What do Singaporeans make of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s National Day Rally speech? He zeroed in on three issues that he said were important for the government’s effort to build a progressive and inclusive society – supporting low-wage workers, addressing anxieties over work pass holders and managing race and religion. As expected, reactions to his speech came fast and furious. They included from those who generally lauded the government for being “at last” responsive to feedback and finally doing the right thing, others who pointed out that it was forced to act only because the critics had been proven right and some who thought PM Lee had wrongly dismissed the issues of Chinese privilege and CECA.
To be fair, almost everything touched on in the rally speech is a work in progress. Income inequality, protecting the livelihoods of local workers, racial harmony, minority angst and so on. This would not be the last ND Rally speech dealing with these issues. We would probably be talking about the same things 56 years from now. They are part of the challenges of living in a dynamic multi-racial and global city.
As I assessed all the reactions in the media for enlightenment, I found my thoughts somewhat crystallised by two interesting opinion pieces.
The first was “Race, Racism and Racial Privilege in Singapore” by Dr Chua Beng Huat, professor urban studies programme, Yale-NUS College and Department of Sociology, NUS, which was published in The Straits Times on September 2.
Dr Chua pointed out that it was meritocracy in independent Singapore that brought about a situation where Chinese Singaporeans, by sheer number, started to put the other races at a disadvantage as they emerged from the shadows of a colonial past. Whether by history or by colonial design of divide and rule, many non-Chinese occupied jobs in the public sector – civil service, police, army. The illiterate or non-English educated Chinese were left to fend for themselves as labourers, hawkers or small traders and contractors. With independence came a switch to education in English schools and the advantages which came with that. Chua wrote: “With increased proficiency in English and its statistical dominance, ethnic Chinese unavoidably ended up in every employment niche across the entire economic and class spectrum.”
Gradually, the meritocratic system which emerged might have encouraged elitism which tended to develop into eugenicist thinking. “Meritocratic practices can, over time, rigidify social stratification and impede an individual’s upward mobility….Writ large, such social structural impediments can affect certain ethnic groups; for decades, Malays have been identified as a socially disadvantaged group.”
Majority racial advantage – another name for Chinese privilege – should not be dismissed as non-existent or “entirely baseless”. A Reddit reader called it majority blindspots.
The second noteworthy opinion piece was by Joseph Nathan which was reproduced by The Online Citizen on September 3. It asked, under the headline given by TOC: “What exactly are Singaporeans angry about CECA?”
I may not agree with all the arguments given by Nathan. But what he had tried to put across very vigorously was a sense of frustration at the government’s obdurate disbelief that there are Singaporeans who are unhappy about CECA.
To summarise the writer’s disappointment, he said it is not about trade agreements, race or nationality or the need for foreign workers. Trying to paint local anxiety over CECA as xenophobia is wrong and plain stupid.
He said: “When some government officials start labelling Singaporeans as racist or xenophobic for raising their displeasure over CECA, they inadvertently created an unwarranted tension between Singaporeans and Indian professionals working in Singapore when CECA was never an issue of race or nationality.
“In doing so, those 4G politicians of the PAP are in fact recklessly sowing discourse between Singaporeans and nationalities from South Asia.
“As such, aren’t the actions of the 4G politicians xenophobic, racist, and reckless?
“After playing the race card, they now plan to introduce more laws at workplace but for what exactly – to curtail discussion or to target another of their imagined discrimination?”
And Nathan made this loaded but not illogical assertion: “Our government must also make a clear distinction between employment policies for Singaporeans and their overseas investments so that one will not be compromised for the sake of the other. These should be debated vigorously in Parliament if we are truly concerned about safeguarding and fortifying our Singaporean Core.”
A bilingual multi-racial born-in-Singapore Core, I might add.
Tan Bah Bah, consulting editor of TheIndependent.Sg, is a former senior leader writer with The Straits Times. He was also managing editor of a local magazine publishing company.