Singapore’s rising stature as a flourishing tech hub with a knack for getting its geopolitics right has attracted notice in Washington.
Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan was asked on Thursday (21 Sep 2023) how the city-state manages to retain smooth ties with both the United States and China even as the techno-economic rivalry sharpens between the world’s two biggest economies.
One factor is the small trade-dependent nation’s focus on polishing its own competitive edge rather than being consumed by competition, Dr Balakrishnan said.
He was addressing an audience of top US and foreign policymakers, congressmen and Silicon Valley executives at the Global Emerging Technology Summit hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).
Non-profit and non-partisan think-tank SCSP, led by former Google chief Eric Schmidt, sees China as having the potential to win the technology race and has called for the US to shore up its domestic manufacturing and tighten scrutiny of technology flows to China.
Dr Balakrishnan said: “Having two superpowers compete, that is competition. Having lots of small companies competing, that is competition. The real question is competitiveness. In Singapore, it is the latter that we are focused on.”
And the most important ingredient for competitiveness is people, he said.
“That means getting immigration policy right, getting education policy right, getting adult education right,” he added.
Asked to elaborate on how Singapore was shaping its immigration policies to attract the world’s best tech and venture capital firms, he credited the country’s logical and consistent policies as well as its diverse, open and confident population.
