China and Singapore: Perspectives from my ‘double life’

For the past nearly seven years, I’ve lived a double life. I have existed in two parallel universes – China and Singapore.

Up until two weeks ago, my job as The Straits Times’ China bureau chief required me to be based in the capital city of Beijing, where I had – not as a matter of choice – wholeheartedly embraced the unique, immense ecosystem that is China.

It is a world that, for someone coming from a tiny city-state whose very survival depends on being open and fiercely plugged into the global system, can be rather isolating and often frustrating – even stressful.

Instead of WhatsApp, my daily life revolved around WeChat. Instead of paying with my credit card and chalking up points that could’ve allowed me to upgrade to business class on Singapore Airlines, I used AliPay or WeChat Pay which gave me no significant perks. Instead of navigating with Apple or Google Maps, I used A Map or Baidu map, which I’ve found to be far superior if not for the annoying pop-up ads. Instead of sending e-mails, I had to fax government agencies with my media queries. And the most obvious difference of all – instead of English, I operated almost entirely in the Chinese language.

The clearest manifestation of my bifurcated existence was my two phones, each a microcosm of one of my twin identities: Chinese apps on one phone, rest-of-the-world apps on the other.

My singular identity and my perspective, however, has been inexorably shaped by the stark contrast of these two worlds I reside in: the scale of everything in China; the chaos and pulsating energy of a city of 20 million people on the go; the homogeneity but also extremities between the richest and the poorest, the urban and the rural in the second-largest economy of the world and a country that, for the most part, still treats foreigners as an afterthought. And then, there’s the opposite to all of that – Singapore.

I’ve now come home with an acute sense of self-awareness that while I have had the privilege of being at the front lines witnessing great history-making from the most consequential country on earth, I have also been shielded for a large part from what else has gone on in the world while I’ve been away.

The China bubble

Being ensconced in the Chinese bubble is easier than you think. Cast your mind back to the pandemic years when the country, in relentless pursuit of a zero-Covid policy, not only closed its borders and kept everyone out, it also had the capacity to lock down entire cities of millions for months.

I didn’t come home for most of those three Covid-19 years, and when I did, a dreaded two-week quarantine in a hotel would be in store when I returned to China.

The pandemic lockdown showed China’s ability – and willingness – to take extreme measures to shut out the world given the right circumstances, in this case the very real danger of a deadly virus that could collapse its healthcare system and trigger mayhem. But the China bubble is also a state of mind.

As much as 90 per cent of the Chinese population – that is 1.26 billion people – do not have a passport and have never left the country. With the Chinese national leaders and state media constantly characterising the external environment as turbulent and hostile, even fewer now want to venture out of their safe space.

A tightly-controlled media that uniformly amplifies the official narrative, an all-encompassing internet firewall and pervasive censorship have all had the effect of swaddling its citizens in a knowledge cocoon deprived of alternative views.

By contrast, Singapore is a model of porosity and engagement with the outside world – it cannot afford not to be. Its passport routinely ranks as the most powerful in the world and an estimated 85 per cent of its citizens own one. The country has a generally open and accessible internet infrastructure, although the government maintains a degree of control over content.

Singapore imports water, over 90 per cent of its food supplies, and nearly all its energy needs and consumer goods. China, the factory of the world, is so highly self-sufficient that your life and everything you consume can and often will be domestically produced – from the food you eat, the clothes and shoes you wear, the car you drive, the phone and laptop you use, to the movies and TV shows you watch.

China’s ecosystem is so vast and varied – wealthy sprawling megacities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, poor rural villages in Guizhou and Guangxi, and everything in between. It’s a place where the past and future collide, where thousand-year-old temples stand in the shadows of gleaming glass towers, and where the Chinese Communist Party’s omnipresence is felt in every facet of life; most notably in propaganda slogans displayed in public spaces or shouting from billboards.

Organised chaos radiates from most Chinese cities and towns, a consequence of a nation in perpetual motion, driven by intense ambition, cut-throat competition and unbelievable scale.

There is an uncomfortably high threshold for bad behaviour because no one has time to be judgmental; they’re too busy making money, fulfilling their bosses’ demands, making sure their children get the best life.

The lack of regard for rules and absence of pressure for social etiquette can be as liberating as it is offensive to a Singaporean sensibility. So as much as I love zipping around on my electric scooter to beat Beijing’s notoriously bad traffic, I find myself constantly blowing up at reckless drivers and self-absorbed pedestrians, while the law-abiding part of me never got comfortable riding against the flow like everyone else.

It’s early days and the reintegration has just begun, but I’m appreciating the orderliness afforded by this well-calibrated machine that has kept Singapore going, the quietness on the public buses, the lush but meticulously-pruned greenery that drapes the entire city.

China has taught me to embrace complexity, to find beauty in the messiness of a dynamic society in flux. Singapore taught me the value of order, of systems that work seamlessly to create a livable environment. 

In China, I could lose myself in the chaos and the hugeness; I know that in coming home I will miss that sense of freedom that comes with anonymity in a vast foreign land. On a small island like Singapore, everything is much more visible, and with it a pressure to conform. It’s not the compliance you would associate with being in a highly-controlled authoritarian system such as China, but a more subtle one of fitting in and being held accountable to family, work and society’s high and perhaps narrow standards. Space asserts its own behavioural dynamics; it’s the contrast between living in a teeming ocean of marine life and a well-tended pond.

Having been a denizen of these two highly contrasting worlds has heightened my sensitivity to the paradoxes of both countries. China is both conformist and unruly. Cosmopolitan Singapore, for all of its global connectivity and its people’s unparalleled degree of mobility, has its own bubble too, where life can be surprisingly self-contained and insular.

Low crime, efficient governance, and clean streets aren’t the norm in many parts of the world. And most Singaporeans have grown up in a hyper-stable society with systems that work – a luxury many others don’t have.

As citizens of a city-state with no rural and urban divide and with strong minority integration, Singaporeans have also been protected from the kind of internal divisions common in bigger, more diverse and complex societies.

The worry is that this bubble can lead to a lack of empathy and perspective, naivety about global affairs and inequality, or assumptions that “what works in Singapore should work everywhere”.

As China – and the rest of South-east Asia – continue to ascend, Singaporeans would be wise to come to terms with their vulnerabilities, shed myopic tendencies and abandon any sense of self-importance.

Chinese companies from Huawei and BYD to ByteDance are penetrating markets once dominated by Western or regional players and aggressively expanding their international footprint. DeepSeek has disrupted the global AI and chip industries so brutally they are still reeling from it.

For all its strengths, Singapore is a prisoner of its size and lacks the depth of resources and cultural influence that allow China the latitude to shape the wider world around it.

Meanwhile, Chinese entrepreneurs, students and tourists are flooding global hubs, including Singapore, bringing both opportunities and challenges, potentially testing the strength of Singapore’s social fabric. Missteps in managing such dynamics could fuel resentment or division, undermining the cohesion that underpins Singapore’s stability. 

Like it or not, China’s rise is a transformative force reshaping Asia and the world. To understand it is to subject yourself to its unique ecosystem, including grasping its official thinking and fathoming the Chinese psyche.

Deep national pride, fuelled by an entrenched narrative of historical humiliation when China was carved up by foreign powers, runs through the veins of every Chinese person. And as the country and its people single-mindedly pursue a better life and bid to reclaim what they see as their rightful place on the world stage, there is no time to waste.

This hunger, coupled with a very pragmatic mindset and that oft-cited ability to “eat bitterness” is propelling and will continue to propel China to beat every form of competition in its path.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s vulnerabilities, stemming primarily from its deep reliance as a small nation on international trade and the rules-based order, have quickly come to the fore as US President Donald Trump upends the global system. In the wake of Mr Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff shock and the subsequent escalating trade war with China, Singapore has cut its growth forecast for the year.

In my two “worlds”, big challenges loom as the US pushes to undo a global trading system that its president deems unfair to America. In fact, the Trumpian challenge has helped to crystallise my observations in my host country of the past seven years, and now seeing my home with fresh eyes.

Clearly, Singapore is no way equipped like China to push back at the Trump tariffs, and my time in China has left me with a deepened sense of how small and vulnerable Singapore is. Our success story, the swift ascent from Third World to First, from mudflats to metropolis, might have obscured in some ways the fragility of our existence as an island-state whose well-being is hugely dependent on outside forces.

Singapore lacks the deep buffers of resources that China has to rely on when things go wrong, but here is another paradox: our small size can both magnify our sense of success (and self-satisfaction) as well as our risk aversion.

While we can be rightly proud of what this little country has achieved, pride can breed complacency too. However, I have been constantly left in awe of the sheer tenacity, decisiveness and audacity of the Chinese.

As we head into a time of flux and uncertainty, we could do with a bit more of the derring-do and big thinking that come from the hyper-competitive environment that the Chinese have accepted as a part of life. That courage, combined with the spirit of adaptability that is Singapore’s strength, would stand us in better stead in a world where, as Singapore’s leaders like to remind us, no one owes us a living.