Touted as one of the main engineers of Singapore''s economic growth, Dr Goh''s collection of writings and speeches seek to shed light on the various challenges that China faced in the early 90s. His arguments and analyses were presented clearly and concisely while being firmly established upon economic principles. Covering a broad range of topics from the growth of industries and enterprises to financial reforms and the difficulties of doing business in China, this collection provides a comprehensive view of problems the Chinese government faced while providing possible solutions. Despite being written two decades ago, the issues raised in these papers and speeches are uncannily relevant to the issues that the current Chinese government faces today.
Dr. Goh Keng Swee's extensive career as a public servant was dynamic as well as distinguished, in many ways decisively instrumental in the making of the Republic of Singapore. This distinctive collection of essays attempts an assessment of the long-term influence and significance of Dr. Goh's major contributions.Envisaged as a companion volume to Goh Keng Swee: A Public Career Remembered, this volume brings together an exceptional team of Singaporean scholars whose interdisciplinary expertise and cross-generational perspectives offer a balanced analysis and nuanced appraisal of Dr. Goh's lifetime of public service. The book's contributors argue that Dr. Goh's past endeavours bequeathed an enduring legacy, meriting fresh examination and careful evaluation in order to appreciate the heroic scale of such achievement.Particularly instructive are the examples of Dr. Goh's thinking patriotism, fiscal prudence, strategic pragmatism, and creative imagination at work — technocracy at its finest — which could be of immediate, practical benefit to a wider ‘nation of technocrats’. Further illumination comes from the insights of those contributors who had worked with the former Deputy Prime Minister and knew him personally. For a half-century that witnessed key turning points and phases of development in Singapore's transformation from colonial port city to independent global city, Dr. Goh played a leading role in the crafting and conduct of public policy, as with the creation of public institutions, which made the difference between survival and success. The organization of this volume reflects both a thematic approach and a chronological arrangement of material, the focus and the order of chapters corresponding to the historical sequence of public offices that Dr. Goh held: social welfare; political and constitutional evolution; development economics and finance; the armed forces and defence industry; the education system, from schools through higher education to the research institutes; Chinese studies, from Confucianism to ‘China watching’; and cultural development, with special emphasis on the creation of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.Goh Keng Swee: A Legacy of Public Service will be read by present and future generations of public servants, by Singaporeans in general, and by all students and laypersons with an interest in the modern history of Singapore — social, economic, political, military, and cultural — to which a characteristically simple and frugal Dr. Goh contributed both decisively and unreservedly.
Born in Malacca in 1918, Dr Goh Keng Swee reached maturity at a time when European colonialism was breathing its last. By the time this keen-eyed Malayan Became self-governing Singapore's first Minister of Finance in 1959, he had made a name for himself s the colony's foremost social scientist, having carried out groundbreaking surveys on urban poverty and housing. He immediately initiated pioneering projects that laid the ground for the island's economic success. When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, Dr Goh took charge of building an army from scratch.
Touted as one of the main engineers of Singapore's economic growth, Dr Goh's collection of writings and speeches seek to shed light on the various challenges that China faced in the early 90s. His arguments and analyses were presented clearly and concisely while being firmly established upon economic principles. Covering a broad range of topics from the growth of industries and enterprises to financial reforms and the difficulties of doing business in China, this collection provides a comprehensive view of problems the Chinese government faced while providing possible solutions. Despite being written two decades ago, the issues raised in these papers and speeches are uncannily relevant to the issues that the current Chinese government faces today.
Singapore's success story has increasingly been recognised but few have told it from the perspective of an insider. As a senior civil servant and "mandarin" from 1959 to 1999, Ngiam Tong Dow served with the founding generation of political leaders and contributed to the country's economic growth. In this book, he reflects on these experiences, sharing personal anecdotes and perceptive insights of Singapore's early decades. He also boldly questions some of the policies of government and emerging trends in the country to suggest how Singapore must change to survive and thrive in the future.
A crucial founding father of independent Singapore, Dr Goh Keng Swee has his distinguished and unparalleled stint in public service hitherto reduced to dates and designations. The book is the first to collect and present a broad range of historical material commemorating Dr Goh's public career. This book is not a biography of Dr Goh's life. Instead, it commemorates his public career and attempts to portray a more personal and candid perspective of the principal architect of independent Singapore. This is done by pulling together a variety of historical sources, ranging from Dr Goh's public statements and speeches, and existing and fresh oral interviews with his former colleagues to archival documents and imagery. This book is an important contribution not only to Singapore's history in general, providing valuable historical context to the challenges of ensuring the sustainability and survival of a young nation at the highest levels of policy-making, but also a tribute to Dr Goh — how he is remembered, respected and revered by some of his closest peers and colleagues.
"This book record achievements of the East Asian Institute (EAI), one of the top five think tanks in the world under the leadership of Dr Goh Keng Swee, Professors Wang Gungwu, John Wong and Zheng Yongnian. The hard work behind the nurturing of this institute is sometimes invisible, unwritten and under-appreciated but the contributions and results are clear and relevant to the scholarly world. The works of EAI's originating guardians as well as the future endeavours of its current directorship thus need to be chronicled for future generations of scholars to learn from this intellectual experience of managing an institution as complex as EAI. The detailed historiography of EAI in this publication represents the multiple histories of EAI, China's developmental path since the initiation of market reforms as well as Singapore's collaborative interface with China's development."--Provided by publisher
Dr. Goh Keng Swee's public career spanned two eventful decades. He was a founding member of Singapore's ruling political party, and played a significant role in creating and shaping the destiny of Singapore today. This is an anecdotal account of Dr Goh's life-story told by the author, his daughter-in-law. Tan Siok Sun traces Dr Goh's footsteps from his humble beginnings in Melaka, to his days at Raffles College and the London School of Economics, to his service in the Singapore Government, and to his retirement.
This volume is a book of reflections and encounters about the region that the Chinese knew as Nanyang. The essays in it look back at the years of uncertainty after the end of World War II and explore the period largely through images of mixed heritages in Malaysia and Singapore. They also look at the trends towards social and political divisiveness following the years of decolonization in Southeast Asia. Never far in the background is the struggle to build new nations during four decades of an ideological Cold War and the Chinese determination to move from near-collapse in the 1940s and out of the traumatic changes of the Maoist revolution to become the powerhouse that it now is.
Goh's thinking patriotism, fiscal prudence, strategic pragmatism, and creative imagination at work - technocracy at its finest - which could be of immediate, practical benefit to a wider 'nation of technocrats'. Further illumination comes from the insights of those contributors who had worked with the former Deputy Prime Minister and knew him personally. For a half-century that witnessed key turning points and phases of development in Singapore's transformation from colonial port city to independent global city, Dr. Goh played a leading role in the crafting and conduct of public policy, as with the creation of public institutions, which made the difference between survival and success. The organization of this volume reflects both a thematic approach and a chronological arrangement of material, the focus and the order of chapters corresponding to the historical sequence of public offices that Dr.
