13 November 2015

Rethinking the haze and Indonesia


Tiny and rich Singapore flails comically when it comes to Indonesia and the haze. For all its claims to being a diplomatic giant on the world stage, Singapore fumed helplessly for the last 2 months as forests and peatland burned in Borneo and Sumatra.

It's a smog that gives Peking, Shanghai, and Hong Kong a run for their money. A smog that's more lo-fi, yet more poisonous. And according to both locals and expats, a smog that has more immediate effects on health. More importantly, Singapore's credibility as a vibrant cosmopolitan city and productive financial centre withers each day the haze lingers over its skyline.

07 October 2015

18 September 2015

Modelling the 2015 general election: numbers, outcomes... and theory?


Singaporeans voted on 11 September 2015 and returned the People's Action Party to power with a supermajority and a 9.9% swing in its favour. This was despite 5 years of poor performance by the PAP, where policy and governance failures erupted in the public eye. We at Illusio conduct a postmortem to uncover, from the numbers, if what went wrong for the opposition can be best explained from the voting model we have championed.

16 September 2015

Modelling the 2015 Singapore general election: theory and outcomes


Singaporeans voted on 11 September 2015 and returned the People's Action Party to government with a supermajority and a 9.9% national swing in its favour. This was despite 5 years of poor performance by the PAP, where policy and governance failures erupted in the public eye. We at Illusio conduct a postmortem to uncover, from first principles, what broadly went wrong for the opposition.

10 September 2015

Modelling the 2015 Singapore general elections V: Rational voter choices


We at Illusio, having duly considered the facts and circumstances laid before us in the past 5 years and during the rally season, do hereby endorse for the 2015 Singapore general elections...


09 September 2015

Modelling the 2015 Singapore General Elections IV: The main opposition

I introduced last week a voting model based on the idea of a dominant party system. Here at the end of the rally season, I've decided to compare the election strategies and positioning of really existing major opposition parties in Singapore against the theoretical model. I also explain why SDP is the comeback kid, why WP can't seem to get out of the kenna hantam mode, and why SingFirst might just surprise everyone in 2 days.

Let's now turn to how the rest of Singapore's opposition parties have waged their campaigns and compare their actual strategies to the predictions in our theoretical model, which I reproduce again here for your convenience.


Singapore Democratic Party, Chee Soon Juan, the Comeback Kid

We previously wrote that the SDP "demonstrates clearly the divergent strategy. It is as liberal as the PAP is centrist or conservative. On the policy front, it challenges most of the PAP's policies". We were right, and the SG2015 Electionaire proves it.

Modelling the 2015 Singapore general elections III: The PAP campaign


As expected, the People's Action Party's campaign consisted of silly references to SG50, the Legacy of the party, and playing the LKY card as though every reverent mention of his name could resurrect the man.

And then, there was Minilee's lunchtime rally speech, quoting Papalee's House of Cards speech word for word.



It just doesn't work.

03 September 2015

Modelling the 2015 Singapore general elections II

Despite expectations, the PAP hasn't run its LKY nostalgia campaign yet.
But did you know the PAP has no viable campaign to run in 2015?

02 September 2015

Nomination day observations

PAP supporters arriving at a nomination centre via chartered bus
Picture courtesy of The Online Citizen


Up close and personal, the proceedings of Nomination Day are no less theatrical and farcical than the edited version you watch on television: all sound and fury, with candidates and their supporters behaving as though they were at a pro-wrestling event.

31 August 2015

Modelling the 2015 Singapore general election I

How much of a swing in the electorate would the opposition need
to dethrone the PAP in 2015?

In a very accessible article, Jeraldine Phneah writes about the advantages the People's Action Party has over the opposition in Singapore. Note that several of the advantages are institutional and arise from the PAP's position as the dominant party in Singapore politics.

In PolSci speak, Singapore belongs to a subset of democracies that are called dominant party states: these are countries whose political landscape are overwhelmingly dominated by a single ruling party, often for decades. As it turns out, a phenomenon like the PAP is not that unique to history or politics. And as it turns out, phenomena like the PAP do come and go.

24 August 2015

Living with Myths X: Singaporean words and images

Being a review of the final in a long, year-long series of seminars

Singapore's Literary Myths

Is a national literature a reflection of national ideology?
Is the development of a national literature a reflection of competing national ideologies?
Who gets a say?
Which question did Gwee Li Sui ask, and answer?


18 August 2015

PAP upgrades its own Upgrading Carrot

 
Uniquely Singapore inception

Minilee is expected to dissolve parliament some time after the NDRS. Nevertheless, campaign season has already begun: the opposition has resolved its coalition talks to great success, and all parties have begun unveiling their candidates.

Trust the PAP to trot out more upgrading carrots. They've already begun in Sembawang, Tanjong Pagar, Jalan Besar, and Bishan-Toa Payoh. Presumably, some MPs did not got the party memo, which upgrades the HDB upgrading carrot into the GRC master plan carrot (see media reports on Tanjong Pagar and Jalan Besar).


27 July 2015

Living with Myths IX: Cultural medallions, poverty, histories

Being a review of the 9th in a year-long series of seminars


Poor people don't like oats either

Teo You Yenn is a sociologist who studies Singapore's social welfare ecosystem. What happens after the cabinet fixes a policy stand on social welfare? How does policy get enacted by ministries, semi-government bodies, and social organisation? What does social welfare look like when it is delivered to the poor?

18 May 2015

Living with myths: Singapore pastoral


Taiwan Review has published a few excerpts from Loh Kah Seng's new book, Squatters into Citizens. Followers of the Living with Myths reviews on this blog may remember the good doctor had based his presentation in Living with Myths VI on his new book.

Back then, we noted that sociologist Chua Beng Huat (an outspoken critic of the establishment for the past 30 years) took Loh to task for mythologising life in Singapore's rural kampungs and squatter settlements as ideal, free, and nobleand levelled the charge of academic irresponsibility at Loh.

Because Loh had presented a new myth: the Singapore pastoral.

Life by the River by Liu Kang

03 May 2015

The Apothesosis of Lee Kuan Yew VI

From Republic of Singapore to Republic of Nanyang

In the midst of the political purges of Singapore’s early post-independence years, the PAP government ditched its race-blind Singaporean Singapore ideals, subverted its own image of multiculturalism, appropriated key social and cultural policies of the Chinese cultural elites and absorbed them into the civil service as a form of political accommodation. This resulted in the sinification (whether intended or not) of Singapore by 1980. The mandarins and the political leaders of Singapore would then embark on even more ambitious schemes that would put the nation on the map as a Third China.

"Singapore is a Chinese country what", say just about every Chinese immigrant here

02 May 2015

The Apotheosis of Lee Kuan Yew V

To boldly go...

It is possible to typify the leadership of early Singapore and the PAP as a triumvirate consisting of Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, and S Rajaratnam. The first was a political man of action who wielded charisma, power, and authority to get people to comply with the national plan. The second was the technocrat who made sure every aspect of the plan was sound. The third was the ideologue, the voice of wisdom put a human touch to the plan.

Star Trek's holy trinity
In this way, the PAP early leadership serves the same archetypical functions that J Michael Straczynski sees Kirk, Spock, and Bones fulfilling in the Star Trek narrative: the Warrior, the Priest, the Doctor.


06 April 2015

Living with Myths VIII: Danger and Development

Being a review of the 8th in a year-long series of seminars

Openness and reform under the shadow of danger



An authoritarian regime often resorts to a national narrative that begins with an existential threat to the State and ends with a taboo on certain discourses. Don't tempt fate by talking about race and religion in Singapore; these topics are so sensitive, any discussion will bring down our truly great but simultaneously fragile state.

Ian Chong turns his gaze away from Singapore, where this rhetoric hasn't yet been laughed out of society, to 1987 where authoritarian regimes in Taiwan and Korea ended several long-held taboos to free up political discourse and democratic participation. It is worth noting these measures did not lead to riots in the streets or the fall of South Korea or Taiwan, or even the ruling parties governing them. Roh Tae-woo succeeded Chun, while Chiang Ching-kuo's anointed successor, Lee Teng-hui, became president.

Chong argues what had changed was a recognition at the top that society had outpaced the state's ability to regulate its politics. Society had become so complex with multitudinous identities and loyalties, that anyone at any one time could be in a minority—and that the best path forward was to let people negotiate, compromise, and negotiate their rights, recognition, roles and responsibility in a more democratic mechanism.

Chong did not provide economic and social indicators comparing the trajectories of Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan post-1987. The trade-off might actually have paid off handsomely.

Lucius Sulla seized dictatorial powers, reformed the Roman constitution
then stepped down voluntarily.

Rethinking racial categories

Laavanya Kathiravelu recycles the keynote presentation she gave at the Singapore Heritage Society's Anatomy of a Riot seminar in September 2014. Which is resembles nothing like the writeup for Living With Myths VIII. But we'll deal with the presentation she gave, not the presentation she promised.

From her anthropological research on migrant labourers in Singapore, Kathiravelu magically takes aim at the nation-state's "CMIO model", even though their identities as migrant labourers here are shaped by both ethnicity and class. She shows powerpoint slides of recent controversies in ethnic relations (the Little India riot, STOMP complaints, etc) and presumes they are self-explanatory, and embody all that is wrong with the CMIO model, which somehow is the root of everyday racism in Singapore.

Yet listening to her speak, it is unclear if she even knows whether it is the act of classification, the inadequate description of finer, more sophisticated ethnic identities, or the very fact that master identities in Singapore are ethnically based that is her bugbear aside from her conviction that racism is bad; and it's all CMIO's fault.

Even the academic audience had fun with her unpresentation at the Q&A, where several postgraduate researchers suggested other readings of recent controversies, including the class divide, the growing disconnect between global migration and local identity, or even neocolonialism. Kathiravelu was unable to respond in a meaningful way, ironically privileging race discourse instead of rethinking it. Those interested in actually knowing about what the CMIO model really means and why it's a Bad Thing and inadequate for a modern Singapore may consult Nirmala PuruShotam's Negotiating Language, Constructing Race.

Innovation: smart nation, technology, and governance in Singapore

Arthur Chia's presentation is commendable; it is a close reading of state rhetoric from the past 3 decades on technology and innovation. He proves that it's never been about technology or innovation per se, but about attempts to define and demarcate Singapore's place in a globalising economy using the preferred frames of reference of its managerial elites on one hand, and on the other, to buttress the ruling party's technocratic, meritocratic virtues and hence right to rule.

Chia's presentation was so circumscribed to proving this point, we almost suspect the paper he's currently researching and writing on this topic has far more to say, such as correlating each attempt at reinventing technocratic discourse to earlier failed attempts at climbing the tech/innovation/productivity ladder. We wish him best of luck, and hopefully a return to the Living with Myths seminar before the end of the series.

30 March 2015

The Apotheosis of Lee Kuan Yew IV

Lee Kuan Yew, the political realist and chameleon

The pre-merger consensus in Singapore in the post-war decades was for a pan-Malayan identity. Post-merger, Lee Kuan Yew the populist democrat honoured the desires of Singapore's populace and fought the battle for a Malaysian Malaysia and lost.

Therein lies a historical problem that is tangential to our study of (if you haven't guessed by part 3) Singapore's evolving language/bilingualism/multiculturalism policy: Why did the sage and political genius of Singapore fail to recognise the MCA-UMNO political contract—the foundation of the Federation of Malaya and hence the Federation of Malaysia—was not for a Malayan Malaya, that a Malaysian Malaysia was not what the populace in the peninsula wanted, and why did he fail to politically outwit and outmanoeuvre the ruling coalition?

As it so happened, Singapore was independent—booted out or amicably divorced, depending on Lee's initial, long-term narrative or his new retelling on Goh Keng Swee's funeral. Whereupon Lee insisted on a Singaporean Singapore but somewhere along the years, became a Sinicised Singapore.

Multiculturalism in Singapore before sinification
If the Chinese elites had ultimately won the war for the soul of Singapore despite losing the battle for its political compass, it was a victory that was borne out of a significant defeat and thus could not be acknowledged as a victory. We will prove that the brand of Sinification pushed by the elites has been reactionary, essentialist, and ultimately radical, then argue further that with the passage of time, changing demographics and shifting geopolitical realities have overwritten the initial appeal of Sinification to Singapore’s Chinese population, alienating this elite and its cultural programme from not just Chinese Singaporeans but Singaporeans at large.

Take for example the idea that a Chinese Singaporean who does not speak and write fluent Mandarin is somehow un-Chinese and not worthy of respect. In the years 1959—1965, this axiomatic statement and the assumptions it makes linking language, culture, and ethnicity (in effect, the assumptions underpinning modern ‘bilingualism’ in Singapore) would not have made sense.

Pre-merger bilingualism as promoted by the PAP consisted of Malay (the national language then and still today) plus either Tamil, Mandarin, or English, depending solely on one’s medium of education. The ‘second language’ one spoke did not have any bearing on one’s ethnic identity, and was not expected to.

Parangolés, Helio Oiticica
In the late 1960s, Brasil embarked on an experiment of cultural fusion and creation
called Tropicalismo




Post-independence, Singapore multiculturalism was, under ministers Lee Koon Choy and S Rajaratnam, a matter of creating a fusion culture to create a distinctive Singaporean identity. The present-day understanding that bilingualism ‘preserves cultures’ and ties one’s identity to a ‘mother tongue’ would have been alien, if not an affront to the vision of multiculturalism and bilingualism agreed upon in the early days of Singapore. In the view of S Rajaratnam, a multicultural Singapore could not exist as a Singapore populated by hyphenated Singaporeans. A Singaporean identity could only arise out of the deliberate distancing of Singaporeans from their ‘ancestral’, ‘ethnic’ loyalties and identifications.
As a Singaporean I have no difficulty, in a single lifetime, forgetting in turn that I was a Ceylon Tamil and Sri Lankan though I was born there. I had no difficulty forgetting that I was a British subject, or the formative years as a Malayan and where most of my kith and kin are... Being a Singaporean is not a matter of ancestry. It is conviction and choice... Being Singaporean means forgetting all that stands in the way of one’s Singaporean commitment, but without in any way diminishing one’s curiosity about the triumphs and failures of one’s distant ancestors.
Witness how this radically opposite this hews from the PAP's latter-day concept of multiculturalism. It has been revisioned as an initiative of the elite, to build mini-sages and "bi-cultural elites" to trade, to enter a regressive, if profitable transaction with the now ever-present, pressingly relevant land of ancestry. It is a multiculturalism where the state prescribes and polices race and cultural identity, a multiculturalism completely at odds with Rajaratnam's race-blind Singaporean Singapore.

23 March 2015

The Apotheosis of Lee Kuan Yew

The Apotheosis of Washington, 1865
"Even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up."
-- Lee Kuan Yew, 1988 NDRS

As the authority and competence of the People's Action Party wanes, historians are starting to point out that Singapore has no proper history, only a hagiography.

While the authoritarian leader eschewed a personality cult, it did not stop generations of Singaporeans speaking of him in hushed, deferential, even reverential tones. Neither did it stop him from making a nation in his image, from adopting the rhetoric of the enlightened despot. Leaders like him do not pass on; they apotheosize.

Lee Kuan Yew is dead. We commemorate his passing not by declaring his divinity and author of all that is good in Singapore, nor by painting him as a folk-devil responsible for all the woes of Singapore. We are guided here by a firm sense of proportion, empiricism, and grounded theory that puts the man in his proper place.

The Apotheosis of Lee Kuan Yew III

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's populist leader

What can a politician do to win the votes of a demographic whose popular leaders were jailed, exiled, and taken out of the political process? We argue that as the purges against Singapore’s Chinese political elites continued, the PAP had to make an increasing number of cultural and social concessions to Singapore’s Chinese—in effect, to valourise “Chineseness”—in order to maintain their electoral competitiveness.

National Language Class, by Chua Mia Tee
In their push towards the merger in the post-war decades, Singapore’s Chinese elites on both the left and right had advocated a pan-Malayan identity for the future state of Malaysia. As the price for Singapore’s admission into an independent Malaya, they would go so far as to adopt Malay as a lingua franca.[1] Regardless of political affiliation, the political narrative of the Chinese population up to 1963 had been that Singapore and Malaya were “flesh and bone” which were destined for a reunion, that the Chinese people of Malaya would lead the way to forge a national identity that was not Chinese, not Malay, not communitarian but “Malayan”.[2]

Despite its growing unpopularity and near collapse in the initial years of self-government, the PAP outmanoeuvred its main political rival, the more popular Barisan Sosialis, by championing the merger—a pet issue of the Chinese community and its leaders. While the merger project would prove to be a failure, it was easy for the PAP to continue down this path in order to remain electable as the bearer of Chinese culture and politics in an independent and democratic Singapore, especially when its ‘anti-communist’ purges against the Chinese elites (who had been building an alternative power base in Singapore’s schools, newspapers, and trade unions) intensified.

This was achieved through the PAP government’s selective appropriation of the cultural and social agendas of the defeated Chinese political elite to fashion a “Chinese” identity that was acceptable to the PAP’s nation-building project, and the absorption of the Chinese cultural elite into the civil service and the surrender of ‘soft policy’ areas to this group.[3]

Relatively early, the PAP government discarded its idealist socialist rhetoric and fashioned Singapore’s national narrative in terms that would appeal to its Chinese elites. Singapore’s war on “yellow culture” took its cues from Mao’s appropriation of national self-strengthening initiatives to combat the moral decrepitude and corrupting influences of “Western” culture, and intensified in the 1970s to become a crusade against long hair, hippies, rock music, and drug culture. By the 1980s, a barely disguised neo-Confucian “Asian Values” was touted as the root of Singapore’s exceptionalism. And by the mid 1990s, Singapore made its play on the world stage as a “Third China”, laying claim as the heir of authentic Chinese culture and identity by recreating the Tang Dynasty as a theme park in Singapore for the benefit of Singaporeans and an outside world yet to access the real China.

A rare, if not only non-Sinocentric staging of Kuo Pao Kun's Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Education became the employers of last resort for graduates from Singapore’s only Chinese-language university[4]. The brazen purges and undisguised proscription of the Chinese political elites (largely Nanyang graduates as well) had deterred the private sector from employing Nanyang’s best and brightest, while the English-educated civil service saw them as no less suspicious than the alleged pro-communist Chinese political elites whom they were purging.

Barred from contesting the economic future or any substantial policy direction of Singapore from within the system, it is hence in the “soft” ministries of culture and education that Nanyang’s graduates were allowed to refashion themselves as Singapore’s Chinese cultural elite, protecting Chinese culture and values, subject to what the PAP government felt was necessary to its nation-building project.

In the crucial years of 1969 to 1989, the mandarins at the Ministry of Education had instituted or enacted policies that would shape an essentialist Chinese identity in Singapore: the wholesale adoption of the PRC’s Chinese orthography reforms, the bilingual policy, the intensification of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, and the promotion of tough standards for Mandarin education. Far from being seen as radical, most of these moves would have been comfortingly familiar to Singapore’s Chinese elites—who had looked to China as a harbinger of the modern and kept abreast with innovations in politics, culture, and education—and signalled the commitment of the PAP government to progressive and modernising ideas that were in vogue in China[5] and hence in vogue with Singapore’s Chinese elites.

From this, it can be argued that through the process of democratic politics and political accommodation, Singapore’s Chinese elites have won the battle for Singapore despite their political defeat, just like how the South had in fact won America despite losing the Civil War. As with the American case, the dominance by Singapore’s Chinese cultural elite goes unrecognised by that same elite, and cannot be spoken of or acknowledged. It is a victory shrouded in the myth of defeat, fought in a neverending war, by oppressive victors who forever see themselves as oppressed.

The literary output of one Wong Meng Voon, former civil servant, Cultural Medallion winner, and literary grandee, illustrates this point. An anthology of Wong’s short stories[6] invariably paint a caricature of English educated Chinese Singaporeans as race traitors who have lost their essential Chineseness and in so doing become less than human, and suffer, shamed, or are otherwise punished for it. The tentative advances of a Singaporean Chinese student in the States is rebuffed because the object of his affections, a Shiksa Goddess, is turned off by his poor command for Mandarin.[7] An English-educated civil servant feels shame when he miswrites his own name in Mandarin in a calligraphic piece for visiting Chinese officials.[8] A graduating class holds a vote to select a suitable country for a cultural tour; the sole student to vote for China is the sole non-Chinese student of the class.[9] Two Singaporeans who spurn China for New Zealand for a tour discover that their souvenirs are all made in China.[10] The haughty king of the monkeys demands his entire race undergo blood transfusion to develop superior, snowy furs; the entire race dies of leukaemia.[11]

Such essentialist notions and visions of a perpetually threatened Chineseness and Chinese identity would be alien and unrecognisable in the literature of Malaysian Chinese authors, whose literary output on Chineseness is centred on hybridity, self-refashioning, and ultimately nativist. These short stories from Wong and his literary colleagues cannot exist and would not be elevated as a dominant discourse if not for the cultural and ideological groundwork laid out by his fellow cultural elites at the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture.

1Chua Mia Tee’s 1959 painting, “National Language Class”, is typical of the willingness of Singapore’s Chinese elites to create a popular discourse for and about an imaginary, future Malayan/Malaysian identity on the island, which was not shared by the Chinese in the Federated Malay States.
2PJ Thum, “Flesh and Bone Reunited as One Body” in Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, Volume 5, 2011-12.
3Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli, 2008. The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and its pasts. I am indebted to the authors’ account of how under specific policies and initiatives, Singapore acquired its very specific “Chinese” identity in the post-independence years. While the authors narrate the roll-out of Singapore’s “Sinification” cultural policies as a product of an ideological process of negotiating with historical identities, this essay argues for a materialist critique that exposes the social, political, and most importantly, institutional roots of this negotiation process.
4Ibid. The founder of Nanyang University, the philanthropist and entrepreneur Tan Lark Sye who had lobbied for Singapore’s Chinese population to be granted citizenship, was accused by the People’s Action Party government of “supporting communist activists” and had his citizenship revoked in 1963.
5Preliminary studies for orthography reform had in fact been kickstarted under the KMT government in the 1930s as a means to increase literacy. It was only the KMT’s loss of mainland China and the CCP’s championing of the simplified script that put all orthography reforms in Taiwan on permanent hold.
6Wong Meng Voon, 2012. Under the Bed, Confusion Singapore: Epigram Books
7Ibid. “The Foreign Girl”.
8Ibid. “Michael Yang”
9Ibid. “Leisure Tour”
10Ibid. “Fine Print”

11Ibid. “Transfusion”

The Apotheosis of Lee Kuan Yew II

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's unsung democrat

Singapore's first prime minister has been called a dictator, not least by William Safire and other young, educated Singaporeans over the decades. Lee was not ashamed of the term; the statesman revelled in the patrimonial image of a strongman who did what was necessary for the nation.

Recently, the declassification of the British colonial archives has resurrected, or given credibility to an old charge against Lee: a politico whose undemocratic, underhanded, and cynical plottings leading to the Merger have poisoned the foundation of Singapore.

The undeclared civil war of Singapore between the alleged communists and the PAP (or as Dr Thum Pin Tjin might say, between the Chinese socialist left and the PAP's non-communist socialists) has left enduring scars on Singapore's political landscape, so much so that PM Lee Hsien Loong recently argued that Singapore could not afford to be divided along the red state, blue state lines of the US.

Political polarisation or political accommodation?


The younger Lee’s conceptualisation of America’s Red State, Blue State problem is not unorthodox; the discovery and subsequent branding of this phenomenon occurred in 2000 to describe what looked to be a state-level ‘sticky’ voting preference in the US presidential elections. Even though the stickiness dissolves and a “Purple America” emerges once the polling data is refined on county and district level, the longevity and appeal of the Red State/Blue State discourse can be explained as a conceptual extension of earlier political realities, namely the “Solid South” of the Democratic Party and “Southern Strategy” of the Republican Party.

These political phenomena should be understood as the legacy of the American Civil War. Following the complete military and political defeat of the Confederate States (which had half the population of the Union), Reconstruction was initially proposed to disenfranchise the South[1] while reunifying the nation. If successive Republican presidents had stuck to the grand plan, the ironically-named Reconstruction project would have turned the United States of America into a nation where a quarter of the population would live and work in federally-administered or even military dictatorships.

Despite these plans, the victors of the civil war eventually accommodated the defeated South to preserve the legitimacy of their victory in a free, open, and democratic America—with all the elections that this entails. It is the necessary cultural concessions, the valourisation of the South and its agrarian values and religiosity[2] that when accreted over close to two centuries, looks like a Red State, Blue State “divide”.

In Singapore, the leftist purges conducted by the People’s Action Party from 1959 to the late 1970s were no less devastating and widespread. Pre-dawn arrests by the secret police, decades of detention without trial, televised confessions and recantations ensured the wholesale removal of several generations of political elites from the Chinese community.

Far from being the arrogant, bullying, conceited, dictatorial, egotistical folk-devil of popular imagination, Lee did not suspend democracy, impose martial law, and transform Singapore into a dictatorship. Unlike Latin America, Singaporeans were not kidnapped by paramilitaries and disappeared forever. Unlike Taiwan's White Terror, Singaporeans were not executed for treason. Lee's methods, however infamous, were not internationally infamous, and kept Singapore's place within the British Commonwealth.

Elections went on as normal, and that meant the PAP had to pay a heavy price to ensure its continued successes at the electoral box. Like Lincoln’s successors, the PAP had no choice upon winning its war against the Chinese political elites on the left but to politically accommodate Chinese voters in Singapore, then numbering over 70% of its population. As the purges against Singapore’s Chinese political elites continued, the PAP had to make an increasing number of cultural and social concessions to Singapore’s Chinese—in effect, to valourise “Chineseness”—in order to maintain their electoral competitiveness.
 
1The Radical Republicans had demanded a loyalty oath that would have disbarred the majority of state electorates and their representatives, while the moderate Lincoln would have accepted a 10% electorate plan that would render the ‘new’ Southern states undemocratic minority-run pro-Republican regimes. Under Johnson, the South was broken into 5 military districts.


2In popular narratives, every winning presidential campaign needs a Southern candidate, the metonym for America is not New York or DC but small town America (which is why Superman, defender of the American Way, is a farmboy), The Hunger Games is an allegory for the tyranny of Reconstruction, Gone with the Wind is the highest grossing film adjusted for inflation, etc.

18 February 2015

Living with Myths VII: Discipline and proscribe

Being a review of the 7th in a year-long series of seminars
 
From HBO's ROME: Julius Caesar surveys a map of the city
Maps and narratives are the product of power/knowledge relations
through discipline of the self and proscription of the body politic

Narratives exist in an "always already" tense; they retroactively over-determine and limit the sum total of competing possibilities and strategies of reading history. Yet without a narrative, there is no subject to be constructed, to be made known, and ultimately deconstructed...

The myth of Singaporeanness: values and identity in Singapore education

Taking the audience through the succession of "moral education", "好公民" (literally: good citizens), "civics", "religious knowledge", and "national education", subjects taught in schools in Singapore, Christine Han's presentation is a rudimentary introduction to the academic critique of citizenship education. That is, the ideas of citizenship and civic-mindedness are the products of discursive formations within the institutions of state-directed education. To simplify even further: social engineering creates the next generation of Singaporeans who believe in a unique and exceptional Singaporean nation and Singaporeanness, and know how to conduct themselves as decent Singaporeans.

Han identifies rigid morality, resorts to prescriptive teaching, and cherrypicking of history as some of the major weaknesses of Singapore's model of citizenship education. Unfortunately without a proper introduction to just what citizenship education is about, or a cross comparison with other countries, it is impossible to say conclusive what Singapore is doing wrong, even if it's easy to say what's so annoying about Singapore's citizenship education efforts.

We would have recommended Yeow-tong Chia, who has actually written several comparative studies on citizenship education, to take this presentation.

Political lawyers: The development and clampdown of the Law Society in the 80s

Teo Soh Lung limits her narrative to the year of 1986, between the election of Francis Seow as Law Society president to Parliament's amendment of the Legal Profession Act to remove the statutory duty of the Law Society to publicly comment on legislation, white papers, and bills.

The tenor of her presentation centres on the dissatisfaction of young lawyers over the lack of open and transparent consultation between the legislative body and the bar association. Given their interpretation of its "statutory duty" and the supermajority of the People's Action Party in government, it appeared that laws were bulldozed through parliament without due consultation with lawyers and legal experts.

The fury of Papalee and his perception of an activist, political Law Society is understandable considering what is known of his philosophy of government. Left unsaid is the fact that the legal profession everywhere else has access to legislators, whether mandated through the charters of bar associations or as a result of activist activity from the lobbying arms of law firms, precisely because of lawyers are experts at legislation and the legislative process.

The banning of a film

Chua Beng-huat offered a sociological analysis of the banning of Tan Pin Pin's To Singapore With Love. Chua posits that the government's response and rhetoric to Tan's film hardened and became more extreme over time (culminating in Minilee's declaration that it was an insult to the people who lost their lives in the struggle against Communism) only because there anti-Communism (i.e. "Socialism that works") is the founding narrative of Singapore, and that the PAP has failed to develop a popular successor ideology to keep itself relevant. Without a new ideology modern Singaporeans can believe in (witness the quick succession of citizenship education models in Singapore!), the PAP is forced to keep alive antiquated enemies, to continue to define itself in oppositional terms to long-defeated enemies.

Chua suggests that the ban is self-defeating and yet inevitable; it jibes with the PR/makeover campaign the PAP has embarked on after losing Aljunied GRC, but yet is the logical endpoint of holding on to an outdated ideology.