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Jan 13, 2025 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Michael Barr
For Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) government, the best news of 2024 came in May, when then prime minister Lee Hsien Loong (72) handed the premiership to his handpicked successor, Lawrence Wong (then 51). Lee’s succession plans had been the nagging background story in Singapore politics since 2016.
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May 12, 2024 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Michael Barr |Enze Han |Willy Jou |Amit Ranjan
For a geographically tiny country with a special combination of political, economic and social features, Singapore has done well to be seen from time to time as the voice of its region. Singaporean leaders certainly have no monopoly on such regional leadership, as Anwar Ibrahim’s speech in March demonstrates.
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May 12, 2024 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Michael Barr |Enze Han |Willy Jou |Amit Ranjan
On 15 April 2024, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gave a month’s notice that he was stepping down after 20 years in the job and that Lawrence Wong — his 51-year-old deputy — would succeed him. The official announcement was remarkably prosaic, reading and feeling more like the notification of a high-level personnel change in the civil service or a large corporation than the arrival of a new prime minister.
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May 6, 2024 | 
insidestory.org.au | Michael Barr
The mythmaking around the choice of Singapore’s new prime minister depicts the transition as a delicate balance of continuity and change: the island’s safe, technocratic leadership style will now manifest itself in Lawrence Wong, a smiling, guitar-strumming “everyman” who was born into an ordinary working family and attended an average neighbourhood school. It’s a nice story, and superficially true, but it disguises a fundamental rupture in the established pattern of leadership in Singapore.
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Jan 18, 2024 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Michael Barr |Allison Alexy |T.Y. Wang |Chung Min Tsai
19 January 2024 Author: Michael Barr, Flinders UniversityLast year was unprecedented in independent Singapore’s history. Difficulties have arisen in past years for the government, the economy, specific sections of the Singaporean populace or in terms of escalating repression, but 2023 encompassed all the above. Recovering Singapore’s reputation for clean governance will not be an easy task.
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Sep 24, 2023 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Allison Alexy |Ying-kit Chan |Kazimier Lim |Michael Barr
Author: Editorial Board, ANUIn 1956, the then US Senator John F Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, a series of case studies on statesmanship of US politicians. Apart from becoming an instant bestseller, the book served its intended purpose of establishing Kennedy’s reputation as an intellectual, winning him a Pulitzer Prize, and carrying the implicit message that Kennedy’s presidency would be marked by similar feats of putting the national good over political expediency.
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Sep 17, 2023 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Allison Alexy |Ying-kit Chan |Kazimier Lim |Michael Barr
Author: Editorial Board, ANUThailand’s Pheu Thai, the populist party linked to the deposed former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, is back in power for the first time since being ejected from office in a military coup in 2014 — ironically, in coalition with the proxy parties of the military junta that installed the last prime minister, Prayut Chan-ocha.
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Sep 14, 2023 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Allison Alexy |Ying-kit Chan |Michael Barr |Kazimier Lim
Authors: Lee G Branstetter and Mengjia Ren, Carnegie Mellon University and Guangwei Li, ShanghaiTech UniversityGovernments around the world regularly spend an enormous amount of money subsidising businesses. But few spend like China. A 2022 report suggests that China spends 1.7–5 per cent of its GDP on industrial policies, more than most countries.
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Sep 12, 2023 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Robyn Alders |Allison Alexy |Ying-kit Chan |Michael Barr
Author: Robyn Alders, ANURice is central to food security in Asia. The domestication of rice in Asia is well known, and its reliable supply continues to be a key component of food security strategies in the region. Less well known is that chickens and pigs were also domesticated in Asia and that livestock continue to play a key role in its cultures and economies.
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Sep 12, 2023 | 
eastasiaforum.org | Martin Miszerak |Allison Alexy |Ying-kit Chan |Michael Barr
Author: Martin Miszerak, Renmin UniversitySince early 2023, Chinese authorities have started extending an olive branch to China’s top platform tech companies after over two years of ‘regulatory crackdown’. The crackdown started in November 2020 with the cancellation of the initial public offering (IPO) of e-commerce giant Ant Group — an affiliate of Alibaba. Besides Ant Group, the ‘rectification’ affected most of China’s large platform companies.
