Local Chinese bankers in postwar Singapore: negotiating cultural entrepreneurship and sociopolitical leadership in Singapore's post-colonial political economy (1945–2015)

• Main Author: Woon, Vincent
• Other Authors: Koh Keng We
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Banking; Cultural entrepreneurship; Chinese business; Bank; Political economy; Singapore
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/174450
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis examines the history of Singapore’s local banking sector through the cultural production of its bankers as cultural entrepreneurs within Singapore’s postwar transformations arising from the emergence of its post-colonial political economy. It argues that as cultural entrepreneurs, Chinese bankers sought to expand, maintain, and preserve their position within public culture, pivoting their postwar cultural production towards new structures, practices and norms that responded to emerging postwar sociopolitical conditions and business needs. Even as changing political economies and societal shifts undermined familiar avenues and cultural bases for accruing and exercising social capital, bankers continued to adapt their cultural production towards new affinities in public culture. By illustrating how bankers pursued new cultural bases and preserve old cultural affinities amid societal shifts and political constraints, while adapting familiar business structures to meet economic challenges, this thesis expands on Singapore’s economic, political, and sociocultural histories, providing perspective against Foucauldian narratives of antagonism and control used to describe Singapore’s developmental state. It also expands on historiographies of cultural entrepreneurship and Chinese business by considering the role of culture in forming pluralistic expressions of capitalism, which are modal rather than modular, and how cultural entrepreneurs negotiated the emerging paradigms of developing nation-states.