By Zach Isaiah Chiah
If there is one noticeable trend in the civil service, it is the transition from legal to business language. The civil service engages in work plans, measures results using key performance indicators, analyses return on investment and identifies business opportunities.
Such language has also made its way into the Ministry of Education.
Most companies and now the civil service use the idea of stakeholders. Stakeholders is a very important business concept. Entry level business classes at pre-university level teach students that understanding the target-market is the first key to any business. College level classes get in more detail and describe stakeholders as key targets especially in the service sector.
The Ministry of Education also has its own stakeholders.
But not all stakeholders are created equal, all stakeholders are important but some are more important than others. Perhaps the most important stakeholders that the MOE has are neither the parents nor the ministry but the students. It is the students of today who will be the adults of tomorrow, and the are the reason for the education system.
‘Every school a good school’
Education Minister Heng Swee Keat introduced the term ‘every school, a good school’ at the start of his tenure. He has had a very tough time convincing parents of the ministry’s vision. So tough that PM Lee had to come out and support him at the National Day Rally.
“I believe we can make every school a good school and we have done a lot of that to ensure that every school provides a good education for the students. We give them the resources, we give them the good teachers, we emphasise values and we have made a lot of progress towards this goal.”
Slogans work because they capture the imagination. This slogan does not work because it does not capture, in a sound-bite, the common aspirations of all stakeholders.
From a business perspective, the fact that target market does not buy-in is itself proof that 1) the concept is not good, 2) the marketing is poor.
The government has responded on the belief that the latter option is correct. I think it’s more a problem with the concept.
When we were young our teachers would tell us that sticks and stones could break our bones but words would never kill us. As we grew up we realized how much more insidious words were. It is words that has created a society which looks down on students in ITE and brands them as ‘it’s the end’, it is also words that has created a society which envies academically successful 18 year olds as future pillars of society.
College level introductory Communications classes teach that personal identity is affected by societal impact. A slogan is important because if it catches on it can affect the way people think. A slogan can affect the way the way we look and think about things. The oft-bandied Swiss standard was a successful slogan from that standpoint.
Slogans also have a way of symbolizing ambition in an area.
It is not often that the Singapore is characterized as not ambitious enough. This time though the slogan is simply not being ambitious enough.
Speaking about a school being good is rather confusing. What makes a good school? Grades, programs, facilities, teachers? What does a good school look like? Is the ambition for every school to be an infrastructural mini-RI? Opinions will differ.
Yet, if every school is a good school then no school is a good school. The word good can only be meaningful if there is bad and everything in between. It is one of those ambiguous words that is relative, just like ‘day’ only existing because there is ‘night’. Parents competed for streaming (EM1 versus EM2 versus EM3), after it was replaced with advanced subjects there was competition for the children to be advanced in all subjects. There have to be good, better and best schools (which is code for weak, normal and top), there’s no way around it. It is almost impossible to fathom parents here buying into the idea that every school is equally good because Singapore, unlike Finland, is not egalitarian yet.
Beyond the semantics however, the slogan does not motivate students and the teachers too.
The slogan seems to focus on structures and systems rather than people.
The transformative nature of today’s education system does not come across to all stakeholders. This perhaps explains why in spite of the good work that the schools and Ministry are doing, few parents buy into it – Scholars call it the 40-year gap.
The main stakeholder here is really the child and it is the child that should be the focus.
For a small country maximizing the strength of every person is vital, if a small nation like ours cannot then no one can. We cannot arbitrarily define best through a narrow definition of academic testing and develop a select few, we did it successfully as a developing economy when scarcity became a virtue. The developed economy though demands a lot more skill sets for that we have to celebrate diversity.
We do not have the luxury that larger nations have. Firstly, we cannot command the numbers for narrow measures like academics. We do not have 10 million students every year taking one standardized test to enter the top 4/5 universities in the country (like in China, South Korea and Japan). We probably do even not have 500,000 wannabe engineers sitting for the IIT entrance exams annually. Secondly, a high stakes exams does not measure a range of other factors that could be equally important for a child.
Our nimble size is our advantage, we can focus on each child and develop him fully.
This mindset change is fundamentally important, and the impact of the right slogan cannot be overstated.
More specifically, the impact on social expectations that a slogan can have.
Pygmalion effect
The Pygmalion effect is a phenomenon where the greater the expectation on a person the greater they perform. It was shown by Rosenthal and Jacobsen in 1968 that when teachers expected performances for students, those students tended to perform to those higher expectations. When the teachers were led to believe that these students were potential late bloomers and were very ‘good children’ it created a positive expectation and affected both teacher and student behaviour. The students ended up doing better in tests.
On the contrary when teachers were told that the students were not so good, these students did indeed fare worse.
The Pygmalion effect of positive affirmative is used by business managers also to obtain the best from their students. One top user of the Pygmalion effect was the late Lim Kim San who (it was revealed by Ngiam Tong Dow) identified the talents of his people and developed those talents.
Since we are already using business lingo in education, why not go the whole eight miles and use business management strategies too.
The better slogan should be ‘every child, a good child’.
A good child can mean many things. A child may not be academically gifted but still good. Unlike a ‘good school’, a child can be good in maths and bad at arts. Most importantly, a good child is worth cultivating. The diversity of our children is what makes the slogan work.
This slogan encourages teachers to view each child as a treasure, it encourages the wide segment of parents to look at their children’s achievements broadly, it encourages administrators to work on improving customization in eduction rather than simply one size fits all, most importantly it is a societal ‘hug’ to our youth who need it the most.
When PM Lee first took over the premiership in 2004 he mentioned wanting many peaks in Singapore rather than one narrow height. This is the base from which our young can scale many different Everests. The vital psychological shift to complement what is already a tacit approval of the idea. The most inspirational teachers and reformist administrators have always believed in it, even the PM, “I brought the Rally to ITE for a serious purpose – to underscore my longstanding commitment to investing in every person, every Singaporean, to his full potential.”
This is a business slogan that is a better fit with the vision of the ministry and has potentially more buy-in ability because it is aspirational. Done right, it has the ability to bring long term change to how we educate our young and bring everyone on board.
Think about it, MOE.
It's the wrong slogan, MOE
Singapore: Tax haven or not
While Singapore banks are consistently ranked among the strongest in the world, allegations of secrecy remain
By Gaurav Sharma
Amid growing concern internationally on the use of financial centres to hide illicit funds or evade taxes, Singapore has initiated stringent efforts to ensure that the country remains a clean and trusted financial centre.
Steps to combat cross-border tax crimes.
- Laundering proceeds of tax evasion and tax fraud is now a crime in Singapore, effective 1 July. Financial Institutions are required to conduct customer due diligence to deter and detect proceeds from serious foreign tax offences, even if they are not offences in Singapore.
- In May, Singapore signed the OECD Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, in order to enhance the international cooperation on the exchange of tax related information.
- Proposal to amend the Income Tax Act so as to allow the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) to obtain bank and trust information from financial institutions without having to seek a court order.
- Conclude with US an inter-governmental agreement that will facilitate financial institutions in Singapore to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a US law which requires all financial institutions outside of the US to pass information about financial accounts held by US persons to the US Inland Revenue Service on a regular basis.
Ravi Menon, managing director of Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), while presenting the authority’s annual report 2012/13 in July discussed the above measures and said, “Over last three years, MAS has conducted a total of 108 Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) inspections covering banks, insurance companies, money changers, remittance agents, and licensed intermediaries.”
Of these, Menon cited two examples where financial institutions with control deficiencies were firmly dealt with by MAS. “A bank which facilitated ship-closing transactions, did not conduct adequate due diligence on the final identity of buyers behind these transactions. MAS ordered the bank to commission an independent audit of its AML/CFT controls, which uncovered serious control weaknesses and compliance failures. We imposed a composition sum of S$350,000 on the bank,” he said.
“Another case was of a licensed financial adviser which was rated poor following MAS’ inspection, for serious lapses in policies and procedures on customer due diligence. We did not discover any actual money laundering or terrorism financing cases but MAS imposed composition of S$187,500 on the licensed financial adviser for breaching AML requirements. We then directed the licensed financial adviser to cease all new business until the independent person has verified that the licensed financial adviser has taken corrective actions to address inspection findings. The adviser is in process of winding down its financial advisory operations.”
“MAS will not tolerate abuse of our financial system for criminal activity. Our message to tax criminals is loud and clear: their money is not welcome in Singapore. And our message to our financial institutions is also loud and clear: if you suspect the money is not clean, don’t take it,” Menon reiterated.
Recent allegations of Singapore being a tax haven
India
The Indian ministry of finance in its, White Paper on Black Money, May 2012, had described Singapore as a “tax haven” and listed cumulative FDI inflows to India country-wise between April 2000 to March 2011. The ministry stated that Singapore with 9.17% or US$ 11,895 million is next only to Mauritius (41.8%), in terms of FDI inflows, and added, “Mauritius and Singapore with their small economies cannot be the sources of such huge investments and it is apparent that the investments are routed through these jurisdictions for avoidance of taxes and/or for concealing the identities from the revenue authorities of the ultimate investors, many of whom could actually be Indian residents, who have invested in their own companies, though a process known as round tripping.”
Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, took strong exception to this during his three-day visit to India and clarified the matter with his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh. Lee also asserted to the local media that neither Singapore has any interest in being a money-laundering centre nor would any shady money wants to come to the city-state. “I think shady money would rather go somewhere else rather than risk being scrutinized by our regulators,” he said.
Germany
Last year in October, Germany and Singapore had agreed to enhance their cooperation in tax matters to tackle cross-border tax evasion and bolster their double-taxation agreement with internationally agreed standards on information sharing. This came after US and various European regulators have starting clamping on tax cheats by pressuring Switzerland, considered a traditional tax haven, to disclose information about their citizens’ deposits in Swiss banks, resulting in people looking for other tax-friendly places such as Singapore.
Myanmar
Allegations that Myanmar’s former military junta has stashed billions of dollars in Singapore keep surfacing every now and then, which always attract strong rebuttals from both Myanmar and Singapore governments. Also, the banks in question – Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation and DBS Group— have always denied such allegations.
So, it came as a surprise to many when on September 20, Kyaw Kyaw Maung, Myanmar’s Central Bank chairman, Soe Thein, a minister in the President’s Office, and Myint Zaw, the deputy energy minister, confirmed that their government holds US$ 7.6 billion of foreign reserves in overseas bank accounts, while declining to give further details regarding the locations and banks in which these funds are held.
From Newzzit
Miss World Megan Young: The triumph of Pinoy power
By Clement Mesenas
Megan Young’s success at the glittering finale of the Miss World pageant in Bali on September 28 could not have come at a more opportune time to cheer her countrymen.
For weeks they had been sickened by “pork barrel scandal” reports which revealed how their political leaders had been enriching themselves to the tune of billions of pesos, feeding at the national trough over the last decade with impunity.
Filipinos can and have been taking the natural calamity of typhoons and earthquakes in their stride. The horrors of the Zamboanga conflict – a three-week-long clash between Muslim fighters and the military resulting in the loss of numerous lives – made them mourn their misery.
Things could have been worse.
But Filipinos will tell you, with a shrug and a grin, that that that’s life in the Philippines.
They will stoically agree with the country’s Tourism Department sales slogan, “It’s more fun in the Philippines”, even while wading through perennial floods in the capital to get to work.
Young’s triumph, it could be said, reflects their never-say-die spirit. Vice President Jejomar Binay was quick to exult over her Miss World victory as “proof of the beauty and excellence inherent in the Filipino people”.
“Amid the many issues our country is facing today, Miss Young’s victory is a candle of hope that assures us we will pull through,” he said.
Politicians in the Philippines never fail k to seize the opportunity to ride on the triumphs of their beauty queens and sporting champions. And the man in the street – with childlike candour – is willing to forget the trials and tribulations of life and bask in the fleeting limelight generated by stars like Megan Young. Don’t forget also how the entire Philippines, well almost, comes to a halt when boxing icon Manny Pacquaio gets into a Las Vegas ring.
First Filipina Miss World
Young made history — she not only bagged the Miss World title, which had been eluding the Philippines, but she also put her country on the podium for being the first to win in five major international beauty pageants.
While Brazil was the first to win the “Big Four” – Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss International, and Miss Earth – and Venezuela is the “most successful” with 19 victories from the four pageants, the Philippines holds the record for winning five major pageants, including Miss Supranational.
Miss Supranational? Well, it’s not included in the Big Five, but who cares.
After Young’s historic win as Miss World, the Philippines now has nine title holders from the five pageants, following Venezuela’s record of 19 and United States’ 14.
Beauty pageant pundits will no doubt proclaim that the era of the dusky beauty queen has begun. Young is a morena, a brown-skinned woman not as highly regarded as her fair-skinned mestiza sisters. Mestizas somehow rank higher in the beauty stakes in the Philippines just as they are in South America, despite the fact that the majority of Brazilian women are dark-complexioned. But Young’s success – coming so closely on the heels of the new Miss America Nina Davuluri, a dark beauty of Indian origin – might signal the end of the reign of the mestiza queens.
Skin apart, Filipino beauties are often expected to do well in beauty pageants. Young was tipped to win the Miss World contest. Still, as millions of Filipinos viewers held their breath around the world, the winner could have been any of the other finalists. There was the sexy Marine Lorphelin of France, the classy Navneet Dhillon of India, the statuesque 6ft 1.5in Carranzar Shooter of Ghana.
So did Young win because of her exotic looks, her well-defined curves? Or was it her ability to speak English – which she does very well although her detractors might say so what, she has an American father? In fact, some of them are already saying that she is more American than Filipino as if to say that she would not have won if she was a “pure” Filipino. Truth be told, many Filipinos are well and truly mixed – the blood of their Malay ancestry blended with that of European and other Asians. The Chinese have been trading with the Philippines for close to 1,000 years. In the last 500 years, the 7,000 and more islands of the Philippines have absorbed various foreign influxes– from Spanish to American, and Arab.
The Filipinos themselves have spread to all corners of the world – from America to the Gulf and Africa, all 10 million of them forming part of the Great Filipino Diaspora. Their resulting offspring is a delightful fusion of the West and the East and several races in between.
Filipina beauty contestants
But we must not overlook the natural desire of the Filipino woman to always want to look beautiful and her propensity to want to put her beauty to the test by taking part in beauty contests. It’s embedded in her genes, as some pundits might say.
Helen Rillera, a writer, puts it this way: “No matter how modest a Filipina may be, there is always that natural something in her heart that craves for flattery and attention. These, she is given aplenty, and in a short time, her name is on the lips of many Filipinos from city to city. The popularity and beauty contests all help to herald her name more and more to her people.”
But this triumph is often short-lived, says Rillera, as men are too selfishly interested in their own pleasures to give thought to the poor girls’ sentiments and sacrifices.
She wrote this essay while she was a student in the United Sates in the 1930s. Have things moved forward for the Filipina – beautiful though she may be – now that decades have passed since Rillera wrote her lament? One wonders.
Cory Quirino, the organizer of the Miss World pageant in the Philippines, says she is pleased with Young’s humility despite her “high-profile” showing in the run-up to the finale in Bali. “She’s the favorite of the media, but you can see it hasn’t gone to her head,” says Quirino.
Young herself cites the “values” attached with Miss World as a charitable organisation.” Miss World embodies the beauty in giving, and I think I have a lot to offer when it comes to that,” she says.
Young says she identifies with the message that the Miss World pageant projects about the diverse kinds of beauty. “I think it inspires younger women to embrace the beauty that they have, whether you’re tall or short, whether you’re big or you’re thin. You know, we’re not just beauty and looks. We can also fight and be as strong as men are.”
On her part, Young thanked her supporters – as well as her critics. “Thank you for the hugs, thank you for being mean to me, thank you for understanding, thank you for misunderstanding, thank you for caring, thank you for not giving a damn, thank you for the love and affection. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she wrote.
He would not have succeeded here
By Zach Isaiah Chia
Paul Nurse had a happy childhood.
But behind the loving family environment was a dark secret that was kept from him and everyone else, a dark secret that Nurse was to discover at the age of 61. Beyond the facade of clarity is a tangled web of familial relations. Ironically, for a man who studies genes, Nurse still does not know who his father is. While applying for American citizenship, Nurse discovered that his older sister was his biological mother and his mother was his biological grandmother. If that was not confusing enough, the two brothers he grew up with become uncles overnight. Even more bewildering, his biological mother ended up getting married and having another three children legitimately never recognising at any time.
There would be even more twists and turns to his life.
The search for truth would consume his life, and the simple pursuit of truth would set him on the path to success.
His knightly quest for truth illuminated how living beings grow and reproduce. It also irradiated important knowledge on cancer. For this, he would be given greater responsibilities in public life.
Nurse is the current President of the Royal Society in UK, President Emeritus of the world-famous Rockefeller University, and first Chief Executive of the Francis Crick Institute (formerly the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation). He was jointly-awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for his discovery of the role of cycline dependent kinases in the cell cycle. Before that he had won the Albert Lasker Award for basic research in 1998. He was knighted in 1999.
Sir Paul is currently in Singapore to receive the Albert Einstein World Award of Science from the World Cultural Council. The annual event is being held for the first time in Singapore, at the Nanyang Technological University. The high-powered committee, including 25 Nobel Laureates, selects scientists, artists and educators who have contributed positively to the cultural enrichment of mankind.
Nurse had a humble academic background. He completed his bacheror’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Birmingham and then did his PhD at the University of East Anglia, both relatively unfashionable universities. He proceeded to do most of his postdoctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, where he made his name. His work at Edinburgh was on yeast, career considerations incited him to look for the same process in humans.
All this would not have been possible if his tenacity was stifled by rigidity. Nurse was rejected from every University he applied because he did not study a second language. Undeterred, he began work as a lab technician and then convinced the administration at the University of Birmingham to accept him into their baccalaureate degree course. He was not a ‘good student’, he was a rebel. Nurse was a student activist. During his time as an undergraduate, Nurse was an open and active supporter of the Socialist Party, helping to sell party broadsheets on campus. He was also part of a sit-in in the Chancellors office as part of a student protest.
The occasion of him receiving the award in Singapore, presents a picture of contrast – a man who succeeded because of slithers of flexibility receiving an award in a city renowned for firm inflexibility. Would someone like Sir Paul have succeeded in Singapore?
The Singapore system is a practical one of averages, it does not reward people who are exceptional (way beyond even the Gifted Education Program) and it penalizes those who are unconventional. The study of ‘soft’ subjects tends to be frowned upon. The slow death of literature and the drop in humanities enrolment are good examples.
Rigidity affects whether students will be accepted or not. With the exception of Mohammad Haikai Abdul Zainal, who was considered for medical school admission at 13 the list of non-conventional acceptances looks bare. Child prodigy Aidan Cawley was rejected from local universities despite acing his GCSE O’levels at 10 years old because he was too young and did not have GCSE A level’s results. Late bloomer Lim Wah Guan was rejected from NUS four times before being accepted in the University of New South Wales, Oxford and Princeton, where he is currently working on his PhD in East Asia Studies. Rebels like Alfian Sa’at are frowned upon because they are considered too subversive for the local culture. Even SMU which used to pride itself on accepting non-traditional students has begun to conform and take in students purely by exam results.
For a country that wants to take the next step into the brave new world of developed economies where creativity and ability matter more than technical skill, has our education system moulded the future of our nation too well, forcing all her square pegs to fit into the round holes.
Would Singapore universities have accepted a candidate like Nurse? Would a rebel have been able to thrive in a local university? Would Singapore-based scientists have been able to investigate non-applied research for simple scientific curiosity?
Why PM wants to be in the news
By Abhijit Nag
Has the Prime Minister become more outgoing than usual? Is he appearing in public so often that he is no longer front-page news?
In the last 10 days, Mr Lee Hsien Loong featured in The Straits Times on at least five occasions but made the front page only twice – when he attended the Church of Vincent de Paul’s 50th anniversary celebrations on Saturday and when he spoke at a public service seminar on Monday.
I was surprised when I opened the newspaper on September 25, the morning after Ask the Prime Minister. A television show like that where he answered questions from the public is a rare event. But the news was nowhere on the front page. You had to turn to the third page to get the story and it did not even include his picture.
He did not say anything new, I was told. Hey! He said: “There’s only one Lee Kuan Yew in many, many generations, in many, many countries. We’ve been blessed.” When did you last hear a political leader anywhere in the world praise his father on television so memorably? Why wasn’t he quoted in the paper? If that isn’t news, what is?
I was not surprised when his speech about more help for special education students was reported only on the second page of The Straits Times on October 1. The front page reported the first fall in resale flat prices since 2009 – property news that interests just about everybody in Singapore.
He was also seen at the Deepavali light-up in Little India, the picture splashed on the Straits Times’ page three with a short report on September 28.
The Prime Minister has been getting around to drive home the message that he is listening and responding to the people.
And the message is consistent with the events playing out. The “hire Singaporeans first” policy may not go far enough to placate the critics, but fewer foreigners are getting jobs, resale flats’ prices have fallen, the education system is under scrutiny, and billions are being spent on new buses and railway lines.
Though no elections are near, the Prime Minister seems to be already out campaigning, talking about the things he is doing to help the people. That’s the advantage of being a leader. He can highlight his achievements and initiatives on any forum and it will be reported by the media.
He was clearly thinking about the next election when he spoke about the role of the public service. He spoke about how it could increase public “trust in the government”. And the more people trust the government, the more likely it is to win the next election.
There is nothing wrong with such an appeal , of course. The Prime Minister was calling for better public service, which is good for the people.
The Prime Minister spoke candidly. Good public service “will encourage Singaporeans to work with the government… and support our programmes and we can achieve our goals together,” he said.
He clearly wants the people’s support. It’s not going to be easy, according to Channel NewsAsia, which reported: “Observers said it will take time to rebuild trust in the public service as a new social compact is forged between the government and citizens.” Maybe that is why he is going the extra mile and has more to say.
It should be noticed that he is not making a complete U-turn. He has not stopped insisting that the government cannot do everything, that the people also have to do their part.
But he is addressing the big issues of the day, responding to the people.
This is not the first time he is facing a challenge. In 1985, just a year after entering Parliament and becoming the minister of state for defence and trade and industry, he chaired the Economic Committee. It recommended changes to government policies to revive the economy, which was then in recession.
Now he is fighting for lost ground after winning the May 2011 general election with the slimmest majority in the PAP’s post-independence history and losing both the subsequent by-elections. The reverses have galvanized him into action. He is leading from the front.
'While I can still afford to fail': First-class honours graduate becomes a hawker
By Shaun Poon
At an age where most university graduates are just starting to build their careers, 27-year-old Tan Jun Yuan left his reliable job as a product manager to work as a hawker 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
To be sure, Jun Yuan’s choice to become a hawker is not for want of other job opportunities. With a degree in management with first class honours from the University of Manchester, his occupation belies his capabilities. While his shift in career goes against the grain, Jun Yuan credits his mother’s excellent cooking as his driving force.
“I’ve always enjoyed eating my mom’s Bak Kut Teh(pork ribs in peppery herbal soup) over the weekends,” he says. Together with his mother, he sells Bak Kut Teh in a coffee shop at Block 177 Toa Payoh Central. Shuffling about as he tends to the bustling store, he takes orders switching between Mandarin and English. One middle-aged lady orders takeaway with her woefully undersized foil bag and Jun Yuan uses different containers to let the lady best carry everything without spilling the precious soup. When an elderly man comes to have a taste after reading recent reviews of the Bak Kut Teh, the store has run out of meat, but Jun Yuan lets him have a taste of the soup so his trip from a faraway part of Singapore is not in vain. Preparing food over the steaming pots of soup, there is something impeccably Singaporean about the young son taking on orders with keen confidence and charm alongside his mother.
Within the family, there was always talk about setting up more outlets, says Jun Yuan. “It was always wishful thinking… but I thought why not make (my mother’s) wish come true, and just for the fun of it,” he adds. A budding entrepreneur, Jun Yuan had previously set up an events company after his graduation which had a turnover of about $50,000 during its 2-month operation. He went on to work in two technology companies for over a year, his entrepreneurship impulses constantly nagging at him. “When I was in a job I was always pretty restless,” he explains.
“A lot of people think it is crazy, it’s very difficult, actually it really isn’t. Because at the end of the day, if you fail it’s just one year of your life, half a year of your life,” Jun Yuan elaborates. He says that young people should take risks before they grow up and become tied down by family commitments. “In the grand scheme of things half a year is nothing at this point of my life,” he adds.
From the looks of his roaring business right now, the gamble has paid off, at least for the moment. Jun Yuan reveals that he sells out by 7pm every night although the store is open till 8pm. As I interview him it is 6pm on a weekday and there is a constant stream of customers, and he sells his last bowl around 6:30. A group of office workers comes and stares as him, probably drawn by positive reviews his store has received. “They’ve come to look at Ah Meng in the zoo,” he jokes.
That’s not to say that his education went to waste though, as it had a role in his current business. “I think in terms of expansion, in terms of growing… I see pricing as a strategy, a game,” Jun Yuan says. He applied some of his business skills from university in creating a value set to go with Bak Kut Teh and created some publicity for the store. “I think it’s the education that thought me how to do it, and a lot of it (comes from) experience, and I couldn’t have done it without my mom” he adds.
Jun Yuan is excited by new ventures, and feels motivated by the possibility of expanding his mother’s business. With his previous job as a product manager at Trek, he was drawn to the innovative firm which is known for its invention of the thumb drive. Regardless of how these possible future expansions pan out, he will have the support from his fun-loving friends.
Why doesn't the govt get it?
Q and A: From the Prime Minister downwards, nearly every government leader has only harsh words for the discourse on the Net. Why does the government still keep harping on the negative aspects of the Internet? Academic Cherian George answers this and other questions on the government-Internet showdown posed by P N Balji, editor, The Independent Singapore.
Q. It has been about 15 years since Singaporeans have taken to the Internet seriously. How do you see the growth of this medium as a platform of expression?
A. In Singapore, it has clearly made communication more democratic. It has lowered the regulatory and economic barriers that used to prevent publishers, writers, filmmakers and artists from reaching the public. Of course, if you want to make money from your content, that is still not easy. But if you are happy to share your work for free, at least you have the option to do it now. Pre-internet, even if you wanted to give content away, you couldn’t, because the regulations and the costs kept you out of the public sphere.
The other big thing that has happened is of course social media. Pre-internet, we used to have these sorts of conversations in the coffeeshop, or with a taxi driver, or after work, sharing information and opinions within our circles. ‘This government is damn one kind, and by the way the laksa I had was damn shiok.’ The urge to share is nothing new, but social media have grown the frequency, intensity and scale of our talk-cock sessions exponentially.
Q. What role did the social media play in the results of the GE 2011?
A. We can safely say that the contest between Tin Pei Ling and Nicole Seah in Marine Parade GRC would have played out very differently if not for social media. Although she won, Tin was probably the biggest casualty of the new online politics in 2011; and Seah was the biggest winner, even though she lost.
Beyond that, the impact of social media was probably over-hyped. Let me put it very simply. If the technology was stuck at 2006 levels, or even 2001 levels, would the PAP’s vote share still have slipped by several points in 2011, and would the Workers’ Party still have won Aljunied GRC and retained Hougang? I think so.
The PAP was punished because it dropped the ball on too many policies that matter to Singaporeans. I don’t think Singaporeans needed Facebook, YouTube or Twitter to tell them that public transport was overcrowded or public housing overpriced, that the country was overflowing with too many foreigners, or that public officials were overpaid. Sure, social media helped people vocalise their unhappiness, and this may have had some effect at the margins; but social media didn’t invent the public unhappiness.
I think the real effects are more long-term. Singapore’s political culture has been transformed by the internet. Pre-internet, the government used to demand respect based on rank, by invoking Confucianism or Asian Values. But the internet allowed Singaporeans to talk to and about their officials as equals. And it has allowed other Singaporeans to observe this and to see for themselves that roof hasn’t fallen down – we can speak about our officials frankly, and investors don’t flee and we don’t revert to fishing village status. Gradually, over more than 15 years of this, we now basically have a new political culture, one which I think is far more resilient and healthy because it is openly skeptical of power.
Q. The government has yet to come to grips with how to deal with this medium. Why so?
A. Intellectually, I don’t think there is anything the government doesn’t grasp. They have done enough studies, they have scenario planners, in-house experts and consultants. No group in Singapore has invested as much quality brainpower into this as the government has.
The problem is application. I think it is genuinely difficult for the PAP’s heart to act according to what its head tells it. One of the pillars of PAP dominance was its ability to set the agenda by getting the cooperation of a small number of gatekeepers in the establishment media, and by forcefully keeping everyone else out of the game. Suddenly, there are many more new players and the old legal, political and economic carrots and sticks don’t work. The government has had to find new ways to shape the agenda. It has been moving in the right direction, but on the spur of the moment, or when it feels provoked, the old instincts are triggered, like a reflex action that it can’t help.
External factors also influence the government’s choices. In the mid-1990s, all the tech gurus and industry leaders were saying that the internet was about freedom. Singapore had to go along or risk putting off high-tech investors; hence its “light touch” promise, which it actually lived up to it for several years. But then 9/11 came along and the West began prizing order more than freedom. So, you were less of a pariah now if you started introducing internet controls.
Fast-forward to 2013, and we see the US, the supposed champion of internet freedom, engaging in mass surveillance and going after whistleblowers. I don’t think it’s pure coincidence that other governments are now much less shy about showing their true feelings about online dissent. China and Vietnam, for example, have been talking tough and trying to introduce some pretty outrageous controls. Singapore hasn’t gone to their extent, but I think you will see the government hide its impatience less than it used to. So, partly because of this global mood, the government’s adaptation to the internet era may be slowed.
Q. What should the government do?
A. I assume that it wants to remain in power and fairly dominant. This is a realistic target, but it must moderate its expectations. It cannot dominate to the extent it used to, and if it tries to be domineering, it will slide faster.
First, it must have confidence in itself that it can win debates fair and square, without recourse to unnecessary force. Second, it must have confidence that democracy works, and that the majority of Singaporeans would support a government that does the right thing in the right way. Third, arising from this confidence, it must relax its grip on the mainstream media and allow professional journalists to do their job of fearlessly serving the public interest. And fourth, stop using laws like defamation or contempt against critics when you could persuade more people by simply engaging the debate. Basically, never pull rank online. Win respect by being right, repeatedly.
Like I said, none of this is new. I have heard the same ideas from individuals in the establishment, who believe such reforms would be very good for the PAP. The problem is that, to some in the PAP, these steps sound like a softening, or even a surrender. To them, the hard line seems more reassuring in the short term, even though it is self-destructive in the long term.
Q. What is it about the Singapore’s Internet community that you don’t like?
A. Well, to a large extent, the Internet community reflects the good, bad and ugly of the offline world, so any comment about the online world is usually true offline as well. Except that when it’s online – whether it’s racism or obscenity or any extreme behaviour – it is more visible and shareable, so there is a higher tendency for people to fly into a moral panic and then blame the Internet for what they don’t like.
So, personally, when I encounter anything upsetting or troubling online, I’m inclined to discount it and not assume that it spells the end of civilisation. Having said that, I think it is accurate to say that there are certain aspects of online interaction that are worse than their offline analogues.
People in online discussions sometimes behave worse than they would offline. Please note that I am not passing judgment based on my own standards. I am saying that some people don’t live up to their own offline standards when they go online. They show a mean-spiritedness, a hatefulness, towards others who express ideas or comments they don’t like, in a way they wouldn’t in face to face settings.
Look at the personal attacks that go on, and not even anonymously. Some are people I know, and I know they wouldn’t talk that way in, say, a real-world discussion. Singaporeans even behave better in a football stadium, where it is socially acceptable to be act more tribally. At Jalan Besar, we may curse the referee, jeer the opposing players – but we don’t abuse the visiting fans, not even Malaysians, to the point of xenophobic hatred, until away fans just stop coming. But that’s what we are doing online: creating enclaves where the environment is so hostile to those who think differently, that they just shut up or stay away. I’ve yet to find an offline equivalent.
I’m looking at this from the perspective of deliberative democracy, which prizes inclusive and open debate. Make no mistake, the number one obstacle to that is still the PAP system’s intolerance of opposing political views. But I don’t think the answer is to counter intolerance with intolerance, at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, that is what’s happening.
Digital newbies and the elephant in the room
By Abhijit Nag
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1, 1)
First Witch: When shall we meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain? (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1)
The success of major policies that Singapore is undertaking hinges on one key factor: the trust citizens have in the Government, said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday. (The Straits Times, October 1).
What does the King James Bible have in common with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Straits Times?
They are all available in print and you have to borrow or buy them.
Not even the word of God was free in Shakespeare’s time. The King James Bible was originally sold leaf-leaf for 10 shillings or bound for 12 shillings, according to Wikipedia. If you are too young to remember when people bought and sold and were paid in £sd (pound, shilling, pence) in Britain, 12 pence made a shilling — and 20 shillings, a pound. Costing 10 or 12 shillings in Shakespeare’s time, the Bible was expensive. Actors were paid a shilling a day by an Elizabethan theatre company, Philip Henslowe’s The Admiral’s Men, according to the Internet Shakespeare.
Singapore today, of course, has free newspapers. But do you remember how they came about? Today was launched in November 2000. By then we could read almost every online newspaper — The Times, the New York Times, the Guardian — for free. Even printed newspapers were available for free in many cities. The freesheets, as they were called, and the free websites all hoped to make money from advertisers.
You could not only read but blog for free. Blogger was launched in 1999. “People are making lots of money charging nothing,” wrote Chris Anderson in his book, Free, published in 2009. He discussed not only Google and Facebook but also their impact on newspapers and added: “In 2007, the New York Times went free online…”
How times have changed. The New York Times is no longer free. Even bloggers are trying to “monetize”. Andrew Sullivan, one of the most popular bloggers in America, has become like the Straits Times. You have to pay to read his full posts. Across the Causeway is the subscription-only Malaysiakini.
I love free websites as much as anyone else, but are they sustainable? Ultimately someone has to pay for the content: either the readers or the advertisers or the site owners themselves.
Four years ago, in 2009, the New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr compared the print media to the Titanic and the digital media to airplanes. If so, websites are like the early flying machines when you didn’t know how long they could stay in the air.
Still, intrepid flyers went up and took their chances then. And so is The Independent Singapore today along with a raft of other websites on this little island. Pardon the mixed metaphor. I am trying to look into the future, but the view is obscured by the elephant in the room.
I dare say whoever comes up with a website just goes ahead, elephants be damned. That may seem reckless but has acquired a different nomenclature. When a serious publication or website is launched, it’s called philanthropically funded journalism or philanthro-journalism. The category includes winners like the online ProPublica, which has won Pulitzer prizes. But the best example perhaps is the Guardian, whose late owner, John Scott, put all his shares into a trust to keep the newspaper running.The Guardian has not only survived but remains one of the leading British newspapers. As a left-of-centre quality daily, it has certainly provided diversity.
That’s what websites here hope to provide: variety. Here’s to tomorrow.
Which way GDP?
By Thusitha de Silva
The Singapore government’s economic focus is likely to remain on continuing to grow the gross domestic product.
When Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi recently said that Singapore should learn from the more relaxed way of life in her country, it affirmed what many in the city-state were thinking. While optimistic about the future, the majority of Singaporeans want a slower-paced life, for which they are willing to compromise on economic growth.
This is one of the findings of a survey of 4,000 citizens conducted in January as part of the Our Singapore Conversation exercise.
That Singaporeans now generally want a slower place of life is not particularly surprising. Things have been hectic in recent years. While Singapore’s economic development since the 1960s has been remarkable, things really started to accelerate from early in the new millennium. Between 2002 and 2012, Singapore’s population expanded from 4.18 million to 5.31 million, according to government data. Over the same period, the gross domestic product (GDP) more than doubled from S$162.3 billion to S$345.6 billion. That is some pace of growth but it has come at a price, including a high cost of living, lofty property prices and a wide income gap.
Three basic areas of Singapore’s economy, namely healthcare, education and transport, are all facing the strain of this phenomenal run. This, in turn, puts strain on many Singaporeans who are struggling to get by.
New challenges
Going forward, Singapore faces new long-term challenges as the global economic environment changes. In the past, the city-state could perhaps rely on at least one of the world’s biggest economies, the US, Europe and China, to take up some slack, but now all three are working out their own problems.
A sustainable recovery doesn’t appear to be on the cards for any of them in the medium term, though in China’s case, it’s more about a downgrade in growth expectations. As such, Singapore will likely have to look closer to home to enhance its growth prospects in coming years.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong alluded to some of these growth drivers within the city-state in his National Day Rally Speech in August. This includes plans to shift one of the world’s busiest ports to Tuas, freeing up land for property development in the Keppel area. More property development means more GDP.
Another obvious source of growth opportunities for Singapore is South-east Asia. Singapore has actively sought to improve ties with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), and bilateral relationships with the likes of Malaysia and Indonesia have been ok, even with a few hiccups along the way. Further, despite Ms Suu Kyi’s gentle reservations about the path that Singapore has taken, Myanmar remains a strong economic ally.
In a speech at the opening of the inaugural Network Asean Forum in Singapore in August, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam articulated something of a rallying cry to the region in his concluding remarks. “We are at a good starting point. We are also in the right part of the world where there are significant growth opportunities not just domestically but also to be achieved through greater regional integration. While our external environment has gotten tougher, it is a useful reminder that our domestic and regional fundamentals have to be enhanced if we wish to offset negative spill-over effects, and in fact improve our growth performance,” he said.
The Network Asean forum got business leaders from the region to brainstorm solutions to some issues that are holding back the creation of an integrated Asean Economic Community (AEC). The roadblocks are understandable considering different countries in the region are at different stages of their economic development.
Also, not all countries are likely as focused on growing GDP as Singapore is, even though their respective governments may harbour such views. So, it’s only natural that there have been delays.
In the meantime, lessons have also been learnt from the mess that is the Eurozone, where countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal are on different economic gears compared to the likes of Germany and France.
Mr Shanmugaratnam’s comments at the forum were directed at business leaders from the region, and he would likely not have heard any dissenting voices. Business leaders tend to have gone to the same schools and all are trained to think in a similar way. But how is the Singapore government going to cope with the growing view that people’s lives should not be compromised by GDP growth?
Singaporeans are not blind to the negative effects of the unbridled growth in the last decade that is evident in Singapore. Things are getting a bit more edgy in the city-state and because of the internet, people have a place now to vent their frustrations. The internet also enables them to closely scrutinise every policy that the government comes up with, much to the latter’s chagrin.
What Robert F Kennedy said
This trend of growing awareness is only likely to gain traction and the next general election in Singapore, which has to be held by 2016, could become a sort of a referendum about whether Singaporeans think that the government is navigating a sustainable path for the country. Will its focus on GDP be too much to bear by then? Perhaps we should remind ourselves of what then US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy said about the gross national product (the market value of all the products and services produced in one year by labour and property supplied by residents of a country) at the University of Kansas in March, 1968.
“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Mr Kennedy was assassinated three months later, and never became US President. We’ll never know if his thoughts on the economy would have been put into practice. Things could have been different if it did, because the US was the global thought leader in those days. Still, the likes of Ms Suu Kyi may have been inspired by Mr Kennedy’s words.
However, there are few other global leaders these days who would publicly say the same–the corporates behind the scenes will have none of that type of nonsense. Nonetheless, one gets the feeling that Mr Kennedy’s words are likely to resonate even more today as the gap between the rich and the poor widens across the world, including in Singapore.
Thusitha de Silva has been working in financial media for the last 20 years.
The wind beneath my wings
By Ravi Shankar
In a nice way, the shoe was on the other foot.
As journalists, we are the ones asking the questions, seeking the answers, looking for that exclusive photo or interview.
So when some of the media spotlight, albeit briefly, turned on me for winning this year’s China Friendship Award — the highest prize for foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to China’s economic and social progress — I felt some initial discomfiture.
But that soon disappeared when I realized that this was my own little Oscar moment.
How do you feel about the award, was the first question in an online interview even before I had received it.
The right noises: Thrilled, of course. An honour and a privilege to be counted as one among many greats. But I didn’t wail in joy; nor did I thank everyone from my kindergarten teacher to my golf coach. (Cleverly, of course, I acknowledged my bosses in full sincerity.)
Of course, I was thrilled. But the simple truth is this award was for no eureka moment or for apples falling on the head.
The story wasn’t me. It was China Daily. And the recognition of the global operations spawned by a newspaper from humble — though pathbreaking — times in 1981.
A little historical perspective: Very few newspapers around the world are feted at their birth like China Daily was. Almost every major global news agency and newspaper (in many languages) reported on its birth like they would today about a panda birth in Edinburgh Zoo (and yes, there was a panda story on the front page of the first edition even though it was about a lack of procreation).
In those days, China Daily was China for the typical foreigner who did not speak the language. It was their only window into an unfathomable and unfamiliar world emerging from isolation.
Of course, as China opened up, there were many more avenues of information but China Daily continues to lead the pack. It no longer was a newspaper for foreigners in China who could not read Chinese.
We took it to the rest of the world. In just the past few years, we have launched dedicated editions in the US, Europe, ASEAN and the wider Asia-Pacific, as well as Africa. And our multimedia platforms are your first “hits” on search engines.
The response has been more than gratifying because there is such a thirst for China knowledge around the world. Readers are not interested in coverage only through a narrow prism of set agendas.
They want to know the Real China. The China Story. And the Chinese Dream. People I meet in Europe, the US or Asia want to know how in the Kingdom of Bicycles the car is the King of the Road. They want to know about those incredibly fast trains. They want to know about migrant workers and how they will fit into the new urbanization plans. They want to know about social trends and social media. They want to know of marriages and divorces; and, indeed, if concubines have made a comeback!
This is exactly what we are trying to answer.
To come back to why (I think) I won the award: Yes, I have been closely involved in conceptualizing, coordinating and executing many of the major projects we have undertaken in the past decade. They include the continual expansion and revamps of the paper; special editions like The Olympian for the 2008 Beijing Games; for the 60th anniversary of the founding of New China; and the launch of several overseas editions.
Longevity helps. I am the longest-serving expat on the paper and so have a “historical perspective”. The good thing is that there are many who are thinking long-term and they bring a wide array of talent.
In the euphoria of the moment, I give myself a pat on the back. But the truth is I’ve been carried on the back of a great China Daily team, increasingly being made of expats like me.
Here I feel it is incumbent on me to mention Zhu Ling, our publisher and editor-in-chief. During our first encounter in China Daily Hong Kong Edition more than 11 years ago, I got a thinly disguised verbal lashing for not correcting “Chinglish” on my first night at work. I didn’t know what Chinglish was, having just come from Singapore’s “Singlish” which I was comfortable with. He has been more than kind since. I greatly appreciate the opportunities he has given me, and I hope I have learned.
Ravi Shankar is executive editor of China Daily’s overseas editions. A journalist from India, he formerly worked for The New Paper.