90 Years In Singapore

Irene Lim writes vividly about her life, family and friends over a period of 90 years. Except for a few years spent in Bukit Mertajam, Penang during the Japanese Occupation, Irene’s account is also a small Singapore Story.

Alpha C Chiang, a renowned economist, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Connecticut, is best-known for his classic textbook — Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics.In this memoirs, he tells the entertaining, scary, embarrassing, glorifying and surreal tales that colored his life.On the academic side, Alpha describes in detail his scholastic journey, including why and how he created one of the most popular books on mathematical methods in economics, as well as the experiences of his teaching career. On the nonacademic side, he describes his ventures into his many hobbies, the spices of his life, including Chinese opera, ballroom dancing, painting and calligraphy, photography, piano, music composition, playwriting, and even magic. Such tales round out the depiction of a colorful life.What's behind his unusual name, Alpha? What schooling disaster tripped him at a young age? What surreal occurrence did he experience at a cliff at age 8? What major miracle changed his family? How did he become a loan shark when he was a graduate student at Columbia University? What Hollywood glamour star mysteriously materialized within inches of him when he was working on a TV show in his student days? How did he conquer a serious phobia and eventually become an acclaimed professor? What motivated his writing of his celebrated book? And what funny, embarrassing, and memorable events occurred in his teaching career?This book is a unique story about a unique life.

This book explores to what extent China has drawn lessons from Singapore, both in terms of its ruling ideology and through the policy-specific learning process. In so doing, it provides insights into the opportunities but also the challenges of this long-term learning process, focusing attention to how non-democratic regimes deal with modernization. The stellar line-up of international contributors, from China, Singapore, Europe, and the US, offer a variety of perspectives on Singapore as a model of "authoritarian modernism" for China. The book discusses how the small Southeast Asian city-state became a major reference point for China, how mainland observers often misunderstood the nature of Singapore’s governance and instrumentalized it to bolster the CCP’s legitimacy, and why the Singapore model appears to be in decline under Xi Jinping. The chapters also analyze policy-specific learning processes, including bilateral mechanisms of policy exchange, the Chinese "mayor’s class" in Singapore, and joint industrial projects and lessons in social welfare provision. The book will be of interest to academics working on Chinese politics; development in China; state society and economy in the Asia-Pacific; international relations in the Asia-Pacific; and Southeast Asian politics.

The global pandemic has delayed many real estate plans while accelerating the adoption of many technology challenges. In turn, these technologies will disrupt the real estate industry, causing some to become irrelevant and useless. Combined with the increasing numbers of ageing baby boomers, what is Singapore’s future going to look like? What plans should we make for our properties? Market commentator and respected real-estate expert Ku Swee Yong weighs in on some of these questions and shares his insights on the opportunities for investors and what is the future of real estate in Singapore.

The Chinese in Southeast Asia, with their growing economic clout, have been attracting attention from politicians, scholars and observers in recent decades. The rise of China as a global economic power and its profound influence over Southeast Asia has cast a spotlight on the role of Southeast Asian Chinese in the region''s economic relations with China.The Southeast Asian Chinese as an economic force and their growing importance with China are, to a certain extent, determined by the nature and development of their communities. This book uses a multifaceted approach to unravel the forces that helped to transform the communities in the past. Containing 17 papers written within a span of six and a half years, from 2000 to 2006, the book focuses on the social, economic and political aspects of these communities, with special emphasis on the Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore.

The rise of the economic power of the ethnic Chinese, known also as overseas Chinese, Chinese overseas or Chinese diaspora, was a late 20th century phenomenon. It was partly the result of the rise of the Four Little Asian Dragons in the 1970s, and was speeded up by the tempo of globalization towards the end of that century. This book explores the ethnic identity and boundary of the Chinese as minority groups in foreign lands, and as sub-groups among the Chinese themselves. It examines prominent personalities that had wielded considerable influence in the ethnic Chinese communities in the economic, social and educational arenas. It also discusses the type of politics that had impacted their relationship with their mother country — China. Containing 16 papers presented at various international conferences in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan as keynote speeches and research findings which are predominantly unpublished in English, this book provides fresh perspectives and re-interpretations on the issues of ethnicity, leadership and politics in the ethnic Chinese worlds.

Since independence in 1965, Singapore has developed its own unique approach to managing the diversity of Race, Religion, Culture, Language, Nationality, and Age among its citizens. This approach is a consequence of many factors, including its very distinct ethnic makeup compared with its neighbours, its ambitions as a globally oriented city-state, and its small physical size. Each of these factors and many others have presented Singapore society with a range of challenges and opportunities, and will in all likelihood continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In the writing of this book, the author team set themselves the task of projecting the impact of current domestic and international social trends into the future, to anticipate what Singapore society might look like by around 2040. In doing so, they analyse the particular path that Singapore has taken since independence, in comparison with other multicultural societies and with regard to the balance between the necessity of forging a new national identity after British rule and departure from Malaysia, and the need to ensure that Singapore’s ethnic minority populations remain socially enfranchised. They further consider how current trends may develop over the next couple of decades, what new challenges this may present to Singapore society, and what might be the likely responses to such challenges. In this book, Singapore is a case study of a global city facing the challenges of developed-world modernity in frequently acute ways.