Political Agenda — “Fake News”, Foreign Interference, and Freedom of Expression
It's been about a year since Singapore's Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods held its open hearings. Although no Bills have yet been tabl…
Author: Thum Ping Tjin
Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is Managing Director of New Naratif and a historian at the University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel, his work centres on Southeast Asian governance and politics. His most recent work is Living with Myths in Singapore (Ethos: 2017, co-edited with Loh Kah Seng and Jack Chia). Reach him at pingtjin.thum@newnaratif.com.
Southeast Asia Dispatches — Episode 14
This week, Adam Bemma takes a look at the political parties running in Thailand’s general election, Laura McDowell profiles Timor-Leste’s first bl…
In Conversation with James Minchin
Thum Ping Tjin sits down with James Minchin, author of "No Man Is An Island: A Portrait of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew", to talk about his life in Sing…
Southeast Asia Dispatches — Episode 13
This week, Kirsten Han invites us to lunch with Singapore's Old Left, Mike Tatarski looks at the effects of Vietnam's booming tourism industry, PJ Thu…
The Singapore Narrative(s): Old and New
In its 60 years in power, the People's Action Party has used three, very starkly different, official historical narratives. In this lecture, PJ Thum e…
The Highest Stage of Colonialism?
A lecture that our Managing Director PJ Thum delivered at Stanford University in October. He discusses Singapore's political development and evolution…
The Use of Humiliation as a Political Tool
Singapore's Vandalism Act (1966) was designed, from the beginning, as a political tool to humiliate those who fight to exercise their right to free sp…
Why does Oxley Road Matter?
PJ Thum explains the contours of the dispute between the Lee family siblings and why Lee Kuan Yew's Oxley Road house matters so much to them.
The Elected Presidency and the Political Economy of Race in Singapore
With Singapore’s first racially reserved Presidential election looming, historian Thum Ping Tjin observes that the government’s much vaunted “Ch…
Justifying Colonial Rule in Post-Colonial Singapore
Both the British colonial government and the post-independence People's Action Party government have used the same three myths to justify their polici…
