Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Professor Wang Gungwu.

Wang Gungwu is an internationally renowned historian known for his scholarship on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, as well as the history and civilisation of China and Southeast Asia.

Across his illustrious academic career, Professor Wang has held eminent appointments at institutions around the world. He was Professor of History at the University of Malaya (1963–68), Professor at the Australian National University (1968–86), and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong (1986–95). He is currently Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University and University Professor at the National University of Singapore.

In this conversation, we explore how geography shaped China and America, why China historically remained a continental rather than maritime power, the differences between Chinese and Western civilisation, modernisation without Westernisation, Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations”, the US-China rivalry, Singapore, identity, and what history can teach us about the world today.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Trailer
00:45 Introduction
01:39 Why China Never Built a Navy
06:52 Zheng He and the Fleet China Burned
13:06 Why China's Enemies Always Came by Land
15:05 How America Inherited Britain's Oceans
20:48 Is China Still a Civilisation?
31:00 Make America Great, Make China Great
32:24 America's One God vs China's Yellow River
43:25 Why America Preaches Universal Values
46:50 China's Choice: West One or West Two
50:58 Did China Modernise Without Westernising?
54:17 How Marx Gave China the Idea of Progress
59:48 US vs China: Where Huntington Went Wrong
1:05:23 Why China Has No Wish to Run the World
1:07:59 What China Admires About Singapore
1:11:23 Why America Feels a Duty to Convert the World
1:14:33 Being Chinese in Singapore: Multiple Identities
1:22:58 How China and the West Read History Differently
1:31:25 Closing

This is Episode 95 of The Front Row Podcast.

A huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast:

@marinama2728
@deborahchoi1455
@annkowong
@yewchoutan5876

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Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Professor Daniel Markovits. This is the 94th episode of The Front Row Podcast.

Daniel Markovits is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the founding director of Yale's Center for the Study of Private Law. He is the author of The Meritocracy Trap (2019), which argues that meritocracy, the system meant to replace inherited privilege with earned advantage, has become the main mechanism by which wealth and status are now passed between generations. The book drew responses from Michael Sandel, Thomas Piketty, and a wide readership beyond the academy, and in 2021 Prospect named him one of the world's top 50 thinkers.

Markovits trained as a mathematician at Yale before a Marshall Scholarship took him to the LSE for econometrics and to Oxford for a doctorate in philosophy. He publishes across law, economics, and philosophy, with work appearing in Science, the American Economic Review, and the Yale Law Journal, as well as the New York Times and The Atlantic. His next book turns to demographic decline and what a good life looks like once growth slows.

This conversation matters because Singapore has spent 60 years treating meritocracy as settled doctrine, and Markovits offers the clearest account yet of the flaws of meritocracy.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Trailer

0:48 Introduction

1:32 What Meritocracy Actually Means

2:27 The Original Promise

4:43 Michael Young's Warning Nobody Heard

8:12 Training: The Ingredient Everyone Ignores

11:11 Why Merit Is A Sham

14:33 The Education Arms Race

17:10 Too Many Lawyers, Too Few Teachers

19:13 Plutocracy Or Meritocracy?

23:30 Should Harvard Become Less Elite?

25:58 How Singapore Pays Its Teachers

28:34 Meritocracy And Performance Legitimacy

33:24 Why Meritocracy Kills Birth Rates

36:14 The Dismantling Of The Middle Class

39:24 Concierge Doctors For The Rich

43:04 When Success Means Exclusivity

47:15 Will AI Deepen The Divide?

51:25 Sacred Versus Profane Education

53:41 The Finland Model

56:16 Advice For Insiders And Outsiders

58:14 Closing

Full transcript at ykeith.com

Sir Vince Cable is one of Britain's most experienced observers of Asia's rise, having tracked China and India for over three decades from inside both business and government. As Chief Economist at Shell in the 1990s, he built the scenario work that helped shift one of the world's largest companies towards serious investment in China and India — at a time when both were regarded internally as too risky to touch. He later served as the UK's Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills from 2010 to 2015, leading Britain's trade engagement with Beijing and Delhi during the coalition government, and went on to lead the Liberal Democrats.His new book, Eclipsing the West: China, India and the Forging of a New World, argues that two Asian superstates will end three centuries of Western dominance by 2050 — and that the competition, unlike the Cold War, will be won or lost in economic rather than military terms. The book was named a Financial Times Best Book of 2025 for economics and shortlisted for the Westminster Book Awards.This conversation matters because Cable has sat on both sides of the West's China dilemma — as the minister championing engagement, and as a witness to Britain's turn towards securitisation — and he names, from the inside, the decisions he believes his country got wrong.This is the 92nd episode Of The Front Row Podcast.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Introduction 0:52 Inside Shell: Seeing Asia's Rise Early 4:35 Persuading Shell to Bet on China and India 6:42 Selling Britain to Beijing and Delhi 8:48 Was the Coalition Naive? 11:05 Superstates, Not Superpowers 12:26 What China and India Have in Common 15:23 Two Models of State Capitalism 18:04 Thank You PlaudAI 19:45 The Reality of Doing Business In China And India 22:18 Why Britain Turned Against China 27:16 The Perception Gap with Southeast Asia 30:10 The Kindleberger Trap 33:06 From Returns to Resilience 35:10 Three Futures for the World Order 40:19 India: The Swing Superstate 45:11 The Case for Multilateral Optimism 48:27 What Britain Must Fix First 50:35 Advice for Young Southeast Asians A huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Thank you for checking out my episode with Prof Kumar Ramakrishna. This episode is brought to you in partnership with the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. For more information on the school and its programmes see here - https://rsis.edu.sg/publications/rsis-publications/annual-reviews/Professor Kumar Ramakrishna is one of Southeast Asia's foremost authorities on terrorism, extremism, and national security. He is Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University, where he also holds the President's Chair in National Security Studies and serves as Research Adviser to the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. He was first appointed Dean in January 2023 and re-appointed for a further term from January 2026, he has spent more than 25 years at RSIS and its predecessor, the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, which he joined in 2000.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Trailer 0:42 Introduction 1:21 What the Pre-9/11 Security Mindset Missed 4:51 The Paradigm Shift After Ground Zero 10:01 Communists vs Jihadists: Two Kinds of True Believers 13:53 The Rational Logic of Suicide Bombing 18:07 Why Educated People Join Terrorist Groups 22:52 The Threats We Have Stopped Watching 31:13 Gaza and Singapore's Social Fabric 34:30 Understanding Hamas — and Iran 36:37 Singapore's Latent Fault Lines 39:46 Muscular Secularism 45:29 Securitising Of Identities 49:11 Inoculating Citizens Against Radicalisation 53:13 Family and Community as the First Defence 56:00 The Central Lesson: Sincerely Wrong 59:23 Advice for Fresh Graduates 59:47 ClosingThis is the 92nd episode Of The Front Row PodcastA huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Chandran Nair is the founder and CEO of the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent pan-Asian think tank based in Hong Kong committed to understanding the dynamic relationship between business, society, and the state, and to reshaping the rules of global capitalism.

A Malaysian with a background in chemical engineering and biochemistry, he spent the first decades of his career in sustainability, rising to become chairman of Environmental Resources Management (ERM) for Asia Pacific, one of the region's leading environmental consultancies.

He is a member of the executive committee of the Club of Rome and a regular speaker at global forums including the World Economic Forum and APEC.Nair is the author of three books: Consumptionomics, The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy and Society, and most recently Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World, which the Financial Times selected among its best books of the season.

Drawing on more than thirty years of lived experience in China, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia, he has become one of Asia's most vocal thinkers on the idea of a post-Western world — arguing that the deepest legacy of colonialism is the capture of the mind, and that Asia's future depends on building strong institutions and defining a value proposition for itself rather than for others.This is the 91st episode Of The Front Row Podcast

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Introduction 0:58 What The West Gets Wrong About China 6:07 China As A Civilisational State 13:18 Lee Kuan Yew's Warning Against Westernisation 16:08 The Capture Of The Elite Minds?21:24 Decolonising The Mind 34:25 How China Shapes The International Order 41:18 Why The West Fears China's Rise 45:50 Development, Not Sanctions: China In Africa51:31 Southeast Asia's Wake-Up Call 58:33 When The State Should Intervene 1:03:01 A Value Proposition For Ourselves 1:11:11 Advice For Young Graduates

A huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Professor Tan Kong Yam. This episode is brought to you in partnership with the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. For more information on the school and its programmes see here - https://rsis.edu.sg/publications/rsis-publications/ For show notes and information on our collaboration, please go to ykeith.com/rsis GUEST DESCRIPTION:Professor Tan Kong Yam is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University and NTUC Endowed Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.He occupies an unusual position in the history of Singapore–China relations: he was in the room when Dr Goh Keng Swee first visited China. From 1985, when Deng Xiaoping invited Dr Goh Keng Swee to advise China on its economic development strategy, Tan served as Goh's chief assistant. Fluent in Mandarin, he sat close enough to Deng to take his own notes through the Sichuan accent, and travelled with the Singapore delegation through Beijing, Shanghai, and the coastal cities as the architecture of China's Special Economic Zones was being drawn. He went on to serve as chief economist of the Singapore government from 1999 to 2002, as a senior economist at the World Bank's Beijing office from 2002 to 2005, and as a member of the World Bank expert group advising the State Council on China's Eleventh Five-Year Plan. TIMESTAMPS0:00 Trailer1:18 Dr Goh's First Visit to China 5:30 The Chinese Psyche In PRC's Early Days 10:06 Dr Goh's Verdict On China's Potential 15:30 What China Was Like Post Revolution 17:30 Deng Visits Singapore 21:08 China As Yao Ming? 27:43 Fuzhou, A Young Mayor, And A Debt Repaid30:50 Why Xi's Generation Are Obsessed With Production 33:30 Prof Tan's Prediction 36:03 1989: When The Window Nearly Closed39:00 Lee Kuan Yew's Epiphany 42:50 Lee Kuan Yew Predicts China's Rise in 199549:44 What Singapore Understood That The West Did Not56:15 The Downside Of China's Ascendance 1:01:39 China's Capital Turns Towards ASEANThis is the 90th episode Of The Front Row PodcastA huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with James Liang. James Liang is the co-founder and executive chairman of Trip.com Group, the online travel company he helped launch in 1999 as Ctrip and built into one of the world's largest travel platforms, listed on Nasdaq and operating in more than forty countries. A gifted student who entered Fudan University at fifteen before taking a master's in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he served as Trip.com's chief executive from 2000 to 2006, and then made an unusual move: he stepped back at the height of the company's success to pursue a PhD in economics at Stanford.That second career reshaped him into one of Asia's most prominent voices on demography and innovation. Now a research professor of economics at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management and a co-founder of the Yuwa Population Research Institute, Liang has published in journals including Nature and The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has written widely on population, education, and entrepreneurship. His books include The Demographics of Innovation and, most recently, Innovationism: A New Philosophy for the Age of AI.This conversation matters because Liang makes the case that population and youth are the true drivers of the innovation race — that ageing societies risk surrendering their dynamism and, ultimately, their control over AI. Few can argue that thesis from the vantage point of a founder, an economist, and a demographer at onceTIMESTAMPS:0:00 Trailer0:53 Introduction1:29 Why Travel Beat China's Infrastructure Gap3:41 Surviving The Gladiator Economy6:01 Service As The Real Moat10:35 Go Global, Don't Diversify13:36 Why He Quit At The Top For A PhD16:54 Why Only A Founder Could Save It21:15 Working From Home Before COVID25:57 The Innovationism Formula29:31 Why Ageing Kills Innovation32:41 The Exam System That Broke Fertility35:49 Spend Five Per Cent On The Young44:46 What Singapore Keeps Getting Wrong50:16 The Forgotten Case For A Big Family53:56 Why Big Countries Win The Innovation Race56:55 US vs China: Competition Or War?1:00:34 Singapore's One Missing Variable1:03:06 Why AI Makes Innovationism Urgent1:10:36 ClosingThis is the 89th episode Of The Front Row PodcastA huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Robert Wu.

You can check out his awesome Substack here! https://www.baiguan.news?r=8th0v Robert Wu is the CEO of BigOne Lab, China's leading alternative data and research company, backed by S&P Global and used by institutional investors and corporations around the world to track what is actually happening on the ground in China's economy and tech sector. He is also the founder and co-editor of Baiguan, a data-driven newsletter on Chinese business and markets, and writes China Translated, a personal newsletter offering a practitioner's review of the events shaping China's economy, society, and technology sector

Wu's career path into China-watching was unconventional: before BigOne Lab, he worked across sourcing, travel, and corporate restructuring in Myanmar, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. He later joined BigOne Lab as an employee and partner before taking it over in a buyout and becoming its CEO. He also writes for the opinion section of The New York Times.Through Baiguan, Wu has organised on-the-ground tours for foreign investors into China's robotics and manufacturing sectors, giving institutional clients direct exposure to the country's AI, EV, and advanced manufacturing ecosystems.

His work sits at the intersection of data and narrative: translating the granular, often-overlooked detail of China's industrial policy and technology development for an international audience that, in his own words, still has a shockingly low level of understanding of the country driving the most consequential geopolitical shift of the century.In this conversation, Wu draws on years of on-the-ground research to unpack why the US-China tech rivalry is structurally locked in rather than easing, why China's EV industry is the template for understanding its semiconductor and AI ambitions, and what the real bottlenecks are in robotics, chips, and AI monetisation as China's next phase of growth takes shape.This is the 88th episode Of The Front Row PodcastTIMESTAMPS:0:00 Introduction0:31 Has US-China Détente Actually Changed Anything4:15 Did Export Controls Backfire On The US5:25 The Bifurcation Of Tech Ecosystems11:34 The EV Playbook For Industrial Policy12:20 Why Beijing Let Tesla In18:16 The Real Meaning Of Technology Transfer21:03 China's War On Involution25:57 How Chinese Tech Is Going Global31:30 The Manus Deal And The Trust Breakdown32:23 Open Source As China's AI Weapon34:59 The Monetisation Problem36:50 Lessons From The Manus Fallout41:46 Inside China's Robotics Boom47:17 What Foreign Investors Miss About Manufacturing50:26 Advice For The Next Generation52:40 ClosingA huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with former Chief Editor of Straits Times- Warren Fernandez. Warren Fernandez is a journalist, editor, and public intellectual whose career spans more than three decades at the centre of Singapore's media landscape. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Straits Times — Singapore's flagship English daily — and is perhaps best known beyond journalism as one of the principal collaborators on several of Lee Kuan Yew's landmark books, including The Man and His Ideas and The Singapore Story. His close working relationship with Mr. Lee gave him an unusually intimate vantage point on Singapore's founding generation and the ideas that shaped the nation's development.After leaving the Straits Times, he served as Edelman's APAC CEO from 2022 to 2025. Fernandez joined the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), where he is now engaged in research on world order and the shifting dynamics of great power competition. He is also the author of What We Read and Why, an anthology in which leaders, educators, and young people reflect on their relationship with books and reading, making the case for literacy as both a life skill and a civic responsibility.In this conversation, Fernandez draws together threads from an exceptionally varied career: the craft of communicating ideas, the media's role in a small state, the mechanics of world order, and why the capacity to read carefully and think critically has never mattered more.YOUTUBE TIMESTAMPS0:00 Trailer0:00 Introduction0:53 Working on Lee Kuan Yew's Books4:10 LKY as a Force of Nature5:56 The Statesman Behind the Politician6:11 LKY as Communicator6:56 Singapore's Media Model9:03 Journalists and Power10:02 How to Prepare Like a Journalist12:00 LKY's Enduring Ideas13:15 The Transition to Digital Media16:38 The Real Value of Reading18:47 Reading and the Average Citizen21:01 Singapore's Literacy Paradox23:48 Use It or Lose It25:24 Reading as a Life Skill27:32 How to Build a Reading Movement29:46 AI, Sam Bankman-Fried, and the Case for Deep Reading32:15 Reading and Civic Duty34:00 How Top Leaders Read36:57 Young People Do Read38:54 A Masterclass on How to Read Today42:46 Reading and Geopolitics48:01 What Comes Next?49:37 Singapore's Value Proposition52:49 The GX World53:48 Three Imbalances Nobody Is Fixing58:29 Three Books Every Singaporean Should ReadThis is the 87th episode Of The Front Row PodcastA huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: [email protected] access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Hajoon Chang.

Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean economist and one of the most widely read critics of neoliberal orthodoxy working today.

He is currently a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

He is best known for his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, published in 2010, which challenged the foundational claims of free-market economics with rigorous historical and empirical argument.

His earlier work, Kicking Away the Ladder, demonstrated how today's rich countries used protectionism and industrial policy to develop — before turning around and telling developing nations to liberalise.Chang's research spans developmental economics, the history of economic thought, and the political economy of globalisation.

He has been a vocal proponent of what he calls "non-mainstream" economics: not a single doctrinal school, but a pluralist approach that draws on institutional, Keynesian, and developmentalist traditions to analyse how economies actually grow and change.

In this conversation, Chang offers a sweeping critique of neoliberalism's track record on growth and inequality, a dispassionate assessment of Donald Trump's industrial policy ambitions, and a pointed analysis of the AI boom as a speculative bubble shaped by concentrated wealth rather than genuine demand.

TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Trailer

1:08 Introduction

1:54 Growing Up in South Korea's Economic Miracle

4:36 Why Ha-Joon Chang Is Not "Heterodox"

4:58 The Gwangju Massacre and the Limits of Neoclassical Economics

10:45 How the Neoliberal Turn Happened

18:32 The Real Cost of the Free-Market Experiment

25:20 Why Singapore Works

29:58 Trump's Industrial Policy: Will It Work?

37:50 The Three Elements of Good Industrial Policy

40:54 The Right Lessons From China

44:44 How Bad Is Inequality in the US?

53:18 The AI Bubble

58:36 AI as Public Infrastructure

1:00:48 How to Build a More Just World

1:06:14 Closing