Source: TR EMERITUS
Rebutting Chan Heng Chee on learning to talk through differences
August 9th, 2014 | Author: Contributions
Dear Ms Chan Heng Chee,
I refer to your 2 Aug 2014 Straits Times column “Learning to talk through our differences”.
Never static doesn’t mean Singapore’s national identity should be rapidly and artificially changed.
PM David Cameron’s call for Britishness has little to do with Scottish independence and everything to do with immigration influx.
Nation building, in the context of Singapore, predates our independence. For nearly 150 years prior to our independence, the British government along with Singapore pioneers built this nation, carving a beautiful city out of virgin jungle. By the time of our independence, all the essential trappings and hallmarks of a prosperous nation – roads, buildings, schools, hospitals, civil service, law, police force, 5th most important port in the world, airport, industry, commerce, businesses, running water and even flats – were already existing. All that independent Singapore had to do was to continue and to improve on this solid foundation.
While PAP may be obsessed with identity creation, Singaporeans have, since colonial times, come to see one another as Singaporeans.
There is no birth of our nation in so far as 1965 is concerned for the receipt of our independence is not equal to our birth. Neither were our leaders then founding leaders for they did nothing that remotely qualified them as founding. They didn’t create but inherited Singapore. They didn’t fight but left the fighting for our independence to others.
The struggle between communist and non-communist had been a fairy tale written to make the bad look good and the good look bad.
The merger with Malaya was just the short sighted wish of one man and Singapore was lucky that it all came apart in the end.
The language policy was the extension of the political policy. Just before the merger, Malay became compulsory, once we were out, it became not compulsory.
Communism
The following texts show that our triumph over the communists was quite a piece of cake:
• The Malayan Communist Party … was not particularly effective. It hosted a meeting … most notable … for the comprehensive surveillance by the British Special Branch … Subsequent mass arrests decimated the MCP [page 134]
[Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the], [James R. Arnold]
• The MCP itself … seems to have been more a figment of the imagination of … the British Special Branch and the right-wing forces in Singapore. Its “ghost” may have lived a much longer and more active life than the real one ever did. While the party … attracted idealistic recruits from Singapore … we may question the extent of its organization and power in Singapore, particularly during … 1952-63. Repeated waves of arrests, banishments and defections between 1948 and 1963 severely limited its ability to launch an effective organization [page 101]
[Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control], [Carl A. Trocki]
• In December 1949 the Special Branch obtained the full list of the STC through a planted informer, and conducted a raid on 1 May 1950. Singapore Town Committee Vice Secretary Ah Har and three other committee members were arrested … Later that month, 20 more MCP and ABL members were arrested. Seven months later, on 5 December, because of an alert Special Branch officer, STC Secretary Ah Chin and his assistant, Ho Seng, were caught …the mass arrests caused the near collapse of the MCP’s operations in Singapore [page 61]
• The first thing to realise is that although left-wing and anti-colonial radicalism flourished to unprecedented levels during the first half of the 1950s, the Communist Party itself was diminishing as a controlling force in Singapore over the same period [page 26]
[Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-building Project], [Michael D. Barr, Zlatko Skrbiš]
The epicenter of the Cold War was in faraway Berlin, not a good bogeyman for stirring up fear for communism in Singapore. The above evidences show that Singapore had little to fear of China’s communism export. The MCP largely operated in Malaya; hardly in Singapore. The above evidences also show that the Special Branch had all but wiped out communism in Singapore.
‘Moderate’ is not a word you would use to describe someone capable of locking up political opponents for longer than Nelson Mandela had been.
There are two reasons why it is wrong to say that the PAP collaborated with the communists. Lim Chin Siong, the central figure that the PAP supposedly collaborated with was actually a PAP founder. It is oxymoron to refer to a PAP founder as collaborating with the PAP while he was still a PAP central committee cadre. Secondly, declassified British government documents have proven that Lim Chin Siong was never a communist. Even Tan Kah Kee and Tan Lark Sye who were both banished from Singapore for communism have had their names rehabilitated. It is understandable why the British, the Lim Yew Hock and then the PAP governments found it convenient to label the Leftists as communists because it gave them the perfect excuse to lock these trouble makers away for no reason. The Leftists had been so maligned it isn’t surprising that even the Tungku believed they were communists. The fact remains that all of them were detained without trial but if we were to apply the fundamental principle of law today, we ought not to continue labeling them as communists unless we show iron clad proof that they were.
Public housing, public education and public health had already existed before PAP took power. Singapore’s first high rise flats were built by our colonial government. Singapore’s first public school, Raffles Institution was also founded by the British. Singapore hospitals like KK Hospital and Tan Tock Seng have histories that stretch to the early colonial years. Whatever cut backs Reaganomics and Thatcherite ideas recommended still provided far more than Singapore ever did.
Blaming inequality on globalization, while fashionable, is ultimately wrong because globalization has been happening since the 1960s; MNCs have been investing overseas since the 1960s. How can something that has been happening since the 1960s explain our recent inequality? Globalization touched all nations, not just Singapore. How can globalization simultaneously cause inequality in Singapore and hardly cause inequality in the West, particularly Northern and Central Europe?
No matter how fiercely the United States and Britain debates, they are still doing a lot more than what we have been doing.
Malayan merger
If most people had wanted merger with Malaya, why would Lee Kuan Yew set up a false referendum that even included spoilt votes as votes for merger?
The special position of the Malays had already been codified in Article 153 of the Malayan constitution prior to Singapore joining Malaysia. For the purpose of the merger, Article 153 was expanded to include the indigenous peoples of Sabah and Sarawak. These, Lee Kuan Yew, a lawyer himself, could not have missed. Having married Singapore into Malaysia with his eyes wide open, to then cry foul of Malay special privilege is simply hypocritical. Mr Lee’s Malaysian Malaysia slogan was nothing than political mileage designed to further his political career in Malaysia. If he had been sincere in fighting for racial equality in Malaysia, he should have done it before the merger, not after the merger, not after agreeing to Article 153.
There was no reason why Singapore could not have existed harmoniously in Malaysia like the Chinese in Malaysia do today. What came sooner than later was Lee Kuan Yew’s challenge for power in Malaysia. The May 13 riots in 1969 were the culmination of the power struggle between Lee and the Tungku.
Language
Sri Lanka’s riots after the 1958 Sinhala Only Act mirrored clashes in Singapore arising out of Chinese language / Chinese education issues [1].
The supposed significance of Lee Kuan Yew’s achievement in making Malay our national language is merely skin deep only for which national language in this world is spoken only by ¼ of its population? The language issue in the 1950s couldn’t merely have been political; it was at its very core a struggle by the Chinese to defend its own language and culture. The decision then wasn’t just to retain English but to expand it as much as possible to crowd out Chinese.
The watershed in our bilingual policy wasn’t 1972 but 1953 when Mr Lee Kong Chian became the first person to propose the bilingual policy, close to 20 years before Lee Kuan Yew did. The conversion of Singapore society to English by 1972 was the result of the harsh culling of the Chinese language by the PAP. Colonial era Singaporeans who communicated by learning one another’s languages were no less united than post 1972 Singaporeans speaking the common English language.
Civility has never been lacking from the dissenting voice. Civility shouldn’t require humoring and fawning should it? Learning to negotiate through differences should not mean acquiescing to the government’s ivory tower view, should it?
Race equality and others are our independence values, not our founding values for Singapore was never founded in 1965 but in 1819. It is not up to the government to unilaterally reinterpret the spirit of our values without the approval of our people.
Thank you
Ng Kok Lim
[1]
• The second issue was the conversion of Chinese middle school structure into an English-medium, multi-ethnic school system and the repeated denial of full government support for the newly established Chinese-medium Nanyang University. When the battle over educational reforms fused with the 1961 internal party split within the PAP …, the campuses of these four tertiary institutions were rocked with protests. Students from these institutions often banded together to launch manifestos, classroom boycotts, hunger strikes and street marches so as to protest against government raids, arrests, expulsions … The post-independence period from 1965 was similarly turbulent as the PAP was determined to follow through with its educational reforms by using the Wang Gungwu Report on Nanyang University … In October and November 1966, hundreds of students again had another serious clash with the police at the Ministry of Education
[The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts, Lysa Hong and Jianli Huang, page 138]
• … in another major student protest, the examination strike of 1961, which was also sparked by the government’s initiative to change the Chinese school system. The examination strikes that took place in 1961 were prompted by changes made to the Chinese school system. Traditionally, the Chinese middle schools followed the so-called “3-3 system” … Lim Yew Hock’s … government announced that … Chinese middle school system would be changed to a four-year system in line with the English school system … this new system was opposed by Chinese educators. One major concern was that Chinese schools would disappear … There were also worries that students who failed the Middle Four examinations would lose two years of education … When the PAP took over … in 1959 … the new government planned to go ahead with the change from the “3-3 system” to the “4-2″ system.” … the new government also announced that, starting in 1962, all students in the Middle Four classes would have to take a general school-leaving examination set by the government before they would be allowed to go on to the next level (pre-university). The implementation of the new policy caused conflict between the PAP government and the Chinese educators and eventually led to the examination strikes by the Chinese students.
[Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics, & Socio-Economic Change, 1945-1965, Liu Hong, page 153]
Reader's comment:
In My 80s:
August 9, 2014 at 10:16 am (Quote)
When the PAP first came into power in 1959. It took a drastic step of cutting civil servants’ pay. I was badly affected as I was drawing a very low income supporting my wife and two children. We could hardly make ends meet.
They were then trying to demonstrate that they were there to serve the people with their so-called financial prudence.
Fast forward, they are now feeding themselves with obscene and out-of-this-world salaries which world leaders could not even fathom that dream.
To add insult to injury they keep on raising any fees and charges skyrocketing the cost of living. The hardest hit are of course the lower middle income and the lower income who have to continue slogging well past their retirement age. Is it any wonder that we see cardboard collectors, empty drink cans collectors, tissue packet sellers, table cleaners who are almost in their dying ages?
Where is the compassion for not only these people but also many others who are not doing well in life after their retirement?
From now until the run up of the GE, they try to please the voters. Just watch his ND rally when he will come up with more empty promises.
But of course their famous tag line is WE PROMISE YOU EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING THAT WE FEEL YOU SO DESERVE ESPECIALLY DURING ELECTION TIME, BUT WE NEVER PROMISE TO KEEP THAT PROMISE AFTER THE GENERAL ELECTION.
This has been played over and over again. But many still refused to see it.
Don’t wait till it affects you and your family by which time it is too late.
Rebutting Chan Heng Chee on learning to talk through differences
August 9th, 2014 | Author: Contributions
Dear Ms Chan Heng Chee,
I refer to your 2 Aug 2014 Straits Times column “Learning to talk through our differences”.
Never static doesn’t mean Singapore’s national identity should be rapidly and artificially changed.
PM David Cameron’s call for Britishness has little to do with Scottish independence and everything to do with immigration influx.
Nation building, in the context of Singapore, predates our independence. For nearly 150 years prior to our independence, the British government along with Singapore pioneers built this nation, carving a beautiful city out of virgin jungle. By the time of our independence, all the essential trappings and hallmarks of a prosperous nation – roads, buildings, schools, hospitals, civil service, law, police force, 5th most important port in the world, airport, industry, commerce, businesses, running water and even flats – were already existing. All that independent Singapore had to do was to continue and to improve on this solid foundation.
While PAP may be obsessed with identity creation, Singaporeans have, since colonial times, come to see one another as Singaporeans.
There is no birth of our nation in so far as 1965 is concerned for the receipt of our independence is not equal to our birth. Neither were our leaders then founding leaders for they did nothing that remotely qualified them as founding. They didn’t create but inherited Singapore. They didn’t fight but left the fighting for our independence to others.
The struggle between communist and non-communist had been a fairy tale written to make the bad look good and the good look bad.
The merger with Malaya was just the short sighted wish of one man and Singapore was lucky that it all came apart in the end.
The language policy was the extension of the political policy. Just before the merger, Malay became compulsory, once we were out, it became not compulsory.
Communism
The following texts show that our triumph over the communists was quite a piece of cake:
• The Malayan Communist Party … was not particularly effective. It hosted a meeting … most notable … for the comprehensive surveillance by the British Special Branch … Subsequent mass arrests decimated the MCP [page 134]
[Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the], [James R. Arnold]
• The MCP itself … seems to have been more a figment of the imagination of … the British Special Branch and the right-wing forces in Singapore. Its “ghost” may have lived a much longer and more active life than the real one ever did. While the party … attracted idealistic recruits from Singapore … we may question the extent of its organization and power in Singapore, particularly during … 1952-63. Repeated waves of arrests, banishments and defections between 1948 and 1963 severely limited its ability to launch an effective organization [page 101]
[Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control], [Carl A. Trocki]
• In December 1949 the Special Branch obtained the full list of the STC through a planted informer, and conducted a raid on 1 May 1950. Singapore Town Committee Vice Secretary Ah Har and three other committee members were arrested … Later that month, 20 more MCP and ABL members were arrested. Seven months later, on 5 December, because of an alert Special Branch officer, STC Secretary Ah Chin and his assistant, Ho Seng, were caught …the mass arrests caused the near collapse of the MCP’s operations in Singapore [page 61]
• The first thing to realise is that although left-wing and anti-colonial radicalism flourished to unprecedented levels during the first half of the 1950s, the Communist Party itself was diminishing as a controlling force in Singapore over the same period [page 26]
[Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-building Project], [Michael D. Barr, Zlatko Skrbiš]
The epicenter of the Cold War was in faraway Berlin, not a good bogeyman for stirring up fear for communism in Singapore. The above evidences show that Singapore had little to fear of China’s communism export. The MCP largely operated in Malaya; hardly in Singapore. The above evidences also show that the Special Branch had all but wiped out communism in Singapore.
‘Moderate’ is not a word you would use to describe someone capable of locking up political opponents for longer than Nelson Mandela had been.
There are two reasons why it is wrong to say that the PAP collaborated with the communists. Lim Chin Siong, the central figure that the PAP supposedly collaborated with was actually a PAP founder. It is oxymoron to refer to a PAP founder as collaborating with the PAP while he was still a PAP central committee cadre. Secondly, declassified British government documents have proven that Lim Chin Siong was never a communist. Even Tan Kah Kee and Tan Lark Sye who were both banished from Singapore for communism have had their names rehabilitated. It is understandable why the British, the Lim Yew Hock and then the PAP governments found it convenient to label the Leftists as communists because it gave them the perfect excuse to lock these trouble makers away for no reason. The Leftists had been so maligned it isn’t surprising that even the Tungku believed they were communists. The fact remains that all of them were detained without trial but if we were to apply the fundamental principle of law today, we ought not to continue labeling them as communists unless we show iron clad proof that they were.
Public housing, public education and public health had already existed before PAP took power. Singapore’s first high rise flats were built by our colonial government. Singapore’s first public school, Raffles Institution was also founded by the British. Singapore hospitals like KK Hospital and Tan Tock Seng have histories that stretch to the early colonial years. Whatever cut backs Reaganomics and Thatcherite ideas recommended still provided far more than Singapore ever did.
Blaming inequality on globalization, while fashionable, is ultimately wrong because globalization has been happening since the 1960s; MNCs have been investing overseas since the 1960s. How can something that has been happening since the 1960s explain our recent inequality? Globalization touched all nations, not just Singapore. How can globalization simultaneously cause inequality in Singapore and hardly cause inequality in the West, particularly Northern and Central Europe?
No matter how fiercely the United States and Britain debates, they are still doing a lot more than what we have been doing.
Malayan merger
If most people had wanted merger with Malaya, why would Lee Kuan Yew set up a false referendum that even included spoilt votes as votes for merger?
The special position of the Malays had already been codified in Article 153 of the Malayan constitution prior to Singapore joining Malaysia. For the purpose of the merger, Article 153 was expanded to include the indigenous peoples of Sabah and Sarawak. These, Lee Kuan Yew, a lawyer himself, could not have missed. Having married Singapore into Malaysia with his eyes wide open, to then cry foul of Malay special privilege is simply hypocritical. Mr Lee’s Malaysian Malaysia slogan was nothing than political mileage designed to further his political career in Malaysia. If he had been sincere in fighting for racial equality in Malaysia, he should have done it before the merger, not after the merger, not after agreeing to Article 153.
There was no reason why Singapore could not have existed harmoniously in Malaysia like the Chinese in Malaysia do today. What came sooner than later was Lee Kuan Yew’s challenge for power in Malaysia. The May 13 riots in 1969 were the culmination of the power struggle between Lee and the Tungku.
Language
Sri Lanka’s riots after the 1958 Sinhala Only Act mirrored clashes in Singapore arising out of Chinese language / Chinese education issues [1].
The supposed significance of Lee Kuan Yew’s achievement in making Malay our national language is merely skin deep only for which national language in this world is spoken only by ¼ of its population? The language issue in the 1950s couldn’t merely have been political; it was at its very core a struggle by the Chinese to defend its own language and culture. The decision then wasn’t just to retain English but to expand it as much as possible to crowd out Chinese.
The watershed in our bilingual policy wasn’t 1972 but 1953 when Mr Lee Kong Chian became the first person to propose the bilingual policy, close to 20 years before Lee Kuan Yew did. The conversion of Singapore society to English by 1972 was the result of the harsh culling of the Chinese language by the PAP. Colonial era Singaporeans who communicated by learning one another’s languages were no less united than post 1972 Singaporeans speaking the common English language.
Civility has never been lacking from the dissenting voice. Civility shouldn’t require humoring and fawning should it? Learning to negotiate through differences should not mean acquiescing to the government’s ivory tower view, should it?
Race equality and others are our independence values, not our founding values for Singapore was never founded in 1965 but in 1819. It is not up to the government to unilaterally reinterpret the spirit of our values without the approval of our people.
Thank you
Ng Kok Lim
[1]
• The second issue was the conversion of Chinese middle school structure into an English-medium, multi-ethnic school system and the repeated denial of full government support for the newly established Chinese-medium Nanyang University. When the battle over educational reforms fused with the 1961 internal party split within the PAP …, the campuses of these four tertiary institutions were rocked with protests. Students from these institutions often banded together to launch manifestos, classroom boycotts, hunger strikes and street marches so as to protest against government raids, arrests, expulsions … The post-independence period from 1965 was similarly turbulent as the PAP was determined to follow through with its educational reforms by using the Wang Gungwu Report on Nanyang University … In October and November 1966, hundreds of students again had another serious clash with the police at the Ministry of Education
[The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts, Lysa Hong and Jianli Huang, page 138]
• … in another major student protest, the examination strike of 1961, which was also sparked by the government’s initiative to change the Chinese school system. The examination strikes that took place in 1961 were prompted by changes made to the Chinese school system. Traditionally, the Chinese middle schools followed the so-called “3-3 system” … Lim Yew Hock’s … government announced that … Chinese middle school system would be changed to a four-year system in line with the English school system … this new system was opposed by Chinese educators. One major concern was that Chinese schools would disappear … There were also worries that students who failed the Middle Four examinations would lose two years of education … When the PAP took over … in 1959 … the new government planned to go ahead with the change from the “3-3 system” to the “4-2″ system.” … the new government also announced that, starting in 1962, all students in the Middle Four classes would have to take a general school-leaving examination set by the government before they would be allowed to go on to the next level (pre-university). The implementation of the new policy caused conflict between the PAP government and the Chinese educators and eventually led to the examination strikes by the Chinese students.
[Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics, & Socio-Economic Change, 1945-1965, Liu Hong, page 153]
Straits Times, Learning to talk through our differences, 2 Aug 2014, Chan Heng Chee
With National Day around the corner, it is a good time to reflect on Singapore’s national identity. Writers, columnists, politicians, intellectuals, artists, and the man and woman in the street have their own take on identity.
I see identity as never static. It evolves, expands, changes and may revert, responding to domestic developments and global changes.
In Britain, after hundreds of years of historical and constitutional evolution, because of the move for Scottish independence and the influx of new immigrants, Prime Minister David Cameron recently called on the British people to promote “British values” and to bring back “Britishness” into the curriculum in the schools.
For countries gaining independence with decolonisation, “nation-building” was seen to be the main game.
“Nation-building” came with its twin, “identity creation”. And there is an ongoing debate on whether identities are created top down or evolve bottom up.
The process is both. At the birth of the nation, the initiative comes from the founding leaders, expressing the values of the people and reflecting the historical process. Over time, these values are burnished and reinterpreted. But identity is also organically reshaped by the way people interact and live.
On the cusp of our 49th National Day, I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on the seminal struggles Singapore went through before Independence in 1965 and as it built its identity in the first decades. Who we are has been shaped by the outcomes of these episodes of history.
I would say Singapore went through three seminal struggles in its young history. The first struggle was over our political-economic identity – communist or non-communist. The second was political – our territorial identity – interpreted as whether to go for merger with Malaya or not.
The third was over cultural identity shaped by the language policy.
Communist or non-communist
Singapore’s eventual triumph against the communists was not preordained. This fight was over the ideological direction and the geopolitical orientation of Singapore. It was the time of the Cold War. The establishment of a communist government in China in 1949 committed to exporting revolution overseas reset the politics in Asia. There were communist parties in every South-east Asian country, operating underground and in the jungles.
The Malayan Communist Party operated in Malaya and Singapore. After the war, conservative parties and radical parties popped up on the Singapore political scene.
What was unusual in Singapore was that a group of moderate leaders were prepared to form a united front with the communists to fight colonialism. The People’s Action Party led by Mr Lee Kuan Yew collaborated with the communists, but internally there was an intense fight between the two factions.
This struggle led to the split of the PAP and the emergence of the Barisan Sosialis. These developments pushed Malaysia’s then Prime Minister Tengku Abdul Rahman, hitherto cool to merger, to unexpectedly propose the formation of Malaysia – an entity comprising Singapore, Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak – in May 1961.
He could not have been more frank: “We can see the threat of the communists. If I did not see this danger, I would not be bothered with the other territories like Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo.”
Once Singapore got into Malaysia in 1963, subsequent developments proved to be game-changing. The consuming issue of politics for Singapore shifted to communalism and racial politics. The formation of Malaysia resulted in the sidelining of the communists and pro-communists.
The legacy of this struggle was the PAP’s adherence to democratic socialism to counter communism. I believe Mr Lee’s dedication to zero tolerance for corruption began with his determination to fight the communists and to provide a model of good governance.
As democratic socialists, the PAP supported public housing and public investment in education and health. Once in government, however, it drifted right, seeing the abuses and excesses of the welfare state in the West. Reaganomics and Thatcherite ideas cutting back Big Government and promoting market forces found resonance here.
In the last few years, there has been a shift to the left in the social policies of the PAP, responding to growing inequalities in society exacerbated by globalisation.
Singaporeans socialised for decades by the philosophy of democratic socialism share an egalitarian outlook and believe in the state’s provision of social safety nets. There is wide support for the Government’s moves to increase assistance for the poor and disabled. In the United States and Britain, such policies are a matter of fierce debate.
Merger with Malaya or Singapore alone
The second formative struggle was over territorial identity.
Under the British, Singapore was administered along with Penang and Malacca as part of the Straits Settlements. The Malayan Union, formed in 1946 after the war, left Singapore out.
Conventional political wisdom from that moment argued that Singapore should one day merge with Malaya if it were to attain independence. Very few believed Singapore could exist without its peninsular hinterland. Every political party subscribed to this mantra.
But when it happened, merger with Malaysia lasted all of 23 months, from September 1963 to August 1965.
The relationship did not work in spite of careful delineation of the financial arrangements and powers over tax and education. Left ambiguous was the fundamental question which sooner or later would have to be addressed – who should control political power in Malaysia? Was it going to be a “Malaysian Malaysia” as Singapore advocated or would race-based politics play a bigger role?
The PAP’s “precipitous” entry in the peninsular Malayan elections in 1964 was highlighted across the Causeway as the reason for the deterioration of relations. At heart, it was about the challenge to Malay power – and specifically to the power of the Malay-based party Umno (United Malays National Organisation). This short period exposed Singapore to racial politics and rhetoric at its most rancorous and vicious.
With hindsight, if the PAP did not force the issue early, it would have come later. The May 13 riots in 1969 were about the challenge to Malay power. It was made constitutionally clear in 1971 that Malaysia was to be at its core a Malay polity with Malay symbols of power. That has been the identity of Malaysia since.
Separation on Aug 9, 1965, sent Singapore into a different orbit. Singapore set out to create an identity of a city state, a nation state with its own unique model of race relations.
A language policy for a multilingual nation
Choice of language is the third issue where Singapore’s choice shaped its identity.
New states with heterogeneous populations face the difficult choice of adopting a language policy without accompanying conflict and bloodshed. In 1955, the reorganisation of the linguistic states in India was accompanied by deadly riots. In Ceylon, savage riots followed the introduction of the Sinhala Only Act in 1958, which is considered the root of the Sri Lankan civil war.
In contrast, Singapore’s handling of the language policy for a multiracial, multilingual population without violence and bloodshed must be considered one of our country’s most significant achievements.
What then Prime Minister Lee succeeded in doing was to convince the majority 75 per cent Chinese in an independent Singapore to accept Malay as the national language and the principle of four official languages.
There are not many majoritarian populations in the world who have given up the claim to majority status for their language. Mr Lee reminded Singaporeans of the new state’s location in a Malay archipelago and the strategic necessity of not being mistaken for a “third China”.
It was not an easy sell. The politics of language in Singapore was taken up in the 1950s by the communists in Chinese middle schools. Language simmered under the surface and erupted in the open in the politics of the 70s and 80s.
The decision to retain English as the language of the civil service and the courts suggested to parents that if their children were to secure a job in the civil service, they should be enrolled in English schools.
The watershed came in 1972 when Mr Lee argued that every Singaporean should be bilingual. They should learn English as a language of communication among the multi-ethnic population, and to gain access to science, technology and the world. At the same time, each person was asked to study his mother tongue for cultural retention.
This policy was generally accepted as English was perceived by most to be a neutral language for all ethnic groups. In any case, by then, the numbers of students enrolled in the English schools far surpassed those enrolled in Chinese, Malay and Tamil schools. The universities converted to teaching in English to avoid producing two classes of graduates based on language differences – English and Chinese.
That language policy has largely shaped our cultural identity. Singaporeans are united by speaking English, Singlish and our mother tongues. We are “diluted” Chinese, Malays, Indians or Eurasians – we are Westernised up to a point, and our ethnic identities show in varying degrees.
We are Singaporeans.
We have learnt to live with one another’s differences. We have other shared cultural bonds in food, music, national service and the school experience, and National Day parades.
Most regard the early identity issues as settled, and they are right. But today, we have new identity concerns and new fault-lines.
Singapore will be arguing for some time over how much “foreign” should be accommodated in the population and identity, and how to deal with the new “culture wars” – I prefer to use “cultural divide” – over family values.
Conservationists and civil society organisations will become more active in the coming years. Many of our young citizens are championing a variety of social causes.
All this is reflective of a nation growing more diverse as it matures and evolves. There is an urgent need for us to talk to one another with civility and learn to negotiate our way through differences.
Our founding values of equality of all races, multiculturalism, multilingualism and multi-religions are a tolerant and inclusive vision. We should burnish and reinterpret the spirit of these values as we deal with new diversity issues.
The writer chairs the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
With National Day around the corner, it is a good time to reflect on Singapore’s national identity. Writers, columnists, politicians, intellectuals, artists, and the man and woman in the street have their own take on identity.
I see identity as never static. It evolves, expands, changes and may revert, responding to domestic developments and global changes.
In Britain, after hundreds of years of historical and constitutional evolution, because of the move for Scottish independence and the influx of new immigrants, Prime Minister David Cameron recently called on the British people to promote “British values” and to bring back “Britishness” into the curriculum in the schools.
For countries gaining independence with decolonisation, “nation-building” was seen to be the main game.
“Nation-building” came with its twin, “identity creation”. And there is an ongoing debate on whether identities are created top down or evolve bottom up.
The process is both. At the birth of the nation, the initiative comes from the founding leaders, expressing the values of the people and reflecting the historical process. Over time, these values are burnished and reinterpreted. But identity is also organically reshaped by the way people interact and live.
On the cusp of our 49th National Day, I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on the seminal struggles Singapore went through before Independence in 1965 and as it built its identity in the first decades. Who we are has been shaped by the outcomes of these episodes of history.
I would say Singapore went through three seminal struggles in its young history. The first struggle was over our political-economic identity – communist or non-communist. The second was political – our territorial identity – interpreted as whether to go for merger with Malaya or not.
The third was over cultural identity shaped by the language policy.
Communist or non-communist
Singapore’s eventual triumph against the communists was not preordained. This fight was over the ideological direction and the geopolitical orientation of Singapore. It was the time of the Cold War. The establishment of a communist government in China in 1949 committed to exporting revolution overseas reset the politics in Asia. There were communist parties in every South-east Asian country, operating underground and in the jungles.
The Malayan Communist Party operated in Malaya and Singapore. After the war, conservative parties and radical parties popped up on the Singapore political scene.
What was unusual in Singapore was that a group of moderate leaders were prepared to form a united front with the communists to fight colonialism. The People’s Action Party led by Mr Lee Kuan Yew collaborated with the communists, but internally there was an intense fight between the two factions.
This struggle led to the split of the PAP and the emergence of the Barisan Sosialis. These developments pushed Malaysia’s then Prime Minister Tengku Abdul Rahman, hitherto cool to merger, to unexpectedly propose the formation of Malaysia – an entity comprising Singapore, Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak – in May 1961.
He could not have been more frank: “We can see the threat of the communists. If I did not see this danger, I would not be bothered with the other territories like Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo.”
Once Singapore got into Malaysia in 1963, subsequent developments proved to be game-changing. The consuming issue of politics for Singapore shifted to communalism and racial politics. The formation of Malaysia resulted in the sidelining of the communists and pro-communists.
The legacy of this struggle was the PAP’s adherence to democratic socialism to counter communism. I believe Mr Lee’s dedication to zero tolerance for corruption began with his determination to fight the communists and to provide a model of good governance.
As democratic socialists, the PAP supported public housing and public investment in education and health. Once in government, however, it drifted right, seeing the abuses and excesses of the welfare state in the West. Reaganomics and Thatcherite ideas cutting back Big Government and promoting market forces found resonance here.
In the last few years, there has been a shift to the left in the social policies of the PAP, responding to growing inequalities in society exacerbated by globalisation.
Singaporeans socialised for decades by the philosophy of democratic socialism share an egalitarian outlook and believe in the state’s provision of social safety nets. There is wide support for the Government’s moves to increase assistance for the poor and disabled. In the United States and Britain, such policies are a matter of fierce debate.
Merger with Malaya or Singapore alone
The second formative struggle was over territorial identity.
Under the British, Singapore was administered along with Penang and Malacca as part of the Straits Settlements. The Malayan Union, formed in 1946 after the war, left Singapore out.
Conventional political wisdom from that moment argued that Singapore should one day merge with Malaya if it were to attain independence. Very few believed Singapore could exist without its peninsular hinterland. Every political party subscribed to this mantra.
But when it happened, merger with Malaysia lasted all of 23 months, from September 1963 to August 1965.
The relationship did not work in spite of careful delineation of the financial arrangements and powers over tax and education. Left ambiguous was the fundamental question which sooner or later would have to be addressed – who should control political power in Malaysia? Was it going to be a “Malaysian Malaysia” as Singapore advocated or would race-based politics play a bigger role?
The PAP’s “precipitous” entry in the peninsular Malayan elections in 1964 was highlighted across the Causeway as the reason for the deterioration of relations. At heart, it was about the challenge to Malay power – and specifically to the power of the Malay-based party Umno (United Malays National Organisation). This short period exposed Singapore to racial politics and rhetoric at its most rancorous and vicious.
With hindsight, if the PAP did not force the issue early, it would have come later. The May 13 riots in 1969 were about the challenge to Malay power. It was made constitutionally clear in 1971 that Malaysia was to be at its core a Malay polity with Malay symbols of power. That has been the identity of Malaysia since.
Separation on Aug 9, 1965, sent Singapore into a different orbit. Singapore set out to create an identity of a city state, a nation state with its own unique model of race relations.
A language policy for a multilingual nation
Choice of language is the third issue where Singapore’s choice shaped its identity.
New states with heterogeneous populations face the difficult choice of adopting a language policy without accompanying conflict and bloodshed. In 1955, the reorganisation of the linguistic states in India was accompanied by deadly riots. In Ceylon, savage riots followed the introduction of the Sinhala Only Act in 1958, which is considered the root of the Sri Lankan civil war.
In contrast, Singapore’s handling of the language policy for a multiracial, multilingual population without violence and bloodshed must be considered one of our country’s most significant achievements.
What then Prime Minister Lee succeeded in doing was to convince the majority 75 per cent Chinese in an independent Singapore to accept Malay as the national language and the principle of four official languages.
There are not many majoritarian populations in the world who have given up the claim to majority status for their language. Mr Lee reminded Singaporeans of the new state’s location in a Malay archipelago and the strategic necessity of not being mistaken for a “third China”.
It was not an easy sell. The politics of language in Singapore was taken up in the 1950s by the communists in Chinese middle schools. Language simmered under the surface and erupted in the open in the politics of the 70s and 80s.
The decision to retain English as the language of the civil service and the courts suggested to parents that if their children were to secure a job in the civil service, they should be enrolled in English schools.
The watershed came in 1972 when Mr Lee argued that every Singaporean should be bilingual. They should learn English as a language of communication among the multi-ethnic population, and to gain access to science, technology and the world. At the same time, each person was asked to study his mother tongue for cultural retention.
This policy was generally accepted as English was perceived by most to be a neutral language for all ethnic groups. In any case, by then, the numbers of students enrolled in the English schools far surpassed those enrolled in Chinese, Malay and Tamil schools. The universities converted to teaching in English to avoid producing two classes of graduates based on language differences – English and Chinese.
That language policy has largely shaped our cultural identity. Singaporeans are united by speaking English, Singlish and our mother tongues. We are “diluted” Chinese, Malays, Indians or Eurasians – we are Westernised up to a point, and our ethnic identities show in varying degrees.
We are Singaporeans.
We have learnt to live with one another’s differences. We have other shared cultural bonds in food, music, national service and the school experience, and National Day parades.
Most regard the early identity issues as settled, and they are right. But today, we have new identity concerns and new fault-lines.
Singapore will be arguing for some time over how much “foreign” should be accommodated in the population and identity, and how to deal with the new “culture wars” – I prefer to use “cultural divide” – over family values.
Conservationists and civil society organisations will become more active in the coming years. Many of our young citizens are championing a variety of social causes.
All this is reflective of a nation growing more diverse as it matures and evolves. There is an urgent need for us to talk to one another with civility and learn to negotiate our way through differences.
Our founding values of equality of all races, multiculturalism, multilingualism and multi-religions are a tolerant and inclusive vision. We should burnish and reinterpret the spirit of these values as we deal with new diversity issues.
The writer chairs the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
End of article
Reader's comment:
In My 80s:
August 9, 2014 at 10:16 am (Quote)
When the PAP first came into power in 1959. It took a drastic step of cutting civil servants’ pay. I was badly affected as I was drawing a very low income supporting my wife and two children. We could hardly make ends meet.
They were then trying to demonstrate that they were there to serve the people with their so-called financial prudence.
Fast forward, they are now feeding themselves with obscene and out-of-this-world salaries which world leaders could not even fathom that dream.
To add insult to injury they keep on raising any fees and charges skyrocketing the cost of living. The hardest hit are of course the lower middle income and the lower income who have to continue slogging well past their retirement age. Is it any wonder that we see cardboard collectors, empty drink cans collectors, tissue packet sellers, table cleaners who are almost in their dying ages?
Where is the compassion for not only these people but also many others who are not doing well in life after their retirement?
From now until the run up of the GE, they try to please the voters. Just watch his ND rally when he will come up with more empty promises.
But of course their famous tag line is WE PROMISE YOU EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING THAT WE FEEL YOU SO DESERVE ESPECIALLY DURING ELECTION TIME, BUT WE NEVER PROMISE TO KEEP THAT PROMISE AFTER THE GENERAL ELECTION.
This has been played over and over again. But many still refused to see it.
Don’t wait till it affects you and your family by which time it is too late.
