So I picked up this book called Singapore-China Relations: 50 Years, edited by Zheng Yongnian and Lye Liang Fook. It’s part of a whole series about Singapore’s first 50 years as a nation. And honestly, the story of how Singapore and China built their relationship is way more interesting than you’d expect.
The editors, Zheng Yongnian and Lye Liang Fook, start with something refreshingly honest. They admit the project scared them. World Scientific Publishing asked them to write a book commemorating 50 years of Singapore-China relations, and they thought: huge topic, not much time.
Chapter 1 is by John Wong and Lye Liang Fook, and it tries to do something ambitious: cover the entire arc of Singapore-China relations in one chapter. Centuries of trade, Cold War politics, panda diplomacy, military exercises, and a whole web of institutional frameworks. The through-line is clear: pragmatism made this relationship work, and institutions are what will keep it going.
Chapter 2 is all about one man: Lee Kuan Yew. Written by Zheng Yongnian and Lim Wen Xin, it makes a strong case that Singapore’s special relationship with China was built on Lee’s personal connections with five generations of Chinese leaders, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, and the fact that China genuinely wanted to learn from Singapore’s success.
Chapter 3, written by Sarah Y Tong, is basically the spreadsheet chapter. Tons of tables, percentages, growth rates. But behind all those numbers is a pretty wild story: two countries that didn’t even officially recognize each other kept trading anyway, for decades, because money talks louder than politics.
Chapter 4, written by Chiang Min-Hua, is about how tourism exchange between Singapore and China grew from almost nothing into a multi-billion dollar flow of people and money in both directions. And the numbers in this chapter are genuinely surprising.
This is probably my favorite chapter in the whole book. Lye Liang Fook writes about the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), and it reads almost like a startup saga. Two countries decided to build an entire industrial township together. They clashed on how to do it. Things got rough. Then it actually worked.
Chapter 6 is written by Chen Gang, and it’s about one of the most interesting things Singapore and China have done together. They decided to build an eco-friendly city from scratch. Not renovate an existing one. Not add solar panels to some buildings. They picked a 30-square-kilometre patch of mostly useless land, salt farms and wastewater ponds, and said: “Let’s build a green city here.”
This chapter is different from the rest of the book. It’s not written by academics. It’s written by Singbridge, the company that actually builds these projects on the ground. So instead of theory, you get the practitioner’s view. How does a Singapore company walk into a Chinese province and say, “Let us help you build a city”? And then actually do it?
Zhao Litao’s chapter on educational exchanges reads like a story about two countries slowly figuring out they need each other’s schools. Not for sentimental reasons. For very practical ones.
Lim Tai Wei’s chapter is about the “soft” side of Singapore’s Chinese community. Not the money, not the politics, not the diplomatic handshakes. Instead, he looks at culture, food, education, traditions, and identity. The stuff that shapes how a community actually lives day to day.
Chapter 10, by Huang Yanjie and Zhao Lingmin, is about how Singapore looks when viewed through Chinese eyes. Not the diplomatic version. The media version. Official newspapers, TV dramas, pop songs, travel blogs, internet forums. All of it.
Chapter 11, written by John Wong and Lim Tai Wei, tells the story of how Singapore built serious intellectual infrastructure for studying China. Not just the language or the classics, but real-time political and economic analysis.
So we made it through all 11 chapters of “Singapore-China Relations: 50 Years.” That’s a lot of diplomatic history, economic data, and joint projects. Here’s what stuck with me after reading the whole thing.