Opinion | The world can think its way out of a US-China deadlock, starting by reading Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani

More than ever, the world needs scholars who offer good thinking and writing about China, from Kishore Mahbubani to Hugh White to China’s Central Party School professors. Scholarship can buffer US-China tensions before they get out of hand

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In his writing, scholar-diplomat Kishore Mahbubani has warned a complacent West to wake up and take the full measure of the epochal rise of Asia and China. Photo: Handout

Published: 10:30pm, 22 Apr 2019Updated: 1:58am, 23 Apr 2019

Last week I almost fainted when Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani, that subversive champion of the world beyond America and the West, was honoured by one of America’s most revered cultural institutions.

In a wonderful surprise, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and so on, and headquartered in Cambridge Massachusetts) announced his investiture as an International Honorary Member.

Among this year’s honorees is former United States first lady Michelle Obama.

Nancy C. Andrews, board chair of the American academy, proclaimed that “the members of the class of 2019 embody the founders’ vision of cultivating knowledge that advances … a ‘free, virtuous, and independent people’”. Their induction takes place in October.

To my mind, the dean of forward thinking about China is surely Mahbubani. This provocative scholar-diplomat is worth a documentary all by himself. Title it: Citizen Disrupter.

In the 1990s, after Lee Kuan Yew started edging off centre stage, Mahbubani, then ambassador to the United Nations in New York, hit his stride.

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