PAPERS, COMMENTARY, BOOKS, ESSAYS
Research & Writing
Research is the platform for me to test questions against evidence I cannot gather myself. It allows me to explore the intricacies of public policy and governance with rigour and depth.
The three overarching questions
The collection was created over the course of several years, but the thinking remains consistent. Each of the three question below have been explored through various mediums: published papers, commentaries, essays, books and experiences.
1 How does a claim cross a border, and who is left responsible for it?
A false claim moves faster than any jurisdiction that could act on it. My paper traces that problem through the Russian-Ukrainian war and ends up somewhere I honestly did not expect. Not with better enforcement, but with the question of how a system can be built so that accuracy is the incentive rather than the exception.
Peer-reviewed
International Journal of High School Research, June 2026. Described in full.
Commentary
The Algorithm Decides Who Gets Heard
The same argument in shorter commentary form, alongside four related posts.
Essay
Are you responsible for your beliefs?
John Locke 2024. Whether we control how our beliefs form well enough to be held responsible for them.
In the room
Dialogue with Mr George Yeo, 2026
Singapore and China, approached through language rather than trade volumes.
2 Who does a rule actually reach once it is written down?
A policy can be approved, funded and available, and still not achieve tangible results. Somewhere between the drafting and execution, governance turns into a hurdle that is often overlooked. I meet this question weekly at a constituency office, and have tried to explore solutions to this problem.
Commentary
March 2026. Written directly out of the casework, about half of which is conducted in Mandarin.
Essay
Moot Parliament 2024. A drafted bill rather than an argument about one. I led the drafting group.
Book
Who gets to speak, and who gets heard, is not only a matter of confidence or cultural habit; systems shape it too.
In the room
Moot Parliament 2024, SGLaw 200 Youth Forum 2026
Where drafting stops being a writing exercise.
3 What makes any of it last once the people who started it leave?
I encounter the same institutional problem at Project Flare, where a curriculum has to be documented well enough to be inherited. My own paper try to answer this question through the lens of misinformation governance. Since reactive regulation always lags, the only durable answer is a system where accuracy is structurally incentivised rather than occasionally enforced.
Peer-reviewed
An institutional-design conclusion rather than a media-studies one.
Essay
Harvard 2024. Ends on who funds a reweighted curriculum, taking SkillsFuture as the working example.
Essay
The Resolution of Frustrated Contracts
Peter Cane Prize 2025. Nobody is at fault, and somebody still absorbs the loss.
In the room
GIC and MOE Economics Experience, 2025
Where I first heard reserves described as intergenerational commitments.
The complete collections
1
Peer-reviewed research
The published paper, with its method, findings, limits and how to verify it.
21
Policy commentary
Monthly since December 2024, in four categories, filterable by theme.
5
Selected essays
Philosophy, legislation and economics. Longer arguments, 2023 to 2025.
2
Books
An anthology on public speech and a children’s picture book, and what happened after them.
14
Forums and debate
Dialogues, forums, committees and rounds. Where the argument had to be made out loud.
Where this connects
The four initiatives behind the writing, and the question each of them runs into.
A special mention
I first met the Prime Minister at the SGLaw 200 Youth Forum. That exchange stayed with me, and later I sent his office some of my recent writing, including Words Unspoken and A Weapon of Mass Distraction. A reply came several weeks later.
In conversation with Prime Minister Lawrence Wong at the SGLaw 200 Youth Forum, May 2026.
“I am glad to see you writing so actively, and taking such a keen interest on important issues shaping our society and our future.”
Mr Lawrence Wong, Prime Minister of Singapore
The Path Forward
My research works through a war, two regulatory responses and a hybrid model, and then lands on a claim about structural incentives that I cannot yet make concrete. I can say what a durable information environment would have to do. I cannot say who would build it, who would pay for it or what would hold a government to it once the war that prompted it had ended.
The commentary can show that a scheme is written in the wrong register and cannot say who would have to be made responsible for rewriting it. The books reach readers who came looking, which is the easiest kind of reader to reach. The read-aloud reached sixty children in one morning because a school opened a door, and it opened because I had been a pupil there.
What I want to learn is the part after the argument. How a rule is drafted so that it still works on the platform it was written for; how a service is funded so that it outlasts the enthusiasm that created it; and how anyone finds out afterwards whether either of those worked.