It was a phenomenological, ethnomethodological and interpretive piece that exposed mechanisms by which democracy is made visible in texts[citation needed].
Commenting on his dissertation, Chau explained that "one of the interesting things I think most people don't realize is that those kinds of ethnomethodological work can actually be used for social change.
In Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore for instance, a book that radically reoriented the analysis of politics in Singapore, he demonstrated that the undisrupted reign of People's Action Party (PAP) was based on its ability to develop and maintain a Gramscian sense of ideological hegemony, since the mid-1970s, rather than on authoritarianism.
This ideological hegemony had enabled the Party to shift towards the concept of 'Asian democracy', an attempt to supplant liberalism with 'Asian' communitarism.
[8] By the mid-1990s, as the capitalist economies in East Asia developed, Chua turned his attention to popular consumer culture.
Playfully drawing its title from a 1996 National Day Rally speech by the then Prime Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong, this book explored how Singapore's social reality is constituted in an environment steeped in global consumer imagery.
In it, he wrote about bodies, food, clothes and movies, diverse activities like hanging out at the town centre McDonald's, riding the escalator at Ngee Ann City, a major shopping complex, and looking at price tags at Prada came together as analytical objects.
With these organizing and publication efforts, he has helped to develop a research community of scholars who are engaged in analyzing Asian pop music, film and television dramas.
He was the Artistic Director of a multi-disciplinary group show SENI in 2004, and served on the Board of Directors for FOCAS, a now-defunct not-for-profit publishing initiative that primarily concerned itself with contemporary art, politics and social change in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
2012 Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture, Hong Kong University Press.
Edited volumes 2008 (with Arndt Graf) Port Cities in Asia and Europe, London: Routledge.