Society: The ‘Donald Trump of Beijing’ is FICA-ed

Last week, Singapore ordered Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X to block 95 accounts linked with Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and convicted fraudster, from local users under the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA). These accounts published more than 120 posts on Singapore’s leadership transition in April-May, including statements like “Singapore is in the CCP’s back pocket” and “The CCP has long planned to take over Singapore”. 

Guo, as documented by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, made his money in the 1990s-2000s through real estate and by acting as a “white glove” dealmaker at the shadowy nexus of business and politics in a rising China. His friendship with spymaster Ma Jian offered useful intelligence about the interests and vulnerabilities of China’s fractious elite. Amid a fog of corruption and espionage, Ma’s arrest precipitated Guo’s exile to the US in 2015. There, with endorsements from UBS and Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, Guo won approval to buy a penthouse that occupied the entire 18th floor of the Sherry-Netherland tower along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, paying the US$68m (S$94m) in cash.

Styling himself as an avowed enemy of the CCP, Guo rode the wave of rising bipartisan suspicion of China, growing close to the US’s intelligence community. He founded a media enterprise that attacked the CCP, supported Trump, paid millions to MAGA prophets including Steve Bannon—who knighted him with their deity’s name—and just generally spewed misinformation, from doubting the 2020 election result to vaccine conspiracies. (His fashion line sold a shirt with the word “Ivermectin” for thousands of dollars.) On June 4th 2020, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Bannon joined Guo in New York Harbour, with Guo’s yacht and the Statue of Liberty forming the backdrop, as Guo announced the creation of the New Federal State of China, a shadow government. He wanted to hawk its passports for US$50,000 (S$69,000) per family. “The politics of Beijing had prepared Guo well for navigating Trump’s Washington,” wrote Osnos. “[A]nother realm where money bought influence, business mixed with government, and truth merged with fiction.”

On July 16th, the US convicted Guo of defrauding his followers, including Chinese expats besotted by his promise to “take down the CCP”, of hundreds of millions of dollars. And on July 19th, Singapore issued its FICA directions. Guo’s story exposes the relationships between global plutocrats caught in this century’s Great Game, and the strange way that can manifest in misinformation online. If Trump gets elected for a second term, as seems likely, we might expect other foreign charlatans in DC. Meanwhile, though few Singaporeans would sympathise with Guo’s plight, it’s interesting that FICA was used preemptively, as analysts told The Straits Times (ST), before any real local impact from those 95 accounts. Who’s next?

Society: For low-income transnational families, dedicated help is finally here

Roughly one in four citizen marriages over the past decade has involved a non-resident spouse—transnational, or cross-national marriages. Perhaps this is unsurprising for a global city, but the way we treat them is. Non-resident spouses (and their families) here don’t get the same level of social, legal and economic assistance—grants, subsidies—as citizens and permanent residents, which can severely impair their quality of life and hamper their ability to integrate and assimilate into local society. “If we don’t help them, they get stuck in a cycle of systemic challenges,” Sadhana Rai, head of representation at Pro Bono SG told ST. One case involved a Singaporean father who was jailed while his Indonesian spouse was deported (for reasons unspecified). This left their three kids under the sole care of their Indonesian grandmother, Madam R. Pro Bono SG is helping her secure a long-term visit pass while The Inclusive Fund—set up in 2021 by the South Central Community Family Service Centre (FSC)—has helped pay her medical bills. And now, thanks to Pro Bono SG and South Central Community FSC, this vulnerable group of low-income transnational families in Singapore finally has a centre dedicated to its needs. The Transnational Family Care Centre offers a range of financial, legal and social services, allowing for more integrated care for Singaporeans and their foreign spouses. 

With about seven in 10 non-resident spouses being wives, according to the Ministry of Social and Family Development’s latest Family Trends Report, the problems faced by transnational families mostly impact women. For instance, a 2021 study found that cross-national families with a Singapore-born husband and an overseas-born wife have the lowest per capita income and the highest level of family conflict compared to other family types. And in a 2020 report, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) noted that migrant wives are more vulnerable than Singaporean women to domestic violence. Divorces can be traumatic too, since foreigners rely entirely on their citizen spouses for the right to reside in Singapore, unless they have a work visa. Often, said gender-equal organisation AWARE, the women have to deal with the “painful prospect” of losing custody of their children. (For Singaporean couples who divorce, a standard outcome is joint custody, with care and control with the mum.) And when their spouses die, they’ll probably have to sell their homes if they inherit them, since foreigners can’t own public housing flats. AWARE has since called on the government to grant foreign spouses access to social assistance schemes and benefits; the automatic right to work; and permanent residence on birth of a citizen child or death of a citizen spouse. It also suggested in its 2021 Budget wishlist that there be clear paths and timelines to permanent residency and citizenship. As more foreign spouses become integral contributors to Singapore’s families and communities, our global, pro-family city must stop treating them as merely visitors.

Society: As elections approach, Raja Muda invokes the Raja Pertama

Lawrence Wong, prime minister, was the guest of honour at the launch of the second volume of The Singapore Lion, the authorised biography of S Rajaratnam, Singapore’s first foreign minister. While the first spanned his birth in 1915 till merger with Malaysia in 1963, this second volume—again written by Irene Ng, a former member of parliament with the People’s Action Party (PAP)—covers Raja’s life from the tumultuous mid-60s till his death in the sedate milieu of 2006. As one of Singapore’s “founding fathers”, Raja was pivotal in that transformation. He was the country’s minister for foreign affairs for 15 years, minister for labour for three and deputy prime minister for nearly five.

Wong, himself deputy prime minister for two years before ascending to the top post, proclaimed himself a huge admirer. Once the initial platitudes were delivered though, the “Singapore Lion”, or at least the official version of him, was quickly co-opted in service of a state preparing for election season. “He [Raja] once noted how easy it was to win public attention simply by disagreeing with the government,” said Wong, about the opposition. “…He said this back in 1971, and it still rings true today.” There were other broadsides too, including a rather bizarre analogy involving Roman circuses, breads and hungry lions.

At various other times, the speech dabbled with myth-making, turning Raja into an infallible demi-god with supernatural instincts, a superhuman work-ethic and an eye that could see far into time. Undoubtedly, Raja (and the generation of leaders to which he belonged) was remarkable. And yet, they were also fallible human beings, riven by anxieties, beset by inconsistency, and often ambivalent about the results of many of the momentous decisions they took in the Republic’s early years.

The same Raja who envisioned Singapore as a “Global City” in 1972—a fact Wong marvelled at—was also critical of the “money-theism” it created, and of a culture of consumption which made moneyed citizens “grunt and squeal like pigs scrambling to reach the feeding trough,” as Philip Holden wrote in his biographical essay of Raja for Jom last week. The same Raja who, as Wong rightly pointed out, “was highly effective in mobilising the ground and shaping public opinion” through his virtuoso pen was also a part of a post-independence government that “enacted increasingly sophisticated press restrictions,” according to Holden. Restrictions that today are so deeply internalised as to almost be cultural traits.

All nations indulge in myth-making. All politicians lean on towering figures from the past for legitimacy and authority. Lee Hsien Loong, then prime minister, was present at the launch of the first volume, 14 years ago. (The irrepressible Lysa Hong wrote about a talk Ng gave then, perfectly capturing the blinkered views in “cloud cuckooland”.) Because of this, “national histories tend to prune stories, to move certain figures to the foreground, to weed out contradictions,” says Holden. For a closer understanding of Raja then, and of his Singapore, authorised biographies are but one step. 

History weekly by Faris Joraimi

On July 19th, James C. Scott, the illustrious anthropologist and political scientist died at 87. His groundbreaking work on agrarian communities and societies outside state authority, are now canon in South-east Asian studies. Of particular interest is his 1985 book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Scott spent a year and a half in a Malay village in Kedah, and saw how resistance to powerful institutions was undertaken through subtle ways that did not invite retaliation. For example, the peasants objected to the Islamic tithe (zakat) by giving the worst rice, or putting stones in the rice bag to artificially make it heavier. The book challenges the popular perception that the only meaningful forms of political resistance are protests, marches or petitions. We can think of similar examples in our context, like feet-dragging, MC-taking office-workers, or malingering (chao keng) in the army. 

In his tribute to Scott, Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysian prime minister, said that Weapons of the Weak reminded him of his activism among the rural folk of Kedah. Ironic, given Anwar’s position today within the same structure that Scott critiqued. Given the limited cross-disciplinary reach of much South-east Asian field research, it’s significant that this Malay kampung could say something about the human condition that was comparable across societies. Occasionally I wonder how much the peasants themselves disappear inside the theory that Scott articulated, now cited across academic fields. It took someone from a global knowledge capital (Yale University) to translate their practices into a concept legible to scholars. In any case, reading Scott’s humane depiction of commoners’ struggles was transformative for many in their political and intellectual journeys. 

Seeing Like a State (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) also discussed how governments classify and control populations, and the latter’s enduring efforts at evading them. There is one problem, though: in his student days, Scott fed information to the CIA, writing reports on student movements in Burma and working for the CIA-funded National Students Association in Paris. His defenders argue this was fairly common for other famous academics when they were young; that he became more radical with age; his work inspired South-east Asian rebels; that simply, this speckled past doesn’t diminish his work. Vijay Prashad and Laleh Khalili, political commentators, think he should at least have publicly criticised his role, which he never did. For people from countries destroyed by the CIA’s machinations, this is understandably difficult to dismiss. Of course, we’re allowed to have mixed feelings about anyone, no matter how brilliant or charming.

Arts: Hear the Golden Lion roar

Filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua is bringing a bit of the Lion City to this year’s Venice Film Festival with the first Singaporean film to compete for its top prize, the Golden Lion. His mystery-thriller, “Stranger Eyes”, will make its world premiere alongside silver screen greats Luca Guadagnino, Pedro Almodóvar, and 2019 winner Todd Phillips of “Joker” fame. The Golden Lion is one of the film industry’s most sought-after prizes, and the nomination burnishes Yeo’s increasingly lustrous track record, which includes the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard for his neo-noir migrant-worker mystery “A Land Imagined” (2018)—also Singapore’s submission to the Academy Awards that year for Best International Feature Film. “Stranger Eyes”, shot in Singapore on a budget of US$400,000 (S$538,008), begins with the disappearance of a young couple’s infant daughter. What follows is a modern-day nightmare, as they start receiving mysterious, intimate videos of themselves. The police sets up surveillance to track down the possible voyeur-kidnapper, but the family is already crumbling from corrosive revelations about their private life. Yeo told the South China Morning Post: “[The film] is about surveillance, but unlike in science fiction, I’m more concerned with what it means to see someone—to see and be seen.”

Singaporean film is indeed being seen right now. Earlier this month, Nelicia Low scored a best director win for “Pierce” at the Czech Republic’s largest film festival. The national fencer-turned-filmmaker sets up a collision course between a precocious teen fencer and his malevolent older brother, which Variety described as a “taut, sophisticated debut” propelled by a “graceful thrust-and-parry dynamic” between the on-screen siblings. Low, who represented Singapore in fencing at the 2010 Asian Games, started writing “Pierce” several years later as a way to make sense of her relationship with her own brother, who has autism. It’s hard not to draw parallels between the two films: both Chinese-language features boast heavyweight Taiwanese actors, and are tense psychological thrillers parsing family dysfunction. It takes a certain ferocity of vision to see these genres through. Yeo traces his obsession with character psychology to his undergraduate degree, where he was trained in premodern Chinese philosophy. And Low told AsiaOne: “The hyperfocus, brainpower and reaction speed I need when I am fencing on the piste during a competition is similar to that of directing...Both are extremely intense.”

Tech: Singapore makes space for semiconductor fabs

JTC Corporation will make 11 percent more land available for the manufacture of semiconductors, the tiny chips that help transform those metallic lumps in your pocket into powerful, addictive machines. 

At first glance, this may raise eyebrows. Already, Singapore hosts nine out of the top 15 global semiconductor firms, including GlobalFoundries, Micron and Siltronic. The sector employs approximately 35,000 people, and makes up 20 percent of Singapore’s total manufacturing output. In turn, Singapore accounts for nearly five percent of global wafer (a thin semiconductor slice) fabrication capacity. The ongoing US-China trade war has also led to “friendshoring” trends, which benefit Singapore, as a politically stable and neutral manufacturing location. Local firms have profited too. For instance, SGX-listed UMS Holdings, which counts Applied Materials as a customer, is pursuing a secondary listing on the Malaysia stock exchange to raise capital to meet increased demand.

Yet, challenges loom on the horizon. Malaysia itself is a competitive alternative for semiconductor manufacturing while the US is also aggressively ramping up its ability to produce semiconductors locally, looking to triple its existing capacity by 2032. With the market landscape changing rapidly, and the world on the cusp of an AI boom, JTC’s move to woo new semiconductor giants and retain existing ones appears sound. 

Tech: Chope gets Grabbed 

Grab has announced plans to acquire Chope, a homegrown restaurant reservations platform. Chope, which has more than 13,000 merchants across Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong and China, was founded in 2011 and has since raised over US$64m (S$86m, at current rates) from investors such as Alipay, Square Peg, Singha Ventures, Openspace Ventures and SPH Holdings. This is Grab’s second major move in the local F&B space, having acquired Singapore’s beloved reservation and news platform, HungryGoWhere, in 2022. 

However, the Chope acquisition does not include its Hong Kong and China services, markets in which Grab does not operate. Furthermore, it is unclear how immediately lucrative the acquisition will be, given that Chope does not charge diners for table reservations. It charges restaurants a monthly subscription for using its table management system and an additional small fee for each diner that makes a reservation on its platform. Publicly listed Grab’s shareholders might be wondering how the acquisition will impact the bottom line of the company which finally posted its first profitable quarter in end-2023.

If you enjoy Jom’s work, do get a paid subscription today to support independent journalism in Singapore.