Being Chinese under official multiculturalism in Singapore

Abstract

At the time of independence, there were three visible racial groups among its newly constituted citizenry: an overwhelming majority of ethnic Chinese; regionally indigenous Malays and a small percentage of South Asians. The Cold War conditions precluded the island-state from being a Chinese majority state; constitutionally the new state was declared a multiracial nation. The three groups were reconstituted as Huaren, Malays and Indians. Multiracialism as official policy has become a means of governance of the People's Action Party single-party dominant government. Racial harmony as the public good provides the political and administrative space for the policing of racial boundaries, suppressing open discussion of racial issues. Meanwhile, Huaren culture has been progressively reduced to emphasis on filial piety as Confucianism writ small and an emergent Singaporean identity distances the local born Huaren from the ‘foreign workers’ that arrive daily from the People's Republic of China.

Keywords:

• Singapore
• multiracialism
• Huaren
• filial piety
• Mandarin language

Notes

¹Although the politically correct term might be ‘ethnic’ groups, ‘race/racial’ is the term preferred by the Singapore government and has become common parlance among Singaporeans. Therefore, it is adopted here.

²Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race.

³There was one exception. The Islamic population was to be governed by a separate legislation – the Administration of Muslim Law Act – in religious and family matters; see Kadir, ‘Islam, State and Society in Singapore’, 362–4.

⁴Another education experiment to contain ‘westoxification’ was the introduction of religious studies as moral education in the school curriculum. This was quickly dropped when it was found that students were becoming more religious as a result of the lessons, thus risking greater religious intolerance in society in the future; see Tong, ‘The Rationalization of Religion in Singapore’, 276–98.

⁵This unavoidably becomes problematic when a child has parents from two different races, such as a Chinese father and an Indian mother. For details on how families manage this dilemma see Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race.

⁶This section is adapted from an earlier essay, Chua, ‘Singapore: Multiracial Harmony as Public Good’, 101–7.

⁷Indeed, the perpetuation of such divisions is commonly cited, by detractors of multiculturalism everywhere, as a reason to be against multiculturalism as public policy.

⁸Aljunied, Colonialism, Violence and Muslims in Southeast Asia.

⁹Hussin, ‘Textual Construction of a Nation’, 401–30.

¹⁰For a detailed analysis of the struggles of the madrasahs to maintain their autonomy against government intervention, see Hussin, ‘School Effectiveness and Nation-building in Singapore’.

¹¹See Kadir, ‘Islam, State and Society’, 364–9.

¹²Suhaimi, ‘Feeling Like the Least Favorite Child’.

¹³As the late doyen of Singapore bilingual theatre, Kuo Pao Kun, asked: ‘Has any other majority population ever committed such an extraordinary act of voluntary uprooting, preferring to its own language (a major world language) one which its former colonizer forced upon it?’. Kuo Pao Kun, ‘Uprooted and Searching’. In Drama, Culture and Empowerment: The IDEA Dialogues, ed. John O‘Toole & Kate Donelan (Brisbane: IDEA Publications, 1999), 168.

¹⁴In addition to the Tang case, in another instance, four Malay primary school students were denied entry on the first day of school in 2002 when they turned up wearing the tudung head-dress; see ‘Three Girls to Wear Tudung to School Today’, The Straits Times, February 1, 2002.

¹⁵Mauzy and Milne, Singapore Politics under the People's Action Party, 134, 151.

¹⁶Supporters of multiculturalism in the West tend to have such a liberal conception in mind; see Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Multiculturalism’, 22–55.

¹⁷Ho, ‘Needy Students Get to Go on China Study Tours’.

¹⁸Oon, ‘PM: Don't Lose Bilingual Edge’.

¹⁹For a review of Jack Neo's movies, see Chua and Wei, ‘Cinematic Critique from the Margins’, 177–89.

²⁰For a critical analysis of the structural determination of the economic disadvantaged positions of Malays in Singapore, see Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma.