Kenneth Paul Tan, PhD (Cambridge)
Talent100 Professor of Politics, Film, and Cultural Studies
Hong Kong Baptist University

NARRATING COLD WARS: AN INTERNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE 11–13 November 2021, Hong Kong Baptist University The year 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the “Cold War”, a half-century of superpower rivalry that left few societies untouched. Now, there are concerns about a new great power contest between the United States and China. The conference interrogated “Cold War thinking” — from the primacy it gave to relations between nation-states, to assumptio

Kenneth Paul Tan (2021) "Singapore’s Neoliberal Decadence: Meritocracy Revisited", Public Lecture at Southeast Asian Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong, 8 November. Singapore has often been described as a successful meritocracy. However, over the last couple of decades, as inequality and poverty have become much more visibly felt in many people’s lived experience, views about meritocracy in Singapore have become rather less uncritical. Kenneth Paul Tan discusses fi

The documentary is titled "2021: Do You Live in a Fair World?". Kenneth Paul Tan appears in Episode 2 on 8 November 2021 ("The Meritocracy Myth") and Episode 3 ("Beyond Meritocracy and Fairness") on 29 November 2021. He discusses basic definitions and the origins of the idea of meritocracy, its internal contradictions, how merit is determined, meritocracy in Singapore's national development, and lifelong learning. The documentary also features Joseph Fishkin (Law Professor at