Living the Asian Century

July 15, 2024
A frank career assessment by the longtime Singaporean diplomat whose tenure paralleled the decades of Lee Kuan Yew's stewardship of the country into the international arena. A descendant of Hindu Sindhi people who left what became Pakistan during Partition, Mahbubani (b. 1948), author ofThe Great Convergence, was born in Singapore, where his father worked as a laborer. Often drunk and mired in gambling debts, his father was not a stable provider, and the author, his mother, and his sisters struggled to make ends meet. At the same time, they lived amicably among Malay, Chinese, and Muslim neighbors, as Singapore was an entrepreneurial hub fighting for independence from Great Britain and then from the Federation of Malaysia. As the strong-armed Lee Kuan Yew steered the tiny state toward modernization and greater prosperity, Mahbubani "became convinced that the only way for me to progress was to steadily shed my primitive Asian prejudices and replace them with the advanced thought of Western civilization." In 1967, he writes, "one of the greatest miracles of my life happened." He was granted a President's Scholarship to attend the University of Singapore. Although Mahbubani hoped to become a philosophy professor ("Plutarch was right--education isn't about filling a bucket; it's about lighting fires"), he joined the Foreign Ministry largely to support his mother, and he served for more than three decades. The author writes about his admiration of Lee, who was close to Ronald Reagan, as well as the importance of Singapore's election to the UN Security Council in 2001. Mahbubani credits Lee with being able to stand up to the U.S., like David to Goliath, and the author went on to serve as dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is a straightforward, prolific, influential commenter on Southeast Asia. An intimate view of Singapore's stunning rise since independence.

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