What effects – if any – had the watershed election in 2011 had on Singapore politics? How do local political developments affect Singapore’s actions abroad? How best to ensure our bilateral relations with the US are kept on an even keel despite fluid US domestic politics? Is the US-dominated monolithic global order changing, and how should Singapore conduct its foreign policy against the rise of an increasingly confident China, and the (re-) emergence of increasingly fractious territorial disputes in our neighbourhood?
In an engaging and lively discussion with Oxbridge alumni, Ambassador Chan Heng Chee shared her astute insights into these key questions that Singapore has grappled and continues to grapple with. Alumni gleaned new clarity on the complexities of the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy, and left with a keener understanding of the critical need to preserve Singapore’s space abroad.
Ambassador Chan is Ambassador-at-Large with the Singapore Foreign Ministry and concurrently, Singapore’s Representative to the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. She chairs the National Arts Council as well as the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities in the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and is a member of the Presidential Council for Minority Rights. On the international front, she chairs the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Urban Development, and is a trustee of the Asia Society and a member of the Board of the Lowy Institute for International Policy.
She served as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 2012, and was Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1989 to 1991. When she left Washington in 2012 at the end of her appointment, Ambassador Chan received the inaugural Asia Society Outstanding Diplomatic Achievement Award, the inaugural Foreign Policy Outstanding Diplomatic Achievement Award 2012 and the United States Navy Distinguished Public Service Award. Her other awards include the Distinguished Service Order in 2011 and the Meritorious Service Medal in 2005. She was named Singapore’s first “Woman of the Year” in 1991, and was twice awarded the National Book Awards: in 1986 for “A Sensation of Independence: A Political Biography of David Marshall” and in 1978 for “The Dynamics of One Party Dominance: The PAP at the Grassroots”.