Churchill called December 10, 1941, “the worst day of the war.” Not because of some abstract strategic loss. Because on that day, the Royal Navy lost two of its biggest ships to Japanese aircraft. And with them, any illusion that Britain could defend Singapore.
Chapter V of “Singapore: Unlikely Power” is where things start going very wrong. Perry titled it “Clouds, Thunder, and Storm” and that really nails it. Everything we’ve been reading about in previous chapters, the trade, the empire, the comfy colonial life, it’s all about to get smashed. But nobody in Singapore seems to notice.
The first half of this chapter was all about Suez, steam, and how Singapore found itself at the center of a shrinking world. This second half gets into what actually flowed through that center. Tin. Rubber. People. Some came voluntarily. Many did not.
Chapter IV is where Singapore stops being a scrappy trading outpost and starts becoming a real global port. Three things happened almost at once in the late 1860s and early 1870s: Singapore cut ties with India and reported directly to London, the Suez Canal opened, and the undersea telegraph cable arrived. Perry calls this chapter “Empire at Zenith” and it’s easy to see why. British infrastructure basically supercharged Singapore’s growth.
Chapter III of Perry’s book is where Singapore stops being just a dot on the map and starts becoming a real city. And the story of how that happened is basically about people showing up, working hard, and some seriously questionable government revenue strategies.
Chapter II is called “Wings of Canvas,” which is honestly a great title. It captures this moment in the 1400s and 1500s when Europeans figured out long-distance sailing and suddenly showed up in Asian waters like uninvited guests who never left.
Perry opens this chapter with a line that stuck with me: “An equatorial jungle swamp provides an unpromising spawning ground for a world-class city.”
Perry opens with a memory from his childhood in 1930s New Jersey. A small wooden model boat, a Malayan prau, that he loved carrying around as a kid. His parents had lived in Southeast Asia in the 1920s, working on a rubber plantation. Their house was filled with exotic stuff: a tiger skin on the floor, an elephant-foot wastebasket, brass trays, opium pipes, batik hangings. For a kid growing up in suburban Maplewood during the Great Depression, this was basically having a portal to another world sitting in your living room.
I just finished reading “Singapore: Unlikely Power” by John Curtis Perry, and I have to say - this book blew my mind a little.
And that’s the last chapter.
This is the closing post of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Yeo Bock Cheng spent 32 years at the United Nations. He believes he was the first Singaporean to build an entire career there. His story starts with a casual job offer in Bangkok and ends with him arranging billions of dollars in peacekeeping payments in New York.
“Be careful. You’ll be entering a cesspit of vipers.” That was the advice Dileep Nair got from a former senior UN diplomat before he took the job. He took it anyway.
When Singapore got a seat on the UN Security Council in 2001, Christine Lee figured she would end up chairing a quiet committee. She was wrong. The job turned into one of the most intense learning experiences of her career.
The UN is mostly known for security stuff. Wars. Peacekeeping. Big political crises. But there’s a whole other side of the UN that most people never hear about. The part that works on social issues. Education. Health. Aging populations. Disability rights. Housing. Gender equality. This is the world that Thelma Kay spent her career in.
In conflict after conflict, women were being targeted. Rape was used as a weapon of war. Women were excluded from peace talks. And when the fighting stopped and countries tried to rebuild, women were left out of the decisions that shaped their futures. Noeleen Heyzer decided to change that. And she actually did.
What happens when you take someone from Singapore’s private tech sector and put them in charge of technology for one of the UN’s biggest development organizations? You get cloud computing in disaster zones, facial recognition for police in Guatemala, and SMS voting guides for 120 million Pakistanis.
You hear about what the UN does. Peacekeeping. Humanitarian aid. Climate conferences. But you almost never hear about how the UN pays for all of it. Who manages the money? Who sets the salaries? Who makes sure that when 2.7 million compensation claims come in, the right people get paid the right amounts?
The title of Chapter 38 comes from a quote by Dag Hammarskjold, the legendary UN Secretary-General: the UN exists “to save humanity from hell.” Chew Beng Yong spent 26 years inside the UN Secretariat trying to do exactly that.
Statistics might sound boring. But Chapter 37 argues they are one of the most important things the UN does. And a Singaporean ended up running the whole operation.
When you think of UN peacekeeping, you think of soldiers. But there is another side to it that gets much less attention. Police. Chapter 36 tells the story of Singapore police officers deployed to some of the most troubled places on earth.
Most people think of Singapore’s military as a small defense force guarding a tiny island. Chapter 35 tells a very different story. It is the story of Singapore soldiers wearing blue helmets in war zones around the world.
Every person on Earth is affected by weather and climate. But almost nobody thinks about the UN agency that coordinates how the world monitors and predicts it. The World Meteorological Organization is one of the least famous international organizations out there. Singapore has been working with them since 1966. And the story is more interesting than you might expect.
In the early 1980s, Singapore was a country where commercial-scale piracy and counterfeiting were tolerated. The common view was simple: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan got rich by copying, so why should Singapore be any different? Three decades later, Singapore hosted a major international treaty conference, had the first overseas WIPO office in the world, and was recognized as a model of intellectual property cooperation.
The World Health Organization has 7,000 staff in 150 countries. It works with 194 member states. And some of the most important decisions get made during coffee breaks. That is one of the many things David Ho learned during his time working with the WHO in Geneva.
A young doctor in Singapore gets a phone call out of nowhere. His mentor asks if he wants to work for the World Health Organization in Indonesia, fighting bird flu. He says yes. That one call changes his career and puts Singapore on the global health map.
Ask someone what a UN worker looks like and they will probably describe a diplomat at a cocktail party in New York. The reality, especially for the people in this chapter, is more like 700 trucks driving food through the Ethiopian desert to millions of starving people.
It started with a casual conversation about textbooks. It ended with 115 African policymakers visiting Singapore, a major conference in Tunisia, and four published books. That is how knowledge sharing works when the right people get involved.
Can a mobile app help farmers sell their crops? Can slaughterhouse waste power a kitchen stove? These are the kinds of problems that infoDev at the World Bank works on. And the person running the whole thing is a Singaporean.
Most countries that work with the World Bank stay borrowers for decades. Singapore borrowed for about ten years, then basically stopped needing the money. That is the short version of this chapter.
Janet Lim joined UNHCR in 1980. She spent over three decades working on refugee crises around the world. And she says something that’s hard to argue with: humanitarian work is probably the area where Singapore has been the least engaged with the UN.
When people think of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, they think of the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Mount Fuji. Big, dramatic, instantly recognizable places. So when Singapore put forward its Botanic Gardens, a lot of Singaporeans raised their eyebrows. Really? Our little garden?
Environmental problems don’t care about borders. Pollution from one country drifts into another. Climate change hits everyone. For a tiny island nation like Singapore, what happens outside its borders matters just as much as what happens inside.
Here’s a thing about international trade that most people don’t think about. Every country has its own laws. When you buy something from a company in another country, which country’s laws apply? What happens if there’s a dispute? Who decides?
When Singapore became independent in 1965, one of the first things it needed from the International Telecommunication Union was a country code. They got +65. By coincidence, the same number as the year of independence. Fifty years later, Singapore was helping shape global internet policy and building one of the world’s first Smart Nations.
Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea. And forty percent of global cargo passes through the narrow waterway right next to Singapore. If that strait gets blocked or becomes unsafe, the world economy has a serious problem. This chapter explains how Singapore works with the International Maritime Organization to keep things moving.
September 2011. Washington, DC. The headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. Europe is on the edge of a financial panic. Greece is drowning in debt. The US is heading toward a fiscal cliff. Japan just got hit by an earthquake and tsunami. And the person chairing the room full of the world’s most powerful finance ministers is from Singapore.
A woman from Singapore’s trade union movement walks into a room full of global negotiators, and two years later she helps deliver the first-ever international convention protecting domestic workers. Something that the workers’ side had been trying to get done for over 40 years.
In 2001, a Singaporean judge flew to The Hague to help try war criminals. He was the first international judge Singapore ever sent to a United Nations court. His name was Amarjeet Singh.
Singapore is a tiny island. No natural resources. No hinterland. But somehow it built one of the biggest aviation hubs on the planet. Chapter 17 explains how that happened, and how the UN’s aviation agency played a big role in it.
When people hear the word “atomic,” they think of mushroom clouds and disaster movies. But the International Atomic Energy Agency does a lot more than deal with nuclear weapons. And Singapore has been part of that story since 1967.
When two countries fight over trade, who decides who’s right? For a long time, the answer was basically “the bigger country wins.” That changed in 1995. And Singapore helped make it happen.
People love to mock the UN. Too many speeches. Too many resolutions. Not enough action. But is that actually true? This chapter makes a solid case that the UN has been “doing stuff” all along. And so has Singapore.
People love to trash the WTO. It’s too slow. It’s broken. Nothing ever gets done. You hear it all the time.
If you’re a small country, what do you do when bigger countries can just push you around? You team up. You play smart. You make yourself useful. That’s basically the entire playbook that Burhan Gafoor lays out in Chapter 12.
Here is a question most people never think about. The United Nations belongs to all countries equally, right? One country, one vote. That is the theory. But in practice, the countries that pay the most money get to call the shots. And they have gotten very good at making sure it stays that way.
A Singaporean diplomat walks into a room full of veteran trade negotiators, knows almost nothing about trade law, and somehow ends up chairing the first meeting of a brand new global organization. That’s this chapter in a nutshell.
When you think of global trade talks, you probably picture big countries throwing their weight around. The US, EU, China. But one of the most effective players in world trade negotiations is a tiny city-state with no natural resources.
World Toilet Day. Yes, that is an actual thing at the United Nations. And Singapore is the country that made it happen.
Imagine showing up to the most important meeting in the world. You’re representing your entire country. And you have a team of three people. Three.
Imagine 20 countries making big economic decisions for the entire planet. And nobody asked the other 170+ countries what they thought. That’s basically what happened after the 2008 financial crisis.
Imagine showing up to a meeting where the big players have already made all the decisions. Nobody asked for your input. Nobody even told you the meeting was happening. That was life for small countries at the United Nations in the early 1990s. One Singapore diplomat decided to change that.
This chapter might be the most honest thing anyone has ever written about the United Nations.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Everyone loves to point at Singapore. Margaret Thatcher wanted Britain to become one. China sent over twenty thousand officials to study it. After Brexit, British politicians literally said “let Singapore be our model.” But what is Singapore, really? And why does every free-market thinker keep going back to this tiny city-state the size of Greater London?
Imagine showing up to a new job and the Berlin Wall falls. That’s basically what happened to Chan Heng Chee.
You think the UN Security Council is a place where 15 countries sit together and make decisions about world peace? Think again.
You know what nobody tells you about the United Nations? For the longest time, diplomats had to fight over chairs. Literally.
Before we get into the 45 essays that make up the core of this book, there are some opening pieces that set the stage. And honestly, they’re worth reading on their own.
I just picked up a book that blew my mind a little.
It’s called “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations”, edited by Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, and Joanna Koh (ISBN: 978-9814713030, World Scientific Publishing, 2015). And honestly, it tells one of the most underrated stories in modern international relations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.