Kishore Mahbubani, one of Singapore’s most notable diplomats, academics and thought leaders, would like to dispel several misconceptions about him, chief among which is that he achieved what he has in part due to a privileged upbringing, and secondly, that he is a China apologist.
Regarding the first, the reality is that his early life is far from the assumption that many might have about this worldly, sophisticated and respected authority on geopolitics. “Most people assume that I had a comfortable middle‑class upbringing, with well‑educated parents who obviously prepared me to go to university, but I had the exact opposite experience. I came from a broken home. My father went to jail. We struggled to make ends meet,” he shares over a coffee in his home at Katong. “In fact, at the age of six months, the doctors told my mother, ‘Your son is gone’ because I had a severe case of diarrhoea, and then when I was six years old, I was put on a special feeding programme in school because
