The Rise of China: Singapore’s Golden Rice Bowl Is About to Shatter

Singapore is in a total panic.
The golden rice bowl it’s held for half a century is being smashed, blow by blow, by China.
In 2023, Singapore’s GDP shrank by nearly $3 billion—a rare contraction—and per capita GDP saw its first negative growth in three years. The slight rebound in 2024 is barely hanging on, thanks only to a few high-end manufacturing sectors. This small island nation, which once relied on the Strait of Malacca as a toll booth, worked for multinational corporations, and lay back as an offshore financial center, is now being comprehensively replaced by China across industries.

Let’s start with the lifeline: the Strait of Malacca.
Every year, 140,000 ships and 80% of China’s imported oil pass through here. Singapore has been feasting on ship repair, refueling, transshipment, and refining. But now:
• By 2025, Arctic shipping routes are handling over 40 million tons of cargo;
• The China-Europe Railway Express has run 110,000 trains—Chongqing to Duisburg takes just 16 days;
• Shipping from Shanghai to Rotterdam via the Arctic saves 22 days and $3 million in fuel costs.
High-value goods are all moving by rail or Arctic routes, turning the Strait of Malacca from a must-pass route into a “nice-to-have”.

Then there’s Gwadar Port, which is even more disruptive.
By 2025, its throughput will hit 547,000 tons. Once the Wakhan Corridor is open, Central Asian minerals will go straight to the Indian Ocean—wiping out 3,000 km of transshipment handled by Singapore. Thailand has already announced that 60% of its official cargo will go through Gwadar. The dominoes are starting to fall.

Manufacturing is collapsing too.
Electronics used to make up 40% of Singapore’s manufacturing, with 60 semiconductor factories supporting 7% of GDP. TSMC and Micron even called it the “Silicon Island of Asia”.
What happened?
SMIC is mass-producing 28nm chips; Yangtze Memory has 128-layer 3D NAND; and the Lingang chip park has lured in GlobalFoundries and Infineon. In 2024, China attracted 17 percentage points more foreign investment in Southeast Asian manufacturing than Singapore.
With a huge market of 1.4 billion people and a complete industrial chain, who still wants to squeeze into your 728-square-kilometer city?

The fall from grace as a financial center is even harsher.
Once the world’s third-largest offshore RMB center with S$2.6 trillion in asset management, what about now?
Shanghai’s free trade zone covers 92 countries, and Chinese banks handle all the funding for the China-Laos Railway and Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway. Temasek is frantically investing in China’s new energy and AI sectors.
When Hainan’s free trade port dropped corporate tax to 15%, 12 Singapore-listed companies immediately set up regional headquarters there. Zero capital gains tax? That’s useless when the industrial chain is moving elsewhere.

The harshest truth: China has directly copied the Singapore model and is doing it on a bigger scale.
Suzhou Industrial Park hits 340 billion yuan in GDP. Shenzhen Qianhai’s offshore RMB settlement has tripled in three years. China’s dredging fleet reclaims 23 times more land per year than Singapore.
Even the Kra Canal project is being revived. Once it’s dug, half of Singapore Port’s 37 million TEUs will be diverted.

Singapore now looks like Hong Kong 20 years ago.
When Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen rose, Hong Kong panicked. Today, the entire Pearl River Delta, Hainan, and Qianhai are booming, and Singapore is about to lose even its “middleman” status.

Worse still, its retreat is narrower than Hong Kong’s:
90% of food is imported, 50% of water comes from Malaysia, and even the sand for reclamation must be bought from Indonesia.

For the past half-century, Singapore feasted on the geopolitical dividends of being a “super middleman”:
A port left by the British, a Cold War US supply base, a springboard for China’s reform and opening up.
But now, China itself has become the largest trading partner for more than 120 countries, running its own dual circulation. Who still needs you as a straw?

In 2024, Singapore’s foreign reinvestment rate hit a 12-year low, while foreign investment in China’s high-end manufacturing rose by 28%.
This isn’t competition—it’s a complete change at the center of the industrial chain.

Singapore’s golden rice bowl is truly starting to crack,
And it’s about to shatter to pieces.
And for us, this is only the beginning!