3 - Lee Kuan-Yew and Kim Il-sung: Industrial Connection for Economic Prosperities in Singapore and North Korea during the Cold War

Colonial Singapore served as a focal point for the Asian commodity trading hub from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. As an independent nation-state in 1965, the Republic of Singapore attempted to connect with communist countries like the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and North Korea that desired to have access to Singapore for commercial trade and ideological propaganda. North Korea was a rare Asian country in the 1950s and 1960s that achieved relatively high industrial performances with synthetic fabrics, machinery, underground resources, and heavy machinery goods. North Korean leaders also attempted to use Singapore to distribute industrial commodities and propagate economic performance in diplomatic and domestic terms. Diverse activities to increase industrial trade between Singapore and North Korea could be used to examine North Korean and Singaporean leaders' attempts at achieving economic prosperity. 
This paper examines exchange letters between Lee Kuan-Yew and Kim Il-sung, the founding fathers of each country, that appeared in both countries' newspapers, to investigate the different visions of the two countries behind economic exchanges. An examination of the contextual discourse behind those official diplomatic letters reveals that Singapore and North Korea both sought economic prosperity, particularly through industrialization, for their respective visions of decolonization, Singapore's survival of the crisis, and North Korea's ideological competition in the Cold War context. Based on the survey, this paper investigates the various narratives of Cold War economic history in the Asian context through the collaboration between two countries for different purposes.