This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 10, 2025 - February 16, 2025

RISING from a deprived childhood to international eminence as a diplomat and strategic analyst, Kishore Mahbubani describes his eventful life as a prominent son of Singapore in his memoir Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir with ironic humour and a refreshing candidness. His trademark insights into key global events of his times pepper his recollection of the sometimes dramatic situations he has found himself in, bringing them to life in a poignant narrative. On a visit to Kuala Lumpur, Kishore shares some highlights of his life journey with Rash Behari Bhattacharjee. Here are excerpts from the interview:

What are a couple of the big life lessons that you share in your memoir?

The big lesson from my life is that even though I have experienced a lot of adversity in my childhood, it wasn’t bad for me. Actually, adversity is what made me strong and resilient. So I think it’s important to realise that in life you will always have ups and downs.

And the critical thing in life is the resilience to survive the ups and downs. In my case, I was lucky that my mother was a very inspiring figure for me because she never broke down despite all the stresses and strains that she suffered. So I always kept telling myself that if my mother never broke down, how can I break down? I’ve said in my book that she would tell us: “Even if you’re feeling hungry, don’t tell the world you’re feeling hungry. Just put butter on your lips and smile.”

So you must be strong. Mothers have a very strong influence on us, especially a strong personality like that.

You have met many interesting people throughout your life. Can you describe one particularly unforgettable person who has made a big impact on you?

Apart from the founding fathers of Singapore — Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, S Rajaratnam, these are the three people from whom I learned the most — I would say one other person who struck me as being very wise was Henry Kissinger. I met him twice.

He’s the one who gave me the central insight for my successful book Has China Won? The Chinese challenge to American Primacy. He said the United States has launched a geopolitical contest against China without working out a comprehensive long-term strategy. And that’s actually quite shocking because the United States has the best strategic think tanks, the best universities, the most influential media, and yet the United States launched a contest without a strategy and it still doesn’t have a strategy. That’s amazing.

If I had said it on my own, people would have been sceptical: “Come on, it’s very absurd that you can say that.” But this was an insight given to me by Kissinger.

He also told me, again in private, but I can say this now because he’s passed away, that he was shocked by how the quality of mind of European leaders has gone down. For a long time, it was Europe that produced the strong leaders of the world.

In fact, in 1990, when I accompanied Mr Lee Kuan Yew on his farewell tour of Europe, we met very strong European leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany. And then, now you look, the UK has gone from Margaret Thatcher to having a leader like Boris Johnson, who’s a joker. He’s not serious at all. He actually led his country into committing national suicide with Brexit. He’s responsible for Brexit. But he’s telling lies.

Then his successor, Liz Truss, was a joke. So how do you go from Margaret Thatcher to producing a joker and a joke for leaders? But this is basically what Henry Kissinger was hinting to me. So it’s amazing; I wouldn’t say the progress of nations, but the cycle they go through.

One of the key messages in my book is that Europe certainly is declining.

One statistic I gave … In 1918, the combined European Union GNP (gross national product) was 10 times the size of China’s. Ten times, you know. Now they are about the same size. And by 2050, Europe will be half the size of China. So you’re going from being 10 times bigger to becoming half the size. But it shows you that the Europeans are not preparing for a different world.

I think that’s a key concern. You need to have a very forward and thought-leading mindset, an openness to developments.

You see, the Europeans cannot conceive of the possibility that the time may have come to learn from Asia, to look at what we are doing.

One of the things that makes your comments very attractive is that you speak truth to power. That’s very important in today’s convoluted world.

The trouble is that many European leaders and European diplomats tend to be very condescending towards the rest of the world. So I keep saying to them, the era of condescension is over. Now you’ve got to treat Asians as equals, you know.

That’s why they’re having a very hard time psychologically adjusting to that.

Could you give us a map of the geopolitical situation today, in particular, which are the flashpoints that we should be concerned about?

It looks quite messy. I think that if you look around the world and ask which is geopolitically the most dangerous contest in the world, there’s no question the contest between the United States and China is the biggest one. That’s why I’ve written a book explaining why the US-China contest will accelerate over the next 10 years.

But I think, by and large, the likelihood is that the United States and China will succeed in not having a war. Except, of course, if something dangerous is done over Taiwan. Because the Chinese have made it very clear that if Taiwan declares independence, they will declare war.

I think that’s why you notice that the Biden administration started off being very aggressive towards China and then realised that there were some dangers of a war, so they decided to be very careful.

That’s the most dangerous thing that we have to watch. Well, I think Asean countries have taken the right position. They have made it very clear that they want to be friends with the United States and they want to be friends with China.

And they don’t want to take sides. I believe that one contribution that the Asean states can make is to tell both the United States and China that the world has more pressing problems, like climate change. And we should be focused on taking care of climate change, rather than trying to get involved in a fight over who’s number one or who’s number two.

If you live on a small, interdependent planet, if the planet dies, who cares whether you’re number one or number two?

How should the young cope with this kind of trouble, climate change being one?

I think it would be very good for young people to lead the fight against climate change. Because, you know, my generation, I’m not going to suffer the consequences of climate change. I won’t be around.

I’m 75. But the young people who are 25 will suffer the worst consequences of climate change. And so they should be the ones speaking out to tell the US and China: ‘Press the pause button on the US-China contest; focus on fighting climate change.’

Because if the US and China don’t cooperate, we cannot succeed in fighting climate change.

Let’s turn to the one love of your life, philosophy. Can you explain to people who think that philosophy is too abstract to get a handle on why it fascinates you?

One of the biggest accidents in my life, when I went to university ... for a start, the big accident was that I shouldn’t have gone to university.

When I finished my high school or A-levels, I started working as a textile salesman, earning US$150 a month. And my destiny was to be a textile salesman. But lo and behold, out of the blue, I got the President’s scholarship, paying me US$250 a month.

So my mother said, “US$250 a month is more than US$150 a month. Go to university.” You know, it was amazing. Like, if I hadn’t had a scholarship, I would never have gone to university and I would never be where I am today.

And again, when I went to university, I told myself, I’ve got to be sensible and practical and study subjects like economics, you know. And even sociology. But when I did classes, I found the economics classes extremely boring because they were taught in a rote fashion.

I found the philosophy classes incredibly exciting. So, as I say in my memoirs, I felt like firecrackers went off in my brain. I think it was the English poet, W B Yeats, who said, education is not about filling a bucket. It’s about lighting a fire. So that’s what happened. Firecrackers went off in my brain.

I found the study of philosophy amazing. And what’s amazing is that the lessons I learned in philosophy at the age of 19 have stood me in good stead for five, six decades. It’s quite amazing.

Can you elaborate on how being a free spirit was the kind of anchor in your life and connected you with people who also resonated with that?

Well, starting from my days as an undergraduate, when I wrote articles that were critical of Lee Kuan Yew and which should have actually destroyed me in Singapore.

But instead, the result was that Mr Lee Kuan Yew noticed me. And so that’s how I think I also advanced. So I’ve always been a bit of an iconoclast, you know, challenging conventional wisdom.

At first I thought that, of course, the Western societies would welcome it if you challenged conventional wisdom. But I discovered that even though the West has free and open societies, they have a lot of sacred cows too, which you cannot challenge, which they hide. I mean, I talk about how the United States has become a plutocracy.

I think that’s very important, especially today when we are adjusting to a multipolar world, for the great powers to realise that and for the people who subscribe to the idea that the Western way is the better way. That there’s a lot of diversity in this world that is mutually beneficial (to acknowledge) and that we must incorporate into our global outlook.

Absolutely. Now we’re moving into what I call a new 3M world. It’s multi-civilisational, multipolar and multilateral. We have to make major psychological adjustments to this world.

Paradoxically, the Western countries are having the hardest time adjusting to this different world because they’re used to Western domination of the world. They’re used to having one dominant power, the United States, in a unipolar world. But all that is changing.

It won’t do to live in an echo chamber. I don’t know whether the other voices are getting through to them. Unfortunately, they’re not.

There’s some discussion about Singapore’s future, because the model on which Singapore built its success may not be so suitable for the future. There’s more uncertainty and there’s so much volatility.

Well, actually, I’m still quite confident and optimistic for Singapore’s future because, you know, we have built up very strong institutions in Singapore. That’s one of the biggest contributions of the founding generation of leaders. So, now what we have is strong institutions that will hold Singapore together.

Plus, of course, as you know, Singapore has got a tremendous amount of reserves. A lot of savings that we can use. They’ve been saving for the rainy day.

During Covid-19, they used some of the savings. But by and large, we’re still very comfortable. But in terms of strategic thinking, in terms of the people’s spirit, it’s a very competitive society and very driven.

That wears people down. The new prime minister of Singapore is more or less saying that Singapore’s got to do more to take care of people at the bottom. In some ways, it’s a bit like a kinder, gentler Singapore.

So I’m confident that the new prime minister, Lawrence Wong, will be the right man for this phase of Singapore’s history. It’s very important to have leadership transitions.

Because otherwise, if leaders stay too long, then it becomes a challenge. Yeah, we see that again and again and again.

Although we shouldn’t change as often as Malaysia. It’s good that [Prime Minister Datuk Seri] Anwar Ibrahim will stay for a while.

What do you like or love or hate about Malaysia?

Well, you know, in my memoirs, I describe how when I came here, from 1976 to 1979, there was still a lot of suspicion of Singapore in the 1970s.

It wasn’t easy for me to go and make friends. But now things have changed. Relations between Malaysia and Singapore have never been better.

In fact, the Malaysia-Singapore relationship provides a model of how countries that have been separated can learn to get along with each other. You know, in contrast, you look at India and Pakistan. They were separated much earlier, in 1947, right? That’s now almost 80 years ago and they still don’t have normal trade with each other. It’s very sad.

Your return to academic life — is that your current focus?

Oh, yes. I’m a very lucky man because I now have three distinct careers.

My first career was as a diplomat, from 1971 to 2012, 33 years. And then I had 13 years as the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. So that was academia.

Now, I spend most of my time writing books. So I’ve gone from diplomacy to academia to authorship. In the last seven years, I’ve produced five books.

And the previous one, which is a free book, is called The Asian 21st Century. It’s a free book; anybody can download it. The German publisher told me that the target was to get 20,000 downloads. But instead, there have been 3.6 million downloads in 160 countries. It says a lot about not only the content but also the importance of the topic.

So the world is psychologically preparing for the Asian century. And that’s what we have to get used to. And the thing is that we in Asia must become more confident about the future. About our intrinsic strength and resilience. We have an intrinsic strength culturally. We are able to adjust to difficulties and challenges. We’ve survived over the millennia.

I also described how my friendship with The Washington Post correspondent led to The Washington Post writing a story about my chef, [Prema]. And as a result of The Washington Post profiling my cook, I ended up getting people who wanted to come to my house for dinner: food diplomacy.

What are the significant things that really go to the core of your life purpose that you think readers will benefit from hearing?

Well, I think in life you succeed if you have the right teachers and mentors.

I’ve been very blessed. I had a very absent-minded philosophy professor, Colin Davies. When he spoke, he was like a little kid. In those days, you could smoke in the classroom. He would be thinking so hard. (Holds his hand to his head.) He wasn’t aware that his cigarette was setting his hair on fire. And then the students had to rush out and put out the fire in his hair. And it happened several times. That showed how deeply he was thinking. He was lost in his own world. It shows a certain quality of mind, actually. So, that’s very inspiring. Colin Davies was very inspiring for me.

The other three persons who were very important in my life were the founding fathers of Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee and Rajaratnam. And of the three, two were born in Malaysia.

Goh Keng Swee, I think, was born in Melaka and Rajaratnam was born in Seremban. Of course, they moved to Singapore.

In the early part of your book, the communal harmony in Singapore that you described is also true of Malaysia. There is a sense of togetherness, in spite of all the cultural differences, where people are bonded by their common situation.

Yes, I was very lucky in my childhood. It enabled the Indians, Chinese and Malays to get along very well with one another. I described that in chapter one.

That’s an amazing quality, I think, we have as people. There’s a kind of fellow feeling that’s quite inspiring. If you go to other parts of the world where people have had centuries of animosity …

Nowadays, the Europeans are terrified of the Muslims. The migration of Muslims into Western societies has made them very frightened.

Whereas, in our region, Muslims and non-Muslims can get along very well with each other. And so we provide a model for the rest of the world, Malaysia and Singapore.

That’s one of the critical contributions that Malaysia and Singapore can make. For years, Malaysia, especially, used to be held up as a model of harmony.

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