Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control - on Multiracialism and Malays in Singapore

Multiculturalism in Singapore: an instrument of social control (2003), by "Da Man" (Chua Beng Huat)

"In Singapore, the local Malay population is overwhelmingly descended from migrants from the region itself rather than indigenous to the small island that is Singapore; hence, the constitutional recognition of the Singapore Malay population as indigenous is more a regional reference than specific to the location of Singapore...

If one is Chinese, one is supposed to be a Confucianist; never mind that few, if any, Singapore-born Chinese under 35 or younger have ever read a Confucian text, and their knowledge of Confucianism is almost non-existent... By the logic of this racialisation, there is, ironically, no culturally defined 'Singaporean' way of life in Singapore. Hence, to claim a 'Singaporean' identity without racial boundaries, as liberal Singaporeans often do, is immediately to take a political position against the state...

The ideological success of this strategy is reflected in the ease with which Singaporeans readily describe the nation as multiracial... from the outside, the term multiracialism sits comfortably - disconcerting so - with both the Singaporean government and the people. There is an apparent absence of anxiety about being multiracial, about differences and potential conflicts that are presumed to be well policed and kept in check by legislation and by government agencies. On the other hand, there are constant worries about the 'disappearance' of these racially defined 'cultures' by the respective groups, not at each other's hands but through 'westernisation'. This sentiment is encouraged by the state itself...

Since independence, education for Malays, from primary to tertiary levels, was free... In the early 1990s, segments of the Chinese population complained that, given the visible emergence of a Malay middle class, it was inequitable that the latter's children got free tertiary education while students from poor Chinese families continued to pay fees. The government agreed, in principle... however, it pays the fees on behalf of the students... tertiary education [still] remains, in substance, free for the community as a whole. [Ed: I didn't know this]...

On every public housing estate, a location is reserved for construction of a mosque... Not so for the other major religions on the island... Indeed, many neighborhood ethnic Chinese Taoist temples have been demolished, their land compulsorily acquired by the state, with financial compensation that is insufficient to lease state land for rebuilding. Often, such temples had to merge in order to rebuild; in doing so, all sense of their previous existence as 'local' temples in specific locations, from whence their respective devotees were drawn, has been erased...

The accumulation of such issues does not, of course, sit well with the Malay population and has led to questioning whether the Malay MPs in the PAP government are the best representatives of the Malay community's interests. At its 2001 national conference, the Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) proposed the establishment of a 'collective leadership' of non-partisan Malay-Muslim organisations, an idea summarily dismissed by the government as potentially racially divisive. The AMP was further charged with 'straying' into politics...

These civilisational resources enable the government to claim that Singaporeans are the embodiment of 'Asian values', seen both as significant ingredients in the country's successful capitalist development and, as well, important 'cultural ballast' against the 'corruption' of western liberal individualism...

Racialisation strategically blocks out the everyday practices that are part and parcel of modern capitalism as not integral to the cultures of racialised Singaporeans. Capitalist cultural practices are viewed as 'necessities'... this is a government that ideologically denies the significance of capitalism as culture and its manifest material effects, while aggressively encouraging it substantively in education and production...

Many employers of domestic workers would rather transfer the monthly head tax, in whole or in part, to the guest workers themselves, as the government bears no responsibility at all for the welfare of guest workers. However, such suggestions, among other calls by liberal Singaporeans for legislation to regularise the conditions of guest workers, have fallen on deaf ears, including those of the National Trades Union Congress...

Significantly, with the exception of the Thais, the national origins and ethnicites of guest workers are the same as those if the Singaporeans... Both the state and, often, their Singaporean racial counterparts treat them as 'outsider' - as 'others', as 'essentially' different... An exception for ethnic Chinese should be noted. Given geopolitical conditions, the government has made a fetish out of changing demographics and has decided that the Chinese population should constitute approximately three-quarters of the total population at all times...

That English is a 'neutral' language is, of course, an ideological illusion. Since Singapore was a British colony for 150 years, English was already a common language among the privileged local population who worked for the colonial administration... the ideological promotion of English as a 'neutral' language to all ethnic Asian children has suppressed this class dimension...

If the adoption of English minoritises non-English speaking Chinese, it has also simultaneously eliminated the privileges of Indians prevalent during colonial days... In the top ranks of the civil service and the professions... after independence, Indians were over-represented... However, once English-language education was available to all through the national education system, the over-representation of Indians in the civil service and professions disappeared...

One can examine any sphere of cultural endeavour, from theatre to television drama to everyday handling of items like food and clothes, and discover the encoding of the CMIO scheme...

'Harmony' is a public good that few can deny... the illiberality of a single-party-dominant state shows its administrative, repressive hand. In a relatively democratic space, harmony is, in principle, to be achieved by unhindered and undistorted public debates, discussions and negotiations of the differences and different perspectives among the different races. Along the way, the risks that these differences may lead to conflicts and disruptions have to be assumed and, hopefully, avoided by encouraging public confidence in the reasonableness of the negotiating parties...

The 'paternalistic/authoritarian' mode of governance is define by, amongst other features, a tendency to foreclose public discussion as a pre-emptive move against the possible disruption of public order... As the 'risk' of disrupting racial harmony inheres logically within every discussion of race relations and as no one can guarantee that disruption will not occur, the entire domain of 'race' is considered 'sensitive' and best not raised publicly. Public voicing of grievances within a discourse of race is quickly suppressed and the parties voicing the grievances publicly chastised - if not criminalised - on grounds of being 'racial chauvinists' disrupting racial harmony.

That there has been an absence of racial violence in Singapore since 1969 suggests that the 'danger' of riots might have been exaggerated by mythologising the past... The logic of deterrence continues to govern discourse on race in Singapore. 'Harmony' is used as the repressive device for pre-empting public debate and negotiation of issues that face all multiracial societies - racial discrimination in the job market, structural inequalities inherited from the past and the sentiments felt towards each other by the different groups - all issues that concretise multi-culturalism in practice in most places. The result is a 'racial harmony' that is minimalist, never going beyond visual familiarity and overtly recognisiable differences, one maintained by tolerance of difference without any substantive cultural exchange, deep understanding and even less cultural crossing of boundaries...

Singaporeans, both in government and [the poplation], are 'too confortable', even self-congratulatory, about Singapore as a multiracial and multicultural society. It is a comfort derived from an absence of knowledge and understanding... which are, at best, mutually tolerated. In contrast, the liberal democratic political space of Canada and Australia prevents the term 'multiculturalism' from settling into a fixed ideological space once and for all; instead, it continuously agitates old issues and throws up new ones for continous discussion and negotiation...

In Singapore, multiculturalism was adopted constitutionally at its founding... the result is a series of ad hoc decisions that discriminate against different racial groups at different social structural and political junctures and historical times, that lack ethical/political consistency and that are rationalised under a substantively empty notion of 'racial harmony'."


Just 2 points, since I'm tired after transcribing (the stupid PDF was scanned but not OCRed):

- Just because there are different racial outcomes does not mean there is racial discrimination. After all, the economy discriminates against the stupid, the lazy and the untalented.
- A shallow understanding and conception of multiculturalism does not necessarily imply that Singaporeans lack "substantive cultural exchange, deep understanding [and] cultural crossing of boundaries". They do, but that point has to be proved separately, eg The vocabulary and terms of the discourse of multiracialism being dictated by the Powers That Be