Chapter 11: Chinese Studies in Singapore - How a Tiny Country Watches a Giant
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.
Here’s the thing. Singapore has a majority ethnic Chinese population but sits in a region where being too close to China was politically dangerous for decades. Building institutions to study China was never just academic. It was navigating a minefield.
The De-Sinification Problem
Before independence, Singapore was a hub for Chinese-language education in Southeast Asia. It even founded the first Chinese-speaking university outside of China, Nanyang University, entirely through private effort. No government money. Just community fundraising.
But after independence in 1965, things changed fast. Lee Kuan Yew’s government pushed English as the primary language of instruction. Chinese, Malay, and Tamil became “mother tongue” subjects. Chinese newspapers were viewed with suspicion. Books from China were banned. Travel to China was prohibited.
Young Singaporean Chinese started speaking English at home. Their ability to read and write Chinese dropped. They grew up knowing almost nothing about China’s history or geography. The authors call this the “de-sinification of Singapore society.” It wasn’t the government’s goal, but it happened anyway as a side effect of political survival.
By 1979, the government recognized this had gone too far. They launched the “Speak Mandarin Campaign” to unify the Chinese community around a common language instead of dialect groups. Civil servants had to take Mandarin classes. Passing proficiency tests became a condition for promotion.
But here’s the problem. Speaking Mandarin at the market is not the same as understanding what’s happening inside Beijing’s power structures. The campaign helped with social unity, but it didn’t produce China experts.
Building a China-Watching Machine
Singapore needed people who could actually analyze what was going on in China, and it had to build that capacity from scratch.
The key figure was Goh Keng Swee, Singapore’s first deputy prime minister. After retiring from politics in 1984, Goh became an economic adviser to China’s State Council. That experience convinced him Singapore needed its own China-watching capability.
The institutional evolution went through three phases. The Institute of East Asian Philosophies (IEAP, 1983) started as a Confucian values curriculum project. It became the Institute of East Asian Political Economy (IEAPE, 1992), a China-watching think tank. Then it became the East Asian Institute (EAI, 1997), an autonomous research body within NUS.
When John Wong took over as director of IEAP in 1990, his job was to shift the focus from classical Confucian studies to real-time analysis of China’s reforms and political changes.
The first batch of researchers was a motley group of former Chinese officials connected to the deposed Zhao Ziyang regime. They left China after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. They weren’t trained academics. They were insiders who knew how the system worked from personal experience. The institute found them incredibly useful because they could explain what was actually happening in China, something no academic paper could match.
For the first two years, China watching was done quietly under the cover of Confucian studies. Studying “Communist” China was politically sensitive. Singapore didn’t establish diplomatic relations with China until October 1990. Chinese publications were still banned. The Straits Times still used the word “red” when referring to anything PRC-related.
The Recruitment Headache
Finding qualified researchers was brutal. Wong made recruiting trips to the US, UK, and Australia and came back mostly empty-handed. China had sent students abroad in the 1980s, but very few were in social sciences, and even fewer had PhDs. Those who did preferred staying in America, even at small colleges. An economics PhD trained in mathematical models wasn’t much help for practical, policy-focused research.
This problem dogged the institute for years. You need the right people, and in the early 1990s, those people barely existed.
Singapore’s Unique Approach
What made Singapore’s China watching different from the West or Taiwan? Neutrality. Or at least, a genuine attempt at it.
In the US, China studies were shaped by Cold War thinking. Focus on problems, negative developments, ideological framing. Taiwan’s approach was openly anti-communist, with some research literally called “bandit studies.” Singapore decided early on that its research would be non-Western and non-PRC in perspective. Practical, policy-relevant, as objective as possible.
There’s a great detail in the chapter. EAI assigned a scholar to review decades of Taiwan’s research publications on China, including military intelligence reports. The conclusion? None of them had predicted or even anticipated the Cultural Revolution. This became EAI’s guiding principle: “No foreign China expert knows what is happening inside Zhongnanhai.” Accept the limits of what you can know, and focus on what’s useful.
The institute’s main output was short, readable reports sent to cabinet ministers and senior officials. Wong wrote the first one on January 3, 1991. Over the years, EAI produced over 1,000 Background Briefs covering economic reform, social protests, leadership changes. Lee Kuan Yew was among the regular readers. By the time this chapter was written, a University of Pennsylvania ranking had placed EAI among the top five think tanks in Asia.
Chinese Studies Beyond the Think Tank
The chapter also covers the broader ecosystem of Chinese studies in Singapore.
At NUS, the Department of Chinese Studies goes back to 1953. It merged with Nanyang University’s Chinese department in 1980 and now covers five clusters: Southeast Asian Chinese society, Chinese linguistics, Ming-Qing history, print and popular culture, and Chinese religions. In 2014, Kenneth Dean, an American who grew up in Taiwan and speaks fluent Mandarin and Hokkien, became the first non-Chinese head of the department. As Dean put it, Chinese studies is now an international field, no longer limited by ethnicity.
Nanyang Technological University created its own Chinese-related courses, including Chinese-language journalism to fight the decline of Chinese media talent. NTU also ran a scholar exchange with China, with Chinese students coming to Singapore for economics programs taught in Chinese, and Singaporean scholars going to China.
At the polytechnic level, Ngee Ann Polytechnic offers a Diploma in Chinese Studies, the only such program at that level. Seventy percent of courses are taught in Mandarin.
At the secondary school level, elite institutions like Nanyang Girls’ High School and Hwa Chong Institution run advanced Chinese language and culture programs. Hwa Chong even set up a satellite campus in Beijing for student immersion.
The Bigger Picture
What Wong and Lim are really describing is a national project at every level. From kindergarten Mandarin campaigns to polytechnic diplomas to a world-class think tank, Singapore built a multi-layered system for understanding China.
Lee Kuan Yew wanted Singapore to be the only ethnic Chinese society outside Greater China that could serve as a bridge between mainland China and the rest of the world. That required people who could read Chinese, understand the culture, analyze the politics, and advise their own government on how to deal with Beijing.
The foresight of Lee and Goh Keng Swee looks obvious now. But back in the early 1990s, when they were setting up think tanks under the cover of Confucian studies and recruiting former Chinese officials who were happy to be out of the country after Tiananmen, it was anything but obvious. They were betting on a future that most of the world hadn’t imagined yet.
Previous: Chapter 10 - Media Image in China
Next: Series Conclusion