it comes together again.

So even when you have to go to prison, even when you think the elections were rigged, you accept that these are the processes, these are the courts. You may think the judges are not fair, but this is how the system works.

But there are a lot of guns. And at some point, if people feel that you've bent things to breaking point — there could be violence. And we're beginning to see violence in American society. They have a tradition of handling guns responsibly. The great majority do. But is it a tinderbox? Will more sparks start a bigger fire? We don't know.

There are people, especially in Asia, who think that America is in terminal decline and are wishing for a speedier decline. I'm not sure that is wise, because if America is in terminal decline, there'll be mayhem for generations in the world.

Can it heal? If it heals, how long will it take? It will take more than ten years, because the decline took more than ten years. So we're entering a period of uncertainty with global ramifications — all of which is somehow reflected in one man who arose from that sense of unhappiness with the evolution of American society. He is an agent of change who has no real sense of history. He is a bully, acting impulsively — sometimes to the benefit of his people, sometimes not — but operating within what are still, possibly, the acceptable bounds of America.

So we're all watching with bated breath. And beyond Trump, it could be a JD Vance, it could be a Democrat — but no one can reverse the cracking of the ice.

Keith 00:39:23

If you think about the US today, one of its greatest strengths is that it is still the reserve currency of the world. In that situation where you see this ice cracking, what happens to the dollar's status? Would there be an alternative financial system that emerges, or will the US be able to maintain it, given its extensive military presence across the world?

George Yeo 00:39:51

There's a conventional wisdom that you need a financial system, that you need a reserve currency. But for most of human history, there was no reserve currency. If you entered China, China had a currency. If you entered a big polity like France, you had a currency. But if you were in the Hanseatic League or Venice, you went back to precious metals, which are not dependent on political power.

What is the essence of fiat currency? The essence of fiat currency is a contractual obligation to pay, and you fulfil that obligation with paper money, by law. Can that law be enforced? Behind fiat currency is, ultimately, the power of the state — and behind that, violence.

When Marco Polo went to China, he encountered paper currency, and was a revelation. The Venetians believed in gold ducats. Paper? But then they saw the chop — the seal of the great Khan on it. Because he can honour it. And if his treasury is short of resources, he can acquire them. So the paper is good.

It's like going to a casino — they give you a thousand-dollar plastic chip. For as long as the casino operates, the chip is good. One day the casino shuts down, and that chip is just plastic. But if it's gold, well, it's still gold.

So people ask me about Bitcoin. I say Bitcoin has no balance sheet backing it and no intrinsic value. For as long as the casino is operating, Bitcoin is okay. But if something happens to the casino, it's just plastic.

So you ask yourself — the Singapore dollar. We used to issue $10,000 notes until, under pressure from other countries, we stopped. But they're very convenient. It's like Marco Polo seeing the banknote from Kublai Khan. And I say, "Yes, Singapore has no violence, we are a peaceful and law-abiding people" — but people know that our currency is backed by reserves, backed by gold and hard currency. So it's good money.

China is preparing itself for financial crisis. It's been building up gold stocks, because if you have gold, people say, "Maybe I can trust the currency." Putin saw war coming and knew the rouble would be attacked. So he built up gold stocks. When the rouble was attacked after he moved into Ukraine, he opened a gold window and set a minimum price for the rouble. For a period, the rouble went higher, not lower.

So you come to the American dollar. There are rumours that Fort Knox is not overflowing with gold the way we used to think. We don't know. But Germany has asked for the gold it kept there to be returned. It's taken years, and only a small proportion has been returned.

The fact that the gold price has been soaring is because people worry that the US dollar may eventually lose its status. And if it does, there is a big problem — because the US cannot finance its deficit. Cannot. The debt servicing is already bigger than the defence budget, and it's diverging year by year.

Trump doesn't mind the US dollar getting cheaper, because it makes the US more competitive. But it means that if you don't work harder, who will finance your consumption? So then you print more money. And what happens? At some point people say, "You are just inflating" — and one day the currency be worth less, which accelerates the whole cycle.

There is no central bank, no corporation, no wealthy family which does not worry about the long-term future of the US dollar. I think it is of great concern to the powers that be in the US. When rumours swirled that the BRICS countries might create an alternative reserve currency, Trump's immediate reaction was visceral — 500% tariffs immediately. I thought: that is a neuralgic fear. There is fear.

We don't know how the US is going to square the circle. They thought they could cut down expenses, so they brought Elon Musk in and created DOGE. It was an abject failure, because every part of the budget is already accounted for and politically entangled.

Keith 00:46:17

That seems to be the biggest question coming out of the US right now, at least from my point of view. A lot of people are asking: can the primacy of the US dollar be eroded? And if it falls, what happens?

George Yeo 00:46:29

It depends on the US economy. It depends on the ability of Americans to work harder, save more, consume less, and take fewer liberties with themselves. And can you do that without immigration?

If you can do it without immigration, fine. If you do it with immigration, social stresses will increase. The Republicans will think that immigration is a way to pack the electoral rolls with people more naturally inclined towards the Democrats — though I'm not so sure about that, because sometimes when people are migrants, they come in and they don't want government to waste money, because it feels like their money.

The US is going through a very difficult period.

Keith 00:47:22

You've made this point about legitimacy being backed by violence. And today we are seeing actual violence in our times. I think in Singapore, for example, a lot of people pay great attention to what's happening in Gaza and Ukraine. Especially the Gaza situation — Singapore is in a delicate position. Our defence ties with the Israeli military have been well documented, and at the same time we have a significant Muslim Malay population within Singapore who feel a very strong kinship with what's happening. And not just Muslims — I think people from other races and religions also feel that what's happening in Gaza is very bloody, and it offends us.

So the question I have for you — you're someone who's been a diplomat, who's been in these spaces trying to broker peace. I want to ask: what is the endgame? How should one take a cold-blooded analysis of what's happening in Gaza, and how should we understand our response?

George Yeo 00:48:32

We can't change the world. We can't change Israel. We can't change Israel's relationship with its neighbours. Arab society is going through its own evolution, which we can only follow. It has some impact on us, in the matter of extreme Islamic beliefs. We have some control within the neighbourhood — limited. We just have to protect ourselves, and when the pieces move, we have to recalibrate dynamically and try to get into the safest position possible at all times. Sometimes we make mistakes — so we quickly adjust, pay the price, and adjust again. But be very alert, and be objective.

Keith 00:49:38

Can you elaborate on why we need to be objective?

George Yeo 00:49:43

I was watching the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, and how the Israeli athletes were booed. There is a very strong feeling in the world against what Israel has done in Gaza. Our position is very clear — a two-state solution, going back to UN resolutions. Our relationship with Israel is not premised upon agreeing to Israel's larger ambitions.

So at some point, if Israel says, "Look, either you support us or you don't" — all relationships are affected. We have to accept that possibility. The same with Taiwan. We train in Taiwan. This has always been the understanding. But at the same time, we have to understand what China's core interests are.

At one point, we were going to have an air detachment in Guam. I was very troubled by that. And I'm glad that we decided not to proceed with it, because it would have put us in the line of fire. No position is permanent. Maybe one day we can train in Guam. Maybe one day we can do this or that. We just have to constantly calculate in our own self-interest.

Keith 00:51:17

There's this paradox about politics, right? You have to be cold-blooded at the same time as being warm-hearted. You have to feel that you care for the people you serve and work for. I think you embodied that during your time in politics — trying to be dispassionate, but also deeply passionate about serving people. How do you balance that dichotomy of trying to be objective without being too cool and calculated?

George Yeo 00:51:53

It's sometimes said that diplomats are paid to lie for their country. I was never comfortable with that description. You can lie and gain advantage once. It's not likely you can do the same thing twice. Do it repeatedly, and no one trusts you — so you've given up a long-term position.

In my years in government, I always tried to establish long-term relationships, and then settle short-term problems within those long-term relationships. And since I'm coming back to you again, how can I be nasty to you or cheat you, because I'm going to meet you again and again? And equally for you.

So I think good foreign policy takes a longer-term view. This is the wisdom of Chinese statecraft — they take a very long view and set problems and issues within a longer-term perspective. So even when they have a big quarrel and they apply pressure, they always leave a ladder, because they want to go back to the long-term position.

Keith 00:53:14

If one were to use the Taiwan example you've alluded to — I read a lot of commentaries, and there's a lot of discourse about, for example, Xi Jinping having fired some of his most senior military generals. There's a lot of chatter, especially in Western media, around the idea that China is moving in on Taiwan. What's your view?

George Yeo 00:53:50

I read those reports with scepticism.

The main reason, in my analysis, is corruption in the PLA. They're recruiting very bright young officers because they have to be technologically advanced — in AI, quantum computing, aerospace. You can't have a bunch of senior leaders who are corrupt, and the corruption was very deep.

The problem is that in all countries, military procurement requires secrecy. You cannot subject it to the same scrutiny as civilian procurement. So there have to be internal checks and specialised groups — and that therefore creates more opportunities for special arrangements to be made.

It was quite clear, before Xi Jinping, that promotions were being bought. Think about it: from colonel to general, from one star to two stars, and so on. This went on for many years. People knew about it and played the game. It doesn't mean they weren't professional — they still were, otherwise they could not have developed hypersonics and aircraft carriers. But there was a lot of corruption which degraded the professionalism of the organisation.

So cleaning up the PLA takes time. It's layer upon layers. And even if you have a new group coming up, can you be sure they were not already tainted further down? It'll take time.

To me, that is the most plausible explanation for what's happening. But of course, in a hierarchical system — which is consistent throughout Chinese history — in the process of cleaning up, you also make sure that your political purposes are served.

Keith 00:55:51

Your view is that the structural trends between China and Taiwan suggest that war is unlikely to break out.

George Yeo 00:55:56

Whether or not there's war with Taiwan depends entirely on the US. If the US doesn't back Taiwan, the Taiwanese would quickly find ways to negotiate. Where the US gives Taiwanese people hope that it will back Taiwan independence — whether explicitly or implicitly — the politics of Taiwan are affected. People say, "There's a chance, so let's vote deep green." If there's no chance, they say, "No, that's a dead end" — and minds will change.

When Trump was interviewed by the New York Times after a certain operation, he was asked: what would he do about Taiwan? What is it to him? His answer was astonishing — essentially, that it was no different to Venezuela. One dark night, a special operation, a country folded.

And if you're China, you say, "Oh, that's interesting. Maybe I should plan for such an operation." And you lick your lips.

And if you're a Taiwanese — whether green, white, or blue — you say, "Okay, elections are coming. This is my view of cross-strait relations." It must affect the politics of Taiwan. It must affect the way young Taiwanese are thinking about their future.

The KMT under its new chairwoman — arrangements have been made for her to go to China to meet Xi Jinping. Her deputy has already gone and met with officials. At first, people said she was wrong to take a clear position on one China, because she would lose supporters. I'm not sure about that. Because in a period of instability, what you want is clarity. You may lose some support initially, but in the end you may gain more.

And one notices that this is also Xi Jinping's position — a formulation first articulated by Deng Xiaoping, used a number of times, and recently repeated by a senior Chinese official to the KMT during a meeting in Beijing.

So now, if the blue and white work together, they will win. But I don't believe the green will just sit back and do nothing. They will also adjust. So we're into a new dispensation.

Keith 00:59:14

I wanted to draw out all of these takes precisely because I think they help bring into clarity this idea of multiplicity — that things are going to be much murkier than we assumed before.

Going back to Singapore: in all your lectures, you've been consistent in showing us that the essence of Singapore is arbitrage. We become the place where — as you put it — we buy cheap and sell dear. I wanted to ask you, from your view of where this world is headed, what should Singaporeans be carrying in their minds in terms of how we should adjust?

George Yeo 01:00:05

If we are just traders — if Singapore is just a Change Alley where you buy and sell and make on the margin — that may be the essence of an economy, but it will not give us great satisfaction as a people. It's not all we are. There was once a dismissive comment made about the Japanese — that they were just transistor radio salesmen. It was a remark of contempt. Are we just a big Change Alley?

What we are philosophically, in terms of values, is much more than that. Arbitrage is the result of the fact that in this small place, the world is reflected, and we learn to live with one another. This is very important.

I may be a Buddhist. I may be Chinese, and Chinese New Year is coming. In the old days, there were firecrackers and the smell from the joss sticks. But you're Muslim, you're Hindu — you may complain a little bit, but not too much. You live with it, and you celebrate it too. You visit your Chinese friends, you go to their homes. You don't eat the pork, but you eat the other delicacies. And in doing this, we are embodying and expressing values which the world desperately needs at this point in time.

When I was in Delhi recently, talking about Panchsheel version 2.0 — the five principles adapted for the modern world, taking into account the environment, human rights, and other things — the world needs more of that.

You can be China, you can be Brazil, you can be Russia — each has its own nature, its own history, its own sense of itself. Not only accept that: something you can admire and celebrate.

When I was in Natuna recently — it's in the middle of nowhere, right in the South China Sea — I found the people preparing for Chinese New Year. I thought there must be a lot of Chinese there. There are some. I was talking to a local man who spoke Chinese. He said, "No, everybody celebrates Chinese New Year here. Everybody celebrates Christmas. Everybody celebrates Hari Raya." It's a small community of about 8,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, but with some Chinese and a smattering of Christians.

I thought: it's a little like Singapore. Next to the temple is a church, and further down is a mosque. I was woken up by the call to prayer — I'm not used to that. But if you live there, you adapt. I have friends in Indonesia who, during Ramadan, become vegetarian. They say, "We also join in the self-sacrifice."

People adapt. The world needs much more of this. In other words, Singapore is particular, but Singapore should also be universal — in our own unique way. We don't arrogate to ourselves that we are espousing global values. It's just that by who we are and how we treat one another, we express a hope for the future of a diverse world.

Keith 01:04:42

But there's a tension inside, right? Being global and local at the same time. I think you experienced that firsthand — the political cost of trying to embody that spirit, where sometimes in policy it doesn't translate perfectly and locals grumble. How should governance manage this tension between, as some scholars put it, the particular and the universal?

George Yeo 01:05:16

The tension never goes away. It's in the nature of society. The moment you have interaction, there's conflict.

I was listening to Father John Paul, a Franciscan friar, at mass yesterday. He said that when he was younger, he found many of his brothers irritating — they didn't like each other. As you grow older, you become more mellow and eventually become friends. There's always conflict. The moment you live together, there's conflict — within the family, between husband and wife, between parents and children. These conflicts have to be managed every day, not just occasionally. That's how we have society.

And sometimes hard decisions have to be taken — where it involves right and wrong. So too with society. There will always be troublemakers. There will always be moments when moral issues have to be decisively settled. And that's Singapore.

Keith 01:06:09

You are one of the most fondly remembered ministers, and many people view your 2011 exit as premature. I want to ask you: looking back at your time in governance — and even predating your time in politics — what are some of the big lessons you have learned?

George Yeo 01:06:36

I see it as a continuum in my own life — from school days to university, student politics, my time in the army and air force and SAFOS, having to deal with diverse groups both within the SAF and with other agencies in government, then helming different ministries, leaving government to join the private sector, working for the Holy Father for seven years, and then being involved with a number of universities and groups not only in Singapore but scattered around the world.

I don't see each stage as dramatically different from the others. In all of them, you are dealing with human beings. You have to respect them. You have to find ways to work together. You have to achieve common direction. Set goals and do your best.

Never take credit, because you are just part of a flow. Never be depressed by failure, because that too is part of the flow.

That's how I see my own time in politics. People say, "Oh, you did wonderful things with MICA." I say MICA was already being cooked years before I became minister. The idea for it came long before. The land was already reserved in the 1970s. There were many white papers about building the arts in Singapore. I was just there at a particular point in time. The ingredients came, I did some frying, and passed it on to somebody else. So take some credit, but not all — and always remember: if you take all the credit, you take all the blame.

Keith 01:08:13

That sounds very Taoist of you. I think that's where the Taoist strain of thinking emerges.

George Yeo 01:08:19

It's very deep in me. But it's not a choice — to me, it is the nature of existence.

The Taoist view is, I believe, a scientific view. It is not about values. It's the nature of the world. Everything is in cycles. Everything is in motion. And there are cycles within cycles.

Keith 01:08:47

One last question: you are in the business of advising many people, including young ones like myself. If there is one piece of advice you would want a young Singaporean today to take into this coming, more turbulent world, what would it be?

George Yeo 01:09:00

When I wrote Musings, I wrestled with whether I should dedicate it to my children — not to puff them up. So I dedicated it to them with a prayer that their lives should be a blessing to others.

You can be very clever, you can be wealthy, you can have high achievements. But in the end, for that brief moment when these atoms coalesce and become you — from birth to death — have you added or subtracted from the world? If you have subtracted from the world, then perhaps it is better that you did not exist. You are a net minus.

But if you have added to the world, you will die happy. If you have subtracted from the world, I think you will die miserable.

Keith 01:10:09

Wow. Those are powerful words, Mr. Yeo. Thank you for coming on.

Prof Wang 00:00:19

I've been asked to respond to all that has been said, but having written 300 pages already about my rather long life, I shall only tell two stories.

My first is that the book launching today is not volume three of my memoirs. Margaret had inspired me to write Home Is Not Here for our children. Tommy may remember this — when he launched that book, he pointed out that I was then 88 years old and the book only covered the first 19 years of my life. He did his sums and concluded that I had another four volumes to write. Everybody laughed.

My alumni friends then asked: if home is not here, where was it? You had not arrived in Singapore, and none of us appear in the book. How can you write about home when you had not even met Margaret?

So it was again Margaret who helped me answer the question. After we married, we had moved house six times — twice from Cambridge to London, twice in Singapore, and twice in Kuala Lumpur. Our seventh move was into the new house that she had helped to design and build in Paling Ja. Three years later, in 1968, when we were leaving that house to go to Canberra and I looked dejected, Margaret said, "Home is where we are." And she was right. Those words became the title of our book and completed our story of home.

My other story is about the title of my new book, No Borders. I was asked: what do you mean? There are borders everywhere — notably those created when departing empires produced new nations. The whole world has borders drawn largely by Western European powers.

But here is a paradox. That world order was dominated by a civilisation that claimed to represent universal values — a world with no borders. In any case, my journeys have nothing to do with being civilised or with trying to be cosmopolitan. My story is actually very simple.

I discovered that all borders were drawn for a purpose, and sometimes those borders are radically changed. But there are no borders between civilisations. And for me as a student of history, time also has no borders. Nothing remains unchanged between past and present.

I was ten years old when I first noticed borders in an atlas I was given. There were places marked in red within the borders of the British Empire. My town was in the middle of one of those red patches. Years later, when I returned from Nanjing, I found the empire was gone, and the Federation of Malaya was about to become a nation state. Nine Malay sultanates and two former colonies would now share a border. But there was an anomaly: the country's university, the University of Malaya, was outside the country, in the colony of Singapore.

When Malaya became Malaysia to include Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah, I worked hard to promote the new nation — but only saw its borders changed yet again when Singapore separated. At the same time, I had become a historian of China and learned that throughout its recorded history, every dynasty had different borders. For a while, even the United Nations could not agree where China's borders were.

I concluded that changing and crossing borders was normal. My own experience with universities confirmed that. I was a Chinese who only lived and studied in China when I was seventeen and eighteen years old. I then became a federal citizen of Malaya and later an Australian citizen so that I could continue my studies and pursue a scholarly career.

I was lucky. Each of the universities I worked in gave me the freedom to learn and teach, and my colleagues and students helped me adapt to different local conditions. Whether the universities were in China, Malaya, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, or Singapore, I saw no borders. That made it easier for me to make myself useful wherever I was.

In short, I could go on with my work to connect the past with the present, and look for links that would help me identify possibilities for the future. I could do that best by exploring our region between islands and continents. That exploration has guided my work and became the story of my life — the subject of this book.

Thank you all so much for coming to this launch.

Keith 00:06:44

It's my great privilege and pleasure to be here today. Let me first pay homage to Professor Wang. I had him on my podcast a while back, and that video did quite well — around 100,000 views — and I've had many listeners email me saying it rekindled their sense of wonder and interest in history.

Soon after, Pagitawi Jawan from Indonesia wrote to me saying they were thinking of flying down to Singapore to interview Professor Wang. They did, and I sat in on a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, enraptured throughout. I consider it a great act of service and love that you've continued to inspire so many younger generations here today. Professor Wang, I'd like to first express my thanks to you.

Professor Wang, I wanted to start with a question that bothered me a little — mainly because I think it reflected my own incompetence. You wrote this line in your book: "Amid the great turbulence, the historian could always see some semblance of structure." Many of us, when we see chaos and disorder in the world today, feel disoriented and confused. How do you see a sense of order in chaotic times?

Prof Wang 00:08:06

I have a very simple understanding of the human condition: all of us seek order because we cannot stand chaos. We can't stand the turbulence we so often meet. So we all work for order. And I am deeply impressed by the fact that people everywhere have worked so hard throughout history to achieve it — and yet, again and again, they have failed.

I've come to think that failure is probably inevitable, owing to our own lack of capacity to understand ourselves. That is why I think the past is so important. The past may not tell us everything, but being aware of it — and learning from it — can at least make the turbulence and chaos of the future more manageable, more liveable.

There are no simple answers to order because order has never lasted very long. Almost invariably, it fails because the vast majority of people can't quite cope, can't keep order, and can't sustain it for extended periods. The reasons are too complicated to go into here. But when you look across the sweep of history, it is remarkable how consistently people can turn success into failure.

All I can say, as a natural optimist, is: thank goodness that almost every time, after a period of failure, people succeed again in re-establishing a new kind of order — always hoping it will last longer and be better. And that is something one can hold on to: the hope that we may one day be capable enough, and wise enough, to sustain that vision longer and longer into the future.

But I'm not certain, because in my lifetime, while things were much slower when I was young, they've become much faster today. The speed at which things change now makes it almost impossible to keep up with what is happening each day. In the days when things moved more slowly, people had more time to think, to plan, and to adjust — and yet they still failed. So with the speed we are going, how can we as human beings build the capacity to cope? That is a puzzle to me.

I may be entirely wrong. We may have reached a stage where new technologies can help us overcome the disorder we so regularly face. But I'm not sure. All I can say is that I hope we have learned, and I hope we will continue to learn from the past.

Keith 00:12:02

Looking back at your life, you've witnessed revolutions, the birth of new nations, and the birth of new orders. I'd like to ask you to give us an object lesson — to really draw home the point of how one sees order in a time of chaos. Perhaps it might be useful to look back, from your early days as a young historian until now: what was the most turbulent period you lived through, and how did you make sense of it?

Prof Wang 00:12:34

There are so many stories one could tell, but let me give you two quite obvious examples that you may find relevant.

The first is the Treaty of Westphalia. From that point onwards, we began to develop the idea of borders and an attempt to bring about a new peace — to avoid wars that had arisen from thirty years of conflict in which millions were killed, with people of the same religion killing each other mercilessly. But after thirty years of killing, they decided they must find a way to prevent future bloodshed. They met, reached an agreement that there would be borders, that people would respect those borders, and would not cross them to attack or intervene elsewhere. And it lasted for quite a long while.

It eventually led to the creation of new nations — the idea of the nation state, each recognising the sovereignty of the other, recognising its borders, and recognising that its citizens had all the rights of a citizenry. That was a tremendous step forward. So there was one example where, after total misery and thirty years of killing, people conceived of a world that would minimise further killing — and they succeeded for quite a long while.

The second example is that the nation state idea, with the national empires that followed, didn't work in the end. Those national empires fought each other to a standstill in the First and Second World Wars and virtually destroyed themselves. All of Western Europe was subjected to absolute destruction of the worst kind. And yet again, at the end of it all, the human condition proved remarkable. With great optimism, they reconstructed a new world — the United Nations. As a young student, I was utterly amazed and full of admiration for the ideals set out for it: a world of innumerable nations, all equal, all sovereign, all independent, with the question of respecting borders absolute in the idea of sovereignty.

That raised great hopes. I think the efforts were genuine, highly idealistic, and the work of tremendous numbers of people trying to make it work. And it did work for a while. Despite all the problems — the rivalries, the ideological differences, the ambitions of those who wished to dominate — for about forty or fifty years, there was a kind of balance in which people respected each other enough to prevent the worst of wars.

And yet when the Cold War that enabled that balance came to an end, when it looked as if one superpower could now manage and enforce the rules of the United Nations and deliver a world of peace — it all went wrong. I cannot fully explain what went wrong; it is too complicated. But when people had that power and were expected to use it wisely, they failed. And when that happened, a series of events destroyed the illusion that one superpower could enforce the rules that make the United Nations truly successful — not just based on mutual deterrence, but on genuine principles. What we have seen over the last forty years is a steady decline from those ideals, and a slow erosion of faith in the very things that created that hope.

So what went wrong? I cannot explain it simply. But certainly the lesson of the past is that we should not be surprised. There is no such thing as a perfect order that will last forever. It fails again and again. And yet, at the back of it all, there remains that recurring fact of history: that after a period of failure, people learn enough to try and rebuild something better. So I still have that hope — being a natural optimist — that somewhere, some group of people will reconstruct a new vision of peace, drawing on the lessons of the past.

Keith 00:18:20

Thank you for sharing that. I had a chance to speak with Professor Tommy and Professor Kishore, and I think you join them in that remarkable conviction of being both UN lovers and eternal optimists — seeing the failures and the tragedies, and yet remaining committed to progress.

With that, I'd like to ask you a question about your work as a historian. You recounted in your book your first published article in the Journal of Sinology in 1957, where you made a comment about how Thucydides and Herodotus shaped the way history writing was done in the West. What struck me as a throwaway line was actually quite profound. I'd like to ask you: what did you mean by that? How did these two figures impact Western historiography? And then, how did China's own tradition shape its understanding of history? Where did the two schools of thought diverge?

Prof Wang 00:19:32

What truly impressed me was seeing how Asian historians had spent so much time thinking about their own experiences and drawing lessons from them for the future. Thucydides is a very good example — he drew entirely from his own experiences and tried to sum them up to provide ideas for a better world. Herodotus had a wider perspective, but the same fundamental idea was there: that the collective experience of all the peoples one could learn about, and all the lessons that could be drawn, could lead us to a better world. If we understand that world better, we will be better placed. All of them seemed to embody, for me, faith in the idea that we can learn from the past — and that we should try.

So historians were not simply people searching for truth. What they were really looking for were lessons to learn from the past. That is my reading of even the Greco-Roman tradition of history.

But you also ask about Chinese history, and there it is even more obvious. Look at how the Chinese wrote history. The greatest of them was Sima Qian, but before him there were earlier records. The emphasis of his great work was not about history as we understand it today. Although we translate his work as "histories," the word shi actually means records and documents. What he was really saying is: we now have a collection of records and documents about the past. They have been preserved. We must read through them, ensure they are genuine, authentic, correct, and accurate, and pick from them those that will help us understand what lessons we can learn.

His successor Ban Gu, who wrote the history of the Han dynasty — between the two of them, with Shiji and Hanshu, they set the pattern of a historical tradition that essentially says: we learn from the past and transmit it to the future, so that the same mistakes will not be repeated. The documents are there to prove what was done correctly and what was done badly, causing the decline and fall of a dynasty, and showing where bad rulers appeared.

Behind it all was a kind of moral — not an ordinary moral between individuals, but a model of governance. Governance itself carried a moral lesson, because it was founded on the idea that you govern because you care for the people. That is the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven chose you as a ruler because you were supposed to care for the people. If you did, the people would live happily, social harmony would prevail, and stability would follow. But because rulers make mistakes — because they are greedy, corrupt, or surrounded by ambitious men — all kinds of private interests come in the way of good governance, and it begins to decline.

This became a tradition whereby every dynasty would learn from the previous one by collecting and selecting records to illustrate where that dynasty did well and where it failed, and why it had ultimately been overthrown and replaced by a new dynasty with a new Mandate of Heaven. That mandate was determined by the fact that the people had rebelled and overthrown you — that told you that you had failed and the people no longer accepted you.

Every dynasty did this for the previous one. It became, in a sense, a new profession — sifting through documents to draw lessons from the past and teach them to the future. In the Tang dynasty, they actually established a history office precisely to collect documents even as the dynasty was unfolding, to preserve evidence of what constituted good governance and what did not. At the end of a dynasty, you collected it all and began again. Every dynasty did this, all the way down to the twentieth century.

In fact, even today, the Chinese face the problem of writing the history of the Qing dynasty, which has not been completed — because modern Chinese historians thought: we no longer need to do that. We are modern historians now. So they took modern history to begin in 1840 with the Opium War, which means Chinese history has no proper beginning or end, because anything before 1840 is treated as pre-modern, or even ancient. That completely distorted the Chinese rhythm of historical telling.

But what I find fascinating is that the present regime — after two revolutions and having tried so hard to learn from modern Western civilisation, both from liberal capitalism and from European socialism, both of which flow from the same Enlightenment period — has learned from the west, tried to absorb it, and yet found that it cannot copy either tradition and still remain Chinese. Something else, some other wisdom from its own past, was calling to them. I cannot summarise it for them because that is how they see it. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I try to understand it.

And they are doing it by referring to their own past — to learn what not to do, what not to fail at. If you look at Chinese historiographers today, they no longer speak of Marxist history, the model they had learnt from the west. Even though they are called the Communist Party of China, they no longer use the Marxist historical model. What they are asking instead is: what went wrong with the Cultural Revolution? What went wrong with the Republic of China after 1911? What went wrong with the Qing dynasty?

The irony is that if you look at the most popular books, television shows, and films being made in China today, they are great admirers of the eighteenth century — the century of peace, stability, and prosperity under three Qing emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, who together covered the whole of the eighteenth century. And they were not even Chinese. They were Manchu — conquerors of China. And yet it was under them that China became more prosperous than ever before, stable, free of major internal wars, with determined borders, and with the confidence that China had become great again. And yet it was precisely at that peak that things began to go wrong.

So again there are lessons. When the British arrived in the nineteenth century, they found the Chinese utterly incapable of dealing with a relatively small number of foreign ships arriving at their coast — simply because they had neglected the sea. What I want to emphasise is that the Chinese look back and say: yes, there was a great period long before we learned from the west. So what was it? What was there?

This led them back to their own history. And I am very struck by how often professional historians as well as policymakers refer to Chinese history for examples of both success and failure. The perfect example is corruption — which Xi Jinping uses as a tremendously powerful weapon to try and control the country today. And if you look across the whole of Chinese history, almost every dynasty points to corruption as one of the major reasons for its decline and fall.

What is extraordinary is how the people respond to that. They find it extremely easy to understand: we must root out corruption, at least minimise it enough to enable the country to survive and prosper. And the examples are there in every dynasty history — in the second half of each dynasty, corruption was invariably the central issue.

I don't think that is accidental. There is something to it: the system goes wrong when people become corrupt, and when leaders are incapable of, or unwilling to, stem it in time. And Xi Jinping is also learning from history — not only China's history but others' as well. I was struck when he came to power and said the first thing we must learn from is the Soviet Union. What did he mean? He asked: why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fail? If we had modelled ourselves on them, and they failed after eighty or ninety years, are we not in the same danger? And they identified corruption as one of the key causes.

So it is a coupling of a kind of Marxist understanding of the Soviet Communist Party's destruction with a reading of Chinese history — to say that saving the Chinese Communist Party is saving China, and to save China, one must learn from all the mistakes and all the lessons that history offers.

I find that quite extraordinary. And I think it comes quite naturally to the Chinese. It reflects a completely different understanding of history from the Western tradition — where history is the search for truth. That is entirely respectable, and I agree with it. But the fact is, there is another question: what do you learn from the past that will enable you to avoid at least some of the worst mistakes as you move into the future?

Keith 00:34:18

Thank you, Professor Wang, for indulging us. I had about fifteen questions prepared, but I've cut it down to three. I thought it would be useful to quickly open the floor for questions.

Ambassador Chan asks: if corruption is constantly the lesson drawn from dynasty to dynasty, do Chinese rulers or historians arrive at the idea that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Did they ever draw that lesson from history?

Prof Wang 00:34:48

That is a very good question. I probably cannot prove that the Chinese explicitly understood the idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they acted as if that were true. I don't think they ever spelled it out as a formula distilled from history — they were probably not certain it was always the case — but they acted as if it were.

What is telling is that instead of doing what the West did — establishing constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, to ensure rulers do not acquire too much or absolute power — the Chinese from the very beginning discarded the idea of the rule of law in that sense. Instead, they emphasised the rule of li — proper behaviour, a profound respect for relationships between people. From that, you develop a way of behaving that recognises what is correct, what is moral, what is good, and what demonstrates care for the people.

The Confucian idea of the good ruler is someone who obviously cares for the people and proves it, again and again. Whenever something goes wrong — a great famine, a foreign invasion, locusts destroying the crops — there is a tremendous response from the central government to show that it cares. The historical records document the moments when emperors responded immediately and officials did their duty to minimise damage and restore order, safety, and security to the people.

All of this was accepted — not through law, but through moral conduct. Law simplifies things by laying them down in explicit terms. The Chinese rejected that, and for good reason. There were legalists who advocated for the law and used very severe punishments to deter wrongdoing — but the Confucians rejected it, arguing that either you end up punishing the wrong people or you produce great injustice, because there is no way to guarantee that laws will be properly carried out unless the people administering them are themselves good. Morality, quality of character, and a genuine sense of right and wrong — that is what matters. If you fail to embody that, law is meaningless.

This is what Confucius wanted to emphasise. In a way, the Chinese were responding to the reality of the past — recognising, without quite articulating it as a formula, the truth that absolute power corrupts absolutely — and trying to prevent it through the ethics of the ruler and the moral demands of governance.

Keith 00:38:31

Professor Kishore asks: I'd like to pose a puzzle about Southeast Asia. This is one of the most diverse regions in the world — religiously, culturally, and linguistically — with large Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and other communities living side by side. And yet, paradoxically, Southeast Asia has been relatively peaceful compared to other regions that are arguably less diverse. In South Asia, for example, the differences between Pakistan and India, or Bangladesh and India, are not as vast as what we see across Southeast Asia, yet conflict has been frequent. In Europe, despite deep cultural familiarity between Russians and their European neighbours, we are witnessing one of the most brutal wars in recent history.

So the real question is: why has Southeast Asia, despite its immense diversity, avoided major wars among its member states, apart from isolated conflicts like Thailand and Cambodia? When you attend ASEAN meetings, there is a noticeable comfort level among leaders — they sit together and speak to one another with a certain ease. Where does that comfort come from? What are the historical roots of this relative peace and mutual accommodation among Southeast Asian societies?

Prof Wang 00:40:07

That is a very large question, but let me try to simplify it — at least for myself; it may not satisfy everyone.

I was struck by the fact that Southeast Asia was the furthest away from the Eurasian continent. It lay between two oceans, and long before we developed the ships that could traverse those oceans with ease, the sea was a dangerous place. No major navies were ever developed in the waters between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. So my starting point is this: Southeast Asia was furthest from the Eurasian continent — and the Eurasian continent was where the major struggles took place, where people fought over territory on land, where the mobility of horseback riders and their later equivalents could cross continents at great speed. If you had superior horses, you could dominate the world, and it happened again and again.

Even India — the south of India, entirely flanked by ocean — was relatively peaceful. What really went wrong for India came from the northwest frontier, from Central Asia. Where did all the enemies of India come from? Central Asia. Where did all the enemies of China come from? Central Asia. Even the Indo-Europeans who came to dominate Europe originated from Eurasia — they moved west instead of east, because it was too cold in the north. They moved in all the other three directions. But Southeast Asia was beyond their reach, because there was ocean.

So I think Southeast Asia was, from that point of view, very fortunate. And when new ideas did arrive, they could be accepted freely — there was nothing forced upon them. People could pick and choose. When they encountered Indian civilisation, it came at a time of peace. It was not the period of Turko-Mongol invasions or Persian conquests — those all came from the northwest frontier. The ocean was left to the Indians and the peoples of Southeast Asia, and they learned from one another without difficulty. Indian civilisation permeated Southeast Asia for a thousand years because it was peaceful, because it was something you could selectively absorb. Nobody forced it upon you.

As for China — Chinese civilisation was concentrated in the north, constantly threatened by northern invaders. They never concerned themselves with the south. Once they reached the coast, they stopped. Their problems were in the north. In fact, one of China's great achievements was learning to manage those northern invaders across so many dynasties. But in the end, that very success became a weakness — they never anticipated that they could be attacked by sea from the south. That was their final mistake. But they were right, for thousands of years, to focus on the north.

So what China offered Southeast Asia was different from what India offered. China offered trade, technology, and economic benefit. What is striking is that Chinese civilisation was so compact in its own way — defined by an extraordinarily complex linguistic and moral system — that it was very difficult to simply adopt it from the outside. The Chinese had no missionaries; they never set out to spread their civilisation. People either adopted it or they didn't. By the time Chinese civilisation reached the coast of Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia was already deeply Indianised, all the way to Vietnam. What Southeast Asia needed from China was not cultural transmission, but what China could provide practically — trade, economic relationships, and specific technologies that were new to them. It was a very happy relationship.

So the Indian influence brought aesthetic, musical, artistic, philosophical, and moral values to Southeast Asia, while the Chinese brought trade and technology. I am oversimplifying, of course, but the fundamental point stands: the distance from Eurasia was what made Southeast Asia a special place.

And even today we face the same reality. When people talk about the Indo-Pacific, they speak as if it were some new invention. On the contrary, the Indo-Pacific is the most ancient set of relationships between those two oceans, and the people who benefited most were those of Southeast Asia, lying between them. If the Indo-Pacific means anything and has a future, Southeast Asia has a good future.

Keith 00:46:48

What do you think your unique contribution as a historian is?

Prof Wang 00:46:55

When Tommy mentioned it, I hesitated — I still hesitate — to call myself a historian, because I don't do history the way professional historians do it today. They are guided by a scientific goal that I respect: the search for truth. I totally respect that. Except that my understanding of the past is that the past keeps changing. Every time a new document is found, history has to be rewritten. So history doesn't stay fixed for very long. You're constantly rewriting it whether you like it or not.

If that is the case, then professional historians are well positioned — they will always have work to do. And I've seen people rewrite history so often over just the last few decades, including the history of Singapore, that I think we have to be very careful about saying: this is the truth, this is history, this is fixed. In that sense, I'm not a historian. I'm not out to find the truth, because I know the truth will always elude me. Who knows whether by tomorrow a new document will appear from somewhere and show that things didn't happen the way we thought?

And then I ask myself: does that really matter? For those who search for truth, the scientific method is entirely respectable, and I respect it. But for myself, it doesn't help me understand the past if it keeps changing all the time. What is more important is that I remain aware it can change, that I hold my understanding provisionally, and ask: if this is how we understand the past for now, does it tell us anything? Does it teach us anything? How does it help us deal with the present and the future?

That is what has come to interest me. I don't know whether it sets me apart from others. I think many historians, whether or not they realise it, are doing something similar. And of course, you can also abuse the past — pick from it what you want to use to influence people to do what you want. That is another way of using history. I hope I don't do that. All I really want is to find out whether there are lessons worth learning, and what lessons can be drawn from what we know. If we don't know something, don't pretend that we do. Try to find connections and links between the past of one part of the world and another.

I am constantly struck by the fact that human beings in very different parts of the world very often behave in remarkably similar ways. They may not recognise it — all sorts of cultural and ideological factors keep them separate. But if you actually look at how human beings behave when they are ambitious, or greedy, or cruel, they do very similar things. And if you go far enough to trace what actually happened, the causes are very similar too. They are not all that different.

When you look at it that way, it gives us a better way of understanding what we are like as human beings. I don't think I am fundamentally different from other historians, but I have been consistently concerned that the search for truth should not be the only thing history is for. History should also be understood and used — as best we can — to help us think about the future and its possibilities.

Keith 01:00:43

So the lesson I take from that is: standardised examinations are a way to kill creativity and destroy a civilisation. I suppose that's the right lesson to draw.

Perhaps we have time for one last question. Professor Wu from the Penang Institute asks: we know that geography plays a crucial role in shaping history and politics. At the same time, we have to be careful not to overstate its influence or fall into geographic determinism. How should we think about the proper weight to give geography in our understanding of historical and political developments?

Prof Wang 01:01:27

I actually agree with the concern. I don't want to sound geographically deterministic at all. But I raise geography because it cannot be ignored — it is a vital part of historical understanding. History is not only about time; it is also about space. What space do you occupy? How do you use it? What do you make of it? How do you use that space to gain what you want — power, wealth, influence? So it's not just geography in itself, but the agency of the human groups involved — how they can make use of, or take advantage of, whatever geographical features they find, to maximise their strength.

A good example — and one I haven't mentioned enough — is the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean has nothing to do with the Eurasian heartland. It is just a small sea, almost entirely enclosed, with the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, a small opening to the Black Sea, and no direct access to the Red Sea. Geographically, you might expect it to be limited in historical significance. Yet the opposite happened: because of the intensity of relationships within that small sea, all the peoples involved were so close, so proximate to one another, that they had to engage with each other constantly — fighting, trading, exchanging ideas.

Unlike Southeast Asia, which was widely dispersed across vast oceans where people on one side of the Indian Ocean could barely interact with those on the other, the Mediterranean was compressed. From the days of the Cretan Empire, the Egyptians, the civilisations of the Tigris-Euphrates region, they were all participating in this shared space. The Persians against the Greeks — probably no accident that we still speak of Iran today as a major force in the world — the Greeks representing city-states and something like democracy, the Persians a more centralised imperial power. That war between Greeks and Persians was the best example of what the Mediterranean was doing to all its peoples.

The Greek colonies spread everywhere; the Romans built upon it; the various peoples of North Africa became more and more intensely connected with one another. They created a very distinct civilisation — not only through trade and military exchange, but through the exchange of philosophies, of religion, of visions of the future. Great philosophers and religious leaders emerged precisely from that crucible of conflict. They were improving themselves all the time through the intensity of their encounters.

And yet, out of that intensity, they found they could not remain contained within the Mediterranean alone. They had to find a way out. And they were blocked — the conquest of the North African coast by Islamic forces in the seventh century transformed the Mediterranean into a space divided between Christians and Muslims. The Crusades lasted nearly a thousand years. And the net result was that the Mediterranean was effectively cut off from the trade of India and China — the two wealthiest parts of the world — for those who were not Muslim. That intensified the crusading wars between Islam and Christendom, and eventually forced Europeans to look to the Atlantic, something they had never dared to do, because they believed the earth was flat and that venturing too far would mean falling off the edge.

The idea that the earth was round had to come first — and it is quite extraordinary how long that took. Eventually, people came to believe that if you went the other way, you could reach India. And that is what they set out to do. Nobody knew about the Americas. They were heading for India. The Spanish sailed west; the Portuguese went the other way, down the African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. Why did they do that? Because they could not reach India or China any other way. They were completely blocked — except for the brief window of the Pax Mongolica, which Marco Polo had described with such vivid stories, making Europeans want even more desperately to reach China and India, while being even more frustrated by the Muslims who blocked the overland routes.

So they went round. And when they arrived in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, what made the decisive difference was something they had perfected in the confined waters of the Mediterranean: how to fire a cannon from a ship without sinking it. All the navies of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea had never solved this problem. It was the Mediterranean peoples who perfected it, and the Portuguese who became the greatest cannon builders of their era. The first century of Portuguese victories in Asia was entirely about Portuguese cannons. They transformed the Indian Ocean. The same was true of the Pacific — once the Spanish arrived, they too brought galleons that could fire without sinking, and no Asian navy could cope.

What I also find fascinating is how the Portuguese became mercenaries, working for different kingdoms across Southeast Asia and Asia as experts in cannon building. Technology changes everything — once the technology shifts, everyone wants it. But none of them could match the Portuguese for a long time. It was only later, with the Dutch and the English, that superior naval power put the Portuguese aside.

Then the English and the Dutch created something altogether new — something that had nothing to do with cannons. It had to do with capitalism: the idea of a commercial empire, of building power through trade alone. You need ports, you need control, you need monopolies. You dominate the trade and you win. But it means fighting everyone for control of those ports. And from that comes the whole story of Western dominance thereafter. By the eighteenth century, the British Navy was the strongest in the world, and nobody could challenge it effectively for another hundred and fifty years.

Keith 01:10:42

From China to the Mediterranean, from the printing press to the cannon — it's no wonder the book is titled No Borders. Once again, thank you all for coming. May we give Professor Wang a round of applause.

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Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Ho Kwon Ping.

Ho Kwon Ping is one of Singapore's most iconic entrepreneurs.

He currently serves as the Executive Chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, the international spa and resort group he established in 1994.

Under his leadership, Banyan Tree grew from a single resort in Phuket into a global luxury brand operating in over 30 countries. He runs the business alongside his wife and co-founder, Claire Chiang.

Beyond the boardroom, Ho is known for his candid perspectives on Singaporean society, the changing global order and what he thinks Singapore needs to succeed in the coming years.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Introduction
01:37 - Singaporeans And Cultural Intelligence
07:07 - Singapore's Strength
14:10 - Maintaining A Cultural Core in a Globalized World
18:21 - Cultural Intelligence vs. Cultural Identity
19:52 - Redefining Luxury: Aspirational vs. Exclusive
26:30 - Status Obsession
30:03 - The Coming Civilizational Reset
39:43 - US and China As Civilizations
40:57 - Clashing Reference Points In Political Discourse
50:07 - Implications for Singapore in a Post-Western World
57:43 - Diversifying Knowledge: AI and Non-Western Civilizations
59:06 - Communitarian Capitalism
1:03:11 - Mindset Shifts for Thriving in a Messy World
1:12:36 - The Price of Sovereignty
1:13:27 - Avoiding Mediocrity
1:19:50 - Building World-Class Excellence
1:25:05 - Difference Between Leadership vs. Management
1:32:53 - Hope for Singapore 2056

This is the 75th episode of The Front Row Podcast.

One of the things I really enjoyed about reading your book was discovering the breadth of the Banyan Tree empire — over 100 hotels across the world, from Saudi Arabia to China, Vietnam, Japan, and most recently Singapore. I wanted to ask: what does being so global teach you about cultural intelligence that you think a Singaporean today might underappreciate?

KP 00:01:37

The biggest thing about cultural intelligence is a sense of humility and an openness to what you can learn from others. The reason why it's underappreciated in Singapore is that Singaporeans are generally very judgmental about other cultures because we've been brought up to believe that what we have is the best.

Much of it is true — we are very good in many ways. But it's insufficient to just look at what Singapore has achieved, because some of our success has been difficult due to our size, and some of it has actually been easier because of our size.

When I ask our general managers who the most difficult tourist is — and difficult is the word, not the most rude or violent, but difficult — they say without a doubt: Singaporeans. Because they're niao. You'd have guests who are violent or get drunk easily — the stereotype would be Russians and Brits. You'd have others who don't appreciate Western culture and essentially live communally, cooking their own food in hotel rooms — sometimes Arabs and Indians do that. These are stereotypes, but they have some truth. But what people say about Singaporeans is that they are really niao about little, little things. They won't let up.

Keith 00:03:37

Can you elaborate on what you mean by niao?

KP 00:03:40

Complaining about small things. Not demanding compensation, the way many English-speaking guests do — they're proficient in English, they know how to write complaint letters and threaten to sue. Singaporeans don't ask to be refunded. They're just very difficult to please. Always complaining, but not to the point of wanting a refund or thumping the table. Just always picking on little things.

To me, it probably reflects a lack of cultural intelligence. And that matters less for Singaporean tourists, but it's a real setback for a Singaporean trying to work as a businessperson or employee in a multinational or foreign setting.

Keith 00:04:47

There's a quote I think you said — that Singaporeans are hard workers but also world-class complainers.

KP 00:04:56

Yeah. There's a joke that whenever a Singapore delegation goes anywhere in ASEAN, at the social nights when everyone starts singing, Singaporeans don't know what to sing. They end up doing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" because that's the only thing they know. They're just not very comfortable in various milieus.

Keith 00:05:26

How does that hurt us?

KP 00:05:31

There are two types of hurt. One is what I'd call instrumental hurt — it prevents us from getting things done, whether as a nation or as individuals. The other is a deeper, more psychic one. It just doesn't allow us to enjoy things, to be more lighthearted, more appreciative of the world, rather than always looking for things to pick on.

It hurts us as people if we can't see the beauty of poorer cultures, or in meeting people who may not seem as bright or as accomplished as we are. And that's probably the root of it — if we cannot appreciate the outside world, we also cannot fully appreciate what we have inside, in Singapore, in our homes.

Keith 00:07:07

So let me ask the inverse question. Now that you've been out in the world and seen so much of it — what is it about Singapore that you've come to appreciate, that you find beauty in, that maybe other cultures don't have?

KP 00:07:24

I think there's a sense of pride that I appreciate. And maybe also because of our niao-ness, Singaporeans are very hard to intimidate, which is actually pretty cool.

You see what's happening geopolitically today — a lot of countries are bending over. Europe in particular has been grovelling. I hope Singapore will not grovel. Most Singaporeans wouldn't want to, because we've been brought up with the mentality of being this little red dot — nobody, but a tough little red dot. That sense of vulnerability, of being small, has made us quite spunky.

Another aspect I've spoken about before is what I'd call an egalitarian spirit. Not equality — there's very high income inequality in Singapore, just as there is in the United States. But egalitarianism is different. It's an attempt to reduce the social friction of apparent inequality.

Japan has a very egalitarian culture. Singapore had that too. The joke between myself and Hong Kong friends is this: in Hong Kong, if you could barely afford a Rolls Royce, you'd buy one just to show off. In Singapore, the super rich would drive a normal Mercedes because they didn't want to stand out, even though they could easily afford a Rolls Royce.

Now you're beginning to see people in Singapore flaunting their wealth. But that egalitarian spirit was something the PAP, as a founding generation, clearly cultivated. People forget today that the PAP was born as a democratic socialist party — it was a member of the Socialist International. It espoused a very egalitarian culture that has in some ways persisted, but is now eroding.

The first generation of Singaporeans — whether in business or politics — went through the hardships of colonialism and World War II. People who have lived through hardship generally take no pleasure in flaunting wealth. The achievement of wealth was about proving you could escape poverty, not about displaying it.

Now, wealth has become so easy for an entire generation. And it has perhaps worsened in Singapore because we've shifted from a manufacturing-based economy to a more financialised one. Financial services became the main source of economic growth after the global financial crisis, and with financialisation comes capital begetting capital — accumulated to obscene amounts.

The flaunting of wealth is so much easier when you're a private equity guy who made money quickly, compared to someone who built wealth through manufacturing. And you see it in the second generation — Indonesian rich kids driving Lamborghinis in Singapore, or Singaporean second-generation wealth flaunting it. It's beginning to fray.

Keith 00:14:10

It's very globalised, so naturally the cultural influences from other parts of the world are going to be more obvious. But that openness is what keeps the economy going. The question is: how do you filter out the parts that are harmful?

KP 00:14:28

Do we have a big enough core? It's unfortunate, because it's not just the wealth culture of private equity in the West. China has a very strong culture of hard work. But the people coming from China — the family offices, the money launderers, the crypto guys — they live lives and display inequality far more than even family offices in the West. Their displays of wealth are truly obscene.

So we get the worst, because we are so welcoming. And particularly, we welcome not because of agriculture or mining, but because of financial services. You get people with great amounts of capital coming here — whether money launderers from China or legitimate family offices or private equity firms. It's all about capital. And because of that, a certain culture develops — the pubs, the bars, the private clubs, and so on.

We should have a strong cultural core in the Singapore heartland. But we are very small. Compared to Dubai or Monaco, we luckily have a larger local population, because those are two examples of city-states going in directions I would hope we avoid. Their local populations are so small that they have very little cultural ballast of their own, and they become essentially hotels where the rich come to play.

Then you have societies of similar population size to Singapore — Denmark, Switzerland — but with far longer histories and a hinterland that gives them a deep sense of who they are. We inhabit a difficult in-between place.

Keith 00:17:12

And we're also a relatively young nation. Given that we're a multicultural and multiracial society in a very heterogeneous region, that makes it even harder to build a stronger core.

KP 00:17:33

For sure. It would have been much easier to build a strong core if we'd wanted to be like Hong Kong and just build up the Chineseness of Singapore. But that would have been a mistake.

So at a time when Singapore was so young, the leadership elite — not just the PAP, but religious leaders, business leaders — all agreed that we had to try to build a truly cohesive multicultural state, otherwise we would fall apart. And at the same time as you're trying to build that sense of identity, you're getting outside influences that are not always positive. It has not been easy.

Keith 00:18:21

How does a sense of cultural intelligence emerge out of all this?

KP 00:18:24

I think there's a difference between cultural intelligence and cultural identity. Identity is an internal recognition of who you are. Intelligence is something that manifests when you deal with people.

The cultural identity of Singaporeans is moving in the right direction — a greater sense of who we are, not defined by shallow things like cuisine or landmarks, but by a growing awareness of who you are through knowing who you are not. Singaporeans become more acutely aware that they are Singaporean when they travel overseas than when they're here. Here you're just floating like little guppies. But out in the big world, you suddenly realise you're a kopi, and when you see another kopi, you bond.

Cultural intelligence, however, is a different thing. It requires self-awareness about how to behave and think about other cultures. That one, I think, we're still lacking.

Keith 00:19:52

When you talk about the erosion of egalitarian culture in Singapore, you're also operating in the space of luxury — which I think is an interesting paradox. Most people think luxury means being ostentatious and showy. But you're offering a luxury service through your resorts. How do you think of luxury differently?

KP 00:20:24

Egalitarianism does not mean equality. And in the same way, I make a distinction between aspirational luxury and exclusive luxury. Aspirational luxury is, to me, a little bit like egalitarian luxury.

Take an Apple smartphone. It's more expensive than many alternatives, and you get young people queuing for the latest model. In a way, buying an Apple is a certain kind of luxury. But Apple is an aspirational luxury, and it's inclusive — its sense of luxury is not based on exclusiveness. People are happy that the Apple community keeps growing. When you have an Apple and I have an Apple, we talk about the features, the design, the apps — we aspire to be part of that community.

Then you have what I'd call total exclusive luxury — and the clearest example is a Hermès Birkin bag, selling for 30,000 euros. The bag looks like any other bag. Its inherent value is nowhere near that price. Its sole value is its exclusivity — "I have, you don't have." It builds entirely upon the haves and have-nots.

Apple doesn't ask you to brag that you have an iPhone and someone else only has a Huawei. You're happy to be part of a community built on shared appreciation. Some luxury brands are built on aspiration; some are built on pure exclusivity. We are very clearly in the aspirational camp.

When we first set up Banyan Tree, we clearly said we did not want it to be luxury. Even now, I wouldn't call it a luxury brand. It's quite expensive because building beautiful pool villas isn't cheap. But we've always wanted to be aspirational.

We loved reading the guestbooks in our early days, particularly in Bintan — couples from HDB flats who'd saved up because they thought Banyan Tree was so special. We're proud of that rather than being seen as only for the rich.

When we set up, people kept asking why we didn't use Hermès soaps or branded fragrances. We refused — we said that doesn't make sense. We're trying to build our own brand, not borrow other people's exclusive ones. Instead, my wife sourced locally, we created our own fragrances, used small ceramic jars instead of disposable bottles because it was better for the environment. Now others copy us, but we did those things out of conviction. We're quite expensive, but we've never said we're about luxury.

Keith 00:25:56

Most people falsely equate price with luxury.

KP 00:26:02

Exactly. I would equate price with quality, not luxury.

Keith 00:26:09

And that idea of aspirational versus exclusionary luxury makes me think about status obsession — the way exclusive luxury builds on in-group and out-group dynamics, where status is derived from others not having what you have.

KP 00:26:30

Exactly. But look at how Patek Philippe has positioned itself, with a slogan unchanged for decades: you never actually own the watch, you merely look after it for the next generation. It's about the idea that it's expensive, but not to show "I have and you don't." It's expensive because it's a legacy, an heirloom you pass on. The ads don't show beautiful women on yachts. You own a Patek Philippe not to show it off — you own it to pass it on to your children.

Compare that to a Cartier or Chanel watch worn purely to show off. Status obsession is very real and it is growing everywhere in the world.

Keith 00:27:59

Maybe in this time of status obsession, Singaporeans should think more aspirationally rather than getting caught up in all of this.

KP 00:28:08

They should just think more for themselves. Like buying Uniqlo because it has real value and you like the values of the company. They position themselves as lifewear, not fashion. It's not just cheap — the quality is good, there's technology and fabric innovation behind it, and there's a clear philosophy of producing things you wear every day that you can mix and match into good fashion. Every brand has to have its own values and stand for something, and customers resonate with that.

Keith 00:29:09

And zooming out, it's not just relevant to brands — it's true of every family, every company, every country. You need a philosophy and a value system you have clear conviction in, not just because it's politically convenient.

KP 00:29:27

Absolutely. And I find it very facile when people talk about "brand America," because what American values should stand for — the values of liberal democracy — is not just a brand. It's a set of civilisational values: values about family, about the individual, about governance and community.

Keith 00:30:03

When you talk about civilisational values, one of the ideas you've put forward is this coming civilisational reset. Can you elaborate on why you use that specific term?

KP 00:30:26

I was quite surprised, and quite happy, when I saw Donald Trump's National Strategy Paper using the word. I started talking about a civilisational reset about two years ago, when I began arguing that what's happening now isn't best captured by the terms political scientists prefer — the shift from a bipolar to a multipolar world. I objected to that framing because those terms belong to the Cold War period, when bipolarity and multipolarity were understood primarily in quasi-military, security-oriented terms.

In the Cold War, there was no real civilisational clash of values. The Soviet Union was not a civilisation — Russia may have been, but not the Soviet Union. It was already a failed state with no values to speak of, only military power.

What I observed, beginning with MAGA, was the culmination of a long process: the decline of Pax Americana. After roughly 100 years — from the end of World War II to now — American civilisational power has been dominant. But the bigger thing happening is that the entire Western civilisation has been dominant, which is the only thing the whole world has known for over 200 years. Western civilisation was the dominant civilisation and therefore the reference point for everything.

After World War II, that dominance was largely benign. It was very good for countries like Singapore and many others. But what it did, almost invisibly, was make the West the reference point for everything.

Now you're beginning to see, particularly with the rise of China and the rest of Asia, a civilisation of 5,000 years that has never been broken — not like Egyptian or Greek civilisation, but a continuous civilisation with its own wholly coherent set of values. Its own reference points on family values, on the rights and responsibilities of the individual, on political governance. It's not just Xi Jinping being an autocrat. China has had thousands of years of dynasties — wise emperors, unwise emperors, good dynasties, weak dynasties. The Communist Party, in my view, is essentially the current dynasty.

So what I see happening is a reset. And what I find very interesting is that Trump's own strategy paper refers to the exact same phenomenon, but from a completely different viewpoint — they call it civilisational erasure.

The same words, different meaning. Civilisational reset and civilisational erasure are two sides of the same coin. From their perspective: "We, Western civilisation, are no longer going to be the single dominant force because we are being erased — by Muslim immigrants, by China threatening Taiwan, by people who are no longer white or Christian." I'm saying exactly the same thing. White Christian civilisation is no longer going to be dominant. They see it as erasure. I see it as a reset — back to a few hundred years ago, when Western civilisation was an important one, but not the only dominant one. You had a very vibrant Islamic civilisation before it went into its own crisis. You had a very vibrant East Asian civilisation — Japan and China — with its own set of values, which then declined and is clearly rising again.

There are aspects of Western civilisation, beginning with the Age of Enlightenment — the secular state, industrialisation — that led to an extraordinarily positive confluence of events. It was not bad at all, and all of us thrived for quite a while. I would certainly hope that liberal democracy, which much of Western civilisation has created for all of us, does not go down the drain. But at the same time, liberal democracy is no longer the only reference point for good governance.

Twenty years ago, many people were writing that China was going to collapse, or that China would eventually become like us. Both arguments shared the same reference point: only liberal democracy can truly thrive. Either China becomes like us, or China collapses. But China has been essentially an autocratic dynasty — at its best, a benevolent autocratic dynasty — as we saw with the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties. No elections, and emperors like Xi Jinping. It's a governance system that has worked for China. And the Western world can no longer claim to be the only reference point against which we measure everything.

Keith 00:39:43

It reminds me of a quote from Wang Gungwu, who said that America and China are both civilisations dressing up as countries. On one level they are states, but at a deeper level, they have civilisational aspects that are not determined by borders or boundaries.

As you were articulating this shift in reference points, a question was forming in my mind: with now a multiplicity of views, don't you lose a sense of coherence? When the West-is-best mental model prevailed, there was a single ideal — rightly or wrongly. Now it's going to be a much more confusing world.

KP 00:40:42

That's why cultural intelligence is so much more important.

Keith 00:40:44

Where do you see the areas of conflict being played out between these civilisations — or however many there are?

KP 00:40:57

The conflicts arise from different reference points. Let me give you two examples: territorial ambitions and governance.

On territorial ambitions, Chinese historians have written quite interestingly about the difference in civilisational reference points. They observed that European civilisations — whether small Portugal, Norway's Vikings, the Romans from a small part of Italy — outgrew their ability to expand internally because they were in climatically hostile places with limited agricultural prospects and rapidly growing populations. A tiny Holland ended up controlling all of Indonesia. A tiny United Kingdom controlled the entire British Empire. And the United States expanded westward with Manifest Destiny, conquering Native Americans. So conquest as a means of expanding your people's reach is very much embedded in Western civilisation.

In contrast, Chinese historians argue that Chinese history is characterised by an enormous amount of internal conflict — warring states within a relatively fixed geographic area. Because of this, stability became the main governing principle for Chinese civilisational elites, whereas overseas expansion became the main governing principle for European elites.

That's why some Chinese historians say the West has misread China: when you see a powerful country, you immediately assume territorial expansion — because that's what powerful countries in your civilisational history have always done. But for China, the imperative is stability, not expansion.

On governance, Western society progressed through monarchies that maintained legitimacy through bloodline succession and clearly oppressed people. Out of that oppression emerged the primacy of individual rights — and eventually, one person, one vote, and elections as the prerequisite for legitimate governance. That is deeply embedded in Western thinking.

In Chinese thinking, there have never been elections in thousands of years. But embedded in Chinese history is the concept of legitimacy — the mandate of heaven. And embedded in Chinese history is the willingness of peasants to overthrow a dynasty that had simply failed, without any contortions about lineage or succession. In Western society, they go through extraordinary lengths to find the right nephew or cousin to be king. In China, a general can overthrow a failing emperor and start a new dynasty.

The Communist Party are good students of this history. They may not care about elections, but they read Chinese dynastic history closely and understand that political legitimacy is critical. If you lose it, suppression alone cannot save you. That's why there are all these anti-corruption campaigns — they recognise that the inability for internal self-renewal was what caused dynasties to fail. In the West, elections cause the self-revolution. In China, the party must generate it internally.

If these two great civilisations — Western civilisation as manifest by the USA and Western Europe, and East Asian civilisation as manifest primarily by China — cannot understand where each comes from, and how each civilisation's thinking is determined by its own historical experience, then I think you're going to have a genuine clash of civilisations.

Keith 00:49:24

It reminds me of a point a guest made earlier — that the Thucydides Trap is itself a Western frame. When political theorists from the West apply it, they assume it's universal.

KP 00:49:33

Exactly. Everything in Western civilisational thinking is assumed to be universal. That's what I meant about the West always being the reference point. They are beginning to recognise that many of their values are good values — but not necessarily universal.

Keith 00:50:07

What are the implications of all this for a small country like Singapore, which has for so long been so dependent on a Western-led world order? So much of our growth was underwritten by American FDI, American MNCs, Western cultural imports. How do we make sense of this transition? It's going to feel very messy and discombobulating.

KP 00:50:44

There are two levels at which we need to deal with this.

The first is the superstructural level — our government navigating the tensions between China and the US, not getting caught by either side. This Trump "Board for Peace" is childishly ridiculous, but it's a real test. If you say no, Trump targets you with 100% tariffs. If you say yes — which I would never advocate — no self-respecting sovereign country, other than Middle Eastern regimes totally dependent on him, would want to join that. So I think adroit diplomacy is what's required. And we need to be very careful, because things said innocently can offend other countries.

But there's a deeper level that requires a completely different civilisational mindset — a broader one. Let me give you an example. A Chinese researcher once argued that AI researchers in China would do no favour to the rise of AI in China if they simply chased Western benchmarks — making AI faster, more energy-efficient, and so on — because that would again just use Western reference points.

The argument this researcher made was that to the extent AI draws upon everything written on the internet, it will always be biased towards what dominates the internet. So even Chinese political scientists trained in the West, applying AI, will only draw on Western reference points. There's so much written on Western political philosophy — from John Stuart Mill onwards — while the Chinese political philosophers, from the Legalists to Mencius and beyond, are barely represented online.

So if AI is to draw upon civilisational knowledge, it's incumbent upon Chinese and Asian AI researchers to increase the access to non-Western civilisational knowledge. And this applies not just to political theory, but to science and medicine as well.

The relevance to Singapore is this: we have the potential ingredients for something remarkable, because we are multicultural. We come from several deep civilisations — Indian, Islamic, and Chinese — for which most younger Singaporeans have barely scratched the surface. Our educational system, our political systems, our economic linkages have all oriented us entirely towards Western civilisation. But we have the potential to go back and draw from our parent civilisations and extract far more value.

You could make the argument that tiny Singapore has, within itself, the basis for a very active AI community that is genuinely intercultural. AI researchers who want to work on India's wealth of knowledge — in literature, in Ayurveda, in Indian science — could do that from Singapore. Someone applying AI to traditional medicine could access knowledge from Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian civilisations all from one place.

Keith 00:57:43

If you enjoy this show, please check if you're subscribed — every subscriber helps us grow and serve you better. Now back to the show.

There is a need to essentially diversify the dataset, or the data points. Gita Wirjawan from Indonesia told me that Southeast Asia is about 14% of the global population but produces less than 9% of the world's text output. So if AI is simply taking the world as it is, going back to your point, it's going to be very Western.

KP 00:58:23

Yes, and it's not just about political thinking — though I don't think that's shallow, because political philosophy is the lens through which we look at everything. But take something very tangible, like medicine. Every old civilisation has had its traditional medicine. We've barely scratched the surface of applying AI to centuries of TCM or traditional medicine from these civilisations. Even getting the source data has been difficult, but it's all there.

Keith 00:59:06

You made a very good point that the lens of political thinking actually dictates how you conduct business and how you live. And one example you've given consistently is the idea of communitarian capitalism — which I'd describe as a synthesis of West and East. In the West, at least among certain elites, there's an almost unadulterated worship of capitalism itself, which has created disillusionment among many young people. Your view seems to be that capitalism should be moderated by a sense of egalitarianism and communitarianism.

KP 00:59:53

I'd push back even on the word "moderated," because that again takes Wall Street capitalism as the reference point.

Look, economics is a science. The laws of supply and demand, pricing, competition — those are tangible facts. China today is a totally capitalist system. Communism is really a political system, not an economic one, and it simply doesn't work economically. So the whole world is capitalist in the fundamental sense.

But it is part of Western, and particularly Anglo-Saxon, civilisational dominance — the rise of the UK and then America — that the so-called rules-based order was basically an anglophone world, with Germany and Japan having to conform. And when you clear your eyes of that dominance, you notice that capitalism already has multiple forms.

There's Nordic-style capitalism. There's Japanese-style capitalism, which people laughed at, but frankly, it hasn't been so bad for the Japanese people to have avoided the wrenching bankruptcies and the poverty that came with America's market-clearing mechanisms and creative destruction. Japan didn't go through that — and has it really been so bad?

You have the extreme law-of-the-jungle capitalism, and then you have the more muted communitarian capitalism. The mere fact that we take Wall Street capitalism as the reference point and say we need to "moderate" it — that's a reference point I reject. We should not see them as the norm and ourselves as the anomalies. They may actually be the anomaly.

Keith 01:02:55

I say "moderate" because I think Singapore has genuinely imbibed and imported a lot of Wall Street capitalism — that's the natural consequence of being so dependent on American multinationals.

KP 01:03:00

Yes, absolutely — because we have.

Keith 01:03:11

So the follow-up question is: if you look at the way we conduct business as companies and as individuals, what are the mindset shifts we need to make in order to thrive in this coming messy world?

KP 01:03:33

Let's talk about survival first and see where it takes us. Because I think you're right to pull it back to something practical — what will enable a normal Singaporean to prosper in the future?

To me, it's going to be largely economic. And I think where our government has gotten it right from the very beginning is that Singapore is no soft European state that sold its national defence needs to someone else for a peace dividend. We've spent a lot on our sovereignty.

And there's a wisdom in LKY's approach here — we refuse to ever be an ally. We're not an ally of any state. We don't have American bases. We facilitate the Americans having a presence, so we give them something — refuelling rights and so on — but even though Singapore is tiny, you could easily have imagined us becoming like the Philippines, which is a much larger country that is totally allied to America. A huge country like Australia has totally sold its soul to America.

Tiny Singapore has basically said: we will be a poisonous shrimp to everybody, to everybody. If Donald Trump wanted to threaten to invade Singapore, I think we would say bring it on. Of course you could invade us, but it's going to hurt you. You cannot go and kidnap Lawrence Wong from the Istana the way you did Maduro. We have no offensive needs, only defensive needs. We're so small, nobody really wants to invade us, but if you tried, it will hurt you — very much like the Swiss concept.

So I don't doubt for a minute that our sovereignty is at risk. The question most Singaporeans worry about is not civilisational values — it's how long this good life can go on. Being one of the wealthiest countries in the world on a per capita basis.

I think it can go on. But the question I think is important is: have we had sufficient discussion about the trade-offs that are going to be necessary?

Take the example of family offices. We went pretty extreme in one direction — welcoming them by the hordes, giving generous benefits, not being very scrutinising. Then some coming from China turned out to be money laundering. In Monaco or Dubai, which are solely dependent on this kind of capital, the government would have swept it under the carpet. Singapore made a big deal about clamping down. It has hurt us — a lot of wealth has not come here because Singapore is now seen as much tougher. But the government, I think rightly, took that decision. And if it hadn't, I would be concerned we'd be moving towards becoming a Dubai or Monaco — totally dependent on other people's money, essentially a tax haven and nothing else.

These trade-offs are going to happen all the time. Some areas where we've wanted to succeed, we haven't. Our intention to become an advanced manufacturing economy has not really succeeded. We haven't been able to go into AI and robotics the way the Chinese have. We haven't been able to turn A*STAR into the unicorn factory we hoped for. The National Research Foundation has spent a lot of money on research that hasn't been successfully commercialised — through no fault of anyone, but that's the reality.

So what do we pivot towards? One clear strength is our position as a financing hub. We don't have many indigenous startups, but Singapore has become one of the most important places for startups to come for funding — venture capital and PE firms have set up here, and startups from India to China come here for capital.

In aviation, we can't do manufacturing, but we're strong in MRO, potentially strong in avionics. Changi Airport may no longer be the clear premier airport in the world — Dubai is getting very strong — but are we still strong in aviation as a combined cluster? Leasing, repair and maintenance, sophisticated avionics manufacturing?

You have to build upon these clusters constantly. It's a daily exercise. As long as we can do that, I think we'll thrive. If we don't, we'll become a second-class, mediocre economic state.

Keith 01:12:36

On the price of sovereignty — I had a conversation with Tommy Koh recently, and he was saying that Lee Kuan Yew always positioned Singapore as a friend, not an ally, because a friend can tell you the truth and an ally can't. Being an ally to America means, to a large extent, subservience.

On mediocrity — you've spoken before about Singapore potentially becoming an A-minus or B-plus city, which is good by most standards, but perhaps not what we should be striving for. What would cause Singapore to become mediocre?

KP 01:13:27

Largely, it's people. And it's government. A government and its people that are no longer hungry.

We are obviously no longer hungry in a material way — we have everything materially. So hunger has to come from somewhere else. Hunger is either hunger in your stomach or hunger in your soul.

Societies that make the fastest economic climb are those with hunger in their stomachs, because that is such a powerful and imperative driver. But when you are a developed country, the question becomes: do you have hunger in your soul? Does the society have a vision and a goal for what it wants to be?

Look at old Europe today — so exhausted, so coddled. People have no national goals anymore. They just want their working week protected more and more, more work-life balance. I believe in those things too. But you also need a sense of who you are.

The Nordic countries seem to have maintained their social fabric far better than Western European countries like the UK, France, and Italy. That may be related to immigration, I don't know the full answer. But I think the converse of national ambition and vision is a fraying social fabric — because if the social fabric frays, it becomes impossible to have a common vision for the future.

That's probably why the government spends so much time talking about national identity and cohesion. Because if we start to fray, we will fray faster than other countries given the relative youth of our society. And once we fray, it becomes almost impossible to build a common vision. Then we become a capable, mediocre, relatively prosperous society — comfortable on our reserves, good education system, people will still come here. But you become mediocre.

You can sense that mediocrity when foreigners talk to Singaporeans and find them only interested in little material things, with no vision for what they want the country to be.

Keith 01:17:51

And in a world where the Singapore premium exists, the cost of mediocrity will be higher.

KP 01:17:59

Yes, and the Singapore advantage is reducing. Singaporeans were very much sought after by multinationals for leadership roles across Southeast Asia. Now you have very well-educated Indonesians, Thais, and Malaysians working in those same roles. Indian nationals, driven by the historical necessity of a less prosperous home economy, went off to multinationals and headed up many of them.

Singaporeans, not willing to travel, comfortable, always wanting to be at best the head of a multinational's APAC operations — well, with technology changing corporate hierarchies, many multinationals are no longer even basing APAC heads in Singapore. The opportunities for Singaporeans to become multinational leaders begin to shrink.

And interestingly, those with a strong Chinese background — like Singaporeans who've built familiarity with China — have a greater advantage than those who purely went through RI and ACS.

Keith 01:19:50

You're one of the few Singaporean outliers who has built a truly global hotel brand that stands alongside the Kempinski's, AHGs, and Mandarin Orientals of the world. You can speak to world-class excellence and to escaping the mediocrity trap.

For a young aspiring Singaporean today, looking at what you've built — what are the right lessons to draw? Can they make their mark on the world?

KP 01:20:44

One would be: always be hungry, always be ambitious. I'm 74. We have 100 hotels, and I think we've barely scratched the surface. We're doing a significant deal now in a part of the world a Singaporean company would normally never go to — when you find out about it, you'll understand what I mean.

So one principle is: be always very humble about how weak you are, and always be hungry for more. This mixture of ambitious humility is what has propelled me. Hubris, I've said many times, is the first source of collapse. When you think you're so great and you really aren't, you take on more than you should. Humility is critical to survival precisely because it keeps you aware of how vulnerable and frail you are.

And yet on the other hand, this ambition — to want to break out and be something meaningful. There's a constant tension between knowing how small you are and wanting to do more. That tension has been one of the reasons for our relative success. I am never content with where we are, but I always recognise we are far from what we want to be.

The other thing is recognising that because I operate in so many different cultural environments, the world is a very large and very different place — which is part of what makes experiential travel so exciting. But at the same time, people are all the same everywhere. You cannot judge them.

One thing I attribute to whatever relative success I've had is that I have always been an outsider. I grew up in Thailand — I'm definitely not Thai. I'm as familiar with American politics and literature as any American — I don't feel American. I don't feel I belong anywhere. I studied neither in Singapore nor in Thailand nor in America long enough to form that deep network of friends from school days.

But that outsider feeling is liberating. It frees you from being stuck in a particular mindset and allows you to look at everywhere you go and say: I can be successful here. So what I would tell a young Singaporean is: be humble, be hungry, and be completely open to every place you go. See the excitement and beauty of that place without bringing along your own baggage of superiority.

Keith 01:25:05

You don't come to where you've come by just being a boss — you needed to be a leader. You've spoken about the difference quite clearly. What do most people get wrong about leadership?

KP 01:25:28

I've always said there is a world of difference between leadership and good management, and most people assume the two are the same.

Management is a skill — the ability to coordinate minimal resources for maximum outcome. It's measurable. There are management tools, management education. All that is management.

Leadership, I think, is more transcendental. Leadership is the ability to motivate people to aspire beyond themselves.

With that definition, you can clearly associate transcendental, aspirational leadership with religious leaders, with great political leaders who exhort people to go beyond their little selfish selves to do public good. But there's this weird assumption that business leaders should not need to be aspirational. That business leaders just need to be good managers — make the most money for shareholders, give the highest salaries, produce the most competitive product.

That's all true, but insufficient. A great political leader like Lee Kuan Yew didn't just deliver efficiency. He gave Singapore a vision — from third world to first, from fear of being small to pride in being a tough little red dot. That's leadership.

So why is it so odd for business leaders to speak on things beyond their balance sheets? Why is it so odd for them to inspire their employees about the meaning of what they do?

I've spoken to companies across many industries and I've always said: you can always find something noble in the work of your business. Take hospitality. It seems glamorous from the outside, but on the inside it's tough — low pay, shift work, getting scolded by guests. So as a leader, what must I do?

First, create a culture and atmosphere so that even a lowly waiter wakes up in the morning and actually wants to go to work. Second, preserve self-respect — which is what we all want in life. We created a service culture around the idea of "I am with you" — you serve someone not out of servitude, but out of empathy. You try to understand where that person is coming from. If they're nasty to you, you try to understand why, and you don't lose your self-esteem.

Third, you must help your people feel that the company itself stands for something beyond giving them a salary. So we have values around sustainability, around community building, around the idea that tourism can be a force for peace — because when you bring people of different communities together and they understand each other more, that's a genuine contribution to peace.

With all of that, a young waiter at Banyan Tree may not religiously believe in the brand, but they do believe the company has a purpose. And if the company has a purpose, there is a purpose for them in it too. That's leadership.

Keith 01:31:29

Are there any leaders in your lifetime you've looked at and thought — that's a great leader?

KP 01:31:41

People who can build a vision and execute on it — to me those are leaders. Lee Kuan Yew was clearly one. In the world of business, Steve Jobs was clearly one. Leaders don't always have to be nice — many of them aren't — but there has to be a compelling vision.

And Elon Musk, before he went off the rails. He clearly is a genius, and in the beginning, probably also a good leader — inspiring people with his dreams for Tesla, SpaceX, and so many other things. But then, possibly because of Asperger's or other factors, he's gone off in his own direction and no longer really inspires in the same way.

Keith 01:32:53

I deeply admire Tharman Shanmugaratnam. I think he's an example of a great leader.

Last question. You wrote an essay about Singapore in 2045 — a science fiction piece about a futuristic Singapore — something about our first Malay Muslim Prime Minister and microchips, if I recall. I'll point it out to you later.

But looking forward — what's your hope for Singapore in the next 30 years? What do you think we can accomplish by 2056?

KP 01:33:45

I value the diversity we have in Singapore. We have ethnic and cultural diversity. But I'm not sure we have what I'd call intellectual diversity — and intellectual diversity has to come from greater political openness.

The government, including Tharman, has been very successful in building a relatively cohesive society, one where identity politics hasn't taken hold the way it has elsewhere. But I think, for reasons best known to themselves, the government has not been building as creative, as diverse, or as open a society as it could have.

You no longer get jailed for making statements the government disagrees with, but you still get ridiculed, you get put down. There is still, to me, not a real flowering of the Singapore creative spirit.

When that creative spirit is truly encouraged, there will be some rebellious aspects to it — but I think Singapore's electorate is mature enough to handle it. They've shown it, repeatedly re-electing the same government out of genuine sober confidence in how Singapore is governed, not out of lack of alternatives. Populist and demagogic political parties are shunned at the ballot box. So why can't we be more open? Why can't we be tolerant of truly diverse views?

The inner circle that determines Singapore's future is still very small. It could be opened up more.

Keith 01:36:58

So in 30 years, we want to be much more open.

KP 01:37:02

I would like to see a much stronger civil society. I thought we'd have one by now, and we don't. I'd like to see much more diversity of views.

A great man who recently passed, and was a good friend — Liu Thai Ker — was not always particularly revered because he was quite independent. He made a famous comment once, after which the whole debate was shut down. He said: let's have a discussion on what population size Singapore can sustain, and he put forward 10 million. That whole debate started, and then the government shut it down. No discussion today on that question. None of the think tanks will touch it, even though other countries discuss it openly.

Anything about the future that is not within the close scrutiny of what's acceptable — according to script — just isn't discussed. So how can you have genuine openness? We don't even debate the optimal population for Singapore. Liu Thai Ker brought it up and it was shut down. That's hardly radical.

Keith 01:38:52

It's a pity we don't have that kind of discourse. So the hope is that in the future, we have a more open space for discussing these core issues.

KP 01:39:05

I think Singaporeans are mature enough now. There are many other issues I think we'd all benefit from discussing more openly. It could be done under Chatham House rules. There's got to be greater trust between the governed and the governing — a sense of shared vision, of being brought into the conversation.

Right now we have a very competent, very capable government, but there is still a distance. The Singapore Conversation exists, but there's so much more that could be discussed.

Keith 01:39:51

With that, KP, thank you so much for coming on.

Mehran Gul is an author and researcher exploring the shifting geography of technological innovation and the rise of breakthrough companies beyond traditional Western hubs.

He is the author of The New Geography of Innovation, published by Simon & Schuster (U.S.) and William Collins (U.K.), which charts the emergence of dynamic tech ecosystems across Asia, Latin America, Africa, and beyond. The book originated from an essay that won the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for the best business book proposal by an author under 35. It has since been translated and published in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Russia.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro: The New Geography of Innovation
00:35 Why The West Used To Dominate
01:24 The Global Inflection Point in Tech
01:54 3 Lenses to Map Modern Innovation
04:46 Govtech Innovation in Singapore
06:05 Researching the Map: Lessons from 200 Interviews
07:39 3 Through-Lines of Singapore’s Success
09:37 Beyond the US-China Binary
12:51 The ResNet Case: Why US-China Synthesis is Ending
14:14 Debunking the Silicon Valley "Obituary"
16:58 Why Some Hubs Die and Others Survive
19:42 Talent Density vs. Relationship Density
21:41 The Geopolitics of Capital & Reserve Currencies
24:30 Can You Actually Replicate Silicon Valley?
27:07 The London Paradox: Why UK Startups Exit Early
31:20 Is Europe a Regulator or an Innovator?
34:10 The Hidden Strengths of European Universities
37:13 The Mittelstand: Germany’s Deep Tech Backbone
41:10 China: The "Precocious Student" of Innovation
43:47 Invention (USA) vs. Execution (China)
49:03 Watching India
51:44 Singapore as an ASEAN Launchpad
55:22 Solving the Exit Bottleneck in Singapore
57:23 Switzerland vs. Singapore: Two Small State Models
01:01:42 Why Innovation is a Biological System
01:07:05 Advice for Policymakers: Diversifying the Horizon
01:11:44 Advice for Graduates: Learning to Learn AI

This is the 74th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

My guest today is Mehran Gul, author of The New Geography of Innovation, a Financial Times best book of the year in 2025. This book is a groundbreaking exploration of the shifting landscape of technological innovation and how it has transformed into a global phenomenon, challenging the traditional dominance of Silicon Valley.

In today's conversation, we discuss why, despite China's growing technological dominance, America remains the world's most innovative country, why we should not discount Europe today, and what small states like Singapore can teach the world.

If you look at the old order of innovation — the old map of innovation, as one might put it — how did that look?

Mehran 00:00:48

If you go back about 25 years to the first internet boom, just about all the major technology companies that were globally relevant and that monetised that technology were almost entirely American. And it's not just the internet. If you look at one platform shift after another from the 1970s — whether it's desktops, mobile, social networking, or internet search engines — all of those technologies and all of their monetary value went primarily to one country.

But we do seem to be at something of an inflection point right now where that is changing. It's no longer an American technology-driven world. It's going to be much more diversified. We are most vividly seeing that in the case of China, where it is competing head-to-head with the US in a number of technologies. But my point is that it's not just China — you're seeing a lot of this activity happening in other places as well, in places like Sweden, Canada, and Singapore. That is worthy of our attention and focus.

Keith 00:01:59

Your book opens with a methodology where you use three complementary lenses to map out innovation geography: venture metrics, cumulative market cap, and the global innovation index. Can you walk us through why?

Mehran 00:02:12

When we talk about innovation, we primarily talk about fast-growing companies. But over the course of my research, I very soon understood that this is a very limited way of understanding innovation. Take Singapore, for instance — it's a country that has notably not produced much in the way of globally relevant technology companies. If you look at the neighbourhood, China has produced dozens, South Korea has produced many, but not a lot of technology companies have come from Singapore specifically. And yet at the same time, Singapore is richer than both China and South Korea. If you look at the World Intellectual Property Organisation's rankings, it is ranked as one of the ten most innovative countries in the world. It has more venture capital under management than the rest of the ASEAN region combined.

So you come across all of these examples that don't necessarily fit into our conventional understanding of what innovation is, which means we need to broaden our understanding of what we talk about when we talk about innovation.

I use three different lenses. The first is to look at high-value companies — fast-growing companies — the way a venture capitalist would. But this has an obvious limitation, primarily that in a world where Nvidia is now worth over $5 trillion — bigger than the entire economy of Japan or India — you cannot make the argument that innovation only happens in new companies. Older companies are also innovating, at times more than new companies. Samsung, for instance, sells more smartphones than Apple. One in four smartphones sold in the world is a Samsung.

So the second lens takes into account both new companies and old ones. When the world is looked at through this lens, it looks something like: the US is the head, then China, then Europe, then the rest of the world.

The first two approaches still have the drawback of making everything about financial valuations and high-growth companies. So the third lens is much more multifactorial — WIPO's global innovation index, which looks at everything from the number of STEM graduates coming out of universities to patent filings. That gives you a slightly unorthodox list, led by places like Switzerland and Sweden, and also including Singapore, South Korea, and others.

Keith 00:04:48

I really appreciate the inclusion of something non-financial — the global innovation index — mainly because as a Singaporean, I use the parking app here. Parking.sg is an app most of us who drive around would use. It's government-funded and government-produced. If this were in America, it might have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital.

Mehran 00:05:16

And that is why Singapore is such a compelling example that I included in the book. A lot of the focus in the Singapore chapter is not on startups or companies. I mention that when you look at GovTech — Singapore's government technical capability — that is as relevant to examine as companies like Grab. I hope that people in other governments can look at the example of GovTech, the agency that built both Singpass and Parking.sg, and say: we don't need to just compete over who has the most unicorns. We can also compete over who has the most innovative government.

Keith 00:06:05

I'd like to double-click further on your research process for mapping out this geography of innovation.

Mehran 00:06:12

I very quickly realised that the only way to do that is to go to those places myself and meet those people myself. If you rely overwhelmingly on secondhand accounts — if you read the usual things like Startup Genome reports — every country looks like it's doing really well, all rainbows and sunshine. But when I go there and really talk to the people, and that's why people are really at the centre of the book, I've tried to make sure I include as many perspectives as possible rather than just my own. I interviewed more than 200 people to write the book, and that's how I got the gut instinct about what's really happening out there.

I came to Singapore as well. I was invited by DGX — the Digital Government Exchange — which is the major event organised by GovTech to get other governments involved in discussing government innovation. So the short answer is: a lot of it had to do with travelling and talking to people.

The map is not a territory — it's not meant to be accurate down to the decimal, but it's supposed to give you a good sense of how a country feels and the different ways in which it's innovative.

For instance, coming back to the example of Singapore: if there are three through-lines in the Singapore story, the first would be immigration. I start with the example of the Croup, which is at this point the largest company Singapore has ever produced — bigger than the next three companies on the stock market combined — and it is primarily a story of Chinese immigrants starting this company. The amount of economic activity that can be attributed to immigrants is something that cannot be underestimated.

The second through-line is the role Singapore is increasingly playing in the ASEAN region. Singapore's wealth was initially built on it becoming an outpost for Western multinationals to expand into Asia. But now it's trying to attract Asian companies — like Grab, which was famously a Malaysian company that moved to Singapore — to serve almost the opposite function: attracting Asian companies to Singapore so they can conquer markets abroad.

The third through-line is government-led innovation, which is what we just talked about. I tried not to make every chapter about one person or one thing, but to have multiple angles of entry to figure out what a place is doing.

Keith 00:09:26

So you're looking at different countries across different metrics, and that gives you a sense of complexity that perhaps the headline narrative of US versus China misses. What are some of the nuances of innovation that you've discovered through this process?

Mehran 00:09:37

If we start with the US versus China narrative and then move on to the more global picture — the first thing about US versus China is that I mention in the book that perceptions about China have lagged reality by about five years. When I first started writing the book, people were still saying that China is primarily copycat innovation, that they don't come up with anything new. Just yesterday, I was watching an interview with Demis Hassabis, and he was still making the argument that China has shown it can be three weeks or six months behind on foundation models, but whether it is able to innovate at the frontier remains an open question.

I mention the example of ResNet in the book — a research paper authored in Beijing that, within a decade, has become the most cited research paper in artificial intelligence, the most cited paper in computer science, and is now the most cited paper in all of science ever. If that doesn't make us question whether we are systematically underestimating what's happening in China, it ought to give us pause.

The second thing I try to address in the book is why we need to expand our scope beyond the US-China binary. First, there is genuinely interesting stuff happening elsewhere. Spotify is the largest music streaming app in the world. DeepMind is one of the most important AI companies in the world. Samsung is one of the most diversified technology conglomerates in the world. But also, if we only ever talk about the US-China binary, that's what it's going to become — because perceptions really drive reality in the tech industry. That's one of the reasons OpenAI can almost achieve a trillion-dollar valuation even though it has only $13 billion in revenues.

We cannot afford for technology development to be about just two countries. If you look at the top ten American tech companies, they're now worth more than the entire GDP of every single country in the world except the US itself. If economic outcomes are already so skewed and going forward we only see technology development in two countries, what happens to Latin America? What happens to Africa? We're already living in a world where the largest company in Africa, Naspers, essentially does nothing in and of itself but simply owns a small stake in Tencent. That's why we need to look at countries other than just the US and China.

Keith 00:12:50

I like the ResNet example because ResNet was a research effort funded by an American MNC — Microsoft — but the paper itself was produced by four Chinese researchers who were born, bred, raised, and educated in China. So in a sense, it represented the best of an East-West synthesis, and that synthesis seems to be on the decline. Is it over?

Mehran 00:13:23

I'm not sure whether the East-West synthesis broadly is on the decline, or whether it's primarily the US-China element that's declining. If you look at Singapore, American tech companies are still present in full force — OpenAI opened an office there in 2024. The collaboration between the US and South Korea is still going very strong. The US often looks at India as an alternative to China, even though there have been some challenges in moving supply chains there.

So while the China story is definitely one of decoupling — Google closed its AI labs there, and there's a lot of pressure on Microsoft to close the MSR lab in China from which ResNet came — there's a bifurcation where on one hand relations with China are clearly tense, but the rest of Asia still seems to be working just fine with the US.

Keith 00:14:16

I wanted to quote you something from your book — an Atlantic article from 2022 that talked about the end of the Silicon Valley myth. The article says that the tech giants that have shaped our lives online and off over the course of the 21st century have at last hit a wall, now ruled by monopolies, marked by toxicity, and over-reliant on precarious labour. Where does this eternal doomerism about Silicon Valley spring from?

Mehran 00:14:59

I think when anything is doing really well, there are always predictions of when that's going to end. It's not just true about Silicon Valley specifically — it's also true about the US as well. I've been hearing about American declinism since the 1960s, just about as soon as the US won the Second World War. Within ten years, people were talking about whether the US is in decline. You always hear these things — with Vietnam, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were big predictions about the US being in decline.

Similarly with the Valley: just because it's doing really well, that creates a market for people making predictions about why it won't be important in the future. But at the same time, some of these predictions about other places have come true. Detroit is no longer the centre of the automotive industry. Japan is no longer the centre of the electronics industry. Germany is no longer the centre of the automotive industry either — a lot of that has moved to China.

People tend to assume that what's happening in the Valley is similar to what's happening in Detroit or Pittsburgh. But there's something about the Valley that makes it unique and different. You mentioned that Atlantic piece came out in 2022 — a very unfortunate time, given that 2022 is now the year we look at as when AI really started making an impact, and just about all the companies in the AI revolution, starting from OpenAI to Nvidia, are from the Bay Area. So 2022 is probably the most unfortunate time to be writing an obituary for the Valley.

Keith 00:17:03

You made a very interesting point, which is that hubs sometimes die and sometimes lose their advantage. It is not clear to me why Silicon Valley continues to have such a dominant advantage as the world's premier talent hub and network.

Mehran 00:17:19

There are many different reasons, which I mention in the book. The key one is the flexibility of the Valley. A lot of other hubs are built around a single technology or a single industry — Detroit was built around the car, and the Valley initially was built around the semiconductor industry. But the Valley has been able to move from one industry to the next with relative ease. Within about ten years, Japanese players were out-competing American companies in semiconductors. But instead of sticking closely to that initial technology, the Valley went from semiconductors to desktops, from desktops to smartphones, from smartphones to the internet, from internet to social networking, and now into everything from cars to the space industry.

One reason often mentioned for this flexibility — and this is just one reason I highlight in the book — is that if you go back to the 1970s, it was the East Coast that was the leader in technology in the US, and the West Coast was lagging behind. The East Coast had all these companies like Xerox and Raytheon. Within ten years, it was out-competed by the West.

Dr. AnnaLee Saxenian has worked on this, and her conclusion was that the fact that non-compete clauses were not enforced in California had a big role to play. In California, you could leave your company on a Friday and go work for a competitor on a Monday. Whereas on the East Coast, you had these long careers in the same company — thirty, forty years — and switching employers was really frowned upon.

On the one hand you had a talent hub on the East Coast. On the West Coast, you had more of a talent network where everything was much more connected, and that made all the difference. People often talk about talent density, but we may also need to talk about relationship density — and that was much deeper in a place like the Valley than on the East Coast.

Keith 00:19:44

Can you elaborate a little more about the difference between the talent hub of the East Coast and the talent network of the West Coast, and its relation to talent density?

Mehran 00:19:58

A lot of places in the world have international talent coming and working for them. But not everywhere have they been able to absorb that international talent in a way that makes people feel they're truly part of the environment.

In a place like the Valley, over half of residents speak a different language at home than they do at the workplace, which shows the volume of people coming in from abroad. And yet within maybe five or eight years, these people begin to consider themselves American.

In places like the Nordics, that's still very different. I was recently talking to somebody in the Nordic tech ecosystem, and they told me about a study showing it takes about five years for an immigrant to make friends with a local. The integration of international talent is much more limited. So you have a lot of immigration happening in the Nordic countries, but do those immigrants have relationships with the host community? That remains a big challenge, whereas the US has been able to overcome that problem.

I mention in the book a quote from Ronald Reagan: you can move to France, you can't become a Frenchman; you can move to Germany, you can't become a German; but you can move to America and become an American very smoothly. That has been one of the enduring advantages the US has — it doesn't just have that density of talent, it has the density of relationships that talent forms as well.

Keith 00:21:45

I wanted to ask a geopolitical question. A lot of critiques point out that America's primacy in innovation is contingent on the fact that America has huge access to capital, partly because it has the exorbitant privilege of being the world's reserve currency — able to borrow cheaply and access liquidity that other countries can't enjoy. So the question is: if there is a day where the world no longer uses the US dollar as its reserve currency, how would that affect or slow down the American innovation engine?

Mehran 00:22:32

In the book I really only look at the innovation engine in the US — what does company creation look like? Is there enough venture capital? Are large companies innovating? Are they producing enough smaller companies? I do mention in my conclusion that when you look purely at the innovation engine in the US, it still far exceeds any other place in the world in terms of producing high-value companies and fundamental breakthroughs.

Now, whether political factors might undermine that innovative capacity is a separate question. I also mention in the book that the US might be a victim of too much innovation rather than too little. In a world where just ten American tech companies are worth a third of the entire US stock market — and more than the entire GDP of every single country in the world — that is what has produced the skewed economic outcomes to which we are now seeing a populist backlash.

Whether political factors might kneecap the innovation engine in the US — that could happen. But for me, that is almost outside the scope of the book. I can't simultaneously talk about the dollar as a reserve currency, what's happening in the Republican party, and also devote the time and attention needed to explore why the Valley became the Valley in the first place. Evaluated solely on the merits of its innovation engine, it's still leading the world by a big margin.

Keith 00:24:14

The other question I had was also about Silicon Valley. There are many examples of countries trying to imitate Silicon Valley — trying to become the next Silicon Valley. What is it about Silicon Valley's enduring advantage that no one has really displaced?

Mehran 00:24:32

I try to stay away from two really bad answers that I often get to this question. The first is that centrally designed government efforts never succeed, and you always need something more organic that leverages pre-existing strengths. To a certain extent I agree with that, but I also mention the example of Shenzhen. Shenzhen was a centrally mandated city — the first experiment modern China had with capitalist ideology. The city was literally fenced off from the rest of the country in its initial years so that the experiment wouldn't infect sentiment elsewhere. And it ended up being perhaps one of the most monumental economic decisions made in modern China. Nobody would argue that Shenzhen has not been a massive success story, and that entirely had to do with a central government taking market-based principles and creating a laboratory for them in one of their own territories. In per capita terms, Shenzhen is now the richest city in China.

So I would caution against a blanket rejection of centrally planned innovation efforts, because Shenzhen is a very compelling counter-example. But at the same time, you can't just copy another model wholesale — there are more failures than successes in this area.

The biggest successes I've seen have been countries that came up with their own roadmap. Just because Silicon Valley had Stanford at the centre, surrounded by research institutions and then a lot of venture capital, didn't mean China did it the same way. In China, they first had large companies that monetised a big market, and then went back to build universities and research centres. They essentially inverted the pyramid — companies first, research later.

Keith 00:27:07

The big takeaway I have from your book is that there are many roads to innovation. One shouldn't be too enamoured with the Silicon Valley model, and should appreciate the different pathways through which countries can create value and drive innovation.

I'd like for you to talk a little more about the London paradox, where UK startups rank third globally and perhaps best in Europe — a bittersweet podium finish.

Mehran 00:27:58

A lot of what gets criticised in the UK is the fact that these companies get sold very early, and much of that has to do with not being able to raise late-stage capital. To use one very vivid example: if you look at a company like DeepMind, we talk about it in the same breath as OpenAI and Anthropic. It's absolutely in the top tier of AI efforts in the world. And yet it's different from its American and Chinese peers in one very important respect. OpenAI is now worth something like $700 billion. Anthropic is multiple hundreds of billions of dollars. DeepMind was sold for only about half a billion dollars ten years ago. It is not an independent company — it is a subsidiary of an American tech company.

People like Ian Hogarth, the head of the Foundation Models Task Force for the UK government, have very clearly said that it is hard to argue the UK would not be better off had DeepMind remained an independent company. And you see this in company after company — Dark Trace, a major cybersecurity company in the UK, was sold to Thoma Bravo. Company after company in the UK is either sold off to American partners very early or goes public in US capital markets rather than in London. ARM chose to go public in New York rather than London. Holding on to their most valuable companies has been a real challenge.

The other reason I'd mention is risk tolerance. The risk tolerance you find in Europe and the UK is often lower than in the US, and you see that very vividly in compensation for early employees. In the US, about 20% of an early-stage company is owned by its employee base. In a UK-based company, that figure is around 10%. And the way new companies are made is usually: you work for Facebook as an early employee, it goes public, it creates a lot of wealth for the employee base, and then those employees either start their own tech company or invest in other tech companies. Those repeat cycles of innovation are missing in the UK versus the US, quite simply because employees prefer higher salaries over more stock.

In the book I talk about the comparison between Skype and PayPal — how PayPal created company after company, but Skype did not have as virtuous an effect on its ecosystem. What happens when there's a liquidity event? Does that capital go back into reinvesting in more companies? Or does it get locked up in real estate? Simply being a financial hub doesn't mean the capital flows towards startups when investment decisions are made.

Keith 00:31:23

A few years ago, the EU Commission came out with landmark legislation on how it sought to regulate AI, and critics point out that most of the companies being regulated are actually American. It was seen as a sign that Europe is more of a regulator than an innovator. To what extent is that stereotype actually true?

Mehran 00:31:51

There are two interpretations. The first is the one you're alluding to: when you can't innovate, you regulate. But there's a second interpretation, which is that an overactive regulator very keen on fining American tech companies might just be trying to protect its market from a very active overseas tech industry — creating space for their own companies, in the way China did.

It's only now that you're beginning to see in Europe more genuine concern, especially given what's been happening this year. Over the past thirty years, there was just this assumption that if you have cultural similarity with other groups of people, if you share the same values, then it doesn't really matter if economic relations are very skewed. In my book, I quote a very senior European official who told me that the big eye-opener for them has been the realisation that it's not about values — it's about power. You cannot have the same comfortable assumptions in a world where, over very fundamental issues of geopolitics, they have frictions with a country like the US that for much of the past century has guaranteed their security.

People in Europe are wondering: can they really be sovereign in any meaningful way if for their entire technology stack they rely on one country? The natural corollary is that they either need to develop their own alternatives or diversify their tech stack away from the US. That is an ongoing discussion.

Keith 00:34:07

So what are the strengths of Europe that we should not underestimate? This is a conversation that people don't have very often.

Mehran 00:34:13

The very first one is that people often assume the US does better when it comes to higher education. But there's nuance to that. There's no peer to the US when it comes to the very top of the education pyramid — no other place has a density of places like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But on average, it is often noted that European universities do better than American universities. The US has very skewed outcomes in education quality: a handful of universities are the best in the world, but the average American university student's educational experience may not be at par with the average university student in Europe.

Europe doesn't have these superstar universities, but the median is much higher. I mention in the book the case of graphene, which was discovered at the University of Manchester — far beyond what would be considered a top-tier prestigious Western university — which shows that the UK's bench strength in top-tier research runs very deep. The quality of talent coming out of Europe on average is still often believed to be much better than that coming out of the American education system as a whole.

Europe also still has these older companies like BMW, Siemens, BASF, and Peugeot. At this point in time, they're not very keen on M&A activity with early-stage startups — the culture of working with new companies is a very weak one. But that's something a lot of governments are trying to change, getting these older companies to be customers for newer companies as well. That capital is available; the culture just needs to change for it to find its way to newer companies.

And Europe is still an aspirational place for international talent. It attracts a lot of people globally — the UK attracts more people per capita than even the US. So there are still quite a few cards that Europe has available to play.

Keith 00:36:47

You pointed out an interesting example of Germany, and that reminds me of a conversation I had with Professor Keyu Jin, who talks about China aspiring to be more like Germany than like the US. In Singapore, we also take inspiration from Germany as a deep tech hub. What is it about Germany that allows it to become a deep tech powerhouse?

Mehran 00:37:18

The role Germany plays in the tech industry is often a discreet one, and the reason for that is we tend to equate successful tech with big companies — the Facebooks and Amazons of the world. But in Germany, it's a very different model. They have these big companies like BMW, Siemens, and BASF, but the backbone of German industry is really these smaller family businesses — the Mittelstand — which are companies that employ around 500 to 1,000 people, never go public, and are passed from one generation to the next.

Within the Mittelstand you have examples of globally significant technology companies. I mention two notable examples in the book. The first is EOS, by far the world's most successful 3D printing company, whose CEO and founder Hans Langer is the only person in the world to have made a billion-dollar fortune in 3D printing. They are not just leaders in the older generation of 3D printed objects — in the space industry, they have over half of the entire market, with customers ranging from Blue Origin to SpaceX. Similarly, Herrenknecht, a tunnelling company, is a leading maker of tunnels, with projects ranging from the New York subway to the subway in Doha. They compete with Elon Musk's Boring Company, which is less talked about — the difference being that Herrenknecht has completed more than 3,600 major projects, while the Boring Company has completed only one in its seven years of existence.

Germany has a very deep bench strength in high-tech companies. They're just not very visible because they tend to be family businesses that always operate at a smaller scale, simply because they never go public and don't raise the external capital that could help them grow — and maybe that's one of the things structurally holding back the German tech industry.

As for what enables that culture in the first place: if you go back 100 years and I were to have this conversation about the top three technology powerhouses in the world, the list would be the US, the UK, and Germany. Of the industrial era, Germany was certainly one of the most significant technology powers in the world, and that has created a legacy of institutions — the Max Planck Institute, TU Munich — representing this long tradition of engineering excellence.

In my book I talk about how in the aerospace industry, some of the earliest pioneering attempts were made by German engineers. The first man-made object sent into space was sent by Germany. The earliest jet propulsion engines were made by Germans as well. Of course, Germany eventually ceded much of this preeminence to the US, simply by virtue of the fact that many German engineers from their space programme ended up moving there. But the universities they have, and the culture of manufacturing, have meant there is a very strong background in deep tech and deep engineering.

Keith 00:41:15

Western discourse often frames China as either a copycat or an existential threat. But you reframe that as the "precocious student." Help me understand why.

Mehran 00:41:26

When we talk about China versus the US, we very often think they're competing on similar terms. But when you look at the two case studies in detail, there are nuances that people tend to miss.

Some of the most notable examples of major breakthroughs in tech that have happened recently — whether it's large language models, transformers, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, or solar — the fundamental breakthroughs that enable these technologies are still coming primarily from the US. The invention side is still very heavily skewed towards the US. But where China runs away with the game is in deploying these technologies in industries and everyday life much faster than everyone else.

One way to put it: the US is really good at going from zero to one. China is really good at going from one to one hundred. Another way it's often described is that the US is really good at putting up ladders, and China is really good at climbing them.

There is an acknowledgement within China itself — Keyu Jin was telling me — that China's near-term innovation advantage is not that it will out-invent the US, but that it will out-execute the US. All the technologies I mentioned — EVs, autonomous driving, solar, robotics — none of these were really invented in China. But for all of them, the scale of adoption on the mainland is now greater than the rest of the world combined.

So the old China playbook was to take business models and technologies already doing well in the US and replicate them in China. The new China playbook is to find new technologies wherever they may have been invented around the world, and then put them into place faster than anyone else. That's where the idea of the precocious student comes from — there is an acknowledgement that the US is still leading, but when it comes to learning quickly and scaling rapidly, that is where China has an advantage.

Keith 00:43:52

So in a certain sense, the US values invention more, whereas China values execution velocity much more?

Mehran 00:44:04

I'm not sure it's a matter of what they value more. I'm sure China would love to have more fundamental breakthroughs as well. But that takes a long time, and there are some institutional changes that need to happen first. I had a very senior technology executive in China who spent a lot of time in both US and Chinese tech companies tell me that a lot of these shifts will have to be psychological — the Chinese education system still does not engender the cognitive flexibility, the questioning of doctrine, or the creative thinking that would allow consistent major breakthroughs. Whereas in the US, the immigration culture and the liberal nature of the university environment create the macro conditions for those innovations to happen.

So I'm sure China values invention just as much, but there are structural constraints which may take a generation or two to overcome.

Keith 00:45:15

And you made the point that America has the privilege of drawing from a population of eight billion people, whereas China effectively draws from one billion.

Mehran 00:45:28

Yes. And the interesting fact there is that less than 1% of China's population is foreign-born — and that's as true for places like Beijing and Shanghai. If you look at Toronto, a third of the people living there have immigrant backgrounds. Over half of the people living in a place like San Francisco speak a different language at home than at the workplace.

In proportional terms, North Korea gets more immigrants than China does. We tend to think China has a massive labour market because it has a billion people. But the US is drawing from over eight billion people, despite all the pushback against immigration that has happened in the past year. H-1B numbers are still going up, not down.

Keith 00:46:25

No country has suffered more from the H-1B caps than India. Seven out of ten H-1Bs are given to people of Indian origin. When they instituted the $100,000 cap last year, there were predictions this would lead to a massive decline in applicants from India. This year, application numbers have gone up by 10%, not down. That's a testament to the fact that the US, despite all that's happening there, is still a much more attractive option for many people than their home countries.

You earlier pointed out that there's some structural rigidity in the Chinese system — particularly in the way it executes education policy — and yet at the same time it's been rapid in adoption and deployment, which also requires openness and willingness to experiment with technology that isn't fully figured out yet. How does one square that circle?

Mehran 00:47:28

I think adoption at that scale requires less openness and more discipline. It requires deep case knowledge and engineering excellence, which China has. There's also an argument I hear that you cannot separate the manufacturing side from the invention side, because the two work hand in glove. You need to know how things are made in order to understand what's possible in practice. And that is what the US has lost over the past decade by outsourcing manufacturing to China — they've outsourced all the tacit process knowledge that goes into making things.

That's a valid point. But I'll believe in consistent Chinese breakthroughs on the invention side when I see them consistently — which is still not happening frequently, except in certain industries. In the EV industry, I would say China is much further ahead than any other country, which is an example of what you're talking about: you start with execution and then work your way backwards into becoming a world leader in bringing new ideas to the table. Whether the EV industry is an early signal of what other industries will look like — that's something we'll see in the coming years.

Keith 00:49:08

Where does India fit in all of this? I'm surprised India didn't feature more heavily in the book.

Mehran 00:49:14

The eight countries I've discussed are not a ranking of the most innovative — it's a mix of the three approaches I described at the beginning, and I've tried to discuss a mixture of places across each of them.

India is obviously a big market. But when we talk about the foundation models race, for instance, I see a lot of contributions coming from the US and from China, not so much from India just yet. There were certain pockets — the space industry there is doing really well — but I didn't see anything happening on a much broader scale that would make me say this is a country that really needs to be right up there alongside the US and China in this book. There's a lot happening there, a lot of high-value companies monetising their domestic market. But I tended to prioritise countries that either gave me a new model for innovation — like Singapore — or that were producing major breakthroughs, or outperforming in specific areas like China's execution.

Part of me also wonders about the Gulf countries, like Qatar and the UAE, which have been spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure. There's a lot happening in France right now. Vietnam is producing its own EVs and recently had an acquisition from Nvidia. In the end, the ones I prioritised were places that had something genuinely distinctive going on and that spoke to the three lenses I described in the introduction.

Keith 00:51:49

You previously alluded to the example of Singapore. As a young Singaporean myself, I'd love to hear more about what surprises you found, and maybe some of the things that I, as a fish in water, might take for granted about Singapore's innovation ecosystem.

Mehran 00:52:02

The inversion happening in Singapore really struck me — the shift from being the outpost for Western companies trying to go into Asia, to now fishing for interesting companies in the wider ASEAN region. Singapore wants more companies like Grab to come and be based there, to serve the wider ASEAN market. This is the hub for companies that can do that.

It's a model I'm seeing replicated. I've just come from Dubai, and they're now thinking about their role in very similar terms to the way Singapore relates to ASEAN. Dubai is trying to become the hub for the rest of the Middle East — stable government, predictable rules, zero tolerance for corruption — and then serve the wider regional market.

What makes that meaningful is the contrast with Europe, which is still a very fragmented market. No one country has been able to become the hub for pan-European companies in the way that Singapore is the natural hub for companies that want to monetise Indonesia, Malaysia, and the wider region. That might seem like it's not saying much, but it actually is.

Another thing that was quite striking was the extent to which the Singaporean government is willing to step up and fund early-stage companies. The biggest hurdle for most entrepreneurs is getting that first $100,000 to $500,000 to get a company going. My impression in Singapore was that as long as you're associated with a major university, it's not that hard to get that seed capital. That's not something that's available in most other places.

Similarly, the extent to which the Singaporean government supports people who gain admission to top-tier American or UK universities — offering scholarships and that kind of support — is again not a facility that's available to people in other countries.

Keith 00:54:37

You're right in saying that. Recently in our economic strategy review, one of the key thrusts was that Singapore was not going to be just a landing pad but a launch pad — where startups looking to internationalise in the region can come to Singapore and start building their companies even in the very early days.

The obvious follow-up question is: what are some of the bottlenecks that you've seen in Singapore's innovation ecosystem?

Mehran 00:55:20

The big one is pathways to liquidity events — exit opportunities. That's a structural challenge and it's hard to see how you overcome it without addressing the elephant in the room, which is China.

There are few domestic exit opportunities because Singapore doesn't have the pre-existing large platform companies that exist in most other places. How do exits happen in places like the US? Either a bigger company buys you, or you go public. That first option is simply not available to most companies in Singapore. Which is why some of the largest acquisitions of Singaporean companies that have happened recently have gone to Chinese buyers — and that has become controversial, both in terms of Chinese companies setting up shop in Singapore and acquiring Singaporean companies.

So if that major source of M&A is excluded, the big question becomes: even if you do have high-value companies, where do they go? Can you go public in Singapore? The public markets there don't yet have enough capital to achieve the valuations that companies like Grab have achieved — and remember, Grab went public via SPAC in New York, not in Singapore. And if you don't have your own big tech companies that can acquire you, are American and European companies willing to step in? If not, is it desirable or acceptable for Chinese companies to fill that void? It's a very contentious topic and has become very geopolitical. So I'll leave it as a question rather than a statement.

Keith 00:57:13

In a certain sense, we mirror London's dilemma — a lot of UK-based startups get acquired by their American counterparts, and in Singapore, a lot of our startups get acquired by Chinese companies. It's a common dilemma we both need to resolve.

I wanted to ask about another country Singaporeans look up to: Switzerland. Most people think of Switzerland as a country of skiing, cheese, and pleasant weather. What can the world — or maybe even Singapore — learn from Switzerland?

Mehran 00:57:50

It's interesting that you draw the comparison between Singapore and Switzerland, because in one way they're comparable, and in another they're almost exactly the opposite of each other.

The state plays an expansive role in Singapore — very centralised, very much led from the top, to the extent that people sometimes raise privacy concerns. Switzerland is exactly the opposite: a very decentralised country, with power completely devolved. In Singapore, there's one individual whose shadow is much longer than any other person in the country's history. In Switzerland, it's a committee of nine people that runs the country, and you don't really have these single iconic figures associated with its political structure.

I compare the two countries in the book through the lens of contact tracing during COVID. The Swiss system was completely decentralised and anonymised — those databases could not be used for any reason other than COVID contact tracing. In Singapore, it was a very centralised system, and the databases were subsequently used for other investigations as well.

Two small, highly successful countries approaching the same problems in completely different ways — that comparison is genuinely valuable.

What can Singapore learn from Switzerland? Switzerland has played an outsized but often discreet role in technology on the international stage. If you look at the big technology revolutions of the past thirty years, the worldwide web would absolutely be among the biggest. The fact that the world's first website was not a .com or a .gov but a .ch domain tells you everything about the outsized role this country often plays in the tech industry.

Switzerland's deep tech credentials are pretty extensive. Its universities — ETH Zurich, for instance — have alumni that include Einstein and John von Neumann. So Switzerland has a longer tradition of both higher education and deep technology that Singapore, which does have an appreciation for those things, can perhaps learn something from.

Keith 01:01:14

The reason many of us have such admiration for Switzerland is that it's a multicultural, multi-racial society that has lasted over 700 years. It has built world-class institutions — not just companies, but also nonprofits. One thinks of the Red Cross. For a country to survive for 700 years, that's something we as a young nation take real inspiration from.

You provocatively argue in your conclusion that cultures are not like biological systems — they are biological systems. They're social organisms with technological fertility. How should we better understand the link between culture and innovation?

Mehran 01:02:00

The reason I mention the cultural connection is that I'm really arguing against the explanation given by Matt Ridley, which is that innovation is simply a product of liberty and wealth. We rarely talk about Norway when we talk about the world's most innovative places — it's a country that is very free and very rich, and yet when it comes to groundbreaking inventions, especially the tech company type of innovation, it's not a place that comes up very often.

Using the cultural lens — both on the macro level, where I do think cultures at large operate as distinct organisms rather than simply collections of people — is worthwhile. An organism, in the way that there's been so much research on emergent systems: a beehive is an organism that is independent of any collection of individual bees. Every single element of that system can die over time, and yet the system survives. Looking at cultures that seem more innovative in order to understand the cultural attributes that make them that way, I think, is a very worthwhile exercise.

This is independent of the more theoretical explanations — it happens where you have a lot of universities, a lot of venture capital, a very liberal environment. I can point to five or six places around the world with all of those attributes: Norway, Japan, Russia used to be very innovative, Germany stopped being very innovative at certain points. That's why I think having a more cultural approach — looking at each country and asking what makes this place more fertile ground for new ideas than others — is more useful than listing out universities, research institutions, and all the rest.

Keith 01:04:20

Also, a randomised control trial seems insufficient for understanding what innovation actually looks like. You can't just look at the numbers and compare like for like. Just because two places — say, New York and London — are both financial capitals doesn't mean the numbers alone explain the variance in the kinds of startups and innovations they produce. You really have to walk the ground, be present on the soil, breathe the air to understand the vibe of a place.

Mehran 01:05:05

Which is why I would also question the WIPO global innovation index. There are certain things you really cannot capture through statistical methods — for which you do need to go and breathe the air.

If you go to Sweden, things that people mention very frequently are that it's a very flat culture, a culture of informality. I remember talking to a Swedish billionaire who, when I set up the meeting with him, just told me to call him at a certain hour. When I did, he was driving his car. He simply parked on the side of the road, took the call, and we spoke for about ninety minutes. It's not a very hierarchical society in the way that Japan or Korea is.

In Sweden, they often make comparisons between the Germanic engineering culture and the Swedish engineering culture. In Germany, as they would explain the difference: engineering is supposed to mean you receive a set of instructions and execute them exactly as written. Whereas in Sweden, the engineer will always try to tailor the approach to their own preferred way of doing things.

These cultural attributes — how different people behave in different countries — you cannot capture neatly in economic models. But they absolutely drive behaviour and outcomes just as strongly as institutional factors. I feel like there is still not a very strong appreciation for that.

Keith 01:06:59

So if you were to advise a head of state today, how would you advise them in creating a more innovative society?

Mehran 01:07:05

I would advise looking at more examples than they currently do. When we talk about innovation today, most policymakers are indexing themselves against high-value companies — how many unicorns do we have? Even in China, right down to the domestic bureaucracy, the big goal that has to be delivered on is how many unicorns have been created in your environment.

I would like more governments to ask themselves the question: how do we have a government agency like GovTech? How do we have government-led innovation like Parking.sg or Singpass?

I would also like more places to question the Western assumption that technological progress happens by old companies being replaced by new companies — the IBMs and Xeroxes being replaced by the Microsofts, which get replaced by the OpenAIs. If you look at a place like Singapore or South Korea, it has operated very differently. Hyundai started as a construction company — today it's the bestselling EV brand in the US after Tesla. Samsung has been around for almost a hundred years, started by selling noodles, and today is going aggressively into frontier areas: semiconductors, smartphones, biologics.

How old companies innovate is a question that Singapore and South Korea have perhaps answered better than other places. If I were talking to a policymaker, I would tell them: the world today is different from thirty years ago. You don't just need to look at what's happening in the Valley or in Austin. You also need to look at what's happening in London, Sweden, Shenzhen, Singapore, Seoul.

Keith 01:09:18

It's interesting that you pointed out the chaebols in South Korea. It got me thinking about Nokia — a company that started as a paper company, went on to produce smartphones, and now makes telecom towers. In a certain sense, Nokia did solve that problem of how old companies can actually innovate.

Mehran 01:09:45

How I would describe it is: we used to think of technology as a hierarchy. Something new happens in the Valley — e-commerce starts with Amazon — and the assumption was that we'd have something like Amazon in the UK two years later, and something like Amazon in the Middle East five years after that. Same for social networking.

But now we have examples where it's more like having zones of interest. If you want to know what's going to happen in EVs, you really need to keep China front and centre in your mind. I'm sure you've seen videos of the Xiaomi SU7, and the features that car has. I think very soon, a lot of American customers will be demanding those same features from their own carmakers — even if Chinese EVs can't be imported into the US, the fact that a better experience is available somewhere in the world means people will start demanding it elsewhere very soon.

If you want to know what's happening in the gaming industry, maybe it's worthwhile to keep an eye on the Nordics. And I wouldn't limit that to gaming, given the increasing overlap between gaming and education. How do you create engaging content for young people who get distracted very easily? For people in edtech, maybe the Nordics are a more interesting place to watch than the Valley.

In short: open your eyes, diversify your horizon, broaden your perspective, and take in more data than you otherwise would.

Keith 01:11:24

I come to my last question. Mehran, you have travelled extensively and researched deeply. If there's one piece of advice you would give to a fresh graduate entering the working world today, what would that be?

Mehran 01:11:49

We didn't go very deep into AI in this conversation, and I'm glad about that, because too many conversations get hijacked by AI and what it means for jobs. Anyone graduating from university today has front and centre in their mind the question of how they stay employed and how they deliver on the economic expectations on them.

With all the fear and concern about AI out there, I see very few people who actually know what's happening in the AI space beyond LLMs and foundation models. I see very few people using AI beyond the usual ChatGPT or Claude. The range of AI tools available is much broader than that — you can use AI literally as your assistant to book meetings for you, manage your inbox, and so on.

So my primary advice would be: don't fixate on specific tools, but learn how to learn what's happening in AI very broadly. Learn about tools beyond just ChatGPT, and become really good at incorporating AI into your everyday life.

I'll give you one example. I rarely get enough time to read books because I'm travelling extensively. So I now very often just upload a book to NotebookLM, which turns a book into a podcast. On the go, I can listen to a book in an hour. And it's a very compelling podcast that NotebookLM produces. I'm just using this to illustrate that there are a lot more AI tools out there than one. Try and become very comfortable with using all of them — because I think that's really going to be the secret to competing in the future. The question is: are you using AI better than the other person?

Keith 01:13:32

Mehran, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Mehran 01:13:35

Thanks so much for having me. This was a very interesting, wide-ranging discussion.

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Susan Sim.

This is the second of a two-part series covering Singapore's merger and seperation from Malaysia.

Susan Sim is the editor of The Albatross Files- Inside Separation, a landmark publication that brings to light previously classified documents detailing Singapore's merger with and separation from Malaysia in the 1960s.

For the first time, oral histories, cabinet memos that were previously secret are now declassified. This book brings into light the raw emotions and real struggles Singapore's first generation of leaders faced when contemplating seperation.

She is also the author of The People's Minister, a biography of E.W. Barker, Singapore's longest-serving Law Minister and a key figure in the separation negotiations.

In this conversation, we talk about her editorial approach, the last two months leading up to Separation and why more of us should care about EW Barker.

00:00 Trailer
00:45 What Are The Albatross Files
13:05 Understanding Seperation
28:15 The Emotional Weight of Separation
34:24 Why The Hong Lim Election Mattered
36:50 Why The British Was Excluded
42:43 The Final Week Before Seperation
49:08 The Role of E.W. Barker in the Separation Process
56:38 E.W. Barker: A Man of the People
01:03:07 Lessons for Young Singaporeans from History

Introduction

Keith (00:00:45)

Today I'm joined by Susan Sim. In the last episode, we spoke to Janadas Devan, who brought us through the dynamics of Singapore's merger and separation from Malaysia. Much of our discussion centered around the book The Albatross Files. Today I have the incredible privilege of speaking with Susan Sim, the editor who put the book together. I'm incredibly excited to speak with her about how this book came to be.

Susan, thank you for coming on.

Susan (00:01:18)

Thank you.

What Are The Albatross Files?

Keith (00:01:20)

Before we go further into the secret stories behind it, I'd like to first ask you what the Albatross Files actually are and why they're important for every Singaporean.

Susan (00:01:30)

It's a file that Dr Goh opened probably around mid-1964 when he had one of the first of several meetings over the next few months with Malaysian leaders, especially Tun Razak, who was then Deputy Prime Minister. He would meticulously record those meetings. The first one, he typed up and shared with the cabinet.

Before that, there had already been some concern about the shape the Federation was taking and the impact being part of the Federation was having on Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew, who was then the Prime Minister, had written a memo. It's undated, a cabinet memo, but undated. I think that's how sensitive it was. There were no file registry numbers. I think it was just circulated amongst cabinet members. He talked about the twin evils facing the Federation: racial politics and the communist threat. It was very long, about 18 pages.

This was just before the race riots took place. We think he wrote it before the July 1964 race riots because he doesn't mention them, and something of that magnitude he would have talked about. But it's not in there. We know it's obviously written around mid-July because he talked about meetings he had on 7th July and so on.

Dr Goh obviously kept that memo and then at some point opened a file to put that document in. Over the next 22 to 23 months, he kept some of the memos, drafts of papers intended for the Malaysian Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and his own notes in this folder.

It wasn't meticulously filed. When I was given access to it, the documents had just been piled one on top of the other. You had to figure out the chronological order.

In essence, the Albatross Files represent Dr Goh's view that by July, clearly after the riots, Singapore being part of the Federation of Malaysia was like an albatross around Singapore's neck. The main aim of going into Malaysia was a common market. Sixty years ago, Singapore wasn't a fishing village. We were more than that. But we were small, didn't have a critical mass yet, and certainly needed a hinterland.

They thought the only way to survive was to be part of Malaysia. When the PAP won the most seats and formed the government in 1959, they campaigned on being part of Malaysia, on merger.

The Tunku, the Malaysian government, the UMNO party, they weren't terribly interested in having Singapore because in Peninsular Malaysia, Malays were in the minority really. If you add up the Chinese, Indians and others, the population of Malays in Malaya itself weren't the majority. UMNO was formed on the basis of Malay dominance essentially.

They weren't keen on having Singapore because Singapore's majority Chinese. If we joined Peninsular Malaysia and formed one country, the Malay population would definitely not be the majority anymore.

But the British government was still responsible for our external defence and foreign policy. They were quite keen for us to be part of Malaysia as well because their concern was that at some point, the communists might take over in Singapore. They didn't want that. They thought if we were part of the Federation of Malaysia, a larger Federation, the chances of that happening were much less.

That's why we went into merger with the Federation of Malaysia. But there was a lot of idealism involved. Singaporeans, what we call Singaporeans now, they thought of themselves as Malayans in those days. That was their identity. This was one nation, never mind that we were part of the Straits Settlement, a crown colony, and not part of the Federation of Malaysia when that was formed.

Our leaders certainly felt they were Malayans. People living in Singapore had family ties, families in Peninsular Malaya. So there was that emotional aspect of it, but also the cool pragmatism that to survive, we needed to be part of a larger common market.

That didn't happen. The minute we went into the federation, suddenly from having self-governance, a lot of the financial matters, economic policymaking, even issuing pioneer status, tax exemptions for foreign investments, those were being controlled from Kuala Lumpur.

It became quite unbearable. And then the race riots happened. Goh Keng Swee kept this file to track the state of discussions as well as the internal discussions the PAP government of Singapore was having about how to deal with it.

Most of these were papers written by Lee Kuan Yew. He would record notes of meetings he'd had with Malaysian leaders or with the British High Commissioner or Australian representatives. Every now and then he would put in his assessment of what he thought was going on, the state of discussion, then suggest how we should move ahead, the strategic thinking.

Goh Keng Swee kept all these documents in this file. When he started negotiations with the Malaysians, with Razak essentially, on separation, he wrote notes by hand and put them in the file as well.

The file disappeared for a while and reappeared in a Ministry of Defence storeroom in 1980 when Goh Keng Swee started being interviewed as part of the oral history programme called Political History of Singapore 1945 to 1965. He was being interviewed in '81, '82 and the interviewer found the Albatross Files in a Ministry of Defence storeroom.

The Narrative of Separation

Keith (00:10:02)

It might be useful to situate where the Albatross Files fit in our understanding of Singaporean history. When we think about separation, one of the things you pointed out in the book and publicly is that for the longest time at the start of Singapore's journey, when Tunku Abdul Rahman articulated the story of separation, it was conceived or portrayed as an ejection. There wasn't really contestation within Singapore against that narrative.

Susan (00:10:38)

Tunku Abdul Rahman wrote a column in 1975 in the Star newspaper of Malaysia where he talked about being in a London hospital, wrecked by shingles, thinking about the pain that Singapore, primarily Lee Kuan Yew, was creating for him. The pain that Lee Kuan Yew was inflicting on him with his speeches up and down the peninsula and his insistence on a Malaysian Malaysia.

He decided then that Singapore is like gangrene. When you have gangrene in the body, you cut it out. I think that started the whole process of separation in the sense that he told his deputy in Kuala Lumpur, go find out how the Singaporeans feel about separation.

When Goh Keng Swee went up to see Razak, Razak said, what should we do? Goh Keng Swee said, we go our separate ways. There was no pushback from Razak. He was surprised, I think, but his parting words to Goh Keng Swee were, could you find out how Lee Kuan Yew feels about this? He agreed. He was outsourcing the job that Tunku had entrusted him with, to find out how the Singaporean leadership, primarily Lee Kuan Yew, felt about separation, about going our separate ways.

Keith (00:12:28)

But this wasn't articulated back then, right? Tunku was making that statement.

Susan (00:12:33)

Tunku did write in his column that he had written a letter to Razak, I think dated 1st July, where he said there may be time to cut Singapore off. Essentially he said, cut Singapore off and please find out whether the Singaporeans agree with it, because he did not want it to be a unilateral decision. He wanted it to be a mutually agreed upon separation.

Keith (00:13:07)

To a certain extent, the common imagination is that Singapore was expelled rather than it being a separation.

Susan (00:13:13)

We couldn't have left Malaysia if the Tunku did not want it to happen. He had to be the first one to decide on it, more or less. On the Singapore side, it wasn't a decision that the government of the day came to readily. It was a very reluctantly reached decision.

There were a lot of constraints, a lot of trade-offs that they had to balance. In the Singapore cabinet itself, there were differing views. Lee Kuan Yew himself was quite conflicted. This was, as you would have heard, an article of faith for the PAP that Singapore had to be part of Malaysia. I think they all believed it when we went in, when there was the battle for merger and we went into Malaysia. It was a happy day for Singapore.

But then the trouble started. There was no common market. And then the riots, where Singapore leaders realised that racial and religious tensions could be weaponised against Singapore. They were trying to find a solution to it. There were discussions with the Malaysians because Tunku said, let's talk about how we can de-escalate tensions, more or less, and how maybe Singapore could have greater autonomy. But that didn't work.

The British did not like the idea. So in the end, everything was stymied. But that in a way also started the ball rolling where people started thinking about what sort of other frameworks we can have apart from a looser federation.

I think Tunku himself decided it's time for Singapore to go back to what it was before merger, let Singapore run itself. Goh Keng Swee was probably amongst the first to come to that decision because he's pragmatic, very decisive. You could say he provides a lesson in strategic clarity in leadership and governance.

Eddie Barker says in his oral history interview 16, 17 years later, that he never understood why we wanted merger in the first place, because what do we have in common with Sabah and Sarawak and so on. But there were valid reasons for merger.

By August, July, August, as Goh Keng Swee says, everyone essentially had enough. They were like, how much more of this can we take? We're being threatened all the time. There was great fear for lives as well. Eddie Barker, every time he went up to KL, once he told his daughter Carla, who was 12 years old, if anything happens to me, and this is on the eve of a trip to Kuala Lumpur, if anything happens to me, you will be looked after. I have a Swiss bank account, put aside some money, mummy knows the number.

The family was looked after. He had four children, they were like six to twelve years old at that point in time. But once the process started, they soldiered on. They went up and negotiated the agreement.

Interpreting the Story of Separation

Keith (00:16:50)

How should one correctly interpret the story of separation?

Susan (00:16:54)

When Lee Kuan Yew wrote part one of his memoirs, The Singapore Story, he laid out the facts. He laid out his role, Goh Keng Swee's role. He even wrote and said that it was only in 1994 that I realised that Goh Keng Swee never discussed any other option but separation with Razak. So it's all out there.

That same year, Albert Lau had written A Moment of Anguish where he quoted declassified diplomatic cables from the British, Australian, New Zealand, the US government. So the basic outlines of the story have always been out there.

I'm not sure what Singaporeans were taught in school because I'm of that generation where history wasn't really taught in school. But I don't think, let's put it this way, immediately after, well, on the day of separation itself, the Tunku, in his speech in parliament and subsequent press conferences said, it was my decision.

Then he gave an account of how separation came about. It started with him making that decision and then the discussions and so on. I think he even gave the impression that the documents themselves were drafted by the Malaysian Attorney General, not by Eddie Barker, the Singapore Minister of Law.

I don't know. One can only speculate, but I would imagine that the Singapore government of the day, there was already, it was emotionally charged moments. There were concerns about unity of the Singapore cabinet because some of the key members like Toh Chin Chye, Rajaratnam and Ong Pang Boon were against the idea of separation.

I think the focus for Singapore from 9th August onwards for the government was about Singapore. How do we build an economy? How do we ensure prosperity for the nation? I think there was possibly a sense, possibly I say, because there are no written accounts, but the sense that things could still go wrong because you could still have people in Singapore who feel that they want to be part of Malaysia and you could still have racial violence.

You want to be forward-looking from that point onwards to focus on ensuring what the ideals of equality, democracy, happiness and prosperity, building the society of Singapore instead of delving into issues that could be polarising.

I asked Albert Lau this question when I was working on the Albatross Files and he said, look, the Singapore government never used the phrase, never said we were ejected or ousted. They always said separate, we were separated. The neutral term separation. Ejected, those are other people's terms.

Keith (00:20:54)

So it's a conscious choice. It was just at the end of the day both parties knew that the fundamental visions of how a country should look like were different. Therefore this was a logical conclusion.

Susan (00:21:07)

I don't know how you can have a grand plan unless the other party is playing ball with you. Actually, I would think that before 9th August, we were kind of in a prisoner's dilemma. You cooperate or you defect, right? That's the classic prisoner's dilemma. If both do this or both do that, but if one cooperates and one doesn't, then you end up in a worse situation.

Keith (00:21:39)

If you enjoy this show, please double-check if you're subscribed. Every subscribe matters and it really helps us to grow this show to serve you. Thank you so much for the support. Now back to the show.

Susan (00:21:49)

I think these were really tense 22, 23 months where it was about survival, not about personal ambition. The key thing is that they showed Singaporeans that you have a government that cannot be cowed, cannot be intimidated, that was only interested in doing what is right for Singaporeans.

The Editorial Process

Keith (00:22:17)

When one looks at this humongous book and looks at the Albatross Files, it might be useful to have a sense of how you edited this volume.

Susan (00:22:31)

The Albatross documents in themselves, in the end we've put 23 of them in the book. They're fascinating reading and very well written as well. But there has to be context because these are 60-year-old documents that had never really seen the light of day, that had barely been read by anybody. Clearly, the original documents were hardly ever touched.

With a book of this nature, I looked for examples, but I also had editing principles that I wanted to set out very clearly from the beginning. It's an exercise in transparency. You're putting out documents for anyone to read. But you have to contextualise them, cross-check information against other sources. In some ways, triangulate across other documents of that period.

In triangulating across the national archives, documents from national archives of several countries, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia, these are the main countries where the notes of what was going on in that period were diligently kept. Many of the British and Australian documents have been declassified and are actually freely available online. Hardly anyone reads them because why would you unless you were working on a history project.

But my approach to the Albatross Files was I cannot just be a compiler as an editor. I have to make every document, I'm just talking about Albatross Files documents at this point, to make every document, explain the context of every document, so that if that's the only document you read, if you only read one document in the file, you'll be able to see how it fits into the larger picture.

I wasn't trying to provide one narrative, but there are many different arcs. Separation wasn't just one dramatic rupture. It wasn't just one main arc. There were all these overlapping arcs, overlapping fears. Actually, first of all, overlapping arcs. There were different competing forces, different competing fears as well and constraints.

I would read through each document and then where someone, where it's written, a certain idea or certain individual or certain event is mentioned, I would try to footnote it so that if you're coming to this new, you don't know very much about Singapore history to begin with, you would have the means to not just read what I've written, but also to go and look for the documents themselves.

At some point whilst working on the documents, I went to the National Archives. Our National Archives, the Singapore National Archives, they're amazing. They have a lot of materials, a lot of the declassified documents from the British and Australian archives are available. I found, by pure chance, a file titled File on Special Relations, Special File on Relations between Singapore and Malaysia. Actually the title is Special File on Singapore's Relations with Malaysia.

That was being kept, or that had been kept by the British Deputy High Commissioner based in Singapore. The filing of it was as messy as the Albatross Files because some of the documents didn't really have dates or they were hidden in other parts. You had to read carefully to find the dates. Some of the documents were, do not circulate. There were background papers that were written to try to dissuade Tunku and the Malaysian government from creating a looser federation and so on.

The reference is DO 187/60. So I made sure I put that reference number in the Albatross Files so that if you wanted to read the file yourself, you could. If I cite news media reporting, I would reference largely the Straits Times because you can easily access Straits Times archives through the National Archives, the Singapore National Archives.

The whole idea is opening a file, showing the evidence and annotating the evidence, providing further evidence so that any reader, especially Singaporeans, can make informed decisions for themselves as to what it means and what it means for how we see ourselves now, why we are the way we are, about sovereignty, about identity.

Surprising Discoveries

Keith (00:28:17)

What's one surprising thing you learnt throughout this whole process of editing the Albatross Files?

Susan (00:28:21)

I think what surprised me was how raw the emotions were still. The documents themselves were written largely about 60 years ago. You could feel the anguish, sense of humour too, but also the very strategic thinking that was going on at that point in time where Mr Lee would write a memo or paper to his cabinet colleagues and say, this is how I see things unfolding and this is what we must do. But go away, think about it and send me your views. Tell me what you feel about a looser federation.

At that point, the bulk of the Albatross documents, the first part is about looser federation discussions and papers about looser federation and he asked them for their views. There was strong pushback from Rajaratnam. I'm sure in cabinet meetings there was strong pushback as well from Toh Chin Chye, Ong Pang Boon.

With the oral histories, these were recorded about 17 years after separation in 1982. You can almost feel the emotional weight of the decision-making process. Lee Kuan Yew especially was going through why, what was going on. They're going through the history, how they experienced it.

In a way, I think they were also conscious of the fact that they were recording the history of their participation in pivotal moments of Singapore's history as a nation. They wanted readers of, you can also listen to the audio recordings, readers, listeners, to understand why they made those decisions.

History isn't linear. It's not bloodless either. There's a lot of back and forth, and they try to explain it as best as they can, but from their own personal perspective, which is why the book, we have 10 different oral histories, and we try to let evidence decide on the structure.

Organising them, we want to organise them in a way that had a certain coherence to it. We start with Lim Kim San because he's the first person essentially to be told by Tunku that he's thinking of letting Singapore go its own way because he said to Lim Kim San, tell your prime minister the next Commonwealth meeting he can come here as his own prime minister.

Lim Kim San said later that he kind of missed it, what Tunku was trying to say to him and so did not quite report that to Lee Kuan Yew until much later when he reflected on what Tunku meant.

Then it's followed by Lee Khoon Choy because his victory in the Hong Lim by-election of July 10th, 1965 was quite pivotal in showing how much support the PAP still had in Singapore itself.

Then we have Othman Wok who talked because he was, before merger, he was a deputy editor for Utusan Melayu, which had been started by our founding president, our first independence president, Yusof Ishak, but then had, at some point, there was selling shares, UMNO members essentially bought the majority shares. So they obtained control over the newspaper and moved the headquarters to Kuala Lumpur.

Othman Wok was there working as deputy editor. He was invited to meetings with UMNO leaders and he's sitting there listening to them talk about Singapore, Singaporeans. In his oral history, he talked about the impressions he gleaned.

Then there's Ong Pang Boon who talked about why Singapore contested the April 1964 election and Rajaratnam on why he opposed even a looser federation. Of course Goh Keng Swee, Barker who negotiated, who drafted documents and Lee Kuan Yew.

Then after that, after separation, to give a sense of the state of mind of Lee Kuan Yew with Devan Nair and Kwa Geok Choo, Mrs Lee Kuan Yew. So there's a certain method to the madness.

All of these oral history interviews, you can read them on their own. On their own, they're fascinating. Just that for this book, we only focused on merger, if they talk about that, and separation. But all of them also were asked by the interviewers, so what do you think now about separation, now it's been 17 years, how do you feel about separation?

All of them, I think Mr Lee wasn't asked that question, or anyway in the book, but all of them essentially said, the decision makers themselves said, it's the best thing that happened. Read Rajaratnam's oral history, he basically said, yes, we have spent the last 15, 16, 17 years proving ourselves wrong in thinking that we could only survive as part of Malaysia.

The Hong Lim By-Election

Keith (00:34:25)

We talked about the Hong Lim by-election, which was briefly alluded to. I want you to help me understand the significance of that result of Lee Khoon Choy winning the Hong Lim by-election on 10 July 1965. Why was it such a watershed moment for Singapore?

Susan (00:34:43)

PAP had lost the last two elections for Hong Lim. The by-election was forced by the sudden resignation of a former PAP member who had left the party. PAP leaders believed that the Malaysian federal government, basically UMNO, had orchestrated the resignation of Ong Eng Guan so that there would be a by-election because they wanted to test the grounds. They wanted to see how strong support was for the PAP in Singapore.

Around that time, there was a lot of agitation for Lee Kuan Yew to be arrested. Don't forget, the Hong Lim by-election was July 10th. July 8th, things had come to such a point where leading figures of PAP, Toh Chin Chye, accompanied by Goh Keng Swee, Eddie Barker, and I think Lim Kim San, they had a press conference to essentially say, if you arrest Lee Kuan Yew, you better arrest the rest of us too, because we are going to keep pushing for what he's been asking for, a Malaysian Malaysia. Fair treatment for all races.

That was their way of signalling that we know what we are doing and we are not going to play ball. You can't just remove Lee Kuan Yew and think that Toh Chin Chye or Goh Keng Swee will just take over. That's not going to happen.

So they made that point and then they won the election. There were very clear signals, actually stronger than signals. There were very clear statements. They were basically drawing the red lines to say that if you move against us, it's going to be very difficult for you. Then the victory in Hong Lim showed that we have support. We can do what we say.

The British Role

Keith (00:36:52)

Less than 10 days, right, you already have this discussion of separation. Goh Keng Swee meeting Razak and Ismail in KL and that was already when he was confirming that Lee Kuan Yew was open to secession. At this point in time, EW Barker was already drafting separation agreements. I think on 20th of July they were looking towards the separation happening on 9th of August. They were very clear that the British must not have a whiff of this.

Previously Janadas talked about the fact that the British kind of deconstructed any arrangements or were able to politically cut apart any alternative arrangements. Therefore there was this need to put separation as fait accompli. I wanted to ask you, what was it about the British or what was it about Anthony Head specifically that made it important that they kept this away from the British? What were their considerations?

Susan (00:37:58)

The irony of it was that they liked each other. Lee Kuan Yew and several ministers, they spoke to the British diplomats all the time. A lot of it is really about safeguarding Singapore's interests by making sure that the British government understood what was going on and what the wishes of Singapore leaders hoped would be happening.

They were keeping, and Tunku was doing the same thing with the British, with Australians, same with Singapore, British, Australians, New Zealanders and so on. Americans as well, of course. But the Americans kept a more hands-off approach to this.

I think they knew how good the British were at this game. In some ways, it's a diplomatic game. The British had really shown Singapore leaders by March when the initial discussions for a looser federation broke down, how good they were at changing the Tunku's mind.

Don't forget Tunku, if the British file, the documents, Paul Moss's documents are to be believed. Tunku had actually, at some point in December told Ismail, the Malaysian Home Affairs Minister, that he's thinking of cutting out Singapore, throwing Singapore out. The British panicked and said, no, no, no, that cannot happen.

So they wrote a paper with the intention of essentially frightening the Malaysians into not doing it, by putting up arguments, they call punchlines, that Singapore would become a Cuba at their doorstep, the communists would take over and so on.

They were not just directly giving their paper to the Malaysian government, they used their own British officers who were serving the Malaysian government, especially the then Malaysian Inspector General of Police, Claude Fenner. He was a British police officer who stayed on after Malaysian independence and the Malaysians trusted him. He worked very well with Home Affairs Minister Ismail and he had been asked by Ismail to help him draft documents for discussion in cabinet.

So Fenner used some of the language, some of the punchlines that the British diplomats had come up with and put it in that paper. These were discussed in cabinet.

In any event, the Tunku hadn't quite decided what he wanted with any proposed changes. So then he told Singapore, I want you to hive off, but when he said hive off, he did not mean separation. He meant looser federation.

There was all this back and forth. What was very clear, and you see that from reading the Albatross documents, what was very clear was Singaporeans, Tunku simply didn't want Singapore members of parliament in the Malaysian parliament in Kuala Lumpur, arguing with them on policies and in some ways showing them up. He just didn't want Singapore in parliament, but he wanted Singapore to pay for defence and so on. You cannot have taxation without representation.

So that was a non-starter. Then the British persuaded Tunku that, no, no, of course you must have Singapore. The Singaporeans must be in parliament. So Tunku said, okay. If you read one of the notes of meeting that Lee Kuan Yew wrote, he said, I don't understand. Tunku has changed his mind, now he wants us back in parliament, but he wants to give us greater autonomy. How does that work?

Keith (00:42:01)

There was even talk about sending Lee Kuan Yew to the UN, right, during that period of time?

Susan (00:42:05)

That was a Malaysian thing because the British did not think that was a good idea. Especially after the riots. Because it's like, I think it was an open secret. All the diplomatic missions in Singapore, the foreign missions, more or less, especially the British, the Australians, the Americans, they all came to the conclusion that hardcore extremist elements in UMNO had provoked and instigated the riots, the July 1964 riots. You can't then say Lee Kuan Yew steps down and goes because how would that appear to the Singapore ground? He had support in Singapore.

The Final Days Before Separation

Keith (00:42:44)

3rd of August, you had Goh Keng Swee meeting Razak and Ismail and it's told that the Tunku agrees to separation on two conditions. One is Singapore is to make a military contribution to Malaysia's defence and enter into a defence agreement with Malaysia. And Singapore must not enter into any treaty that counters the proposed defence agreement. What was going through Dr Goh's mind? At this point in time, we're like six days away from separation.

Susan (00:43:16)

He saw his job as keeping the Malaysians on track. Whatever they proposed, he wasn't going to argue with them because when you have separation, Singapore becomes an independent sovereign nation. You cannot be telling a sovereign independent nation what to do. We weren't creating a confederation, we were becoming a separate nation.

So he said, sure, whatever. You want us to have brigades? No, we can't afford it. He was trying to reassure them that we would not pose a threat to Malaysia. Of course we were not going to pose a threat to Malaysia with independence. We didn't really have an army. That came about much later.

I think Goh Keng Swee saw his job as that of getting a separation agreement signed and then passed through parliament. He had to go through in one sitting because otherwise, if stretched out over a few days, three readings of parliament and so on, first of all, the ground was agitated. Hardcore extremist elements who opposed separation like Jafar Albar would be agitating his ground.

So you could have violence, could have riots. The British would stop it. They would work on Tunku to say, no, you cannot do this. We are fighting in Sabah and Sarawak against Indonesian saboteurs because this was confrontation. So things could have fallen apart.

Lee Kuan Yew himself was quite reluctant because if you read his oral history interview, he's on 7th August, he's still thinking he could persuade Tunku that, yes, we may have a separation agreement, but if you want us to be part of Malaysia, but in a looser, as maybe a confederation or a looser federation of some sort, we'll tweak the separation agreement and come up with a new arrangement. He's a lawyer, Eddie Barker's a lawyer. They can easily draft another agreement.

Keith (00:45:31)

In a certain sense Dr Goh was there actually not just to keep the Malaysians on track but also to keep Lee Kuan Yew on track?

Susan (00:45:37)

In some ways, yes. I think they're all clear-sighted enough to realise that the status quo at that point in time could not go on. Life could not go on like that. But I think Goh Keng Swee realised that Lee Kuan Yew would agree to separation. That was the only way forward for Singapore.

I suspect, and I don't know, I'm speculating here, I suspect he just didn't want to clutter the issue. He just wanted to not play prisoner's dilemma, to say that this is the path, this is the only path open to us at this point in time. He made it happen. Lee Kuan Yew reluctantly and with great anguish signed the agreement, persuaded Toh Chin Chye, Rajaratnam to sign the agreement and Toh Chin Chye in turn persuaded Ong Pang Boon to sign the agreement.

Keith (00:46:45)

It was worth noting that throughout the whole negotiations, you will see that actually Lee Kuan Yew is conspicuously absent. If one goes back maybe 30, 40 years ago, before all this was released, you would think the Prime Minister would be much more involved, but he was conspicuously absent.

Susan (00:47:06)

Tunku wasn't involved either. Tunku was in London and in Europe before he flew back on August 5th. Yeah, the flight was delayed coming in. I think everyone in the Singapore government knew how much the Malaysian leaders did not like Lee Kuan Yew.

Goh Keng Swee had written the notes of a meeting in July 1964 where he sort of reported the awful things they were saying, the complaints, what he called the usual bellyaching about Lee Kuan Yew. He had circulated it to the cabinet. So Lee Kuan Yew read it, so they all knew.

I think if Lee Kuan Yew had been present in negotiation, it would have been harder to work it out because then someone might be tempted to say, no, no, we don't agree, we want this. And then we say, no, but you can't do it this way and so on. So it would have taken much longer.

I think tactically, it's much wiser if he was not present. And why would he be negotiating with Tunku's deputy anyway? So it should be his deputy. Goh Keng Swee wasn't deputy prime minister, but he was very close to Lee Kuan Yew. So everyone knew that whatever he said had the backing of Lee Kuan Yew.

But Goh Keng Swee, as you pointed out, was also concerned that Lee Kuan Yew might change his mind. That's why he asked him for a letter of authorisation to discuss all possible options, which in his mind would of course include separation. Because if you can't get confederation or looser federation or greater autonomy, then the only other real option is separation. At the end of the day, that was the only real option. Greater autonomy in a federation really wouldn't have worked.

EW Barker's Instrumental Role

Keith (00:49:09)

We all know what happened on the 9th of August and I think there are a lot of publications that detail that fateful day in the Istana in KL. So we will not go into that much because we all know the moment of anguish and for those who are more interested you can refer to the previous episode we did with Janadas Devan or read the book. Read the book.

I wanted to ask about EW Barker because I think his role is instrumental and you actually wrote his book, The People's Minister, which I thoroughly enjoyed as well. Take me through the role that EW Barker played, especially in the last week when there was this sprint towards separation. What was his role in facilitating separation?

Susan (00:50:10)

He had both tangible and intangible roles. He was well-liked by Malaysian leaders. He had played, I think, hockey with Razak at Raffles College. They all studied in Raffles College before going on to the United Kingdom for tertiary education. So they liked him. They saw him as someone who could be trusted because he had not participated in the April 1964 election. So they inferred from that that he did not agree with the decision.

He wasn't very heavily involved in the Malaysian Solidarity Convention. He was at the first meeting. I mean, there are photographs of him there. But then he's a lawyer, so he was probably brought in to draft agreements or the main press statement or something. But he wasn't someone who had gone around making speeches about politics of the day. He was very much focused on his job in Singapore itself.

But he was good friends. They liked him and they trusted him. By most accounts, very good lawyer. He had drafted the separation agreement.

They were discussing the agreement that he had drafted. But he only went up to Kuala Lumpur on the 6th of August, where they were going to finalise the agreement. So obviously he had to be there.

I think at the last minute, Ismail said, we must have this clause to relieve Malaysia of all the liabilities that we might have assumed for Singapore when it entered into any agreement. Goh Keng Swee said, of course, then we must have a clause to say that we will cooperate economically as much as we can and so on and so forth. So Eddie would draft those clauses and put them in.

With him and Goh Keng Swee there, they were both liked and trusted by Razak and Ismail too, to some extent. The discussions, I think by then there weren't so much negotiations as really how do we come to an agreement. I believe they were quite convivial because at some point as they were waiting for the typing of the documents to be done.

This is pre-personal computer days. So documents were being typed on a typewriter. If you make a mistake, sometimes you have to throw them out. I'm not very sure about Blanco in those days, but they threw them out. You have to type with carbon paper so that there's more than one copy and so on. Maybe they typed them separately, I don't know. But you have to make sure that it's a long, tedious process.

So they were waiting for the typing to be done. According to, I think, Goh Keng Swee's oral history interview, he said, the drinks were passed around and I guess everyone was so relieved. As Goh Keng Swee said, it's like a prisoner being given a reprieve. So there was some happy imbibing.

At the end, when it came to sign the documents, as Eddie Barker said, nobody read it before they signed it. He, because he's a lawyer, wanted to read it and was told by Razak, it's your typist who typed the thing, sign it. What are you so worried about? So he signed it. After that, he went back to Istana House, read it, and to his great relief, saw that no mistakes had been made. Then handed over the documents to Lee Kuan Yew.

Keith (00:54:15)

Yeah, it reads to me that EW Barker was like this lubricant of sorts, right? Like he made it much easier for them to, I won't say like what you said negotiate, but maybe discuss. And then after independence he was still a very strong presence informally between Malaysia and Singapore. Can you talk more about that?

Susan (00:54:38)

Because he knew them personally. He said that, you're sportsmen, we don't stab each other in the back. You don't kick a person when they're down. He believed that strongly. That was his sportsman's ethos. He believed in the same ethos. So he would, and they met on the polo grounds at the Turf Club because he, I think at one point owned a horse or owned half a horse.

In the horse races in those days, it was part of a circuit that went up and down the peninsula and Singapore. So they would meet each other at all these locations. He would, even after, for years after separation, every year for Hari Raya, he would lead a small group of Singapore leaders up. Even after he stepped down, he would go with the newer leaders to act as the friendly face, to get everyone comfortable.

He also had a role to play in those days where we had to negotiate the water agreements as well. So it's very important that the Malaysians had someone in the Singapore team that they felt they trusted. Because there was a lot of suspicion that Singapore is always out for itself and so on. They didn't see as much of that in Eddie Barker.

Obviously, if you are the leader of a country, your first obligation is to your citizens. You look after your people first. But it never hurts to have someone whom they feel they can trust to do the right thing as far as from their definition, rather than from our own national interest.

Keith (00:56:40)

I want to help them find out what comes next.

Susan (00:56:42)

Yes, and I think that was always the intention because you were neighbours. There was always intention to have win-win outcomes. If there's already an underlying layer of suspicion that goes back decades, it's a little bit harder.

The Spirit of EW Barker

Keith (00:56:58)

A modern young Singaporean today thinks about someone like EW Barker, we know he's the Minister of Law. He was the Minister of National Development. He was very involved with the sports scene in Singapore. We can name his portfolio and achievements, but what's the spirit that he represented that Singaporeans today can take inspiration from?

Susan (00:57:23)

Everyone who's met Eddie Barker loved him. They saw him as a man of the people. He was someone who was comfortable standing in a taxi line, waiting for a taxi or going to a hawker centre and drinking beer with friends. He was very comfortable in his own skin. I think people liked that about himself.

All these, he was a minister at the time before social media, before Facebook. He didn't have to take photos of himself in hawker centres and put them on Facebook. People just saw him there and word would spread and they knew that that was the man he was.

But there are many facets to him. Apart from being a national athlete who continued to be strongly involved in sports and lobbying for greater sports facilities for the sporting community, for everyone actually, he was someone who also survived the death railway during World War II. He was sent to work on the railway that the Japanese military was building in Thailand, which we call death railway because a lot of people died working on it.

He survived it, but he always had long-lasting health issues arising from that time there. But it never slowed him down. He never talked about the suffering he underwent or he witnessed. He always took it happy, jovial. But he was also, as Law Minister, if you read the book, someone said to me, he formed the template of a Law Minister in Singapore.

He saw his job as, if this is government policy, how can the law make it happen? But he was also a man of conviction. He did not just say, oh, you want to do this? OK, I'll get it done. He would be, are you sure we want to do this? Because this goes against whatever, whatever. Or maybe there's a better way to do it. Maybe we shouldn't use the law to do it. We should apply moral suasion instead.

Also he was someone who would stand up to even Lee Kuan Yew and argue with him in cabinet. Unfortunately we don't have records for all this because, but you hear about them, he's talked about the debates they've had in cabinet with friends.

When he stepped down, I think one interview he did, but he never gave any, except for one or two, he never gave interviews about his work as a politician, as a Law Minister. He would talk about sports, but never about his work. He was very disciplined as well.

So there are many different facets to the man, and it's such a shame that most Singaporeans, many Singaporeans now don't really know much about him.

Don't forget, he also held like four or five different portfolios over a period of 24 years whilst being a Law Minister throughout those 24 years. But he told an interviewer, Kevin Tan once, Kevin was the only person who actually got an interview with him before his passing. He said, what was the job he enjoyed most? Being Minister for National Development. He liked the fact that he was helping to build homes for Singaporeans.

I was shown this photo of him where he's about to put his hand in, in those days when you choose flats, you have to show up and then there's a lottery system and the minister would then put, they had little balls with your number in a little drum and it'll be rolled and then the minister will stick his hand in and take out a number and he'll read the number. So you chose your flat, the floor, the unit, according to the number that was called.

There are a lot of photos of him doing it and he was beaming away. He just loved the idea of building homes. He wanted to make life better. One day he was being driven down the street and he saw it was raining and he saw kids playing in the rain and he thought, we have all these HDB flats and why instead of building flats all the way to the ground floor, why don't we keep them, we create what we call the void deck. Empty space where when it's raining the kids can play indoors.

Now of course, with older people they can also sit down and play chess or just chat with each other. So that's from him.

Keith (01:02:30)

So it's that spirit of public-mindedness but not to take yourself too seriously as a politician that we can remember him by.

Susan (01:02:49)

That's one way of putting it. He also, Lee Kuan Yew said to him once, you're the last Eurasian. And he said, no, I'm a Singaporean. He was Eurasian, he loved being a Eurasian, but his political identity was that of a Singaporean.

Takeaways for Young Singaporeans

Keith (01:03:08)

Given all that we know today, what you've done with the Albatross Files, what are the right takeaways that a young Singaporean should have with regards to understanding Singapore?

Susan (01:03:21)

If you look at Singapore politics, the phrase that's often used by academics is there's a siege mentality. We always feel under siege. We always harp on our vulnerabilities. A lot of it has to do with how we were founded.

There was a sense of siege. There was a sense of great vulnerability where you have a government that did not have control over its own internal security, where someone could come in and whip up emotions and create riots.

The policies thereafter, the housing policies, I think Lee Kuan Yew said in his memoirs, look, if 80, 90% of the population own their own homes, they're not going to be burning them. They're not going to be setting fire to them and doing tit-for-tat violence.

This idea about keeping racial harmony, how fragile racial, religious harmony could be, that's something that is so ingrained in our pioneer generation. That's why there's been this great need to put in place laws and safeguards. We all wish our society could be different. But at the end of the day, I think most of us still are happy with our life here. Life is good. We don't have to worry about our basic necessities.

A large part of it is due to the fact that we have a system that works. It may not work very well for everyone, that's granted, but it works by and large. It's not just because we had a very present government from day one, but it's also because we had generations of Singaporeans who supported the system and worked to build that system for all of us.

Closing

Keith (01:05:21)

Thank you so much for coming on.

Susan (01:05:24)

Thank you.

Keith (01:05:25)

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to The Front Row Podcast.

Thank you for checking out my interview with Janadas Devan.

Janadas Devan is the Senior Adviser at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information and current Deputy Secretary at the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore

Mr Devan coordinated The Albatross File: Inside Separation, the authoritative 488-page volume documenting Singapore's path to independence, co-published by Straits Times Press and the National Archives of Singapore.

Here is more context on The Albatross File:

The troubled 1963 merger with Malaysia began with fundamental disagreements and was further strained by the 1964 race riots.

Finance Minister Dr Goh Keng Swee maintained a secret file code-named "Albatross"—referencing Coleridge's poem about burden and consequence—containing Cabinet memos, negotiation records, and his handwritten notes from meetings with Malaysian leaders.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Trailer
00:51 Subscribe!
01:19 Did We Take Merger For Granted?
05:25 The 1945 Split: Singapore's First Separation
09:44 Battle for Merger
12:48 What Tunku Actually Wanted
16:20 Ten Months: From Victory to Riots In Singapore
19:08 September 1963: PAP's Big Malay Win
26:30 Misreading Malaysian Politics
28:33 The Counter-Offensive Gamble
38:29 LKY's Strategy Works Too Well
42:35 The Idealists Who Opposed Separation
46:30 Ideological Divide in Singapore's Cabinet
49:49 How Real Was The Risk to Lee Kuan Yew?
52:53 How LKY Rattled UMNO
57:16 LKY's International Reputation
59:16 Why Secrecy Was Essential
01:04:21 Tunku's Decision: "Singapore as Gangrene"
01:07:17 Dr Goh's Masterstroke
01:11:28 Understanding Separation In Context
01:15:30 Three Lessons for Singapore


This is the 72nd episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 00:01:13

We take it for granted that Singapore's merger with Malaysia was almost inevitable, at least for the lay public like me. But if we look early on in our history, we see that even in the time of someone like David Marshall in 1955, there was this idea that he wanted a merger with Malaysia. But back then, the Tunku was already lukewarm. He was not convinced. So the idea that we would eventually head towards merger between Singapore and Malaysia seemed at least not inevitable. At the very least, it seems very historically contingent.

Janadas  00:01:41

The people who wanted merger were all Singaporean. It was an article of faith for the founding generation, both within the PAP and outside the PAP. As you mentioned, David Marshall, chief minister in 1955, was the first to broach merger with the Tunku. It was the Malaysian leadership, in particular the Tunku, who was resistant to the idea of Malaysia.

Almost the first article of the PAP's manifesto when it was formed in 1954 was merger. This was not just the left or the right, but everyone. There is a Malayan Communist Party, there is no Singapore Communist Party. They took it as an article of faith that Singapore should belong to Malaya, the peninsula.

You must remember at that time it was inconceivable for a city state, for a city to be independent, to exist on its own. Even now, besides Singapore, how many city states are there? Actually, it's only Monaco and Vatican City. That's it. So it wasn't obvious that Singapore could survive on its own as an independent country.

We forget this, but for a very long part of Singapore's history, in fact for most of its existence as a British possession, we were part of Malaya. We were part of the Straits Settlements, which included Malacca and Penang and Singapore. Singapore was the central city of the Straits Settlements.

After the war, the British decided they would propose the Malayan Union, and very early they decided to keep Singapore out of the Malayan Union. Why? Because they knew that a Malayan Union with Singapore as part of the Malayan Union would be rejected. Malaya by itself, excluding Singapore, had about 1.9 million Chinese, 2.1 million Malays, and about 600,000 Indians. This was in 1945-46.

To have included Singapore would have meant that the Chinese would have overwhelmed the Malays. Even then, with a bare plurality of 2.1 compared to 1.9, the Malay leadership rejected the Malayan Union. Why? Because it had proposed liberal rules for citizenship. Almost all the Chinese then in Malaya would have been accepted as citizens. UMNO was formed to object to the Malayan Union. They put in place far more restrictive requirements for citizenship. You had to understand Malay and so on. The vast majority of the Chinese population was not given citizenship in the Federation of Malaya.

Singapore was hived off as a separate Crown Colony only in 1945. You might actually call that the first separation. The British were the ones who decided to put Singapore out of Malaya.

After that, it was an article of faith by everyone that Singapore could not be independent other than as a part of Malaya. This was an almost universal sentiment.

Keith 00:05:23

You go back to this idea of the article of faith, and it's not clear to me as a reader whether this was actually a consensus view.

Janadas  00:05:29

They were all in favour of merger for a variety of different reasons. Nobody really believed that Singapore could succeed economically by itself. The best case against an independent Singapore was made by the PAP's founding leaders. As Rajaratnam says in oral history, after 1965 they had to spend the rest of their life proving themselves wrong because they were the ones who made the case that Singapore could not survive on its own. Everyone, without exception.

Keith 00:06:07

So within the party itself, they already agreed that for economic reasons we needed to merge.

Janadas  00:06:13

Economic reasons, security reasons, and for political reasons too. The PAP leadership at that time felt that if they were part of Malaysia, the federal authority would take action against the communists or the extreme left. That was another reason why they wanted merger.

Keith 00:06:38

Can you say more about the security reasons? When I read about the political angle of maybe a merger as a way to guarantee PAP survival and to a certain extent protect itself from the communist insurgency.

Janadas  00:06:52

When we read about, for example, Operation Coldstore. Operation Coldstore took place before we joined Malaysia, but certainly the decision on Operation Coldstore was made by the Internal Security Council, in which Malaya had a decisive vote. It couldn't have happened otherwise. If the British and the Singaporeans had disagreed, the breaking vote, the casting vote, was held by Malaya.

For the Malayans, the British persuaded them, and they accepted and realized that if Singapore were to go communist, for example, you would have a so-called Cuba at the feet of Malaya. So from their point of view, they could see that Singapore's security was inextricably a part of their security, internal security as well as external security.

Singapore was a major British base and had been for a very long time. It was part of the defence structure for both Malaysia, Malaya, the peninsula, as well as all the other British possessions in Southeast Asia. The reason why the British built a naval base in Singapore from the 1920s onwards was actually not to defend Singapore, but to defend the approaches to India, which was their major possession, and of course to ensure the sea lanes between Britain, India, and then their other possessions, Australia, part of the Dominion, Australia and New Zealand. So it was part of a global security structure.

At that point, Britain was still a major power, just gone through the war. They all saw Singapore as very much a part of the security and economic structure that they were trying to put in place post-war.

Keith 00:08:59

So you couldn't... For Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP, I think the public articulation of the way they appeal to investors has always been this idea of, one, the common market, and two, this idea of a Malaysian Malaysia, right? But the security aspect also played a part, both internal as well as external, but it's not been more publicly discussed back then.

Janadas  00:09:21

No, it was. You look at Mr Lee's Battle for Merger talks in the lead-up to the referendum. He was very explicit in arguing that Singapore could not survive by itself. The very idea of Singapore as an independent country was absurd. He said that it would be to commit national suicide if we didn't merge. Everyone, all of them, felt that way.

Keith 00:09:53

The road to merger, and you alluded to the Battle for Merger. There was this huge contestation for how and on what terms Singapore should merge with Malaysia. I think both David Marshall's Workers' Party and Barisan Sosialis opposed the PAP's view of merger in parliament explicitly. I wanted to ask, do you think there was any credence to their view as to why Singapore should merge on different terms than the PAP proposed?

Janadas  00:10:17

Both Barisan and David Marshall objected to the terms of Malaysia as set out by the Singapore leadership, the PAP. They had a referendum, and the PAP alternative got substantial support, more than 70%. And so we went through. But by that time, David Marshall had accepted that the terms the PAP had negotiated were adequate.

He had objected to the initial terms because he felt that Singapore citizens would become second-class citizens in Malaya. So he objected. But when he was chief minister, he himself mooted merger, didn't get his way with the Tunku. Then, on the eve of the referendum, there was a famous debate between him and Mr Lee, and he accepted at that debate that the terms that they had negotiated on citizenship were fair. So that actually played a part in assuring a portion of the Singapore population that the terms the PAP had negotiated were adequate.

But he was not the decisive figure. The decisive players were the Barisan on one side and then the PAP. The Barisan actually miscalculated. They had argued in favour of joining Malaysia on the same terms as all the other states in Malaya. What they didn't realise, and they couldn't repair the damage once it was pointed out to them, that if we had joined Malaysia on the same terms as the other states in Peninsula Malaya, a sizable portion of Singapore's Chinese population would have been disenfranchised. So which is why that argument lost.

It is very important to realise that none of them, either Barisan or David Marshall, argued against merger as such. It was an argument about the terms of merger, not whether Singapore should merge. As I said, it was an article of faith by almost everybody in Singapore that there was no alternative to merger.

Keith 00:12:44

What are the terms that the PAP set as we went into merger?

Janadas  00:12:49

Actually, as it turned out, it would have been better if Singapore had merged with Malaysia on the terms the Tunku initially conceived. The Tunku wanted Singapore to be part of Malaysia as an autonomous territory. You take care of all your affairs, and Kuala Lumpur will take charge only of foreign policy and defence. In other words, he saw Kuala Lumpur as taking the place of the British.

When Singapore became self-governing in 1959, it had full internal self-government except for foreign policy and defence, which remained with the British. And then, of course, internal security became a shared responsibility with Malaya, the federation, having a decisive voice.

We had the police under Singapore between 59 and 63. We had a minister for home affairs. Mr Ong Pang Boon was minister of home affairs. When we joined Malaysia, we no longer had a minister of home affairs.

Unfortunately, the Malaysian finance minister, Tun Tan Siew Sin, objected to giving Singapore that much autonomy, especially authority over finance and taxation and revenue. So he insisted on a greater federal role, oversight over Singapore. In the end, Singapore only had autonomy in labour and education. It had some autonomy in health, provision of health services. It had autonomy in broadcasting, but everything else was a federal responsibility.

As a result, Tunku himself said Singapore felt it had to interfere in Malaysian politics in order to safeguard its interests. So the Tunku was a man of considerable insight and foresight. Unfortunately, he didn't get his way. At Tan Siew Sin's insistence, the federal government played a bigger role in Singapore than the Tunku had initially conceived.

You can read the oral histories. The one thing they all united on is, both Tunku as well as Singapore leadership, they were all united in blaming Tan Siew Sin for a lot of things that went wrong. It was unfortunate. I mean, I think if we had different terms, I don't know whether Malaysia would have succeeded, but certainly the relations might not have become as fraught as soon as they did.

My own view is that the contradictions between the two societies were such, the social, the political contradictions were such, that inevitably the merger would have failed. It would have failed for the same reason Singapore was never a part of the Malayan Union. You can't change demography.

Keith 00:16:17

In 1962, Lee Kuan Yew was actually giving a broadcast when he was getting students, getting everyone in Singapore, to actually support merger. And he had this view that in a decade or 15 to 20 years' time, any political party had to eventually embrace multiculturalism.

Janadas  00:16:36

That it was the nature, as time passed and people became citizens, they would eventually have to take a view that you had to be multicultural.

Keith 00:16:45

So in the final analysis, was he right or wrong?

Janadas  00:16:50

He was obviously wrong. As late as June 1965, his famous speech, 5 June 1965, the first Malaysian Solidarity Convention rally here at the National Theatre. There is a clip we show in the exhibition. He said, "History is on our side. We will all become Malaysian."

Well, no. I suppose they were idealist. They underestimated the pull of sectarian identity. It was not a lesson they forgot once we became independent. Which is why you have in place all these safeguards in Singapore. The first thing that we did after we became independent, the first major constitutional change, was to provide for the Presidential Council for Minority Rights that had the power to veto legislation that affected minorities in Singapore adversely. And then, of course, later, you know, MRHA and all the rest.

But I think, looking back, all of them, Mr Lee included, underestimated the pull of sectarian identity, race and religion. Which is why they were shocked when the riots occurred. He knew things were heating up. He suspected something was going to explode. But they were shocked that communities that had lived at peace with each other for decades were suddenly at each other's throats. It was a searing experience for all of them.

We never had those kinds of riots before. And you have to consider, I mean, look at this. 1963, September 1963, Singapore's general election. It took place a few days after merger. There were at that time three Malay majority constituencies in Singapore. In all three Malay majority constituencies, the PAP Malay candidates defeated the UMNO Malay candidates.

This shocked the Malaysians, including the Tunku, who had come down to campaign on behalf of the UMNO candidates and the Alliance candidates. They were defeated. They lost all the seats they contested. Both the Malaysian Chinese Association candidates as well as the UMNO candidates, they lost everything. And they were shocked, in particular, the loss of the three Malay majority constituencies, which they had won in the 59 general election.

So here you have a multiracial party defeated UMNO in the Malay majority constituencies that September. July 1964, you have riots. Ten months. That's all it took. Within ten months, racial sentiments have been riled up, racial suspicions have been triggered, fostered, instigated. And you had riots.

And I think all of them, I mean you can read all the histories, they expressed their shock.

Keith 00:20:35

21 September, when there was this Singapore general election, I guess the aftermath of it within the PAP was that they were confident that this multicultural ideal could actually...

Janadas  00:20:48

No, I mean, not confident, but they underestimated the resistance. They underestimated... I mean, perhaps they didn't understand Malaysian politics. They didn't understand how race was not merely a factor but was central to Malaysian politics.

Their political experience was different. They grew up in a more cosmopolitan city state. Many of them were educated overseas. And just look at the leadership composition. It was multiracial from the beginning.

I remember Viku recounting his experiences meeting Tunku in London in their earlier years. Many of them were educated here. Razak was educated here. He was a classmate, or rather a college mate, of Singapore leaders. Eddie Barker and him were friends from Raffles College. They used to play hockey together. And then, of course, they met up again in Malaya.

So their association and their knowledge was with the Malay professional and upper middle class. They were exposed to political elites within Malaysia.

Keith 00:22:09

Why would they get it so wrong?

Janadas  00:22:09

You must remember also quite a few of our Singapore leaders were Baba or Peranakan. Mr Lee was Peranakan. So he spoke Malay very fluently. Dr Goh was Peranakan. So they were familiar with Malay culture, with Malay language. They had dealings and interactions with Malays, English-educated Malays. But they were comfortable with a certain type of Malay, so to speak. They had little knowledge of the kampong, simply because they were living in urban Singapore.

Keith 00:22:53

Going back to the general election in September 1963, the question I had was, if there was a tacit agreement between UMNO and PAP back then, it doesn't seem apparent to me why immediately after merger... It was literally a few days after merger when Lee Kuan Yew was proclaiming that we were going to be like brothers to Malaysia and this was not going to be a master-servant relationship. So there was this view that we're just going to run Singapore on our own and then UMNO can run Malaysia. But immediately after, there's this... It doesn't seem that the tacit agreement was actually in place.

Janadas  00:23:25

Well, yeah, because I think Mr Lee and the PAP leaders thought that the Tunku would not interfere in our politics. But the Tunku and the other Malaysian leaders did. They came down to campaign on behalf of the Alliance, the coalition, in the Singapore general election. And that is why when it came time for the Malaysia general election in April 64, people like Dr Toh Chin Chye, who was chairman of the party at that time, PAP, and Mr Rajaratnam and Mr Ong Pang Boon felt that they should contest in their elections.

It was a fateful decision, as Mr Lee said, because when they decided to contest in their elections, Mr Lee especially attracted huge crowds in Malaysia. The rallies were so huge that they all felt that they would probably win all the nine seats they contested. As it so happened, they only won one seat. But it rattled the Malaysian leadership.

And then April 64, they ramped up their agitation in Singapore. Ja'afar Albar came down to Singapore, agitated, made a huge number of, many incendiary speeches. And in July 64, three months later, you had race riots.

Keith 00:24:58

You look at the way things play out between 21 September 63 and 25 April 64. It seems to me like the classic example of game theory, right? Like if one defects, your counterparty will automatically defect. So if you come and contest in my elections, I'll go up and do it to you as well.

Janadas  00:25:15

But in this case, the PAP's strategy towards Malaysia was actually quite well calibrated from the onset. Meaning that they didn't directly contest a seat. Mr Lee was so nuanced, nobody in Malaysia understood it. You know, we are not opposing the Tunku, where we are not contesting, please support the Tunku. And so people took him at his word and they decided not to vote for him. I think some of the PAP candidates lost their deposits in Malaysia.

And it was so nuanced that nobody quite got it. But nevertheless, it made such an impact. And they were huge. The crowds were huge. They'd never seen crowds like that in Malaysia. I mean, the politics always was a bit subdued. It was more gentle, more low-key. Whereas here, the PAP brought the intensity of politics from Singapore. They had gone through a period of fierce contestation with the Barisan Socialists, winning hearts and minds. So we are used to a different style of politics, much more intense, and it came as a shock to the Malaysians.

Keith 00:26:29

But if you came away from that campaign and they only won one Bangsar seat, wouldn't the analysis be like, actually, this is not a huge political threat?

Janadas  00:26:34

Yes, logically, yes. But nevertheless, they were emotionally affected. And they could see the potential.

And also, it was not just extra-parliamentary, was also in parliament, because you had these intense debates in parliament. Remember, as I said just now, you had in place terms of merger that had the central government interfering to an extent that the Tunku didn't want in domestic affairs, Singapore affairs. And therefore, in response, in reaction, we had to take a... The Singapore leadership had to take a strong position whenever it came to budgetary issues and finance and taxes and so on. And so there were these intense debates in parliament.

And the British high commissioner at that point in Malaysia, Anthony Head, noted that whenever there was an argument in parliament, the PAP ministers clearly had the better of the argument. And so all this rattled them. And they responded in kind, responded by trying to intimidate the Singapore leadership.

The race riots was an act of intimidation. There is little doubt that it was engineered by elements in Malaysia, not the Tunku, but others. And this is... Everyone who commented and who was privy to information at that point, the Australians, the New Zealand diplomats, the British, the Americans, all concluded that the race riots was instigated.

Keith 00:28:16

We kind of take it for granted that in Singapore now you're much more multicultural, much more multiracial. But you're someone that lived through the period, witnessed that history. Do you have... Can you give us a sense or at least paint a portrait of what was it like to see those riots?

Janadas  00:28:29

Mustn't underestimate the impact of the race riots. They had an overwhelming impact, and I don't think Singapore recovered for decades from those race riots.

A whole host of things resulted from the race riots. The suspicion of Malay dominance arose from the race riots. Mr Lee says in his oral history they had a difficult time containing anti-Malay feelings among their supporters because they were affected. You know, they could see that the federal police was in federal hands, and they felt that the police was not evenhanded. Whether it's true or not, probably not true, but they felt that way. And it took a long time to recover.

There was part of Mr Lee's oral history where he conducted his oral history in 81-82, where he noted that whenever he visited the Housing Board, HDB flats, even then, 81, 15 years, 16 years after separation, he noted that Malay families tended to congregate, if not on the same floor, the same block. Why? Well, he had this theory. He said that they were fearful that if another race riot were to occur, they didn't want to be amongst non-Malays. I see. So they tended to congregate.

So he felt, and I don't think he's wrong, because you are a majority when we were part of Malaysia, suddenly you are a minority. So it took a long time, and I think a few generations, to arrive at where we are now. Which is why someone of my generation, I'm surprised the extent to which people of your generation don't regard race as a coercive factor.

We were much more conscious, my generation, of race differences. Why? Well, because of the race riots. It took a long time to recover.

I mean, deliberate conscious effort was required. A whole host of factors came in. Where in those days you used to have vernacular schools. About 30, 40% of Chinese Singaporeans went to Chinese schools. There were Malay schools. There were even Tamil schools. Now everyone goes to the same kind of school. Everyone, the main language of instruction is English. Your Malay, Chinese, Tamil, it's the second language. But it took years.

Keith 00:31:48

So it seems to me that the racial differences were more pronounced then also because you had all the social institutions also organised on the basis of race, which is very different now.

Janadas  00:31:54

Yeah. So I think to a certain extent it was this race riot that really sharpened the impact of having race-based organisations being too explicit in everyone's life.

They still exist, but I mean, I don't think you should assume you have arrived. But certainly we're far better off than we were. And it took a long time to recover. You don't recover overnight from cataclysmic events like that. They were... There were two race riots, by the way. July 1964.

Keith 00:32:27

Right. Yeah. So the fact they came quite in close succession to each other definitely weighed heavily on the minds of the leaders.

Janadas  00:32:34

Yes. And at the same time, the economic union wasn't coming into...

Keith 00:32:40

No. I mean, that's the reason why Dr Goh got fed up. The primary reason, as he says somewhere in his oral history, he says he had had enough of Malaysia, which is why he proposed going our separate ways. And he says, I just wanted to get out. I could see no future in it. And the political cause was dreadful, and the economic benefits, well, didn't exist.

In those days, there was something called pioneer certificates for new industries. In the two years we were in Malaysia, we only got two pioneer certificates approved by Kuala Lumpur, and one came with so many conditions you might as well not have given it. So our industrialisation was stymied. Our economy didn't do well. Well, also because of confrontation with Indonesia. So the common market didn't come to fruition.

So as Dr Goh says, what economic benefits? None. And the political cause, as far as he was concerned, were dreadful.

Keith 00:33:43

In the year before, literally in less than ten months before you won this seat where your Malay candidate won against UMNO, then you had race riots. And then within ten months you had racial riots.

Janadas  00:33:53

That's right. There's no common... I mean, the PAP won in Geylang Serai, which became the locus of the race riots ten months later. So this reversal of fortunes so drastically that they were very shocked by.

Keith 00:34:11

So then we go on to the events that led to separation, right? So I think there's this idea of hiving off that was surfaced three months after the second riot. There was 15 December 64. And then within, I think, for PM Lee back then, he was thinking about outlining the possible constitutional rearrangements. What were the permutations that were available at the table?

Janadas  00:34:36

Well, as you can read in the oral history, both Dr Goh's oral history and Mr Lee's oral history, Mr Lee in particular had determined on a counter-offensive following the race riots. If they were going to turn on and off this racial switch, race riot switch, as Dr Goh put it, then we need to organise ourselves in Malaysia up and down the peninsula. We had to become a party beyond Singapore. PAP had to become a party beyond Singapore in order to put pressure on them, whether in parliament or outside parliament.

So that was the genesis of the Malaysian Solidarity Convention, which was really an alliance of five non-communal parties that included not only Singapore PAP, but also political parties in Peninsula Malaysia as well as political parties from Sabah and Sarawak.

And so they determined on a strategy: I will campaign, I will put pressure on you, I will increase the political pain. So you start race riots here, you cannot be sure that there won't be an explosion throughout Malaya. So that was the strategy that he had adopted. It was a counter-offensive.

And actually, the counter-offensive began bearing fruit almost immediately. That is why the Tunku himself, in December 1964, raised the possibility of a looser federation. It was he called it hiving off. Then later it became confederation. It became the Ulster model. All sorts of things. But the general idea was to get Singapore out of the Malaysian parliament.

Those negotiations failed by March 1965. They had failed. Why? Because one, the Malaysians couldn't quite figure out what exactly they wanted because they kept flip-flopping. But more importantly, it failed because the British learned about it and put a stop to it.

The British were adamant that Singapore should continue to be represented in the Malaysian parliament. They didn't want their international position to be undermined by the perception that Malaysia was breaking up. And as they said, you know, we can't be defending you at the frontier against Indonesia and then the rear disintegrates. That's how they saw it.

So as a result of British intervention, that whole idea of a looser federation failed by March 1965, had unraveled. It didn't mean that the political struggle ended. In fact, it became more intense. There were calls to arrest Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Calls that actually the Tunku himself took seriously and considered, albeit briefly.

The Malays, the PAP side, the Singapore side, ramped up the political pressure. By May 65, the Malaysian Solidarity Convention had been formed. June 1965, you had the first rally in Singapore, massively successful. And then also debates in parliament. Famous debate in May, thanking the Yang di-Pertuan Agong for his speech opening parliament. And Mr Lee made his famous intervention, 27 May, when he spoke in Malay. Speech had a tremendous impact in Malaysia, and it rattled again the Malaysian leadership.

The Tunku is on record saying that that was the last straw, 27 May speech.

Keith 00:38:31

The first question I had is, why couldn't they go back to the Tunku's original proposal?

Janadas  00:38:36

Well, that remained a possibility. It remained a possibility, ironically, in Mr Lee's mind. In fact, his preference, as he makes it plain in his oral history, was not separation. He wanted to bring pressure, counter-offensive. He embarked on his counter-offensive with the aim of getting the Malaysian leadership to agree to measures that would allow Singapore to be more autonomous. That was his first preference. Failing which, separation.

So up to the eve of separation, his penultimate meeting with Tunku on 7 August, he asked Tunku, can we go back? By which time the Tunku had got fed up. The Tunku had decided by then, Singapore out. And it was the Tunku who said to Mr Lee, no, it's finished.

Keith 00:39:30

So did the counter-offensive work too well, is that what you're saying?

Janadas  00:39:36

I think the Tunku couldn't see any other way out. And I personally don't think the Tunku was wrong. If somehow or other we had failed to accomplish separation 9 August, the contradictions between the two societies were such that you couldn't postpone the inevitable for that long. In fact, separation may well have occurred under violent conditions. So it is a miracle. But very fortunately, we separated on amicable terms.

It wasn't the first partition, if you like, in postcolonial societies. The first cataclysmic partition took place on the subcontinent, India. And the partition of India and Pakistan was incredibly violent. More than a million people died.

So I suppose, looking back, we should be grateful to leaders on both sides, Singapore as well as Malaysia, that we effected this separation peacefully.

Keith 00:40:54

And even the reverberations of the partition still echo today. Very real, tangible ramifications. There's still, well, in effect, state of war still exists.

The other question I had was on this counter-offensive strategy, right? Like, Lee Kuan Yew was clearly seen as the main catalyst.

Janadas  00:41:12

But he was not alone. The others in the PAP leadership, for different reasons, were central to that counter-offensive. Dr Toh Chin Chye and Mr Rajaratnam and Mr Ong Pang Boon were the people who decided to contest the Malaysian general election. They also were the decisive figures in the formation of the Malaysian Solidarity Convention.

But Mr Lee was the leading figure, the leading voice. You know, they embarked on this with a different end in mind. I don't think Dr Toh and Raja Ratnam were ever expecting separation to be the outcome of their decision to fight on and fight on fiercely. But that was the result.

Keith 00:42:06

But when I was reading the different memos, it was very interesting to see the memos from both Rajaratnam and Prime Minister Lee, because you could see that there was a very clear... I won't say ideological difference, but they had a very different point of view, right? So I think for Raja Ratnam, he really believed that there was going to be a Malaysian Malaysia if only we persisted.

Janadas  00:42:28

Yeah. I don't think even after separation, Mr Rajaratnam gave up on that idea. In fact, quite a few months after separation, he's still on record saying that remerger is inevitable. So there were lots of people who felt that way. I suspect Dr Toh felt the same way for many months.

I mean, his letter to the Tunku accepting separation spoke about succeeding generations succeeding where they had failed. He said, although lasting unification of Singapore and Malaya have not been achieved this time, nevertheless it is my profound belief that future generations will succeed where we fail.

Keith 00:43:22

That's right. Yeah. And that was to the letter that Tunku sent.

Janadas  00:43:27

That's right. I was quite shocked by that because I thought it's like someone literally tells you to break up, right? Sure, so revisit this.

And I know many, most people in Singapore today can't understand this, especially the younger generation. They find it inconceivable that Singapore should not exist as an independent sovereign state. But for that generation, that was never in their wildest dream a possibility until it was forced upon them.

Keith 00:43:59

Why would someone like EW Barker and someone like S Rajaratnam... They're so different in their outlook. Like, what explains that difference?

Janadas  00:44:12

Well, first of all, as I said, Dr Goh was very much in favour of merger. He was one of the architects of merger. He was actually the lead negotiator when he was... He was the lead negotiator in entry into Malaysia, and he was the lead negotiator in now getting out of Malaysia.

Mr Barker was not involved in merger. He only came into parliament, the legislative assembly, following the 63 general elections. Then he became minister for law. So he wasn't involved in the earlier part.

They were all individuals. They had different beliefs, and they argued ferociously, as the record indicates. But fortunately, they held together. And I suspect that one reason why they held together, despite the profound differences, is they had gone through an earlier period of intense struggle against the extreme left and the communist. It was in many ways a more dangerous struggle and more dangerous period. In some ways, not in many ways, but in some ways, more dangerous than the period we had gone through in Malaysia. And it was a struggle that lasted for many years, almost from the beginning, even before the PAP was formed in 54.

They got into an alliance with the extreme left, the communist. And then, of course, they broke up. And they held on by just one seat for two years. And it was a very intense period. And I think the team gelled together then. They learned to trust each other. And therefore, when this test came, despite the fierce arguments, despite the disagreements, Rajaratnam, Toh Chin Chye, Ong Pang Boon almost didn't sign the separation agreement.

When they were persuaded to do so, well, by the Tunku.

Keith 00:46:15

It was like they literally were trauma-bonded. They were bonded by their trauma, I think.

Janadas  00:46:21

Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it's fortunate because... And Mr Lee feared the PAP splitting up.

Keith 00:46:30

Because they already split up under...

Janadas  00:46:35

No, I mean, this core leadership splitting up. It was a concern. We quote him expressing his concern, not only to the British and the Australian diplomats reporting him, you know, expressing his concern quite frankly in conversations with them. And following the negotiated agreement between Singapore and Malaysia, 6 August, 7 August, early morning, well, he had to manage his cabinet, in particular, three individuals.

The three being Dr Toh, chairman of the party, Mr Rajaratnam, and Mr Ong Pang Boon. These were the three Malayan-born... The others were Malayan-born. Dr Goh was Malayan-born. But these were the three figures who were most intimately involved in organising across the peninsula.

Keith 00:47:35

I wanted to get you to maybe elaborate on the dangerous strategy that he took. So he raised the political pressure throughout 65. He talked about the formation of the Malaysian Solidarity Convention, the parliamentary speeches, right? And you talk about it rattling the UMNO leadership. Can you elaborate a little more about what was the risk?

Janadas  00:47:52

Dr Goh says this. Mr Lee decided on this strategy, supported no doubt by others in the PAP, at considerable risk to himself. There was a very real possibility that he might have been arrested.

In fact, the Tunku came close to deciding to arrest Mr Lee. Even the Tunku, moderate figure. We quote British documents. British High Commissioner to Malaysia, Anthony Head, went to see the Tunku on 1 June 1965, three days after Mr Lee's famous speech in the Malaysian parliament, 27 May. And Anthony Head asked the Tunku, we understand that, here, rumours that a case is being made up for Mr Lee's arrest. And Tunku confirms it. Says, yeah. And then he tells the British, don't interfere. This is domestic.

And Anthony Head says, look, if you were to do that, Britain, the United Kingdom, would have to reconsider its relations with Malaysia. In other words, he was hinting, we can't be defending you. We might not be able to defend you against Indonesia.

And the Tunku says, well, in which case, I'll make peace with Sukarno. This is 1 June.

And then Anthony Head, immediately after that meeting, sees Mr Lee Kuan Yew and says, well, tells Mr Lee, they're thinking of arresting you. And the Singapore leadership had heard it also. And Mr Lee says, too late. I says, we can't backtrack. We must persist. We must continue to keep up the pressure.

That was at best. That was the risk. He was going to be arrested. And not only him, because, you know, they arrest him, it's not as though Toh Chin Chye and the rest would keep quiet. They will continue to agitate. They will continue to organise. And how can you be sure that arresting Mr Lee in itself will be enough? So very real possibility others also might be arrested.

That was at one end. At worst, he would have been killed off. And he expressed his worry. I don't think he thought that the Tunku would order it, but somebody else might.

Keith 00:50:44

The ultras.

Janadas  00:50:44

Yeah. Yeah. And he, there was a genuine fear. And he was not the only one who genuinely feared this. The British feared it. The Australian diplomats also feared it as a possibility. Because they knew who was behind the race riots.

And when the Tunku wrote to Toh Chin Chye on 7 August, telling him, look, I'm no longer in as strong a position. I'm no longer in a position to prevent bloodshed. What was that? What does that mean? It means that I'm not in full command of all the forces in Malaya.

So if separation were not to occur, I cannot guarantee that there is no bloodshed. And that is what compelled or persuaded Dr Toh and Mr Rajaratnam and ultimately Ong Pang Boon to sign.

Keith 00:51:51

And that was... Even with that, it's like you have to consider that actually the riot just happened less than a year before, right? So it's... This could be way worse than the traumatic event that happened the year before.

Janadas  00:52:03

So the arrest was a real possibility. The actual case was made. The British, as a result of British pressure, and I think ultimately the Tunku is not a bloody-minded person. You know, and he's a wise man in many ways. I think he realised that arresting would not have solved anything.

Keith 00:52:29

So then if we look at the parliamentary speech of Lee Kuan Yew in 1965, there was this part where you said he was speaking in Malay, he was speaking very fluently. I wanted to get you to maybe elaborate a little bit more on that. Like, in what way was it actually going to be increasing the political pressure?

Janadas  00:52:48

Well, as Rajaratnam put it, among others says, here you have someone whom you are trying to portray as a Chinese chauvinist, and here he is speaking in fluent Malay, meaning, unlike you, he's in a position to address not only the English-educated as well as the Chinese-educated, he's also in a position to address your ground, the Malays.

And don't forget, barely a year earlier, 1963, September, the PAP, led by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, won in all the three Malay majority constituencies. In other words, they have a capacity to organise among, at least what they used to call, progressive Malays. Right?

So there was no guarantee that you could confine the PAP leadership and Mr Lee in particular to just the Chinese ground. Right? So there was a possibility, and they felt threatened that he could expand beyond not only the Chinese ground in Malaysia and not only the Malay ground in Singapore, but also the Malay ground, at least in the urban centres. So that was the threat.

Right. And so they must have done their calculations, and they could not be sure that his influence would grow over time.

Keith 00:54:28

So in other words, in 15, 20 years' time, if like he got... Maybe even less.

Janadas  00:54:34

He could have. Yeah, he could have won the urban seats. I mean, I don't think, looking back, I don't think it would have been as simple as that. But they felt that way. Right?

And also, you must also remember that Mr Lee, by that time, had acquired... Mr Lee in particular, but also the Singapore leadership in general, had acquired quite a considerable international reputation. And in fact, the Tunku, after separation, writes to Harold Wilson, British prime minister, and says, well, you know, if not separation, I considered, could have considered, repressive measures. But I decided not to take repressive measures because there would have been an international repercussion.

Mr Lee had, quote-unquote, insinuated himself to foreign leaders, especially in Asia. Actually, he meant not only Asia but also Britain, Australia, and much of the Commonwealth.

Mr Lee undertook a famous, well-known journey through Africa at the request of the Tunku, December-January, December 63, January 64. And he spent 35 days visiting many African countries. Egypt, Algeria, meeting all the major figures of the anti-colonial struggle period. Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, Nyerere, Nasser, Ben Bella, all these people who were big names in those days. And they all came to admire and have a high regard for him. And every time they met other Malaysian leaders, Razak, Tunku, they would say good things about Mr Lee.

More importantly, Mr Lee had established close relations with the British Labour Party leadership, whom he knew, in particular Harold Wilson, Dennis Healey, and others in the British Labour Party. And as luck would have it, the British Labour Party won the general elections in Britain in 64.

If it had been the Tories in charge, may have been different. Douglas-Home, the prime minister at that time, the Tory leader, was an aristocrat, may have been a bit more comfortable with Tunku. Whereas the Labour Party chaps were all grammar school boys. They were not aristocrats, and they were intellectuals, and they got along with the Singapore leadership.

And Mr Lee says in his memoir somewhere that that was the most fortunate meeting he had with the British Labour Party on the eve of the election victory. Harold Wilson had invited him to address the Labour Party conference. So he went and addressed the Labour Party conference.

So, and then, of course, he had a relationship with Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, who was a major figure. He was a war leader. He was Australian prime minister during the war. So he was a tremendous figure in those days.

And so he had this... The Tunku was aware of this. Not only the domestic pressure, but the possible international pressure.

Keith 00:58:12

Tangibly, what would those international pressures amount to?

Janadas  00:58:18

Commonwealth. Right? Many of these countries were members of the Commonwealth. And in effect, Harold Wilson says that he told the Tunku, look, if you were to arrest Lee Kuan Yew, please don't come to the Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conference. And the Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conference was in June 1965.

So anyway, Tunku went there, and then as a result of, I suppose, all the pressure and so on he was feeling, developed shingles and ended up in hospital. And there is, somewhere or other, he says in his memoirs he was tossing and turning in the London clinic, unable to decide which was causing him more pain, the thought of Lee Kuan Yew or the shingles.

But anyway, I think all these things... Both the domestic pressure, the tremendous political pressure that the Singapore leadership had brought to bear, both in parliament and outside parliament, and their growing international stature. And the fact that he didn't feel that he would have carried British, Australian opinion if he had decided to take coercive or repressive measures.

And finally, I think we need to acknowledge that we are fortunate that Tunku was the prime minister in Malaysia at that point. Because Tunku was fundamentally a decent man.

Keith 00:59:57

I'm trying to put myself on the other side, right? Which is... And I don't think a lot of people talk about this, but it's just like, I can't imagine being in Tunku's shoes because he had so much pressure on from everywhere, right? So everyone is putting pressure on him.

Janadas  01:00:09

I mean, the Tunku... I mean, Mr Lee acknowledges in his order of history. He says, he said at one point, I suppose I should be grateful to Tunku that he wasn't a bloody-minded person.

Keith 01:00:16

I think now was a good time to talk a little bit more about the process of separation. So as one reads through the different memos and one goes through the book and even goes through the exhibition, I think one thing that stands out for me was just how secretive it all was. Right?

Janadas  01:00:33

Yeah. For example, EW Barker was typing out the separation agreement himself.

Keith 01:00:40

No, no, he got the cabinet secretary.

Janadas  01:00:40

Oh, the cabinet...

Keith 01:00:46

But at the start, at the start, was just, you know, he did all the research himself. He didn't... No staff assistance.

Janadas  01:00:51

Yes. You know, didn't even consult the attorney general. Yes. Did his research himself, went to the university library, called for certain books, and, you know, read them and drafted the thing.

And the only other person he showed the agreements to, the draft to, was Mr Lee and, of course, Dr Goh. And Mr Lee showed it to Mrs Lee. And Eddie Barker's wife didn't know. Nobody knew. She only knew, I think, when Lee Kuan Yew, when separation actually occurred or just before, the day before.

So it had to be kept to a very small circle. Number of reasons. Number one, they had gone through this period, remember, December 64 to February-March 65, when they were trying to negotiate a looser federation or even possibly a confederation. It collapsed because the British learned about it. And the British were very, very ingenious, very skillful. They took it apart piece by piece. So it didn't happen.

So both Mr Lee and Dr Goh in particular were obsessed about keeping it secret from the British. And so they had to repeatedly tell the Malaysian leadership, please don't tell the British. And fortunately, they didn't. When the British did discover on the eve, Anthony Head tried to put a stop to it. And by that time it was too late. That's number one reason.

Number two reason. If it had been more open, more people had known about it, both within Singapore and their leadership, it may not have occurred. Because Toh Chin Chye, Rajaratnam, would have objected. They objected to a looser federation. They would probably have objected to this.

Same on their side, right? I mean, the ultras would have objected. People like Ja'afar Albar didn't accept separation. In fact, he resigned as UMNO secretary-general in the wake of separation. Mahathir Mohamad was at that time just MP, but very articulate MP, very strong in his views. He objected to separation.

So if more people had been involved, I think it may not have occurred. In fact, I'm quite sure it would not have occurred at that point. And Mr Lee had to manage his own cabinet, and he had to make sure that they held together. And they may not have held together if it had become, if it had been more public.

Keith 01:03:47

So it's literally do it first and then maybe ask for forgiveness later.

Janadas  01:03:47

Right. Yeah, yeah. The whole process of negotiation had to start... So if we were to discuss the process of negotiation, we have to start with Dr Goh, right? Because I think he was, like, what you said, the lead negotiator was fundamental.

Keith 01:04:09

He was fundamental to the discussion of Singapore's eventual separation. And as one read through the book, he immediately entertained the option of separation.

Janadas  01:04:19

Yeah. But we should not now assume that separation occurred only because of Dr Goh.

Keith 01:04:26

No. Separation would not have occurred if the Tunku had not decided on it.

Janadas  01:04:32

Yes. Tunku was the decisive figure. If he had changed his mind as late as 7 August, it wouldn't have happened.

He had decided Singapore had better hive off by 1 July. He was in the London clinic, tossing and turning, as I said, unable to decide whether shingles or Mr Lee was more painful. And then he decided, Singapore, gangrene, cut it off. And he writes to that effect to Tun Razak, 1 July.

Dr Goh, in June, was away in Germany, medical treatment. He comes back early July. The Malaysians try one last time to check whether or not, to test whether or not, the PAP has support in Singapore. So they probably engineered a by-election. There was a by-election in Hong Lim, 10 July.

Fortunately, the PAP candidate won in an area where they had lost twice before in a row. By-election 61, and then again in 63, they lost. And this time they won.

15 July. Razak asked Goh Keng Swee to come and see him. And it was at this meeting on 15 July, when Razak, probably desperate, and by which time he had already received Tunku's letter saying cut off Singapore, asked Dr Goh, do you have any suggestions?

Dr Goh and the Singapore leadership didn't know at that point that the Tunku had written to this effect to Razak. That only became obvious when the Tunku published his memoirs in 1977. Looking back many years later.

And at this meeting, Dr Goh says, let's go our separate ways.

Razak, taken aback, says, are you sure? Would Mr Lee agree?

And Dr Goh says, if we do it fast and we do it secretly, yes, I think so.

Then Razak says, go and ask Lee Kuan Yew.

So Dr Goh comes back, tells Mr Lee Kuan Yew. He tells Mr Lee they are thinking of getting us off, hiving off. He didn't tell Mr Lee that he had proposed it. And then Mr Lee says, okay, but tells Dr Goh, try for a looser federation.

Dr Goh goes and sees Razak again, 20 July, and says, Mr Lee would go for it. But he didn't say the... But he didn't say looser federation.

Third meeting, 26 July. By this time, Razak got cold feet. Says, you know, how about going back to the earlier arrangement? It was Razak who raises it. He says, you know, you become independent. What if you establish relations with China? This, that, and the other.

And so... And Dr Goh, and here is where I think Dr Goh is the decisive figure. He says, anything you want. He didn't play along. He says, anything you want, we are comfortable. You want us to remain looser federation, we are comfortable. You want us out, we are comfortable. Whatever the case, our position is going to be strengthened day by day. We will win greater confidence internationally. The British are already favouring us.

And Tunku had to acknowledge that. Razak had to acknowledge that might be so. And domestically, our position will grow, will strengthen.

And then Razak groans and acknowledges as much.

Fourth meeting, 3 August. By which time Razak had got clear instructions from Tunku: go ahead, settle the terms, convene parliament. Parliament was going to convene on 9 August in any case, the Malaysian parliament. And everything was settled. He looks at the agreement that Eddie Barker had drafted by then, Razak. And he makes a few points, he changes some things on defence and so on in there, but he accepts.

And then 6 August meeting stretches into 7 August. They finalise the separation agreement.

So number one, separation would not have occurred if the Tunku had not decided. He was the decisive figure. Why was he compelled to come to the decision? Well, it was the counter-offensive from Mr Lee and the others in the PAP, held by others in the PAP. Here they were, contesting fiercely for both public opinion within Malaysia as well as public opinion internationally. And then, of course, you just won the by-election in Hong Lim.

So you try and arrest Lee Kuan Yew, you try and use repressive measures. How can you be sure that the Singapore population will not revolt? And what is more, how can you be sure that the revolt will not spread? Because they've now got support in the entire peninsula, not only Singapore, and also possibly Sabah and Sarawak. So they decided, Tunku, let him go. He says, better give Singapore to Lee Kuan Yew. That's what he says.

Number three. If it had not been Dr Goh leading the negotiations, it would have gone haywire. If you had had someone in the position... Razak says, how about looser federation? He says, okay, let's try and talk about it. So then the negotiations would have gone astray, and you would have considered this, and you would have delayed, and you may not have had a settlement by 9 August.

Why did we have 9 August? Well, nobody consulted an astrologer. It was just because parliament was convening 9 August, and Dr Goh said, 9 August, let's do it then. And they agreed. They were at that point as desperate to get us out, Tunku in particular, and possibly Razak also, as Dr Goh was desperate to get out.

Keith 01:11:18

I remember it's a much more complicated story than either getting booted out against our wishes or clever Singaporeans, they plotted our way out.

Janadas  01:11:30

Yeah. I think the story of a divorce is always... You always have to revisit why they got a divorce in the first place. And I think even Dr Goh mentioned that he said that Razak was dithering a lot.

Keith 01:11:35

Yes, he... That's why he kept changing.

Janadas  01:11:42

I mean, the Tunku was a much more decisive figure. He decides... Even Mr Lee gave up, 7 August. He says, you know, there was a decisive quality about the Tunku. It was quite clear when he had decided, there was no changing his mind.

There's this very memorable scene where Mr Lee says, look, Chin Chye and Raja don't want to sign. Can you write to them? And he goes and writes a letter to them, and he gives the letter. He writes a letter to Toh Chin Chye, and he gives the letter to Mr Lee, and he says, it's over.

Keith 01:12:17

In Irene's biography, and again in the Albatross, it's like you have a sense that they were really the idealists, and they were holding out. It took them a whole half a day just to sign.

Janadas  01:12:28

No, they believed in a Malaysian Malaysia. They were... There were quite a few others in Singapore who believed that Singapore was an inextricable part of the peninsula.

There were few in the cabinet. By that time, Dr Goh had come to this view. People like EW Barker felt that, you know, I don't understand why they wanted to merge in the first place. The other people like Lim Kim San had decided that merger will not succeed. We are better off by ourselves.

And Mr Lee himself was completely torn. He was the one person in the cabinet who was completely torn. He was genuinely torn, and he felt responsible for the people they had mobilised in Malaya. And he felt that he was abandoning them. And I think that's the reason why he broke down. The people he had mobilised, Malaysian Solidarity Convention, felt responsible for. Probably Sabah and Sarawak, bundled into Malaysia, well, largely because of Singapore.

Keith 01:13:48

The big question I had was just... I think you answered it. Why was he so upset? And to a certain extent, like, what you say, he felt like he was abandoning people.

Janadas  01:13:54

He had spent so much of his life at that point fighting for Malaysia. In fact, Tunku himself acknowledges it when he sends his memoirs, 1977 memoir, Looking Back, to Mr Lee. He inscribed it to Mr Lee: my friend who worked hardest to form Malaysia and hardest still to break up Malaysia.

Well, the second part is not so accurate, but the first part is accurate. Not only fighting for merger in Singapore, but also helping to persuade the British and others to allow Sabah and Sarawak to amalgamate into this larger federation, and winning international recognition for Singapore and Malaysia. 35-day tour of Africa, Afro-Asian countries, and so on.

Keith 01:15:03

I wanted to kind of draw some lessons for us as younger Singaporeans. If we look back at this history, I think the first immediate lesson that one should draw is that we don't should not take our multiculturalism, multiracialism for granted, because that came out of a desire to build institutions to safeguard us from the very traumas that created it. What other lessons for you, like, personally, remember?

Janadas  01:15:28

Don't take all this for granted. I mean, as I said, ten months. That's all it took for race relations to fracture to an extent that Malays and Chinese in Singapore were killing each other. That's all it took. Ten months.

If the Singaporeans had not remained united, if the PAP had lost in Hong Lim in 1965, 10 July, less than about one month before separation, the Malaysians would have decided, okay, this government doesn't have the support of Singaporeans. We arrest Mr Lee Kuan Yew and a few others in the PAP. There won't be a revolt.

The fact that the PAP won in July 65 probably stayed the hands of the ultras on the other side. The whole by-election was engineered. Then we are quite sure of it. The Singapore leaders at that time expressed, contemporaneously, their suspicions that this was a deliberate test. You arranged for the previous incumbent to resign, force a by-election, knowing full well that the PAP had lost in this area twice. By-election 61, where the PAP candidate only got 25%. And then again in 63 elections.

So that's number two. Very important lesson. If you have a weak government, there is no reason why your neighbours, near and far, need to take this government seriously. That's number two.

Number three. Related to this. Remember I said it was not only the counter-offensive that Mr Lee and his comrades decided to mount within Malaysia to bring pressure to bear on the Malaysian government. It was also his reputation, Singapore's reputation, internationally that played a crucial role. Those are things that matter.

The way how the rest of the world conceives Singapore as a useful player, as a useful partner, trusted partner, credible partner, is pertinent to Singapore's ability to survive.

You may ask yourself now, Singapore is not a G20 country, but prime ministers of Singapore, previous prime minister as well as the current prime minister, they are invited to attend every G20 meeting. We're not the world's largest economy. Why? Because of the credibility that you have gained, the way you conduct yourself, the way you position yourself internationally, and the brand, if you like, that you've established as a trusted government, a trusted entity, a trusted society.

All this matters.

Keith 01:19:08

The three lessons, if I quickly sum it up, is one, don't take our multiracialism, multiculturalism for granted. Two, if you have a weak government, your relations with countries near and far would be that much more bedevilled. And the third one is about retaining that position of the Singapore principle as a trusted partner, as a country and a government and a society that means something to the rest of the world. And that's something that all Singaporeans should continue striving towards.

Thank you for checking out my interview with Shaun Rein.

Shaun Rein is the Founder and Managing Director of the China Market Research Group (CMR), the world's leading strategic market intelligence firm focused on China. He works with Boards, billionaires, Heads of States, CEOs and senior executives of Fortune 500 & leading Chinese companies, private equity firms, SMEs and long/ hedge funds to develop their China growth, political and investment strategies.

Bloomberg Article I referenced (GIFT LINK):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-08-11/treasury-secretary-bessent-on-tariffs-deficits-trump-s-economic-plan?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2ODU0NzY1NiwiZXhwIjoxNzY5MTUyNDU2LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUMFVMMFVHUFdDUDYwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJFQjY0MzlEMzE4OTY0NEI4OTIxNkIxRTVFRUJEQzI4QyJ9.Z_uwklJfirwDytjSf0tiRNO3RpGWvF-Coo_G0aM57NE

This is episode 71 of the Front Row Podcast.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro
01:24 Did China Game the System?
06:16 Governance: Serving the 90% vs. The 1%
11:52 Corporate Influence Today
16:34 The Age of Tech Oligarchs
23:06 American Companies in China
28:40 Weaponizing the Dollar & Sanctions
33:42 The Resource War: Chips & Rare Earths
37:56 China’s Drive for Self-Reliance
41:36 Venezuela As A Sign Of The Times
45:12 What Happens to BRI?
47:22 Trump’s Greenland Ambitions
50:50 The Leadership Vacuum in Europe
55:22 Biden vs. Trump on China
58:26 US and China's Domestic Challenges
01:05:51 What the US and China Can Learn From Each Other
01:09:13 Shaun's Core Insight
01:13:04 Advice For Young Professionals

Keith 00:00:00

Today I'm joined by Shaun Rein, the founder and managing director of the China Market Research Group based in Shanghai. I find Shaun interesting because he's not only spicy in his takes, but because he also has a very clear understanding of how America and China works. He's an American consultant helping American companies relocate or move to China to expand their business operations.

In today's episode, we talk about the split between the US and China, where their bilateral relations are heading, why their relations mark a split in their economic relations, and its impact for the rest of the world. I found today's conversation to be thought-provoking and intellectually challenging. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with him as much as I did.

Bessent's view is that the problem of US policy in the past decades has been that it has prioritized cheap imports and thus allowed China, Southeast Asian nations, and even European countries such as Germany to game the global trading system. In the old days, they'd sell us a Sony and we'd sell them a GM. But we've de-industrialised and financialised. We sell them private equity. We sell them Google stocks. We sell them treasuries. All of this had distributional effects. You end up with the coast very rich and everyone in the middle much less rich.

Help me understand what is your view on Scott's diagnosis of where the state of the US economy is right now today?

Shaun 00:01:28

That's a great question. For your audience, I know Scotty. I advised him briefly when he was a hedge fund manager at Soros. I think one of the important things for people to know is that even then, when I last spoke to him around 2013, he was very anti-China. I was advising him on what stocks to invest in the country because I said that China's middle class was growing and would soon start to buy Louis Vuitton handbags and Nike shoes. For the next ten years, I was right. China became the largest market in the world for Louis Vuitton. Nike was getting 20% of its global revenue from China until recently.

The problem with Scotty is that he viewed China as a communist nation which by default was evil and by default would fudge numbers and would collapse. It was sort of Gordon Chang-esque in his analysis of the country. I wanted to put that out there because that's going to help you understand why America has failed over the last six to eight months with the trade war with China, because Scotty and a lot of the advisers around him are ideologues and they're not pragmatic, looking at the real data about the robustness of China's economy.

Now, let's go back to answering your question. There is some truth, frankly, to say that the United States might have over-outsourced too much of its manufacturing to China, to Vietnam, and to other countries. You can't blame China for this. China didn't steal jobs. China didn't do anything nefarious. They just created a wonderful manufacturing ecosystem, a reasonably low-cost and reasonably well-trained labour force, and wonderful infrastructure and tax breaks. Basically, China out-competed the United States.

In my book, The Split, I have a chapter where I talk about a metal fastener company that was in North Carolina. They came to me in 2003 and said, "We're collapsing. We can't find workers in the United States. The environmental protections and other red tape bureaucracy is too high. We're going to go out of business if we don't relocate to China." I actually spent the next couple of years helping this company move their manufacturing to China and they bloomed. They did incredibly well getting into the new ecosystem of manufacturing in the country.

Now, was China wrong for this? No. Was the company wrong for this? No. Who could be wrong? Well, actually, this company was bought out by New York private equity firms. You could argue that these private equity firms could have invested more money into the factories in the US to attract workers, but instead were just seeking and maximising profits too much. You could also say the same about Apple and Nike. Don't blame China. Blame Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and Phil Knight for relocating all their manufacturing to China.

Now, let's look at it from two other angles. First, I don't think this hurt job markets in the long term in America. Trump is always talking about how unemployment is really low over the last 25 years since American firms started putting their manufacturing into China. I think there was clearly some economic dislocation in certain parts of the country. But when you look at net-net, 350 million Americans benefited from getting cheap products so that we could have a better quality of life. Shareholders of Apple and Nike won, and then the executives at companies like Nike and Apple won. So I disagree that free trade, that globalisation is a negative.

The only thing that I can agree with Scotty on a little bit comes down to national security. Is it right that America outsources almost all of its antibiotics to China and India? That can become dangerous. Rare earths—right now, China produces about 90% of all rare earths, about 98% of high-end rare earths, especially magnets. That is probably something dangerous for the United States.

Long-winded answer, Keith, but I think there's some truth to what Scotty's saying, but not really. I think trade with China helps the United States, helps the American people. We just need to make sure that every country has enough manufacturing from a national security standpoint in case, unfortunately, global tensions continue to rise.

Keith 00:06:20

I think what Scott Bessent kind of alluded to was there is this idea of de-industrialisation in the US and excessive financialisation, where there is maybe excessive or maybe one would say absolute prioritisation of corporate profits, returning value to the shareholder. I wanted to ask you on the policy side, could this fate of de-industrialisation that spread across the US actually have been avoided, or is this something that's part of the course when you open yourself up to free trade?

Shaun 00:06:46

You bring up a very interesting philosophical point. Let me take a step back and look at what should governments do. What is the role? Should governments be looking at helping the majority or looking at the small group? Should they be helping the 90%, the low-income and middle class, or should they be focusing on helping the 10%, the movers and shakers who get the economy going?

In the United States, they take a very different view from China. In China, the CPC really focuses more on the 90%. I was talking to one of China's billionaires about ten years ago, and he said, "The CPC, the government, is always going to be good for the people, always going to be good for the masses, not so much for the rich." He smiled at me. He said, "Yeah, I've gotten really rich, but you know what, Keith?" He was arrested five or six years ago and he's been in jail for corruption since then.

The government in China makes sure that everyday people, especially under Xi Jinping in the last six or seven years, are getting access to healthcare, getting access to education. Now, by doing this, this hurts the wealthy 10%. The billionaire that I spoke to was corrupt and so he got arrested. He was unable to jack up housing prices, make a lot of money.

Now, I'll be honest. Over the last five to six years, my personal finances have taken a hit by a lot of Chinese common prosperity policies. But if I was greedy, I would complain about Xi. But I'm not greedy because I think when you take a step back, the purpose of a government is to help the majority. The CPC, with all their warts—they have a lot of shortcomings—are doing a good job in helping the 90%. They're reigning in the corruption and excess of the real estate firms.

Now, why do I bring that up, Keith? Because I just was in the United States a few months ago and my son, Tom Rein, moved to Austin, Texas. We were looking for a house for him near the UT Austin campus. It was shocking, absolutely shocking, how expensive the rent was for places that were dirty and crappy. When I talked to the real estate agent, I asked him why. He said, "Here's what's happened, Shaun. Blackstone, a private equity firm, backed the buying of every major real estate area within a 10-15 minute walk of UT Austin and put up for-profit dormitory apartment-like things. These units are really small. They might be clean, but they're charging $4,000 US a month for a small room inclusive of subpar food."

If you don't want to live in one of these for-profit dorms that are backed by Blackstone, you're going to be living in really crappy student housing where the owners know that they continue to make money because there's just a dearth of supply, and so they never do renovation, they never do fixing.

The issue is the United States has set up over the last 50 years, I'll say my entire life, as helping the wealthy 10%. It's a wonderful country if you want to get rich, if you want to raise venture capital, if you want to be the next Elon Musk, if you want to be the next Peter Thiel. America creates wealth for the top, not just 10%, let's say the top 1%, far better than China. But it also comes at a cost. In China, you don't see people on the street homeless. You don't see major drug addiction. It might not have the electricity and vibrancy of the wealthy going out and booming and making tonnes of money and buying Ferraris. But in the United States, you've got homeless everywhere. You've got drugged-out people everywhere. You have crime everywhere.

I think philosophically, your question is what should a government be? Should it help the minority or should it help the majority? In a communist country, because we don't vote in China, there's no way to voice displeasure with your government. In my mind, that means the government has to placate the majority because if they don't placate the majority, there's going to be violence and they'll get killed. They have to make sure that most people are happy.

In the United States, politicians just focus on making their donors and the people who vote them in happy. Everyone else, they don't care. You can see it—congressmen, senators, Democrats, Republicans alike. They all say, "If you don't like what I'm doing, vote me out in two years. Vote me out in six years. Vote me out in four years." That vote and the power of the vote in many ways hurts the majority because their voices aren't heard, because politicians will say just vote me out.

Keith 00:11:55

I heard from an ambassador in Singapore, one of our early ambassadors to the US. He said that the influence of capital in the US has gotten to a point where it's close to a plutocracy, where you have democratic interests increasingly captured by corporates.

Shaun 00:12:14

I don't think it's the corporates. I don't think it's the Fortune 500, frankly. I think the Fortune 500 probably had a lot more influence 40 years ago. Companies like DuPont, a company like P&G or IBM, I think they had a lot of influence then. But you look at it now, the heads of these companies make $5 to $20 million US a year, which is a lot of money, don't get me wrong. But the real money is coming from the hedge funds and the private equity firms, where it's very common to make $100-$200 million US dollars a year.

You see Joe Bae, the co-CEO of KKR, made $130 million US last year. Now, he's a great guy. He's a great investor, but he's making six, seven times now what the typical Fortune 500 CEO is making. That's not even including the equity that guys like Steve Schwarzman from Blackstone, Marc Andreessen from a16z, are making from their equity holdings in some of their companies and when their own companies go public, like David Rubenstein at Carlyle Group.

I think what's happened is it's no longer a plutocracy of the Fortune 500 companies or even the old money, the Upper East Side sons and daughters of the Mayflower. It's now switched towards the tech founders and the hedge fund and the private equity founders who are going out and they have $20 billion, $50 billion—and Elon Musk has $700 billion—and they're going out and buying politicians.

Now, in China, that would be considered illegal, having the corporates or the wealthy people too close to the politicians. In America, it's not considered illegal. It's called legal campaign contributions. It's lobbying. It's setting up a PAC. You look at it, the biggest donors to the US government are people like Ken Griffin from Citadel, a hedge fund, George Soros, another hedge fund, Elon Musk from Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. You have 10, 20 people who are spending massive amounts of money legally influencing elections not just in their home state but across the United States. They're becoming very powerful.

One of the differences I found, because I'm American but I've lived in China for most of my life—I'm turning 48 and I've been in China for about 28 years—is that in China, the businessmen are controlled by the politicians. In America, the politicians are controlled by the businessmen.

You can look at it. One of the biggest China hawks in Congress who was on the US-China Select Committee, he was from Wisconsin. He was always criticising China, said it was evil. He left his position as a congressman to work at Palantir, which is basically the new version of a tech defence contractor. I think you see that these politicians are working with defence contractors while they're still politicians to get rich, and then they leave.

Now, there's probably nothing technically illegal about that, but it's clear that if you attack China like Mike Gallagher did and then you join Palantir, there might be an understanding or a quid pro quo that's not stated, but everybody knows what it is.

I think the other guest you're talking about has some truth to that in terms of a plutocracy, but I don't agree that it's corporate plutocracy. It's more the finance capital guys and the tech guys in Silicon Valley.

Keith 00:16:21

To be fair, a lot of them have become corporates themselves. If you look at a Meta, for example, they're actually a full-on corporate now. Maybe some of these tech founders, they just represent a new age of corporates as opposed to the previous age of corporates.

Shaun 00:16:38

Yeah, exactly. You see them—you see Alexander Wang. He started Scale AI that was acquired by Meta or Facebook for $18 billion US. Now he's ethnically Chinese. I don't remember if it's his grandparents or his parents. I think it was his parents who moved from China to work in Los Alamos. But basically Alexander Wang is pushing hard about the China threat: "We have to beat China."

Now, I don't know if it's because he's ethnically Chinese and doesn't want to be viewed as a spy in the United States, so he has to take a strong stand against China, or if maybe it's because he's trying to get better policies and more subsidies. I think one of the arguments that Europe and the United States are making right now about China, especially when it comes to NEVs, is that it's unfair because China gives out and doles out so many subsidies.

But when you look at the subsidies in America, it's enormous. Elon Musk would not be Elon Musk without the subsidies from the United States government. A guy like Alexander Wang is sitting next to Trump in the White House a few months ago when they had a meeting about AI. You see earlier this week the CEOs of Exxon and Chevron are saying to Trump, "If you want us to invest that hundred billion dollars into Venezuela to get the sour crude oil pumping and refineries going in that country, we need to get guarantees from the United States."

Right now, the US government has basically become a handout to well-connected companies at, to me, a far greater level than anything in China, despite what you read in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or Bloomberg about the unfair subsidies that China is giving for NEVs.

Keith 00:18:36

If you look at, for example, the financial crisis in '09, when the government bailed out a lot of the banking giants within the US, one could argue that was actually a form of subsidy as well.

Shaun 00:18:51

The US has always given subsidies—bailing out the banks, bailing out Detroit. I find it very hypocritical when the United States government criticises China for a lot of areas: economic coercion, militancy in South China Sea or Taiwan. I think America does many of the same things and actually probably does things a thousand times worse. It's just how you couch the terminology, which is why I'm scathing of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

If China arms itself, then that's militancy, increasing aggressiveness. "They threaten our value system. They want to take over the world." I mean, David Perdue, who's the new US ambassador to China, wrote an op-ed last year or a year and a half ago now, saying that China was trying to invade the United States and implement a Chinese value system on America. I think that's hogwash. I don't think China has any interest in invading other countries. Now, it considers Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang its country, but it's not going to go into the United States.

But when America does the same thing, it's deterrence. It's the modern version of the Monroe Doctrine. It's about ensuring national security by killing people, fishermen just floating around in extrajudicial killings off the coast of Venezuela. It's threatening to take over Greenland under the guise of national security that Russia and China is supposedly up there, when at the end of the day it's more about the rare earth deposits that are in Greenland. It's become a kleptocracy.

What the United States does when they criticise China, it always shocks me that my fellow Americans don't realise that we do the same if not worse. I like to use this as an example: Right after America took out Maduro in Venezuela, China didn't do much. Nicholas Burns, the former US ambassador to China, said, "This shows China's weak. They've lost face."

But here's the thing, Keith. China only has two military bases outside of mainland China. America has over 800 military bases in over 80 countries. China clearly is not the military threat that America's government, that Silicon Valley like Alexander Wang, the military contractors like Mike Gallagher of Palantir, are making it out. If China couldn't even defend Maduro, then is China really poised to launch attacks across the world? I don't see China being a militant nation that's trying to become a hegemon anytime soon. Maybe they will 10, 20 years from now, but I just don't see that in the cultural DNA. They're very different from the cowboy warmongering culture that we unfortunately have in the United States that gets us stuck in endless wars.

Keith 00:21:52

Early in the early days of Singapore, when a lot of the citizens, newfound citizens, were Chinese, there was a huge aversion to even conscription politically. The founding leaders here in Singapore had to find ways to make it palatable for them to even consider two years of conscription. You're right in that point that there is something culturally within Chinese culture that is very averse to over-militarisation.

I wanted to ask you a paradox that I've observed, and maybe that's where your insight might come in useful. You've pointed out someone like Elon Musk, a lot of these American newfound titans, have a huge sway in how Washington dictates its policy, especially its foreign policy towards China. But at the same time, you have someone like Elon Musk who's been to Shanghai, who's set up a gigafactory there, who's done a lot of investments within China as well. Then my question becomes: why is that strain of "China is evil, China is bad" thinking remains such a dominant stream, despite the fact that you have a lot of these elites—one might say they have actually done a lot of business in China themselves?

Shaun 00:23:10

The reality is a lot of them haven't done that well in China. Elon Musk, he makes hardware. He's done very well here. Bill Gates is always welcomed as a friend of China. Microsoft has made a lot of money. You've seen Apple clearly has made a lot of money. But aside from those three, a lot of Silicon Valley has been shut out of China.

Now there's a discussion: Is it that China has too many onerous regulations, censorship, that prevents the Western companies? Or is it the Western companies don't want to make the concessions that they would have to make? Apple has flowered in China, but they're willing to censor apps. They're willing to do what needs to be done to adhere to what the Chinese government wants. And they have been fabulously rewarded for that, with China being the second largest market in the world for Apple.

But you see a company like Google. Google was allowed in China, but they had to censor. It wasn't the Chinese government that blocked Google. It was Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin and Larry Page who one day said, "We don't want to censor anymore." And so they pulled Google.cn out of the country. For Americans, a lot of them say, well, the Chinese government banned them. From the Chinese perspective, it was no—Google would have been allowed to operate its search engine in China if they agreed to follow censorship.

Now, in my own mind, the reason why Google left was not because they said "do no evil"—they said they don't want to censor and be implicitly involved with evil Chinese government policies. It was because they lost. Google and Kai-Fu Lee got their butt kicked by Baidu and Chinese search engine players. Kai-Fu Lee in my mind failed as the head of Google and lost market share to Baidu.

If it was about "do no evil" and purely a political stand, why does Google make billions of dollars in China today? The whole Android operating system—my office is in Lujiazui, and just a couple minutes' walk away from my office at the World Financial Center, there's a huge Google operation. So they make tonnes of money in China. It's not that China blocked them, it's that they left.

LinkedIn, which I used to be very active on—I actually helped LinkedIn. I was their strategy consultant when they first came into China. They were allowed to be in China. It was a couple of years ago Microsoft decided that the storage and data laws were too onerous in China to continue. But frankly, I think they left because they were worried about being attacked by DC and activists in America. They didn't want to be attacked for censoring. For LinkedIn, which also wasn't doing very well after it was acquired by Microsoft in China, I think they said, "You know what, the risk and reward is just not worth it. Let's pull out."

Silicon Valley has often failed. Now again, you can argue it's because they lost money. You can argue that the Chinese government was too much. But it's very clear to me that China said, "Here are the rules. You can follow them if you want to follow them. Even though you're American, you can stay in China."

This is very different from what's happening in the United States right now. In the US, because TikTok is owned by China or Chinese people and Chinese companies, they are automatically banned. I think that's wrong. TikTok has said, "Whatever rules you want us to adhere to, we will do so. We will house with Oracle in the US. We will put our data, we will hire thousands of people. We will do whatever America wants. Open up the kimono and allow you to see what we do so that we can stay in America."

But because they're Chinese, America automatically bans them. It's the same thing with DJI and drones. They were banned just because they're Chinese. There's no evidence of wrongdoing. There's no roadmap for a Huawei, a DJI, or TikTok to invest in America in the way that there is a roadmap for Google. There is a roadmap for Facebook.

The other thing, Keith, before I end this, is that Zuckerberg—Facebook generates about 10% of its revenue or about $5 billion US dollars a year selling to Chinese. They sell to Chinese companies. So for them, the risk-reward was: "We don't want to censor and get attacked by America. It's better just to sell our ad space to Chinese companies that are trying to sell their products into the United States."

Keith 00:27:57

This captures a little bit of the dynamic of the split, which I think you talk about in your book. There is a split in not just, I guess, policy infrastructure or even economics now—it's that literally there's just two different views of the world represented by the US and China. I want to quote something from your book. You said, "The world is splitting between the US and China. No government, no country or person is immune to the rising tension between the world's two superpowers. Countries must choose if they want to get closer to China's economic orbit or America's. And it is virtually impossible to be neutral and trade closely with both."

Where do you see the split being most pronounced today?

Shaun 00:28:46

Let's just look at what's happening in the last week in Latin America and the Caribbean. Trump has taken out Maduro in Venezuela and they have been sanctioning or threatening sanctions throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It's mafia-esque. They basically are saying to countries, "Follow us, be our vassal state, decouple from China, or we might take you out." They have threatened to go into armed aggression into Mexico. They're talking about how the days of the Cuban government are coming to an end.

In Trinidad, they've installed radar and military equipment in Trinidad's largest airport. They've put sanctions on not just politicians in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also on their family members. It's really mafia-like. It's "do what we want or we will sanction not just you but also your children."

When you have some of these countries that are only a couple hundred thousand people or a couple million people, getting sanctioned by the US destroys your life. You can't get credit cards. It's not easy to travel on American carriers. Your kids can't go to the United States to study. It's devastating for people who get sanctioned from the United States because the US controls the US dollar trading system.

That's why I think there's a de-dollarisation push from China and Russia and even the UAE, because a lot of these countries, their leaders are worried that they'll be next, that if they don't do whatever America wants, they'll get sanctioned. When China sanctions, it really doesn't matter. China sanctioned Marco Rubio. Who cares? China sanctioned Anduril's founder Palmer Luckey. Who cares? They don't have assets in China. They don't care that they can't do business with Bank of China.

While you look at the Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam during the terrorist rioting attacks in 2019, she got sanctioned by the US and she said that her life was very difficult afterwards because no bank wanted to let her have accounts, even Chinese banks, because in order for the Chinese banks to be global, they have to trade in US dollars. So she was getting paid in cash.

You see Francesca Albanese, I think her name is, from the UN, who was talking about what's happening in Palestine and Israel and Gaza and said that this was crimes against humanity, genocide. She has been sanctioned by the US and she said that she's having problems living a daily life. You see the ICC prosecutors who wanted to potentially take Israel to court for genocide in Gaza. They got locked out of their email account because their email accounts are on Microsoft.

I think, Keith, what you see is the United States is using a cudgel. It's quite scary in Latin America and the Caribbean to force people to adhere to whatever Trump wants. That's right now the biggest, most dangerous area where you see this choice: China versus the US. But I think you're going to see it repeated throughout the rest of the world.

If Trump is saying we're going to control Venezuelan oil, there's a question of will Venezuela be allowed to sell their oil to China. China's invested hundred billion US dollars over the last couple of decades to prop up Maduro and the previous administration. Iran—China gets 20 to 30% of its oil from Iran. If the Iranian regime collapses and you put in a puppet or vassal of the United States, will the US force them not to sell oil to China?

It's a very dangerous time, Keith. I'm typically a very optimistic person, but I have felt this impending sense of doom over the last five to eight years in the world because the Americans—and I love America. I think you and I have talked about this in the past. I might want to become a senator or I would love to be Secretary of State. But I feel that our endless warmongering and bullying might cause a World War III and at the very least is going to cause impoverishment for billions of people around the world because America wants to control too much and is using weapons and bullying to extract what they want. Economic coercion has been far more serious than anything China has ever done.

Keith 00:33:39

What we are seeing right now is between the US and China—they're both trying to find leverage or control over resources, strategic resources for the global economy, be it oil, rare earths, critical minerals. Each is trying to find something they could have leverage over the other. So maybe in the case of Venezuela, is that a step one, from the US perspective, to try to secure oil as a strategic resource that it could then have leverage over China, just as China has over the US with regards to critical minerals?

Shaun 00:34:25

Right now we're fighting a war for resources, commodities, around the world, and it's dangerous. In my book, The Split, I have two chapters that I hope readers look at. One chapter is on semiconductors and the other chapter is on rare earths.

Even though the book came out at the end of 2024, it's still extremely relevant because I predicted almost month by month what was going to happen. I think the United States made a huge mistake by limiting the exports of Nvidia and other chips. They wanted to do that to control China, and this is something that the Biden regime did. Huge mistake, because China wasn't just going to roll over and die.

China has the money, they have the engineering talent, they have the government ecosystem, and their backs were against the wall. So over the last five to six years, they've been focused tremendously on semiconductor innovation. You've seen just in the last couple of months, I think Cambricon and other Chinese semiconductor companies, their share prices have soared in IPOs. AI companies have soared in IPOs because it was clear that China had to make its own indigenous innovation sector in semiconductors because they were forced to by the Americans.

We see that Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, said that they went from a 95% market share to 0% and sold zero of their H20 and I believe H200 chips in the last quarter.

When you put sanctions on Chinese companies, it's going to cause them to innovate. It doesn't destroy them. My criticism of China is that in October during the trade war, I don't think they should have threatened exports of rare earths as much as they did. I understand why they did it because Trump was coming back with tariffs that were out of control, but I think by showing that they were willing or could put restrictions on rare earth exports to other countries, not just the US, but to Japan and all over Europe, that scared a lot of these other countries.

I think you're going to see other nations are going to be investing billions, if not tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, into building up rare earth refining. That's why you see what Trump is doing in Venezuela, as you said, is to control oil as leverage. But I also think that's why he wants to grab Greenland, because there's a lot of rare earth deposits there.

The next 10-20 years, the world is going to see a lot of tension and fighting over not just oil but other access to commodities. Even in the last couple of weeks, I've been telling everyone to buy silver. In the last couple of weeks, silver prices have soared because China's threatened to put export controls on silver—not a rare earth, but it's still something that's needed in the industrialisation or re-industrialisation of the United States if that happens.

It's a very dangerous time, Keith. That's why I think you see in China, a lot of young people aren't getting married. A lot of young people aren't having babies because they're very fearful what the next 20 to 30 years is going to look like because of the geopolitical situation and the Sinophobia that's emerged in the United States.

Keith 00:38:02

If we look over the past, say, decade, because Made in China 2025 just concluded, it seems to me that the point of China investing so much into its technology stack is to decouple itself from the US, or at least reduce its dependence. One could argue that trade diversification, while useful, it's not fundamental, whereas technology is fundamental in a certain sense. They didn't want to be reliant on semiconductors from the US. They didn't want to be reliant on chemicals from the US. As a result, what we're seeing now today is that even if their semiconductor performance is not on par with, say, for example, Nvidia, it's enough that they could survive if, let's say, the US decides to go all out against China.

Shaun 00:38:45

Yeah, absolutely. It's not just semiconductors. China's trying to become self-reliant on everything: beef, soybeans when they can, blueberries. They're worried that the United States, starting with Trump in 2017, is trying to destroy the global financial trade network. China can't rely because they're worried about sanctions on other countries for key input items.

If you go to Shandong Province, there's tonnes of beef. If you go to Yunnan, there's tonnes of blueberries. They're trying to become self-sufficient in everything. That's one of the reasons why I'm concerned about foreign trade. While there will still be good opportunities for Australia to sell seafood and beef and berries to China, the reality is that China wants to have it done homegrown because they do view it as a risk.

I think you see a lot of other nations, because of the split, are being forced to decide: do they want to go with the US or do they want to go with China? A lot of non-Chinese countries that align with China want to buy Huawei. They want to buy Cambricon. They want to buy Chinese technology in a way to decouple or de-risk from the United States.

But unlike China—China will just, if you do something that China doesn't like, they'll just stop doing trade with you. I wrote about this in my book, The War for China's Wallet, that if Japan does something or the Philippines does something, then China just will stop trade. They'll stop selling you products. They'll stop buying your products. They will stop Chinese aeroplanes from flying to Japan to bring tourists there.

The United States goes a lot further. They'll threaten you militarily. They'll take you out like they did with Maduro or Gaddafi in Libya, and they will force other nations not to do business with you. China never says to Korea, "Okay, we're mad at Japan. You now, as Koreans, can't do business with Japan." China doesn't do that. But America does do that. America says to Korea or to Japan or to the Dutch, "If you want to keep doing business with the United States, then you can't do business with China."

That's why the Dutch, they are not really selling the high-end or servicing the high-end ASML semiconductor lithography equipment right now because of American economic coercion. I think what you're going to see is a lot more nations are probably going to gravitate towards America over the next couple of years because of just the raw military power and the willingness to do maybe devious, arguably, methods as a means of leverage.

Keith 00:41:51

I think there's a lot of kind of commentaries out there talking about Venezuela, China's role in Taiwan, for example, and that they might embolden China to act in a way that is more aggressive. I speak to the more enlightened analysts in my kind of circle in Singapore, and they kind of just point out that actually, China doesn't need to take a cue from the US as to how it should act. It will just act purely in its own interests.

My question to you would then be: if you look at the impact of the takeover, one might call it, of US over Venezuela and its oil fields, or its attempt at least, what are kind of the strategic long-term implications that you think are real and tangible that will now factor into Chinese calculations of how it deals with its foreign affairs?

Shaun 00:42:35

Well, I think the key—you're going to see there's going to be a lot more spending on military. You're going to see China is going to spend billions in R&D and they're going to push more sales to other nations. You might even see other nations say, "Well, if you want to be close to us, you have to send Chinese troops to help guard us," the way the Cubans tried to guard Maduro in Venezuela.

You might see that China won't be content with just two military bases anymore in the world and they're going to want to project power by opening up military bases throughout the entire world to be able to serve as deterrence against American hegemony.

That's why I'm really—I'm not defending Maduro. I don't know if he's a good guy or not. I'm not an expert on that area. But I think this to me is just yet another example of regime change and endless wars that the United States likes to do. They put their excuse in a nice box and they put a bow tie on it and they say it's because Maduro was a narco-terrorist or selling drugs.

But my question, Keith, is if it was about drugs, why did they keep the vice president? Clearly the president alone wouldn't be running a cartel. He would have the complicity of the people around him. Secondly, if it was all about drugs, why did Trump pardon the former president of Honduras who was sentenced and found guilty in the United States for drug trafficking?

Again, I'm not an expert on Venezuela, but I have spoken to government officials from around that region and they've told me that Venezuela might be a conduit or stopover for trafficking, but they're not the ones producing and they're not big. It's going through Venezuela and going through other countries until they get into the United States.

To me, this is not about narco-terrorism or drug trafficking. It's about flexing power, threatening the tiny, and plundering Venezuela of its natural resources. It's very 19th century might-makes-right colonial-like thinking. That unfortunately is going to increase tensions over the next 30 to 40 years.

Now, for someone like Trump who's almost 80, he doesn't care because he's going to be dead. But for those of us who have children, we need to be cautious and hope that more pragmatic minds prevail in the United States. But unfortunately, we haven't seen that for decades. We just keep warmongering.

Keith 00:45:20

What are the economic implications of this takeover of Venezuela on China's BRI? Because if you look at the BRI, it's an attempt at greater economic integration across the world, not necessarily Venezuela specifically, but it looks at countries that may be more aligned to its interests and trying to build stronger and deeper relations. But now if you look at this, does this actually throw a wrench in the works of China's efforts to continue building up the BRI?

Shaun 00:45:45

Yeah, it does throw a wrench. I think countries typically like to work with China because they help them get rich, they help them create jobs, they get the infrastructure investment. That's why China, 20 years ago, was the largest trade partner of like 40 countries. Now it's 140. It's flip-flopped with the United States.

When I travel around Africa and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, they like doing business with China because there is a non-interference—I don't want to say no strings attached, but it's less hegemonic as a political creature than the United States.

Keith 00:46:19

It's transactional in that sense.

Shaun 00:46:27

Yeah, I think that's a good way to term it: transactional. But I think the global South or the global majority is going to see what happened in Venezuela and be scared, and they're going to say, "Well, if we don't do what America wants, they might take us out too. And China might give us money, but they don't give us any protection."

I think this does throw a wrench in BRI. It's not going to be huge at first because China is going to want to keep investing. But I've been speaking with government officials in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last few months and they've told me that their governments are less welcoming of Chinese money than it was a year and a half, two years ago, because of the fear of what the Trump regime might do with economic sanctions previously and post-Maduro capture or kidnapping with military action.

Keith 00:47:22

Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about Greenland, because I think Greenland shows a very uncomfortable reality, which is that when President Trump talks about wanting to take over Greenland, whether it's by force or by peace, he's in effect—one would say that he could threaten the entire dissolution of NATO. Because if you look at Greenland as part of Denmark and its place within NATO, it's an attack on NATO itself. But no one kind of had this scenario in their mind five or ten years ago that a NATO ally would attack another NATO ally. But here we are, that this could become a very real reality.

Shaun 00:48:10

A lot of people are asking geopolitical analysts, "What is Trump doing in spheres of influence?" I'm not a psychologist, but I don't think Trump has a grand plan. I think he's a malignant narcissist, and so we need to have psychologists look at what he's doing. I think he gets excited about causing tension and being the centre of attention and wielding power over other people. I think that he also likes profiting himself.

Now, I don't have any proof of that, but there's a lot of rumours out there that there's cronyism and oligarchs and all the people around Trump and his family are making a fortune. Now, I have no evidence, no proof of that, so I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised. That's what other people are saying. But I do think that we need to look into his psychology more than spheres of influence.

I think he's ripping up the playbooks of American realpolitik or neoliberal geopolitical strategy and he's just doing what he wants. Grab Greenland because he wants it. Threaten Europe because some of the Europeans don't kiss his arse and aren't nice to him. I think he's unravelled in the last year, year and a half. I think he's very different from Trump in his first administration that had more guardrails and that I think was better run.

I think this current administration is quite scary because it's not a king complex. It's not a God complex. I think Trump feels that he's above God, and it's very dangerous when you see how the cabinet, Nobel Prize winners, other nations kiss his arse. It's scary.

Keith 00:49:54

The NATO Sec-Gen has not come out to actually make any public statements about President Trump's comments. That's one. And I think two, within Europe there's a lot of anxiety. If you were to look at the split, it seems that Europe—I would think by now would have taken a much more calculated approach with regards to President Trump. The good example that I thought we could discuss was a little bit about Nexperia and Wingtech, the case where there's one run by the court-appointed administrators in the Netherlands over the semiconductor producer based in the Netherlands, Nexperia, and then its parent company in China aligned with Wingtech. That was actually a result of the Dutch government trying to fulfil or trying to comply with President Trump's extended or expanded sanction list, which included now subsidiaries of Chinese companies.

Shaun 00:50:52

Europe should be the big winner of US-China tension. Europe should play America and China off each other and try to extract the best trade deals possible. Individually, European nations are small—$3 billion, $4 billion, $5 billion in GDP. But together, they're powerful. They're about the same size as China.

But I think Europe has been mismanaged over the last 17 years in an almost criminal way. When you look in 2009, Europe as a whole had a higher GDP than the United States. Now they're 40% smaller. I just don't quite understand what Europe is doing.

You see people like Mark Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, who's the Secretary-General of NATO. He's gone on record saying that China will obviously force Russia to attack NATO countries and China is the big threat. But then he remains curiously silent when Trump is actually saying, "I'm going to take over Greenland."

You see Kaja Kallas, who is the former prime minister of Estonia—and when they talk and criticise Chinese corruption, her father was the former prime minister of Estonia too. It makes you wonder what's happening there. You don't see in China under communism where any president had their kid reach a high level in the party. That just hasn't happened. But you see kids of former presidents or prime ministers in liberal democracies often becoming prime ministers. You've seen it in Estonia. You've seen it in Japan. You've seen it in the United States.

You've seen Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU. They've attacked China, but they've been curiously quiet about Trump and Greenland. I don't know why. I don't know if they're paid. I don't know if they're scared. I just don't quite get it.

Now, I think in many cases you see a lot of British prime ministers, especially when they stop being a PM, they end up working for American companies. Tony Blair sits on the international board of JP Morgan. Some of them go off to Google or go off to Facebook. Rishi Sunak has done the same thing, working for American banks and tech companies. So I don't quite understand it.

They're weak. I think the people of Europe deserve better. You see a lot of incredibly innovative, smart, wonderful, moral Europeans, and they're being led by weak, spineless government officials who, I think, are bigoted and racist. They don't want to get close to yellow people, brown people, and black people. They prefer to look at them as colonial-era type cartoons. They're more willing to work even with Trump, who's directly threatening to essentially dissolve NATO.

Only Germany, to their credit, has been quite forceful in pushing back against the United States. It's quite shocking to me, frankly.

Keith 00:54:04

I thought that with the Greenland issue coming up, I thought that there would be much more kind of vocal opposition or at the very least there should be some form of government or policy pushback. But relatively, given the threat, the response seems relatively muted. Why is NATO's head silent after criticising China all these years and saying that he might want to open up an office in Japan in Tokyo because China is their biggest threat?

I challenge anyone to tell me where China's president has ever said that he wants to take over militarily a single NATO country. I challenge the audience to tell me that. I haven't seen that anywhere. But you have Trump daily doing this about Greenland.

Shaun 00:54:57

So if you look at US and China, it's clear that they will still be dominant geopolitical players. The US, I think, for a lot of the flaws that I think you have elaborated and you've pointed out, remains a very strong, vibrant, dynamic, innovative economy. And China on the flip side, although is a very strong industrial economy, it continues to see significant headwinds, especially in the consumer space.

Could there be a road out for both countries for a form of rapprochement where maybe there could be complementarities for both economies, and is the split really inevitable? What could take us away from that split?

I think it's inevitable, but I do think Trump is probably the only politician who could rein it in because he's got such popularity and just doesn't care about other people that if he wants to have good relations and a rapprochement with China, it can be done. I don't think any other politician can because there's too many warmongers, too many Sinophobes, too much pressure in America that would force any politician to take an easy way to get canvas for votes and scavenge for support by attacking China.

Trump is probably the only one who can have some sort of a rapprochement with China. To his credit, I actually like Trump's China policy more than under Biden. I think under Biden, we basically had a situation where it was liberal democracies versus evil communist authoritarian nations. It was basically evil versus good, cowboys versus Indians. I don't think anything that China could have done could have created a rapprochement with Biden. He was an ideologue.

I'm hopeful that Trump will come in April and visit Beijing and Xi will fête him as a hero. They'll play to his malignant narcissist side and maybe there will be more of a rapprochement. But I don't see the likelihood of going back to the Bush era or even the Obama or Clinton eras anytime soon when—I do think that we're on a positive direction going forward. I think it's negative under Biden because he's an ideologue.

I mean, he was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for decades. Biden, more than maybe any other man in the United States history, has been behind all of our warmongering over the last 40 or 50 years. I think Trump is just doing it about power. Again, flexing. He'll attack China, but he'll also attack NATO. He'll also attack Venezuela. He'll also attack India. I mean, tariffs from India right now are higher than tariffs on China. It's kind of crazy.

I was actually talking to the CEO of a major apparel company who moved a lot of his supply chain from China to Taiwan, Vietnam, and India over the last couple of years because he expected and wanted to adhere to what Trump wanted. He told me the other day actually he ended up moving his supply chain out of Taiwan back to China because imports from Taiwan into the US in his categories have tariffs that are higher than imports from China.

So I think Trump, again, it's not this grand strategy. It's very malignant narcissist-based where can he get power, extract things. That's where you have a potential for rapprochement with the United States and China. But again, I don't see that happening anytime soon. I think the split is right on for the next 10-20 years minimum.

Keith 00:58:29

Where do you think the structural headwinds are for both economies?

Shaun 00:58:35

I think both countries are facing a lot of challenges. I think in the United States, the political polarisation is scary. I spent a couple of months in the US this summer for the first time in 25 years, and the Democrats just hate the Republicans and say they're evil. Then when you talk to Republicans, they just hate the Democrats and say they're evil. I've never seen such anger before from everyday people, except for maybe in Cambodia where there's a lot of anger, you know, coming down still from the Viet Cong era and tensions with Vietnam. So there's a lot of anger.

The second thing that scared me was how poor so many Americans are. I interviewed a lot of Americans who had good jobs. There's one woman I met who's a schoolteacher and she worked a full job as a schoolteacher and then after she got out of work, she became a security guard at a housing compound because one salary wasn't enough. Then late at night and on weekends, she entered the gig economy and drove for Uber and Lyft.

I think one of the problems, Keith, that's happening in the United States is anger combined with impoverished middle classes. That's a recipe for disaster. When you look at it, every major civil war or revolution in the world pretty much started not from the poor people, but from disenfranchised middle class, university educated, who had dreams of living well. They can't live well because they see wealth inequality. They can't get good jobs. They view there's corruption at the top and they get angry.

I am very worried about social turmoil in the United States. It's bad. It's bad out there.

Now, when it comes to China, I think it's different. It's peaceful here. The quality of life is quite good. You can walk out at 2 in the morning. It's efficient. The government is constantly improving on their services. But there is this anxiety that's hit the population because real estate has dropped 30 to 40%. Income is very weak. A lot of people have faced salary cuts or stagnant salaries over the last five, six years. There's a worry that the government isn't pro-business enough.

I think you're seeing a little bit of economic stagnation in China and it's very hard to rebuild those animal spirits. If you don't get those animal spirits, you're going to face deflation and involution. If you don't rebuild those animal spirits, you're going to have a demographic time bomb because nobody, like I said before, wants to get married or have kids. If you don't have animal spirits, then housing prices are going to stay 30 to 40% down from their highs. If that happens, no one's going to get excited and spend money again.

I think you have a lot more vibrancy in the United States if you want to get rich like Elon Musk. But aside from the 0.1%, the quality of life is not good in America, and that could lead to social turmoil. I don't see social turmoil in China. I just see stagnation in some areas and the lack of animal spirits because of just the overall society. But people can eat, people can get their kids educated, people can get access to medical care. The quality of life for the 90% in China has gotten markedly better over the last 5-10 years.

So I'm not overly concerned about China. There's definitely issues that investors and businesses need to be worried about, but what keeps me awake at night is what's happening in the United States right now. Because there's too much anger. You can see it in Minnesota right now with the protests. You can see it with Black Lives Matter. It's just like a tinderbox ready to catch fire. Trump doesn't have the dignity, doesn't have the presidentialness to try to calm things down. Instead, he likes to fan the flames of anger with his social media posts because again, I think he gets off on it and wants to appease his malignant narcissistic tendencies.

Keith 01:02:56

When I speak to my friends in China, it's like they have a certain expectation of how growth would go given just how fast they grew in the past 40 years. And then when growth started slowing down, that was something that was very foreign to them because their expectations were kind of—they had to readjust the expectations. On that note also on the quality of life, the quality of life that they enjoy given the purchasing power that they have—they have a much stronger purchasing power despite a lower income. I think that remains one of the more underrated or under-reported things today.

Shaun 01:03:34

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think the reason why things feel so slow here economically, even though I do think it is growing 5%—I don't think the government is fudging that, unlike the Rhodium Group, but I mean the Rhodium Group doesn't have an office in China. So you have all these consulting firms that are based in the US that are spouting off about China's economy or political system, but they don't have anybody in China. It's bizarre, to be honest.

But when China was growing 12 to 14% a year, I actually think it was growing 15 to 20% in a lot of areas, and the governments often under-reported growth because there was so much corruption 20-25 years ago and the poor regions especially wanted to downplay their growth because they wanted to get subsidies from the central government.

If you're in 2000 and your province is seeing 15 to 20% growth, the average person is seeing a betterment or doubling of their quality of life every two or three years. I've got dozens of friends who were making $300 to $500 US a month in the 1990s who became billionaires in 5 to 10 years. The wealth creation was absolutely incredible, and that set expectations way too high where people thought: "This year we buy a bicycle, next year we buy a motorcycle, next year we buy a Volkswagen, the year after BMW, and the year after a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari." That's what was happening in China 20 years ago.

Now when people see the GDP growing at 4 or 5% a year, that means the economy is only going to grow one and a half, two times every decade. So they're not going to get crazy rich. They're not going to see that excitement. I think that's why so many Chinese are scared right now because they realise those days are gone. They're not going to be able to have the type of wealth creation they had for a decade or two in the late 90s and early 2000s. That was an incredible time to live in China. I was very fortunate to see it, but people now are scared.

Keith 01:05:46

Three rapid-fire questions before we end the interview. I think the first one I wanted to ask you was: what is one thing that you changed your mind the most about in the past decade?

Shaun 01:05:57

China's healthcare system has improved tremendously in the last decade. 10-15 years ago, when I wrote my book The End of Cheap China in 2012, the healthcare system was corrupt. It was terrible. Doctors would see 200 patients. You had to bribe them to have surgery. Now the healthcare system is quite good. You've got good talent. It's affordable. You have to wait in line.

I always thought that I would retire to the United States because I thought it had the best healthcare system. But over the last three to five years, I realised America's healthcare system's in trouble. China's is improving. I might actually stay in China because of the healthcare system.

Keith 01:06:40

What's one thing you think the US can learn from China? And what's one thing you think the Chinese or China can learn from the US?

Shaun 01:06:48

I think China should be a little bit more welcoming to criticism. I think too often you might have an unimportant mayor or an unimportant politician in a tiny little country say something against the Chinese government and then the Chinese diplomats go full-on criticising that country and trying to punish them.

You had a small village mayor in Italy a year or two ago do a small showing from an Australian-based Chinese artist called Badiucao or something like that. I mean, his paintings are terrible. They're chicken scratches. They're just awful. He's not a very pleasant person. He had to block me or I blocked him because he blocked me on Twitter because he was harassing me. But this mayor got mad because the Chinese government threatened Italy and protested. It became an international story of, like, another example of China doing censorship and being thin-skinned.

So I think China should open up a little bit on some of the criticism and allowing it from other countries and even from within China. I think the Great Firewall probably needs a rethink on how it's run because it saps productivity in the country.

Now, from the United States, what I would like to see—and this is going to sound crazy and people are going to think I'm a propagandist for China, but I don't think democracy with the one vote means that the government represents people. It's a nice story, but I'm from New Hampshire. I don't like Nancy Pelosi in California. I don't like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton in Missouri and Arkansas. I don't like Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. These are Democrats and Republicans alike that I think have played an insidious, nefarious role on America's government and thus global affairs over the last 40 years. But I have no way of voting out Nancy Pelosi. She doesn't care about me. She only cares about the people in her district and the political donors who give her money from around the country.

I would like the United States to learn from China and represent all the people a little bit better than representing just their small little people living in their district who vote. I do believe that the Chinese government is a lot more responsive to the needs of the majority of Chinese than America's government, for sure.

Keith 01:09:16

Given all the books you've read, all the consultancies that you've done for the major corporates of the world, all the advisory work you've done for leaders in industry, what you consider to be the one most core important essential insight that you have that you uniquely contributed to the world?

Shaun 01:09:34

It's important to come to China with an open mind and view Chinese and China's political system as equals and respect them. I think that's why I've been welcomed in China. Again, I'm 48 years old. I've lived most of the last 28 years in China, almost 29 now since we're in a new year. Unfortunately, I'll never be considered Chinese. I'll always be a guest. But I came to China to learn about China, to respect China, and maybe give advice from a good space.

I think you see a lot of other foreigners come to China saying China is inferior, our political system is better, our ways and culture is better, and they become very obnoxious and critical of China even if they profit off it. So for instance, in my mind, I would like to strengthen the CPC. I don't want to hurt it.

You see some other people like Jörg Wuttke, who was the president of the European Chamber of Commerce for many years in China, who's here for decades, and he was the head or the chief rep of BASF. I think people like that—when he retired from China after 30, 40 years living here, he suddenly moved back to the United States even though he's German and worked for Albright, which was the former Secretary of State's consulting company, and he's become very critical of China and was very critical of China's COVID response because I don't think he viewed China's government with respect and as equals.

I think, Keith, a lot of companies, a lot of book writers, a lot of consultants from the West come to China saying we're better. We're going to plunder the resources. We're going to profit, but we'll never think about maybe we can learn something from China too and merge the best of both worlds. I think that's what someone like Wuttke is.

I actually think Wuttke has done irreparable damage to China over the last 5-10 years because he's probably not racist. He's probably not a bigot, but he's been in China for so many years and suddenly he's attacking Xi Jinping as an authoritarian or attacking China's COVID response as evil. When in reality, I think the response was a little draconian at times, but it did save a lot of people's lives.

People in the Western world grab the criticisms from someone like Wuttke and use that to give fodder to de-risk from China, which is what he's proud of working with the EU and pushing the de-risking strategy. I have a lot of disdain for people like Wuttke who did live here for decades, made millions and billions off of China, and then turn around and say they want to de-risk from China because it's turned evil. I think people like that need to look in the mirror and say who really is evil.

Keith 01:12:46

Your unique contribution is to be a bridge builder, to go to China with open eyes and open mind and trying to understand and see what you can learn from China even though you're from a different political, cultural civilisation.

Shaun 01:12:57

Absolutely. Just respect—respect China. They're equals. Don't look down on them, which unfortunately too many in the Western world do.

Keith 01:13:09

Last question I have to ask: one piece of advice that you give to someone who's entering the working world today in 2026, what would it be?

Shaun 01:13:15

Two pieces quickly. Exercise and eat healthy. It's really important. I think when you're 22, 23, you're going to work crazy hours. You can stay up all night. You can work till 2 in the morning. You can eat pizza and McDonald's. Yeah, sure you can. But honestly, Keith, I'm 48. I feel like I was 19 just yesterday.

It's important when you're starting your career to exercise and lift weights, do some cardio, and eat healthy because when you get to my age, you can see people like me who have eaten healthy and exercised for decades. We are in better shape than some of the guys who ate pizza and McDonald's every day. I think that's going to benefit you long term. So exercise.

The second thing is get mentors. Go out and find three to five people, maybe more—the more the merrier. Just ask them, not for a job, not for money, but just ask them for informational interviews and ask them as your career goes: what works, what doesn't.

I did that with the former CEO of Mitsubishi, Minoru Makihara. He mentored me for decades and he gave me a lot of insight into Japan and China and the United States and how Japanese view China. I also got mentored by the CEO of Texaco, James Kinnear, which is—Texaco is now Chevron Texaco. He always talked to me about one of his proudest moments was empowering the Saudis to build Aramco. So Texaco invested in Saudi Arabia, but they trained local Saudis to run what became Aramco, make money, taught them. So it was that type of goodness rather than just extracting from Saudi and making money and impoverishing the locals.

I think getting good mentors is really truly important.

Keith 01:15:23

Yeah. To recap actually, there are three pieces of advice. The first one that you gave in the first interview, which was to take risk when you're young. The second one today that you've given is to pursue a lifestyle that's healthy. Exercise regularly. Eat healthy. And the third one to seek a good board of mentors.

Shaun 01:15:42

Just a little bit of self-promotion here, Keith. My son is 18 years old, Tom Rein. He moved to Austin. He set up a drone company. He's been profiled by Forbes, profiled by RealClearPolitics, and he just raised venture capital money. Will it work? I don't know. But when you're 18, before you get married, before you have mortgages, before you have kids, you should 100% take a risk, just like you did with your podcast business. You can see how it's bloomed in the last year and a half since we last spoke. Take risks.

Keith 01:16:19

Well, with that optimistic and positive note, Shaun, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and being an early friend of the show.

Shaun 01:16:19

Thanks for having me, Keith. Anytime.

Keith 01:16:25

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to The Front Row Podcast.

Prof Koh is Singapore's Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position he has held since 1990, and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. He is a veteran diplomat and negotiator recognised globally for his contributions to international law and diplomacy.

Koh's distinguished career spans international law, diplomacy and education. He served as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York (1968–71; 1974–84) and Ambassador to the United States (1984–90).

His most notable international contribution was serving as President of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, where he successfully steered 119 countries to sign the convention in 1982—creating what he called "a constitution for the world's oceans." He was also a member and second chairman of the High-Level Task Force that drafted the ASEAN Charter, providing the institutional and legal framework for the organisation.

Koh has represented Singapore in major legal disputes, including serving as chief negotiator in the reclamation works dispute with Malaysia over Tuas and Pulau Tekong (resolved in 2005), and as part of Singapore's legal team in the Pedra Branca cases before the International Court of Justice (2003 and 2017).

At NUS, Koh was the founding Rector of Tembusu College and currently serves as Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the Asia Research Institute and Special Adviser to the Institute of Policy Studies.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Trailer
0:42 Introduction
1:18 Living Through Decolonisation
6:27 Becoming The Youngest UN Ambassador
12:13 Why International Law Cannot Protect Small States
17:21 Condemning America in 1983
19:04 Creating the UN Constitution for the Oceans
28:20 ASEAN's Peace Miracle
29:51 Why LKY Was America's Friend
37:51 What Singapore Should Not Import from America
41:35 The Downside of CEO Worship
52:08 Understanding China
56:17 China's Return To A Tang Dynasty Vision?
1:02:42 How to Engage an Assertive China
1:07:14 Insights From Five Generations of Singapore's PM
1:18:07 Tommy Koh's Hopes for Singapore
1:21:48 Tommy Koh's Advice For Young Singaporeans


This is the 70th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

Keith 00:01:20

Thank you for coming on, Ambassador. I want to start with this quote I read in your memoirs. You said, "When I went to study at Harvard, I traveled on a British passport. After Singapore joined Malaysia, I traded in my British passport for a Malaysian passport. When Singapore became independent in August 1965, I traded in my Malaysian passport for a Singaporean passport." You traded many passports. I have to ask you, you represent a person from a different era, a person who's lived through decolonization. What was that process like for you?

Tommy 00:01:55

I'm 88 years old. I was born in 1937, so I was born as part of the British Empire. Then the British lost the war to the Japanese and I became part of the Japanese Empire. Then the Japanese were defeated and the British came back.

Then the process of decolonization—there was a big debate in Singapore about our future. The PAP was convinced that an independent Singapore would not succeed and brought us into merger. Merger did not work. We became independent. In my life journey, I've gone through many historical phases of Singapore's journey.

Keith 00:02:41

If you were to play back that time of merger—and you've said in a previous interview with my friend Joel that you were against it, you were against the idea of merger—you believed that a small state like Singapore could succeed. What convinced you that this was the case for Singapore?

Tommy 00:02:54

In 1961, if I'm not wrong, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, spoke to the Press Club in Singapore. It was during that speech that he mooted the idea of Malaya, Singapore, Sabah, Sarawak, and Brunei merging to form the Federation of Malaysia. Lee Kuan Yew liked the idea immediately, endorsed it, and campaigned both at home and in the region to bring this to fruition.

The PAP narrative at the time was that an independent Singapore would not survive, that we were too small. I argued the contrary case. I said look at Switzerland, a small country with a population of fewer than 10 million people—it's survived and is a very prosperous country. Look at the Scandinavian countries. There are many examples in the world of small countries that have succeeded.

I was not satisfied with the PAP argument on merger. The PAP leaders' commitment to merger was an article of faith. When something is an article of faith, your mind is closed. You're not open to argument.

I argued with the PAP leaders that merger would not work because there are four fundamental differences of values between us. We are a republic, Malaysia is a monarchy.

We are a secular country, Malaysia is an Islamic country. We are a meritocracy, Malaysia has special privileges. English is the lingua franca in Singapore, Bahasa Melayu is the lingua franca in Malaysia. I said there are these fundamental contradictions between us, and this marriage will not work.

I was not popular, as you can imagine.

Keith 00:05:06

At that point in time, was it purely just because they really couldn't see an alternative?

Tommy 00:05:12

You have to understand the context. When the British ruled both Malaya and Singapore, our students studied together—they were all in London. In London, the Malaysian students and the Singapore students formed a forum, the Malaya-Singapore Political Forum, and people like Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, Toh Chin Chye met with and became friends with people like Razak, Ismail, and others.

They were fellow students in England. They were united in their cause to get rid of the British and to achieve independence. The Singapore leaders were bonded with the Malayan leaders. For the PAP leaders, their belief in merger was beyond rational—it became an article of faith. The current Director of IPS, Janadas Devan, said in a podcast about the recent exhibition "Albatross" that the PAP's belief in merger was an article of faith. They were not open to any contrary arguments.

Keith 00:06:34

I remember reading that even other opposition parties were against it. They believed that it was not beneficial to Singapore, and you said that you were unpopular. That begs the question—after that you went into academia, you became a trained lawyer, you went to Cambridge, you went to Harvard, and you could have been a lawyer and they could have maybe left you alone. But then there came a fateful knock on your door. They asked you to be an ambassador to the UN—not only that, the youngest ambassador to the UN ever.

Tommy 00:07:07

Our country was new. Because the PAP did not believe in independence, we had not prepared for independence. When independence came, we had no foreign service. Out of the blue, overnight, we had to set up a Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You needed people to represent Singapore abroad.

The government looked around Singapore to see who they could persuade to serve Singapore abroad. They picked some businesspeople in Malaysia—the High Commissioner was a businessman, Koh Teck Kin, and George Lee. But they asked a bunch of us from NUS, University of Malaya at that time. Professor Koh Eng Pang went to Japan, Professor Winsemius went to Washington, Professor Maurice Baker went to India, and I was asked to go to the UN. I was the youngest.

At first I said no—I'm just too young, inexperienced. How can I be ambassador? I'm only 30 years old. They said, "Well, nobody else, and at least you have been an intern at the UN in 1964, so at least you know something about the UN."

It was Minister Rajaratnam that actually approached you to do it. And you were newly married then. How did that conversation go?

The PAP leaders knew me because I was very active on campus. I helped to organize forums, I was a leader of the Socialist Club. On top of that—a bit of trivia—in 1962 I was one of the founders of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. I was a very young lawyer, but I felt that Singapore would always be part of a bigger world and we should be knowledgeable about the world. I asked the British Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House to help me set up a Singapore institute. I organized lectures and so on.

The PAP knew that I was interested in world affairs, that I had friends in other countries. Maybe that's one of the reasons they picked me.

Keith 00:09:28

But you were disagreeable with them on something so fundamental. Why would they say let's go and pick this person?

Tommy 00:09:34

But I was proven right. I was proven right. Since I believed in an independent Singapore, they probably said, "Why don't we send this young fellow to represent us at the UN?"

Keith 00:09:48

On a more personal note, how did it feel to be 30 and on the world stage? I'm 30 this year, so I can't imagine myself being thrust into the UN where you're really in the jungle world of diplomacy and geopolitics.

Tommy 00:10:09

I still remember clearly—August 1968, before I left Singapore, I asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to brief me. They said they couldn't brief me because they weren't knowledgeable about the UN. "Why don't you go and find out what's going on there and then inform HQ on the issues in debate, propose our positions, and vote accordingly?"

It was exhilarating but also frightening because I was so young and innocent. I had to think not just about myself but about the country—what the country's interests are, how should we speak on each topic.

The month I arrived in New York in August 1968, nobody told me in Singapore that we were the chairman of the Asian group that month. As soon as I arrived, I chaired a meeting of the Asian group. I think I looked like a kid. Some of the more senior ambassadors tried to take advantage of my innocence and said, "Mr. Chairman, can you endorse our candidature for some post?"

I knew I shouldn't do that. I said, "Why don't you make the announcement and let's see whether there are any competing candidates?" Sure enough, when the representative of Pakistan put forward the candidate for a post, the Indian had a competing candidate. I learned very quickly.

But it was also a traumatic entry to the world because that month, August 1968, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia. I learned firsthand that international law cannot protect you if a great power decides to use force to impose its will on you.

Keith 00:12:18

Even when you were writing in your memoirs, you wrote about when you were at the UN—you were very cognizant of the fact that you had to prepare for an evil day where Singapore would have to maybe leverage or use the UN to protect us in the case where we were defenseless, and we were indeed defenseless at that point in time.

Tommy 00:12:36

Happily, that period is gone. But in those early days of independence, there were threats from time to time by our Malaysian friends to stop supplying us with water. It would be a life and death issue. If that were to happen, then we would of course ask the UN for help. I needed to learn how to make the Security Council work for us.

One of my jobs at the UN was quick learning on how to use the UN system in case we faced an evil day when our existence was threatened.

Keith 00:13:10

What were the lessons you learned about how you could actually use the UN Security Council to help advance Singapore's interests in that case?

Tommy 00:13:23

Some of the lessons were actually not helpful because I found out that the Security Council will not help you unless the great powers have an interest in you, and provided no great power is against you. As you know, the five great powers—the victors of World War II—enjoy a permanent seat and veto power. If one of the great powers is against you, nothing will be done. The Council will be blocked.

At the end of the day, the Council cannot help you, cannot protect you, unless all the great powers are in your favor. That requires all the stars to line up perfectly for you.

Keith 00:14:08

There's this interesting paradox that you pointed out. You said that international law can't really protect you, but at the same time, you're such a huge advocate of international law. You're the person that when people think of UNCLOS, you're the person that people think of. How do we explain this paradox?

Tommy 00:14:25

It's not a paradox. Look at history. Before 1945, we lived in a world in which big countries, powerful countries could do what they wanted and small countries had no recourse but to suffer.

In 1945, the UN was founded and the UN Charter brought about a new world order in which countries big and small have a right to independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, where the use of force is forbidden except in self-defense, where countries are obliged to settle their disputes peacefully. The UN brought about a new world order.

The UN Charter, the UN international law, do not give us full protection, but they give us some protection. I ask you, what's the alternative? Do you want to go back to the world before 1945, the world where there are no rules, where the big country can do what they want and you have to suffer? We don't want that world.

We must continue to defend the UN Charter, the international law, and the rule of law. We must have the courage to stand up and oppose actions by great powers that violate the Charter.

Keith 00:16:01

Recently when the US went into Venezuela, it reminds me of the episodes in Singapore's own diplomatic history, like our involvement with Cambodia, for example. In this case, what should Singapore's position be?

Tommy 00:16:18

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a very carefully crafted statement yesterday. It began by saying Singapore views with deep concern the US intervention in Venezuela. Then it reiterated that Singapore has always supported the UN Charter, international law, and the rule of law. We've always opposed the unilateral use of force, including military force, that violates the independence and territorial integrity of other states.

We have a track record. I was at the UN in 1978 when we condemned the Vietnamese for invading Cambodia. I was at the UN in 1979 when we condemned the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan. I was at the UN in 1983 when we had the courage to condemn the United States for invading Grenada. We have taken a principled stand.

Keith 00:17:26

I remember in your 1983 speech you had to say that this was something you had to do even to a friend, and that you could not on the principle of convenience, or only because they're your ideological ally or adversary, make a different position, which I think some of the other countries there were doing, especially in the case of the US.

Tommy 00:17:47

Of course. In reality, in pursuing a country's foreign policy, you are always balancing values versus interests. You believe in some values, you stand by some values, but you also have national interests. Sometimes your national interest is so powerful that you're willing to sacrifice your values and principles.

But to Singapore, a small country, the right of countries to independence and territorial integrity is fundamental. When transgressions take place, we must speak up.

Keith 00:18:33

To drive home the point of the work you've done in international law, I wanted to quote this because I think it remains underrated. When you were the president of UNCLOS, you said—and this was your reflection on the convention, the ratification of the convention—"On 10th December 1982, we created a new record in legal history. Never in the annals of international law had a convention been signed by 119 countries on the very first day which it was open for signature." How should we understand the significance of this constitution for the oceans?

Tommy 00:19:04

70% of the earth's surface is water. The oceans are not only a source of food but also the highway of the world. Most of international trade is maritime trade. Shipping, freedom of navigation, are fundamental to the world's interests, not just Singapore's interests.

The old law of the sea began to break down after the Second World War. Many new countries, many developing countries, felt that the old law was antiquated and no longer served their interests. They wanted to change the law. We went through a period of chaos when the old law was breaking down and there was no new law.

The UN convened the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. We had a very big ambition—our ambition was to write a new law of the sea for the world. Because we were so ambitious and the agenda was so extensive, it took us 10 years to get it done. Many people thought it would never be done. When I became president, I was determined to bring it to an end.

Keith 00:20:23

It's hard to imagine that you could actually get this passed, that you could persist, and in 10 years' time, in a decade's time, you could actually create a law or constitution that, although non-binding in a certain sense where you cannot really enforce through military action if a country chooses to contravene the law, is accepted by all countries, including countries like the United States which is not a party, as an authoritative statement of the law of the sea. My dream in 1982 that the Law of the Sea Convention would become a constitution for the world's oceans has come to pass.

Keith 00:21:10

One of the lessons I took from that essay and in particular your work in UNCLOS was that you really had to get buy-in from all kinds of countries—landlocked countries, maritime countries. Everyone had to agree that this was a good piece of legislation and was mutually beneficial. How were you able to not only persist but actually get the buy-in at the end of the day?

Tommy 00:21:35

The art of negotiation, the art of compromise, and creative thinking to find solutions that accommodate the competing interests of all stakeholders. In the beginning in the conference, there was a lot of heated debate but there were no texts. We needed a text.

In 1976, I made a proposal to the conference. I said, "We are floundering. We're going around in circles. What we need is a single negotiating text." I proposed to the conference that we ask the chairmen of the three committees to submit to us a draft single negotiating text. To my happy surprise, the conference adopted my proposal.

Beginning the next year, 1977, we had a single negotiating text. You need a text to work with. Once you have a text, then countries look at the text, identify their interests, and groups of countries begin to form around their common interests. Coastal states have a group, landlocked states have another group, countries with broad continental shelves have a group, countries which are long-distance fishermen have a group, countries that depend on coastal fishing have a group.

Once the interest groups are identified, it makes negotiation possible because then you convene all the stakeholders. You try to understand each country or each group's interests and you try to find ways to accommodate these competing interests in a compromise text. It took time, but it also took leadership.

Because the conference took so long, over time there emerged in the conference a group of leaders. They represented different interests, but they shared a common vision to complete the conference successfully and to adopt a new law of the sea treaty.

Keith 00:23:58

You were the chairman but you were also from a small state, from a small country like Singapore. You said earlier that in those days some of them might take advantage of your juniority or the fact that you're from Singapore, a small country. Once you're elected chairman, how did that change?

Tommy 00:24:17

Once you become chairman, your position doesn't depend on the size of your country. Being a chairman gives you inherent power. You're the convener, you're the chair, you lead the negotiation. You have great influence over the outcome of a negotiation.

Once you become chair, you transcend the size and limitations of your country. But with the advantage comes huge burden, because the whole conference depends on you. You're their leader. They depend on you to bring the conference to a successful conclusion.

Keith 00:25:07

There's this idea that nowadays international law is receding, that we're entering maybe a new—some call it multipolar—era where great powers are able to exert more forcefully on their spheres of influence. Would you agree or disagree with that assessment, and where does the role of international law play into this?

Tommy 00:25:32

I've come to the sad conclusion that we will never have a world without war. There will always be conflicts and war. It seems to be inherent in the nature of men. But at the same time, the majority of us in the world want to live at peace.

I would say of the three big goals of the UN—peace, development, human rights—peace is the most important. Without peace, there would be no development. Without peace, there will be no human rights. Therefore, we must support peace. We must support the instruments that promote peace—the UN Charter, international law, the courts. We must have the courage to stand up and say no to powerful countries when they take the law into their own hands and use force to assert their will, whether in Moscow or elsewhere.

We will always have transgressions, we will always have countries that violate law and use force. We will always have countries that say, "I'm not interested in settling my disputes with my neighbor by peaceful means. I will use my superior force to assert my rights." But these are the minority.

The great majority of countries in the world want peace. They want to live under the rule of law rather than the rule of force. If you ask me what kind of world do we live in today, I would say most of the world still lives in peace. But there are areas in the world where we are witnessing war and conflict. But we must never give up our quest for peace and world order. We must continue to work for a world ruled by law and not by force.

Keith 00:27:35

This is a similar takeaway I had when I read Professor Kishore's book on the ASEAN miracle. Part of it was him articulating the fact that ASEAN has created, for a large part of our history, a time of great peace that enabled development.

Tommy 00:27:53

Absolutely. Kishore is right that if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee gave the Peace Prize to the EU, they should consider giving it to ASEAN too. ASEAN has brought about a long period of peace in Southeast Asia. Of course there are still conflicts like the current one between Cambodia and Thailand, but these are minor. There are no big wars in our region.

Keith 00:28:20

The challenge is that sometimes we cannot imagine the counterfactuals. For example, we see what's happening with Thailand and Cambodia, but we don't think actually this could have been much worse.

Tommy 00:28:37

It could have escalated out of control and become a full-scale war. But because they are members of ASEAN, ASEAN has a restraining influence on them. They were at a summit in Kuala Lumpur. Prime Minister Anwar put pressure on them, China put pressure on them, the United States put pressure on them, all their ASEAN colleagues put pressure on them. Collectively the pressure worked, at least temporarily. They stopped fighting.

Then they started fighting again. Again, the foreign ministers of ASEAN had an emergency meeting and ASEAN pressure again forced them to stop fighting. ASEAN has an influence—it can't stop war completely, but it can help to de-escalate, to encourage talks. That's a useful function.

Keith 00:29:31

As Singaporeans, especially being a small state here, we should appreciate and even champion the value of ASEAN.

Tommy 00:29:37

Absolutely.

Keith 00:29:42

I want to move on to another part of your career which I found very interesting, which is your time as our ambassador in the US. I want to revisit your time where you started an initiative in 1985. You decided to launch an initiative where you would try to obtain an invitation from the US Senate and the House of Representatives for PM Lee to address the joint session of Congress. When I was reading that, it seemed like a throwaway line and then you went into how you got that to happen. My initial question was, why did you think this was a good initiative to start working on?

Tommy 00:30:19

I felt that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew had been a good friend of the United States for so long and he was coming toward the end of his premiership. I felt that it would be a good thing for Singapore if I could succeed in persuading the two houses of US Congress to invite him to address a joint session. This was my initiative. It didn't come from Singapore.

I wrote to my Foreign Minister, Mr. Dhanabalan, who was very supportive. He said, "You'll probably fail, but I won't stop you." Then I wrote to Prime Minister Lee. He was very modest. He said, "I don't deserve the honor." I said, "Let the Americans judge whether you deserve the honor, but let me try." Surprisingly, I succeeded.

Keith 00:31:19

The thing you said earlier struck me. You said that he was a very strong friend of the Americans throughout his premiership. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? How was he a strong friend? Because one could imagine or remember times when he was critical.

Tommy 00:31:39

Lee Kuan Yew's value to America is that he was not an ally. Singapore is not an ally of the United States. We are a friend, a partner, but not an ally. Because he's not an ally, he's not beholden to them. He can speak with a certain independence which an ally cannot.

Secondly, he was very knowledgeable about our region. American leaders wanted to pick his brain. Every time he visited Washington, they wanted to pick his brain about what's going on in our region, what's going on in China. He would give them objective advice which they appreciated very much.

What was frustrating for us is that when we gave Mr. Lee a list of our requests—that we wanted ABC from the Americans—he refused to use our list. We asked him why. He said, "No. My value to America is that I'm not a supplicant. I did not come to Washington to ask for things. I come to Washington as your friend, as your adviser, but not as a supplicant."

This was his wisdom. Americans respected him because this was an unusual Third World leader who came to Washington, never asked for anything, but who gave his advice freely and objectively. This was his value to America.

Keith 00:33:07

In turn, what did that get Singapore?

Tommy 00:33:14

Preferential access. When I was ambassador in Washington, I was given access to the Secretary of State George Shultz, to President George H.W. Bush, that most ambassadors don't get. Lee Kuan Yew's friendship and goodwill percolated down. I enjoyed that.

Keith 00:33:43

The common thread seems to be—I previously had Professor Lim Hong on. He said the same thing as you. He said that Lee Kuan Yew taught him that when you go to other countries, especially the big powers, you look at them in the face and you see them as equals. You make sure they treat you as an equal and that we never ask. We always have their interests in mind and we start from that as a basis of a working relationship.

Tommy 00:34:06

One of the wisdoms of our founding fathers—and it was a tough call—was that in 1965 we were poor with high unemployment and rather bleak prospects, and yet they took the courageous decision that we will not solicit foreign aid. This is so that we don't want to be beholden to rich countries. We also want to teach our own people that the world doesn't owe us a living. We have to work hard, make our own way in the world.

Because we don't solicit and don't accept foreign aid, it gives us a certain dignity and standing that many developing countries don't have. We are in a position to—in 1983, if we were an American ally, we would not have the agency to say, "Sorry, you cannot invade Grenada."

Keith 00:35:08

In that sense, it's useful for Singaporeans to appreciate this ability to be independent even as a small country.

You were also one of the most prescient observers of America. I referenced earlier a 1986 essay that you wrote—prepared remarks that you gave at Harvard—and in it, what I found surprisingly timely was that in 2026, the problems that you diagnosed close to 40 years ago remain true today. You talked about the influence of media, you talked about the influence of lobbying in America and the influence of money in America. Help me understand some of the unique dynamics within America that we as Singaporeans should understand if we want to make our way in the world.

Tommy 00:36:03

First, the American democracy is a unique democracy. There's no other democracy in the world like the American democracy. What do I mean by that?

It is a system of checks and balances. The founders of the Constitution did not want concentration of power either in the president or in Congress or in the courts. They check each other. Power is dispersed. Power is broadly dispersed, not only between different departments of the government but also between the government and Congress, between government, Congress, and the private sector.

The private sector has an influence in America that no private sector in any country has. I'll give you an example. When I was negotiating the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, I received no calls on my mobile phone from any of our private sector leaders. But my American counterpart, Ralph Ives, was constantly answering questions on his mobile phone from business leaders who were asking him about the state of the negotiation, whether he was protecting their interests, and so on.

This is a unique aspect of America. But on the negative side, there's too much power given to big money and it's gotten worse. You now see so many plutocrats and the influence they enjoy in Washington is not good for America.

Keith 00:37:52

You made the point of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and today you could even argue that it's Silicon Valley that influences the culture.

Tommy 00:37:58

Actually, the role of media changed. With the new media, alternative media, mainstream media lost influence. But now you've got so much social media, and political leaders now are very skillful in using social media. The media picture has changed, but media as an industry, as a factor, remains very powerful.

Keith 00:38:27

One of the things that I found to be true today was that when you talked about the role of the entertainment industry, you said that in America there was this idea that everything had to be captured in a soundbite. You made this point about a Congressman who said that he could not articulate a proper response on gun control within two minutes. But if you look at social media today, it's interesting that even in the US, there seems to be a move towards meme communication—you need short and snappy, but at the same time more long-form as well. In that sense, I found it prescient that the culture of only being able to communicate in short snippets remains true today.

Tommy 00:39:10

It's a negative development. I'm sorry that fewer and fewer young people read newspapers. Fewer and fewer people have the attention span to read a long think piece. They want the info online in soundbites, in short quotes. This is a pity. It's not good for the world.

Keith 00:39:38

The reason I asked that question is also because in Singapore we're extremely open to the US—not just in terms of our FDI, with the US obviously being the largest source of FDI in Singapore, but in our exposure to American culture and influence in our politics as well. It affects our politics. What are some of the amber lights that you're seeing that you think we as Singaporeans should be cautious of, of not importing wholesale from America?

Tommy 00:40:06

American culture tends to emphasize the individual. It's a "me" culture. PM Lawrence Wong has said recently that we should not have a "me" culture, we should have a "we" culture. We should think of the collective and not just of the individual. This is one of the weaknesses of American culture—an overemphasis on the individual to the neglect of the collective.

Of course, you don't go the other way either where you overemphasize the rights of the collective to the neglect of the individual. You need a balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective.

I think we are moving in many ways towards American popular culture where we become a consumer society. Young people no longer are as thrifty as older people. We have become—if we look at private debt, private debt in Singapore is quite high. These are not good things.

Keith 00:41:21

One of the poor traits that we've imported from the US was also that we've had this obsession with the worship of the CEO. You made the case that actually we should look at the Gini coefficient within the company as well—that the CEO should not be earning 39 multiples higher, for example, than the lowest paid, or a thousand times.

Tommy 00:41:42

I agree. I think we moved the wrong way. We moved towards the American model of capitalism rather than the Asian model or European model. I was very unhappy. I was on the board of two big companies in Singapore.

I still remember one occasion—the director of human resources came to the board and made a presentation to say, "We propose paying our CEO this package"—I can't remember the exact number, but this was many years ago, something like $6 million, which in those days was a lot of money. Then he ended by saying, "I wonder whether it's enough."

I asked him, "What's the Gini coefficient in our company?" He said he'd never heard of the term. To him, the American model was the correct model—we should pay CEOs American salaries, London and New York salaries. But if you go to Japan, go to Korea, they don't pay the CEOs in the same way. The culture in Japan and Korea is more egalitarian. The CEO of a major company is not paid 100 times or a thousand times the average worker in the company. I'm not convinced that we should follow the American model.

I spoke up once and I think I caused some offense to people. I said, "The average bus driver in Singapore earned $3,000 a month. The CEO of one bus company was paid a million dollars a year. The CEO of the other company was paid $3 million a year. How can you justify this?"

Keith 00:43:43

It really goes back to the idea of rethinking for ourselves what are the values that we hold here as a country.

Tommy 00:43:50

We should go back to our original inspiration. Post-independence, our inspiration was growth with equity. We've forgotten that—growth with equity.

In the old days, in my father's day, most Singapore companies had a system of profit sharing. At the end of the year, if the company made a lot of money, they would share the profit with the workers. We've lost that. Now it's working for shareholders, working for senior management. I say, what about the rest of the employees? Don't they matter? Don't their children matter? Shouldn't you also think of the suppliers? You can't just squeeze them. Don't you think you should also think of your customers and think of society at large?

Keith 00:44:52

If you were the management, one could argue that to make a more just society, we should always leave some money on the table for the rest of the folks.

Tommy 00:45:04

I wouldn't say it's charity—it's actually good practice. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine has a restaurant, a successful one. Then she opened several more branches. I asked her, "Many restaurants in Singapore have trouble recruiting and retaining staff. How are you able to do it?"

She said, "I pay above market price, and I have a system of profit sharing." If you pay people well, if you share the prosperity of the company with your staff, I think you will have better prospects attracting and retaining people. But most of our companies don't do that.

I regret to say there are very few good bosses in Singapore. Most of our bosses are not good bosses.

Keith 00:46:07

What would a good boss look like to you?

Tommy 00:46:13

First, you must respect your colleagues. Don't just look up but also appreciate people who work below you. Second, help to develop them, empower them. Don't just exploit them and take advantage of their work as yours. And be a good team player.

One of the reasons I chose the title of my memoir, "The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man," is to make the point that you may be successful, but the success is not due to your own ability alone. It's also due to the contribution of your team, due to opportunity, and due to good luck.

Keith 00:47:06

Was that something that you'd seen? Because when I was reading your book, one of the strong themes throughout is that you really had good bosses that believed in you. For example, when they chose you to go to the UN, I was like, wow, that's actually a huge bet on a 30-year-old young lawyer. We're thankful it paid off and you did more than represent Singapore well—you did a great deal of good for the international community. Is your idea or perception of what a good boss or good leader is very much influenced by your own personal career or journey through the foreign service?

Tommy 00:47:50

Probably influenced by my scouting days. I was a scout leader. From those early days, I learned to be a good leader—take care of the people in my troop, in my patrol, treat everybody with respect, appreciate the contribution of all members of your team, not just the top, but also people in the middle, people at the bottom.

Keith 00:48:20

I wanted to hear from your point of view as well—what do you think American culture did right for Singapore? What did we learn right from the Americans that we should continue doing?

Tommy 00:48:25

The belief in upward mobility. The American Dream. The American Dream was no matter who you are, where you start from, if you work hard with ability and luck, you can get to the top.

In Singapore, at least up till now, no matter who you are, where your starting point is, with ability and hard work, opportunities will be given to you to study, to work, and excel. That's very American and I think that's an important lesson.

The other lesson we can learn from America is not only to do research but to apply research with innovation and creativity. If you look at the world today, high technology is dominated by the United States and China. In American high technology, it's being led by the so-called seven magnificent companies. Why are there no equivalents in Europe? Because America has this unique culture of supporting innovation and not stigmatizing you if you fail.

In America, if you fail and it's an honest failure, it doesn't matter. Pick yourself up and try again. Try and try until you succeed. We should learn from America. There's no shame in failure if it's an honest failure. We must have a system that supports innovation and creativity.

Keith 00:50:17

I speak to my American friends and compare ourselves to them sometimes. We share a similar belief in meritocracy—that if you can prove yourself to be competent, you deserve the fruits of your labor. Sometimes we take it to the extreme, as we've talked about earlier. But they are much more willing to venture, which is something that I think is a critique of the Singapore system or Singaporeans in general—we are becoming increasingly risk-averse. Do you agree with that assessment?

Tommy 00:50:51

I think we're becoming less risk-averse. I think we're becoming a very important hub for startups. The ecosystem is changing. I think we are trying to promote young people to be brave, to start their own companies, to take a leap. I think we're changing, but we should change faster. Here we should look to America for inspiration. We cannot replicate Silicon Valley, but we can replicate the values of Silicon Valley.

Keith 00:51:30

That's food for thought. As we speak about America, we cannot not talk about China. I found something really interesting when I was reading your memoirs, which was that you were actually the person in charge of organizing the first trips to China for three key leaders because you were at the UN and back then we didn't have official relationships with China. You had to find your counterpart in the UN from China and you had to organize these three trips for Dr. Goh, for Prime Minister Lee, and Mr. Rajaratnam. How was that like?

Tommy 00:52:11

In 1974, the government persuaded me to leave the law school again and to go back to the UN because they wanted me to be the leader of our delegation to the Law of the Sea Conference. I agreed reluctantly because I loved my academic career.

But the government also told me that I had a second job, which was to contact the Chinese ambassador to the UN, a wonderful man called Huang Hua, and to begin a dialogue with China through him. For two years, I was the contact point between Singapore and China.

In 1974, a very good friend who's passed away, Lee Khoon Choy, and I took some risk and decided we would organize a working dinner between our Foreign Minister, Mr. Rajaratnam, and the leader of the Chinese delegation. We were worried whether or not they would hit it off, that the dinner would go well, but it went very well.

At the end of the dinner, the Chinese side said they would like to invite Mr. Rajaratnam, Dr. Goh Keng Swee, and Mr. Lee to visit China. I had the great pleasure of organizing those three trips. But after 1976, the contact point was passed from New York to Kuala Lumpur, so I ceased to be the contact point.

Keith 00:53:49

But later on you also negotiated our official relationship, establishing the relations with China, which would make you someone that had a relatively up-close and personal look at the evolution of China's foreign policy or foreign engagement with the world. How have they changed since your first early days at the UN to now? What are the big changes?

Tommy 00:54:10

China has enjoyed a true economic miracle. In 1974, China was poor and weak. Everything changed with Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese leader who changed the fortune of China.

After Deng Xiaoping visited Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, on his return to China, he decided China was going down the wrong path, that the command economy doesn't work. Although he was already in his 70s, he had the great courage to say, "Let's change. Let's open up China gradually, starting with the coastal region. Let's open up China to foreign investment."

That decision by Deng Xiaoping changed China. Over the years, China was growing by 10% per annum for 30 years. I don't think the Chinese could have foreseen that today China is a superpower, that it has the second most powerful economy and military in the world, and that unless there's some great disaster or war, China would become a peer superpower to the United States. This is a miracle.

Keith 00:55:57

One of the concerns that someone like Bilahari talked about—he had this short book about how China is trying to change your mind or trying to influence the way you think—and his view is that Singapore, being a majority Chinese population, is very susceptible to being more pro-China than is in our national interest.

Tommy 00:56:22

I would put it differently. I would say our relations with China can be divided into three historical phases: the Mao era, the Deng Xiaoping era, and the current phase.

During the Mao era, our relations were very bad because China wanted to export revolution to the region, supporting the communist insurgency. But Deng put a stop to that.

During the Deng era, there was a charm offensive by China to do away with the Mao legacy and to start a new chapter in China's relations with Singapore and ASEAN. China succeeded. During the Deng era, relations got better and better.

I would say from maybe the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, the Deng era ended. China has now arrived. China feels that we have become a global power, we have a right to recover territory we lost when we were weak, we have a right to assert ourselves with our neighbors.

In the current phase of China's history, the Chinese are no longer engaged in a charm offensive. China is now, I would say, more assertive of her rights or her perceived rights.

Keith 00:58:13

You had an essay where you talked about your hopes for China in the way it seeks to engage with its neighbors. Can you briefly articulate what your hopes are for China?

Tommy 00:58:29

That was, by the way, a very remarkable experience. Out of the blue, I received an invitation from one of the national institutions of China, the CPPCC—China's People's Political Consultative Committee—which is a sister institution of the National People's Congress. It's a very wealthy institution. They invited us to attend a conference and for me to contribute an essay to a book on the future of China.

It gave me a chance to really think about China's past, China's present, and China's future. I was right in predicting that China will continue to grow and no country, not America, can contain China's rise, that China will become a superpower.

Then I said I hope when China becomes a superpower, it will behave like China during the Tang Dynasty. Many of my Chinese friends were very puzzled. They said, "Why do you talk about the Tang Dynasty? This was so long ago." I said the message I'm making is that the Tang Dynasty was a very good period for China. It was a great civilization that lived at peace with the world. China welcomed people of other cultures and nationalities to be in Chang'an or Luoyang.

The Tang Dynasty was a very peaceful and open and inclusive period of Chinese history. That's my hope.

Keith 00:1:00:29

You know, the funny thing is that I actually interviewed Senior Colonel Zhou Bo and he said this exact same thing.

Tommy 00:1:00:34

Is it?

Keith 00:1:00:34

He said that I asked him what a positive vision of China would look like, because there were views that China has a largely negative vision of itself as a victim in the past 100 years because of the century of humiliation. He said a similar thing. He said that the positive vision that Chinese people should see themselves as today is that we want to have a reincarnation of the Tang Dynasty in its spirit.

Tommy 00:1:01:05

I'm glad to say that, by the way, I'm a friend of Zhou Bo. I endorsed his new book, "Should the World Fear China?" I made two comments on my Facebook—I reviewed the book on my Facebook page. I made two comments that he thanked me for, but they probably got him into trouble with some of his conservative friends and colleagues.

I said that Zhou Bo is not a wolf warrior. Secondly, I said there's an essay in the book which is very important, which is that China should stop talking about the years of humiliation. That's over. China should be self-confident and talk about the future. I like that and I praised him for that too.

He messaged me thanking me.

Keith 00:1:02:02

That's so interesting because when I was reading it, I was like, he made that point and that stood out to me also. When people talk about the 5,000 years, why do you overindex on 100 of the 5,000? You could make the case that there were other periods in China's history that you could take inspiration from. I was very pleased to hear you say that.

The flip side of that conversation would be—in the region, in Southeast Asia, how should one engage with this China that's in that third phase that you just pointed out, that now is seeking to be more assertive in its dealings with the world, that maybe might be too muscular at times? How should Singapore and maybe ASEAN as a whole engage?

Tommy 00:1:02:42

I would say ASEAN—Singapore alone may not be strong enough, but collectively as 11 countries, we have considerable weight and influence. I think ASEAN should continue to engage China. ASEAN as a grouping is not anti-China. We are a friend of China, and the Chinese should know that the ASEAN countries have goodwill and friendship for China. We will not join the United States in confronting China or seeking to contain China.

But at the same time, we expect China to behave like a good neighbor and not impose its will if by doing so they're harming their neighbors. I've made this point to my Chinese friends many times that the Mekong River is an international river, not a national river. Although it begins in Tibet, you don't have absolute sovereignty over the river. What you do in the upper reaches of the river must take into account the rights of people living downstream. You cannot just merrily keep building dams and affect the people living in the lower part of the river in Cambodia and Vietnam.

That's the point I'm trying to make to my Chinese friends—you're big and powerful and rich now, and we like you, respect you, we want to be your friend and partner. But we also want you to behave like a good neighbor and take into account the interests of others, not just yourself. And also take into account the relevant international law on the South China Sea.

Keith 00:1:04:37

You wrote about the South China Sea and it really mapped out a lot of the key facts and claims within that area. But the South China Sea becomes a natural talking point because when people talk about China's neighborliness with the region, with ASEAN, this comes up as an issue. Do you see a way out of this? Because from the way a casual observer sees it, it seems to be a very messy political situation. Is there a way out?

Tommy 00:1:05:16

If there's political goodwill, there's always a way out. The question is, is there political will on the part of China and the claimant states, especially Vietnam and the Philippines, to seek a fair and balanced outcome? If there is will, there's a way out. My sense at the moment is there is no such will.

Keith 00:1:05:48

You made this point also before, which is that this is something that you can't use the law to solve. This is not a legal problem for the most part. It's a political problem.

Tommy 00:1:06:01

There's a problem which is hard to overcome unless our Chinese friends reconsider their policy. Although China is a party to UNCLOS and China has judges at both the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, as a matter of national policy, China will not take a dispute over sovereignty to the court.

You will not take the dispute with Vietnam and the Philippines over the South China Sea to arbitration or to a court of law. That's a problem. China keeps saying, "Let's negotiate." But sometimes negotiations don't succeed. The position of ASEAN countries is more logical—if negotiations don't succeed, why don't we think of taking it to some other procedure, like conciliation, like arbitration, like mediation or adjudication?

But that would require a change of policy on the part of Beijing. That would require the art of compromise as you put it earlier.

Keith 00:1:07:18

I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your privilege of working with different generations of leaders. There is only one man that I think in Singapore today, alive, that can say that they've worked under David Marshall, they've worked under Lee Kuan Yew, they've worked under Goh Chok Tong, they've worked under Lee Hsien Loong, and they're now working under Lawrence Wong, and that person is you. I'd like for you to share with us maybe one key lesson or insight you've learned from each of these giants. Maybe there are other leaders that you'd throw in the mix that you think every young Singaporean today should know of. Maybe we'll start with David Marshall, someone that you consider your mentor in your early legal days.

Tommy 00:1:08:00

Marshall was a better lawyer than a politician. He was not a good politician. He believed in Singapore. He was committed to Singapore.

I'll give you something that people don't know. The State of Israel made him an offer and said, "Come back to Israel. We'll make you the Attorney General of Israel." He said, "No, I'm a Singaporean. I'm not Israeli." He's Jewish, but his commitment to Singapore was total. He was not interested in leaving Singapore to become the Attorney General of Israel.

I admire the fact that he was totally committed to Singapore—excellent lawyer, not so good politician. But in a way he played a role in our battle for independence because he was very strongly anti-British.

Keith 00:1:09:02

And then what about Prime Minister Lee?

Tommy 00:1:09:08

Prime Minister Lee, I think he was charismatic. One thing I learned about him is that, like Marshall, he loved only Singapore and his commitment to Singapore was total and all-consuming, always thinking about Singapore. His work ethic, like David Marshall, was very hardworking.

When I was helping Mr. Lee Kuan Yew to draft his speech for the US Congress, I was impressed at how many iterations he had. He was working on it every day, polishing it, making it better. I told my wife that, boy, this guy is really hardworking. He had something that has become a Singaporean virtue—the pursuit of excellence.

Keith 00:1:10:01

There's this story that whenever I speak to Professor Kishore and Ambassador Chan, they say that the three of you would always have lunch with him and that he would always talk to you guys and get your views. I want to hear from your perspective what those lunches were like.

Tommy 00:1:10:19

Many people think that he was very authoritarian, that he doesn't have an open mind, he doesn't listen. It's not true. I think of our leaders, surprisingly—and the public will be surprised to learn this—he's the most open to other views and most eager to seek other views.

There was a period when Kishore and I were in town at the same time and he would invite the three of us to have lunch with him regularly to talk about developments in the region, in the world. He was genuinely interested in listening to our views, even if we sometimes didn't agree with him. In private, he was a perfect gentleman. We were surprised that he insisted we must walk ahead of him, be served ahead of him. We'd say, "No, PM, you first." He'd say, "No, you are my guests." We really enjoyed those lunches we had with him.

Keith 00:1:11:26

If there was a foreign policy legacy that he had that you think Singaporeans should appreciate or care for?

Tommy 00:1:11:39

That Singapore is truly independent, not beholden to other countries, that it will stand up for its national interests, and that although it's a small country, it will fight to protect its security and national interests.

Keith 00:1:12:04

And then after that, Goh Chok Tong.

Tommy 00:1:12:04

Goh Chok Tong took us to another level because the foundation was already built. Goh Chok Tong was an excellent diplomat. Most people don't realize that he was a better diplomat than Lee Kuan Yew because of his personality. He was very charming, very relaxed, and people, the foreign leaders, liked him.

I remember sitting with him in a meeting he had with a European leader. At the end of the meeting, they shook hands, and then before he left, the European leader turned around and said, "By the way, I like you."

Then Mr. Goh asked me, "Does any leader ever say that to you?" I said, "No, because they like your openness, your lack of arrogance, your humility, your sincerity."

He was a very good diplomat. Because of him, he launched many things for us. I remember the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement is like the famous golf game in Brunei. But he was also very devoted to ASEAN. He introduced something called the Initiative for ASEAN Integration, which is to help bring up the four new countries.

Because of his leadership, there are Singapore officers in four countries—Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam—basically to help those countries with technical development. We bring them to Singapore for training.

Keith 00:1:13:54

I remember reading both of his memoirs. He was also the person who came up with the idea of the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement.

Tommy 00:1:14:00

It was his idea, but he's a modest guy. Instead of doing it himself, he asked the Prime Minister of Thailand to be the champion. He came up with the idea of the ASEAN Regional Forum, but again he asked the Thais to claim credit for it. He was the one who came up with the idea of the Asia-Europe Meeting, and again asked the Thais to do it.

Keith 00:1:14:27

We've had a gem as a diplomat. He also founded IPS as well.

Tommy 00:1:14:34

He's still the patron of IPS.

Keith 00:1:14:39

And then after that you served with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. What was that key lesson or key insight?

Tommy 00:1:14:45

Lee Hsien Loong is a different person from PM Goh Chok Tong. Lee Hsien Loong was always very disciplined, very focused, very businesslike. But I liked working with him because he was always clear-headed. He had an agenda, and we were clear about what our job was, how to help him succeed.

Keith 00:1:15:18

And finally now we have Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, where the verdict might not be out yet, but if you could give us some inkling or share some insight as to what excites you or what keeps you hopeful for the future?

Tommy 00:1:15:33

He's the right leader for the new generation of Singaporeans.

Keith 00:1:15:38

Say more.

Tommy 00:1:15:40

Singaporeans like the fact that he did not come from an elite school. Victoria JC—I was from there. They like the fact that he came from humble beginnings, not a famous family. They like the fact that he is not a one-dimensional person, that he loves music. He's an ordinary guy in that sense. I think he engages well with people. He's a good listener. I think he's a good leader for our time.

Keith 00:1:16:17

I'd like to thank you for writing those two essays in this book on the foreign policy legacies of prime ministers, because I thought they were very instrumental in actually understanding the role of prime ministers in foreign policy.

Tommy 00:1:16:36

To be honest, that conversation we had does not do that justice. There's a new book coming out soon on Lee Hsien Loong. I initiated the idea with IPS. IPS is coming out with a new book evaluating his 20 years in office, and I've written an essay on him.

Keith 00:1:16:54

For me, just reading those two essays, I was like, well actually if you think about the prime minister's job just from where we are, they have so much more than just running a country—they also really have to manage our external relations, and each of them brought contributions.

Tommy 00:1:17:12

Absolutely.

Keith 00:1:17:18

You've served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as our ambassador at large. Your diplomatic accomplishments are many, but you've also been in other areas like education. You were director at Tembusu College, you were director of IPS, you were chairman of the National Heritage Board and National Arts Council, and you were on the board of banks in Singapore. You've really touched many aspects of Singaporean life in a certain sense. You have a very good 10,000-foot view of Singaporean society.

I guess my question to you is that if you look at the coming years and look at how far we've come, what are your hopes and aspirations for Singapore? How should we become a more perfect and more beautiful Singapore?

Tommy 00:1:18:06

First, I want to say that I'm optimistic about our future. Some Singaporeans are worried about our future, wonder whether we will continue to succeed and continue to prosper. I'm confident that we will, and I again look to Switzerland as a model.

I think we will have a bright future. We must continue to remain open, to embrace change, embrace technology. But in the process we must also look after people who are not able to benefit from the new technology. My worry about AI is that it's going to displace a lot of workers. I think AI is going to make redundant a lot of entry-level jobs, and even not entry-level jobs. AI can do a better job reading MRIs than doctors can.

I think we have to not resist progress and technology—Singapore's ethos is that we are open to change, we embrace technology. But at the same time we have to take care of our people. Make sure that we don't leave people behind. Make sure that the number of poor people in Singapore gets reduced.

At the moment, I'm disappointed to say there are too many poor people in our prosperous country. I was shocked recently to learn that there are over 100,000 senior Singaporeans living in poverty who can't even afford one hot meal a day. This is unacceptable. We have the means to do better. Back to our original mantra: growth with equity. To create a much more equitable society.

Keith 00:1:20:10

You echo a similar reflection I think Ambassador Chan had when she came on. She was saying that you want to have a high floor, that the least of us are doing better than the most.

Tommy 00:1:20:21

I agree with that.

Keith 00:1:20:27

Is there anything else in terms of values that we as Singaporeans must remember?

Tommy 00:1:20:33

I'm very proud of several things. One is that there's no corruption. This is such a rare achievement. When you go around the region, go around the world, it's so rare to have a country where there's no corruption. We must hold on to this precious achievement.

The other precious achievement we must hold on to is the harmony between people of different races and different religions. Again, a very rare and precious achievement. I think those things we must hang on to.

Third thing is we mustn't allow meritocracy to become a new form of aristocracy. We must beware of what Michael Sandel says in his book "The Tyranny of Merit"—we mustn't allow merit to become a new form of tyranny.

Keith 00:1:21:33

I've read that book and in it he launched a scathing critique that meritocracy could morph into a form of credentialism, and we must make sure that upward mobility is a reality in Singapore and will always be.

But what about the ethos of the people? Is there anything that we as a society in general—if a citizen looks at Singapore today, what are some of the aspirational values or ideals that we should strive towards?

Tommy 00:1:22:08

Having been Rector of a college for over 10 years, I must say that I am impressed with our young kids, the students of our universities. They are good people. Extremely intelligent, hardworking, but they also care for their colleagues, care for society, care for nature, care for the world. I think we have this, and we should continue working on that.

Keith 00:1:22:43

Obviously being a former Rector yourself, I have to ask you to wrap up this conversation. What is that one piece of advice, given everything you know about the world today, that you'd give to a graduating student entering the working world today?

Tommy 00:1:22:57

Do not lose faith in the face of adversity. There will always be war, but we must continue to seek peace. There will always be countries that behave as outlaws, but we must continue to defend the rule of law. We must continue to work for a world ruled by law and not by force. This is something that every Singaporean should keep in our heart.

Keith 00:1:23:22

With that, Professor Tommy Koh, thank you for writing these two books—"The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man" and what I think should be a core essential of every IR class in university, "The Tommy Koh Reader." Thank you for coming on and thank you for your labour of love for our country.

Tommy 00:1:23:39

Thank you.

Keith 00:1:23:39

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you're watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to The Front Row.

Lim Siong Guan is a Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, instructing on leadership and change management.

Siong Guan was the Head of the Singapore Civil Service from September 1999 to March 2005. He has been the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence (1981-1994), the Prime Minister’s Office (1994-1998), the Ministry of Education (1997-1999) and the Ministry of Finance (1998-2006).

Of note, he worked directly with Singapore's founding fathers to help Singapore transform itself into a modern economic hub of Southeast Asia.
He was also Lee Kuan Yew's first Principal Private Secretary.

In every appointment, he introduced innovative policies and practices which enhanced the drive, capacity, capability and performance of the organization. He has chaired the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (2004-2006), the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (2004-2006) and, the Central Provident Fund Board (1986-1994), and has been a board member of many companies including Temasek, the other sovereign wealth fund manager of Singapore.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Trailer & Intro
01:20 Early Days at Public Works Department
04:11 The Road Roller Story: Learning Government Systems
08:41 Philosophy of Problem-Solving: Think, Try, Switch
09:14 Joining Dr Goh Keng Swee's Team at MINDEF
10:30 Building the Junior Flying Club from Scratch
15:01 The Glider Experiment: Cutting Losses & Moving On
18:06 Starting the SAF: Culture of Curiosity & Discovery
18:50 Becoming Lee Kuan Yew's Principal Private Secretary
22:31 Understanding Power: Service Before Self-Interest
26:16 The Three Pillars of Trust: Care, Competence, Commitment
29:40 Building Modern Defence from Zero
35:47 Total Defence: Beyond Military Capability
40:05 Concentrating Talent Across the Public Service
46:55 Introduction to Scenario Planning for Government
49:37 Hotel Singapore & Home Divided Scenarios
53:59 The Unknown Unknowns Challenge
57:47 From Copy-and-Improve to Indigenous Innovation
01:02:31 Can Small Countries Lead in Innovation?
01:04:32 The Biggest Threat: Unwillingness to Try
01:08:04 The Mother's Challenge: Cultural Barriers to Startups
01:09:43 Defining Success 30 Years From Now
01:12:41 How Younger Generations Answer Differently
01:14:52 Advice For Fresh Graduates Today

Keith Yap 00:00:50

In the beginning in Singapore, there were the first generation leaders. One thinks of the legendary politicians Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, Dr. Goh Keng Swee, S. Rajaratnam. Well, alongside them, there needed to be a first generation civil service.

Today I'm joined by a legendary civil servant, someone who served under them and could say proudly that they helped Singapore transform from third world to first. It is my great privilege that I welcome Mr. Lim Siong Guan onto the podcast today. Mr. Lim, thank you for coming on.

Lim Siong Guan 00:01:15

Thanks very much for having me.

Keith Yap 00:01:20

I wanted to start at the beginning of your career where you were in the Public Works Department. Take us through what Singapore was like during that period in time, what you were working on, and what were the early lessons that you had, literally doing the dirty work that shaped your outlook on policy in the future.

Lim Siong Guan 00:01:38

I studied at the University of Adelaide from 1965 to 1969. Frankly, having been exposed to just studying in university, your thoughts about the future are things like whether you can go on to do a PhD. In fact, I had an offer of a PhD fellowship at Cambridge, but when I asked approval from the Public Service Commission, since you take a government scholarship and you have a bond to serve, they said no. Singapore desperately needs you, at least that's the feeling they conveyed.

So I came back to Singapore and you just wait a couple of months to see where you are posted. I got posted first to the Public Works Department. Since I graduated as a mechanical engineer, that made a lot of sense. But it was frankly only just a few weeks, and then I got posted first to the mechanical branch to look after all the mechanical equipment of the government. Then I got posted for a few weeks to the Sewerage Branch, which runs the sewerage system in Singapore, basically a job of civil engineers. But they still needed a few mechanical engineers to look after mechanical equipment in pumping stations that they had. I spent almost a year in the Sewerage Branch, so most of my experiences were there.

As to what conditions were like, I've always had an open mind. You go to a place and you say, what can I learn from here? What can I do which is useful here?

I need to describe to you the very first day I turned up for work at the branch, which at that time was at Paya Lebar Kim Chuan Sewage Treatment Works. As I entered the gate, I saw a couple of workers just painting up a road roller which was obviously rusted. They were painting it gray. I went in and asked why are the people painting that rusting road roller, and I was told, oh, because they're going to condemn it.

Condemnation is just a term that's used in government. If a piece of equipment is no longer working properly or is beyond economical repair, you need to condemn it as a piece of equipment which is not worth keeping. After you've been able to dispose of it with a condemnation certificate, then you can go buy a replacement piece of equipment.

They told me that the reason they were painting it up is because they needed to condemn the road roller to get a good replacement. That of course made it even more mystifying. If you are going to condemn a piece of equipment, why are you painting it?

They explained to me, well, you know, there's going to be a mechanical engineer sent in to inspect the piece of equipment and to certify that it is beyond economic repair. But if they come and see that road roller all rusted up, they will say that the reason is because you didn't look after the piece of equipment properly. So here are the men painting it up so that we won't be blamed for the condition of the road roller.

The thing that struck me here is, wow, we've got clever people. They think carefully about what needs to be done in order to get the approval that they need.

As I started work in the treatment works, my perspective was always about how can I be helpful to the people here. Here are mechanics and technicians working under me whose knowledge is way beyond anything that I can ever know for the equipment that they have to maintain. As a young engineer coming in, and here are the mechanics who are more than double my age, how do you make yourself useful?

The usefulness I found is because I go in as an engineer, and if you want to buy spare parts and so forth, you need the engineer to certify this is required. The mechanics cannot do the certification themselves. So that's where I came in useful, because I have to certify, and so I have to understand to a significant extent what they're trying to do. Basically, position yourself as helpful to the mechanics and technicians. You have to get the job done.

Let me describe to you another particular incident. At that time, Singapore was subject to flooding quite frequently, and there was this massive flood that happened in my time where the rivers overflowed. There was this pumping station we had at Kallang which became totally flooded and the pumps ceased to work. Before we could get the pumps going, we had to get the water out, because the pumps are located in a deep kind of well, deeper than most basements you find. They had these pumps working, but the pumps really couldn't do the job of pumping the water out of such a deep well.

I asked the workers to join the pumps together, one pump which feeds water into another similar pump so that there'll be greater suction power. The workers turned around to me and said, nobody has ever done this before, which set me back thinking about what I studied in my engineering at university. I reckoned, well, this is my reputation at stake in the minds of these workers.

I decided that yeah, I believe it will work and I believe it will be helpful. So I told them to do it, carry on and do it. If the engineer tells the workers, they'll do it. I'm sure I rose several notches up in their eyes that the system didn't break down and did show itself useful for purpose.

My approach in all this always is you think, you try, and if you try and something doesn't work, then be prepared to switch tracks. It's not a matter of pride, it's always a matter of getting the job done.

Keith Yap 00:09:02

Just from those two stories you recounted, the lesson or philosophy that started to develop back then was this idea of just being helpful and trying to solve the problem, trusting your expertise at the same time.

Fast forward, within a year you were then called up to be one of Dr. Goh's team, one of a young team of civil servants. Do you know how that actually transpired? Why did he choose, for example, younger folks like yourself who were just fresh out of university as opposed to maybe people who were much more seasoned and experienced?

Lim Siong Guan 00:09:32

I think Dr. Goh was being posted back to MINDEF for his second tour as Minister of Defense. He believed he needed a team of people to take a look at what's going on, people who, he said, start off with at least the mental capacity to do this.

I wasn't told, in fact. In the process of this latest book, The Best is Yet to Be, I read there one of the people who wrote notes on the past, Professor Lui Pao Chuen, who was the chief defense scientist of MINDEF. He said that he had a hand in choosing all the young engineers that were brought in. I didn't know that until he wrote that in the book.

All I knew at that time was Dr. Goh looked like he was given a free hand to choose whichever civil servants he wanted from the whole public service. He called me up to go to his office to be interviewed, which he did with a whole series of other people. I turned up in MINDEF together with people like Philip Yeo and Tan Chin Nam. There was a whole bunch of really young people who were there not because we understood all the technicalities, but people who at least looked like they had the energy and the mental capacity to learn new things fast and be prepared to try out stuff which nobody has ever done in Singapore before. We never had a defense ministry and we never had to build an armed forces before.

It immediately threw you into the deep end. I'm not terribly sure it's all that deep. The first appointment I got was as project director to get going what we called the Junior Flying Club, now called the Youth Flying Club. Dr. Goh's idea with the Junior Flying Club was to get young people interested in becoming fighter pilots for the air force.

We created this club and invited students from secondary school and the junior colleges. When they got to junior college, we would send them for flying training to get what is known as a private pilot's license. I set up the Junior Flying Club from scratch and worked on that.

Maybe a story there again. Dr. Goh, remember, as Minister for Finance, he was a man who was very careful about spending money. He just wanted to make sure you spend your money wisely and responsibly. He decided since we were going to have all these young people get flying training to get a private pilot's license, instead of the normal training which takes place on light aircraft, he said we should try to use gliders for this purpose. The point about the gliders is you get it into the air and then the plane just glides without an engine running. He decided that we should get gliders to do the private pilot license training, at least the initial training. He decided that we should buy powered gliders.

I went along with somebody who was going to be the chief pilot instructor for the Junior Flying Club. We bought eleven of these powered gliders, brought them back to Singapore, uncrated a number of them, started flying, and soon discovered that we couldn't use the gliders over Singapore. Gliders stay up in the air because of what are called thermals, convection currents. We discovered that you get very little of it over Singapore, probably because of our whole environment, the fact that we are an island and so forth.

We couldn't use the gliders. I got back to Dr. Goh and we decided just to abandon the project and go back to the normal way people train, which is to get people on the Cessnas and the light aircraft.

Just to add on to that story, once we discovered that powered gliders were no longer useful, one of the important things I learned from Dr. Goh is this point about, if you discover you try something and it doesn't work, just drop it and move on to get something that works.

I don't think we uncrated all the eleven powered gliders that we bought. But the few that we did, we discovered soon enough we couldn't use the powered gliders. So just dispose of the rest, even the ones that we hadn't even uncrated.

That was a very important lesson that I learned. Cut your losses and don't waste your time and don't waste your energies on something which you already know is not working, simply because you've taken the decision and you are fearful that somebody may come along and say that was a stupid idea. Why did you do a stupid decision? It was about just learning as you go and making sense out of what you do. What doesn't work, just cut it and move on.

Keith Yap 00:15:32

When one today thinks about starting, for example, an air force from scratch, many people think, oh, you've got to buy all this equipment, you have to get all this training, which is equally crucial. But no one really thinks, oh, you need to start a pipeline of talent earlier on, get people actually interested. This is one of the maybe more underrated components in the development of our air force.

Lim Siong Guan 00:15:57

Dr. Goh saw that when you talk about the SAF as a whole, Singapore does not have a military tradition. Many parents would not consider having their sons join the armed forces as a good career choice. Even more extreme, Dr. Goh felt that trying to get the future fighter pilots, which all had to be your own citizens, is something you have to first convince the public and convince the youth about the good sense, about something exciting for their future.

Here again, going back to Dr. Goh, we made a crucial decision. The question was, since at that time we never had any idea of having women as our fighter pilots, should we bring girls into the Junior Flying Club? Dr. Goh said yes, because these are going to be our future mothers. You want them to be supportive of their sons becoming fighter pilots.

That's how far-thinking and broad-thinking Dr. Goh was, to say you open the Junior Flying Club, bring the girls in right together with the boys.

Keith Yap 00:17:29

I've interviewed Madam Tan Siok Sun, who was his biographer, and I've interviewed Ooi Kee Beng who wrote his intellectual biography. They both added different elements of Dr. Goh's thinking, especially with regards to maybe his approach towards public policy as a whole, that he treats it very holistically. I wanted to ask you, as someone who worked with him to literally start our modern defense force in Singapore, what else do you see in him that you think more Singaporeans should know of?

Lim Siong Guan 00:18:00

Starting the SAF was a complete new thing. We never had to build a military defense capability ourselves before. Dr. Goh, in order to encourage us to try things, to think broadly, he had this saying which was plastered all over the SAF: the only way to avoid making mistakes is to not do anything, and that in the final analysis will be the ultimate mistake.

He was just encouraging us all. The key is about thinking, about trying, about discovering what works and what doesn't work so well. Therefore, knowing that the real problem is if you have people trying, and whether for reasons of pride or for reasons of not being able to recognize it, they just keep going on a path which doesn't work.

He wanted to encourage us to say that yes, be very questioning, ask all the good questions. But the most important thing is try and see whether it works or it doesn't work, and improve on what you can and move on when it doesn't work.

He introduced a frame of mind, a culture in the SAF which is about curiosity, about learning, about discovery.

Keith Yap 00:19:36

In the meantime, I wanted to ask you about another role that you had soon after your time in MINDEF, which was that you were Mr. Lee Kuan Yew's first Principal Private Secretary. For many of us who don't know, can you tell us what the PPS actually does at the start?

Lim Siong Guan 00:19:56

The PPS, that name is Principal Private Secretary. I actually went through a few discussions with him as to what we should call that appointment. Well, you're the Principal Private Secretary. You're the secretary, you're the assistant to Mr. Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister.

In many ways, what you do is totally dependent on what he tells you to do. In a surprising kind of way, a lot of people like to ask me the question, because Mr. Lee Kuan Yew's persona is somebody who's very strict and very demanding, and people are always wondering, how was it like to serve under Mr. Lee Kuan Yew for three years? My answer was, those were the freest years of my life.

It's because I was his secretary. I should only be dealing with what he tells me to deal with. Whereas in all my other appointments previously in the Public Works Department and MINDEF, and later on when I became Permanent Secretary, I'm in charge of organizations, I'm in charge of leading people to produce good results. Because I am in charge, I set the agenda. I can tell people, this is the strategy we want to adopt, these are the deadlines and so forth.

But for the three years under him, it's he who sets the kind of jobs and the jobs for me to undertake. So those became the freest years of my life in the sense that I got a lot of time to think of issues, a lot of time to read, a lot of time to just learn as we go. Particularly because Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was really, to my mind, an excellent teacher.

He got me to sit in every one of his meetings with officials, with other ministries, or with foreign leaders and so forth. He was very strict in keeping me out of all his political meetings within the People's Action Party. But other than that, he brought me into all the meetings, which was helpful to him because there were already records of the meetings and he left it to me to clear the records. But for me, it was an enormous learning opportunity.

Time was filled with learning, but the specific things to do and the deadlines and all that were set by him.

Keith Yap 00:22:31

One of the things that I saw in a lot of my readings of third-party accounts of him, and even in your book, was that many people kind of ascribe him to being a person who understood how power worked. Some call him the master of power dynamics. Understanding power dynamics, in your book you wrote that was one of the first few key lessons that you spoke about with him. Can you say more about what that actually meant?

Lim Siong Guan 00:23:00

Although people talk about he understood power, and very often you understand that kind of statement as meaning he uses power to bully people and so forth, but that was not what I found.

I found it totally remarkable that before Mr. Lee met any group of people, whether it was speaking to a Singapore audience on something or before he met foreign leaders, the most important question in his mind was about who am I speaking to? What are they concerned about? What can he do which will be helpful or will be beneficial for the people he's speaking to?

He was very clear, for example, that when he spoke to foreign leaders, he said it's important for Singapore that we don't go around with a begging bowl. But instead, you all the time present yourself as, we understand we have to look after ourselves. We have to do what we can for ourselves. But really asking, what's your concern? How can we understand what their concerns are? Because their concerns are what takes up their time and their energies.

I did find that very helpful, very significant.

There's another thing I want to say about Mr. Lee. I remember the very first day I reported for work under him, he said that in the course of your work, you are going to have to deal with foreign officials. He said, when you deal with foreign officials, you look them in the eye. You never look on the ground, because they need to respect you as a representative of the country.

That was such a remarkable statement for me, an instruction to say, as Singapore, we carry ourselves as Singaporeans proud of our country and proud of ourselves. We have a job to do and we are serious about getting it done. We are a serious people whom you can trust to deliver on our promises and you can trust to take ourselves seriously, so that whatever we say is something that we are going to carry through. In the same way, they are going to deal with us on the basis of we are going to take them seriously at what they speak about.

Keith Yap 00:26:16

To contextualize for the listeners, you were relatively young at this point in time, right?

Lim Siong Guan 00:26:22

I was thirty-one.

Keith Yap 00:26:28

I remember you were in your early thirties. I was wondering, was that actually intimidating for you to be in such a room, for example, where a lot of these figures seem larger than life and perhaps older and maybe they feel more seasoned, so therefore you felt intimidated? Did you ever feel that?

Lim Siong Guan 00:26:44

Not really, because first, I mean, if I go see them, they will know that I'm seeing them because Mr. Lee Kuan Yew has sent me to see them. So I'm obviously carrying a message, a message from Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. They take you as seriously simply because you are speaking in Mr. Lee Kuan Yew's name.

Keith Yap 00:27:13

What other things about him do you feel that maybe a Singaporean today tends to underappreciate that you think should carry on? Some of the values, some of the lessons that you learned that you think, if someone in 2030 is looking back at our early history and they want to learn something from Lee, this is something that they should definitely take away with.

Lim Siong Guan 00:27:31

Mr. Lee was very clear about the governance of a country. He said, you think about it, if you're running a company, you might think that to improve the performance of a company, you may want to remove your underperformers or your marginal performers. But Mr. Lee was very clear. He said, when you run a government, you cannot run it like you run a company. You have to look after everyone in the country.

That was quite striking to me. The whole essence of governance of a country, and after all, the most important asset for any government is the trust of its people first, and also of course the trust that you can build for other people or other countries to have in you. The most particular thing is the trust that you have in your people.

An integral part of trust is for people to recognize, for your own people, your public in Singapore, to recognize that they can trust you. We can say that there are three aspects of trust.

First, that you care about them. That your heart and your intentions are good.

Second, that you know what to do. That you are somebody who can solve problems and put the country on a good path.

And third, that you'll do what you say. That you're not just making empty promises, but you have to deliver.

Keith Yap 00:29:26

Care, competence, and commitment. That's a great way to phrase it.

You became PermSec and I had to also ask about literally you spending twenty-one years in the Ministry of Defense. For context, it's remarkable how Singapore actually went from zero military to a full-fledged modern armed forces that we have today. When people think about the military nowadays, they don't have a maybe a rosy view of the military, and they don't think of the military as a place of innovation fundamentally. A lot of people think of the military as maybe perhaps laggard adopters.

But I think in your time, especially when you were leading as the PermSec, you kind of saw the military as a place of testing new ideas. Later on, a lot of the ideas that you started when you were in MINDEF became greater public service initiatives as well.

I wanted to ask you this question about the military. What was it unique about building up a military from ground zero that you think most people actually tend to underappreciate?

Lim Siong Guan 00:30:38

A very important part of thinking about the military is really about thinking about the future. One must appreciate that the whole idea that we have about the military is to keep Singapore safe and to keep Singapore secure. The belief of the government is that we must have a military capability which is effective for deterrence. The whole point about deterrence is to maintain peace and security. You succeed if you are able to maintain the peace.

A lot of people think of the military in terms of going to fight and winning the battles. But in the case of Singapore, the idea is how do you develop a military so that you avoid getting to have to fight?

I want to say also that when you look at major pieces of military equipment, very often from the time you first conceive of the need for a piece of equipment to the time that it actually becomes operationally ready is easily ten years. Whether you talk in terms of building your armored units or you talk in terms of building the air force, anytime you think of a major piece of equipment, from the time you think about wanting to acquire it to the time you actually get it operationally ready is probably ten years.

Now you would say, how do you know what you need in ten years' time? This is the kind of thing which really drives you to say you have to, yes of course you have to take your chances, yes of course you have to dream of possibilities. But frankly, if you just see what you're trying to do is build a capability which will offer you the deterrence, you think of it differently because you are thinking of it from a defense perspective.

When I was in MINDEF as Permanent Secretary, one of the things that drove me was to introduce this concept of Total Defense. Total Defense at that time had just five components: military defense, civil defense, economic defense, social defense, and psychological defense.

The idea there was to say that it's not only about military defense, it's about the whole of nation being involved in building up that strength and that capability as a nation. The whole idea being, how do you maintain peace? How do you build up security for yourself?

Most particularly because we run a system which is very dependent on National Service and very dependent on the reserves as a major part of your army, what they call the army order of battle, the psychological part, the willingness of your own people to be defending Singapore becomes critical in this domain. That's why you talk about psychological defense, social defense being just the critical foundations of the defense of Singapore.

There is also the element of economic defense, which is about how you look after the economy so that your economy is stable and that you can rely upon it to operate even through crisis.

It's this kind of thinking that we are there to maintain peace and security for Singapore, and whatever we can do to enhance our capabilities to that end, that is what we should do.

Keith Yap 00:34:59

One of the through lines in your work as a public servant is that you've been a strong advocate of concentrating talent within the government as well. I think that stems or comes from the time in MINDEF, especially mainly because as you've pointed out earlier, Singapore when it first started didn't have the culture of wanting people to join the military as a good career. So then you need to solve that problem of how do you actually crowd in talent. That also later influenced your thinking in terms of the public service as a whole needs more talent.

What's your approach or the way you thought about talent management? How do you actually, in a sense, stack talent in your favor?

Lim Siong Guan 00:35:35

My approach when you're thinking about people is every person comes along with his particular talents and abilities. What we should be trying to do within our various public service organizations, and most particularly as a government as a whole for the country, should always be what can you do to help your people develop their talents and abilities and to be able to contribute their talents and abilities according to their capabilities.

To me, the talent issue really started with the idea about we really want to help every person realize, in the best way that we can, their talents and abilities.

Because you run many organizations through a hierarchical system, then obviously you have to pay particular attention to the people who can reach the higher levels, because they carry the bigger responsibility to develop all the people under them to be able, as an organization, to be the best it can possibly be.

Obviously then you pay particular attention to trying to spot your people who have the talent to reach the highest levels. You pay particular attention to try to spot this talent as early as possible, because the earlier you can spot the talent, the more and the earlier you can focus on developing them, and the earlier you can get value out of their capability.

That really was the idea of talent, a recognition that as you look for people at the higher levels, obviously there are fewer of such candidates. If we have a mechanism by which we are able to make the best assessment that we can, it is human assessment, so sometimes you make mistakes, but you try to make the best that you can to spot the people who can reach the highest levels. That's how you get the maximum value for the organization as a whole, not only for the individual person that you put in and that you try to bring on top.

This, particularly in the armed forces, became particularly critical, because in modern warfare, you're running military organizations which are highly mobile, where things change very fast. Basically, therefore, you need to have relatively young, energetic people, people with that energy and with that capability both mentally and physically to be in your senior positions and your top appointments.

Almost in MINDEF, therefore, you have this need to develop your commanders in compressed time, because you need to have commanders, you need to have senior staff officers with all that energy both mentally and physically. Therefore, the earlier you can spot them and the faster you can develop them, the more you are able to benefit from what they do, because there comes a time where physically it's not reasonable to expect it of them.

That's the reason for concentrating, for putting all that particular effort to try to recognize who can reach the highest levels. But as they run this, the system that we implemented in MINDEF was actually an attempt to see how we can best develop talents and abilities of people at every level. It was not simply a matter of just thinking of the people at the top.

Keith Yap 00:39:52

There's a more general lesson across the whole of public service as well, but perhaps it is felt the most acutely in the military.

Lim Siong Guan 00:39:57

Oh yeah.

Keith Yap 00:40:05

There is another strand to your thinking, which is that you are obsessed with the future. Part of it is this idea of scenario planning, especially when you're going back to what you said earlier, from where you start the conceptualization of, say, a certain asset to the point of its actual execution and implementation takes ten years. You're obsessed about the future and you took this idea of scenario planning, thinking about the future, into the much broader public service.

One of the conclusions you had was with regards to the future scenario of Singapore. The kind of possible threats to Singapore is that we either have a Home Divided or a Hotel Singapore.

Lim Siong Guan 00:40:45

The first set of national scenarios we developed, scenario planning was first developed in MINDEF for the SAF actually. The first set of scenarios were developed really for the SAF within MINDEF only. It's only when I got posted out of the Ministry of Defense to the Prime Minister's Office in the Public Service Division that I decided that this was really very critical for Singapore to be thinking about the future, and so brought the scenario planning framework there.

The first set of scenarios we produced, which was published I think in 1997, had two scenarios developed for the external environment and two for the internal environment. The two for the external environment, to be frank, I can't remember what they were. I don't think many people can, because this is virtually thirty years ago.

But the two internal scenarios, many people involved in scenarios can remember them even now across the civil service. These two scenarios were Hotel Singapore and Home Divided.

Hotel Singapore really posits that you could have a future in which Singaporeans stick around in Singapore only when things are nice and comfortable, and when things become uncomfortable, they run away from Singapore. That was the hotel thing. It's just like tourists. They come along when everything is peaceful and secure, but if there's trouble, they're going to stop coming. So that was the Hotel Singapore scenario.

The Home Divided scenario was like saying, you and I, we may be working in the same office, but in the evening I go home to my HDB flat and you go home to your condominium, and there's a brick wall between us. So Home Divided is really talking about divisions within society itself, which may be economic and may be social, but they are divisions within themselves.

These are two scenarios we developed. The whole idea of scenarios is very critical for us to understand. The scenarios are developed not as predictions about the future. They are developed as possibilities of how the future may be.

When we developed the first set of scenarios, we went around and talked to every member of Cabinet, including at that time Mr. Lee Kuan Yew and Mr. Goh Chok Tong, who had taken over from him as Prime Minister, and every minister, every Permanent Secretary, everyone whom we think can answer the question, what keeps you awake at night? How could things develop for Singapore?

We spoke to journalists, we spoke to both foreigners as well as Singaporeans, just to get these ideas. We put these ideas on how things may go wrong for Singapore. In order to make it easier for us to visualize that future, in order to make it easier for us to help people think about ways to mitigate these kinds of issues, we drew up scenarios about the future.

Scenarios, as I said, are not predictions. They are possibilities, and we are saying in order to think about the future for Singapore, you have to think in terms of possibilities.

I want to say one thing that developed interestingly at that time. Mr. Goh Chok Tong was then already Prime Minister. His office was having to prepare a speech for him at one of the graduation ceremonies in one of our IHLs, and he asked whether we had ideas. We sent the two scenarios, Hotel Singapore and Home Divided, to his office.

Mr. Goh Chok Tong went through it and said they are very interesting scenarios, but he says they are both negative. Can you think of a positive scenario?

Frankly, this is not normal scenario methodology. Scenarios normally are developed in terms of how things may go in the future and how things particularly may go wrong in the future, and therefore what can you do to prepare for it. But here's the Prime Minister asking, can you develop a positive scenario?

It was an interesting challenge. It is not in the normal way of scenario planning, but we just sat down and asked ourselves, what would we do in terms of policies and in terms of actions that could be taken to mitigate the effects or even minimize the probability of these scenarios happening? While all the time in all humility recognizing that these scenarios are all there, you are not undermining the validity of the scenarios by working out things to try to mitigate the effects or to minimize the possibility of scenarios.

We produced a scenario called Singapore 21, which contained ideas about things like how do we build resilience? How do you build racial and religious harmony in Singapore and things like that? We presented that to Mr. Goh Chok Tong, which he found very interesting and took up many of the ideas.

Quite frankly, we discovered something which we had not conceived of when we started scenario planning, which was with Singapore 21, we now could go to the ministries to say, this is the positive future that we can think about, and this serves as a kind of strategic framework for government policy going forward.

That's where scenario planning went, and that is why I moved on it.

Keith Yap 00:47:06

You were then, you also then had to kind of implement this idea of upgrading the public service for the twenty-first century. Part of the Singapore success story was that the civil service was professional, was meritocratic, and it really delivered a lot of public goods for the Singaporean citizen.

Why did you feel that need at that point in, say, 1995 to really go on this spree of, we need to modernize and try to upgrade the public service? And what were you looking to upgrade, actually?

Lim Siong Guan 00:47:37

You go to the civil service today and you talk about their values. The civil service today has just three values they talk about: integrity, service, and excellence.

Integrity as being that you are trustworthy and you are incorruptible and things like that. Service as a reminder to all civil servants that your job is to serve the people and to serve the private sector in Singapore where they depend on government for approvals and licenses and things like that. These are the people that you serve. This is why you exist as a government, to serve the people and various companies and so forth.

And third is about excellence, which is about being the best that you can be in everything that we undertake as a government. We need to be the best that we can be.

With that as a backdrop, what I wanted was to have a public service which imbibes these values, which really has to be the best that it can possibly be, has to try to do the best it can in whatever it undertakes. What this means is not simply doing today's job well. It's a matter of being innovative, about being willing to take in new ideas, being on a track where you are continuously improving.

That was the idea behind PS21, to create an awareness among people about service to the public, to talk in terms about a public service which is welcoming of change as a way by which you keep improving. We talk about the public service as aware of the future. You have to position the public service for the future. It's not good enough just to do a good job today. You have to ensure the sustainability of that success going into the future, and scenario planning was an important part of that exercise.

Really, PS21, which stood for Public Service for the Twenty-First Century, was a call, a whole exercise to bring the civil service to do a great job today and to position Singapore for success and for sustainability of the success and to enhance its survivability for the future.

Keith Yap 00:50:03

Earlier you spoke about the idea of being nimble, of being energetic and being willing to move fast and cut losses. Part of it was you were in the early phase of Singapore's nation building. You were also relatively young. But as civil services mature as well as governments mature, they tend to be more bureaucratic in nature.

One of the challenges that Singapore faces is that now you face a form of innovator's dilemma. What has allowed you to be innovative in the past could create new dogmas or doctrines that might not be relevant for the future.

Then the follow-on question is, how do you actually get the public service as a whole to be more open-minded to change or to actually be able to implement some of these initiatives that you've proposed, for example?

Lim Siong Guan 00:50:48

I can't speak about the public service today. I'm only speaking about the public service in my time.

What I can say about implementation, as I said, was that we had developed a scenario called Singapore 21, and that was a framework. I could talk to my Permanent Secretaries, because I was Head of Civil Service. I talked to Permanent Secretaries to say that's what we need to do, that's the transformation we want to make for the future.

Here I need to elaborate a bit further about scenario planning. Scenario planning is really about understanding what the driving forces are which can shape the future that any organization may face, because after all, scenario planning is something which is useful for organizations and is also useful for us as a country.

Scenario planning deals with recognizing the driving forces and knowing that there are two kinds of driving forces. One is the predetermined elements, the kind of things you know, things like population. MINDEF today can already have a fairly good idea five years from now how many national servicemen they can have available.

But there's also this other thing called critical uncertainties, where you acknowledge that we don't really know how the future can turn out, but we have to try to prepare ourselves no matter what future turns out.

Like one of the critical uncertainties is in geopolitical terms, the relationship between the US and China. Will they be more cooperative in the future? Will they be more combative in the future? What is it? But irrespective of how it turns out, you have to recognize this is a critical uncertainty which we have to be prepared for.

The point to recognize about scenario planning though is that obviously when we look at the driving forces, we're looking at factors which we can identify as factors important, which can have a heavy influence on Singapore in the future. It is what I would call you're dealing with what are called the known unknowns. You know what you do not know, and you create these scenarios on the basis of how things may turn out differently in the future. That is why you have several scenarios, because things may turn out differently. But you're dealing with known unknowns.

If you're dealing with the known knowns, it means you're dealing with a world where nothing changes. Then of course you work out your standard operating procedures. You know exactly what to do. You're not surprised by new things day by day. Some things can still be treated that way. But we also know that things are changing very fast in all kinds of different domains.

Then there's the known unknowns, where you know what you do not know.

But I think that we are now facing a situation where you have to ask yourself, how do you position yourself for the unknown unknowns?

Now the point about the unknown unknowns is you cannot use scenario planning for the unknown unknowns by definition. Trying to create a scenario based on what you do not know, when you don't know what you do not know, it is impossible. You can't run that scenario. That is, I think, a major challenge for Singapore as you think about the future.

Let me raise this point by thinking about the future, by bringing us back to 1965, or even when Singapore became independent, or even before that, 1959, when Singapore attained internal self-government while the British were still our colonial masters.

In 1965, when Singapore became independent, we were third world. You would say our natural ambition, of course, in economic and to some extent in social terms also, is to be first world.

Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, in a sense, as Prime Minister, when he travels, visits other countries, sees other things in the world, he sees something in Japan, he said, that's good for Singapore. He makes a point of telling his ministers and telling the civil servants, this is what is important for Singapore. Similarly, he sees stuff in Europe and he sees stuff in America, and you bring home the ideas. But we don't copy blindly, and that's one thing good about Singapore. We copy the ideas, but we improve along the way.

In that kind of scenario where you're copying other people who are definitely in technological civilizational terms already way ahead of Singapore, you copy, you improve on what you see. In a period of thirty to forty years, Singapore itself became first world.

Now here's the point. If our expertise or our competency that we developed most particularly was copy and improve, when you copy and improve somebody who is thirty, forty, maybe even fifty years ahead of you, in thirty to forty years, you yourself became first world.

If what we then now keep in Singapore, what's been very good is copy and improve, who are you copying today is a critical question. Because let's say we're talking about AI. Are we talking about AI today? I would say that if you are copying people in AI, maybe the leaders are only three years ahead of you.

Then we have to ask ourselves seriously, what does it mean to think about getting our way into the future by copying somebody who's three years ahead of you when we started copying somebody who's thirty, forty, or fifty years ahead of you?

Remember, when you're copying somebody thirty years ahead of you, there are certain things you have to change. You hope you can change through the homes, because the home has the biggest impact on the children growing up. The values, the ideas, what would make it possible for the children to be as successful as possible.

If the homes can deliver, that's nice. But if the homes cannot, then you will end up having to do it through the schools. Just think about the schools. If you count two years kindergarten, six years primary school, six years secondary school, two years NS, four years to get the first degree, that's twenty years.

If you want to try to change something and you can't and it wouldn't naturally come through the homes, you have to change it through the schools. That's a minimum twenty-year thing. In order to have clarity as to what you need to do for the twenty years, you need to have a strategic goal which is twenty-five to thirty years ahead.

Now this is the big challenge. In the days, in the early days from our independence and so forth, because you're copying somebody forty, fifty years ahead of you, maybe in thirty years you could become first world. In that time, of course, major changes took place in Singapore. Our sense of working hard, our sense of no one owes us a living, our sense of being able to consider a technical or engineering career, like happened to me, which was not the way we thought before when we were just a British colony. All these things could be brought together and copying from somebody else who's gone ahead, and we made good in one generation is fine.

But today, as we think about the future, the question is, is the future such that our homes will be able to bring us there in a way that gives hope and opportunity and a good future for the children? Or is it not good enough? That's a critical question.

I'm taking a long time to answer this question because it's quite complicated in a sense, but I want to give you a story. I went to Block 71 once and I met this girl who was doing a startup. She was really excited about her startup, and I asked her, what has been your biggest challenge for your startup?

She said, my mother.

I said, understand the mother. The mother is saying, you know, with the degree that you got from NUS and so forth, you can easily get a well-paying job outside and it's fairly stable. We don't even know whether this startup will still be alive six months from now.

Therefore, she said the biggest challenge is her mother, because her mother loves her, because her mother is protective of the children, because the mother wants the best future possible for the children.

But the message to my mind is what it means is that for what the startup is doing, all these things that we're trying to do in terms of creativity, in terms of innovativeness, just leaving it to the homes will not deliver what we need.

I believe as a country that if we see our future as needing a high level of innovativeness, a high level of creativity, a high level of, let's say, initiative and imagination, that is not something that's going to simply happen through our homes. It is not something that's simply going to happen on the basis of what we see other countries doing.

Because if the homes are not delivering it, we'll need to do it through the schools. For the schools to do it needs to be on a path which is to get to something which is twenty-five, thirty years into the future.

Now that's a completely different kind of challenge than the kind of formula we could use when we were following somebody who is three, four decades ahead of us.

Keith Yap 01:02:31

One of the big points in your answer just now is that Singapore now needs to move into this space where we become an indigenous innovator. The returns on imitation towards innovation is slightly decreasing or decreasing a lot more after we achieved a certain first world status.

I guess my question to you is, what do you think is needed? What are the ingredients needed to create the unlock for Singapore for us to really be at the forefront of innovation?

Lim Siong Guan 01:02:56

I think I need to be very careful about this. We are a small country. We are a small economy. We've got a small population. To be realistic about it, you are never going to be in the forefront in all these areas and so forth. To be able to imbibe an idea and go on the basis of what can I do with this technology, what can I do with this new development, that is where the innovativeness comes in.

It is not about, let me just copy what somebody else is doing. Because I think when you are talking about getting on a path that can get you to a good situation for the survivability and sustainability of Singapore twenty, thirty years from now, you can't get there simply by copying people.

I just want to be clear when I talk about innovativeness and imagination and so forth. It is not like you are going to be able to do everything and be right in front of everything. It is about a spirit which says, yes, I'm aware of what's going on in the world, but it is about a challenge to my imagination. What can I imagine myself being able to do with these things and not be constrained on the basis of, who else has done it? If nobody else has done it, then I think it's too risky to do it.

Rather, to go back to Dr. Goh's premise, he said the only way to avoid making mistakes is to not do anything. It's about saying, yeah, but the biggest threat, as it were, to your future is this unwillingness to try.

Things are changing so quickly. The only way you can actually know, and in many ways interestingly, the only way you can even be clear about the questions you need to ask, the questions you need to ask come to you only when you actually get on and try. It is not like you have all the answers before you try. The questions arise when you decide to try.

This is the challenge I believe. If you look in terms of Singapore and how do we make that way into the future so that you are able to imagine for yourself and you are willing to, yeah, just this whole attitude of trying and learning as you go and discovering the possibilities and being at par with the best in the world.

I want to tell you this thing. One time I was speaking to a Swiss professor who had been involved in giving various ideas for Singapore's future and things like that. I asked him a typical simple question, which is, what do you think we can do better in Singapore?

His answer to me, this is not the exact words, but this is the spirit of his answer, he says there's a problem with you guys in Singapore. You are world class. And now you have to think for yourself the way going forward. Don't always go on the basis of what other people are doing, and therefore what you should be following. It is a different way of thinking.

Keith Yap 01:06:30

Locally in Singapore, are there any kind of policies or kind of things that we can do to have that mindset shift?

Lim Siong Guan 01:06:42

Having a clarity of your strategic goal. For example, if you were to say that being highly innovative, highly creative is necessary for the survivability and sustainability of success for Singapore, then you're going to sit down and you're going to say, okay, what do we need to change? What do we need to change in terms of national attitudes? What do we need to change in terms of the way parents encourage or guide their children? What do you need to change in terms of the way we deliver lessons in school?

This is after all, innovative and so forth is a frame of mind, is an attitude, a perspective which says the worst mistake we can make is to not try. But trying is only for the purpose of keeping on improving as you go.

Keith Yap 01:07:39

I still struggle to fully conceptualize the full implications of it, mainly because I think there's a huge coordination problem. If everyone wants to be innovative, let's say within the government, you can't do that, for example.

Lim Siong Guan 01:07:58

I agree with you. This thing about being innovative, one of the big dangers we face in Singapore is that if you were to tell all our young people, be innovative, be creative, don't be bound by the past and all that, there could be some people who turn out and say, if that's the case, then I can say anything I like, even if some people get upset. It's okay.

What we've been trying to do, for example, in national education, whether it is in schools and so forth, you have to, it's very important, we may have to modify the way we teach. But national education becomes even more critical.

If we are moving strongly on this line of being innovative and creative, you need also to be able to move strongly on the point of saying, remember we are doing all these things because we believe the best thing we can do is to help every Singaporean be the best they can possibly be. But they can only be the best they can possibly be if they are able to maintain the racial harmony and religious harmony, if they are able to maintain peace and security and stability for Singapore.

All these things, the foundations and environment to allow you to move on this path, are totally dependent on your being able to keep things going. So national education becomes very important. This is why you have to think about it holistically.

But if I can take just a little bit more time to mention this. How do we decide what the strategic goal is when we are dealing with something which is the unknown unknowns?

My proposition is, for example, Keith, if I were to bring you and your friends, a group of people, and if I were to ask you, tell me how to describe the successful Singapore thirty years from now. How would you describe that successful Singapore?

Keith Yap 01:10:11

If you ask me, I think it'll be one that is economically vibrant, open, and inclusive.

Lim Siong Guan 01:10:19

Yes, yeah, all very good. Then I say, okay, now let's get down to the descriptors. You described it. So we go next level. And say, okay, now what are we talking about? What's the prevailing culture? Because at the end of the day, I believe it is the culture, what is regarded as the culture, the national characteristics which gives you this winning profile to have this wonderful economy and inclusiveness.

We have to discuss that. What do we need to shape the culture? You have to shape the culture. The attitudes of the people towards life, the attitudes of the people towards, let's say, innovation. What is their attitude?

My point is that if we now run a session that you talk to your friends and say, what is that future Singapore thirty years from now? The reason I say thirty years from now, remember, is because if we can have a sense in our mind what the strategic picture is like thirty years from now, we can then ask the question for each of the characteristics.

For example, you talk about the vibrant economy and all that. For each of the characteristics, we can then ask, what do we need to stop doing that we are currently doing? Because what we're doing today will not get us there. What do we need to start doing today which we are not doing but we need to do to get us there?

That's the kind of question we can begin to ask when you are clear where you're trying to go to.

Keith Yap 01:12:12

Makes sense.

Lim Siong Guan 01:12:20

Now I tell you the interesting thing. I do hold workshops where I talk to people who are just interested in these things, and I say thirty years from now, how would you describe the success of Singapore thirty years from now?

There are a good number of people who find it extremely difficult to answer that question, because they are more used to operating on the basis of reacting to a situation. In other words, if you tell me what the situation is thirty years from now, I can tell you the Singapore that is necessary to survive and to do well in that kind of situation. But since we're dealing with unknown unknowns, I can't tell you what the situation is like, and therefore I can't also give you an idea of what it is.

But on the other hand, I do find, and particularly the younger people in their twenties and thirties, I find that they can answer the question. Because I rather suspect they are not answering my question directly. My question is, how would you describe the successful Singapore thirty years from now? I believe they are not answering my question directly. What they're answering actually is the question, what would make Singapore a great place for my grandchildren? It's no longer their children, it's their grandchildren. What would make Singapore a great place for my grandchildren? And that is the answer that they are giving.

Which is still a good answer, because it really says, what will give us that sense of stability, that sense of direction to feed the hopes and aspirations of people not just for today but going into the future?

When I talk twenty to thirty years, it's deliberate for two reasons. One is because there are certain things, let's say about national characteristics and national competencies, which we need to use the school system to bring about, which takes you a minimum of twenty years.

But at the same time, talking twenty to thirty years also presents a challenge for anybody who says that idea is out of this world, is impossible. To which our question to them is, you mean we can't do it even if we have thirty years?

That's a kind of mental perspective which will make us think differently.

Keith Yap 01:14:52

The last question I have for you is, given all that you know now, what is one piece of advice you'd give to a fresh graduate entering the working world today?

Lim Siong Guan 01:15:05

I would say, chase the opportunity, don't chase the money.

When you chase the money, you are being paid for what you know today, what you have learned from your past and what you know today. When you chase opportunity, you are building your future so that you have the continuing ability to find, the continuing ability to build your life, to chase after your aspirations, to keep earning good money for your future.

But if you chase the money, you're only doing things for yourself today.

Keith Yap 01:15:42

With that, Professor Lim, thank you so much for your time and coming on.

Lim Siong Guan 01:15:49

Okay, my pleasure.

Keith Yap 01:15:49

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to the Front Row Podcast

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Professor Jostein Hauge

Dr Jostein Hauge is a political economist and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, based at the Centre of Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies. He is also the Director of the MPhil in Development Studies and a Fellow of Magdalene College.

His research lies at the intersection of international political economy and development economics.

He is the author of ⁠The Future of the Factory: How Megatrends are Changing Industrialization⁠, published by Oxford University Press.

The book investigates how industrialization pathways are shaped by recent technological developments, new forces of globalization, and the threat of ecological collapse. It also charts new pathways for industrial policy and global governance.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction and Trailer
01:20 Why Alexander Hamilton Still Matters
03:03 The Return of the State: From Free Markets to Industrial Policy
07:21 Beyond Tariffs: The Full Toolkit of Modern Industrial Policy
10:28 America's Industrial Policy Deficit
14:02 The Rise of Services
17:35 How America Deindustralized
20:43 The Fatal Mistake: Conflating Low Price with Low Value
23:41 Losing the Industrial Commons
26:04 The East Asian Tiger Playbook
33:32 China's Gladiator Economy: When Copycatting Drives Innovation
37:27 The Patent Paradox
40:16 Vietnam's Geopolitical Tightrope
44:56 Mexico's Cautionary Tale
54:31 Why Industrial Policy Requires Embracing Failure
55:35 Who Bears Responsibility for Climate Change?
59:00 China's Green Tech Dominance
1:02:01 The Overcapacity Debate
1:08:52 AI Anxiety
1:16:20 Ha-Joon Chang's Impact on Jostein
1:20:42 Advice for Fresh Graduates Entering the Working World

This is the 68th episode Of The Front Row Podcast

I want to start with Alexander Hamilton, the first US Secretary of the Treasury. Many of us know him through the musical, but I think he played an important role in formulating the importance of tariffs in creating the infant industry argument. Help me understand why we should care about Alexander Hamilton.

Jostein 00:00:41

It's great that we're starting with Alexander Hamilton. Just to give a brief introduction to who he was: he was one of the founding fathers of the United States, the first US Treasury Secretary. He's a very important figure in United States history and also very important in understanding theories of economic development and theories of the state.

He submitted a wealth of reports to the US Congress during his time as Treasury Secretary. One important one was the Report on the Subject of Manufacturers. In that report, he argued that the United States needed an active industrial policy and specifically needed to implement protectionist measures in order to catch up with the economic powerhouse and industrial powerhouse of that time, which was Great Britain.

He laid the basis for something we today know as the infant industry argument, which is that when countries are in early stages of development, they need some kind of state intervention, some kind of state protection sometimes as well, in order to be able to catch up technologically. The importance here is the role of the state, but also the importance of manufacturing growth. Hamilton said that for the United States to become a prosperous nation, it really needed to put emphasis on developing the manufacturing sector.

Keith 00:02:06

In recent times, we've seen a huge pivot from embracing free trade, embracing globalization, especially in the northern more developed economies, towards embracing tariffs and protectionism. That's maybe most clearly articulated by someone like President Trump. What animates this shift?

Jostein 00:02:26

We can talk about the return of industrial policy and the return of state intervention, and then on the other hand, the move towards more protectionist measures. They are linked, but they are somewhat separate.

Let me start with the return of the state and the return of state intervention. I think there are multiple factors here at play. We saw after the 2008 financial crisis that there was less faith in free market orthodoxy. We've also seen that climate change has become a real threat, and there's increasing recognition by countries worldwide that to deal with it, there needs to be some interference by the state.

But I think there are two big factors here that really explain it well. One is the COVID-19 pandemic. It really exposed to countries the vulnerabilities of being dependent on a lot of imported inputs. That gave many countries around the world this idea and this drive that they needed an industrial policy to be able to become more resilient across segments of supply chains.

Then I think geopolitics and geopolitical tensions play a big part. The rise of China is unarguably the most significant political and economic event of the 21st century, not just from the perspective of a huge transformation happening within China and also around the world because of that, but also a lot of countries around the world, especially wealthy countries and most prominently the United States, have responded with industrial policy and protectionism.

In some wealthy countries, we need to understand the rise of the state and the return of industrial policy and state intervention and trade policy as a response to the rise of China as an economic competitor and as an economic threat. It's not an understatement to say that economic competition policy in the US these days is very much centered around how it can compete with China and sometimes how it can actually prevent China from developing technologically.

Now what about protectionism? We've seen the return of the state in many parts of the world, not just in the US but also in Europe and in some parts of the global south, but not all countries are implementing protectionist measures. This does seem to be a very Trump-like thing. Trump implemented tariffs during his first term, especially on China. Biden then continued some of these tariffs during his term, again mostly on China. And then Trump in his second term, for reasons many of us are still a bit confused by, implemented sweeping tariffs, not simply as an economic policy but as a negotiation tool. Maybe he was upset about the way he was talked about around the world, but sweeping tariffs on almost all countries in the world in his second term.

I think we need to understand that these tariffs and these protectionist measures by Trump are not driven by a clear economic rationale like it was for Alexander Hamilton or like it has been for a lot of the East Asian tigers during their development periods, but simply as a negotiation tool, simply to make a statement in global politics.

Keith 00:05:21

Thank you for decoupling the role of the state in economics and protectionism, because I think a country like Singapore, for example, has traditionally had active involvement from the state. Some might say we practice a modicum of industrial policy, especially in our early years, but we never embraced protectionism. But today I think a lot of us tend to conflate both of them together.

I had Louis-Vincent Gave from Gavekal Research, and he was talking about this idea that in 2018, the trade war between the US and China escalated into a technology war in the sense of America trying to prevent China from getting access to critical technology such as chips. It continued to accelerate under the Biden administration, and that drove China towards technological self-sufficiency.

If we were to see that as one form of industrial policy, what are some other forms of industrial policies that are maybe more modern in nature or flavor that we are seeing today?

Jostein 00:06:24

I've written a book called The Future of the Factory. I'm just going to plug it in here now because I have this table in the book that provides a taxonomy of industrial policy instruments that gives readers an idea of how big the toolkit is of industrial policy, and it is really massive.

The most obvious ones we think of are trade policies like protectionism or subsidies to domestic industries, but really there are a lot of other important instruments that countries use. I think especially in developing countries, state ownership in the economy, so that the state takes an active role in owning certain assets in the economy, is a very important instrument of industrial policy.

You can also talk about how the state is involved in the financial sector, for example, through controlling the banking system and through lending money directly through state-owned development banks. This has historically, and also especially in developing countries, been an important tool of industrial policy to mobilize investment, mobilize credit, and to direct and steer credit into desired sectors.

And then, especially in the context again of lower-income countries, developing hubs or zones for manufacturing where both foreign and domestic firms can cluster and agglomerate together has been an important part of industrial policy.

These are just a few important examples, but the toolkit, once you start studying it, is really big and can encompass microeconomic policy, skills, education policy, research and development and innovation policy at the national level. It really is a big toolkit.

Keith 00:08:10

In recent years, the American flavor tends to be a bit more restrictive, meaning that there's been a lot of trying to constrain its main geopolitical rival. On the supply side, within the country itself, there hasn't been an effort from my point of view to upgrade its internal industrial capacity. Do you think that's a fair statement, or do you think that's a bit of an exaggeration?

Jostein 00:08:40

You could argue that if you look at industrial policy in the United States in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and early part of 2010s, you could make a strong case that there has not been much of an industrial policy. This is also reflected in the fact that America in that time period, and even earlier than that, started losing manufacturing, or manufacturing was offshored. That was to some degree a deliberate choice. There has been a period in that time of minimal industrial policy in the United States.

Although the United States has for a while had this strong national innovation system—there's this book called The Entrepreneurial State written by Mariana Mazzucato which outlines how, for example, every technology in the iPhone comes from military-related spending in the United States through agencies like DARPA—the military-industrial complex in the United States is in some aspects part of its industrial policy.

Then I would say industrial policy, starting with the first Trump administration, did ramp up a bit. It hasn't been extensive. You saw trade policy increasingly implemented. I also think it's very important to talk about the CHIPS and Science Act. This is the largest industrial policy bill in human history in terms of the amount that is potentially promised from the federal government to develop semiconductor capabilities, or redevelop semiconductor capabilities, in the United States.

And then of course now in the Trump administration, we're seeing less of that, but still we're seeing trade policy.

I think an important point to make here is that although there have been aspects of industrial policy in the US, especially ramping up in the last 10 years or so, there hasn't been a very clear long-term vision or plan of industrial policy in the United States like, for example, we've seen in China. Made in China 2025 was a very clear vision published in 2015 that was more or less completely followed up on in the next 10-year period. Whereas in the United States, we've had different administrations with different visions implementing different types of policies.

Private manufacturing firms in the United States have explicitly said during this period of Trump's quite reckless and unpredictable tariffs that they are becoming more uncertain about the future of manufacturing because they don't know what exactly the policies will be, where the direction is heading. That's the main thing that's been lacking in industrial policy in the US—a long-term vision and direction due to competing visions between these different administrations.

Keith 00:11:06

If we were to zoom out a little bit and go into some of the things that we cover in your book, there are four major structural trends or megatrends. The first one being the rise of services. The second one is the adoption of smart manufacturing, and I think a lot of it ties into the conversation around AI today. The third one being global value chains, the emergence of globalization as a modern production phenomenon. And the last one being ecological breakdown, or what we call the climate crisis.

If we were to look at the first point, one might look at the American economy today and Chinese economy and say, if I look at the Mag 7 in the stock market, for example, you have companies like Nvidia and Apple—their core capability, their value, is not really manufacturing per se, but an ability to design or build an ecosystem that encompasses the services, the design, and the production. One might say, it's okay that we're a bit overly financialized, it's okay that we've offshored majority of our manufacturing, as long as we're doing a lot of these higher value-added activities, we should be fine.

Jostein 00:12:22

One thing we need to keep in mind is that a lot of services are dependent on manufacturing. If you go to an economy like the US, things like industrial design and research and development are very much connected to the manufacturing sector. Actually, if you look at services and manufacturing and agriculture as separate sectors, we see that the manufacturing sector is much more closely connected to R&D spending than the other sectors of the economy.

If you want a—so it's not just about the factories, it's also about the research and development ecosystem that surrounds it. That's why when high-income countries start losing some manufacturing, they're also at the danger of losing this entire innovation and R&D ecosystem that's not all the time captured in these manufacturing statistics.

Another important point to keep in mind is the spillovers. There's been a lot of research on the spillover effects or the job creation effects that different sectors in the economy have, and research consistently finds that the manufacturing sector has stronger spillover effects to other parts of the economy. Meaning that it generates a lot of demand from other parts of the economy, and it also creates more jobs than other sectors of the economy, also in other sectors.

That's because, think about construction, for example. So many jobs in construction, while not always counted in manufacturing, are very much dependent on manufacturing activity. Obviously these spillover effects and these demand effects go vice versa. You also have creation of manufacturing jobs to the services sector. But again, research consistently finds that manufacturing has stronger spillover effects. This is why it's really crucial to develop a prosperous economy to have a strong manufacturing base.

Keith 00:14:17

Given the importance that one might understand manufacturing has on the local economy, the US saw its share of global manufacturing dip from 37% to 12% essentially, within the past 34 years. To me, the policymakers are definitely smart. So what happened there that caused them to willingly give up this important part of their economy that now they're trying to recover and reinstate?

Jostein 00:14:43

There are a few different factors at play here. One is obviously the lack of industrial policy and the deprioritization of manufacturing. The centrality of industrial policy in US politics, as I said, has varied, but generally over the course of the last 50 years, there's been a strong belief that the US can move towards a service-oriented economy. That's largely been reflected in policy priorities—that manufacturing was something that in many instances could be outsourced.

As East Asia largely got integrated into the global economy with cheap labor, it turned out that many East Asian countries could do cheap manufacturing activities, and American firms and American consumers were actually very happy for that to happen and happily outsourced a lot of manufacturing production to East Asia. So part of this is that industrial policy wasn't central and there was a belief that the US economy doesn't need a huge manufacturing sector. It should move towards a more service-oriented economy.

Another more neglected part of this story is how we count manufacturing in national accounts and national statistics. In this figure, say the US—say manufacturing is 12-13% of the US economy—in the central figures, this doesn't actually capture a lot of these activities that are related to manufacturing but counted as services. For example, the people who design an iPhone or all the research and development activities that are carried out by actual engineers that are interested in production but that don't happen on the factory floor.

Apple, for example, is an American company. When you buy an iPhone, the iPhone says designed in California, made in China, or the components are made in a lot of other countries. So Apple itself doesn't have any factories. Does that mean that there aren't any manufacturing capabilities or manufacturing-related capabilities in the US? No. There are still many manufacturing-related services in the US, but these are also in danger of being lost now to the East Asian production system as it becomes better and better.

Those are the two reasons that I think explain the decline of manufacturing in a lot of wealthy countries, especially in the US.

Keith 00:17:20

When I speak to my learned commentators, I think a lot of them also share that there was a faulty mental heuristic that happened, which they ascribed value to price. Meaning that a lot of them thought that because manufacturing was cheap or maybe it was low margin, therefore it was not valuable. They should focus on the parts where they could charge a higher price for, and therefore it is more valuable. But I think we're starting to see that mental model break apart right now, where actually the real value a lot of people neglect is in the low margin, the manufacturing component.

One example I can raise off the top of my head is the Apple case study that you talked about, which Patrick McGee wrote a whole book about. He was talking about how it was really this manufacturing capability that was developed in East Asia, especially in China, that allowed them to catch up and emerge as a manufacturing powerhouse.

Jostein 00:18:20

I'm glad you bring that up because if you think about the value-added along the stage of a supply chain, some component manufacturing is actually pretty low value-added as a share of the final retail price. Some is high value-added. For example, if you look at the semiconductor supply chain, a lot of the component manufacturing adds a lot of value. Value here being defined as the share of the retail price going to a specific activity in the supply chain.

It's quite fair to say that assembly tends to be low value-added, and then you look at these production services like industrial design, like testing, like research and development—they tend to be fairly high value-added. That's why companies like Apple were so happy to keep outsourcing, because a lot of the high value-added, service-related or manufacturing-related service activities were still retained in the US.

But the danger is when you offshore all the other stuff, eventually you start losing that as well. And that is what we're seeing now. Ten years ago, China was doing much more low value-added manufacturing stuff. Now China has taken over so many parts of the supply chain, also the high value-added stuff, because they're connected to the low value-added stuff and they start learning more and more. So the danger of outsourcing too much is that you eventually lose the entire supply chain.

Obviously we need to recognize it's not all a story about industrial decline in America, not all a story about choices made in America. It's also about brilliant policy choices made in other countries—brilliant policy choices made in Japan, made in Korea, and now more lately made in China at a massive scale.

Keith 00:20:03

I'm glad you brought it up because I think there's this point that I heard a Chinese VC share with me. She said that basically, if you look at the ecosystem within China itself, because every entrepreneur is so close to the supply chain, they can actually conceptualize what product to build because they know where they could source those parts, where are the different parts of the supply chain they could access. But if you completely outsource it, then you lose that ability to be close to the supply chain. Actually, that's something that maybe you wouldn't account for in your national accounting—the effect or the spillover effect of being close to the supply chain on entrepreneurial activities.

Jostein 00:20:44

There's a book I highly recommend people to read if they're interested in this, called Producing Prosperity by two economists at Harvard Business School, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih. They capture really well what they call the industrial commons. So not just what happens in the factory, but the ecosystem of activities that take place in the process of making a product from beginning to end.

They map out these different industrial commons in the United States and make the point that I also made, which is that when you offshore some things in some industries, you will also be in danger of losing other capabilities, the productive capabilities too. This varies from industry to industry. In that book, they talk about which industries have capabilities strongly clustered together across the supply chain, which can be more spread out, and so on.

Keith 00:21:34

You earlier alluded to the point of the brilliant policies in East Asia and China. So I have to ask a two-part question. The first one is: what were some of the brilliant or maybe important policy decisions that were made by the East Asian tigers that remain underappreciated today that allowed them to emerge really well in the global value chain? And then I guess the second one is: why is it faulty to assume that China is simply an East Asian tiger on steroids? Meaning there's just whatever the East Asian Tigers did but with much more massive scale.

Jostein 00:22:06

Let me try to talk about what the policies were that made it really successful. It's obviously complex, but I can think about a few certain key aspects here.

Just for the audience, when we talk about the East Asian tigers, we talk about Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. These are countries that achieved enormously high growth rates for an extended period of time. They went from low to high income in what, a 30-40 year time period, 1950 to 1990s or thereabouts.

Let me highlight three things that have been key in countries that have successfully industrialized in the 20th century, and these countries here being really the most important.

One is achieving a high investment rate in productive sectors, because when you're a lower-income country, mobilizing investment is incredibly hard because resources are strained. This entails incentivizing more savings by households. It entails setting up development banks to direct investment to desired sectors. It entails a degree of financial repression, so repression of consumption and low-interest loans to the industrial sector. It entails some degree of attracting foreign direct investment, although this was limited in the Asian tigers. I'll get back to that when I talk about China.

It's a mix of a lot of effort to really mobilize investment. You need a high investment rate in productive sectors to industrialize. If you don't have that, you're not going to industrialize, period.

Another thing is understanding that the process of industrial policy is not only a process of picking winners, it's also a process of losing. Think about the state being a big venture capitalist putting different bets in different sectors of the economy. Some of them don't go well. Some of them take a long time to really bear fruition.

South Korea's steel industry is a great example. It took a long time for POSCO, the steel company that was set up as a state-owned enterprise, to actually become competitive. Today, POSCO is a private company, one of the most successful steel companies in the world. Same with Japan's automotive industry, which had to be protected for decades before it actually started succeeding. You don't see these winners instantly.

The third aspect, especially among the Asian tigers that was important, is what we call reciprocal control mechanisms. This is something that's written about by the economist Alice Amsden, a great scholar of South Korean industrialization. She highlighted how in South Korea, the state really put in place financial incentives to make firms become internationally competitive and to make firms export rather than producing for the domestic market.

This could be simply things like bonuses or prizes if a firm makes a product that's close to the technological frontier. The important part being here that the state actually puts in place incentives for companies to become competitive and punishes companies if they don't.

These are three broad aspects of the process of doing industrial policy right that was very central to the Asian tigers.

Now let's get to your point about China. In what way is China different from this? I do think it is important here to mention scale before we go on, because scale is a big part of what makes China different. When you have a country of 1.4 billion people becoming dominant in global manufacturing, it looks very different from when you have a country of 50 million people or even Singapore, four, five million people.

Because of the scale, this has allowed China to become dominant in almost all manufacturing activities, and this is not something we've seen in these other East Asian economies. China literally dominates almost all manufacturing. Not necessarily everywhere—it's still behind, for example, when it comes to the aerospace sector—but it's not really controversial to predict that quite soon, China is going to dominate all segments of manufacturing, and it can do that because of scale, I think.

But there are a few elements where China differs a bit from what these East Asian tigers did. Although foreign direct investment was important in the industrialization drive of the Asian tigers, it's been more central to China and generally more central to developing countries that have embarked on a development process after hyperglobalization since the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

So foreign direct investment was very important in China, but obviously China succeeded a lot more with that than many other countries. I think in big part it was because of the way they formed joint ventures between foreign companies and state-owned enterprises in particular. Although state-owned enterprises have been central in Singapore, for example, and also Taiwan, in China itself the role of state-owned enterprises has been extremely important. China has by far the most state-owned enterprises in the world. Some estimates put the number at something like 3 million state-owned enterprises that exist in China.

Those are some very particular Chinese characteristics. I also think we need to mention here the model of internal competition in China. The way that China does industrial policy is in some industries they pit firms against each other in quite fierce competition. I had one person on Twitter saying that it's kind of like a gladiator match where whoever comes out on top turns out to be a super competitor on the global stage.

We've seen this, for example, in the EV industry, where lots of automotive firms have competed against each other, and now we've seen the emergence of a few giants that are producing extremely good cars at very competitive prices. I'm thinking in particular of BYD.

Those are some of the particularities of China where it distinguishes itself from these East Asian countries.

Keith 00:29:31

The gladiator economy. I think that was first popularized by Kuo Yuli, right? He was talking about this idea that in China, the copycatting is a feature, not a bug. When Westerners throw shade at China, in which they say China's very good only at copying, what they fail to understand as a secondary implication is that when you copy each other all the time, then that is the forcing function for innovation. Because now you have to find a new mode which your opponent can't copy. So if the opponent can copy it, it means that it wasn't actually a very strong advantage.

I think that was Kuo's understanding from his point of view, which is that the copycatting is actually a form of open-source innovation. And that's the way I understand it, at least. I think quite a few other commentators do make that point.

Jostein 00:30:21

This is an issue that's created a lot of controversy—the way that China engages in technological learning. I want to be clear, though, that the process of economic development is in part about imitation before it becomes innovation. Well, innovation plays a part throughout, and there are overlapping periods, but we need to understand that copying technologies, or—I'm not sure if I would use the word—I would say technology transfer from wealthier parts of the world to poorer parts of the world is an incredibly important process of technological development. Some people call it copying. That's fine. Some people have called it technology theft, which I think is the wrong way to look at it.

Because, for example, if you look at a company like Apple, Apple made a huge chunk of its operating profit in the last 10 years from China. Apple is just one example of many manufacturing firms in the West, in Europe and in North America, that have gone to China and taken advantage of cheap labor, of a cheap production system, and an efficient production system, and to be honest, subordinated China into their supply chains.

In some sense, you could say that because they profited tremendously, shouldn't some degree of technology be owed to these countries given the role they play in making technology for wealthy nations and for consumers in wealthy nations? I think so.

There are many ways to look at this phenomenon of technological learning and technological copying or technology theft, but I'd argue that looking at it as theft is something we should try to avoid.

Keith 00:32:06

One of the challenges people have is: how do I incentivize the original innovator? What are the existing IP laws? Are they insufficient in protecting intellectual property? For example, I would say in Singapore, I think we benefited a great deal of technological transfer. Taiwan did as well. Morris Chang was part of Texas Instruments before he started TSMC. A lot of the chip entrepreneurs of the 90s and 80s from Singapore did come from Texas Instruments as well, and they enjoyed a lot of implicit knowledge transfer about manufacturing or industrial design. So it's not clear to me actually how do you draw the line between theft and transfer, because to me the lines seem very politically drawn.

Jostein 00:32:51

I'm glad you bring up the issue of patents and laws around patents, because we need to ask: are patents in place to protect the interests of large and powerful transnational corporations in the world economy and to protect their profits, or are they in place to stimulate innovation?

The traditional argument is that patents will incentivize innovation through the profit motive. But then again, there are tons of innovative practices we've seen that have taken place throughout the history of capitalism without a motive for profit.

We also need to really ask the question: what kind of world do we want to create when we have extremely strict laws about patenting? If we want a world of shared prosperity and also shared technology, we need to have more relaxed patent laws. For example, the agreement within the World Trade Organization called TRIPS—Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property—needs to become much more relaxed, even scrapped, if we want to see developing countries being able to develop technologically and having access to some of these technologies.

My point that I was trying to make is that given the central role that labor in so many of these countries plays in the world economy and plays for technological manufacturing companies and technology companies in the West, we should talk about how a lot of these countries and firms in developing countries deserve access to some of this technology.

Keith 00:34:26

One of the past guests that I had on, Gita Wirjawan, did talk a little bit about Southeast Asian dynamics of China. His concern is that primarily, given China's overwhelmingly strong leap in critical technologies, what happens to Southeast Asia for the most part is you'll just be an adopter of technology, which is good. Maybe in the near future you adopt the technology at a cheap price, you benefit a bit from their overcapacity or involution, depending on how you see it, and then you upgrade your infrastructure or technology stack within your country. But then the question I have for you is: what is the playbook for developing countries today to say, hey, how can we actually accelerate our ability to go further up the value chain?

Jostein 00:35:10

I don't think the playbook necessarily looks that different. If we look at each development experience, each successful development experience, you see a lot of unique features. Every country takes advantage of the situation that they're in.

For example, I've talked about the importance of the policy ingredients in South Korean industrialization, but we cannot neglect the role of geopolitics at that time and the role of the United States at that time in supporting South Korea during the Cold War. So historical circumstances matter. The point I'm trying to make here is that all development experiences are unique.

I want to be clear—some people say it's become so much harder to industrialize today. It's become, the window isn't as open. We need to keep in mind that the number of countries that have actually successfully embarked on industrialization, transformed their economy from low to high income—the number of countries that have done so in the last 150 years or so is quite small, actually. The number of countries that have done so altogether is quite small.

I'm saying this because the point here is that it is really hard to successfully industrialize. It's not an easy task. So it's always been hard. It's not that it's harder today.

But I do think one new challenge that developing countries face today, and a very recent challenge, is how to deal with these competing power poles that are emerging now—the US on the one hand and China on the other, especially, but also the EU. Some countries are successfully navigating this great power competition. I think maybe Vietnam is the prime example. If someone were to ask me which developing country today that's still developing, that's still not at high middle income or the income status of China, I would say Vietnam is really that country that's going to be the next success story. This is a country that is able to manage to keep good relations with both the United States and China.

I've heard people refer to this maneuver as being a geopolitical swing state or a connector country.

That becomes important, but I also think fundamentally, given that China is now becoming such an important player in the global south, that somehow finding a way to have a good economic relationship and good economic partnership with China is going to be key for industrialization in the rest of the global south.

I was at a workshop on green industrial policy recently, and someone there said that it looks like across the global south that any strategy to develop green tech intrinsically has to involve China, given China's dominance in green tech. So now development in the global south is much more about how to find a way to develop good economic cooperation with this huge and emerging power, which is China.

Keith 00:38:16

The idea of leveraging China to accelerate your development, and the point that you made about Vietnam, is really interesting. Because if one looks at the way they are approaching, for example, their own rail programs, they import technology from China, but they also import technology from Japan, from Europe. So when they build a rail system, I think it's very diversified in nature. You're able to create what many investors would call a diversified portfolio, so you derisk yourself on multiple fronts.

The other point that came up after you showing how to successfully industrialize—there's another point that I thought would be interesting, which is: what are the cautionary tales? Because there's the right way to do it and there's the wrong way to do it. I think in your book you talked a little bit about Mexico being a cautionary tale on how one should actually liberalize itself.

Jostein 00:39:08

This is a really important topic because it touches upon these fundamental debates about liberalization versus the role of the state. Every time a country successfully develops, there are people who come in and say they developed because they liberalized their economy, it adopted free market orthodoxy, and so on. Because in a lot of countries that have successfully developed, we've seen an integration into the world economy.

What we saw in Mexico, especially in the 80s and the 90s, was a liberalization period, was attraction of foreign companies at that time. They came from the United States. But they ultimately had a lot of footloose operations. So technological capabilities weren't developed much in Mexico during that time period. There wasn't much upgrading in the value chains. And then eventually when China joined the WTO and they became a cheaper outsourcing destination compared to Mexico, American companies moved there.

Mexico is doing better today, but in that time period in particular, liberalization didn't work for Mexico. And I think Mexico is not the only story here. We've seen, especially in African countries, that liberalization, trade liberalization, and rollback of state intervention has been disastrous for countries around the global south. Particularly the African countries in the 80s and the 90s, and in Latin America it's been more mixed, but trade liberalization has generally heightened inequality and the results haven't been as good or as promising as in East Asia.

Now, the key point if I were to draw lessons from liberalizing the economy around the world for the purpose of economic development: you really see that the countries that have been successful have had a state that has managed this very gradually and done it on its own terms.

I really want to come back to China here because there's a huge debate on this. Did China develop because it integrated itself into the capitalist world economy, or did it develop because it had a very strong state?

China did liberalize trade, opened up after Deng Xiaoping. You saw on so many metrics clear signs that China became more integrated into the world economy, the capitalist world economy, since the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s. But they managed this extremely carefully. They didn't allow multinational corporations to gain control over key resources, which has happened in a lot of other instances of trade liberalization. They didn't do everything on the terms of international corporations. As I talked about earlier in our conversation, they had these state-owned enterprises that made sure that they learned technology from multinational corporations that came into their country.

So they had a very clear strategy of how to use liberalization and attract multinational corporations to upgrade domestically and to upgrade in international value chains, to embark on this process of technological transformation. The financial sector was controlled, still is controlled in China.

That's very important to know, that in successful cases of industrialization, you could argue yes, you've seen trade liberalization, but you've always also seen a state that has governed the market.

Keith 00:42:48

To summarize that into one sentence: it's really about viewing liberalization as a tool, not a goal.

Jostein 00:42:54

Yeah, completely. The aim of the liberalization is to actually achieve certain economic outcomes and not to see the liberalization as the end goal.

Keith 00:43:03

On that note, I interviewed Manoj Pradhan, and he made this point which is that the impact of globalization on China is huge, but China's impact on globalization was equally large, in the sense of its labor mobilization on such a huge scale created such a massive deflationary influence on the entire global labor supply. He talked about the introduction of close to a billion people into the global labor pool and how that actually reduced the cost of production so much for a lot of these multinational firms that you talked about earlier.

And then on that other note, within Southeast Asia, there is this book called Ambivalent Engagement by Joseph Liow in Singapore. He's a political scientist, and he talks about how Southeast Asia has a lot of ambivalence towards liberalization, partly because of the Asian financial crisis, where there was this huge push towards financial liberalization. As a result of the contagion effect when the Thai economy started to collapse, what happened with financial liberalization was actually you had a lot of bad behavior that was exposed, but at the same time you experienced a lot of shocks that would not have been there if you liberalized on your own terms.

Jostein 00:44:17

The Asian financial crisis is a perfect example. Also here, the role of the state in controlling the financial sector is an incredibly important point that perhaps I haven't talked enough about. Capital controls obviously is one. Financial repression, although it sounds bad—the word itself, repression, is a negatively loaded term—but that's actually been very key in countries that have successfully developed their economies.

That's something that the Asian Tigers and China actually share in terms of controlling the banking system, having capital controls in place, having a state that mobilizes investment, having a state that directs investment in the direction that it wants, rather than having for-profit capital that directs investment.

I think this has become so apparent in green tech right now—the different system that China has in place versus the United States. In China, you have a state that directs investment. In the United States, for-profit capital, and in particular wealthy individuals that have no alignment necessarily to national long-term objectives, control much more the direction of investment.

How did China become so dominant in green technology in such a short period of time? It would have been impossible had it not been for the fact that you actually have a state that says we're going to go for green tech, because green technology isn't necessarily profitable. You see this in the West where there's still huge investment into fossil fuels because fossil fuels are still highly profitable.

There's this great book by Brett Christophers that gets this point on climate and finance very right, and it's entitled The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet. He talks about how if you follow a logic of just price incentives and letting the market fix everything, you cannot steer the economy into a direction that doesn't necessarily look profitable in the short term. But when you have control of the financial sector, that's what it allows you to do. And this is particularly what's allowed China to become so dominant in green tech.

Keith 00:46:33

It reminds me of the story of Solyndra in the US, right? I think a lot of the investors back then in climate tech said, "Hey, when Solyndra failed, the wrong lesson I think they took away was you shouldn't do green tech," where maybe the right lesson was something that you alluded to earlier, which is that you have to expect failures if you want to solve some of these hard problems. From my understanding and from my conversation with some of these people within the space, they were like, yeah, because of that, now this became a taboo issue because no one wanted to have another Solyndra happen again.

Jostein 00:47:08

This goes back to the point I made about being successful with industrial policy—it's about failing. I mentioned Japan and I mentioned South Korea. I could also have mentioned China. I could also mention how industrial policy in the automotive industry in China was really not going very well. Industrial policy in the semiconductor industry in China was considered a failure for a very long time.

We've definitely seen also in China, which everyone is pointing to as the perfect example of successful industrial policy these days, and rightly so in many ways, has also failed a lot along the way.

Keith 00:47:43

On that note, I'd like to segue us into two challenges that we face now in a lot of our modern economies. The first one is what you call the ecological breakdown. Many of us see the effects of climate change, especially in Singapore—sea levels are rising. Our government's spending a lot of money in terms of building the right infrastructure to ensure that we don't get flooded. That's one.

And then the other one is the adoption of AI. I think in Singapore, especially in a service-oriented, service-heavy economy, there is a lot of existential worry about where AI might take us.

Like to go first into climate change. The big question I have actually with regards to attacking or solving or maybe reducing the impacts of climate change is that when it comes to industrialization, one thinks of industrialization as a very pollutive activity. How does one go towards an industrialized economy that will be less taxing on the planet and perhaps more sustainable in the long run?

Jostein 00:48:44

I don't think industrial activities are generally more harmful to the climate than service-based activities. I think all economic activities at scale can harm the climate, whether that be through emissions or that be through resource use. When I say resource use, I think about things like soil degradation, I think about mass extraction of rare earth minerals and metals, and deforestation—these are things that take a toll on the earth's resources that can result in emissions but are their own separate issue here.

When we talk about climate change, it's important to be clear about who bears responsibility and also where currently emissions are the highest per capita. Overwhelmingly, research—and if you look in research on this, in journals like The Lancet Planetary Health or Nature, highly respectable science and climate journals—mostly research concludes that wealthy nations overwhelmingly bear responsibility for climate change and also in per capita terms, that's mostly where emissions are happening today.

It's really—we really need to understand that the responsibility at the moment, to take action fast to reduce emissions, lies with wealthy nations.

But this doesn't mean that developing countries shouldn't embark on green strategies. As we've seen, becoming competitive in green tech can also have economic benefits, and China is a very strong proof of how—they now dominate solar module manufacturing, wind turbine manufacturing, EV manufacturing, lithium-ion battery manufacturing. These are also technologies of the future. So an industrial strategy and policy for green tech should be about saving the climate, but it can also be a strategy of becoming economically competitive.

For a lot of countries in the global south, and this is something I alluded to earlier, it has become a lot about what kind of relationship you develop to China at the moment and seeing what's going on in China. Because it's impossible to talk about green tech without talking about China. China dominates globally this sector so much.

If you go to Brazil, for example, another large developing country that is trying to put efforts into green industrial policy and green tech, China is an integral player in terms of imported products, in terms of investment. China isn't just producing all these things, but it's now becoming a major investor around the world in green energy products.

Keith 00:51:28

Fundamentally, what you were recommending is like, hey, if a country wants to seriously embark on green growth, perhaps the best way to do it without sacrificing development is to adopt Chinese tech, especially at its current price point.

Jostein 00:51:45

It's tricky, though, because on the one hand, talking about China in the global south, China provides a lot of opportunities. China helps actually some countries achieve more energy sovereignty and a higher share of renewables in electricity and energy production by, for example, providing pretty affordable solar modules. Solar modules I think have become an incredibly big part of the story here in terms of how China is helping a lot of other developing countries embark not only on a green transition but also an energy transition.

I want to emphasize that in some ways, we talk about the decarbonization challenge of the world. Well, most lower-income countries, to put it bluntly, have a carbonization challenge. What I mean by that is that they have an energy production challenge. We should accept that there are some emissions along the way, and ideally, it's about finding diversified sources of energy and ideally as much clean energy as possible given the situation we're in.

China is to some degree helping those countries through investment projects, through, for example, export of solar modules like we've seen in many parts of Africa, through, for example, export of EVs like we're seeing in Nepal. But at the same time, it's also become a challenge to develop productive capabilities in green tech in those countries given China's dominance.

I talked to representatives from both Indonesia and Brazil a few weeks ago, and they told me that it's becoming hard for companies in those countries to compete with Chinese companies in green tech. I mean, generally in all manufacturing, but this was specifically about green tech.

Are we expecting a model where China dominates the green tech sectors in all these countries? Will China to some degree crowd out opportunities for green industrialization and green tech and manufacturing more broadly to develop in those countries? It's hard to say, and I myself am quite ambiguous about this question.

I do think China generally is a better development partner for countries in the global south than traditionally the West has been, because China invests more in infrastructure, they invest more in manufacturing, and they respect sovereignty more. But it's not obviously, as I've just mentioned, it's not all unambiguously positive. China is crowding out some industrialization opportunities in the global south.

Keith 00:54:21

That's the trade-off actually that I wanted to get you to speak on, because I think that has traditionally been the problem when people complain about Chinese overcapacity, which is that, especially in a small country like Singapore—I will give you a very lame example, but it's like if Chinese F&B outlets expand too rapidly within Singapore, man, a lot of the restaurants in Singapore are complaining. Because to these Chinese conglomerates, Singapore is just another city, but to a lot of the Singaporean restaurants, this is your neighborhood, and now you can't have a steak. You're being crowded out in that case. That's a toy example, but it kind of illustrates a broader point, which is that when you have such China scale and you're exporting at such a massive rate, there is this concern of what people call overcapacity. I think that's actually a very legitimate concern of overcapacity, not in the way some of the Western media portray overcapacity to be.

Jostein 00:55:22

Yeah, I take your point here. When we talk about China in the international stage and China's role in trade, I'm a bit hesitant to call it overcapacity. I do think it is dominant and it is everywhere, which reflects I think China's population, China's scale.

So China is 17% of the world's population. When you have a country of that size, 1.4 billion people, developing at that speed and especially starting to export goods of all kinds, more, higher variety of goods and higher volume of those goods at cheap prices at incredible speed, that overwhelms the world. But is it overcapacity?

China represents 17% of the world's population. I think it makes up around 13% to 14% of global goods exports. So lower than you'd expect maybe given its population. Also, in per capita terms, its trade surplus is far below a lot of other countries. This is something that the economist Kyle Kuo or the sociologist Kyle Chan has pointed out—that China's trade surplus per capita is actually not that high.

I do think we're more talking about a large developing country that developed incredibly fast and specifically a model that relied on exporting manufactured goods to the rest of the world, which to be honest is the model that has proven to be successful for development in the past for other countries too. So I wouldn't call it overcapacity, but I definitely understand the point about China being dominant in trade.

Keith 00:57:03

I think it's also the speed, right? Like the speed in which the takeoff has happened. You pointed out BYD—it's like five years ago or 10 years ago, you remember the Elon Musk interview where he was laughing at BYD, but now he's not laughing anymore. It's just the way they have accelerated, I think, has caught a lot of people off guard as well, a lot of policymakers off guard, because I think it was really after COVID that a lot of these industrial policies really came to bear.

Jostein 00:57:32

The auto industry and the EV industry is perhaps the perfect example here of how it's scary for countries around the world. If you go to Germany, what's the future of the German auto industry? Especially if we're going into EVs more and more, which we are, is there a future for the German automotive industry given how much more dominant and how much further ahead China is in EVs than Germany?

If you're a German policymaker, you have legitimate reasons to be worried about an eroding industrial base and also especially the future of the German auto industry because of China. That's perfectly legitimate.

At the same time, I think the framing here is very important. On the one hand, a lot of the West was very happy to have China integrated into the world economy as long as it wasn't a direct competitor. They were very happy to have China subordinated in supply chains. They were very happy to, are still happy to, import a lot of Chinese products.

We need to understand that fundamentally, China's trade surplus is happening because there are a lot of places in the world that are happy to buy Chinese products at prices they very much enjoy. It's not like China is forcing onto other countries their products. There are firms and consumers in those countries that willingly buy Chinese products.

So it's very important that framing, because in the West, in Western media, we see a lot of talk about China is an unfair trading partner, China is exporting too much, they need to behave more with its exports. China has, from its perspective, done everything right. I'm a development economist, and when I look at China, it has done exactly what a developing country should do to develop its economy.

We also shouldn't forget that when we talk about EVs and green tech, China is the one country that's actually now giving us some hope to solve the climate crisis because they're actually investing in this stuff and also giving the rest of the world a chance.

Of course, it's not all a dance on roses. As I said, there are problematic aspects of this, especially in terms of other countries retaining their competitiveness. But we really need to nuance the debate here more than it has been in particularly Western media.

Keith 00:59:58

I want to talk about another existential challenge, which is automation technologies, or nowadays the way we see it, artificial intelligence. There is a worry, especially among maybe the more advanced economies that are more indexed towards the service side, that the way technological progress of LLMs has been so quick has created a swarm of existential worry—that people are going to be structurally unemployed or perhaps displaced by someone who is maybe cheaper offshore, augmented with AI.

I wanted to ask from your point of view as someone who studied this space: how do you see the role of such technologies in perhaps the reorganization of labor forces?

Jostein 01:00:48

I don't have a crystal ball, so it's always difficult to talk about this because to some degree we are talking about what are the expectations for the future.

But we've now had maybe 20 years where we've seen digital automation technologies being commercialized at scale. Maybe some people say, "Oh, but we haven't seen the full scale yet," but I've heard that said for a long time. We even had people protesting—you might be familiar with the Luddites, this group of people protesting in the early 1800s in Nottingham about the use of machines in the textile industry because it was taking away their jobs. These were artisan textile weavers that broke into factories in Nottingham to destroy machines because they were taking their jobs.

So that kind of the fear of automation in terms of displacing jobs has been around for a long time.

If we look at forecast studies today, for example by McKinsey—the McKinsey Global Institute generally produces a lot of good forecast studies on the impact of automation on job displacement—they say that yes, automation is going to displace jobs, but the restructuring of the labor force that we'll see is not going to break with historical trends. Because when you implement automation tech, you have effects that also create jobs.

You'll have productivity-enhancing effects which create jobs. You also need jobs to oversee that technology, etc. So there are a lot of job-creating aspects of automation tech that people don't see because they focus on the tasks and the jobs that this technology can automate.

We also need to keep in mind that some automation technology can only automate tasks rather than entire jobs. So at times you'll have a task automated, but not a human fully replaced.

So I do think the fearmongering around automation displacing jobs is a bit excessive. But this is not to say that this—we talk about restructuring, we talk about some sectors of the economy actually losing out. You'll see people in some industries just fading away and some jobs and some professions becoming redundant because of automation and because of LLMs, and we're already seeing that.

The big question is: is that actually breaking with historical trends? Because we've also always seen the fade and the rise of new industries. The composition of the labor force in the countries we're sitting in today, in Singapore and in the UK, is it the same today as it was 50 years ago? Are people in the same type of jobs generally? And no, not really.

So this is the consequence of rapid technological change worldwide. But I don't want to dismiss the fact that some sectors are going to face challenges quite seriously because of LLMs and automation tech.

Keith 01:03:48

The takeaway is that you really have to be grounded a little more in history, right? Look at how technological disruptions have occurred in the past, be it through the industrial revolution, the digital revolution—with it came both its boons and its banes. To be wary of the worry that you're just going to be completely displaced in a matter of seconds. I mean, that process takes a bit more time, and diffusion happens a little more slowly than one expects.

Jostein 01:04:14

I agree. I mean, the counterargument to that is to say, "Well, this time it's different." And maybe, and in many ways it is different, and maybe you'll come back to me in 10 years and say I was wrong.

But we are seeing—let's go to China where we are seeing industrial robots applied at scale. And at the same time, the manufacturing ecosystem in China employs tens of millions of people. The manufacturing ecosystem in China employs more than 20% of the labor force, which is an example of how you implement automation tech and at the same time it's not labor-displacing.

Another interesting piece of evidence in light of "well, this time is different" is a study done by the OECD which looked at the OECD countries that had implemented automation technology in the 2010s, so the most recent period of available long-term evidence. It found that the countries that had applied the most automation tech among OECD countries in that time period, so 2010 to 2020, had the lowest unemployment rates and the lower labor displacement rates because of the impact that the adoption of new tech has had on productivity growth.

So the evidence keeps pointing out to this positive impact that automation tech has on productivity growth.

Keith 01:05:47

Okay, so that's actually a very optimistic perspective to have, especially with a lot of AI fearmongering now, that's grounded in history. We should take a more grounded view—adopt the technology early, experiment with it, but don't be consumed by the worry that it will displace you.

Jostein 01:06:05

Just a final point here which I think is important. If we talk specifically about the prospects for labor-intensive industrialization, and this is something that economists like Dani Rodrik have said, that it's not that feasible any longer because of automation tech—if you look at the two fastest-growing economies in the world today, Vietnam and China. So when I say fastest-growing, I mean over a sustained period of time. So really two of the big success stories among developing countries today. The labor force in manufacturing is extremely high. So they are proof that labor-intensive industrialization is happening at this point in time.

So I would be very optimistic, especially if we take this and talk about the prospects for labor-intensive industrialization in light of automation tech. It's still very much possible because it's actually happening right now.

Keith 01:07:03

I have to come down to my last few questions for you. First, I have to ask you—you're a disciple of one of the most famous East Asian economists, Ha-Joon Chang. I wanted to ask you: how did his thinking influence the way you think about the world today?

Jostein 01:07:20

Yeah, so Ha-Joon has influenced me a lot. For the audience, Ha-Joon Chang was my PhD supervisor when I did my PhD, but I encountered his work way before I did my PhD. Actually, one of the first non-textbooks in economics that I read was one of his books called Bad Samaritans that was recommended to me during my undergraduate studies.

I was just reading normal economics textbooks. I read this book and it really opened my eyes to a lot of questions in development that I hadn't thought about before. Me and my friend, we read that book I think between the first and second year of our economic studies during undergrad and talked about it all the time. That book really got me thinking about development questions in a very grounded sense.

And then later, lucky coincidence in some part would have it that he became my PhD supervisor. So of course, given that his work has had an influence on me for a long time, given that he was also my supervisor, I do a lot of the work and touch upon a lot of the questions that he does. His influence has been great.

I think one thing I like about Ha-Joon Chang is that whatever questions he talks about, he always tries to relate it to something that's happening in different countries around the world. Real-world economics is very much applied, something that appealed to me a lot and something that I really try to carry on. We always have to ground these big economic theories in what's happening in the world today.

Given that you're from Singapore, he loves talking about Singapore. One thing he says about Singapore is that no economic theory can explain Singapore. What he means by that is that Singapore is this example of a country that—you could make the case that Singapore is very free-market-oriented and capitalist-oriented. At the same time, you can make a case that Singapore has a very strong state and governs the market and so on.

He uses that often as this example of a country that doesn't really fit into any straitjacket of either capitalism or communism or socialism. It's kind of a mix of all of it.

Keith 01:09:37

The joke I have with my friends from the US when they come over to Singapore is that depending on whether they're Democrat or Republican, they have very interesting takes. The Republicans like the low taxes, for example, but they can't wrap their head around the public housing. Therefore, the Democrats operate the reverse. So it's really fun to have my friends come here and then them try to make sense of this beautiful little country we call Singapore.

But a lot of us appreciate that we're small. So maybe that allows us greater bandwidth for experimentation, and that maybe explains a little bit why we're a little idiosyncratic from the outside eye.

Jostein 01:10:15

Yeah, I do think that's something we haven't talked about today, but it is an interesting point that if you have, quote-unquote, idiosyncratic elements like being a small country—well, sorry, if you're a small country, you can implement more idiosyncratic directions in terms of development.

We talked a lot today about the importance of manufacturing. Well, there are small countries who have managed to develop without manufacturing. Oil-rich economies in the Arabian Peninsula, and my home country Norway, very much dependent on oil, no competitive jobs, still a high-income, wealthy country. So yeah, when you're a small country, you can experiment a little bit more and might go in certain idiosyncratic directions.

Keith 01:10:57

With that, I come to my final question, Prof. Given all that you know, what is that one piece of advice you'd give to a fresh graduate entering the working world today?

Jostein 01:11:06

I think there are two qualities. If we talk about students entering the workforce or whatever they want to do, I think there are two qualities that really can shape your career in a positive direction.

The one thing you really need to have if you want to be successful is passion for what you do. And the other is grit and perseverance. I know right now it's tough for graduates. The labor market is extremely competitive, and it looks like it's becoming more competitive. But if you stick with something for a while that you have passion for, and if you have the grit and endurance to stick with it, I think those are some ingredients that I think are important in being successful.

And I also want to say that as an academic or intellectual, students often come to me, and if they pursue corporate careers or something in that field, they feel embarrassed to tell me about it. And I would say really, really don't. I think there are so many different types of careers that are worth pursuing, and worthwhile careers shouldn't be just limited to intellectual, academic endeavors. There are lots of exciting paths to take in government, in the private sector, etc. So it's all about finding what you're passionate about first and foremost.

Keith 01:12:29

With that sage advice, Dr. Hauge, thank you so much for coming on.

Jostein 01:12:33

Thanks for having me, Keith. It's been a pleasure.

Keith 01:12:36

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing and turning on notifications for whenever new episodes are out. If you're on Spotify or Apple, it would help us greatly if you could leave a five-star review on those platforms. Once again, thank you for tuning in to the Front Row.

Today, I am joined by Professor Scott Anthony of Dartmouth University. He's currently a professor in practice that looks to teach MBA students how to navigate disruptions and innovation. He recently published this book called Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shape the Modern World. In this book, he covers 11 modern innovations ranging from the printing press to the iPhone, and he goes into great detail about how each invention and innovation radically reshaped the world that we live in today. I hope you will enjoy my conversation with him as much as I did.

Keith 00:01:36

You are one of the most influential disciples of the notable scholar Clay Christensen, a foundational thinker who influenced many executives and corporate leaders across the world. I know of a story where Jensen Huang keeps his book in his backdrop, and the idea of the innovator's dilemma is something that he keeps at the forefront of his own thinking as well. I wanted to ask a really obvious question: how should one understand the dilemma an innovator faces?

Scott Anthony 00:02:05

The dilemma that innovators face that Clay Christensen identified in his research is a really challenging one. The dilemma is you do everything that feels right. You listen to your best customers. You innovate to meet their needs. You produce the best products and services on the market. You do everything that the Harvard Business School and other schools would teach you to do, and you leave yourself susceptible to someone changing the game with what he called a disruptive innovation. That's the dilemma. The right answer ends up being the wrong answer. You invest to make today better. You miss the opportunity to play tomorrow's game differently.

It's something that is a real challenge because it feels like as a leader, you're doing all of the right things until that moment where it's clear that you have done the wrong thing. The good news is Clay identified this in his research 30 years ago, and there are lots of examples of companies that struggled with it historically. You can think about Eastman Kodak and its struggle with digital imaging, Blockbuster Video and Netflix, some of the old mobile handset manufacturers and Apple and Google.

Today, large established organisations have recognised that disruption need not be a threat. It can be an opportunity. And that really has changed the way that many organisations have approached innovation.

Keith 00:03:18

You wrote this book, Epic Disruptions. There are two layers to this. One, it has to be epic. I need you to unpack that for me. Why is it epic? And two is disruption. I think when people think of disruptions, at least in Singapore, disruptions are like the trains are not working. They're a disturbance. They're an inconvenience. But you point us towards innovations or technological changes that reshape the world that we live in. Take me through the core thesis of what epic disruptions should seek to tell us.

Scott Anthony 00:03:49

Let me define the words in inverse order. Let me do disruption first and then epic. The way that I like to communicate the idea of disruption is doing a very quick tour through the history of computing. If you go back to the year my father was born, 1947, there was one, exactly one computer in the world. It weighed 20 tonnes. It was incredibly complicated to use. My father would never see that computer.

I was born in 1975. At that point, there are tens of thousands of computers. Still, I as an individual would never see them because they're in large organisations. They're for very complex tasks. By the time my daughter Holly is born in 2007, there are hundreds of millions of computers. They're desktops and laptop computers. That's the year that Steve Jobs and team introduces the iPhone. Today, we've got billions of computers in our pockets and our palms. This is disruptive technology, disruptive innovation. You take things that were complicated and expensive. You make them simple and affordable. You change the dynamics of markets. You drive explosive growth.

What is an epic disruption? Sir Francis Bacon in 1620 said that there had been three things in human history where you can draw a line before and after: the printing press, compass, and gunpowder. That's the idea of an epic disruption. Something where the world is materially different after the innovation is introduced, like the smartphone. Now the world is a different world and all the knock-on effects that we could talk about for hours. Just like gunpowder, one of the ones that Bacon identified—the idea that warfare used to be like this, cities used to be defined and defended like that. When gunpowder and the cannon came, everything changed. That's what an epic disruption does. It changes everything.

Keith 00:05:44

One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading this book was how certain things that were once out of reach or exacted too high a price became rapidly commoditised. What was once a luxury is now what most people could consider a common good. I think your book encapsulates the idea across the technological spectrum.

There is a follow-on question I had. If you look at today, the big commoditisation that's happening is the commoditisation of computation in the form of artificial intelligence. You detail in the book—you bring us back to the first information revolution, the introduction of the printing press. Part of me wants to ask this question: what are some of the lessons from the introduction of the printing press, the creation of the printing press, that would inform or should help us think better in the way in which we understand AI today?

Scott Anthony 00:06:46

It's a great question. AI is top of many people's minds right now when you think about today's epic disruptions. I teach a class at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College called GenAI and Consultative Decision-Making. About half of our graduates go into consulting. So let's create essentially a sandbox where we can play and learn about the technology.

What can you learn if you go back to the 15th century and study the introduction of the printing press? Actually, a lot. Very brief version of the printing press story: Gutenberg arrives in Strasbourg, Germany in 1434. He's not working on the printing press. He's working on a completely different business—these trinkets that with a mirror would capture the essence of the Holy Spirit during a planned pilgrimage to the area. The pilgrimage gets called off because the bubonic plague breaks out. That's bad for many people but good for the world because Gutenberg and team pivot to create the movable type printing press which truly democratised knowledge.

Before the printing press was introduced, one historian said you could take every book, every single book in circulation in Europe, and you could put it into a single wagon. After the printing press, there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of books. A true democratisation of knowledge.

Here's one interesting thing that I think you can take from the story. Who's the first customer of the printing press? The first customer of any scale is the Catholic Church. They've got real problems to solve. They want to standardise how religious services are run. A handscribed Bible would take three years to scribe. With a printing press, you can standardise, you can simplify, you can spread the way you communicate. At first, they're super excited about the technology. But then Martin Luther and other people who have different ideas about things like religion, they get hold of the same technology and they start spreading alternative viewpoints. We have the Reformation. The church splinters. You have the rise of many different religions. A technology that at first was really good for the Catholic Church ended up being really bad for it.

What does this have to do with AI? Right now you have very big consulting companies that are making a lot of money helping their clients adopt and utilise AI. I wonder if it will be the same thing as the Catholic Church where it feels really good for McKinsey, Accenture right now, but it ultimately feels bad because the end customer client business can now do things that no longer require working with consultants.

The second thing I would say is as knowledge spreads, it really changes the way society works, the way that things are organised, because you can capture and transmit knowledge. We will see the same thing with artificial intelligence. The way organisations are set up today, it's a relic of the industrial revolution. I don't know what the organisation of the future will look like. But as everybody has the ability to process data and information at scales that we could never think about, organisations will look fundamentally different—how power structures work, how they're structured. That will all change in the years ahead because that's what happens whenever you get this kind of democratisation.

Keith 00:10:03

The other question I had was on Gutenberg himself. What was it about him specifically? Because before Gutenberg even went and created the printing press, he was an ironsmith. What were his competitors, his partners or rivals in that guilded age? Why did they not develop the printing press? Why is it him?

Scott Anthony 00:10:29

It's a great question. I ask in the book, why is it Gutenberg in Germany? It could be lots of different people. In fact, if you look at history, one thing people ask is why Germany versus China? A lot of the technologies that are used—paper and ink and moulding of letters—those technologies trace back and were originally created in China. Nobody knows the answer for sure. We don't know exactly why Gutenberg. But what I argue in the book is one of the most persistent findings in the innovation literature is that magic happens at intersections when you get different mindsets and backgrounds coming together, and Gutenberg managed to be at the right intersection at the right time.

He's doing work in Strasbourg, Germany. There's a really good bell foundry industry there. You get a bunch of people who are good at inscribing on metal. It's a wine-growing region. People have presses that are used for wine, but they can be adapted into the movable type-based printing press. Gutenberg didn't come up with the press itself. It was this guy Conrad Saspach who joined his team who had that. Gutenberg's father worked at the mint, so Gutenberg had exposure to what it was really like to do fine etchings on mouldings. Turns out the people at the time could etch at something that was many times better than today's laser printers using tools that existed in the 15th century.

It's a big trade route in Strasbourg. You've got people coming from lots of different places. The Catholic Church has a big outpost there. You've got a customer there. You've got money there. You needed money to start a business then, you need it now. Johann Fust goes and provides the original funding. The argument I make in the book is all of these intersections allowed Gutenberg to do something that no one else could do. What exactly was the thing that drove him? Nobody knows. That's lost to history. But I suspect those intersections are what really powered him.

Keith 00:12:18

If we were to map that to the modern times, you would say that it's actually a convergence of location, capital, and talent—talent in divergent fields. But they can't be too divergent. They have to somehow have a sufficient overlap across those sectors.

Scott Anthony 00:12:31

I think very well put. It's one of the reasons why you see great things happening in places like Silicon Valley or Shenzhen or Singapore, because you get those things coming together. Yes, you need talent that is looking at the world in different ways. You need talent that is pushing frontiers. But too much divergence leads to, in essence, chaos, and you cannot create innovation from chaos.

Keith 00:12:57

Before you entered academia, you were an innovation consultant to some of the biggest businesses in the world. One of the things that strikes me as someone who's in that space is if you look at businesses, they often champion themselves as innovators, as disruptors, but even then a lot of them don't sufficiently innovate, or some of them even die as a business. Why is it that that actually happens?

Scott Anthony 00:13:29

It's a great question. I explore it in the chapter that focuses on steel. If you know any of Clay Christensen's research, you know one of his favourite stories was to talk about steel minimills. Very brief overview of that story: there are two basic ways to create steel. You can build a huge integrated mill. Bethlehem Steel built the last integrated mill in the United States in the early 1960s. In today's terms, multiple billions of dollars. They're huge, like a mile long. And they produce pound-for-pound the best quality steel in the world.

Steel minimills are a lot smaller. They use an electric arc furnace that melts scrap steel and turns it into finished products. You don't need to invest billions. You can invest tens of millions and create a steel minimill. Quality is not as good, but it's a lot cheaper. It's a classic disruption.

The way Clay would tell the story is the reason why the integrated mill struggled with the steel minimill was resource allocation. It was completely logical. You invest your resources on your highest-performing, highest-margin opportunities upmarket, and you ignore and don't invest in your least profitable businesses downmarket. The steel minimill looks at those least profitable markets, and because they've got a lower cost structure, they make money at those markets. They get better and better and better until they get into more demanding markets.

The whole story can be told without anyone doing anything that's irrational, except for this: at the end of the day, a company like Bethlehem Steel, once one of the true titans of industry, gets killed. It goes bankrupt. And no rational leader would say, "I want to go bankrupt." So there has to, in my mind, be some irrationality in it.

To me, the biggest thing comes from a 1548 proclamation from King Edward VI. In 1548, King Edward VI issued a proclamation against those that doeth innovate. The king tried to ban innovation. Why? What does an innovator do? They question the status quo. If you're questioning the status quo in 1548, what are you questioning? Who are you questioning? The king. If not the king, God above the king. People didn't like that. That was a heretical act.

Now, we don't issue those proclamations any more. But still, innovation disrupts dynamics inside organisations. It threatens the sense of self that people have in organisations. So for lots of irrational reasons—people wanting to cling to power, being afraid of change—people will say, "No, cannot, not worth doing, somebody else will take care of it." And it leads to organisations, even if they intellectually get it, not being able to ultimately make the change because they're scared. That to me is what really is at the root of it. There are other things that I talk about in the book about getting over past traumas and overcoming invisible patterns, but it really is that fear—that fear of somebody losing power, that fear of somebody losing identity—that I think is the biggest barrier to driving change.

Keith 00:16:32

One of the things that came to my mind as I was reading that part of the book when you're talking about Bethlehem Steel was the story of Foxconn in China. The main reason was because they went into, as you said, the classic disruptor—they went into the low-margin business. I think Terry Gou puts it when he was talking about why he decided to become a cheap contract manufacturer for the big tech giants: he saw the opportunity to learn and optimise. He was willing to sacrifice on the profit margins so that he could optimise and relentlessly improve. I think that's what some economists call learning by doing. By going through that process, you can eventually go upmarket and challenge the incumbents. This is why Foxconn is one of the biggest or best contract manufacturers today.

On that note, I have to ask this question about this bigger macro trend within the US, which is what I'm seeing: there's a lot of discussion about de-industrialisation. Across the board, a lot of the big traditional industrial giants—I won't say expecting a reversal of fortunes of sorts—if you were in their shoes today, I would like to ask: is there a way to reverse that if you're being disrupted now? Is it too late? How does an organisation turn the ship around in that sense?

Scott Anthony 00:18:00

It's a big, complicated question. I'll say two things. Number one: usually by the time it's clear to you you need to do something different, if you haven't already done it, it's too late. I teach my students this by calling it the information-action paradox. Bit of a mouthful, but the idea is by the time the data are clear that you need to do something different, it's too late to act on the implications of the data.

A wise, decisive leader, which is what we seek to build in our school, will paradoxically act when the data tells them not to, because by the time the data tells you to do something, it's too late. I think for some of the really large companies that are finally recognising they're at the end of the road of what they're currently doing, it will be really hard for them to change. But there's plenty that have started to act early and will be in fine shape.

The second point I'd make is there's data to show that large established companies that think and act in the right way can turn disruption from a threat to an opportunity. One great example I think is a company based in France, Schneider Electric, that really has driven what we called in my old consulting days a dual transformation. Transform the existing business of providing industrial goods by driving digital everywhere you can in production, service, assembly, and then create new businesses—services that will take the industrial products that you have and get data insight from them and be able to sell additional services to people.

Schneider Electric, if you look at its stock, a phenomenally performing company that is in a whole bunch of old-line industries, but has shown that if you use the disruption to make today's business better and you use the disruption to create tomorrow's business, and you do both of those simultaneously, as an incumbent, you've got some advantages. You've got assets, you've got access to customers. When you do it well, it can be a really powerful engine of growth. That's the exception. Most companies don't do that, but when they do, it is a really powerful growth engine.

Keith 00:20:00

You have this exposure—you've consulted a lot of these leaders. Part of the challenge is they're at the top of the game, and like you said, you're asking them to act in absence of data. Is it hard for them to actually turn that corner, to actually be willing to take more risk when there's so much at stake for them?

Scott Anthony 00:20:13

A couple things. This exact question—my students said, "What do you mean you're telling us to act when the data tells you not to? Telling us to go gamble?" I said, "No, no. Just recognise the limits of traditional data. What do you have to do? You have to spot the weak signal, which is another form of data, and you have to learn how to amplify it using a tool, model, framework, historical example, whatever. So it still very much is the quest to find the right information so you can say, 'I see something here that suggests that I need to act.'"

That is an incredibly hard thing to do, but it is a doable thing. The thing that gets challenging is the bigger, the more successful you are, the harder it is to do this. Bob Dylan once said, "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose." You look at the research by Kahneman and Tversky—prospect theory and related areas—as humans we get more benefit from avoiding losses than receiving gains. So when you're the great big market leader and there's a perception that you have to go through what's called a J curve—things get a little worse before they get better—we really don't like that J curve. The entrepreneur? We can just do whatever we want. We don't have anything to lose.

Yes, it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. But here's the thing. You said they have to take more risk. I would have a different point of view. There was a CEO once who came to a gathering at my old consulting company that framed it really well. He said, "Okay, let's talk about risk and innovation. I can invest in innovation and people perceive that to be risky. But best case, worst case. Worst case, I'm wrong. I write the investment off. As long as I don't invest so much that I lever up and bankrupt the company, that's okay. Best case, I'm right. Great. New growth engine, new platform for growth.

Let's say I choose not to invest in innovation. Best case, worst case. Best case, status quo. Worst case, I bankrupt the company because I miss an inflection point and I get way behind my competitors and can't catch up. So what's the risk? Is the risk to innovate? No. The risk is in many cases to not innovate. You've got to be smart about it. You've got to manage your resources. But it's not actually risky if you think about it and act in the right sort of way."

Keith 00:22:30

It's interesting that you say that because I think most folks don't frame risk and innovation that way. I think the common model is just if I take a risk, I might stand to lose something, and most often than not we don't consider the counterfactual, which is if we don't do anything, what's the risk there?

Scott Anthony 00:22:48

It is absolutely right. This is a huge bias and blind spot we have. I know it doesn't feel right, but this is the thing that the mindset has to shift, because the riskiest thing for most organisations to do today—there's so much going on. I said earlier Sir Francis Bacon said three things in world history line before and after. Today you've got augmented reality, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and additive manufacturing. I've got four and I've not left the letter A. There's so much going on now. You can't stand still. The risk really is saying, "Oh, just wait for this to pass." It's not a good plan.

Keith 00:23:27

In a sense, it's worse to commit the sin of omission than the sin of commission.

Scott Anthony 00:23:32

For sure. But the challenge is if you're a leader, you commit the sin of commission, you get fired. You commit the sin of omission, people are like, "Oh, you know." You feel like you're taking less risk when you're doing it, even though you're taking more risk when you do it.

Keith 00:23:49

I know you've consulted, you've done work in Singapore. Have you been able to see innovation or the work of innovation being done in Singapore? What makes it different here as compared to the US?

Scott Anthony 00:24:02

Another area we could have a long conversation around. We're having this conversation right now—I'm in the midst of a trip with 30 of my MBA students. We're looking at Singapore from as many angles as you can in a week to try and say Singapore has followed an approach where they've managed to balance tensions between short-term and long-term, being a multi-ethnic society, living harmoniously, being friends to everybody, the world's most powerful passport. It's all worked incredibly well. Will it continue to work? It worked well in a rules-based order where meritocracy was successful. As we enter into what might be a different world order, does that continue?

To me, one of the reflections is just what is truly unique about Singapore. As we've looked at things from different areas, you have multiple places where the way people approach things is a very pragmatic paranoia—a paranoia that our success is fleeting, that we're in an area where we've got much bigger countries around us, we're the little red dot. There's healthy paranoia that we have to continue to think differently, but pragmatic. What are we going to do? We can't just despair. We have to take action.

To make that work, you look widely to find the best examples you can find globally. You think very expansively. It's not just about what am I going to do today? We went to URA—what's the 50-year plan? What's the 100-year plan? You need both of those. You debate vigorously. We were with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and they were talking about some of the new policies that they've implemented. I said they listen to all sides and make sure that they've got very careful considerations of all perspectives. They don't know the right answer at the beginning, so they need those different points of view. Then you act very thoroughly. When you do those things in the right way, you can do powerful things.

When I go internationally and I say 2017 I think it was, MAS set up a regulatory sandbox to encourage fintech—the financial regulator, the central bank did that—people honestly just can't believe it. But it's that kind of thinking that gives me optimism that the Singapore story is not over.

Keith 00:26:12

As a young Singaporean, I'm thinking we did a lot of things that helped us succeed in the past, so now you're at this trap where you might think, "Let's just keep working on what has worked for us in the past." I actually don't think that states escape the innovator's dilemma. Most people think of the innovator's dilemma from the company's perspective, but from a government perspective, you should also continually innovate as well.

Scott Anthony 00:26:34

For sure. You look at what has changed globally. I lived here in Singapore from 2010 to 2022. If you just freeze on 2010, what's different globally today than 2010? When you talked about innovation in China, you would say China is a place where you get Foxconn, you get people who do very cheap knockoffs of things and they're fast but they're not innovative. Today you look at EV, AV, you look at the low-altitude economy, you look at artificial intelligence—China's pioneering in many places. This was not the case 15 years ago. That's a pretty big deal.

You look at Singapore then in that picture. First project I did in my consulting days was with the Singapore Economic Development Board, 2003, and one of the questions was how do we make the island more entrepreneurial? We went around and we talked to people—name an innovative company in Singapore, name a startup in Singapore—and people just kind of looked at us blankly. They said, "Creative, maybe," which was founded in 1980. So that was at that point a middle-aged company.

Today you have legitimate unicorns that are being born in Singapore. You go to Block 71, you have 800 active startups. It's a little messy in places and I really like that because I appreciate general cleanliness in Singapore, hygiene standards, but for innovation, you need a little bit of mess. Singapore has gotten a little bit messier and I think that's a good thing. I think a little bit more mess would be even better.

Keith 00:28:05

You talk about this idea of anomalies being wanted. How should one become the right anomaly in that sense? How does one in their own way of thinking about the world try to be more innovative or entrepreneurial?

Scott Anthony 00:28:18

My favourite chapter in the book is the chapter on Julia Child. I love the chapter because I just didn't see it coming when I started writing it. Julia Child, if you don't know her well, you'll read the book so you'll know her, but for listeners who don't know her—a famous chef. In 1961 she's the co-author with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle of this book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. People are like, "Well, what is she doing in a book about disruption?"

Before that book, if you wanted to enjoy great French food and you lived in America, your best option was to get on a plane or a boat and go to France because you just couldn't find it anywhere. She made it, with her co-authors, simple and easy for a greater population to be able to cook French food in their own home. Classic disruptive innovation.

The thing that Julia Child really teaches us is people are not born as great disruptive innovators. She was not born a great chef. The first meal that she cooked for her husband Paul Child was brains simmered in red wine sauce. No idea why she picked that. It was a disaster. Paul Child's family said she can't even boil water. She failed the exam at Le Cordon Bleu, the famous cooking school. What was she? Incredibly persistent. What was she good at doing? Making connections. She had two co-authors. She went and worked with all sorts of different people. She was curious. She asked questions. She kept trying.

For her second main cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume 2, she needed to crack an incredibly difficult problem. How do you enable someone to cook French bread, a baguette at home? No one thought you could do it because you needed a special oven that you have in a boulangerie. How did Julia Child crack it? Persistent experimentation. Thirty different experiments, 284 pounds of flour, and ultimately she figures it out.

The thing about these anomalies, people like Julia Child, is they are not superheroes. They're normal people who follow behaviours like this. They're curious. They're collaborative. They're experimental. They're persistent. Any one of us can do it. One of the key mindsets underneath this is recognising a single failure is not fatal.

Julia Child started working on Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1951. It was supposed to come out in 1954. It took seven extra years. There were two publisher shifts. There was a near-death moment where right before the book was going to be published, the publisher said, "You know what? I don't think we can bring this book out." And yet through it all, Julia Child was able to overcome and change the world of cooking.

Keith 00:31:00

How does the anomaly or how does a disruptor actually build a team around them? Because a lot of times when you think about an anomaly or someone that's weird or that's weirdly persistent, the idea is that they'll be out alone doing their own thing. How do they actually gather the right talent stack to help bring that disruption to pass?

Scott Anthony 00:31:17

First, if I talk about the persistence for just a second, it's important to recognise whenever you're doing a book like this, there's survivorship bias. We are studying the people who ultimately succeeded. There are plenty of people who persisted and never did. And you don't write stories about them because those stories end.

I look at my own history. I've had plenty of things that have succeeded, but plenty of businesses I've tried to launch that have not. Plenty of investments I've made that didn't pan out. Plenty back in my consulting days of projects I tried to sell that I didn't, even clients I did great work for that had no impact. Students who hate what I do in class, whatever. There are plenty of those things. The key thing to remember is it need not be fatal if you learn the right thing when something bad happens. Where people get into trouble is they persist doing the wrong thing.

Julia Child, to her credit, when a publisher said—the near-death experience—"The recipes are too long, this is too complicated," she took her wounds and she said, "All right, I will respond to that. I will simplify and make it easier." That is something that's really critical. It's not just continuing to run into a wall over and over again. That's bad. That hurts. It's saying there's something here that I can learn from and I can go in a different direction.

How do you then form the team around you? This is something that I learned from the research. I had this view in my mind that there were some stories that were really about the lone genius, like Gutenberg as an example. The story in my mind is it's this dude, say it's 14-whatever. It's this one guy working on his own. Never true. There's no story where it's an individual doing anything. It's too complicated, too hard, even in the 15th century.

What you have to be really good at doing is saying, "Here I am. I've got a certain set of skills. I've got a certain set of assets. What can I do that will complement me with somebody who might have skills in different areas?" Julia Child was a pretty scientific chef. One of the co-authors of her first book was a more intuitive chef, somebody who would just try things. One of them was a bridge between the two. I think there's something really lovely about that.

The prototypical startup is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, where you've got Wozniak who's the technical guy and Jobs who's more of the marketing guy. That idea where you've got different people who've got complementary skills coming together, I think that's really critical. Again, above all else it's a mindset: I can't do it on my own. There's just no way I'm going to do anything material unless I have friends who are helping me out.

Keith 00:33:43

I don't think that actually is the common mindset, at least in Singapore. I think a lot of the thinking goes around—you should try to be compliant. You don't want to rock the boat. If things are going good, you don't want to rock the boat. It goes back to this idea of the innovator's dilemma where you talk about the incumbents are just resistant to change or there's a built-in inertia.

One of the things that I still think about today in terms of bringing innovation to everyday life—how do we actually get people to embrace innovation?

Scott Anthony 00:34:13

Again, no silver bullet answer to this, but there was a study that was done once looking at the people who founded companies and what was common in their background. One thing that showed up in a number of the backgrounds of successful founders was they went to a Montessori schooling programme. The Montessori method of schooling is one where you encourage creativity and curiosity. You have different ages mixed together. So it's not everyone's going through the same thing. There's some degree of freedom. There's boundaries but there's freedom at the same time, and you really are doing a lot of learning by doing.

I put all my children in early ages through Montessori programmes. This is a bit self-serving but I went to a Montessori programme myself. The thing that my mother, who had very strong views on this, said was what I always appreciated about Montessori programmes is the kids who come out of it, they have an intrinsic love of learning. They're not trying to learn because they want to pass a test. They're learning because learning is interesting and therefore they're curious and they're saying, "Huh, why are we doing it this way? Could we not do it a different way?"

To me, above all else, it is the innate curiosity, the wonder. Why do things work this way? How might we do it a different way? That's the unlock. If you have curiosity at scale, you can then apply it to find other people who are curious that you can collaborate with. You can apply it to what do I not know about this idea? How do I do fast-cycle experimentation? You can apply it to, "Hey, this didn't work. I failed. What can I learn from it and do better the next time?" The curiosity is the connected tissue between all of it.

Now, you get back to Singapore. What's the concern? Singapore PSLE is a really big deal. You have very high pressure put on children at an early age to say, "No, no, no, not that. Ace the test." Your score is the thing that matters. It is not the journey, it's the destination. The thing that balances that is many Singaporeans then get out of Singapore for at least a period of time for some of their education, and that I think helps give them a different perspective. Of course, us humans, we are a unique species. Everybody's a little bit different.

But if I could wave my wand about Singapore, it's two things. One is a little bit more mess. Two is just a little bit more encouraging of children just to screw around, just to be curious and experiment.

Keith 00:36:40

If you were to have another wish in your three wishes with regards to the education system, it could be in Singapore, it could be in the US where you're from—how should education systems evolve to encourage people to be comfortable navigating the time of increasing disruption?

Scott Anthony 00:36:54

It's something I think about all the time. It's interesting for me to reflect on this. My first career is consulting. I spend more than 20 years essentially in day-to-day combat because in consulting you're either fighting the problem, the client, the team itself that you're working with, sometimes the world. It's exciting, but it can get really fatiguing.

Then 2022, I become a teacher. I'm like, "Okay, great. I'm going to academia. It's slow-moving. Everything's going to be okay." I start 1 July 2022. A few months later, ChatGPT 3.5 comes out, and then you have an administration come in that has very clear views about what it wants to do with education. Here I am back in the deep end again on the front line of disruptive change, because as educators our question is how do you teach? How do you measure? How do you run a class in a world where people have this new amazing tool?

To me, the biggest thing is pushing on experiential learning. More ways for people not to learn rotely by reading things or having ChatGPT or Claude or whatever do their homework for them, but really getting a chance to have simulations, to play games, to do role-playing, to experience. One of the great things about business education when it's done well, the essence of business education is the case study. What a case study does, it allows you to step in the shoes of someone else.

I have as an example a case study based on a consulting client I had back at Innosight, working with DBS Bank as it's undergoing its transformation. Students step into the shoes of the chief data and transformation officer DBS eight years ago. That chief data and transformation officer, Paul Cobban, opened up this new centre in Hyderabad. It was supposed to be a showcase for everything DBS was becoming. It was a disaster. It wasn't working well. There you go. There's the problem. You don't know what the answer is. What do you do?

Of course, you can get an answer from ChatGPT. But the key thing is getting in the room and having a discussion where people are saying, "We could do this, we could do that. There are pros, there are cons. Let's explore." When it goes well, something magical happens because people have stepped in the shoes of a business leader. They've experienced something and they've learned something from it.

Things like that where you get people more chances to experience and experiment, which tools like AI and augmented reality can really help you do—that to me is critical to help learners. That's a long answer for part one.

Part two will be shorter. Part two: have people leave the classroom feeling excited. Have them feel like this was cool. I love the fact that I learned something and I want to learn more. I don't think—I know education doesn't happen solely in classrooms. When the student leaves the room excited by what they've learned and they want to keep learning about it, the world is their classroom. That is the best circumstance that you can be in.

Keith 00:40:01

Two-part follow-up to the question. You have to tell me what happened in the end with the DBS case study. And the second point I wanted to make was that it seems to me that AI—you could actually utilise AI to make it more human, for people to lean into their humanity and think about how they can have improved executive decision-making. Where else have you seen some of the other benefits of implementing AI in the education space?

Scott Anthony 00:40:22

The first part—so read my book, Eat, Sleep, Innovate, which talks about the Hyderabad case and everything that DBS did. The TLDR summary is if you really want to shape culture at an organisation, you really want people to adopt digital technologies, it's not the technology, it's the day-to-day behaviours. Really trying to actively work and think about how do we have people on a day-to-day basis experiment, be curious, be collaborative, be all the things we've talked about. That was the thing that DBS learned. The book describes exactly what they do to help with that.

On the second part related to AI, back to the class that I teach, GenAI and Consultative Decision-Making—AI can be a huge enabler of learning if used in the right sort of way. The two things that I tell my students when it relates to innovation, what AI can really uniquely enable you to do is number one, imagine different perspectives. AI is really good at taking on different personas and at least sounding like it's somebody who is a cynic or somebody who is excited or somebody who's an early adopter or somebody who's a tough investor, whatever. That ability to then look at a problem from multiple angles really improves if you use AI well.

The second thing is you can use AI to really upgrade your experiments. Whether it's actually running an experiment through AI or it's creating collateral, creating mock-ups, creating low-tech versions of solutions, that dramatically accelerates fast-cycle learning. Those two things to me are really powerful.

Of course, there's the basics. You can get smart about anything quickly if you use it the right way. But the thing that I urge students to remember—ultimately if they want to strengthen this muscle, if they want their brain to be stronger, they cannot outsource to AI. By analogy, you can lift any amount of weight you want to at a gym if you bring a forklift with you. But that does not help you get stronger. If you turn everything over to AI, it's the same thing as bringing a forklift to the gym. It's not the point. The struggle is the point.

Keith 00:42:29

If you look at the incumbents, a lot of them actually logically say that we should have—we did everything right. I think you use the example of Nokia when they were at the pinnacle of their success and they failed to see that Apple was going to disrupt them and out-innovate them radically in the coming years. You pointed out earlier was that there was a part of them that just didn't seek to innovate.

The other question that I had to ask was what were the other actions they could have taken? For example, could Nokia actually have invested in building their own smartphone, or is it really deterministic? Should one think about this innovator's dilemma—the incumbent kind of really just focusing on the high margins and then eventually losing their ground—as something that is deterministic? If today we could play back to Nokia in 2007 and you were in the boardroom with the CEO, what would you have said to him?

Scott Anthony 00:43:28

I think there's data to suggest it's not deterministic. You said anomalies wanted. What would be anomalies to Clayton Christensen's original finding that market leaders struggle in the face of disruptive change? Look at all the big tech companies. A generation ago, Meta would not have bought Instagram. Meta would not have bought WhatsApp. It would have said, "That's not what we do. We're a social network on computers. We're not something where we take pictures on smartphones." So Meta did both of those things.

Go back 30 years ago. When Microsoft stalled 15 years ago, 20 years ago now, that would have been it. It would not have gotten cloud computing. It would not have gotten artificial intelligence, which are fundamentally different businesses and business models. They have very disruptive characteristics to Microsoft. But under Satya Nadella, they did those things.

You go back 30 years ago, Google might not have been leading in the AI race with Gemini, but today the market leaders are increasingly recognising that we have to play offence, not defence. I think you've got some data to suggest it.

What would I have told Nokia back in 2007? I'd say, well, let's start the clock a few years earlier, 2005. Nokia had a version of a smartphone working in its laboratory. So say, "Good, like any incumbent company, they see it. You're never blind to it. You always see it." Number one: you need more, not less here. Number two: the Symbian operating system that you have grounded everything in is going to inhibit your ability to do what the next generation is, which really is a personal computer in your pocket. This is the thing that people get wrong. A smartphone is not a smartphone. It's not about the phone. It's about bringing computing to new context. Tell Nokia you have to think about your operating system, and I'd say you might have to buy something if you want to be a real competitor in this space.

I would say even more—if you look at the research that Quy Huy has done over at INSEAD based here in Singapore in the campus here—the real problem at Nokia was their culture was one where people were very afraid of saying anything that was not perceived to be good news. The fact that Apple was beginning to get market share—bury the news, bury the news, bury the news. When you have a culture that doesn't have what Amy Edmondson at Harvard would call psychological safety, it's really hard to respond to disruptive change.

What I'd want is very simple. I would want a completely different culture. I'd want them to create more space to completely rethink the operating model choices that they made for their devices. And I'd want some pretty big acquisitions. Would it all have worked? No guarantees in life. Business is complicated. That is the thing. Even if you've got the right playbook, I had consulting clients I worked with where I stand by 100% the recommendations I gave them and they didn't work, or other cases where the clients ignored the recommendations and they found great success. Plenty where they did what I recommended, those things work, but business is complicated.

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, said you can't step in the same river twice. Every circumstance is different. Even you look at doing financial analysis—where do the numbers come from? God didn't put them on a spreadsheet. Some human went and made an estimate, maybe aided by AI, but that might have made it worse. That said, "This is the number." Is that actual real honest truth? You don't know.

Keith 00:46:53

The biggest reversal of fortune to me in the past decade seems to be Microsoft. They went from struggling company—they'd tried multiple products and they failed over time—and today now they're undisputed one of the leading leaders in, be it generative AI, be it cloud solutions. What do you think sparked that evolution or that reversal?

Scott Anthony 00:47:17

The good news is it's a pretty simple answer. Of course, the reality is always a bit more complicated, but Satya Nadella comes in as the CEO after Steve Ballmer. His biggest thing, the biggest unlock, is we're going to change the mindset of the company from a know-it-all mindset where we're going to force-rank everyone and believe that we're just better than everybody else to a learn-it-all mindset. We're going to embrace the growth mindset and say, "Hey, right answers can come from lots of different places and we really want to embrace curiosity and think about things differently."

That enables you to say, "Cloud doesn't have to be a threat. It can be an opportunity." Enables you to say, "Hey, we have fought fierce battles with Apple and we probably will in some cases continue to do it, but it's the leading smartphone platform. So we better have our enterprise software on that platform." It enables you to say, "Hey, there's this cool company, OpenAI, that's doing some interesting things. This could completely change the rules of our business. Let's invest in it."

Those are things that would be unimaginable a generation ago, but with a growth mindset where you see possibility, they're easy things to do.

Keith 00:48:16

With that, I come to my final question for you, Prof. With this new book that you've written, with all that you've known in the world, if there's one piece of advice you give to a graduate student entering the working world today, what would that piece of advice be?

Scott Anthony 00:48:28

Have more fun. The world can be a very scary place. You have the king's proclamation against those that doeth innovate. Technologies can feel overwhelming. Life can feel overwhelming. It's very easy to say, "I will find comfort in the known, and I will just put my head down and execute and all that." As we said, that's a recipe for stasis, if not moving backwards.

Have fun, explore, try new things. Get in the robo-taxi you've never gotten in before. Take the overseas assignment that you've never taken before. Experiment, and you never know exactly where it'll get you, but the destination will be worth it. So have more fun.

Keith 00:49:07

Prof, and with the viewers here watching the podcast, I'd like to recommend you read Prof's new book, Epic Disruptions. I found it to be tremendously useful in reframing and understanding how we navigate technological changes today. So if you want to understand where the future is, it's useful to understand the past. With that, thank you, Prof, for coming on.

Scott Anthony 00:49:27

Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure.

Keith 00:49:38

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