The United States House of Representatives passed legislation on February 11, 2026 that would exclude China from major international financial institutions if Beijing were to threaten Taiwan. The bill passed with an overwhelming 395-2 vote, reflecting rare bipartisan consensus on the question of Taiwan’s security and American strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific. The legislation targets China’s participation in the G20, the Bank for International Settlements, the Financial Stability Board, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, and the International Organization of Securities Commissions.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Representative Frank Lucas, framed it in terms of systemic coherence: if China seeks to disrupt the global order, it should not remain a participant in the institutions designed to preserve that order. The argument is philosophically straightforward, but its practical implications are enormously complex, particularly for economies like Singapore that sit at the intersection of American and Chinese economic networks.
The bill has not yet passed the Senate, and there is genuine uncertainty about whether it will. The Republican-controlled Senate is reportedly reluctant to make major changes to US-China policy ahead of a planned Trump visit to Beijing in April 2026, where the president is expected to meet Xi Jinping and negotiate on trade, rare earths, and Taiwan. Trump himself described an earlier February call with Xi as excellent, though Beijing’s readout of the same call was noticeably more pointed, particularly on Taiwan. This divergence in framing is itself revealing of how fragile the diplomatic atmosphere remains.
Even so, the bill’s passage in the House carries weight as a signal. The near-unanimous vote tells Beijing something about the floor of Congressional sentiment, and it tells American allies and partners something about the direction of US policy architecture. Whether or not it becomes law, it represents a serious attempt to formalize economic coercion as a deterrent mechanism in the Taiwan Strait.
For Singapore, the implications deserve careful attention. Singapore occupies a structurally unique position in global finance. It is one of Asia’s premier financial hubs, home to the Asian headquarters of hundreds of multinational corporations, a major foreign exchange trading center, and a node in the supply chains of both the United States and China. Singapore is also the largest foreign investor in China and has deep trade relationships with both powers. This is not an accident of geography but a deliberate product of decades of foreign policy premised on not having to choose between Washington and Beijing.
The institutions targeted by the US bill are not abstract. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision sets the global standards that Singapore’s Monetary Authority applies when regulating local banks. The Financial Stability Board, which coordinates macroprudential policy across major economies, includes Singapore as a participant. The Bank for International Settlements operates a regional office in Hong Kong and Singapore’s central bank engages with it regularly. If China were excluded from these bodies, the coherence of global financial regulation would fracture in ways that create real operational problems for financial centers like Singapore that deal heavily in both dollar-denominated and renminbi-denominated instruments.
There is also the question of secondary effects on trade finance. Singapore’s port is one of the busiest in the world and handles enormous volumes of trade between China and the rest of the world. Any significant disruption to the financial architecture governing Chinese participation in global commerce would ripple through Singapore’s logistics and trade finance sectors with speed. Banks operating out of Singapore that facilitate letters of credit, trade financing, and currency hedging for China-linked transactions would face immediate compliance and counterparty risk questions if the legal landscape shifted dramatically.
Singapore has historically navigated US-China tensions through a combination of principled neutrality, quiet diplomacy, and economic pragmatism. Its leaders, including Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, have been consistent in warning that small states suffer most when great powers force binary choices. Singapore has supported a rules-based international order precisely because that order protects smaller states from coercion by larger ones. The irony of the current moment is that the US legislation, framed as a defense of that order against Chinese disruption, could itself contribute to the fragmentation of the multilateral institutions that give the rules-based order its practical substance.
There is a deeper structural tension here that Singapore and other middle powers will have to reckon with. The bill assumes that exclusion from international financial institutions is a credible threat that would deter Chinese aggression toward Taiwan. But China has spent the better part of a decade building alternative financial infrastructure precisely to reduce its vulnerability to this kind of leverage. The Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the gradual internationalization of the renminbi are all part of a deliberate strategy to insulate China from Western financial coercion. Excluding China from the FSB or the Basel Committee might therefore be less painful for Beijing than Washington anticipates, while being considerably more disruptive to the functioning of global financial governance for everyone else.
For Singapore, the more immediate concern may be the chilling effect on investment and business confidence. Multinational corporations and financial institutions based in Singapore use it as a platform precisely because it offers stable, predictable access to both the American and Chinese economic spheres. If that dual access becomes legally or politically untenable — if compliance with American restrictions on Chinese institutions begins to conflict with operating in Chinese markets — Singapore-based firms will face uncomfortable choices. Some may relocate functions, restructure operations, or simply reduce exposure to one side or the other.
Singapore’s government will almost certainly respond to these developments with its characteristic combination of public restraint and private engagement. It will not take sides publicly, but it will work through diplomatic channels to preserve the institutional architecture on which its economic model depends. It will also, as it has done before, continue to make the case internationally that the degradation of multilateral institutions serves no one’s long-term interests, including America’s.
The bill’s ultimate fate depends on the Senate and on the trajectory of Trump’s diplomacy with Beijing over the coming months. But the vote itself marks a significant moment in the evolution of American strategy toward China, one in which economic integration and institutional participation are being explicitly reconceived as instruments of deterrence rather than as goods in themselves. For a city-state whose prosperity is built on the premise that integration and openness benefit everyone, that reconception carries consequences that will unfold regardless of whether the bill ever becomes law. Wednesdays as a weight
Mrs Lim had been cutting the same mango tree for thirty years. Not cutting it down — she would never do that — but trimming it, coaxing it, negotiating with it the way you might negotiate with a difficult relative you nonetheless love. Every Wednesday morning she was out there before the heat settled in, her small yellow-handled shears clicking against branches that had grown, over the decades, into something resembling a personality.
Her neighbour, a young man named Darren, had moved in eight months ago. She knew this because she had counted. He worked from home, she gathered, because his lights were on at strange hours and he never wore a shirt before noon. He had nodded at her once in the car park. She had nodded back. That was the full extent of it.
On a Wednesday in February he came outside while she was working and stood at the low fence between their gardens holding two cups of coffee, one extended toward her with the uncertain body language of someone who had rehearsed the gesture but was now unsure of its execution.
She looked at the cup. She looked at him.
“I make too much,” he said. “Every morning. I don’t know why. Habit, I guess.”
She set her shears on the plastic stool she used as a work table and took the cup. It was the right thing to do and she knew it immediately, the way you know certain things without reasoning through them.
The coffee was too strong. She said nothing about this.
“That’s a big tree,” he said, for lack of anything else.
“My husband planted it.” She waited to see what he would do with that information.
He looked at it with what she felt was genuine attention. “Is he — “
“He passed. Seven years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He lived very well.” She sipped the coffee again. “The tree is getting difficult. The roots are going toward the drain.”
Darren looked at the base of the tree, where the roots had begun to ridge the soil in long, questing lines. “Can you do anything about it?”
“I talk to it,” she said, and then wondered if that sounded foolish to someone his age. But he didn’t smile in the wrong way. He just nodded as though that were a reasonable approach, which she appreciated.
They stood there a while. A motorcycle went past on the road. Somewhere a mynah bird was conducting a noisy argument with itself.
“I’m not good at this,” he said eventually.
“At what?”
He gestured vaguely. “Being a neighbour. Being — around people. I moved here from KL. I thought it would be easier here. I don’t know why I thought that.”
Mrs Lim considered this. She had lived in this house since 1987. She had seen the neighbourhood change around her the way a river changes the landscape — slowly, then all at once. The family with the loud children. The retired teacher who grew orchids. The couple who fought every Saturday and then went out for dinner together every Sunday, which she had always found quietly moving.
“It is not easier anywhere,” she said. “You just get used to the specific difficulty of the place you’re in.”
He looked at her. He was not bad looking, she noticed, in the way that one notices things without attaching importance to them. He had the expression of someone who had expected a simpler answer.
“That’s not very comforting,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “But it’s true.”
He smiled then, a real one, the kind that takes over a face before the person has approved it. She found she liked him for it.
She handed back the cup. “The coffee is too strong,” she said. “Tomorrow, use less.”
He took the cup. “You want me to bring you coffee tomorrow?”
She picked up her shears. “It’s up to you,” she said, which they both understood to mean yes.
She went back to the tree. She heard his door close behind her. The mango tree stood in the morning light, its roots reaching where they would reach, its branches full of small hard fruit that would ripen when they were ready and not a moment before. She clipped a wayward branch and added it to the pile at her feet.
Wednesday continued as Wednesdays do, at the pace of things that matter without announcing themselves.