Chua Beng Huat - Current Research Interests

Current Research Interests

His research efforts are focused at three key areas; comparative politics in Southeast Asia, urban and housing planning, and Cultural Studies in Asia.

One noteworthy work in the area of comparative politics in Southeast Asia is his discussion of communitarian politics. He asserts that the liberalism and democracy do not necessarily have to go hand in hand in Asia. With nationhood being a new phenomenon and liberalism lacking deep historical roots in much of Asia, he questioned what other values instead of those of liberalism might be promoted in these regions, and analyzed dynamics that surround construing national ideologies in communitarian terms. In this way, he revealed how social practices in parts of Asia disrupt the global hegemony of liberalism. In Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore for instance, a book that radically reoriented the analysis of politics in Singapore, he demonstrated that the undisrupted reign of People’s Action Party (PAP) was based on its ability to develop and maintain a Gramscian sense of ideological hegemony, since the mid-1970s, rather than on authoritarianism. This ideological hegemony had enabled the Party to shift towards the concept of ‘Asian democracy’, an attempt to supplant liberalism with ‘Asian’ communitarism.

In the area of urban and housing planning, Chua has made inquiries into the uniqueness of public housing in Singapore, with it being neither an investment and consumer good in a free market, nor a social right as in socialist nations. In Political legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore for example, he shows that the success of its unique public housing system, which guarantees a home for all citizens, is a fundamental contribution to the ideological hegemony and thus legitimacy of the single-party state in Singapore.

By the mid-1990s, as the capitalist economies in East Asia developed, Chua turned his attention to popular consumer culture. This resulted firstly in editing, Consumption in Asia: lifestyles and identities, a volume in the Routledge New Rich in Asia Series. This was followed by the attention-grabbing neon pink book Life is Not Complete without Shopping. Playfully drawing its title from a 1996 National Day Rally speech by the then Prime Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong, this book explored how Singapore’s social reality is constituted in an environment steeped in global consumer imagery. In it, he wrote about bodies, food, clothes and movies, diverse activities like hanging out at the town centre McDonald’s, riding the escalator at Ngee Ann City, a major shopping complex, and looking at price tags at Prada came together as analytical objects.

By the late 1990s, Chua became increasingly interested in Cultural Studies. He became a founding Co-Executive Editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. With financial support from the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore, where he leads the Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster, he organized conferences and workshops in related topics and themes. Edited volumes, such as Political Elections as Popular Culture and East Asian Pop Culture: analyzing the Korean Wave, are results of these workshops. With these organizing and publication efforts, he has helped to develop a research community of scholars who are engaged in analyzing Asia pop music, film and television dramas.