Melissa Chen

Melissa Chen (born 1985) is a Singaporean journalist and activist for youth, oppressed literature and secular schools in the Middle East. She is a contributing editor for Spectator USA and co-founder of Ideas Beyond Borders.

Biography Chen was born in Singapore in 1985. She immigrated to the United States at 17, living in Boston and attending Boston University. She later became a journalist. a Singaporean student who had been arrested and imprisoned for publishing materials (depicting Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew in a negative way, and also criticizing Christianity and Islam) that the government of Singapore considered to be insulting. Chen assisted Yee when he fled to the United States and claimed political asylum.

Yee severed ties with Chen in 2017 for what he saw as her authoritarianism. Chen serves as the organization's managing director.

Views

Chen is a critic of China's human rights record, curtailing of free speech, and foreign policy. An article Chen authored for The Spectator USA about the need to close Chinese wet markets was criticized in Singapore for using an image of a Singaporean wet market, though Chen later clarified the image used was chosen by an editor and not herself and her article did not criticize wet markets in Singapore.

In 2021, Chen criticised the removal of The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future by Dav Pilkey from publication by HarperCollins in response to a 289-signature petition accusing the book of stereotyping harmful to Asians in depicting kung fu master Master Wong as wearing "a traditional-style Tang coat" and using "stereotypical Chinese proverbs" in training his black and non-Asian students to eventually surpass him in skill, with Chen instead praising Wong as "a prime example of a positive portrayal of an Asian character in literature, [coming] across as endearing and full of wisdom", refuting the petition creator's derision of the novel's Chinese proverbs as stereotypical and calling out their own negative views of Chinese people ignored by Pilkey, calling for the book to be unbanned.

She was one of the first advisors, along with Bari Weiss, for FAIR, an organization that seeks to fight critical race theory. On The New Yorker, Emma Green wrote about Chen's involvement in FAIR and her conflicts with its other members.

Chen called for the flogging of Just Stop Oil activists in 2022, writing, "My home country Singapore got it right all along. Flogging needs to make a comeback as the penalty for vandalism."