James Crabtree is an associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is author of "The Billionaire Raj."
A rare sense of COVID-era optimism coursed between Singapore and Hong Kong last week, on news of a mooted two-way travel bubble. The prospect of business trips without irksome quarantine rules, or even a Christmas holiday, suddenly seemed a little less distant for millions of marooned residents of the two Asian city-states