Symposium on The History of Overseas Chinese in Singapore

good morning everyone on behalf of the chinese studies council here at yale us college i'd like to welcome you to our symposium on the history of overseas chinese in singapore let me first start with the obligatory reminder for everyone in the live audience to ensure that your cell phones are either turned off or muted today's event is a momentous one for us here at the college in previous years the chinese studies council has organized many events focused on both chinese history literature and philosophy as well as on modern day chinese politics economics and china's role in today's geopolitical world as an emerging superpower today however is the first time we've held an event focusing on the history of the chinese and chinese cultural influence right here in singapore thereby examining one of the major ethnic and cultural groups that have helped make singapore what it is today and it is an event i think that is long overdue to that end we've managed to assemble an exciting lineup of the foremost experts on this subject from across a number of institutions here in singapore and thanks to each of their gracious acceptance of our invitation to speak today i'm confident that all of you are in store for what will prove to be a fascinating and memorable day of stimulating discussion today's event as with all our events would not be possible if not for the generous support of the tanjin tuan foundation which provides the funding for all the activities of our chinese culture and civilization program here at yale us and which is is of course uh one of singapore's leading foundations whose mission it is to provide for the achievement of measurable and sustainable outcomes in such areas education and community development not only here in singapore but throughout all of southeast asia and i must add here that the foundation's founder tan sri tanjintwan was himself an integral part of today's story a major figure in the overseas chinese community here in the 20th century having played a crucial role in establishing singapore's chinese banking and financial industry indefinitely navigating that industry through the perilous times of the war in the pacific and through his chairmanship of innumerable committees in the service of both government and industry and playing a leading role in making singapore into the prosperous nation it has become and as as great as all those achievements were his incredible philanthropic worth work uh carried on today by his family certainly ranks right up at the top and we remain ever grateful for their support finally let me note that in order to reach as wide an audience as possible the working language for today's symposium is isn't english but i'd be remiss if i didn't say at least a couple of words of uh welcome in chinese so um now there are a number of other people that i need to thank for helping put today's event together but it's time this morning is short i'm afraid i'm gonna have to save those things for the end of the program with that to turn now for some introductory remarks from someone who certainly knows much more about singaporean history than i do and also because our keynote speaker professor wong gong woo is such a towering figure as to deserve an introduction by someone of greater stature than myself i'd like to now hand things over to the president of our college and our own resident expert in history of singapore among other places would you please welcome president and professor tantayong [Applause] good morning uh everyone uh and welcome to the symposium on the history of the overseas chinese in singapore my chinese is not as good as scots so i'll only be speaking english today but this event is organized by the elnus chinese studies council and supported by the tangent one foundation and i wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the tan chintuan foundation for its generosity in supporting the chinese studies council's work in promoting the study of chinese culture and civilization at the college the council is headed by professor scott cook dan chintuan professor of chinese studies who has been leading the charge in a promotion of chinese studies at the college one of his key initiatives is the multidisciplinary chinese studies minor program designed to foster an in-depth understanding of china both as a historical tradition and as a modern nation with a wide-ranging sphere of influence while the chinese studies courses and activities have served our students well instilling in them knowledge understanding and appreciation of chinese language culture and history we feel that more can be done to extend the understanding of china and the chinese world in relation to singapore and southeast asia this symposium aims to draw that connection by focusing on the history of the chinese community in singapore in addition to an important discussion on migration settlement and the evolution of the chinese community and its identity in singapore we hope to understand how identity and culture shape perceptions and in turn influence the tone and content of relations between southeast asia and china we hope that this meeting will help us better conceptualize our chinese studies program making it more distinctive valuable and stimulating to our students this is an ongoing effort on the part of the college to build something that is coherent distinctive and would leave a lasting impression on our students as they go through these courses and activities with us so that they can develop a deeper an understanding of china the chinese world and the larger context of relations between china and southeast asia so i i hope to get your views your advice your insights on how we can do this better and i wish to thank scott and his colleagues in the chinese studies council for their ongoing effort in this regard and for organizing today's symposium well it's good to see so many familiar faces in the speaker's lineup and i'm truly grateful to all of you for giving so generously of your time today we are especially honored by the presence of our keynote speaker professor wang gangwu he needs little introduction in a gathering of this nature in a long and illustrious career as scholar teacher and academic leader pravwang has left very deep and lasting imprints in the broad field of chinese and global history he is guru and mentor to many of us and all of us in this room are intellectually indebted to him in so many ways as we know pravang is a prolific author having written more than 20 books and he doesn't stop writing his most recent being home is not here published in 2018 china reconnects published in 2019 and most recently with the late margaret wang home is where we are published last year prafwan will be presenting his keynote address on chinese in singapore parallels continuities what's new it gives me great pleasure to invite profung to address us profound please [Music] thank you thank you very much uh professor anthony i feel a little uh uneasy about uh speaking to an audience for a change i've been so used the last few months talking to a screen so uh forgive me if sometimes i feel a little bit lost as to where i am uh i'm delighted to be in this beautiful building i've been here once before but i've never had the privilege of speaking here and i thank scott for inviting me and giving me a chance to do so the subject of course is something that is of great interest to all of us in in singapore and the history of this question of the overseas chinese in singapore has been an intriguing one for lots of people for a long long time indeed there's a lot of history and the amount of material now we do have about the chinese in singapore is really voluminous and it's gathering getting more and more all the time contributed largely by some of the people in the audience here today and the focus that scott has chosen to talk about things like education identities and in fact way different ways of doing research and new ways of doing research on the subject all very intriguing i don't have the kind of expertise to go into the specifics of some of these areas because in fact more people here know much more about the singapore chinese than i do but i have always been fascinated by the place of singapore in the region the relationship between the chinese here and the chinese in china and the chinese around the region for a long time now and i would like to take this opportunity to look back a little and do some comparisons between the various communities i'm shocked for example by the fact that we are looking at a singapore that has been identified as being quite unique the only country in the world outside of the greater china area that is a chinese majority and is run as a plural society these are quite obviously distinctive features which cannot be found anywhere else and unlikely ever to be found anywhere else again but given the fact that this is so it is intriguing that the history of singapore has never started quite like that and the the long history of courses is is well known now but much better known than before and we've taken mostly taken our history from the time when the british made it into the great port city that it has become from 1819 and that story itself of some 200 years is extraordinary but let me say that the new perspectives that we now have of the period before 1819 i think gives us a little bit more depth to the place of singapore in the region the colonial and the chinese accounts about how singapore began we now have a much better idea although it was poorly recorded at the time and we had largely colonial accounts and then some very desolatory notes about the different groups of chinese who have turned up in singapore and it was not until the whole thing was pulled together by song xiang that we have a larger picture and a continuous one but that itself reminds us that the question of singapore chinese is linked closely to the question of the relationship between those who are settled and those who came to work here passing through most of them meaning to go somewhere else or going back to china and that that relationship between the settled the local born so to speak and some local bond for several generations and those who came in and out and who came later and the fact that the local born were overwhelmed by the migrants and the people who came later itself is always a unique feature of of the of of the time so that period we have recorded and we have been that we studied very well and we now might know much better about them than before but then followed what was again quite extraordinary but this is not unique to singapore this is what might be called the the non-young perspective of a china that was equal that was finally conscious of the fact that they had lots and lots of chinese spread out around southeast asia the area they called nanyang before that of us we all know the ming and qing dynasty over some four or five hundred years weren't terribly interested in the chinese overseas in fact of course officially banned them from leaving china and those who left are only supposed to do trade and to go out and come back under very strict uh supervision and control so it was in that context where a new china conscious of the fact that they were chinese spread around who could be useful to them that they developed over a period of two or three decades quite rapidly a new nine young perspective of these chinese were temporarily abroad and that period determined the shape of the chinese who settled in singapore who were coming in and out of singapore not many of them were really clear that the newcomers anyway not many of them were really clear that they will stay in singapore and make their homes here in fact that was not at all clear until in fact until about 50 years ago or a little bit more than 50 years ago and that fact alone creates a special relationship the non-young chinese decided that singapore was a most central and valuable hub for the nine young community and it it served that purpose for i would say at least half a century and it was a time when of course the question of uh education identity all these issues uh were very much in the air the chinese who had settled down had to make choices the ones who were passing through and were just migrant here for migrants here for work uh they were they didn't have to make the choice they were chinese and recognized as chinese temporarily abroad so that was clear but that the pressure on the local born to make a choice and choose to identify with these new chinese and the new consciousness of chinese china's position in the world a new sense of nationalism which is totally new to the chinese was a major pressure major problem for them incidentally not only for those who are settled and local born but even for those migrants who are here actively doing business or seeking making a livelihood even they had to make decisions then about involvement in what was happening in china and the fact that events are moving so rapidly in china were forcing people to pay much more attention to china than they ever had before instead of just being interested in business they now had to be interested in the political changes that were rapidly transforming china from a dynastic confucian state into one that was a republic modeling itself on the western modern nations of of western europe and the united states and that stage of us being a nine young chinese was a kind of new identity for the chinese to to look at and say whether they were or not some were given no choice in fact by law in china the national position was that everybody born of a chinese father was a non-young chinese and this of course created a tension between those who had settled or those who did not intend to return that rapidly or to identify with the politics of china to have to make big choices and affected their activities in in in in singapore the changes after the war was even more significant suddenly the colonial powers are gone the chinese were faced with new nation-building efforts on behalf of local nationalists who had different ideas of what what the chinese should be allowed to do and why and why not stay in in their countries the choices were a different set of choices had to be made and that the first was a period which uh lasted for about half a century too starting from just before the war to at least the 1960s and 70s when the tension was still on it was not until the question of the cold war itself the ideological war which didn't didn't involve the southeast asia that much directly but was above their heads and because china had become communists after 1949 put the chinese in southeast asia in a very awkward position for quite a while that part of the story i think you're all familiar with what is so interesting to me is that the decisive moment when singapore changed its future all together all that time and i mentioned it all that period that we talked about think is simply a port city either under some local malay the whole empire jurisdiction the dutch and the british arguing about where singapore should belong and then the british colonial rule very successful rule making singapore an increasingly important port city in the region but that period always based on the idea that singapore was part of something else either a part of the british empire part of an anglo-dutch agreement about how to deal with the region or part of malaya and this final stage of being part of malaya of british malaya from at least the late 19th century and through to the up to 1945 and on to 1957 was the overhanging identity problem for the chinese an identification with malaya and this is interesting that the chinese were probably more ready to identify that malaya that included singapore than almost anybody else they were very very keen in fact i was always struck by the fact that the chinese used the word malaya from the 1920s onwards very cheerfully and in fact the first political party really active political party in this part of the world was the malayan common communist party that the chinese had founded and that they used the word malaya identifying with malaya from very beginning but that malaya always included singapore so singapore in a way never was given a sense of its own identity all that time it was meant to be part of something british and then something malayan and that period of course gave a particular coloring to the way the chinese were settling in in singapore that local born in their relationship with this concept of malaya changed significantly of course because of singapore itself but it was even more significant vis-a-vis a larger entity called malaya and the question again of this local bond their identity identification with malaya and the whole educational experience experiences of changing political circumstances became very relevant for myself what is really fascinating was once singapore was separated from malaya the idea that singapore was really quite different and blair had to go without singapore and become malaysia something else altogether then the question of the singapore chinese history actually changes shape altogether the focus changes the nature of that history itself began to change a sense of the chinese in singapore was a different story altogether from the chinese of malaya or the chinese of nusantara or chinese of nanyang of the nine young chinese all those perspectives were shifted once singapore became independent but even more significant was that independence of a kind of a new country a new republic that had a chinese majority but did not want to be a chinese state or insisted of being a plural society of migrant peoples what added another dimension to the story which led to again as a completely new set of premises as to how this singapore was to be and it was interesting also for the first few decades of this republic there was a actual reluctance to study the history of the chinese of singapore and the reasons for this are very complex i won't go into that many of you here are familiar with that but i just want to draw attention to the fact that this tension lasted for about 30 30 years or so it was not until the 80s and 1990s that you have a really fresh start in looking at the settled people the local born of singapore a different lot of local born all together not the local born that we now identify as baba or but a local born singaporean a chinese singaporean of people who are now have memories but only memories of what it was like before and then what we find so interesting is a fresh start to the study of the history of the chinese in singapore in a very different context and i think we're reaching a tremendously exciting period now i mean we all noticed in the last few years the history of the general history of the chinese of singapore first in chinese and then in english that both the two editors are here in the audience and that is to me a sort of climax of a new mark as it were as of where the history of the chinese of singapore has now reached but it is important to remind us that this is a really a new start it was really a different kind of history of the chinese that we've we read about before 1965. in fact we had very little between 1965 and 1995 in my view very uncertain and uneasiness around how to deal with the question of chinese in singapore the recovery from that to understand that this new position is to stay and that this is a completely legitimate and not only legitimate necessary position for the historians of singapore to take that the chinese of singapore is a different story altogether today is i think an exciting moment for all of us to bear in mind what i have to say today about parallels continuities and what's new uh draws upon this background and i let me just briefly say that by parallels i really mean parallels but different similarly with continuities continuities in a new frame so to speak and finally i'll ask the question what's new these are questions actually very much in my mind so i i'm not sure that all of you are interested in the same kind of questions that i i'm interested in but these are issues very much in my mind so what i'm going to say to you is not because i've done all the work necessary to to give you the answers what i'm really uh offering is a sharing of my thoughts and the questions in my mind of how to deal with issues like parallels and continuities let me start with parallels i say parallels but different and to make it easier for me to to start to focus on the subject i take on the questions of the local born and the the people who came the newcomers the sinker from outside that that relationship i think gives us a good start to recognize the parallels because this of course was not a peak period to singapore at all although nanyang the southeast asian region the same thing was happening local born and the newcomers and the relationship between the two can be found in each of the countries that uh constitute the southeast asian countries today and then there's then moment you start comparing them you realize that they were marked differences but let me say what they start started out more or less the same in other words they started out as people who had no backing from their own state for their own country they were all on their own virtually us of different groups of merchants and with uh with some workers helping them to set up businesses around the kind around the region and that we were particularly successful in gaining the confidence of local rulers whether they were malays thais or vietnamese and others they serve their purposes by linking their businesses with the business interests of the rulers and they created something like a capitan system i mean we don't we didn't use the word then but it was a kind of indirect rule whereby the chinese rule themselves with the effect in in the favor of the of the of the eyes of the monarchs whether they were sultans uh kenyans of thailand and so on that relationship remained and that was the basis of which the portuguese that dutch later on created the kapitan system as a way of giving autonomy to a set of chinese leaders were made responsible for their own community whereas they were quite distant and separate from the direct rule of the rulers themselves and i think the colonial government found that also useful they didn't have enough officials to control everything anyway and it was uh they did it for almost all the communities each one has its own capital so to speak but with the dutch who will be most ambitious in creating a colonial empire much more so than the portuguese uh or at the time there were rivals they actually made that system into a much more important system because they were primarily concerned with developing a trade with china they were very much interested in getting into the chinese market and they found the chinese community tremendously valuable for them and therefore gave tremendous authority to the chinese capitalist or mayors or letting whatever they call them to look after their own community and make sure that their community all were on the same page as it were when dealing with the colonial and dutch interests in the trade of southeast asia as well as with china and that was a very special relationship i think we we we have enough material now to say that that was itself quite different from anything that was happened before but there was one difference and then it goes to show that these parallels where chinese were without backing from their own state and seeking new as it were leaders to follow rulers to follow and that's the case of the philippines and of course the philippines has always been an exception in our part of the world for many reasons but largely because they will say spanish that linked them up with the latin american countries across the pacific and pulled them away from the southeast asian region for quite a while but when you look at it then you can see that these parallels because different people are involved the chinese themselves responded differently behave differently and organize themselves differently and in the end if you take again the parallels of the local born and you find for example uh sharp differences between the chinese in thailand who really related to the royal house with the after before and after taksin in the chakra dynasty and in the philippines between the spanish and came over to the americans how the chinese responded were very quite distinct from the rest of the region but even from within the malay world itself the nusantara area all the whole of the malay world because of differences between the british and the dutch there were also significant differences but the most important difference i suppose one should recognize was the question of religion and that is that in the case of the philippines the the philippines were actually run very much by the catholic church including cohorts with the spanish governor and that of course determined the way the chinese responded to the local born chinese had to become catholics in order to own property they had intermarried locally and they became closer and closer to the local community as mestizos but different messages not the spanish mosquito but the chinese messengers were sharing some of the uh legal rights that the the spanish uh mosquitoes had and in that way distinguishing themselves from the local india's but nevertheless still chinese in the eyes of the spanish and the spanish message source but so different from the chinese elsewhere and if you want to bring in the question of comparative uh comparative religions involved then you see that for the chinese in places like vietnam and thailand and myanmar this was not an issue but it was very much an issue with the muslims in the malay world and that became the basis on which the prana khan of the babas of indonesia and malaysia shaped its sense of identity which is so distinct again quite remarkably different from the uh identities of all the other local born chinese in in other parts of southeast asia we have even these have these different names i mean genoi in the philippines loktin in thailand or poinder in the case of the vietnamese they even had a very special name from the early chinese who settled there they called them the mingxiang minhyun which first today they don't use them in the term anymore because they've all become vietnamese and indeed in the case of vietnam they have become vietnamese in the case of thailand they have more or less become thais in the case of the philippines they have become actually identified with the filipino that is and that the newcomers the ones who don't entirely uh identify with the philippe filipino are late comers who came in only after the 19th century so the 19th century change in migration patterns of course did affect the the new the future development of the local born the local one became very different but the first batch of local born it's themselves local born but to call them all chinese could be very misleading because they do very actually very very diff very different i mean it is impossible for us to say that the baba and the the the filipino message of the chinese messengers in the philippines had that much in common at that time and yet in every in every sense the self-identification as having been of chinese stock or bearing chinese cultural uh heritage and belonging to the the chinese family of and and some link they however vague with the culture in china remain distributed around in very different proportions and this itself the proportions of chineseness and the nature of the chinese qualities that were selected to to be retained and did actually succeed in uh continuing in the region is a fascinating story only in the malay world particularly in the malay states of uh in this part of the between malaysia and the sumatra java area that you have a very clear case of chinese religion playing a major role in determining the local bonds sense of identity with china no language to speak of no language spoken in the home food clothing especially among the women folk were transformed but what retained what was retained were certain chinese religion features of the society which did not survive in either the philippines or thailand uh somewhat some of it did survive in the vietnam in vietnam but not for wrong they were vietnamized as it were very quickly so that itself the distinctive chinese religion effect on local identity made the story of singapore different because singapore was in the middle of it and was in fact as most people would agree the singapore began by having these local born chinese religion based and not directly influenced by events or developments in china who were determining the shape of a new local chinese community called self-identifying as chinese very proud to be chinese and in fact necessarily doing so because it was as chinese that they were most useful to the dutch and the british at the time and and their status in that these two areas became in fact strongly uh supported by the colonial rulers themselves the business interests also were changing but i i don't want to go into details of that but enough to notice how the chinese operated in the malay world in fact as very important arbiters between the dutch and the malay malay japanese peoples in the area whereas elsewhere this is not the case elsewhere in thailand they were really operating as agents of the after king himself and of course in the in the philippines they were operating quite separately uh or from from both the spanish mosquitoes and and the indians and all and had a special relationship with the fujian with their homeland in the future in fujian in trenzo in particular in a very narrowly focused area of chandra in particular that was quite unique and cannot be found anywhere else so these are parallels to all chinese coming out of the same areas of fujian and guangdong but performing very different roles responding differently to their ruling elites and emerging as different kinds of chinese in the region and i think this is important because singapore then stood out slowly gradually coming out of all these differences came out in a very special way as i will now go on to describe the nine young chinese then became the focus of the new 20th century set of developments where both colonization and decolonization occurred and in the nation building process the challenge to the chinese to somehow settle in this in this area now this is a story but in itself i won't go into the details of that enough to say that it is here where the relationship between the local born babas of strange chinese and the newcomers shinka who very soon outnumbered them out business out traded them and became dominant in the whole commercial world and therefore gaining enough leverage to ease the the local born gradually away from their dominant position that they held in the late 19th century and now we come tonight after 1950 these once you reach that point when singapore was on that tip between joining malaya or not joining malaya this transformation of course affected everybody in singapore it did not affect the other people so much nobody cared at the time it was after all a larger harder story was about was a was about to unfold a cold war involving ideological giants like the united states and the soviet union and china was involved and china's shift from the soviet union to the united states in the 1970s all these had consequences and i don't need to go into that but i think what is important was the myth of a nine young far child community that the chinese government wanted to present that all these watch how born of chinese fathers were one in the same people and i'm sure to belong to china and china's responsible to all of them was really quite a myth when you look down at the details uh each community was functioning differently but interestingly enough the most loyal and most openly supportive of closer relations with the government of china were those in malaya and singapore the reasons were quite obvious they were the only areas where the chinese numbers are growing faster than anyone expected and in fact by the by the 1950s what was alarming to the naughty indigenous socrates of the area was the fact that the chinese population was including malay and singapore was half in fact possibly even more than half of the population so that's a major change not let me find into the continuities i would be very brief here because the new frames are obvious first of all we have now a set of our self-identifications which are remain for the local born but the identification by others as chinese was now politically self-sensitive do we wish to be identified as chinese in the course of nation building in the region the continuities of being chinese now dominated by the question of education who is in charge of education i know there are tremendous studies on education and the political sensitivities about education are are really quite extraordinary and very delicate subjects indeed but the fact the major point bear in mind is that the private sources of education were slowly being edged out by the determined efforts of new nations to control the education programs singapore is no different in fact singapore was probably the most efficient and most politically determined to control the education process than almost any other country in the in the region and so and that is a story by itself and i could go on but i think i'm running out of time i won't go into that now except to say that this question of who controlled education who determines what is chineseness in itself i mean we have tremendous arguments of what is chinese is first the chinese have one view other people have different views but often it is forgotten that in each country of southeast asia in particular also true elsewhere as well in each country in southeast asia those people who self-identify chinese actually treat regard chineseness very differently than the others and that difference itself i think is worth looking at very closely why certain kinds of chinese characteristics are valued more and valued less somewhere else is something that i think needs further study and i wish i could have more time to to talk about that but i think i better leave it now to just bring make me go back to my the point that i will lead to what is new number one what is new is that wherever the chinese are if they settle and and now the local born are no longer the babas or the chinoys of the past but they're really a different kind of chinese who are modern who are responding to the nationalisms that they have identified with in their new new citizen citizenship in the new nations and what they see as chinese in china because what we can't get away from is the fact that china was changing so rapidly and the rise of china within a few decades to a position of being regarded as a superpower economic superpower was something nobody expected and that itself has a i was a tremendous impact on how people are thinking even though they may not articulate that problem uh openly but the fact that they are responding to the changing nature of china is no longer a weak or a traditional state it is now a modern highly scientific and technologically clued up financially and economically in on par with almost almost all the powerful economies of the world capable of in fact reaching out in every direction and tremendously focused now on something that they had never focused beyond before and that is that china's security and economic and in fact ultimately national interest was in the maritime realm the fact that they used to depend on continental power was no longer relevant the fact that need to be a maritime power has become uppermost in the minds of the chinese planners that itself has got fundamental impact as well on the whole region and not least on those who still see themselves as chinese one way or the other or was seen by others and not least by the chinese government itself in its programs of influencing and relating to the countries in the region as identifying those chinese in the region no matter how they see their chinese as being essential part of china's relations with all these countries that these chinese who are new nations and these new nations have a role to play is without doubt whether their role is to serve their nations first or to ultimately serve china is is a question mark now being a question being asked by many powers i don't doubt that the localized chinese who have identified the new nations will serve their nation first but at the same time to serve their nation or their greatest service is to help their nations develop a good relationship particularly a good economic relationship with china and that task itself is so sensitive and so open to misunderstanding and misperception that it's always going to be a delicate task for the chinese and how this local bond new local bond not the old babasana the new local born singapore chinese respond to that it's been studied by everybody people are paying great attention not least in fact i would say the chinese authorities in china wondering what is the next stage for for the region so among these things what again i can make a long list of what's new but let me limit myself to a few things i emphasize that singapore is unique in a chinese majority state that did not want to be chinese and want to insist on a plural society global city approach to a new kind of nationhood which nobody quite see how know how to define that is the singapore dilemma as a rule but given that dilemma the new coming relationships with china whether it's from new migrations new developments in business new political relationships diplomatic and otherwise the nature of the region itself all that has come to play again i can go on making a long list but i will not go into that but concentrate on now on the question of singapore in the region up to now singapore has always been seen as one hub in the chain of hubs that linked up the global economic system and created established by the british adopted by the whole of the american world order today that the international order today and seen as being a very valuable position for singapore to retain yet at the same time the fact that the rivalries between the two competing powers today of the united states and china is focused so much on the south china sea under on the fact that they they have now looked upon the the dominance the hegemon position in these two oceans of the indian and pacific ocean places singapore in the new position it still remains part of that global chain of global hubs as it were of port cities except that it is an independent and independent republic somewhat different but what is even more interesting is that it has also become the hub not just above the chain the hub of southeast asia itself the so-called asean the association of southeast asian nations here i think is a very interesting mutually uh existential problem between singapore and the nine other members of asean for the first time in history this is now seen as a region never before i mean other people looked at the region for their own conveniences but today the nations in the region look upon itself as a potentially powerful region that can have a role to play in all the new developments of the of the 20th 20th 21st century and here the location of singapore changes its nature all together it's more than just a part of a chain one in the link in a part of a chain it is the hub of asean and he knows that it can use it can be used to serve asean extremely well if it wanted to be on the other hand it can only survive now by being part of that region it cannot hope to survive simply by being part of a global change that that used to be possible when the hegemons were in london or new york and the chain was global that was possible but today it is not because the the power dynamics of the last few years have made it very obvious that the economic center of economic activity is now moving to the to the asian region and therefore the regional role of asean has totally tried been changed and singapore's position has changed up even more because of that because its dependence on that regional success and the autonomy of the region becomes absolutely vital in that context this the chinese singaporean now has to face a new set of potentially explosive issues but potentially also tremendously vital to the future success of singapore its unique position has actually increased if one can make uniqueness even more unique this thing is an extraordinary situation where the fact that singapore has this particular groupings of peoples linked up with all the neighborhood in the whole neighborhood and yet at the same time with the majority interest in being chinese and being capable of relating to everything that is chinese and becoming part of this competitive force against the hegemon of the region all these have now become issues which are troubling not only the two superpowers but also all the countries in the region and how singapore survives in that so much depends on the wisdom of the leadership of those singaporean chinese or to put it even more cyclic chinese singaporeans who played who played that role in the future is a matter of tremendous concern to everybody in that context the history of the overseas chinese in singapore is not just a history of any overseas chinese it's a history of a particular group of chinese who have become increasingly peculiar to itself and has an increasingly distinctive role to play in world affairs and this part i think needs us to better understand the long history of how the singapore the chinese singaporean evolved as a small local born community into the now something like three or four million local warren community that makes singapore today thank you very much well thank you professor wong for a fascinating talk that really placed the set the stage for the entire symposium placing the singapore singaporean chinese within long history of the young chinese and bringing that right up to the present i'm sure uh you all of you have many questions you'd like to ask we have about uh a little over 15 minutes or so for for q a so i'll take some uh we'll take some questions from the audience um as well as uh those of you who are watching via zoom can also use the chat function to to send questions and we'll try and get to as many of those as we can so let me now open the floor for questions yes [Music] well thank you prof wang for that uh insightful address could i ask you to extrapolate here you have issue early on referring i'm a bit hard of hearing i'd rather you spoke without somebody i can't hear you from yeah uh earlier on you talked about china's awareness pushing of dishwasher of singapore of the chinese communities in the region is unique in one whole with huawei how would you see that today does beijing still see singapore all of us chinese in southeast asia as one watch out community or is beijing aware as you are saying of the diverse and different affinities identities of each of us one of the fascinating things about the relationship between the people in china the leaders of china and the chinese communities outside and not least in singapore is the fact that the chinese leadership has always had difficulties understanding what the chinese are like outside of china this is not a it's not a criticism it's simply the fact that they have too many problems of their own for all for too long they've never paid much attention in the past in fact they paid no attention until the 20th century and and the attention they played in the 20th century or the second half of the 19th century onwards has been to make use of the chinese know-how their wealth and their connections to help china develop so the concentration was always on china's interests there was very little interest in what the chinese themselves were doing in southeast asia except for among a few scholars the political leadership did that one time pay some attention but again on how to make use of the chinese expertise and networks to help china rather than be interested in what the chinese were like out there what is interesting is that in the last two or three decades there has been very serious efforts for the first time among more and more in the of the leadership particularly in the provincial leadership in the south but also in beijing the expert expert groups in beijing who now really do want to understand better what these chinese are like in southeast asia as they come to realize that the vast majority of them are now local born and identified with the new nations and most of them are actually quite passionately loyal to their new nations today and are serving in various capacities in those new nations how to identify these and and pinpoint their interests and their willingness or capacities or ability to be of help to china is a problem that they now take very seriously and they realize that they themselves have not understood these chinese well enough in the past they took for granted that they were chinese therefore certain things you can expect the chinese to do they now realize that that's no longer true and the local born chinese are very very different from the chinese in china today they're now realizing that how different and how varied they are in the different parts of the region they still have to grasp more more firmly but that has led them to do something that she should have done way way back and that's to understand the countries in southeast asia themselves they never bothered because they broadly they were just colonized by the british the french and the americans and so on but now that they're independent countries and each of them have different very different goals different national interests have political systems that are very different and some some in fact so different that on the one hand like vietnam which is more like the chinese uh kind of system to myanmar which is now as you can see a bachelor of military system thailand has tremendous military impact indonesia is hovering between democracy and i think military intervention too i think we have to recognize that possibility and the cure and the very special position of the three british areas of malaysia brunei and singapore and yet and singapore in particular totally different because of its large huge chinese origin chinese singaporeans so they're now beginning to realize they can't simply talk about the chinese and dealing with the chinese they have to recognize the national interests of all these 10 very different countries and recognize that their beginning to be of any influence in the region does not depend on their relations the chinese as they used to think but depend on their relations with those nations and to enable those nations to trust their citizens of chinese origin so that these chinese ethnically chinese nationals can serve their countries in helping to improve relations between them and china the layers of understanding today which were never there before in china is now evolving and then and taken very much more seriously and i think will continue to be very seriously uh developed in in the future and that is something again that singaporean chinese and others and the governments of southeast asia must take great care to understand what what is precisely the chinese what are the chinese steps to try and reframe their relationship with southeast asia with that understanding the role of the chinese what they can and cannot do with those of chinese origin in the region something that i think they still have a long way to go before they can understand thanks to that question for us uh we'll take one more question from the live audience before we turn to uh to the online nights yeah hi professor wang uh this is a question regarding different types of chineseness particularly among the within southeast asia so you mentioned that and you also talked about how the self-identity of chinese is related to or is linked to how the chinese in southeast asia perceive china so my question is could you elaborate a little more about how you think the rise of china in the past few decades have affected the self-identification of chineseness within different southeast asian countries is a very big question i i i actually started to to look at it some time ago but it is much bigger than i i can call myself i think we need a team of people to go around the region to have a understanding of that it really stems from the fact that i think there is the conception of arguing about what is chinese was placed wrongly they are always argued in trying to essentialize chinese to find out what is the core the essence of chinese that is a very abstract philosophical anthropological kind of study what i think really we're up against is how different groups of chinese scattered around the world understand the part of china or the things at the time things chinese that they still identify with or want to retain and that varies enormously as i just a few tests here and there even around this region i found that the first differences are so great i mean what they what the chinese in bangkok or chinese and manila think about what is what parts of chineseness that they they should look out for is so different from what the singaporean chinese would be interested in and if you if you go around and realize how different they are then you see that this whole debate about chineseness has been based on certain false assumptions that if you identify the essence of chineseness then you'll be able to to understand how people behave i think this is the wrong way around it actually should be the other way around how self-identification what choices do you make you have actually make you have choices each each one of us makes choices about how chinese in what way am i chinese how i relate to it i may relate to it in terms of language and literature of art and culture and other cultural artifacts but other people might relate it in terms of political identity and the system of government or completely rejected the opposite can be can happen but regard that is totally unacceptable not a way of life that i want to have anything to do with it and yet i am chinese and i identify with other parts of science so the variations are just enormous and i think this is something that still needs to be done in fact i do hope now new generations they are beginning to do this but not so systematically that i can understand it so far i'm struggling to understand the variety of what people identify with as chinese around the place and it's quite interesting i mean take a very simple example i talked just now about chinese religions was what brought the baba community into a sense of chineseness for at least 200 years and that is very peculiar chinese elsewhere did not do that and what are the reasons for that and why have they given it up when they gave it up they became christians catholics partisans or they became a few became muslims in some countries others have just become secular totally secular modern science and technology business forget about religions and or if anything more interested in the connections of secular material interests in in wealth making and business international global economic institutions so something else is happening all the time and how you separate these how do how that rabbit identification of chinese religions once you broke free from that the directions in which that community went in itself fascinating not to say all the other new local bonds the new local bonds are those who are born in singapore since 1950 let's say and they are identified very differently they don't have that baba background at all they never totally identified with chinese religious you're always a mixed crowd including people who are identified with the may force movement with with progressive ideas in china with socialism and communism and all sorts of other and not even not even forgetting that there are small groups of them who still identify with confucianism perhaps again even there the complications are enormous those who identify with confucius as a philosopher those are identified with various confusion practices and those who identify with practices which can be described as confusion but really have nothing much to do with confusion so the whole range so if you start to dissect and look at each part separately you realize this whole concept of identifying with chinese and what is chinese is really a very open question that we haven't even begun to fully understand thank you um uh amberly do you have any questions from the online audience hello yeah um we have quite a few questions coming in so one interesting one is from lin wong lynn asked what is the new role of chinese clan associations now in remaining relevant to singaporean chinese and better position us in the world with two superpowers i need some help can you tell me shall i shall i repeat it with my mask off okay okay so um we have a question from lin wong lin asked what is the new role of chinese clan associations now and remaining relevant to singaporean chinese and better position us in the new world with two super powers people chinese associations again uh on i'm very fascinated by how different kinds of chinese associations have been established how some are revivals of traditional associations but not very successfully in my view and in fact many of them do not attract the young people many many holdovers from the past some with weight nostalgia some for very clear personal interests uh there's the whole again the whole range is different the active association that really matter today are quite frankly those that have specific goals related to either political or economic ends and some in some cases social social social contacts and social cohesion is effective but i think economic and political ends are the are the major reasons why associations are being created today and those most successful ones are those who are more focused on clear political and economic objectives and in that context how these associations behave in different countries again are extraordinary again i was surprised to see the range of associations that were revived after suharto was removed new democratic processes were introduced in indonesia and the chinese reorganized reorganized many of the old associations but with different functions with different goals in mind using institutions which have historical routes but using them for totally different reasons for how those associations used to have before so again i i get this i've not done enough work on this to know what where all this is leading to all i would suggest is that we we know this is happening and i think it's important for us to again trace all the different groups again not just to take them at a word that they're just another traditional organization but to see what they're actually doing today as compared to what they were able to do i mean the perfect example in singapore and i know it's a sensitive subject but let me just mention it it's the chamber of commerce in singapore i mean when you recall how powerful the chamber of commerce was in the 1990 from 1904 to to 1950s and 1960s then you look at what it is doing today totally different function but in many ways it is structured in familiar ways it looks the same it is a beautiful building and people gather them for similar reasons but underlying it all the nature of that association its functions in the society its economic role its political connections with the rest of chinese society totally different from what he used before so under the same label the substance of what they do has changed quite radically in some cases so i would like to look at these associations i think more closely at what they really are doing today they have the same name but i think it would be wrong for us to assume that they're performing the same function so i i cannot generalize on that because i i've only begun to pay more attention myself but i do know some people have studied this and i i hope what in the course of the discussion other people who know more about this will give us specific examples we're just about out of time if anybody has one last burning question they want to ask uh okay yeah one last one let's make it quick and then back there in the back row hello thanks for uh i was always thinking about a question uh it's like does the identity and in the classification of the dialect group disappear if so how did like obviously chinese people locate themselves if not how did the boundary transfer that's my questions that are good well as someone who who deeply regretted the uh steady suppression of the dialect spoil-speaking people of singapore i actually welcome the affirmation of uh that is going on uh but at the same time i recognize that it may be too late for some families anyway i met people of a maybe your generation who who are fewer fewer of your generation actually speak that i like or even want to now they can barely communicate with their grandparents in dialect and they are actually much more comfortable in putin or for even more comfortable possibly in english but they they no longer wish to return to that so i all i can say is that i i regret that uh that happened i i actually wish the alexa remain it'd be much richer to the to the languages to the language the chinese language itself in singapore it would have made it even more distinctive if there were major contributions from the various dialect groups towards a new newly uh newly fresh china singapore and chinese as it were to emerge and this of course takes much a long way the whole question of language and how it works it takes us a long way i was thinking very much of an analogous position of how baba malay was regarded by the malays by chinese who who thought that these people who can't speak chinese are certainly more malay than chinese and various opinions to the much simpler debate but very fascinating debate over singlish because in a way english is the equivalent of like baba malay in the in the malay world distinguishes to the english the standard english speakers uh their their attitude towards and yet it has it has a role to play but can it survive and how can you survive and will it will it have to be uh something to be formally accepted or it would just be allowed to evolve like all dialect groups or slang slang languages which can evolve naturally as a linguist like to say this is a good thing it's a natural thing let people evolve and these words will become eventually part of a new vocabulary and actually enrich the vocabulary of english in this part of the world now all these are fascinating things i do not know how they will end up to all i'm saying is that language should not be again imposed in a very strictly regulated grammatically correct form at all times that's all right for certain purposes official purposes and so on but for natural evolution of language among people who speak it as a first language particularly as a first language and how they speak naturally should not be looked upon as either correct or incorrect i i'm on the side of the linguist here in saying that that is something should be allowed to evolve quite naturally and see how what it comes out at the other end it may not be what you like but it may be very enriching to the imagination and the creativity of new generations of users yeah thank you very much um i think i'm afraid we'll have to bring the session to a close so let's let's thank professor wong uh once again for a terrific opening keynote lecture to start our symposium off so now we're gonna we'll take about a 25 to 30 minute coffee break and reconvene it uh 10 45. um those uh presenters please come with me we'll we'll for a brief photo for the rest of you i'm afraid there's not really any coffee in this coffee break um due to covert regulations and all but um anyway we'll look forward to seeing you all back in about 25 minutes or so thank you [Music] welcome back everybody and now that we'll proceed with our first panel for the day today which is on the theme of chinese education in colonial and post-colonial singapore our first speaker in this panel professor kwapakalim is a figure who looms large in the subject of today's symposium his research focuses on the history of the chinese community and its pioneers in singapore and he has long been active in community service and deeply involved in promoting the cultural values and historical heritage of the singaporean chinese currently he is council member kum chairman of the research committee of the singapore federation of chinese clan associations and he also serves as board of governor for ntu's chinese heritage center and as a member of the national library collections and programs committee the singapore chinese cultural center's academic advisory committee and the resource panel of the wanchinian sunyatsun nanyang memorial hall he also serves as a history consultant for the triangle history museum of overseas chinese in china and as adjunct professor in chinese studies at new era university college in malaysia over the past decade mr kwaz delivered lectures in china and japan both under the auspices of auspices of singapore's national heritage board and at the invitation of the national of sorry the china national archive in beijing he's been recognized by the national arts council and national heritage board for his pioneering contributions to the arts and heritage of singapore and received prestigious singapore chinese cultural contribution award for his contributions to chinese culture in singapore he's the author and editor of many publications including uh most notably editor of the original chinese edition of the monumental and literally quite weighty work uh xinjiang general history of chinese and singapore an incredible achievement documenting over 700 years of that history published in 2015 to coincide with singapore's 50th anniversary of independence and he's also the co-editor of the along with uh uh who will be speaking later today of the english version of that work published only four years later in 2019. so the title of uh professor cross talk today is an introduction to the chinese textbook textbook used by the colonial government for the civil service so would you please join me in in giving a warm welcome to professor [Applause] kwabakki hi good morning good morning everyone two months ago professor scott contacted me he asked me whether i can present the people in his same position i didn't reply to him immediately because during that time i still thinking what sort of interesting topic i can share with you so after a few days considerations i replied to professor scott that this is the topic i am going to present antiquity an introduction to the chinese textbook used by the colonial government for the civil service this is a textbook i'm returning to why this textbook what is the significance and who are the persons using this book and what happened to this school now this is basically the four major point i'm going to highlight and share with you this morning before i go further can we look at this paragraph this building i think of you know where is this ruling but the important thing is that what is the connection of this building related to me to my presentation this morning so let me carry the answer first this is the method straight settlements chinese call tofu sun sunfu in fact is a political system implemented by the british government in 1826 it lasts for 120 years and ends in 1946 san josu consists of three places singapore pendant america originally the capital was in penang in 1832 the capital was moved from penang to singapore this is the threat of street sediments so after the setting out of central food they have made so many immigrants come to singapore and as the property is getting larger and larger the politics government has decided to manage this school for people so they sent out a chinese potato or corporations of chinese and at the same time the qin government which means the china government also wants to take care of these chinese they send us chinese council here this is pickling the first chinese potato sent by london to singapore this is his office chinese potato ring this is a picture whereby i saw to you in the beginning these chinese this building currently is used by the subordinating court in hebrew this is a chinese council to singapore he is a career he's a career nepo mix and he stayed in singapore for 13 years because these two persons are doing the same job actually they are during managing the overseas chinese and due to the nature of their duty the two used to complete so from the survey we find that the concrete actually is the overlapping of portfolio in fact it's not this is a political rivalry also for political context they are trying to impose their influence and leadership over a chinese community in singapore so in order to better manage this group of chinese community the british government also called the chinese potato ring has decided to compile a book to train the civil servant this book you see the title of this fool is very long a textbook of documentary chinese specially designed for the use of the civil service member of the civil service in the street settlement and the quantitative native states this is a protective protected native state those current rate were street settlements this is the original copy of sanjo fuentes tsuji in chinese and in singapore there's only one copy and it's currently kept by natural library so these three volumes they are all together total seven chapters the first volumes there are two chapters petition and programmation second volume also has two chapters letters the third volume got three chapters forms dispatch and memorial a total of 383 documents was corrected and in this sunday this book was published in singapore in 1894 which is 127 years ago and the editor was gt here you look at it this group actually is quite a large group length is 29.5 cm why 23 cm tick 4.2 cm if you take a look at this book apart from the content page which is in english the rest of the book are all in chinese and you can see that all the chinese texts are written in the classic chinese union word and it's in the complicated chinese character aunties without any punctuation no in front of this book there is a memorandum invasive force written by the editor basically he said what is the purpose for him to compel his fool is because he feel that previously for those bacteria used to train the civil servant actually with no local relevance so in all enhanced the civil service service here and also to better understand of the chinese community in singapore and the chinese is so important so he want to compile which is local relevant to train the civil servants this fall was written by gt hay in may 19 1894 in singapore so we want to know who is this gta in fact i might have no validator about him i have searched all the material i can only know that he was the assistant producer of chinese that is to say that he was the assistant to william picklings and he has a very good combined knowledge of chinese language when he passed away in november 1906 there was a fundraising from the chinese community want to build a memorial for him but the project didn't end up reason unknown this is a press cutting of the singapore fully pressed later 18 august 1891 here there is some information about hey saying that he's in charge of immigration and he was the restaurant of immigrants i tried to search his photograph but couldn't get bad luck one day i went to malaysia and accidentally i call him so he is a young gentleman standing in a petrol head gta so what is the significance of this as i mentioned just now this food is specially made to train the civil servants in the street settlements the book covers a wide range of material including chin nsc official correspondent as threat of local chinese newspaper petitions office notice commercial code of smartening duty and this textbook the purpose of this textbook is to enhance the knowledge of chinese politics economy and society for a civil servant working in singapore so let me cut a few examples to describe how important of this book take a look at this building building is called [Music] the singapore medical institution there is two school of talk concerning its formations one said that tongsier was formed in 1867 the other said that tong chien was formed in 1885 there is a difference of 18 years which is correct which means these two years which were which is career for the commission of something yet we make a check at this center for interesting in chapter one petition document number one we found that there is a petition to the chinese potentially to apply for the formation of but unfortunately this document has some preferred why because the document is unrelated without it we are not able to know the accurate information of configuring [Music] in this chapter he spelled out very clearly the rules and recreations of thompson yen you see all are written in the complicated chinese threat unless we you are very good in chinese otherwise it's very difficult for us to understand in this document there are four elements here to confirm that means the founding situation of sankhya santiago social bank and the first since then to station congress importantly the date of establishment is confirmed as 1aa5 but currently say that if the first chinese example something bad happened to him in one day of the year 1887 a carpenter a kyoto carpenter by the name of swa today he carried a weapon which is xac and went to beckling's office and told the ex at quicklinks so quickly was seriously injured and because of this so-called terrorist attack the british government was very angry they think that the attack could be due to the connection of secret society therefore they impose a ban on the secret society this one can be found in chapter 2 document 22 indicate that from now on the secret surprise is a sacred society until today this document is later first july 1890 so the 1890 the year of 1890 become a very significant year in our study of chinese current association this year is very remarkable and four days after the announcement of this bank on secret society there was a global gadget that prickling retire when that too and then and substitute subsequently passed away because due to the attack the injuries in fact this custom has been on for the past 100 years in this document chapter 4 document number 37 it spelled very clearly that 100 years ago how our ancestor surveyed the summer moon vegetable so it's quite interesting actually more or less the same today we have third time of singing song 100 years ago although there's no good time the next question is that we will be wondering how come the civil servant those are more unknown years ago they are so good in chinese now we always complain that chinese language is very difficult to study why those are more they are so good and can study chinese so well we we know that the british government has a very strict system in selecting the aspect of civil servants so those people want to work overseas as expected they are very good in all the languages they are more than financial the first class civil servant is 10 to india only the second and third class people come to singapore and um and these people are so good that after their retirement they apply their knowledge locally local knowledge and convert themselves they teach in the university and become a very famous scholar uh i can't do it the first one is therefore i know we stick very well and we say was a civil servant he first came to mayor in 1902 as the main officers and he's very good in the study of the marine language and marine history and customs after his retirement he teaches in the university of london his famous group this is win street his famous book is dictionary so you can imagine the murray dictionary it's not known another person better person and working in malaysia after his return he teach in eastern history at cambridge university so today we know little person is not a serious servant he was a historian and very famous historian he's a person his book is the chinese in baltimore what happened to this textbook now yes i mentioned it there are three volumes seventh chapter a total of 383 documents was corrected in facebook so out of these 387 documents we selected 162 documents which is relevant to singapore and we come out with a new version this project was carried out and done by the facca is the office in porpaio i am the research committee chairman work together with a professor in the new era university college in kl both of us we took two and a half years by this is the book here i i'm not coming here to sell this book i just want to introduce that this is a very useful historical material it's currently under use so just to draw awareness of this this book the actual size of the original copy is the same we just want to change the original history it's actually the same but we have actually converted the complicated chinese into simplified chinese and then we entered on it we put the punctuation there and coming out easier for you to read and understand there is also an original copy put as an attachment of this book and the chinese newspaper are so happy to promote my my book it was the spiritual right of the whole pitch last time so this and my presentations i hope you're enjoying and for the next 10 minutes i am going to present you a documentary this documentary was taken in the year 1938 or 83 years ago and when singapore is still under the system of straight settlement let's see how the old singapore okay well we set that up let's give a round of applause to uh uh [Music] 19 only a little over a hundred years ago stamford raffle a far-sighted official of the famed easter company realized britain's great need of an important base in indies and against advice and wishes of this company secured by agreement from the sutton of johor an island off the extreme southern tip of the melee peninsula and here founded singapore a settlement destined to become within less than a century one of the greatest commercial ports and the most strategic point of the british empire singapore about 77 miles north of the equator is at the crossroads of australia and india south africa and china and as military base and home of the combined british far eastern fleet is rightly considered the gibraltar of the east garrison and singapore are regular seasoned troops composed of european indian and melee units [Music] the finest and most efficient air force in the bar east both personnel and equipment is stationed in singapore with air dome unrivaled in the orient the busy harbor and waterfront the vine buildings and crowded mountain streets the speaker importance as their freeport and the greatest transshipment center in the east where practically everything that is made can be purchased duty-free with the result singapore one of the cheapest shopping centers in the entire world much of the plan of the present city is due to its founder stamford raffles and the square which is the heart of its business life bears his name on it face many banks offices retail and commercial establishments and through it during the business day passes a steady stream of pedestrian and vehicular traffic to protect motor cars against the direct rays of equatorial sun cloth covers are often used [Music] of singapore's estimated population of half a million more than 55 percent are chinese though the majority are coolies and laborers and their commercial interests are vast and of the greatest importance some originally immigrants from china and others descendants of the pioneers who came to trade when raffles established the settlement in addition to the great percentage of chinese singapore's population is also composed of numerous other orientations and occidentals all parts of the world and it is claimed no less than 26 languages are used in conducting normal business [Music] uh the cosmopolitan population works and lives together in harmony and religious freedom in one street is seen an imposing chinese temple and within a short distance stands in elaborately carved hindu place of worship [Applause] [Music] the muslins and there are many bow tour mecca beneath no white domes or a mosque of the prophet [Music] dividing the city singapore's river presents an always changing scene of busy activity many small lighters and trading jumps tie up at caves to unload or discharge their montumas wales all lie empty in midstream awaiting [Music] cargo [Music] so [Applause] the shipping activity is even heavier upstream where the river is narrower and the key is more congested [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the chinese believe their boats must see where they are going so large eyes are placed upon the bowers in pleasing contrast to the crowded oriental sections are the open spaces of the european areas with wide splendidly paved boulevards pre-shaded avenues and modern buildings paralleling the harbor is connect road one of the finest drives in the city and comparable to any similar thoroughfare in europe at the edge of raffle's plane and fronting eastward to the sea stands the imposing cenotaph silent memorial to singapore's world war death overlooking the lane is the victoria memorial hall and nearby the stately municipal building one of singapore's newest construction adjacent is saint george's anglican cathedral also facing the flames all parts of the city are served and connected by well-paved roads convenient arteries for those who live in the suburbs or in the beautiful residential section of tangled the governor's mansion stands upon a hill commanding an unobstructed view of the entire city unpretentious yet spacious and comfortable are many of the homes built in an older architectural style with great open arcaded verandas serving as living rooms in this tropical city social life in this thriving crown colony is always full and varied with garden parties dinners races sports meets and dozens of other activities a gathering place is raffled hotel one of the most renowned hosteries in the east at tip in time the midday meal hour the veranda of this well-known rendezvous is always crowded with those who come to enjoy cooling drinks fine music and pleasant companionship the colony proudly boasts of one of the finest and most modern swimming pools in all the east singapore swimming pool children as well as adults bathe in the cool filtered sea water which flows continuously through the two spacious pools devoted and loyal chinese servants called amaz watch over and care for the european children on the balconies of the clubhouse all the terraces overlooking the peaceful waters members and guests relax and enjoy the refreshing breezes which blow from the straits of malacca or the china sea here on this tropical island which was once but an impenetrable jungle along the coast of which ships of the past sailed with timothy england has built a great city and established for the trade of all nations a mighty guardian in east [Music] [Applause] well certainly a very interesting glimpse and an interesting take on the uh live in the early 20th century singapore we'll we'll bring professor paul back on a little bit later for the question and answer session but now let's uh move on with our second speaker in this panel uh another heavyweight in the field professor huang professor hong is associate professor of history at the national university of singapore and he's concurrently also a research research associate at the east asia east asian institute and in 2011 he was honored as uh and us stanford distinguished fellow in southeast asia he originally earned his phd in a commonwealth scholarship at australia national university where he some not some time ago wrote his dissertation under the supervision of professor professor huang's research straddles two related fields the history of republican china from the 1910s to 1940s and china diaspora studies he's the author or editor of several books including his 1996 the politics of depoliticization in republican china guomindang policy towards uh student political activism from 1927 to 1949 which was translated in chinese uh in 2010 and more recently his uh 2008 co-authored work on the scripting of a national history singapore and its past his coordinated volumes include power and identity in the chinese world order and macro perspectives and new directions in the study of chinese overseas he's also published in a wide range of international referee journals such as frontiers of history in china modern asian studies inner asia cultural studies journal of chinese overseas and the journal of southeast asian studies the title of professor huang's talk today will be uh disappearing chinese vernacular schools in singapore post world war ii british decolonization and the guangxian's failed struggle would you please join me in giving warm welcome to professor hwang kindly hello morning everybody i'm very happy to be here to share this opportunity with scholars in this year and us session the topic that i've been sort of chosen to speak this morning is on the disappearing chinese vernacular schools in singapore in the post-world war period and a lot to do with british decolonization process as well as focusing on the men reconciled struggle i'd like to give you first an overview first of the whole lecture itself within 30 minutes so today as you look around there are no more chinese schools per se in singapore with chinese language as the major medium of instruction liquinu and is ruling pap government in 1987 have replaced all the vernacular schools in the national stream teaching just purely in english as a first language so second chinese remain by only as a very small part of the curriculum within about an hour or two within the assault day or so but my argument in this presentation is that we should not just focus on 1987 and what the pb government did to chinese education but the story of the disappearing chinese schools actually or the disappearing process should be traced to the much earlier years of post over to british decolonization so we need to move backwards to get a better holistic picture of things so my presentation focuses on the difficult process process of negotiation between the chinese community and the british colonizing authorities over chinese education and i will use singapore-based tycoon likon chen as endeavor as the prism to view the tension arising from a chinese community struggle for chinese schools funding and autonomy amidst the restrictive british policies now since i focus on the man itself it needs to remember that actually he took a very low profile in the pre-war period but he plunged into political limelight and played a very executive role as singapore transited from the british colonial rule to self-governing and finally to full independence the path of likong chang's struggle was far from linear the shaping of post-war educational policy was in fact one of twists and turns the eruption of political activism in chinese school in a post-war period 1950s or so posed additional challenges for him eventually the counter currents proved too strong with lee kung chen staring at the status quo defeat and withdrawal so that's my main argument for this presentation so let me begin giving you an overview first of the situation of the british decolonization and chinese education in singapore uh as you can see from the first presentation singapore was colonized since 1819 from british uh sort of reference landing in singapore and then uh when malacca was rigged from dutch in 1924 they formed the straight settlement so penang malacca and singapore became sort of the straight settlement in 1826 with penang first and headquarter in 32 they moved the headquarters to singapore recognizing its premium importance even over that of penang and then the british uh transferred the rule uh initially was governed from india then transferred a rule over from india to london as a colonial colon crown colony in 1867 and that process was interrupted during the war itself 1942-45 by the japanese occupation when the british came back they knew it was the end of the day for them so they put in the process of decolonization right so started as early as 1945 in fact even before the war ended they were doing some pre-planning in london itself so 45 46 almost they came back and start to put in place things and then the federation first a million union scheme which didn't work well and eventually a federation of layer scheme from 48 to 57 giving independence to malaya but this time including penang and malacca by detaching singapore from the very scheme itself so singapore was went on a separate path and was grown to self-government only in 1959 and that's when the pap came into power with lee kuan yew leading the party and then um there was a formation in malaysia together in malaya again with sapa sarawak and then forming the malaysian state in 1963 giving independence to singapore but didn't work out well so we left barry after two years in 1965. so it best reminding that this is a colonization process of singapore and how we struggled for independence and in terms of population demographic is very important right in many things so at the point it's important to remember that in fact the chinese majority is the majority in population as early as 1930s okay from about up to 75 percent so chinese schools are very important part of our history and what happened is that the british essentially based a priority on malay vernacular education giving priority to the indigenous malays as well as to promoting a small group of english educated professionals so that was the focus as far as chinese education is concerned the british adopted a pre-war period a minimalist laser fair approach to chinese education essentially are left very much on their own relying on mutual help and self-governance of and self-governance so a clans a native native place trade associations and all that took over so there was earlier questions about the role of the client associations and trade uh unions and all that now this was before the war what happened is things changed after the war there was a sea change and very explosive pressure from the point on why because of the falling number of three factors first the schools were damaged very badly damaged as many other institutions by the war itself and so the chinese had to pick up the pieces all over again and many of the chinese businessmen actually lost the fortune of substantial part of it during the war itself so very limited financial resources and how to revive those for long and broken down school system so that was the first pressure secondly the chinese schools resumption not only resumed but also it went on explosive growth a very vast expansion why because the war delayed 42 to 45 delayed entrance of many schools into education system so they want to go back to the school system so the enrollment number went up sky high and post war was also a period for baby boomers in singapore so population population population and more than that was a layer of political awakening so this is a post-war period so the british were decolonizing and so the idea was to give power of voting to the chinese community so the electorate was going through a political awakening process and together that was an issue of cold war fear because this is the churchill making the statement about the iron curtain has fallen okay so this is the beginning of cold war and they saw conflation between communism although russian is the main culprit you also got communist china as well becoming communist part rule from 1949 so the conflation between chinese schools and communist influence so these are the various factors that make the post-war situation very unusual very explosive the next section deals with introducing the man himself before we talk about his struggle so lee kung chen and about his trans regional business empire and how he went into the post-war political alarm line he was born in nana'an a county in fujian province in 1893 came over to singapore at the age of 10 with his father in 1903 he started here for a little while and then get a scholarship went back to china and studied again and came back again in 1911 entered the workforce and he worked very well he was talent scouted by the robert manneque kankakee and rose to the top management position within tangati's firm and takaki even married his eldest daughter over to him in the year 1920. in 1928 he began to solve decided to leave the tankaki company and form his own company called the lee rubber that's 98 in chinese okay in the year 1928 so over the next few decades this man actually built an extensive regional business empire straddling over the region so it's real sense of southeast asia in that sense right singapore malaya sumatra south thailand was his base also headquarters in singapore so by 1930s it was among the world tears in southeast asia very much known as a rubber king as well as a pineapple king these are the two epithet applied to him not quite a major financier then because the banking sector was dominated by the european bank at that point in time including hong kong and shanghai bank but he was already becoming a major player since ocbc was formed in 1932 or the great depression merger okay and ocpc was run partly by him but also by professional manager including the most famous one by tan chintuan who is actually the foundation is sponsoring today's symposium okay in 1967 the kangchin passed away at the age of 74. so this is a background to him and he saw trans regional civilization business empire now throughout this early period although he was already becoming very well known and very wealthy he actually essentially kept a pretty low profile okay with deference partly to his father-in-law tankaki who was a leading saw a person in the chinese community but if you look into the sources and all the reportings and all that things changed quite dramatically when the war ended in 1945. in the war it happened when the war broke out he was in america attending a rubber conference and he stayed there and give some lectures in universal colombia and all that but he actually came back and very much ready to plunge into the thick of things because by then tengaki has moved onward to china politics and eventually left for china in 1950 so a plunge in the whole forefront of social political activities and what i have on the screen is a whole list of them uh advisory council to the british admin which put into place immediate war period post-war period august 26 to february 47. he also began to take up the presidency of the chinese chamber of commerce again while the most important leading chinese organization this is second presidency he had one earlier before the war he resumed the chairman of chinese high school was interrupted by the war itself taking over from tankaki since 1934 he was against he spoke out very much against the kuomintang in china trying to re-exert his influence over the overseas chinese it was we spoke out most importantly against the british millennium plan the million union okay and the federation of malaya as well which was forged since 1946 so they launched this pres pan-malayan association of chinese chamber of commerce against these two major plan of millennial union and federation and he was the president of the pam million unit he even organized play a very major role in organizing a one-day pan-malayan journal strike called hata in the in the day in particular day 20 of october 1947 to send a signal to the british that these two plans were not welcomed by the chinese community okay but it did not stop the british metric going forward okay well uh following that a million federation was formed in 48 and he attended the launch of the millennium chinese association mca in malaya okay in the year february 49 he was from singapore but singapore was excluded from that so we were not part of that but that association but he endorsed it so he attended the launch he also endorsed the amno launch kind of a multi-racial political alliance for independent malaya in 1957 so you can see the whole series of things that he actually plunged into very active direct political limelight after the war itself so he is the leading man to look at this whole picture about chinese education in the post-war period how he played a very major role in negotiating the various educational changes so the the details are quite daunting a lot to them and essentially over disagreement over school land what land should be given to the chinese school to set up land and you could pay for the government for the land the pay for the building the building of it the cost of it how much a government would play a role in it operational grants matching salary for such teachers language to be used in the schools curriculum that should be used student enrollment management autonomy extra etc so these are all the very nitty-gritty things which they have to go and negotiate with the british government for greater space and autonomy for the chinese schools he hated japan malayan guidance committee for resumption of malayan school which was solved immediately as you noticed a date is june 1946 so almost immediately after the war to respond to all this need to negotiate with the political authorities initially it was very positive response from a british they launched this thing called the educational policy in the colony of singapore a core 10-year educational program in august 1947 very positive they adopted this thing about all young children should learn mother tongue and at the primary school level so this is something to be endorsed so equity for all schools are all streamed by the british and very ambitious goal of setting up three primary schools with 100 public schools in tenure okay so uh very positive in a point in time when they started off this negotiation but then british encountered problems because of the stirring issues money problems extra and also because of personal changes leadership changes in the ministry of education and all that so very soon in fact it turned negative okay it turned negative with the following plan you can see the name is still the same the word tangier is their 10-year program data and interim policy september 49 and they issue a supplement to the 10-year program called data and interim policy of early 1950 and you look at the two plan they use the same phrase 10-year plan but it was a real backtracking it turned from positive to negative the para is no more equity is priority for more english schools not for chinese schools another negative thing came from the issue three reports on malayan education about chinese education in malaya because by then malaya was sort of become a federation independent there's a ban report there's a phenome report there's a uh it's also educational ordinance in 1952 so all these were very pro-malay pro-english education okay and pretty against the chinese education so lee kung chen has to be as a chair of the chinese school coordinate joint committee they formed in 1951 to counter the british kind of approach to things but it didn't stop the british from staying on path they issued another white paper in december 54 which is also very negative that is called bilingual education that increased aid okay they now say okay we believe in bilingual believe the space for chinese education will give you some grants but then they insist on having a new semester system a lesser hour for chinese more hours for english and all that and a restructured curriculum so again lee and his community had to respond a chat the chinese federation of school management and teachers don jiahui launched on the 5th of december 1953 so these are the going forward and backward but you can see the trend essentially from optimism to pessimism and to negativity and as so things were difficult for him things become even more so following in the following years because there was an eruption of political student movement in the chinese school system okay so this complication from student political activism as a next section beginning with awakening in the may 13 movement of 1954 protests against the national service ordinance which was put in place to recruit young people to join the sort of military the police force and all that part of the thing about the million emergency plan so they clashed the police and there were barricades being imposed hunger strikes as well in chinese high school so lee kung cheng was a chairman of chinese high if you remember the previous slides so he also hated the chinese federation of chinese schools management and teachers he had to rush back he was then oversee when this thing took place he rushed back and he went to approach a student talk to them numerous times and pleaded with the students to disperse and to return to classes okay so in a way uh this is a very important moment uh the way i sense it it makes a very profound impact on the conscience because it added to all the pre-1954 negativities that he was already feeling and i think from this point i think he can see the writing on the wall there was to his disadvantage and my reading is that he began to decide that it's about time for him to retreat from a political limelight but he executed the retreat a little bit over a period of time from 54 to 56 not immediately so he still showed the responsibility for a little while more which is to do with the following items the million emergency was still ongoing but the british felt confidence enough to handle the pre-communist problem so they commissioned the render commission put in place a rendered constitution in february 55 recommending major changes for the political landscape in singapore a legislative general election held in april 55 and then labour front under david marshall won the election so his government took place in 55 to 56 period and this is a period whereby uh you have got a major outbreak of student activism labor activism as well beginning with the april to may 1955 the hawk so-called famous hawkley bus prior the workers together as student political activism protested against some of the measures well david marshall's government responded positively to convene an all-party party report on chinese education okay that we need to solve this problem in chinese school and they put out this report the report was commissioned in may 55 report came out in february 56. if you read the report it's all party report which means all parties representative opposition and all that and therefore including lee kuan yew himself was involved in that report and it was in a way pretty positive okay there's a place under the sun for chinese education so it was a positive thing with that report by the david marshall government but barely two months later it turned negative okay when it went to a government process away from the all party thing so this is a government process two months later in april 56 they put out a white paper on education which is negative this is an important foundational document okay it became a document of which the following prime minister from david marshall chenille muhawk took over launched the 57th educational ordinance which is adopted in a way very negative against chinese education and is adopted and entrenched by the lee kuan yew and his pap english educated elite even after they took power in june 1959 so this whole thing actually signaled the end of the policy struggle and the beginning of the end of chinese education because essentially it still recognized the premium importance and the prioritization over english schools so to conclude i would say that the termination of the sort of chinese medium school under the news pap government in 1987 is a very complex story okay a lot of people blame the pap and the government which they have the shoulder part of the blame and of course together this is a story of the nanyang university as well right so this thing people remembered for they saw the end the closure or the chinese education this is the story of primary and secondary school and then the university story nine university is not about the story so the focus is very much on lee kuan yew pap and chinese education but the argument i mean in this presentation is that it has this beginning point in the post-war ii british decolonization process of the late 1940s and 1950s the future of the chinese vernacular school and the granting of citizenship to overseas chinese settler had emerged as the two most important interrelated concern in the post-war ii period and tangled with this whole issue about new nation-making the post-war resumption and expansion of the chinese schools amidst the limited community resources had led to a reversal of the self-help approach and a very loud demand for direct and urgent government help but i think it's very important to remember the whole context that if you look into the details their writing cry was not for special privileges for chinese ethnic education not that so the term chinese privilege is being very much voiced today right i miss all these things about you know going back to the malay world and all that and uh against the majority chinese kind of thing so the white male chinese privilege being evolved all the time but actually in this context of the struggle important to remember that rallying cry is not for that special privilege for chinese ethnic education what they were arguing for was a parity a parity framework of equal funding for all schools of all streams regardless of where your whether it's chinese english or malay or tamil and yet while retaining a degree of autonomy so that they can run the schools with the score of school management boards now in the post-war years le conchan political alarm light as you have witnessed in defense of chinese education he was in the forefront of it and we all learned that his powerful struggle was far from linear actually his negotiation for a better educational policy was one full of twists and turns as you can notice from a timeline that layout for you and it's complicated very much by the eruption of political activism in singapore in the chinese school system and the counter currents eventually proved too strong and unfavorable against the chinese schools okay so this is where he beat the retreat okay so as early as 1954 to 56 likon chen actually saw the writings on the wall and opted to retire from direct business operation and to fade from other social political activities from then on he kept a minimalist public profile then after one of which to be the chancellor of singapore university in 62 for a brief two-year period so which is why in today's university hall just further down the road you have our new university hall building one wing is the kongchen the other wing is tan chintuan okay who actually help him to run the ocbc so both of them actually associated this story of mine all right so this retreat was arguably very closely tied to his disappointment and anguish in not being able to negotiate a better deal for chinese school this is not expertly stated not inspired by him but this is the way i read the the way the history unfold so in short chinese schools in singapore have been increasingly locked onto the path of disappearance since the end of world war ii by the lack of british support by co-op conflation between chinese and communism by parental preferences and by ethnic politics of making as framed by the emerging local english educated political elite thank you [Music] okay now let's uh invite both professor hong professor qua back to the stage for some q a another microphone this one so i've just heard a couple of wonderful talks on uh the history of chinese education in singapore and uh we have about um a half an hour for uh for questions and answers so um maybe we'll should we start with a question from the online audience amberly are we ready for that hello okay um yeah i think we can start with just one question from the um the zoom q a um so one question is um can chinese education be revived in some form to preserve the chinese culture of the modern time i guess this question is open too maybe it applies more to um mr huang professor huang [Music] the question is whether chinese education can be revived right so in the context of today's talk is about schools uh in teaching in chinese medium right which is called chinese schools so in that putting that question in that context uh my answer would be no okay because we have traveled too far down the road uh whereby you know the school system has really been totally changed and so i think schools uh chinese schools teaching in chinese the main medium is not likely to be revived okay so i think it is about the degree of the mastering of chinese uh language chinese culture chinese history that is the sort of the sort of heart of the matter and in that context there is a bit of hope for revival although we have gone down the path quite precipitously to even to the point that many in the community experience chinese community feel that we are becoming more and more a monolingual society okay so while the government has been beating the drums of bilingualism throughout all these years actually it's on a path of decline and almost they were becoming a monolingual society with chinese mastery of chinese really down to a very low point almost a terminal point but uh i would say maybe there's a way to sort preserve a bit of the optimism uh and in that sense that in a way chinese bilingualism may have failed always but sorry bilingualism command of chinese may fit with a large number of people but there's still a quite a core group of singaporean who is able to solve right that wagon or bilingualism and maintaining that sort of double mastery over both english and a second language so and then with the rise of china today with economic opportunities cultural interaction and everything so that's also a second source of hope a third source of optimism will be in terms of the new new migrants which is there's a group of migrants that's coming in uh some part from other parts of the world but there's also a substantial portion coming from china so in that context i think the mastery of chinese language history culture and everything might be sort of having a possibility of really turning away from a lowest point and picking up again that would be my response thank you okay a question from the audience oh yeah mr lo please uh i have two questions one for each speaker so for mr kwa uh i wanted to find out whether from your research uh did you manage to understand whether or not the british colonial officers themselves found the book that you mentioned to be helpful to them in governing the chinese here in singapore and then for professor huang i'm curious to know a little bit more about li kong xian and why uh you said that uh he was actually against uh two things once he won he was against the komintang's influence or intervention in local politics here and why secondly uh he was also against the i the british idea of malayan union anyway thanks we i just i forgot to mention that the publication of this book is with the support of stbc fund thanks a lot anyway i find that the british government invented better than last in knowing the chinese culture so there are many many many reasons i think always we always say that you know you you yourself manage yourself and then actually it's not a good it's not a good thing british as an outsider they look at you differently and they can treat you very fairly so you can see that during the korean times the chinese education the chinese school actually in facebook that was after when the second world war when they tried to fighting for the independent from then onwards the chinese education system go down i know whether candy agree me okay i think this is my answer okay as for the sort of a question with two subparts to me only kongchan itself yes the context of it is that when you talk about china politics influencing overseas chinese the heart of the highest drum beat of it started in the 1920s and 30s under the kumitang when the government came into power in 1927-8 in nanjing uh with changkat shah in power so that's where they started the drum rolling of really getting all the old chinese mobilizing them although there was a part earlier by the late chain but really the hype really dropped big height was around that period of time so they were interrupted by the wall and then they tried to pick things up after the war itself so i'm the part that i talk about is after the immediate after the war 1945 part and what happened in that period was that there was already a civil war going on between kumitang and the chinese communist party and more more or less resolving in favor of the company's party and so this is one part of the change in the political landscape in china at a point in time and also it has an impact on the local context because uh local context and global context in the way the world is actually turning left in the way after the war itself including in britain at least government the labor government came to power and so what happened is that in singapore community there's a sec major section under leadership tangaki began to turn in favor of the communist party instead of komintang so he was in the way very much standing on the side of the group together with his father-in-law together a substantial group of chinese community who were beginning to view chinese communist party as a more favorable viable political party than compared to the komintang so when the community tried to revive all these things getting southeast asian to be elected into legislative council and all those things he was opposed to that in that sense but he was different from his father-in-law in a sense that he did not opt to go back to china he actually prefer very much to be planted within the local context so this provides the answer to your second question as to why the conclusion was against the million union and against the federation of malaya because as prop 1 is sought into that is that what happened is the world war ii and japanese occupation has really unleashed the feeling about malayan consciousness about being in this part of the world long enough to be part of this world and separate from that of china so therefore uh tearing singapore out from the straight settlement from penang and malacca and forming milan union and the federation malay is the wrong thing we are in fact malayan as part of the whole thing so the degree of million consciousness is very much reflected in that in fact he went even further he actually wrote a piece in the london times in 1940s before the war ended just about when the time war ended to propose a federation of southeast asia so he actually wrote a little piece that recommending formation of the federation of southeast asia inclusive part of thailand or which is business empire was and indonesia as well so very much reflecting this kind of trans regional business empire that he suggested that so that would be the answer to my q to your question thank you okay thanks let's take a another question or two from online yes um i think i can pose two questions the first one is a really quick one many people are asking where they can access the video clip that mr kwa showed just now and the second question is um is it possible to draw a parallel between the malaysian chinese school system and the singapore chinese school system why is it that the malaysian chinese schools can survive with minority chinese population in contrast to singapore as with its majority chinese population so i answered a question first uh they are asking for a video clip visit can we share a lot so i actually i passed the copy to professor scott so let you decide okay uh well we're after all part of the one world right the million consciousness and all that singapore and malaya has always been one so this chinese education issue is really sort of staring at us you know point blank in a way that uh in the end we saw it become an independent nation there's a causeway link but it's a very tenuous link and really developed into two different worlds all together and chinese education is part of it and irony is a year we are in this little island is 70 75 over percent of chinese and yet we could not keep the chinese school education system going and yet over there where they were becoming um you know they would start a point in minority and then the numbers are drinking and doing during and yet today if you go across the malaysia you can see a very festive kind of a struggle going on and they're keeping it alive you know they still got the chinese school teaching system management box system the chinese schools uh in fact the chinese school system they have their own set of problems of course it's not really all easy going but they they were still alive and well and sometimes even the malays parents decided to opt to send their children to those chinese schools so that they can really master real bilingual uh education in fact it's more than bilingual if you look at the malaysian system they produce actually they easily beat singapore anytime okay our bilingual is not real their binding world is more than real because it's trilingual okay they can speak malay they can speak english they can speak chinese and you throw in the dialect it's really multilingual okay so they have been able to do that so we have not been able to do that and this is all kind of the historical packages and the way we have the political leadership has has charted our path uh unfortunately i think we've gone down too far now we're more than 50 years since independence so it's very difficult to reverse the situation so in response to the first question to i i don't see a reversal but maybe not not as bad as us today or so hopefully things will be better but the the system is really very ironic that in a way we have failed over a year but they have more or less uh succeeded they have their own set of problems not an easy path but no relatively comparative speaking they've succeeded more than us in terms of keeping the chinese education school system alive and well okay next question here it's okay um thank you very much professors for the talks i actually have two questions one for you so for the first presentation um it's kind of interesting for me personally to see you say that uh uh the british who are kind of removed from the intricacies of the cultures of the chinese communities within singapore were more confident according to you in kind of the managing of a public service why why is that so like why is removal better because these are the same british people that in the very problematic put in the video said a very loyal chinese servant is is helping the european little children not drown in the water so it's not really in my opinion of benevolence but why is it successful uh in european for the second one to which extent is multilingualism in in countries uh beneficial i come from tunisia which is also a trilingual country and i don't see it as a benefit at all if anything i see that most students in my country fail to master any of the three languages that we learn french arabic and english and we fail to communicate them equally why is that a useful skill to have i am of the opinion that the monolinguality that singapore is going towards is much better so your question is very interesting in fact i also think you know british we so-called british empire in fact it's not simple he british actually is a very small island and he can control the territory which very much largest land his country there must be some reason and when i compiled a book with professor kwa kwan songwan on the chinese history in fact purity sui i love coral government there are so many systems impressed by the british government and until today we are still practicing it a lot of things they if they see any wrong ruling they will come up with a certain law certain law is actually you want to play the game with me i set the rule for you so this is one thing secondly that they are very they emphasize on the executions so you you can see the those civil servants sent to send from london to singapore maria or indian they are all well educated and they want to emphasize if you want to manage this group of people you must know their culture their language their custom for pickering himself he can speak hokkien he can speak hokkien and then he knows chinese like our professor scott this bandwidth is very good he's better than me even so emphasize our education on culture and make sure that the civil servant understand and immune in the local so-called local chinese community that's very important you can see that the british officers they go around just now taking the photograph or with the local chinese i think that makes makes sense for them to [Music] go for a better management of the local chinese community thanks yeah thanks for a question a bit surprising that you you did make a declaration yourself that you come from a country that is more multilingual and then in your experience in singapore you actually like the environment you're better in being more monolingual right so i find that very surprising but i suppose there's a logic to what you what you your stance is because um there's this famous phrase that uh you cannot it should not be a jack-of-all-trade a master of none right so mastery over one language and being very good at it is the way to go forward so that is the sort of underlying logic in a way to the stand that you have taken yeah but uh i would i would argue actually in the opposite sense that uh i think this uh having bilingualism multilingualism is very important uh more and more so uh because despite the logic of that i think that language is a key to many things to history to culture and all that in fact we wouldn't be able to pass a student in graduate study if you do not master a second or third language this is also the heart of most american graduate education right that whatever country you come from you've got to pick up a second and a third language in order to claim your phd right so this is the whole approach in a way that languages is very important gets you access to primary and secondary source material and more importantly is about the window to a culture for culture to be porous you need to have that language key to unlock it of course you have translation work but somehow there's something lost in translation the nuances and all that so having being multi-ling bilingual being multilingual is very important uh especially in this era of globalization so this era of globalization means the interaction of people from different places and so all the more having multiple language is a great advantage and i would add that one more thing would be that if you look at the way the world being transformed nowaday i think it turned that idiom that we said earlier about being sort of uh you know do not be a jack or trade master of none actually it's the opposite nowadays in fact it's about moving away from too narrow too professional kind of a focus and actually we all need to acquire things about multitasking is about knowing multi different contexts and really you know not doing to be too narrow and to be more wider so that and even discipline wise although we are trained historian we always told you try to be interdisciplinary okay so one profangan who is a leader of that uh which early days from his work he actually tried to transcend beyond just a domain or history trying to borrow concepts for social economic ideas and all that so i think that kind of multilingualism is very important still all right okay amberly okay um i have two questions again um so the first question would be are parental preferences for language mix in the educational system noticeably changing with the rise of china and my second question is to what extent is singapore's current education landscape influenced by british education and what about by chinese education okay well this issue of parental preference is actually very important okay so when we critique the sort of the path of educational policy the path of the way education took place it's not just about the political leadership determining certain thing i think they have to shoulder a large part of the blame because the political direction is quite critical but you also find that if you go back into reading all the sources the defense put up by the politics is always that it's not totally our fault you look at the parents they're obtaining with their feet using to put their children in english education instead of chinese education so if you look at material for the period i struggle talk about struggle or chinese education one issue that i did not highlight is actually for parental preferences there was a beginning of a shift towards english education is it because they feel that if i'm from a chinese family back to the issue of multilingual and bilingualism i would like my children to at least if they are from a chinese family to learn english you see so they like to send their children for english school so the enrollment for chinese school was dropping so this was one dilemma that they had to grapple with at the point in time but in the spirit of bilingualism so why lee kongchen is always harassed as a model because likkonji is able to achieve what he did was because he had mastery over both he was one of those that was truly bilingual not so much a tan chin tuan tanjin is quite good at hawking and all that but in terms of the the chinese language per se his early congression is the one that's mastery over both so many of the parents younger parents actually opted to send their children to chinese school in the world that so it boomerang back in a way also to them to say if you are fighting so hard for chinese school why are you not sending your children to chinese schools because many many leading including size family also had a children educated in english schools so this parental preference thing is very important and it still applies today i think as i said no reversal because parents they will still send their children to english schools with the rise of china being important i would say the level of the sort of bilingual hours and curriculum thing will become more important because if you want to write the economic bandwagon you need to master that although you can do it via english as well right getting access to chinese culture history and everything else via the english language but having the mastery will still help them so hopefully this will be another source of optimism that more and more parents also will not frown on their children just becoming mastery or english but at least really paying attention to the english the chinese education as well next question anyone in the live audience yes please okay uh thank you um both of us for your very interesting lectures i would like to ask um prof huang actually what what do you think on uh sap schools or shenzhen like do you think they have succeeded in doing what yukon you originally envisioned to help preserve chinese culture uh and their tradition or do you believe that it's just it's mostly superficial and service level and doesn't really achieve a deep understanding you're referring to accept schools yes okay okay yeah this is a very interesting thing uh that at the point when the political leadership liquinu and the pvp and all that moving towards the kind of having removing all the vernacular schools and putting in a national stream they actually single about a dozen of schools beginning their primary and then later as few selected secondary so-called special school whereby they identify them as schools with stronger chinese education background and then trying to preserve them they will not be close and so therefore they will keep going and then they will also have chinese being taught at a higher level as well so the whole idea is to have this kind of so-called some people call it an elite school whereby it's really trying to put in more resources helping them to keep the sort of chinese vernacular education alive and well in this kind of schools even they have gone national in that sense right uh well there are uh so there's a two way to read this one way is that it's out of this whole genuine thing about concern about bilingual education about preserving part of the legacy so in a very positive way the negative way of reading it is this conspiratorial kind of thing that when the political leadership is moving towards sort of shunting this chinese education apart they were giving out some concessions so it's a bit of a political balancing act that when you take away something from a chinese community you try to tell them that you're not taking away everything but you're preserving something so it's a kind of from a conspiratorial angle if it's negative would be about trying to do that particular balancing act uh just as the way they close london university through a numerous steps instead of one single move okay so this is the one way of reading it the second respond to your question would be that unfortunately the way it turned out maybe not unfortunately a lot of people say it's predictable because if it's if it's a if it's just a balancing act just a kind of temporary soothing of nerves and all that in the end it would not work out well and that's true enough so actually if you go to a lot of sap school today you will find that very little of the kind of chinese heritage and interest is being preserved the principles initially were all from chinese educated stream but increasingly they were replaced by professionals some even do not know how to speak english and they were even the school's population even more so when they interact in the tuck shops in the in in the of our sports hour they were all essentially interacting in english and not chinese so there were places being mounted uh about tankaki for example going back to chinese high school and they were walking around and the students were all speaking in english you know and he couldn't hear understand a part of it is it even though he's the one who founded that chinese high school so there's kind of irony in a sense that all these sub schools are really sub-schools in name but in terms of substance they are not fulfilling the function and we are still declining precipitously towards the path of being monolingual with english as a main priority okay next next question from the online audience okay um i think this question applies to um mr kwa so um kareem asks about the challenges with translating the book for civil servants since translation and punctuation can sometimes change the meaning of words with regards to the conversion of the book from traditional to modern chinese and the addition of punctuation how did you ensure that the meaning was coherent with the original book this is our main challenge when i edited this book in the first place the qualification is that you must be very good in chinese so the person who are helping me is actually a great ship from taiwan university so every text or every chapter we go through we went through many many times and we try to argue out whether the punctuation we insert there where is the car you know of course i cannot guarantee 100 is connect but i can say that it should be over 95 is quite accurate i hope that if the this this audience who have my book i welcome his comments if you find that any mistakes he was supported by him can let me know thank you very much maybe uh we should talk about five minutes or so um so further questions yeah clay all right hello okay uh thank you both so much for your fascinating presentations uh my question is for professor huang i wonder if you can help us sort of if the 1950s is the beginning of the end for chinese language schools in singapore can you tell us a little bit more about some of the events after the 1950s until 1980 and i wonder if you could tell us particularly more since you mentioned that uh the history of nanyang university right if the 1950s is the beginning of the end and that's when this university is founded how does it fit into this story thank you okay um well it's a big question so uh i've in a way answer it probably in the presentation but let me just pick up this the segment that i saw with kind with what you say right the unknown universal story is part of this story okay because the first chinese schools is chinese high school set up in singapore it's a secondary school they set up primary school from a very early days from around the turn of the century 20th century in 1905 1906 then the second secondary school only took place in 1919 okay and then after that it took a number of years would be that no then how then you have sort of continuing beyond that it's always step by step right aspiring for higher level so in the past many of these graduates from a secondary chinese school will go back to china to study university but then what happened the war interrupted all this and china was turning communists right so there's the path we saw a block after that so what happens they want to set up a university so nanyang university was formulated the idea was trial in 53 launched in 55 55-66 and then eventually went through a very tedious path at least there were three committee that was studied what to do with it and the issue is also over this medium of instruction should the university at that level be teaching in english or are you should you teach with chinese the main medium of instruction what kind of curriculum you should have and all that so that the kind of complications it started right error beginning on 1950s 60s 70s and eventually it's liquid news problem and he through a number of steps he decided in a way to close it by merging the university of singapore okay so become nus so before nus is su singapore university combining in nanta so it becomes the national university of singapore so that's the story of nanta part of this story although my presentation focuses more on the primary and the secondary school level now in terms of events that are the period of time i've got all the keywords up there one would be decolonization okay so this is a very big issue about decolonization uh and then when you decolonize then how what do you how do you move forward so part of the moving forward is very much dangerous education and part of it is what citizenship part of his politics so to engender the kind of new citizen what kind of language that you should use in schools in order to have sense of unity okay in order to have sense of feeling about southeast asia et cetera extra so uh this whole thing the decolonization was in a way tie up with the issue of citizenship and tie up with the united meeting called education okay and a fourth element in that landscape will be the word communism okay because it's from churchill speech about iron curtain has fallen and then china turning communists in 49 and then the whole world saw being polarized so the chinese school systems of uh being seen as more or less turning towards the left side in the early years of course the british were already concerned as early as the 1930s onwards because then was the common tank then trying to influence them with the solve the other part of the china politics but after the war is the is the communist element part which bothered the situation much more so this whole thing the chinese school system being conflated with communism and all being influenced by them and how to regulate them became a major issue so i would say these are the various things decolonization citizenship education cold war my sense of thing will be about it's about the political transition uh it's about what kind of leadership that took over after the british that is the main key thing so there was a tussle the bigger electorate is actually a chinese educated electorally purely in terms of numbers right but what happened is that the way the election panel uh is about the loss of the chinese business influence in uh earlier election 1955 to david marshall and company and then in 1959 it was the uh pep and the leecon u which has a segment of the chinese educated group but eventually as you know moved further down the road it is actually riding the tiger and actually coming to a point they will abandon the thing and they too become in a way essentially the core of the pap leadership is still very english educated so i would say the turning point is about the political leadership and it was because the political leadership that decided on education policy at the time were the british were the david marshall lemieux government or the pap government and because the leadership was essentially this group of people who were not that well in tune or understand or in empathy with the aspiration of the chinese community and that in a sense turn against them in a sense so i would say is there a moment of that if that composition is different the outcome may be different okay okay well it's been a long morning i'm sure representatives are starting to get uh quite hungry at this point so i think we'll uh we'll we'll call the a panel at this point i will let's uh thank once again our speakers professor kwan professor punk so for presenters and invited guests please join me in the lobby in about five minutes from now for the rest of you uh we'll reconvene at two o'clock and hope to see you have a good lunch and hope to see you back then thank you welcome back everyone and welcome to our second full panel of the day this one on the theme of exhibition and research of historical chinese culture our first speaker of this panel mr dos away is presently uh chief executive officer of the singapore chinese cultural chinese cultural center initially trained as a lawyer he later graduated with a masters in history of art from the school of oriental and african studies at the university of london he's on secondment to the center from the national gallery of singapore where he was director curatorial collections and education in addition to being an award-winning curator with management experience mr lowe has also been involved in strategic arts planning and in policy in singapore's ministry of information sorry ministry of information communications in the arts in 2013 through 2014 he was the first singaporean to be selected as an international fellow at the core fellowship program a prestigious london-based program aimed at developing and strengthening leadership potential across the cultural and creative sectors the title of mr lowe's talk today is singaporean examining chinese culture chinese singapore culture through the lens of exhibition making and if you haven't been out uh down to the singapore cultural center yet uh to see the singaporean exhibit firsthand i highly recommend that you do so it is it's really fantastically done and engaging exhibit um but now let us first hear what went into its creation so would you please welcome mr los away thank you scott thank you for the introduction so good afternoon ladies and gentlemen today i'll be sharing about the content and the considerations behind the curation of our permanent exhibition singaporean which opened in february last year the entire process took about two years and along the way we benefited from the advice and feedback of many individuals and organizations some of whom are here with us today and i would like to take this opportunity to again thank uh professor wang gomu and mr kwabak lim for their kind advice the objective of our exhibition is to highlight what's distinctive about the chinese singaporean culture in other words we wanted to examine what made the chinese culture here in singapore different from what you might find in other chinese communities around the world and for this simple objective the key word for us was singapore singapore is both the name of a geographical location as well as a state both aspects have an impact on cultural development but the latter is i would say a relatively more complex notion the european concept of nation state is based on the principle of a group of people usually with a common origin language tradition inhabiting a defined territory and organized under an independent government so using this definition it then becomes clear that singapore and most of the countries in modern southeast asia do not have the usual or conventional attributes of nation states mainly carved out of former european colonies these nations do not have a common language ethnicity or religion and singapore is a case in point for instance in a study of over 200 countries in 2014 the pew research center found that singapore was the most religiously diverse country in the world so this chart actually shows how singapore's religious diversity compares with other countries like france united states and iran so the significance of this diversity means that most governments in southeast asia have to constantly pay attention to the task of nation building this is the promotion of a common national identity so as to unite a country of desperate peoples as most nations in southeast asia are relatively young most having gained independence after the end of the second world war national identity is still very much a work in progress and in this task of nation building there are several forces at work on the one hand the government needs to build a common national identity and on the other hand many have recognized that the ties of ethnicity language religion run deep it is not possible nor desirable to erase such identity markers hence in singapore the integration model emphasizing multiculturalism has been adopted rather than the assimilation model however i would say that the integration model is not a straightforward one firstly ethnic groups do not remain static each group will evolve through interaction with others hence the chinese in singapore will become distinct from other chinese communities elsewhere and develop a distinctive chinese identity and the same can also be said for the malay indian and eurasian communities in singapore secondly ethnic groups will develop shared values and norms through common experiences like studying the same schools or living in the same neighborhoods and over time these shared values and norms will also develop into common singapore identities such as respect for diversity the singaporean accent the use of singlish and also even a love of hawker food thirdly the issue of ethnic identity will become ever more complex with time singapore's cmio chinese malay indian others framework or method of classification will become increasingly difficult to apply for instance due to recent waves of migration to singapore there are now rising numbers of singaporeans who do not fit neatly into the cmio categories in 2017 one in five marriages in singapore were between people of different ethnicities this was more than double the rate in 1997 20 years earlier so over time there will be more singaporeans with mixed ancestry so this was then the larger background context against which we developed the curatorial narrative for our exhibition before highlighting the distinctiveness of singapore chinese culture we felt it was important first that the exhibition should begin by examining singapore in some detail what are some of the special aspects about singapore that led the local chinese community to develop differently and here we selected five historical social geographical factors as being the most significant firstly for about 150 years singapore was a british colony and to develop singapore into a port city the colonial authorities imported cheap labor from asia particularly china so within about a short hundred year period the local population expanded by more than 40 times and the proportion of chinese residents grew from about 30 percent in 1824 to about 75 percent in 1921 however as the british had little concern about the social welfare of such migrants the local chinese community had to really fan for themselves by setting up clan associations schools and temples and due to such british benign neglect the chinese could carry on with their traditions and practices from home without much interference so paratoxically this meant that some traditions like the chong yuansir the hungry ghost festival continued to be practiced in places like singapore long after they had faded out in china for various reasons and moreover the chinese government also had little interest in these migrants in addition british colonialism entrenched several key institutions such as their legal and education systems these had a deep impact on singapore's first generation national leaders like lee kuan yew and gokeng sui and the use of english by the colonial government had also led to the borrowing of english loanwords by the local chinese such as their shi for taxi or barcian for percent as in 100 this was of course later reinforced by the continuing use of english as the main working language in independent singapore the second aspect is being located in southeast asia so being in a tropical region meant that the local chinese had to make changes to their way of life the hot and humid climate definitely affected the design of their homes and their clothing so for example the chinese used to live in atab dwellings very much like the indigenous people located far from china also meant that local chinese did not have easy access to traditional ingredients for their home cuisine so they started using more locally found spices fruits vegetables meat products in their cooking such as native pandan nutmeg torch ginger coconut and banana lastly life in the malay archipelago logo also meant that the local chinese had to interact with indigenous people who tended to use malay as the common regional language this helps to explain the prevalence of malay in our daily language today so for example the local hawkians borrowed malay words like sukha for like tawin for mary basad for market and kopi for coffee likewise the malays also came to use certain hokkien terms like me for noodles a day for tea tahu for beancurd and gongxi for to share the third aspect would be that up until the late 20th century most chinese migrants to singapore came from the southern provinces of fujian and guangdong so only a particular part or region of china this is why chinese singaporean culture has greater influence from southern china and less from places like say hernan or sichuan over time the hokkiens became the largest dialect group amongst the local chinese this explains why the hokkien dialect minan played such an important role in the evolution of language in singapore such as the popularization of hokkien words like in kyasu and the use of hokkien syntax in singlish these migrants came mainly in two waves the first wave smaller in numbers comprised largely of chinese traders from southern coastal cities like xiamen who traveled to the region from as early as the 12th century those who had settled down married local women and this formed the genesis of the early paranaquan chinese community in port cities like malacca their descendants tended to adopt local habits and customs due to longer periods of settlement in southeast asia so for instance the pranagan chinese spoke baba malay which is a hybrid language of malay and hokkien some also became fluent in european languages and became a middleman of sorts between europeans and locals in the region the second and much larger wave occurred in the 19th century when many poor chinese from the same coastal cities left china in such a better livelihood cheap labor was needed to develop the new british port of singapore and later of course the rise of the tin and rubber industries in british malaya further increased its demand for labor apart from better employment prospects in singapore the chinese were also we must remember fleeing from the famine and unrest in china during this period so we know that for example the taiping rebellion claimed about the lives of 20 million people in china so initially these migrants intended to return to china after they had made their money and the situation in china had improved however with the outbreak of the second world war and singapore's eventual independence many migrants chose to settle down in singapore by marrying local chinese women so hence unlike the earlier group of peranakan chinese this group tended to maintain more values and practices from china because most of the chinese migrants came from southern china they spoke southern chinese dialects like hokkien teochew cantonese haka and hainanese so this meant that the different dialect groups in singapore living on a small island had many opportunities to interact with one another something which they did not have in china therefore the different dialect groups here had access to one another's food customs such as sampling different types of wound cakes and dumplings for mid-autumn or the tuanu festivals and intermarriages between dialect groups in singapore were also much more common compared to china in the early days the fourth aspect would be that due to modern singapore's origin as a colonial port city the local population had long been very diverse adding to the indigenous malays the british colonial government imported cheap labor from india and china it also encouraged traders from around the world such as arabs javanese armenians to use singapore as a base for their operations and over time the local population became predominantly chinese due to large numbers of workers imported from china however there is still a large proportion of non-chinese minorities singapore's proportion of non-chinese stands at about 25 percent which is relatively large compared to other chinese communities where the non-ethnic chinese groups account for less than 10 percent of their total population so for instance in terms of the non-chinese groups hong kong has eight percent beijing has four percent and taipei has five percent so this means that the chinese in singapore have relatively more opportunities to interact with and be influenced by other ethnic communities due to the colonial government's hands-off attitude towards the locals in fact all ethnic groups were free to continue with their own ways of life in singapore and this state of affairs continued into the post-colonial period when the national government adopted various national policies based on multiracialism and multiculturalism these days new migrants bring in much needed talent to support singapore's globalized economy and to make up for the declining birth rate and such migrants now come from a much broader range of backgrounds and this has led and created a singapore that is even more diverse than before the fifth and the final aspect would be that actually singapore is a very small island with no natural resources it has however a deep harbour and it sits on a crossroads of major shipping trade routes and today for example singapore's the busiest port in the world in terms of shipping tonnage with more than 130 000 vessels calling at our port annually so since antiquity singapore has been a port city so this meant that the inhabitants of singapore has always been exposed to a constant flow of goods ideas and peoples from around the world in fact singapore's small size means that it is always affected by larger developments externally and less likely to be insular or resistant to change singapore's economic survival depends on it continuing to be a hub for trading of goods and services and the global economy must find singapore relevant and useful to them and singapore needs to be open to inflows of different ideas beliefs and ways of working and this has of course been hastened by the rise of telecommunications as well as the greater internet connectivity so these five aspects may be distilled into or summarized into three driving forces firstly what the chinese brought with them and these could be categorized as chinese heritage which includes values belief systems language customs and food dishes that originated from china secondly whom the chinese encountered here chinese migrants interacted with many different peoples in singapore these were they were there were interactions between dialect groups as well as between ethnic groups these cultural interactions range from the casual say daily encounters or deeper engagement such as inter-marriages and all these led to changes and adaptations to the way of life of the chinese in singapore lastly how the chinese responded to local government chinese migrants were also affected by how singapore is governed whether during the colonial period or post-independence all governments seek to shape society to achieve certain objectives and they often do these through public policies and laws hence these three driving forces at play affect the development of local chinese culture chinese heritage cultural interactions and public policies in other words these are the three underlying ingredients if you will that give the chinese singaporeans recipe its distinct flavor these three ingredients found in many overseas chinese communities were present in the past and continue to exist in singapore today the influence of each ingredient varies with time creating complex outcomes that shape chinese singaporean culture so let me give you an example of the three forces at work the way that we celebrate chinese new year in singapore the festival is definitely a tradition that originated in china and as such is part of chinese heritage that's the first ingredient but we all love to eat pineapple tarts and love letters for chinese new year however these are snacks which did not originate from china in fact these were items made popular by the piranakan chinese who often adopted western techniques like the baking oven or western ingredients like butter in the cuisine so these types of hybrid foods are an example of cultural interaction at work the second ingredient lastly during chinese new year all of us have attended or like to attend mass events like chingay parade or river hongbao and these events you know did not originate in china these are local large-scale public events organized by the state or state-sponsored organizations and this is an example of public policies the third ingredient shaping the way in which chinese new year is celebrated here in singapore now i'd like to go a little bit deeper into how we looked at the our exhibition strategy for an exhibition to be effective in conveying its narrative the audience must first be very clearly identified because audiences vary in terms of language proficiency familiarity with subject matter and interest levels so knowing one's audience would determine the writing of text the selection of themes as well as methods of audience engagement so whilst aiming for the exhibition to be broadly appealing to the general public the center eventually focused on schools as its target audience particularly upper secondary schools for several reasons firstly schools are strategic partners because teachers in schools can actually use our exhibition for learning journeys secondly we felt that teenage students are mature enough to be able to understand certain abstract concepts like culture and identity and thirdly it is important for the centre to be able to help shape perceptions about chinese singaporean culture from a young age so with our target audience in mind the students the center then deliberated on what would be the best entry points into the exhibition what aspects of chinese singaporean culture would best convey the desired ideas and what examples of singapore chinese culture would be of interest and relevance to young people so the centre eventually focused on three festivals food and language as the exhibition's thematic entry points they were chosen because the interplay of the three driving forces i mentioned earlier could be clearly seen in the evolution of festivals food and language these are also aspects of daily life which young people are familiar with today so apart from their immediate relevance using examples from daily life would also help dispel the notion that culture is something from the past or only of interest to people who are artistically or academically inclined i'd like now to elaborate a bit more about the thematic entry points into our exhibition so festivals many of the traditional chinese festivals celebrated in singapore like chinese new year or mid-autumn festival were originally based on seasonal changes or the needs of an agrarian society in china however singapore is a modern city which does not have the four seasons hence it was important for us in the exhibition to highlight that such festivals continue to relevant in singapore today because of the values which they embody rather than an original purpose and many of these values are in fact based on confucianism taoism and buddhism three very influential schools of thought in china which emphasize harmony in society and the universe and the exhibition in fact focuses on 10 values treasured by the chinese community and i've listed down what they mean in the slide over the years the chinese have come to treasure these values even though they are not unique to any ethnic group reflected in popular stories and even stereotypes these values are passed down through festivals schools institutions and most importantly within the family so to emphasize that these values are passed down at home from one generation to the next the exhibition team designed the zone to be like a home old windows and doors were salvaged from soon to be demolished flats in badok and red hill and were repurposed into drawers and cupboards which could be opened by visitors the drawers and cupboards contain very familiar everyday items that can be found in many homes the concept was that each everyday item reflected a particular value would be thrift or loyalty so for example many homes would have a set of national service uniforms the ns uniform more than just an item of clothing the uniforms in fact reflect that singapore's security depends on the collective loyalty of its citizens values are also promoted by traditional festivals like chinese new year ching ming as well as mid-autumn festival these are festivals widely celebrated by the chinese in singapore and by chinese around the world however the the exhibition emphasizes that festivals do not remain static but evolve over time so for instance during chinese new year many chinese singaporeans still subscribe to the traditional belief that red is an auspicious color to wear however the tossing of the lohey yushen is a recent development having been invented or made popular in singapore in the 1960s the exhibition further highlights three other very popular festivals in singapore chong yeon sier jiwang yatan the nine emperor gods festival as well as the topic gong festival in bula ubin however these festivals and folk beliefs are much less common in china today because by the end of the dynasty many in china felt that china needed to modernize by breaking with all traditions like confucianism and folk beliefs and hence festivals with more religious associations like chongyeon sierra became less common especially after the chinese communist party came to power in 1949 however chinese migrants in singapore were unaffected by such developments and continue to maintain these traditional beliefs and practices so this is a particularly distinctive aspect of chinese singaporean culture the development of language in singapore also reflects the interplay of the three driving forces here so for this zone the exhibition design team wanted to create a space that would resemble a housing estate playground to emphasize that cultural interactions often take place amongst children when they come together to play and three language categories were selected to highlight how linguistic landscape in singapore evolved firstly there is the category of borrowed words so this comes about when one ethnic community or dialect group borrows words from another group in order to facilitate communication and in the early days even though the ethnic and dialect groups often lived apart but their paths would still frequently cross in singapore for example a hokkien housewife might buy something from a cantonese shopkeeper a teochew trader might need the services of a malay policeman or british officer so through these interactions people learn bits and pieces of each other's languages so for example you would have kang pang which is a word bar borrowed from malay by the chinese to refer to kampong and basien as i mentioned earlier a word bought from english language for percent and this borrowing as i said also occurred in the other direction for instance kyasu which is a hokkien word for afraid to lose is now part of the english language here and tahu which is a hokkien word for beancur is also used in malay secondly we have combination words these came about because there's close and sustained interaction between two ethnic groups in singapore and their respective languages became then familiar to each other in early 19th century singapore where malay made up the majority malay was the common language used in the region in fact dictionaries were published to help chinese in singapore to learn malay however over time due to the great influx of chinese migrants singapore eventually had a chinese majority within which the hokkiens formed the largest group hence the hokkien dialect also became commonly used by many communities here so some examples of combination words will include kopitiyam so kopi is malay for coffee and being the hokkien word for shot and then you could order a drink like kopi ping soo thai so kopi is malay for coffee ping is hokkien for ice and sugar is cantonese for less space meaning less condensed milk so within one drink order you have three different languages and thirdly of course we have the last category which are created or invented words so these are words which are created specifically to cater to unique contexts in singapore so for example a public housing scheme is a big success and so we have a word referring to http flats jungfu we also have an invention known as the coe the certificate of entitlement and for that we invented a unique chinese phrase so these are again terms that will not be at all familiar with other chinese communities around the world food the evolution of food also reflects this interplay of the three driving forces in singapore and for this zone the exhibition team designed the space to look like a hawker center to emphasize the fact that hawker centers are again a different type of space where people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds gather to enjoy each other's cuisines so two food categories were selected to highlight how certain local food dishes have evolved firstly there are local dishes which reflect interactions between two different dialect groups in singapore for instance the popular tainanese chicken rice has its origins from the wenchang chicken dish this was brought to singapore by early migrants from hailan island however the hainanese in singapore later incorporated the cantonese method of dipping freshly boiled meat in ice water in order to create a silky jelly-like skin so this is an example of interaction happening between two dialect groups secondly there are also local dishes which reflect interactions between two different ethnic groups in singapore so for instance a very common breakfast staple at the local coffee shop is the cajon toast coffee and softball eggs so this was a breakfast set first made popular by hanani's run coffee shops many early hainanese had in fact worked in british or praanakan chinese homes where western style fare was eaten this was where they learned how to cook softball eggs brew coffee and also serve toast with jam since fruit jam was not easily available in singapore then then local cooks replaced it with kaya which is a local gem made with coconut milk eggs sugar and pandan leaves the manner in which three driving forces influence the evolution of food language and festivals is organic and complex it is the cumulative result of many actions taken by different peoples and groups over many years so hence it is difficult if not impossible to attribute certain changes to specific individuals or events so for example researchers have still not been able to determine the first hainanese who came up with the idea of using the cantonese method of cooking chicken rice or the person who first coined the term kopitam however it is possible to see how the interplay of the three driving forces has had an impact on the creative output of local individuals and organizations because they have all grown up in singapore and felt the full impact of its multicultural milieu and public policies over the years so from its migrant beginnings singapore has become one of the most diverse societies in the world and as a city-state singapore is also one of the most globally connected places in the world this has resulted in many singaporeans who are open to different ideas languages religions lifestyles and points of view so whether in the arts in food in popular culture they are not bound to a fixed way of looking at the world and the exhibition highlights a number of such cases so for example and eric cool were the earliest to incorporate singapore's multilingual environments into their plays and films over time it became common to hear mandarin together with english malay tamil and other chinese dialects all within one film or theatrical production sometimes characters would switch between languages a trait exhibited by many singaporeans today so this would lead to a genre of multilingual films and theatrical works which is a distinctive trait of the local art scene likewise the works of designers like golia chan and hans tan reflect their cosmopolitan approaches to chinese heritage bai chan is most well known for making chong sums the chinese dress making it more relevant for modern women by using more contemporary cuts as well as unconventional fabrics similarly hans tan a local designer has taken the form and materials of chinese porcelain and reinterpreted them in fresh and unusual ways but in doing so he provokes us to reflect on how we could relate to chinese culture today lastly the exhibition also includes individuals and companies who have had a major impact globally or internationally so for instance there's a prolific writer yotin whose essays are included in textbooks in singapore and china and whose books have sold more than a million copies in china other household names include the local coffee shop chain yakun kaya toast which now has more than 70 outlets all around the world including the middle east so having shared about the exhibition i thought it might be helpful uh if we take a look at a video that was produced by rhys by a local company called the smart local just to give you a taste of what the exhibition is oh my like [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] so we'll be playing [Laughter] wow so through the examples of festivals food and language and the creative practice of singaporeans the exhibition has sought to examine how the driving forces of chinese heritage cultural interaction and public policies can influence chinese singaporean culture and identity however the exhibition also recognizes that there are many many other facets like age gender which can have an impact on personal identity hence before visitors leave the exhibition they are asked to choose the three most important elements that make up their own identity and then the cumulative results are then shared real time on a projection screen at the exhibition exit in this way visitors can see how their own personal choices compare with the aggregated results interestingly the top three choices thus far are family religion and nationality in contrast age gender and career were considered the least important in terms of personal identity so in conclusion we'd like to acknowledge that an exhibition like ours can really never comprehensively cover a wide and complex topic like chinese singaporean culture and identity rather the exhibition hopes to provide an introductory framework for us to consider such issues so that the discourse can continue at opportunities like today's symposium so on that note i look forward to receiving your feedback on our framework and how it can be further improved thank you very much thank you mr lo for taking us uh through in and behind the scenes of your wonderful exhibition um we're going to go on continue now with our second speaker professor kenneth dean professor dean is raffles professor of humanities and head of the chinese department at national university of singapore he's also the research cluster leader for religion and globalization at nus's asia research institute his recent publications include epigraphical materials on the history of religion in fujian changzhou region in four volumes let's sorry jongho region four volumes uh and two co-edited works a secular secularism in south east and southeast asia a massive two-volume work um and a massive two volume work the chinese epicurry of singapore 1919 through 1911. he also directed board in heaven a film about ritual sensation on the celebrations around chinese new year's in the city of putin in china's fujian province his other publications include his co-authored ritual alliances of the putin plain in two volumes his lord of the three in one the spread of the occult in southeast china and taoist ritual and popular cults of southeast china these both later to both published by princeton university press and his co-authored the absolute state and the body of the despot he's published altogether nine volumes of stone inscriptions gathered in both fujian and southeast asia his current project is the construction of a pair of interactive multimedia databases the singapore historical gis and the singapore biographical database and it is of these databases now that we are about to learn more uh the title of his talk is new approaches to the history of overseas chinese in singapore introducing the singapore historic historical gis and singapore biographer biographical database would you please join me in welcoming professor kenneth dean good afternoon everyone i apologize that i wasn't able to join the symposium this morning due to a class that i had to uh teach online um so it's a pleasure to see people in person here in the audience and thank all of you in the online community for joining us today the maybe which one this one oh okay uh yes so this is the title of my talk today and uh i'll go right into it because i'd like to discuss a few things the singapore historical gis has been up and running for a few years now the singapore biographical database uh also was launched at the nlb uh two or three years ago each of these continues to expand and we try to incorporate and add in new materials and i'll also make some mention of the chinese epigraphy in singapore project that we've been working on because we're trying to extract some biographical information from those sources to add to the biographical database also we'll mention a fairly new project on qing tombs of singapore which we've we're well into and hoping to publish a collection of of tomb inscriptions this year and then i'll briefly mention our plans for expanding these online databases through first a malaysian historical database and ultimately of course we'd love to have a southeast asian historical gis okay what do these things mean this is the cover page for our singapore historical gis all these projects all such digital humanities projects are team projects involving the collaboration of many many scholars students and graduate and undergraduate students and that's uh certainly true about this project as well we have a recent article that's uh in religion so it's online and downloadable and gives a history of these these uh projects for you if you're interested to get more information i welcome you to look look up under religions and just download the article what this project allows us to do is to show the locations of over 800 chinese temples 250 chinese associations five or 600 christian churches over 100 mosques 30 indian temples also because we're able to include historical maps layers upon layers of historical maps that were digitized and made available to us through the geography department of nus we can show the locations of former kampong villages former cemeteries over 500 chinese schools so the we invite you to go on to this website and see for yourselves what you can uh what's interesting to you we also ask you to use the video look at the video first the how to use video because otherwise there's too much information but what the video shows you is that you can take away layers of information and then rebuild your own maps with the layers that are of interest to you basically behind this website is a survey that we've done of many temples in the community and i won't have time to go into a great deal detail here but i would like to mention that the largest piece on this pie represents the spirit medium altars in individual apartments in hdb blocks many of whom do not want to be on a map and we have not put them on a map we've put those on the map that advertise their their addresses but they still make up the largest number and in a way it's a very interesting set of temples or altars i should say in in people's apartments often in their living rooms many of these uh spirit mediums would like to have a temple of their own and many of their followers are urged them on in this aspiration and as they so there's a kind of push from below to uh create a new temple from these kinds of community forces now one feature of our gis that i think is very interesting is that we've incorporated about 250 reports composed by nus students in the course of the course i was teaching this morning uh everyday life of chinese singaporeans i ask student groups to go out and interview chinese temples and associations and to produce a photo essay and a pdf report all of which is available on our website for those of you who are interested to see what they found out what they what they've learned this report allows us to focus in on very interesting areas of singapore such as gaelang which former red well still for red light district but it's packed with temples and very virtually every lauren you can find four or five temples some churches some tibetan monasteries all kinds of uh clan associations so a very rich and complex neighborhood with very interesting historical reasons for the concentration in in this place so the uh singapore historical gis allows you to zoom in on specific neighborhoods and ask questions about how they came to be the way they are why the distributions are the way they are basically we can use this as a platform to tell a very simple story about singapore this is a map that shows the locations in yellow a former kampong almost 200 villages around singapore with a number of their cemeteries nearby so those purple dots are cemeteries that were associated with villages but with the rise of the hdb and you see the pink coloring behind a lot of the villages disappeared by the end of the 90s there were very few left if any on singapore and some of these other areas that you see here were taken over for either military uh or airport or uh industry so the the villages indeed have disappeared this is a typical image of that process with the hdb block going up in the background and the village being torn down in the foreground now many of these villages had temples of their own sometimes two or three on the left hand right hand corner there you can see uh the dots that represent different temples of different villages all of whom ended up in this joint temple or united temple each temple being reduced down to a single altar so the gods of their temple would be in front of that altar uh sometimes as many as 13 in a single space so we have about 70 such joint temples in singapore with over 350 temples included in them and they represent a very interesting part of singapore's history the first one is from 1974 [Music] many of them tell the stories of the movements of their communities from their villages and the effort of those communities to somehow survive to the present day in these in these somewhat reduced circumstances this is one example of one temple that's had to move four times in its history over the past 50 or 60 years due to constantly evolving urban redevelopment plans that has been the fate of many temples most temples only get a 30 year lease and so we're often forced to contemplate moving here's one temple that moved three times before giving up and then sending its gods back to jinman where they had come from many years before they gave them some money to set up a retirement account for the gods and ask them to look after them there but the opposite trend is the deeper historical trend moving from uh fujian which you see here in a linguistic map uh two um zooming into the other temples of the major uh god cults regional gods of the uh hokkien community matzu gonzo zunwang and chicheong hang meow all of these uh gods have a set of temples here in singapore and what can trace the generation by generation spread of this division of incense network across southeast asia as you can see in this one illustration we'd have to go into much more detail to describe how it really worked locally another feature we've added recently to our shgis or the financial accounts of most of the religious institutions in singapore that are registered uh charities so it's possible to uh to download the annual finances for the last three years for several hundred temples and we can do interesting analysis of the religious economy of singapore through these resources so there's lots in this website i encourage you to look into it and and see if you find something interesting for yourselves and also if you find errors to let us know now moving on to the biographical database this is a web representation of the relationships of of several hundred key singaporeans with several hundred more singaporeans it's uh it's uh based on uh uh dr quas uh uh uh which includes uh 1278 biographies of historical chinese singaporeans we've also drawn on 100 years of chinese in singapore and we've worked with the nus chinese library on their collection of the nanyang mingren which includes many people from the 30s and 20s and 30s in this region we're now looking to find ways to incorporate more materials from our epigraphy studies so we found in our first two volumes over forty thousand individual donor names and over the names of about ten thousand shanghai or chong hao uh that were active in that early period meanwhile we've also digitized the booked brown burial record of 68 000 individuals names but it's very difficult to move from those english recorded sources to the chinese tomb inscriptions because there can often be a delay in the burial and the transcriptions reflect many different dialects so we're still working on trying to connect those kinds of data and we're working also thinking very hard about working with the library further on the collections this incredible collection of uh regional and clan association commemorative volumes uh mr lee of the library uh spent years going around to quigwan to collect these sources of which there are several hundred there are 1200 in all singaporean libraries and we believe we're now working with uh groups in malaysia to try to expand their catalog of those sources to include additional sources found in malaysian queben we're very eager to work on genealogies we know there are about a hundred interesting genealogies here in singapore but so far people haven't really done the work to trace them back people in zhengzhou put together a collection of about 600 of their genealogies and found several hundred in taiwan that they could link directly to those genealogies what generation what person went to taiwan and what the continued connections and circulations may have been we believe we can do a great deal of similar kind of research with singapore sources in the future i'm happy to say that paul kratoska's index to the colonial archives has now been digitized by the library and it's a really great resource which we can uh look forward on drawing on individuals names out of there as well so the tombstones that i'll introduce in a moment are also another source and many more sources are available in the national archives so all of these projects linked together through the types of institutions and archives that you see listed on this slide so i won't spend a lot of time on this for those of you who are interested please download the article from religions and you can get a lot more information there these are the inscription volumes that professor cook very kindly mentioned just a moment ago they include about 1200 inscriptions from the about 70 or 70 odd uh sites around singapore now for each of those what we do is put the text into a computer text something called textual enhancement initiative allows us to transfer those texts into a computerized and searchable database so we put the text in like that in the original format then into a computer format and then we can extract individuals names and the names of organizations from there this is just more detail on that several of them overlap with those already in our biographical database and so we're excited to find some such development of frequency counts that tell us something about not only the leading elites but also the middle men who helped things develop between institutions uh in this case these are all individuals names centered in various major institutions but a lot of them intersect in smaller institutions uh where they also contributed to a to a smaller type of uh either hue or temple yeah okay this is these are kinds of graphic representations of a family business the family business and all of his uh intimate connections you can see how densely uh located it is on the screen this is one for the tantok singh and the hokkien communities instead of working on a family business model they worked on a trading model where they work with several groups simultaneously develop banks and insurance companies and create a kind of a climate of interaction which both of these models have impacts on singapore today which we could discuss this is the next volume i was very happy to see mr lowe here today because i can personally thank him for the support of the singapore center for chinese culture which has helped sponsor this second volume a second set of volumes that we're working on now it starts out with the singapore chamber of commerce and other famous temples that have inscriptions after 1911 or 12. we've found about another 1200 artifacts with inscriptions in these which we're going through and translating and classifying and hope to publish sometime later this year uh singapore in the early period was clustered around the river and then there were lots of gambiar plantations elsewhere uh the ten ho king on telegram street overlooked the sea some of you may not know that some of the newer visitors to singapore this is the temple today and these are some of the inscriptions and the materials that we've worked into our databases by first typing them out in this format and then putting them into a computer format and same with these inscriptions the hung chanting is a very interesting story because uh it was in tiong baru unfortunately burned down in 1992 it was very beautiful in its heyday and it was the and this was its uh regulations which survived this plaque survived and is in the na nang huegon exhibition hall uh this uh is part of a this the the hyung chanting was the cemetery organization for the hokkien people and so they kept there was a cemetery in tung buru it expanded there soon it filled in and uh as the singapore general hospital expanded they took more and more parts of the cemetery so the uh hung chanting organized a shinhan jiangting a new hunchangting out in what's as close to bukit brown we all know about bukit brown but some people may not realize that there was originally three or four other cemeteries there the saiyan swa the lao swa and the these were and the hokkien queen cemetery were all in the area before the colonial government cut out a piece uh for the establishment of the book at brown in 1922 and in these places we have found great many clusters of qing dynasty tombs as you can see from this this list here one particular set along unreal road which is closed off road off of mount pleasant had the earliest tombs that we found in singapore um and about 450 of them meanwhile as you know the highway went through bucket brown and and several thousand tombs had to be exhumed amongst that number about 336 stated to the qing dynasty but we have at least the photographs and inscriptions that we've been able to take from those in our own field work we found almost 200 more in bucket brown and almost 200 in lausa many of you will be familiar with mr raymond go who has gone around and found all these inscriptions and brought many families back to their ancestors tombs over the past years his website which has recently gone up has over 360 tombs that we don't yet have information on david ching very earlier on worked on some inscriptions and we have other scattered tombs by these i include the uh the tombs of founders such as tantok singh and saint joseph's christian cemetery has has about close to 100 and the japanese cemetery as the tombs of many uh karikan uh women forced into prostitution in the early period so in total we think we may have close to two thousand qing dynasty tombstones in singapore which is a fairly significant part of the material cultural heritage of the island tanto sang right here and his tomb this is the tomb of his son in the old days it was out in changi with beautiful uh ornamentation in front of it uh later it was moved into book brown and is this is the way it is now this is a chin's tomb some years ago but more recently it's grown over and all the moss has completely covered it up so it really also requires sustained uh care to turn it into a important monument of national history and heritage these are some of the early tombs down in tung baru hung chanting down below and these are the movements over time into the new cemetery so these are this is sort of what this these clusters look like they're all set in just the tombstone in in various sectors we found a bunch in the forest near onryat road this is the earliest tomb we found before singapore 1826. we also found the earliest mention of a buddhist monk in singapore a couple of two or three monks actually from 1847 and his disciple from 1859 and were able to trace back because of the names on the tombstones the points of origins for many of these people a great many of the ones in the hangzhou uh the shinhan shanking cemetery came from one village outside of uh it's called shiatsung and it's near haichang in django so i went to visit it turns out to be the same village that zaixerjang the came from and he had gone back to that same uh jamiao and rebuilt the ancestral hall and there's an inscription under his name there where he explains he's bringing his father and grandfather's shandrupai back then his grandson came back and did the same thing for him so there are a couple of inscriptions showing these ties were very connected to that place in in taichung but the ones here in the jungle seem to have very few descendants and may represent a real difference in class and maybe a coulee contingent out of the same village it's a very big thai lineage now covering about 20 or 30 000 people in a dozen villages nearby side by side really an interesting story though and we think we can do more with this type of research finally i wanted to say that we're expanding into malaysia and we've added several thousand points for temples and different sorts of associations in malaysia for example in penang and its surroundings we can zoom down to find different categories of temples and distributions we can add in materials from fieldwork these green points are added to our by field work and we hope to include the shin swan as one major element in our research moving forward because they remain very interesting and complex centers of chinese everyday life in in malaysia many are many temples in them moved from other locations this is the last thing i'll show you this is a project on sinkawang where we have located lots of locations of temples around the region um for each of those temples we can we've added some photography this one includes a shrine to lofang amongst the other deities he's the founder he's the head of the one of the great guns that uh had an independent kingdom in borneo for about 80 years uh run by hakka gold miners and some architectural plans uh to show the layout of these temples so i think my time is up uh but uh thank you very much for uh giving me this opportunity to share some of our our recent developments and we look forward to your comments and suggestions thank you [Applause] well thanks professor dean for your very detailed and informative introduction it is incredibly useful resources we'd like to now invite you and mr lowe back onto the stage for some uh question answers um we have about uh 20 let's say maybe 25 minutes for a q a um and i guess we'll we'll start with a question from the audience or actually are there any coming in from the zoom feed yet yeah so this question maybe can be directed at both of you so um what uh what kind of progress do you think that chinese singaporean culture will chart into the future um i guess it's hard to say but you know uh looking at the framework that i spoke about just now uh looking at it you know quite simplistically at the three driving forces chinese heritage cultural interactions and public policies i would say that in the coming years it's probably the latter two driving forces that will become more significant uh the diversity uh in singapore is definitely becoming a lot more complex even though we maintain say the ethnic representation in singapore with 75 chinese uh but the types of chinese that are here in singapore is becoming very diverse we have migrants from northern china now different parts of china not just southern china so they bring it with it with them a different complexity and of course the third or the last aspect of public policies would again have a significant impact on how culture develops in singapore how singapore government how singapore is governed as a country and of course how singapore government responds to external developments be the rights of china or other kind of global factors i i completely agree uh with mr lowe's statements i'd like to make a pitch for the importance of heritage nonetheless which may in fact tie into policy uh if there is enough interest amongst younger generations and i think the center's efforts to educate the young on this topic is a very very big part of that process there may be a growing sense that singapore has reached a kind of a tipping point in its its progress and that there is no time and space to consider the past and and heritage issues even more than has perhaps been possible up till now so there seems to be a growing commitment to this type of thing and i think the center's establishment is an indication of that and the kinds of research that's going on in many sectors is also indicative of growing interest in in heritage so i i do hope that uh heritage doesn't fall behind in in the uh the three driving factors in in the future i would very much agree with kenneth i think the the the high level of public interest over the fate of bukit brown i think signals this uh it's not just you know from a group of historians who are interested but ordinary singaporeans have been galvanized by the fate of booket brown and how it's been able to to to unearth a wealth of information about us that we didn't know before so i think uh it speaks it bodes well for a growing sense of the importance of chinese heritage in singapore or heritage in general thank you good now hi yeah thanks so thank you very much for the very interesting and what seemed on the surface to be quite different presentations but i think it kind of ties up quite nicely because of what dr lowe said about you know in your kind of survey of people who come in and you ask them what are the sources of um chinese identity for them and i think you named family and religion as the top two and that ties directly into ken's talk and so i'm actually really struck by the density of the kind of network of chinese temples chinese religious institutions in singapore and i thought that um professor wang's talk in the beginning you know about like what is chinese identity in singapore um and it just all made me think that you know what is this deep kind of um i mean i wouldn't say obsession but you know this kind of deep feeling for for the uh you know for the ancestral kind of you know what seems to me like an ancestral link but maybe they're not and so how do these um elements of family and religious identities which are centered in in in basically religious practices in singapore how do you think that connects really the sense of identity of being chinese uh with the kind of like you know the home provinces of fujian and teochew so i'm interesting like the the provinces the regions of china where most of the singaporean chinese come from and the current practices of religion here which seems to have quite a lot of this kind of heritage identities but is it really about connections with china or is it actually about using these heritage connections to create new identity identities of chinese in singapore um okay i can't say we've done much research uh regarding the importance of significance of religion to the sense of chineseness amongst local singaporeans but one thing that we have observed and this is uh shown in our exhibition in the sections where we talk about the popularity of the three festivals festival as well as the topekang festival in pulau ubin we made the deliberate decision of using video clips as our display materials and these are all contemporary clips meaning they were shot or filmed in the last five or ten years and then when you look at these clips these video clips it's quite surprising many of the devotees or worshippers taking part in these ceremonies or practices are young singaporeans if you look at their faces and you know what what they are doing in fact there are many younger singaporeans who take part in in such either four beliefs or religious practices and uh i i believe that you're right to say that uh religion uh place still plays an important role uh in their day-to-day life and in that sense probably also plays a role in their sense of identity i think those three uh rituals were very well chosen uh because they also uh display a range of practices in which there's been an increasing localization of chinese identity uh through the jungle good high traditions here in singapore there's really quite something quite unique has taken shape it's quite extraordinary uh to see it developing uh on into a very big online phenomenon recently too the uh nine emperor gods are very hard to find an origin in china to this tradition there's a lot of discussion of whether thailand or phuket or somewhere else may have been the first place where these practices took the shape they have now and then spread through malaysia to singapore where there are 16 temples on the island uh worshiping them in different ways so there again i totally agree with mr lowe that the young people's participation is increasingly interesting sometimes i think that people have replaced incense with a cell phone but they still show a great deal of attention and and interest in the object of their observation and through the social media uh there's a greater impact to these uh events even than the very increasing numbers of people involved would allow but this is a kind of a southeast asian developed ritual that's spread across the chinese communities here and that's very interesting and is a fascinating case where there is the chinese temple but also the the karamat of the islamic holy man and his his family and there's inscriptions above it in several languages which detail the possession of a spirit medium on rangoon street here in singapore by the the lady of that tomb at a certain point in the 1930s and it was so such a interesting phenomenon of trans-cultural interaction that it was recorded in several languages on inscriptions above the tomb so again the inter cultural dimension is is a very interesting develop possible development for singapore in the future uh places like loyang dabugung include in them a hindu shrine to ganesh akaramat and various chinese tutigong deities yin yin yang so very interesting possibilities for future explorations of chinese identity within singapore i'd just like to share a little bit more about the another layer of diversity or interaction that you see at the pulao at the topekong festival in pulau ubin uh the tapo in pulau bin is actually on buddha's hill for shan it's called and this particular topic unlike the other topic on the island on singapore island has chosen a different birthday for itself because it's located on buddha hill so it has decided or it's told its worshippers that it's put its birthday is actually v suck day so it's decided to adopt a buddhist date as its own birthday so therefore the tropicon worshippers on hula ubin uh celebrate topicon's birthday on b saturday so that's another i i just misspoke i just realized when you were explaining that i was thinking of the gosu island uh pilgrimage which i thought was also very interesting because of this mix but this is a wonderful uh example of of a doppelgang adapting a vaisakh day which is itself a compromise between the theravadan and mahayana groups here in singapore to select that day for the buddhist birthday shin from the online audience uh so this is a question for professor dean it's very exciting to learn about the shgis digital platform and are there any plans in the pipeline to expand on these resources and include representations of other ethnicities in singapore yes thank you we do have location information for several 600 churches uh 100 mosques and and 20 or 30 indian temples and we very much look forward to working with communities students and members of the public to extend our coverage of those those sites that the commission of charities information covers all those sites so it's now possible at least at the kind of economic analysis level to to compare quite detailed uh records of these different institutions in recent years and their activities but we hope to add more uh information on the cultural and historical dimensions of these uh sites some of them are very new and very big and growing fast and there is something to watch uh they're very going to play major increasingly important roles in uh singapore's future as well so thank you for the question singapore cultural professor how different picture would i get about being a chinese from visiting the chinese cultural center in waterloo street what's the difference between the two how will you position yourself uh so um just to share the organization or the building at waterloo street or queen street is the china cultural center so that's really an extension of the chinese government it's very much like you know how gutter institute is associated with the french government british council with the british government so the china cultural center um doesn't have a permanent exhibition it's mainly a programming space and i think they also have a very good library and the intent and purpose of the china cultural center is really to showcase uh art and culture from china so they often bring in groups exhibits from china and then share them with the public so at my center which is the singapore chinese cultural center since uh i guess we are doing it in a different manner in a sense that what we want to show and highlight and promote are singapore groups individuals so the works are presented by singapore arts and cultural groups with a connection to chinese culture and this is one of the reasons why we decided that we wanted to set up a permanent exhibition that is open every day and free to the public to show that in fact the chinese culture in singapore rooted in chinese heritage has a very different complexion because it's grown up or evolved in a very different context and that that context is very much rooted in the very diverse or multi-ethnic multicultural society that that has evolved here in singapore so i i believe it should present a very different experience uh when visitors come to our center okay next question okay professor and i want to get a view what is your perception on singapore chinese so this question also for mr law and mr professor lin [Music] so i guess for us uh for me i would see uh the issue of singapore chinese culture or identity um being very much bound to [Music] both ethnic identity but more with the whole process of nation building so national identity that plays a very important role so hence the the title or the subtitle of our exhibition is singaporean discovering chinese singaporean culture and not discovering singaporean chinese culture so for us the it's singapore culture at the core and chinese being the adjective to describe uh this singapore culture so hence i i think to answer your question the singapore chinese culture is one where it's rooted the core is a national one and i think it's the ethnic identity that kind of distinguishes fellow citizens from one another i've only had the privilege of visiting singapore over the past uh 12 or 15 years i think i came in the early late 80s for the first time for a daoist event and i've been at nus for six years so i don't consider myself an expert in the way that many in the audience are i i do think it's useful to study singapore in uh chinese culture in relation to the broader southeast asian context and the historical developments that have led to the remarkable success of singapore i think success has its prices sometimes and that's why i encourage more research on heritage and history and rethinking alternatives to the built environment and i am deeply impressed by the density of religious activity in a post-secular state so i find i find singapore fascinating and chinese culture here extraordinarily interesting i think there are lots of complex issues that singaporean chinese will have to work through and resolve in the future but uh if if there's any way that our work can contribute to building up the historical resources for that uh process we're we're happy to to do that and uh we're very grateful as i mentioned to the singapore uh chinese cultural center and various institutions moe and other mccy hdb and hp have all supported our research so i think that speaks to a growing interest and a growing need to train even more singaporean researchers in these fields so that they can further the process of imagining singapore's future together i think we have time for another question from the online audience with the movement of temples and clan associations over time due to land pressures a lot of artifacts would be lost along the way so do the singapore chinese cultural center or nus have plans to systematically reach out and help collect these items and documents maybe i'll start first i have to answer your question by saying yes and no uh no in a sense that uh because we the cultural center is not set up to be a museum uh nor an archive so we would not be in a position to be able to acquire or to collect such materials but we do want to play a facilitative role so over the years we have put in place grants schemes either grant schemes for research or publications schemes for supporting publications so that's i think the way in which we can play a role in this task i think nus is also somewhat limited uh the museum here is excellent but small and that's a problem perhaps for the entire museum infrastructure in in singapore i think we may have to start to get very creative in thinking of alternative ways to rework the material culture of the past into future possibilities i'm thinking of a of a cemetery in england that's uh reworked itself into a kind of a cultural venue that includes a lot of historical information walks and tours but also has all kinds of cultural activities cafes and and restaurants also working very closely with environmentalists and architects to design interesting ways to rework material culture of the past into contemporary displays or contemporary interactive spaces so i do hope that there can be more such creative thinking uh in the future one example might be the japanese cemetery which is a public park and is very well kept and is a very interesting place to visit a very peaceful beautiful site in singapore as well i can imagine some of the cemetery spaces developing in that direction there's been a great already a great deal of of work from grassroots groups uh the tung baru local history groups have included tantok singh's tomb in their walking tour of tijung baru and helped repair some of the pathways and and railings uh there's efforts on the part of the all things booked brown group to uh identify tombs create walking tours with apps that you can walk through with your phone and find out as you go what you're seeing many more such projects could be done but again it's really quite an urgent question because development never stops in singapore as we know and so there are frequently moments of of where decisions will have to be made uh for preservation or or not so i do hope there can be more creative thinking in this area i thought that one creative solution were in fact offered by the temples here the the the idea of united temples where i know several temples come together uh to share resources so that might be a way for clan associations to kind of creatively uh look for a solution to optimize their own resources okay we're just a couple minutes over now i think we'll have to to conclude at this point so um thanks once again mr lowe and professor dean for uh very wonderful talks and um a round of applause and um we'll uh reconvene in about half an hour at four o'clock for our final panel today thank you panels today um on the theme of the articulation of chinese identities in singapore our first speaker of this panel is professor quachongwan of who is a senior fellow at the s rajaratnam school of international studies rsis at nanyang technological university as well as our honorary adjunct associate professor in the history department here at nus as senior fellow at rsis he supports a series of regional security projects with other regional institutions ranging from maritime security to energy security cyber security nuclear energy safety and security and biosecurity he's also co-chair of the singapore member committee of the council for security cooperation in the asia pacific um and in that capacity was elected as the asean co-chair of that council for the years 2011 through 2013 and he is the rsis board member of the china southeast asia research center on the south china sea which brings together six southeast asian policy institutes to work with china's national institute for south china sea studies in all of his work on security studies and international relations in southeast asia professor qua's research is underpinned by history and a focus on the implicit narratives underlining our framing of regional security at the history department of the national university of singapore and at the archaeological institute at the icas usa feshac institute he's interested in issues pertaining to the long cycles and deep history of southeast asia he's author of numerous articles edited volumes and books including singapore chronicles pre-colonial singapore published in 2017 and 700 years a history of singapore co-authored with derek hung peter borschberg and tan and published in 2019 is an updated version of the work that they had published 10 years earlier and i'll also mention again that he is along with uh the co-editor of the english version of a general history of chinese in the chinese in singapore and contributed to contributor to of a couple of the original uh chapters written specifically for that edition uh the title of professor claus talked today is shaping singapore's chinese identities would you please join me in welcoming professor quatron [Applause] quad well thank you rocco i am sorry you had to read out that very lengthy biography uh i should have shortened it i didn't know you're going to read everything but as i said it's already there on the screen and you just simply said i will leave you to read it faster than i can speak it out for you so i'd like to thank you very much for inviting me to this uh contribute to this yale and u.s zoom webinar it was a surprise a pleasant surprise an invitation which i could not turn down and i'm delighted that you allowed me to speak to this topic that i have agreed to on shaping on the factors and drivers shaping singapore's chinese identities and basically i want to make the point that there are four here and evolving local straits chinese identity the base and i want to argue that it was a push and pull fact of china and the attractions of british colonialism and the imperatives of post-world war ii decolonization and asian building in all of this as a second last speaker i have nothing new to say our keynote speaker prof wang has already covered all of this and i'll be adding a few footnotes only to what he has said this morning and also what my colleague prof huang jian li has said and the last one so he has already covered in some detail yeah so i'm sorry that i have nothing more new to say so first um i start with who did saying think he is well i stand to be corrected by mark lin and by candy who have been looking into this in greater detail but basically the facts that we know of time taxing aware that he was the first of the malaccan chinese to respond to to farca's invitation to come down to singapore and we know that he started as an itinerant hawker and he really made his break when he teamed up with the british merchant j.h whitehead to go into land speculation and then he rose to be the uh leader of the malacca chinese community and rebuilt the manchu temple which you all have been looking at on the screen for the whole of today and contributed to what is today the tang toxin hospital what is interesting here is that the uh how he signed himself off and that dedication steely the seelie is now in the toxin hospital heritage center and right at the end there after all the usual you know my compassion has led me to do this and to do that and all that he says this is my preface uh he did this in the qing dynasty 25th year of the top 1 reign of 1845 and he says [Music] zhou proving the prefecture of province so quite clearly and dak zing saw himself in his ancestral village in fujian and part of a century-old extensive network of chinese trading communities in the nan high he was in effect as professor wong has often reported the basic pattern of hwashang he was a migrant trader who maintained his things with his homeland and in today's language damon also he was basically a comprador linking his hokkien trading world with that of the colonial trading world and this world was the dialect group the bang and it was focused on the temple ken hog king that he contributed i think three thousand dollars to the building off and we have been looking at this silhouette the whole of today in the slides there the hokkien training world i've argued elsewhere is very well defined in this map sullivan what we call the southern map uh of the british uh juris john selden dated around 1620 that is a very unusual map and you want we can discuss it a bit more at the question time range which shows the trading route so the second map in black and white with all those black lines and highlighted are the trading routes of the hokkien merchants in the 17th century so bangkok singh was very much a member of that gang trading world that extended from japan right down to southeast asia and up the malacca streets so the chiang hao king wasn't the only temple the wak hai cheng biang in phillips street is the oldest uh taichu temple and in this photo here you see the architect my young colleague yo kangsha who was largely responsible for the research into the architectural history of the temple which as he deduced was orientated to serve the daichi gambia planters in that region there in the area as we all know the dayton gambia planters predated the arrival of raffles and of course as are discussing during break time the hengshan tang temple on silat road was which was constructed by seahood k who came to singapore with time talking but was already merchant of standing and could build this cemetery temple in 1827 long before anton singh was anybody and the temple there is now a new scene hiking in high ting temple at phuket brown kopiswa they call it bear so the color photo here is from a collection taken by the photographer by the guy ronnie pinsler way back before 1992. we have very few photographs of this temple i think i stand to be corrected by candy but very few here so what we have here and i go on to the next point is that we have the push of china from the 1840s to the 1930s diaspora which was centered around the emergence of the antihoi the secret societies as the british call them to manage the flow of the huacan to singapore and the to do this through the establishment of kong seas or trading companies to control the uh this hong kong so the what we were taught in our history in primary school secondary school the gehen a secret society they were also a congress engaged in business to support their activities there so what we have here is you can see in the three photos how we have remembered this uh hong kong diaspora on in a bronze statue on the banks of the singapore river near the bridge there and that pattern continued as you can see as all of us may some of us may remember in our memories these uh chinese coolies carrying these unloading these cargos along the singapore river and again we have seen that in earlier slides that our colleagues showed this morning there so basically i think has been come out in the earlier presentations these uh kong seas these three arts were a challenge to the colonial authority and how the authorities had to react to them as buckland has pointed out again that it was a challenge also to the first the malacca chinese who control the temples and the banks the third driver here that i would suggest to you is about the law of colonialism that the yes time taxing and his colleagues generation came as compradors but by 1840s 1850s certainly in 1860s they had become collaborators in the british with the british in the building of the empire collaborators to maintain their position with the british of the control of the chinese communities here secondly to join the british in the opening of the malay peninsula tin mining timber and the other natural products of the peninsula and finally the attractions of turning to english education so here you see the picture of the 1867 legislative council harry oate i think is the man there in the gown and you see one of them i forget who is that person in that chinese dress costume there and this other photograph here is the first batch of queen scholars that went off to london to uk for education and the guy at the corner there sitting down that's slim king and the other guy is so you see here this turn to collaborating and of course in the wider context of empire history is nothing new in india the raj turned to collaborate with the british in ruling the country india there's a very interesting quote here of this new evolving lifestyle by the british colonial author born 1879 about the malacca babas who can claim no connection in china but continue to maintain the links the traditions of china and yet basically what he's saying is that outside of those swinging doors they were very british they had their clubs they conformed but once behind the swinging doors they became entirely retreated to a very chinese world there and you can find similar comments by other british commentators of this uh very divided divided uh style of living of the evolving local chinese community so all this builds up to the point that prof wang was making this morning that there was a very clear it was a very clear divide two worlds between the local born chinese and the new immigrant chinese the sin cakes the hong kong here and i would suggest to you that by the turn of the century anja kim was the quintessential baba with one foot in the colonial world one foot in the baba chinese world and these three photos i think makes the point there you see him in his traditional costume with his family and his house the house used to stand on river valley road lima prang it was called just in front of the junction on river valley and saint thomas walked there and from that you can see the lifestyle that we're leading there is now in fact a very interesting private museum run by a medical doctor owned by where he has break replicated much of this uh baba house of the early 20th century and in the bottom there is the funeral hust that anjakim was apparently transported for his last journey when i was assigned to the national museum i found in the storeroom this dilapidated broken down thing and i asked the curators what is this can it be repaired and restored no and i said if you can't then why are we keeping this pile of broken down furniture throw it out and he says no we were not and they restored it to this state there where it was on display at the new national museum there so that was how tanja jacquim made his last journey on this thing there and of course here in that tradition of the anglo increasingly anglophone world would be the pinnacle of it where he openly declared that he is the king's chinese and you see him here in this portrait very british and you look at him with his uh very direct place at you and you see on the table behind him or next to him there you look quietly one of them is the holy bible the one on the table there is his history of the chinese this is the king's chinese what we have then by the turn of the century two competing chinese identities the strict chinese british association on which anja kim was one of the founding members and you see that there on that side there that photo there dedicated to preserving furthering the interests of those straight spawn chinese anglophone chinese and on this side here the singapore chinese chamber of commerce the association of the china traders then and you can see the difference in the costumes where their allegiances are and i think we've seen this photo from bob buckland just now about the powerful very direct pull of china and so i think this quote here this very well-known quote all of us know heaven is high and the emperor is far away applies very well to untoxing he was not bothered about the emperor about being a subject of the great mint of the great ching state but i think by the time of tanja kim sang and limbo king that emperor had come very close to them with the appointment of south england as the council general and as parliament has pointed out the competition the claim or the loyalties of the strange chinese which the british korean authorities then had to respond to so issue then of the reform of the china where the politics of it and you have here the visits of kang yuwe and both bringing the style of politics and reform to singapore and the response by lim bon king a re-cynicized chinese who studied chinese i think he also got to the point where he could translate one of the old chinese classics and he went back to china and for a while was the uh chancellor i think of xiamen and the other guy whom we don't heard too much about who shot one who actually went back to china and sat for the one of the final imperial exams and qualified and passed and qualified to be appointed but he came back to singapore and i think he was the one who hosted gang your way on his visit to singapore wakang iway state for several months suny sun of course is better known in the suny sun villa which we have restored to commemorate his visit and the pool of china again is seen in the uh support that don kaki gave in leading the singapore china relief fund he and obun hall were the key donors to that fund so in this water you see a younger looking bangkaki with sunyat sun and auburn hall all decked out with his british decorations there so that again gives you the conflicting diverse loyalties identities of that generation there and finally during the occupation for these two communities do they join the land peoples and the japanese army and this is the photo of a post-war parade of the malayan people's anti-japanese army that went on to become the militant arm of the malayan communist party in the emergency here so let me sum up this by saying that then it was as he said in his memoirs that he didn't realize until then there was a whole group of chinese educated in chinese schools who did not acknowledge or unaware of the british and the colonial system and after the war he was to learn more about them so i think this line here i put in here to indicate that at least for my generation right through the 1950s 60s we were defined by the schools we went to so whether you went to that school at the top there and i put it there simply because that was my school and whether you went to the other school fundamentally shaped your world view and after that whether you went to this university or you went to that university consolidated that very different identities here and in the post-world war ii world all these identities played out in the politics of the era so here you see the progressive party established after world war ii and then the sbca what to do do we take a point of stand and fight and then president t.w hinch ew he sorry this man he blinked and took the sbca out of politics we are chinese doesn't appeal to the rest of singaporeans but not lky lee kuan yew was actually prepared to use the spca as his first political platform and when they didn't rise to the occasion he went off to form the pap but the chinese chamber of commerce was prepared to put their money down and form the democratic party and of course beneath them both was the malayan communist party with the united front strategy and the mastermind was youtube oh prof wang knew very well when he was brought back to work in the east asia institute and so finally let me conclude by saying that to hear that evolving identity anglophone chinese china chinese had to change as silvie was discussing will they decolonizate with independence and how do you manage the plural society of a colonial port city and meld it into a nation state and so he has worked through all the issues with you rajaratnam thought we should all be put into a cooking pot and become a curry i think by georgio no no no those bits of the curry become a smooth curry look at their little bits and i think george you thought a bit more as a plate of rujak or smoshboard here and as we have discussed also it all goes back to the bilingual policies the speak mandarin campaign from 1979 onwards that fundamentally has changed our identities in singapore here so where are we today are we still evolving our content here hybrid strict chinese or prana khan identity which is responding to the demands of a colonial state a city-state or a global city all three demand different demands on their citizens and all this in a globalizing southeast asia experiencing renewed push and pulls for dominance from china and the u.s thank you very much thank you professor kawa for a highly informative look at what the various factors that went into shaping the different chinese identities here in singapore i'd like to now move on to our today's final speaker uh who is associate professor of chinese at the national university of singapore prior to coming to nus uh professor qui was associate professor in the department of historical studies of the center for diaspora and transnational studies at the university of toronto having previously earned her phd at the university of leiden her research interests include southeast asian history especially the histories of indonesia malaysia and singapore colonialism and imperialism especially dutch and british chinese ethnicity migration religion and transnationalism and entrepreneurial networks among others she's the author of a number of articles in these fields as well as the author of the book the political economy of java's northeast coast circa 1740 through 1800 elite synergy published by brill in 2006. the title over talk today is racializing chinese in southeast asia the case of singapore at the turn of the 20th century would you please join me in welcoming professor quihuei ken thank you hello hi good afternoon everyone thanks uh professor cook for inviting me to this symposium so i just get straight to the story i wonder if i have time to talk about everything but so title of my talk today is racializing chinese in southeast asia case of singapore at the turn of the 20th century i'll start by talking about the field state of the field uh here i refer to the field of chinese overseas especially chinese in southeast asia and especially the sub-field of history so in terms of the historical methodology i think in general not just the history of the chinese in singapore is that we can see that there's actually quite an insufficient interrogation of the sources so if we just think about it the bulk of the sources that we historical sources that we use for the period before late 19th century the whole of southeast asia whether it's relating to the chinese or not would be the european sources and from the late 19th to the around mid 20th century we are added with sources i mean here i'm talking about history before the mid 20th century we added some chinese language sources produced by chinese diplomats politicians and traveling cultural intelligence here in the form of official records reports chinese newspapers etc and also some sources mainly in european and some local languages produced by local born so-called local born chinese and also local people last but not least there will be like very few and we are actually talking about the chinese in southeast asia there are actually very few writings especially before mid 20th century very few of the migrants actually write down records and even then it will be the elite members so i think just now there are a few presentations before this shows this very sufficiently well and there is also in terms of the historical methodology a tendency of stacking materials mentioning chinese or chinese sounding names and also to extrapolate from several cases to it conclude as activities or characteristics of all chinese so there's actually an analytic jump if you think about it a general treatment is that these were unfiltered objective truth about chinese persons generally in history without much consideration of the authorship and here second thing i think with regards to the state of the field is that there are some historical troops that are very standard when we are looking at the chinese in southeast asia especially so some of these standard troops are these standard images about the chinese as colonial intermediaries uh chinese says uh patriotic chinese or aiko hua chao chinese as so somewhat economic animals uh you know like uh and so of course among major scholars the deconstructing of the image of uh ayahuasca or overseas chinese nationalism has been take undertaken to some part so everybody realized that this is more or less a sort of propaganda from china and you know yeah really trying to draw from their subjects uh i mean recognizing the so-called overseas chinese as subjects of china is a kind of political move but there is not really a sort of like analysis and deconstruction of the image of chinese as colonial intermediaries or as as economic animals and well i i can explain why this is the case but just to say that these are the kinds of historical tropes of the chinese in southeast asia the third feature of the in the field of chinese in southeast asia in the field is that there is a tendency to preserve race so ultimately race is kept and promoted that's what i'm trying to point at and here i i i especially draw on two major texts especially uh by professor wong on the chinese overseas is 2000 book and also philip cohen 2008 these are synthesis works but they they tell you what is generally in the field that is um there's often discussion in these these texts that reference to chinese trade chinese business these are all inverted commerce for me uh chinese capital uh discussion of how chinese encountered violence massacres very famous ones on the spanish manila five to six massacres in the 16th and 17th century and of course the famous one dutch massacre of the chinese in batavia in 1740 so but these are gloss over as chinese chinese sufferings chinese exploitation chinese massacres etc etc and as well there are also tendency to subsume different groups right distinct social groups such as hainanese cantonese hakka okay and henghua you name it and also rana khan versus tortor so the so-called local chinese versus the china-born chinese the baba versus the sinkhead so all these actually quite distinct social differences uh kind of put under chinese racial umbrella and turn into variants of uh chinese as violence place of birth rather than recognition as distinct social groups in their own right and of course here we can elaborate also further for those who are familiar with philip kohn's book chinese chinese among others his discussion of the four basic affinities compatriotism kinship for rituality brotherhood again as a kind of as he puts it chinese organizational genius in spite of the very fact the fact that the very specific membership not open to every chinese right i mean here uh uh there's there's a lot of examples indicating this i'll talk about one example later and so in the process of these kinds of his history writing um you kind of see that uh these very distinct groups become variants of the same very similar to the problem of dialect versus language when do we call hokkien a dialect when do we call it a language why is it being called a dialect right i mean these are these are linguist experts and then we are actually learning from them but i'm saying that the tendency that we do is subsume these very distinct groups under a very broad ratio umbrella and also i think when we do that we also cut the comparison the comparative possibilities of very similar dynamics for instance what philippine talks about in terms of compatriotism kinship co-rituality brotherhood these are also very similar if we look at other asian diets for us such as chattyas the sindorkis moogies and even the tamil koli gangs which were described by barbara and daya in her 1978 book on payrock so by and large in the field there's a treatment of chinese as a positivist identity category and that when you actually do that and you generate histories based on this kind of assumption you tend to create a kind of forever chinese image when you when you're doing such and in terms of the histography of singapore specifically relating to the chinese i think here we know all the very standard works uh there are a lot of uh kawasaki maritime bow and chin huang but a lot of the also many chinese language works as well has all the above uh characteristics that there is a lack of interrogation of the sources and the authorship and the intentions of the authors and also that the three tropes that i mentioned just now about chinese as colonial intermediaries as i go for child or as a kind of economic animals uh tends to be also perpetuated in the you know in the works on singapore history because this is not not really that much of a problem compared to other you know other studies of the chinese in other southeast asian countries when chinese were minorities because a lot of these images become turned into uh very negative ones like uh colonial intermediaries are they called colonizers economic animals are they economic predators and these these have been very fruitfully used by colonial regimes against the chinese at very strategic political timings as we all know so i'm just saying especially for singapore chinese studies i mean chinese um historiography the histography on the chinese in singapore uh has this all these tendencies and also i think especially how it's been being promoted into account forever chinese image is very clearly done for instance there's of course a lot of works on the bank formation right occupational specialization and and this is particularly ironic since you know the biggest riots in singapore history is actually not the 1960s racial riots as we know it right i mean it is the intra-racial riots so to speak between the hopkins and the teochews in the 1950s and and also the king fukong example that a few presenters were pointing out in the earlier presentations it's not really i mean it's me name a hokkien temple but it is really at its point of f founding and for a very long time uh a coalition of malacca babas and wealthy chinese junk owners not open to any hokkien or chinese as it's being suggested today when it's been referred to as a hokkien temple of course with decolonization as we understand singapore so-called chinese become citizens normal migrants become hyphenated singaporeans and as we know it especially from the works of uh namala proshotom in her book published in 2000 negotiating multiculturalism um that's um certainly especially striking when we compare to other southeast asian countries in singapore where where race is not spelled out i mean they it might be part of the strategy of the government but in singapore it is clearly spelled out in everything that is related to the government i mean now you just fill in any form you want to apply for hdb flat you know definitely a race category your identity card arrays category i mean number four show them writes this much better than i i can speak as well defer you to her uh do her work and so here if we think about i mean before i go into the topic proper i'll just talk a little bit about theoretical considerations all right which that i draw on when i'm doing this re-reading on the chinese re-reading the sources on the chinese at the turn of the 20th century i think there's a lot to draw from from the black and native american histories when they talk about racial capitalism so very famous writers and activists like dubois c.l.r james franz fanon and also native american writers annabelle quijano jody bright they have critiqued marxist theories for zerocentrism and omitting the study of race and racism in the analysis of capitalism and here especially they discuss focusing on the black especially on the blacks and native americans in the uh the new world so to speak they argue that race and racism racialism was the epistemology ordering principle organizing structure of modern capitalist domination and in other words in india india arguments racial categorization was used to justify the dehumanization and different labor exploitation of people in different parts of the world since the founding of the since the birth of the modern world system in the 16th century i can go on with this but i'll just cut it sort of there so i think a very good quotes will be racialization and colonization have worked simultaneously to other and abject entire people so that they can be enslaved excluded removed and killed in the name of progress and capitalism another body of works that i draw on is the discussion on strategic essentialism and subjectlessness among asian american experts and also comparative literary experts these are people like lisa lowe candice chu uh gayatri spivak and here especially to take notes from lowe who champions gayatri spivak's notion of strategic essentialism she argues that there should be a treatment on the chinese and asian america these are the topics of her study not as a natural or static category but a socially constructed unity and a situationally specific position which is assumed for political reasons and here uh true candidate's true rejects chinese as a positivist identity category proposing subjectlessness as a conceptual tool to manufacture asian american and other ethnic identities in varying spatial and temporal contexts here i quote her if we accept a priori that asian american studies subjectlessness is subject-less then rather than looking to complete the category of asian-american to actualize it by such methods as enumerating various components of differences such as gender class sexuality religion and so on we are positioned to predict to critique the effects of the various configurations of power and knowledge through which the term comes to have meaning all right and here i think it what she's suggesting here is since when we are actually doing uh how i draw it from her is that we're actually doing the he's reading the historical sources instead of treating the the descriptions on chinese s realities about the chinese in the source in history we should actually ask ourselves what is it that the author by portraying chinese in such a way at that time was trying to achieve and last but not least would be a very important scholar in the field on post-colonial studies colonial postcolonial studies will be and stole us many of her books are very important but here i quote especially a 2009 book along the archival grain and as she has collisionally argued i think documents in the colonial archives were not did matter that simply accounted the actions or records of what people thought happened they were an arsenal of sorts that were utilized and reactivated to suit new governing strategies in pursuit of imperial projects from efforts to mold the colonial subjects effective states to the monitoring of the parameters of racial ontologies however as we can see many many historians especially in the field of chinese in southeast asia tend to treat them as unfiltered truths rather than analyze the logic that drives drove these uh racial naming and characterization in any case i'll be drawing on these theories uh to look at the corpus on the chinese in the turn of the 20th century singapore i might be running out of time so here i'm just going to flash to you four main corpus i'm here plundering from my matc which i wrote 20 years ago but uh only this section right but just to say that in fact there's especially we're talking about turn of the 20th century from here i'm referring especially from the period 1880s until around 1910s there are four major corpus which i'm sure all the historians in our group are very very familiar with so firstly the british colonial archives and their sources secondly the the straits chinese writings especially the straits chinese magazine which was published from 1897 to 1907 led especially by limbun king song xiang and fellas and also third major source will be the qing official source and this is the time of course when xing starts to realize that this overseas so-called chinese-looking people who wears a pigtail right can be actually quite rich and resourceful for their full chiang guntong which is to make china rich and uh and strong okay and uh last but not least would be uh i look very closely at the chinese newspapers the oldest one in singapore is le pao and this is uh by chinese cultural intelligence here who are on their surgeons and especially from the newspaper mens so i'm just going to flash a few quotes but to hear our quotes which indicates a draw draw drawing from british colonial uh officials very and first one will be by crawford john crawford was the third second third one of those after raffles the chinese have an intimate knowledge of the markets and a skill in assume i don't know what that and laying in their car goes they display a rigid economy and give an attention to details they have over and above peculiar advantages in the ports of their country some of them such as afford the most favorable materials of commerce with the indian islands the european merchant being all together excluded from second one is drawn from francis light he is of course the so-called founder eic is india company in penang and he says the chinese constitute the most valuable part of our inhabitants they possess the different traits of carpenters masons and smith and traders shopkeepers and plunders and they employ small vessels and prows and send adventures to the surrounding countries and again crawford i entertain so high in opinion of the industry scale and capacity of consumption of the chinese that i consider one equal to the value of to the state of two natives of the coromandel course this is of course southeast india and to uh for malays at least one you basically see from this uh you know there are many codes that i provide in my uh if you re if you want further details on discussion but just based on these few quotes you can see very clearly that in the eyes of the british colonial um [Music] masters the the the chinese were an object of helping them facilitate economy all right here of course in this period of time one major trade was exchanging indian opium for china's tea but a lot of the straits produced were very important as supplements to indian opium as well and basically the british colonial regime and the uh and the european merchants especially the british were relying on the uh so-called chinese to help them with gathering the straits produced produced in the archipelago to be brought to china and so here economic value was the most important thing as we can see when when the british were talking about the the chinese not to say i'll come back to this later with regards to the strange chinese writings and here i'm referring especially to the writings that we find in the straits chinese magazine which was published from 1897 to 1907 is that this were uh uh i'll just quote here all right no i'll just say a few backgrounds before i go to the code these are basically very wealthy and powerful well-educated kings chinese as uh professor puts it queen scholars all right so in the british eyes they are the most educated and civilized among the the chinese but uh when you actually go through every article of this straight chinese magazine what you tend to see and a conclusion you can draw from is that they felt that they have encountered a kind of colonial glass ceiling that is they may be regarded as higher than the natives as the court of crawford indicates that one is equal to four native malays etc but they were always not put under below the whites this is of course the classic colonial racial hierarchy and so if the the way they will write many of the writings that they reflect in strange chinese magazine as well as other individual writings by some of these elite kings chinese is they tend to try to talk about themselves as how chinese heritage all right especially confucianism has actually higher morality compared to the european christianity and as well as how even if they may lose to the western signs which is of course one of the major thing in the justifying the european colonial hierarchy they they would justify that if we don't have as good western science we can learn it and definitely our confucianism puts us on a higher moral scale compared to the to the european so the long and short of it is how they actually try to prop themselves uh to be the eligible leaders of the uh of the colonial regime meaning that they don't want to be put under the white people in the colonial administration and so here i quote the strange chinese people have a great future before them under the auspices of the british government they may confidently aspire to be the most useful and most important positions in the empire if they will prepare themselves for the positions which they hope to feel let us never forget that we are the descendants of a great people if we do then surely there will be no hope for us uh if we pay no heat to them we will all we shall always be an important element in the population of these islands and and let us not look around and see how the descendants of some civilized nations by here that he means the europeans oops uh that they have succumbed to the effects of the tropical environment okay i can discuss further but time is running out so i'm just going to uh uh i mean here is a discussion on the how the qing officials especially when they are writing about the chinese what is it that they are aiming for here we have very good discussions uh indicating that they turn chinese into hua chao as surgeons of temporary surgeons overseas basically reclaim them as part of the chinese nation and ultimately trying to urge them to contribute donate invest in the to enable china to become strong and and able to compete against the west and also this is from the bar one uh again i shall not elaborate further what i do want to talk a little bit further about before time runs out is to talk about how uh that when we actually analyze these four corpus of works which are the standard works of on the chinese in singapore at the turn of the 20th century what we basically see is that every one of them talk about chinese as a collective and all of them has a certain aim i mean it wasn't just uh objectively or you know purely recording but they were recording for certain interests that fits their own objectives and aims whether it is like i said straight chinese to prop themselves as potential leaders in the in a decolonized world or the qing regime trying to get them to invest more in in china and what when we coming to this topic on the racecraft is that what we basically see that it is not really so much objective description of the past but these racialized narratives of the chinese in singapore and southeast asia more generally they did not just remain a kind of interest among academics and professional historians having debates in such symposiums but there are also active sponsorship by the current prc state and the singapore state just very quickly one very uh the prc state is now actively circulating these historical narratives of the chinese as colonial intermediaries i go hot show economic animals and a kind of a sense of the chinese overseas as a kind of forever cultural chinese and it was really towards supporting its current capitalist interests in the asia pacific today to promote a kind of hua chao foreign stroke or narrative and uh ultimately trying to draw them to argue that now china may not be the political motherland of these chinese overseas or this hua chao foreign but they will forever be the cultural motherland so please continue to invest and contribute and donate whatever you do but what two very important recent projects that they are engaging in uh touching on history is the shia nanyang historical documentary which was produced and released in 2013 and uh another one would be uh london gauss uh hua syria and actually i can't see the time so it's just to say that there is a very vested interest by contemporary political interests political economic interests to continue propping these types of historical narratives of unified chinese as for the singapore state i think it's uh this this is uh very common already for many many people but i'll just state a few things for the record 1983 institute of east asian philosophy now eai but it's reminiscent as many scholars have argued of limbo kings and straight chinese confucianism promotion of the confucianism project trying to basically jump on the chinese economic bandwagon especially after 1978 and also of course starting from 1990s singapore stayed very active promotion of the one one team urine i think constantly wrote an article on that but just uh really drawing to that period of singapore history talking about the chinese how they actually con has much contribution to modern china etc and of course one of the tenants of the founding history of singapore is the vulnerability and how the chinese singapore as a chinese island was surrounded by this islamic muslim archipelago really you know malaysia and indonesia's cases are often the boogie man to tell chinese to remain within the group very much like charlemagne the village but i'm going i'll just say please refer to lily lily zubaida raheem's 2009 book on the singapore in the malay world how singapore stayed or often treat itself with a regional outsider complex and always playing up the racialization uh as a form of divide and rule and um here i do want to and do i have one more minute no oh okay so i'll just end here but i i think what i want to talk about is that there are actually if we don't think about race craft and this is not my terminology about terminology by um black his black american studies um experts as barbara fields and karen fields that if racecroft is about making race a commonsensical object into a kind of natural category [Music] then it is necessary to explore how it becomes how such racial racialized imaginary imaginings are crafted into the common sense and how they can uh here we are here looking at three layers multiple layers of racialization and in multiple temporalities whether it's by the moment of the turn of the 20th century historic players whether it's by historians themselves and how it's being played up again by contemporary powerful state interests is something we need to explore thanks very much [Applause] thank you professor kway for another highly informative and highly nuanced examination of issues pertaining to chinese identities here in singapore um i'll invite you and also professor claw back up to the stage now for uh some q a any questions from the live audience or should we start then when with the uh the zoom question uh yeah so there's a question from sharin choi uh how did the difference in identity between chinese peranakans and the chinese-born chinese develop it doesn't seem to consistently be class or about straits versus foreign birth because there weren't many chinese families who stayed in singapore for generations so yeah she's basically asking about the difference in identity between these two groups who's who's been the question being directed to uh to both professors okay did you repeat it again or i don't i don't think uh guy caught all of it so you want to repeat it one more time sorry yeah so uh how did the difference in identity between the chinese karanakans and the sinki chinese develop well here again i invite my other co-panelists earlier in the day to jump in but my understanding is that synch newcomer is a terminology from the 1840s onwards when you got this new wave of migrants coming in as coolly contract laborers and that was how they were labeled by the old established malaccan chinese community so it was literally othering of black and chinese of the other but i don't know here maybe maybe you want to say something about sin cakes uh actually as i know this is a differentiate between the local born chinese and the newcomer from china because they think that the local born chinese which street born chinese they find that they are more or less is a high-class people because they are kings chinese and those in case basically they are kuri and and then they come here to work this is i think it's only the terminology this i don't know whether professor koi agree with me if i understand the question correctly the distinction between the two am i right yes so that is the distinction that the old malaccan chinese wanted to maintain their difference their identity and you are all newcomers um i don't know whether my other co-partner list earlier in the day would want to say something more than that distinction the issue here being today of course whether from our point of view the recent mark visited migrants from china can also be considered a new wave of thinking i think prop 1 you are alluding or hinting at that [Music] thank you i i'm not sure whether the term cinque was actually first used by the strange chinese of alibaba it could have been because there were also other chinese here who are not from the baba malacca groups who came from the rio linga or in from borneo from java and so on who were here so i don't know who started using the phrase but i think you're correct to say that they described primarily those people who came after the 1840s and mostly were working class people but but it doesn't necessarily apply just to the baba melaka apparently to search them because there were other chinese who were also doing quite well who came from other parts of southeast asia who also thought these newcomers were were definitely of a lower class and they did not know how to behave and they had to be treated very differently i think that that was overall impression but who exactly used the phrase first i haven't been able to determine professor queen you have anything to add to that or okay um more questions yes please thanks thank you i have a question for uh professor gwyn so uh thank you so much for bringing in these uh critical fresh perspectives on the um chinese race quote unquote um so with regards to the um racializing project um where would you situate the um the early ethnographic and anthropological texts so um you know by the late 19th century early 20th century those uh um western colonialist scholars began to compose those texts in more and more abundance on all the ethnicities that they encounter and i for me um they somehow represent the earliest attempts to deconstruct and break apart or at least to challenge these um uh racialized categories um that um that um you you you presented about right that um that were perpetuating these um these boundaries so um well they are for sure still um in continuity with the rest of the colonial texts in reinforcing and constructing racial categories um yet um i i would say oftentimes they were written for more humanitarian cause than what stoller said um in the quote that you know it's a it's a it's a it's an arsenal a storage of weapons right so would you consider those threats of thoughts um you know the early ethnographies and anthropological texts as perpetuating the racializing project or would you situate it as something other than that thank you i suppose you are referring to the road would you would you is that what you were thinking or um specific text in mind yeah i guess another question would be since i i i'm more familiar with those texts about other parts of southeast asia than you know british um malaya and straits uh straits colonies i guess um the other question will be um have you encountered many texts like that about this part of southeast asia as compared to like the world and and the dutch you know schools okay perhaps first things first is that when when at least when i think even when whether i'm talking about racialization project or whether and stoller is talking about this racialization projects uh it's not necessary with reference to uh self-professed uh ethnographic texts i mean a lot of what we know very much about history they are written by colonial officials who are were not necessarily i mean they were usually trying to fight for some of the uh policies like the crowd was certainly trying to stop the dutch regime from abolishing the conse system right but the the text that i use which is very similar i mean going along very similar lines will be written by people like um in in the context of singapore history since this is a symposium on singapore i mean we can talk more about southeast asia later it's jd vaughan who was actually a police inspector in penang and then because he comes across so many so-called chinese subjects he start to recall about their barrel customs their marriage customs and things like that on the side and then also of course pickering wa pickering again many scholars in in this room would be very familiar with he's the first chinese so-called chinese protector in the british in british singapore and he was really when you analyze what he was writing about the chinese he was rea and amy especially at the so-called secret societies he was really aiming to appeal to the colonial the government in the metropole to give money in order for him to set up a chinese protectorate and he became the first chinese protector never mind the politics behind but just to say that these are uh tax which were not necessarily returned by ethnographers but they are really returned to promote certain policies on the side and and sometimes they are just but the thing that we should be looking at is how these become transformed into standard historical documents to talk about the so-called chinese in singapore in the late 19th century and this is where i'm aiming at how is are these writings if we analyze them in their own right these are political documents become turned into unproblematic objective descriptions of chinese in the past all right so so i hope it answers your questions i don't think it does but just great thanks uh ashley do you have another question for us from the online house yeah so this question is asked by gilchun to any of the panelists to what extent does the religion of islam it being the predominant religion of the majority of the population in the malay archipelago and the current trend of islamization in the region influenced the chinese ethnic and cultural identity in singapore today so to what extent does islam being the predominant religion of the majority of the population in the malay archipelago influenced the chinese cultural and ethnic identity in singapore today [Music] muslims and islam versus chinese islam has affected chinese identities in singapore i mean it's very difficult to understand sorry i think it's a long-standing um i wouldn't call it myth but it would be uh something that in singapore we keep telling ourselves uh that uh we are surrounded by a chinese island surrounded by you know mostly archipelago and so we must enhance the vulnerability of course these are state narratives which are drum into us from the time we attend school and and you know talking about the vulnerability of singapore the smallness the fact that it's chinese and i'm here uh what i'm actually trying to appeal when i'm doing this talk is really to say in the first place we should consider how uh how uh how how is racialization taking place in singapore how are certain myths of or maybe not myths but imaginings of threat being imagined in singapore how do we come to think of these as commonsensical knowledge is is that truth to this or or is it i mean yeah we always like to point how malaysia is much bigger how indonesia is much bigger but the fact is that uh in terms of militarization we are the best i mean we supply arms to burma we supply we have some of the top most best i think probably professor koa can talk about this even better we have very good uh military what do you call it r d uh which we test out in south africa and other australia etc other places so really where's the threat here besides confrontation lasting for two years and after that separation from malaysia seems that for all these years more than 50 years we certainly didn't see any possible threat that any of our islamic neighbors is going to uh actually will against us but it's something we keep telling ourselves which is why just now i talk about knight shah shah sorry malang's um wonderful film the village i don't know if everybody has watched it but i love the movie you know basically thinking that we are threatened by imagine any enemy and keeping the people in inside the village so i'm just really turning the question back to the one who's asking questions how is it that you think that islam is threat to singapore uh just because we are supposedly majoritarian chinese well i'm not sure it was it was posed as necessarily a threat to singapore but rather just in terms of general influence if i understood the question correctly with it um but i don't does anybody else have any thoughts on that uh or should we move on to the next question let me add here to say that all these statements have to be put in their historical context so whether islam malaysia have to be seen in what point of time who said what for what reason so if you put it in the context of 1965 yes it's quite clear that at that point of time the kuan yew did see a threat from the surrounding countries malaysia indonesia was confronting malaysia we had indonesian saboteurs in singapore so that memory there is fixed in the founding in the memories of our founding fathers and then again how that memory of that threat then evolves so i think here in that historical context you have to follow how the initial event is then remembered and transformed over time it's very easy from today or lky was making it up to defend the hegemony of the pap party you can't say that but in the post-modern language this is crypto-normativism i would say [Music] this question is for both to respond in 1900 when the boxing uprising happened in china and there's a local bond singapore chinese who try to appeal to the street born chinese you know to to organize a volunteer troop go back to china helping british to fight against china 40 years later when china was invaded by japan and tanka can also gather the whole southeastern china chinese to help china to fight against japanese these are the two different identities and two different historical events so i just want to see your view and whether such thing will repeat again in future history well buckling yeah of course is the future is very difficult to foresee so here it's speculative we yes certainly how those memories of being asked to support the motherland whether in 1937 by tankaki or earlier will depend on who's the leader in china who's making those appeals or who in singapore is suggesting that so it's very easy to say that in today's situation yes you can read you can read xi jinping's appeal watch out come back home to support the motherland as in line with that earlier appeals to support them of yeah whether we respond again depends on how we read that here so here if you look at the record there is that action reaction there is that how we respond so i think the challenge for the policy maker here is singapore is like that's what the british government what is our position what does the singaporean government respond when xi jinping makes that direct appeal who in singapore is responding to that appeal that's the policy issue here well i will refrain from using wee wee wee all the time i say no i i totally agree with uh um professor kwai on the point of yeah well well our understanding of being a singaporean might differ but anyway just to um to say it is very good that professor kwai brings in on xi jinping and if sitting ping now says that okay watch your harem please uh donate and save china or whatever you know and and as of course i think rightly points out that how is it that we are going to respond right and and that he also suggests that the response will be probably very different from what happens so maybe in 1937 when tangkaki make similar appeal i i would i would uh i would urge us to consider that maybe what we are thinking now we is very similar to what the chinese in the 1930s are also thinking the so-called chinese in in whether in singapore or in southeast asia when tangkaki made the appeal i mean thank you will see he talks about a lot of pains about how he try to unite the chinese right trying to get them to donate nobody wants to donate they only donate this so i would really strongly encourage you to go pick up uh his memoirs and see the pains he had to go to of course nowadays we tend to gloss it over and say that wow that was the peak of the overseas chinese nationalism but i really wonder because we simply don't know what people are thinking so even if they go back and become hotels what was it that they are thinking we assume that they are patriotic but what is it they are thinking maybe they want adventure when they donate money maybe they think that they are just saving fujian their village rather than the whole of china so i'm more of that sock who likes to imagine that maybe we are just assuming too much when we think and assume that simply because tangaki obtained several millions of us dollars equivalent at that time that means that chinese in southeast asia at that time were patriotic to china right i would definitely put a big question mark and say uh how do we know what they are thinking how do we derive and think that we know what they are thinking just like how we would i mean now xi jinping may appeal some chinese may go back i mean very similar 2008 when the beijing olympic happened there are also many uh advertisements on how there are many chinese overseas especially those in southeast asia you know paid one or two million dollars just to hold the olympic torch and that's this hence equate to what your horrend continuing patriotism or maybe something else they just want to tell their friends that hey i hold the olympic torch but if we make the analytic jump and say hence they are patriotic to china even when they are indonesian citizens then i think we are actually over assuming i would say here this is where it is the challenge of being a historian to put in context what the subject you are studying tangkaki has said it is there in writing it is indisputable what you today are reading interpreting dankaki you got to put it down say this is my reading today or what he said 10 years from now 20 years around another generation will have a very different reading of what don kaki intended 10 years ago had a very different reading of what tan tankaki said so our readings of what those who went before us will change and that's what being a historian is about putting in context what your actor is studying said and this is my interpretation at this point of time in my context i interpreted to be saying and i accept that it's different from what my predecessor said and what those who come after me will say well we we in the audience here have time for um one or maybe two more questions so let's take one from online okay this question is asked by trinh hong to both of the panelists uh what is the role of sudden dialects for example hawkin and teochew in defining singaporean identity in the future and is that value in preserving these dialects amongst the younger generation and will the imminent loss of dialects represent a major shift in the singaporean chinese identity but a sort of a repeat question from earlier but we can get a couple of new views on on this issue singapore's identity already is a question that our previous speaker is best qualified and has said and whether you have to say more in response to this okay let's let's go with one more question then uh i didn't think that any more questions oh okay okay um oh well let me is it clouding back there let's go go ahead and uh uh we'll get one for claudine and we'll see if we want to have one more uh i have a perhaps slightly provocative question for professor qui um what did do you think a chinese would ever stop being chinese i asked this because you are precisely you know questioning the category of chinese itself right and we often look at that with sort of racial ethnic ambiguous traits but you're looking very much at the power structures behind the construction of the categories so with a rejection of those power structures suggests it's dissolution of the category [Music] that's a wonderful question and then of course you are absolutely right to point out that in fact uh i'm only dealing with the larger power structures and there are i think if we if we look and of course i can get away with this because we are dealing with turn of the 20th century right i mean there's not really much other sources we could we could draw on but i think one thing that we just from snippets of historical materials that here i'm especially thinking of wangda hai haitao ichi which was written about java in the 1780s and also which is the padawa the jakarta today's jakarta batavia chinese council we have records of what you know uh what you call common everyday so-called chinese people were encountering within the um chinese council or the under the administration of the chinese capital in chicago during the late 18th 19th century until the early 20th century and i think based on these very snippets right of historical documents that happen to uh be preserved what we do know is this is certainly not just you know i'm here i'm especially uh bringing attention to imperial structures like european imperialism and even chinese imperial state trying to appeal to the chinese who are overseas and also some of the elite groups of chinese uh meeting the about other cultural intelligence here as well as the straits chinese were basically very very educated elite few amongst local born chinese but if we actually look at many of these sources we see that there's also this intra chinese for me a kind of petri linear male control trying to assert also a certain congruent identity a certain i wouldn't just translate it as chinese but there is also definitely intra group tendency to try to impose a certain identity as a form of social control over the lesser groups the whether it's the lower economic class or whether it's the females in the group you know uh so uh look i think that this is probably why uh when we compare the studies of the chinese in southeast asia i mean chinese overseas is a very huge studies right but when i am looking through the literature i feel that those who are in uh who are working on the chinese in america has gone far ahead i mean lisa law candy's true these are people who work on chinese american literature and they have gone far ahead to propose that let's just see that these chinese category is the imagined category something that has long been done by cultural studies expert like stewart hall like all the dubois these people that i'm talking about and probably because they were the most discriminated against group a social group in in the entire human history but i would say the experts in the chinese american field has fam much better than us than us here i use us all right as in the the historic historical experts in in southeast asia who are dealing with the subject of chinese we are still trapped very much on the chinese as a positivist identity category and i'm really trying to propose that is there any way right that we can think of getting out of this box and try to look at the dynamics for power dynamics you know whether it's from the colonial state or whether it's from the qing state whether it's from internal like these straight chinese groups as well as the above group or even day-to-day groups like we see in the case of the batavia capitan how they try to exert patrilineal control over female bodies in 18th century 19th century batavia but we can have a longer conversation after this i just think that this this is probably why chinese category can cannot really be displaced in uh southeast asian chinese studies we'll probably have to end the uh this panel at this point i um a couple things before we close today first let me think once again uh professor quan and professor kui for their talks and for a very lively discussion so one more round of applause [Applause] and before we depart though i'd like to uh thank uh say thanks to a few of the people that helped to put the symposium together uh very quickly if i may let me first start by thanking everyone on the arts team uh for managing all the logistics in the performance hall and ensuring that everything ran smoothly today next let me thank the student assistants uh amber lee ashley shitty jin hong hong jin and song han for all their help especially with the q a sessions for both the in person and online audience let me also thank rachel jen and nahin in the development office for the assistance and promoting event um thanks to jolene and the faculty affairs office for all her help with uh making things run smoothly today and finally three people in particular i think those are special things kevin lowe and ali rozelle's on the events team and jade co from the faculty affairs office all three put in a tremendous amount of time and effort into to ensure that all the logistical and technical details were met for what proved to be i think a relatively uh complicated hybrid event um but with their help we were able to make everything today run uh i think quite smoothly and so they they all deserve a well earned round of applause as well um so [Applause] finally thank you our both our in-person and online audience for coming out today to listen and of course i want to thank our seven speakers uh professor wong gong woo and and everyone else who each spared their invaluable time to come out here today uh to share their learning and wisdom with the rest of us and so with that uh happy new year everyone see you next time you

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Length: 351min 48sec (21108 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021