The year 2025 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Singapore independence. It is also the year when the fourteenth general election was held. When the results were released in early May, People’s Action Party (pap) proved one more time its advance in national leadership. The 65.57 percent landslide was also “an endorsement of Prime Minister Wong’s call for voters to return [to] his experienced ministers.”¹ Being the first-generation prime minister born after independence, Lawrence Shyun Tsai Wong, while injecting new blood into the ruling party, symbolizes the transformation of political succession of pap’s dominance across the sixty years since the nation gained independence.

Pointing out the strategic importance of the geographical position of the islands, Lee’s comments were prophetic—Singapore was on its way to become one of the Asian Tigers, leading the economy and development of the region.

Sixty years have gone by and Singapore, as Lee had envisioned, is here and stands staunch. The country’s state of wellbeing is indicated not only by the 2025 landslide victory of People’s Action Party, but also by the 2023 gni (gross national income) per capita of US70,590, ranked number ninth in the world. As a country that has a population that is seventy-five percent ethnic Chinese, it is time to revisit the Chinese component in the nation. The essays included in this special issue guide us through a reassessment of the Chinese factors at different moments in the history of the country. Taken together, they aim to shed light on the transformation of the ethnic Chinese communities in terms of culture, trade, politics, gender/sexuality and colonial identities since the time when Singapore was still part of the territories of British Malaya. Below please see a brief introduction to each of the essays.

As the largest ethnic group in Singapore, Chinese Singaporeans have developed a deep attachment to traditional Chinese culture. The first article, “Lim Boon Keng’s Translation of the Li Sao: a Response to China’s New Culture Movement,” reconsiders the impact of moderation in the context of the New Culture Movement in the 1920s. The authors, Lan Lin and Ik-Tien Ngu, argue that Lim Boon Keng’s translation of the classic text from the third century bc symbolizes the strong connection with traditional Chinese classicism. In 1929, Lim Boon Keng, a Straits Chinese, published the English translation of the Li Sao. Based on the paratextual materials which Lim provided with his translation, the authors argue that Lim actively engaged in two intellectual debates at that time. The first revolved around the figure of Qu Yuan, long revered as a paragon of Confucian virtue. In his translation, Lim recasts Qu Yuan as a modern Confucian hero in the Nietzschean mold. The second was Lim’s support of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s idea of reviving Asian civilization. While taking a stance that was out of sync with the New Culture Movement, Lim’s intervention on Tagore’s behalf can be seen as loyalty to the neo-traditionalism found among overseas Chinese intellectuals. The authors hope to “contribute to the rethinking and reclamation of neo-traditionalism as an intellectual project” undertaken by Chinese Singaporean intellectuals in the 1920s.

The second article, “The Chinese Migration and Cross-Border Trade System in Maritime Southeast Asia: a Case Study of the Kinmen Business Community in Singapore, 1860–1960s,” examines the contribution of migrant merchants from Kinmen who established a remarkable trade system between the 1860s and 1960s that had been instrumental to the early development of maritime Singaporean trade. According to the author, Bo-wei Chiang, migrant merchants from Kinmen, located in southern Fujian, had come ashore in four waves from the 1860s to 1949. Chiang “explores Kinmen merchants in Singapore from the 1860s to the 1960s and the transnational trade systems they established across Singapore, Malaya, and the Indonesian archipelago.” In his article, Chiang highlights the “jiubahang,” a business structure adopted by Kinmen merchants, who made the most of the free port policy in Singapore. His study also “addresses the system’s decline post-1960s due to independent states, increased regulations, and regional tensions, [thus] offering insights into the Chinese diaspora’s social networks and economic influence in Maritime Southeast Asia.” Given the fact that there are many dialect-based subgroups of ethnic Chinese in Singapore, Chiang’s study widens our understanding of this small but significant subgroup from Kinmen and revises the study of Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.

If the Hokkien-speaking subgroup from Kinmen had made an impact in the maritime trade in Singapore, there are also eminent Chinese Singaporean families which are important participants in the politics of the country. The third article, “Meritocracy and the Emerging Political Families in Singapore,” examines the concept of “political family” in Singapore. The author, Tsai-wei Sun, is interested in “whether this trend impacts the governing principle of meritocracy.” In reviewing Singapore’s eight political families, Sun argues that the factors of the “long-time political stability and intra-party unity of the pap are more conducive to the growth of the political family, so second-generation family members enter the political arena much younger than their colleagues without such family backgrounds.” She further contends, “good performance is still the key for second-generation political family members to maintain their political lives and their families’ reputation.” From this perspective, Sun concludes that the “rise of political families does not seem to conflict with the principle of meritocracy” in Singapore.

The next article, “Number 1 and Diverse Family Formation: Negotiating lgbtiq+ Identities and Rewriting Tradition in Sinophone Singapore and Taiwan,” turns to the issue of queer identities and compares the politics of diverse family formation between Taiwan and Singapore in the context of Sinophone studies. The author Chien-Chou Hou focuses on the Singaporean movie, Number 1 (2020), and explores lgbtiq+ identities and the differences between those identities in Taiwan and Singapore. Hou’s article is “the first academic study of the film, examining the different treatments of lgbtiq+ individuals in Taiwan, Singapore, and China before and after the film’s release.” His arguments are threefold. First, “it critically reflects on the limitations and errors of the China-centric imagination of ethnic Chinese queer culture.” Second, “by extending the film’s use of Taiwanese actors, songs, and the concept of diverse family formation, it highlights the film’s deep connection to Taiwan.” Third, “the cultural symbolism in the movie—such as using local terms like “a’guan,” instead of “tongzhi,” and replacing lip-syncing with actual singing—showcases the efforts of Singaporean cultural workers to assert their voice.” Hou concludes that “the film’s popularity underscores its significant impact on social attitudes and potential to make positive change across Chinese-speaking societies.” The comparative framework also deepens our understanding of the media flow and cultural interconnectedness between Taiwan and Singapore.

The final article, “Where Is Home? Boundary Space in Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride and The Night Tiger,” revisits the experiences of the Straits Chinese during the period of British Malaya and analyzes their struggle with colonial identities in two fictional narratives by Yangsze Choo. The author, Jun-Xiong Peng, argues that both narratives make use of the space of the afterworld, which becomes the “boundary space” that facilitates the characters’ search for cultural identities. The article is divided into three sections. While “the first section traces the history of the Chinese diaspora in British Malaya and the identification of Malay(si)an Chinese,” the second section “examines the meaning of identity and home for the diasporic Malaysian Chinese and their descendants through the lenses of Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall.” Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja,” the third section “focuses on the ‘boundary spaces’ in the two texts and analyzes how these spaces allow the characters to look for their home in a foreign land.”

As Lee Kuan Yew once said, Singapore was a “mudflat swamp over one hundred years ago.”⁵ In the words of Angelia Poon, Lee’s comments seem to serve as the teleology of “The Singapore Story,” which suggests “a linear narrative beginning with the island’s putative status as a fishing village when Thomas Stamford Raffles first arrived in 1819 in search of a trading post for the British East India Company.”⁶ In the wake of the sixtieth anniversary, the five articles try to shed light on different trajectories that tell alternative Singaporean stories. Taken together, they will help deepen and diversify our understanding of the multifarious experiences of the ethnic Chinese (sub-)groups in Singapore.