“Wang Gangwu, the great scholar, said once, ‘Singapore is where the mandalas of India and China overlap’. I thought that was a beautiful description. I’ve borrowed his idea and said that all of Southeast Asia is where the mandalas of India, China and the West overlap in different intensities, in Singapore, Malaysia, Indochina, Myanmar and Indonesia, creating the variegation that we see in Southeast Asia today. But in each of them, if you were to analyse the source radiation, it’s always India, China and the West.”
The publication of Musings — Series Three in August saw the culmination of a massive project that began in 2021 with a suggestion from media veteran Woon Tai Ho. The founder of Channel NewsAsia proposed a series of interviews with veteran politician George Yeo, 69, to gather his insights into the many global and local events in which he played a public role and his intriguing personal interests, such as the importance of harmonising our energy with the larger qi field.
We get a sense of why the first and second volumes of Musings were in high demand — Series One was on the bestseller list for seven months — when Yeo answers the question, “In the past, the peoples of Southeast Asia did not have such hardline views about identity as they do today, but were pragmatic about trade and exchange, and saw opportunities for making money. What examples have they shown of coexistence and cooperation for mutual benefit?” with “It can be shared. It need not be a zero sum, and very often it can be a positive sum.”
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