Latest news with #KishoreMahbubani
Mint
2 days ago
- Business
- Mint
India's Partition diaspora has been a boon for other Asian economies
Nearly eight decades ago, a community of Hindu Sindhi merchants fled the Indian subcontinent in the aftermath of its bloody division. My family was among them. Scattering worldwide, some in the diaspora rose from refugees to run billion-dollar businesses. Ours was one story among scores, mirroring tales of refugees fleeing violence in recent times. From the aftermath of Syria's civil war to the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, then, as now, the openness of adopted nations determines whether migrants flourish or fade. It remains a politically charged issue, with bitter debates raging over America's mass deportations to the EU's recent tightening of migration and asylum rules. Partition changed the course of my community's destiny. It is thought that there are around 2 million Hindu Sindhis in Pakistan, nearly 3 million in India and several million more across the world. This exile has birthed a prominent business diaspora. Also Read: Partition Museum gallery commemorates the lost homeland of Sindh You might recognize the names. The Singapore-based Hiranandani brothers for example. Their father migrated from Sindh, a province in what is now southeastern Pakistan, in 1947, and started a small shophouse near a British military enclave. Today, his descendants are billionaires, ranked among Singapore's richest. An entrepreneurial spirit defines the community, notes Singapore's former ambassador to the United Nations Kishore Mahbubani in his book, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir. When Hindu Sindhis began fleeing Pakistan, many headed to cities they had been operating in since the late 1800s, he writes. The Partition of British-ruled India in 1947 forced one of the largest mass migrations in human history: About 15 million people were displaced and it's estimated that a million died in communal violence. As part of the transfer of power, two new nations were created: Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Both have just marked their independence days on 14 and 15 August respectively. The British devised the split along religious lines, despite the fact that many communities had, for the most part, peacefully coexisted. It meant that vast numbers suddenly found themselves on the 'wrong' side. Also Read: Pet paranoia and anti-immigrant rants reveal economic myopia My father has vivid memories of that time. He lived in Hyderabad in the Muslim-majority Sindh province, as his ancestors had done for centuries. An ancient trading hub in South Asia that bridged East and West, Sindh was swallowed whole into Pakistan. His family was sitting down to lunch in the days before Partition when a Muslim friend burst in, urging them to leave immediately. A mob was on its way, and they were angry. In a frantic rush, my father—just five years old at the time—remembers having barely enough time to grab his shoes. They ran, a few precious possessions in hand, and boarded a train to what was then Bombay, ending up in a refugee camp. From there, they travelled by ship to Indonesia, where my grandfather had business ties. Eventually, they became citizens there. If Indonesia had turned its back on us eight decades ago, families like mine might never have survived. The journey from refugees to entrepreneurs illustrates a wider point: Migration can be a powerful driver of economic growth. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, each additional working-age migrant creates 0.2 extra jobs through entrepreneurship—nearly 4 million jobs between 2011 and 2021. Also Read: US President-elect Trump's crackdown on immigration is likely to be highly disruptive For the family that settled in Indonesia, Partition meant new beginnings. They started in textiles, but now are known as the 'Kings of entertainment'—a household name in the entertainment and media industry. In 2021 Tencent bought a 15% stake in PT MD Picture, a company co-founded by one of the family's next generation scions for some $50 million. Not everyone fled because of Partition. The Harilelas of Hong Kong left Sindh in 1922, developing business links across southern China and exporting antiques worldwide. That trade collapsed during the Great Depression, forcing them to Hong Kong to start over. Over the decades they established a hospitality group with properties in Asia, Europe and the US, becoming one of the region's wealthiest families. The debate over immigration around the world today is complex and deservedly so. Integrating new communities and cultures is challenging. Those pressures can affect local populations. But rejecting contributions can mean that both migrants and host nations lose out. My family isn't among the Sindhi billionaires, but we've contributed to our adopted country in many other ways. Others should have that chance. ©Bloomberg The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China.
TimesLIVE
26-06-2025
- Business
- TimesLIVE
The world is cruel but Africa can learn to be great: former UN Security Council president
Kishore Mahbubani, former UN Security Council president and Asia Research Institute fellow, says Africa faces a 'cruel' economic future in the next decades, as the same nations that exploited Africa's resources for wealth are becoming increasingly protectionist. However, the continent could learn from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), an economic block of 10 Southeast Asian economies: Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Malaysia and Cambodia. The grouping, established in 1967, was instrumental in turning its member states from low-income economies to a combined GDP of $3.6-trillion (R64.07-trillion) in 2022, enough to make the bloc the fifth largest economy globally. Mahbubani said for Africa, replicating this model has gone from possible to critical. He was speaking at the Africa Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) AGM in Abuja, Nigeria, on Thursday. His address comes amid trade fragmentation, protectionism and geopolitical tensions punctuated by war in Ukraine and the Middle East and US President Donald Trump's tariffs. 'In where we go from here and what the prospects are, I emphasise the cruel world. We haven't seen the sharper edges of the geopolitical competition that is coming, partly because the US has been trying to focus on China.'
Wall Street Journal
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Once and Future World Order' Review: After Pax Americana
Dust-jacket blurbs on books are usually ignored by reviewers. But when a new book on international relations carries fulsome endorsements by Gareth Evans (a preachy former Australian foreign minister, now unfriendly to America) and Kishore Mahbubani (a Singaporean former president of the United Nations Security Council who thinks America's moral authority is no greater than China's), a reader must entertain doubts about the book's true worth. With Amitav Acharya's 'The Once and Future World Order,' such doubts quickly turn into a conviction that the author hews to values of which we should beware. Mr. Acharya, an Indian-born professor at American University in Washington, addresses a subject that alarms many of us: the unmistakable decline of the West and the serious fraying (if not quite yet the breakdown) of the American-led world order. But Mr. Acharya is not at all fazed by this. On the contrary, he's impatient for the old order to end and for the world to emerge into the blazing sunshine of a multicivilizational, post-American nirvana. 'Would the end of U.S. and Western dominance really be so bad?' Mr. Acharya asks. 'It need not be,' he says. Such an end 'is not a disaster.' If these hedges lull us, at first, into believing that we're in the hands of a gently neutral analyst of international affairs, we're soon disabused. The end of Pax Americana, he tells us, will 'turn out to be a good thing.' From Mr. Acharya's standpoint, American and Western domination has been less a blessing than a threat—marred since its inception by 'economic inequality, racism, and wars of choice waged usually in the global South.' The author is blithely (and blindly) optimistic, his beliefs rooted in a form of nonalignment that idealizes such events as the Bandung Conference of 1955, a gathering, in Indonesia, of anti- and postcolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. (Only a handful of them, it should be said, believed in democracy; the majority of the leaders present were, or soon became, autocrats and tyrants.)
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
2025 Land-Sea Economic Forum Drives China-ASEAN Industrial Cooperation
SINGAPORE, June 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report from iChongqing: The 2025 Land-Sea Economic Forum was held on June 12 in Singapore, drawing nearly 200 participants from political, business, and academic sectors both in China and abroad. Themed "Connectivity for Shared Success: Trends and Visions for Chinese Industries Expanding into Southeast Asia," the forum gathered Chinese and international guests in Singapore to explore new opportunities for Chinese industries expanding into the region, and to promote coordinated regional economic development. The smooth development of ASEAN-China relations is largely due to ASEAN's effective functioning as a regional organization, said Kishore Mahbubani, a Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Research Institute at NUS and a Former Permanent Representative of Singapore to the United Nations, in his keynote speech. He noted regional cooperation requires working with all neighbors. China's direct investment in ASEAN has doubled since the pandemic, and ASEAN has also become an important source of foreign investment for China. However, China's investment in ASEAN still accounts for less than 10%, indicating significant growth potential, according to He Dong, Chief Economist at the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO). Guan Xin, Vice President of Changan Auto Southeast Asia Co., Ltd., shared in his keynote address that in May 2025, Changan's first overseas new energy vehicle manufacturing base officially began operations in Rayong, Thailand. Changan has also established over 190 stores and partnered with more than 200 suppliers across Southeast Asia, creating over 300,000 jobs along the industrial chain and employing more than 1,100 staff, 87% of whom are local employees. During the forum, China Securities released the report "A New Era of Industrial Revolution and Regional Integration: Southeast Asia Investment Report 2025," highlighting that there is broad room for cooperation between China and ASEAN in areas such as digitalization, manufacturing, and services, with Singapore and Chongqing serving as representative models of this partnership. At the forum, representatives from MINISO, Tencent, Ant International, Malaysian Investment Development Authority, the Asian Development Bank, and the Singapore Exchange shared firsthand insights on going global. In roundtable sessions, they highlighted how AI is reshaping cross-border e-commerce, how Chinese cultural exports are gaining traction in ASEAN markets, and how financial services are strengthening China-Singapore connectivity and regional expansion. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE iChongqing Sign in to access your portfolio
Al Jazeera
23-04-2025
- Business
- Al Jazeera
China-US trade war: Can Trump win?
Veteran Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani argues that it's 'legitimate' for US President Donald Trump to be worrying about the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States, but his idea to force factory jobs back to the US is probably not going to work. Mahbubani tells host Steve Clemons that China will be damaged by the current trade war with the US, but 'the Chinese are prepared to accept short-term pain for long-term gain'. The disarray in US policy is 'a gift to China,' says Mahbubani. 'I don't see countries walking away from China.'
