‘Chinese privilege’ as shortcut in Singapore: a rejoinder
"We disagree with Humairah Zainal and Walid Jumblatt Abdullah that Chinese privilege exists in Singapore politics and that it is perpetuated by the political hegemony of the long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). Consequentially, we disagree that ‘Chinese privilege’ is thus a useful concept for understanding politics in Singapore. Our rejoinder argues that ‘Chinese privilege’ is under-specified and decontextualized by the authors, used uncritically as a shortcut for the consequences of the long-ruling party’s political hegemony for ethnic relations, and is therefore a polarizing distraction to the critical analysis required to advance anti-racism discourse and understanding in Singapore. We show that the authors have mistook incumbent political privilege for Chinese privilege. We argue that ethnic majority and minority Members of Parliament from both governing and opposition parties have had to simultaneously serve as community leaders and transcend ethnic affiliations to represent national interests...
Humairah and Walid take it for granted that ‘Chinese privilege’ exists solely because there is a Chinese majority. This assumption empties the concept of any local and historical nuances such as the deep intertwining of language, education, and ethnicity. Conscientious students of politics in Singapore would know that the term cannot apply to the Chinese-educated who saw their Chinese-medium schools disappear from the landscape and replaced by English-medium schools in the early years of the country’s industrialisation. The same groups also suffered the loss of employment opportunities when English-medium education was preferred over Chinese-medium education. What about the concerns over the loss of Chinese dialects and the alienation of the older generations in the state’s drive to promote Mandarin as lingua franca of the Chinese population? Would the authors then argue that ‘Chinese privilege’ was enjoyed only by English-educated Chinese and not Chinese-educated Chinese, or only by Mandarin- speaking Chinese and not dialect-speaking Chinese? Their vaguely defined concept is akin to a poorly polished lens that fails to pick up important cultural nuances.
The fact of the matter is that, in addition to race, identity politics comprises language, ethnicity, and class, all of which have deep historical specificity in postcolonial Singapore. This fact is obscured by the authors’ simplistic application of the concept to the local. The treatment given by Humairah and Walid to the phrase ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese privilege’ reduces a complex ethnicity into a one-dimensional racial identity. Their homogenisation of ‘Chinese’ is arguably what the postcolonial state was trying to do with its education and cultural policies which targeted the diverse Chinese-educated and dialect- speaking groups that make up the Chinese population in Singapore. On the other hand, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have studied and highlighted the complexities of being Chinese and becoming Singaporean, as befitting a diverse diasporic group struggling for political accommodation in the making of a multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multicultural nation-state. It would be very relevant and interesting for an article to study the interaction between the ruling party’s political hegemony and the complexities of Chinese-ness for a journal such as Asian Ethnicity. However, the concept of ‘Chinese privilege’, because of its straight-jacketed application to a complex community with a multiplicity of class, linguistic, and educational fissures, short-circuits this engagement and causes Humairah and Walid to neglect this crucial body of local scholarship.
Secondly, the authors make no distinction between ‘Chinese privilege’ and the advantages of political incumbency. Their lack of distinction blurs the conceptual contours of ‘Chinese privilege’ allowing the concept to be anything for anyone...
The bar for ‘Chinese privilege’ seems to be set rather low. Humairah and Walid argue that minority Malay or Indian parliamentarians feel the consequences of ‘Chinese privilege’ because they are expected to ‘become de facto leaders of their communities’ while ‘simultaneously expected to transcend those ethnic identifications.’ Chinese MPs, on the other hand, according to the authors, enjoy ‘Chinese privilege’ because they do not face this dilemma. Such arguments ignore the complexity of contemporary identity politics and flies against the face of evidence. Ethnic Chinese MPs too have to walk the fine line between ‘community’ and ‘national’ interests. The rise of China as an economic and geopolitical power over the last two decades has placed pressure on Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, not least Singapore. Many older and more conservative Chinese Singaporeans might feel cultu- rally connected to China and thus instinctively supportive of Beijing’s interests, while others are cognisant that such support may be at odds with their country’s interest. So too ethnic Chinese MPs, whether of the PAP or opposition variety, have to constantly balance the strong support that their constituencies might have for China with the need to advance national interests which might, from time to time, contradict Beijing’s interests. In short, the authors’ claim that ‘minority MPs are expected to go beyond ethnicity, and at times, minimize their ethnic affiliations’ should be extended to ethnic Chinese MPs too. The point here is that toggling between the interests of one’s ethnic community and those of the nation is not unique to ethnic minority MPs, and is certainly a low bar for a demonstration of ‘Chinese privilege’.
The example of the longest-serving opposition MP, Low Thia Khiang, who served from 1991 to 2020 and was WP’s leader, is instructive in this regard. He was driven to politics by the injustice of the closure of the region’s only Chinese-medium university, Nanyang University, his alma mater, by the PAP government and the discrimination faced by its Chinese-educated graduates. He won his seat amidst the PAP parliamentary monopoly in a constituency composed of tight-knit Teochew-speaking communities, with which he formed close personal relationships by speaking the dialect and assiduously attending community events such as Chinese religious and festive celebrations and funeral wakes. He was initially deemed a parochial MP representing ethnic Chinese interests. He was laughed at by the English- educated elites of the PAP for his halting command of the English language, but eventually won their grudging respect by learning to debate with them in English in a principled manner. In recent years, he also won the respect of the government leadership for calling on Singapore to carve its own multicultural Chinese identity in the context of China’s rising assertiveness in the region...
The authors misdiagnose PAP privilege for ‘Chinese privilege’... the authors make no clear attempt to demonstrate how the GRC (which guarantees minority presence in parliament) or the Reserved Presidency (which guarantees a minority president at regular intervals) perpetuate ‘Chinese privilege’ or ‘Chinese hegemony’. They fail to explain why the purportedly ‘Chinese’ ruling elite would seek to provide for more minority representation when it would be far easier to leave elections results in the hands of the Chinese voting majority. In fact, the PAP leaders acknowledged that they were expending their political capital by championing the Reserved Presidency despite public opposition because they believed this would firm up the multiracial character of the state. In other words, if political hegemony sustains ‘Chinese privilege’ as the authors claim, why would the PAP elite seek to implement mechanisms that ensure minority presence to their political cost? The more accurate explanation for GRCs and the Reserved Presidency is that they better serve PAP privilege, making it much harder for opposition politicians and anti-establishment figures to gain access to Parliament and the Presidency...
It is necessary to have conceptually clear and intellectually rigorous commentaries which seek to investigate race and race relations in Singapore. The easy borrowing of popular phrases and labels just will not do. Like Miriyam Aouragh, we think the concept of ‘white privilege’ has been increasingly exported out of the historical context of the US and deployed as a shortcut taking over the analysis of racism that is detrimental to trans- national and trans-ethnic anti-racism movements and scholarship. ‘Chinese privilege’ has appeared as an uncritically imported shortcut in Singapore in recent years, with little evidence to prove its existence other than the prescribed racial identities of those whose actions and articulations are being interpreted.
The result is that ‘Chinese privilege’ has become a pleasurable act of Foucauldian confession by some well-intentioned Singaporeans to reinforce their feelings of goodness and purity while avoiding genuine anti-racism actions, as Claire Lockard has written of ‘white privilege’ in the US. The danger then is a performative discourse by scholars and such Singaporeans alike, full of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing."
