The former diplomat, scholar and public intellectual Kishore Mahbubani has made a name for himself as a provocative pundit. The seventy-one-year-old Singaporean of Indian descent was born at one of the great inflection points in Asia—the end of the colonial era. His Hindu family hailed from Sindh in present-day Pakistan. They migrated to Singapore in what was then British Malaya after the partition of the old British Raj and the formation of India and Pakistan. After schooling in Singapore and university in Canada, Mahbubani joined the Singapore foreign service and went on to serve two postings in the United States, first in the Washington embassy and then in the late 1990s as Singapore’s permanent representative to the United Nations. After a spell as founding head of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, he has established a new Asia Peace Programme at the National University of Singapore.

Mahbubani has been called the ‘muse of the Asian century’. In his latest book, Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Mahbubani deploys the provocative question to explore the contemporary landscape of geopolitics, which is dominated by growing antipathy and tension between China and the United States.

• Tags: Issue 21, Kishore Mahbubani, Michael Vatikiotis, Singapore