The Singapore government and Singaporeans face tension in opposing racism yet maintains pride in the heritage of their respective races.
This tricky balancing act is more pertinent given recent racist acts in this country, including an incident on Jun 5 when a Chinese man had made racist rebukes against a part-Indian man and part-Chinese woman for dating each other, as captured on video and reported in local media. To combat racism, Singapore commemorates Racial Harmony Day every year on Jul 21, which recently passed by.
The distinction among races is strengthened by the official racial classification of Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others (CMIO). The decades-old policy of the Singapore government, led by Singapore’s First Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, is bilingual education where Singapore students learn English and their mother tongue. Lee’s motivation for Singaporeans to know their mother tongue is to ensure they keep the culture of their ethnic group.
It is possible for Singaporeans of every ethnic background to maintain their culture and also harmony with other races. Examples from the history of China and Trinidad demonstrate this.
Chiang Kai-shek, the late Nationalist leader of China, insisted on the use of the Chinese language in his communications. When confronted with a complex technical term in English, he would ask why it was not expressed in Chinese, according to a book, “Thunder out of China”, by two Americans, Annalee Jacoby and Theodore White. Chiang had a racial pride, not a racist pride, said the book.
If Chiang was racist, he would have insisted all his grandchildren were pure Chinese. Instead, he gladly welcomed his Eurasian grandchildren, as well as the Russian wife of his son Chiang Ching-kuo and the Eurasian wife, born of a Chinese father and German mother, of his other son Chiang Wei-kuo.
Like Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan Yew was proud of his Chinese heritage. At one time, he touted Confucian values, then extended that to Asian values to take into account the other Asian ethnic groups of Singapore.
Hakkas
Just as Chiang Kai-shek and Lee Kuan Yew were proud of their Chinese culture, I am proud of being partly Hakka. My father’s ancestors were Hakkas from Meizhou city in Guangdong province, China.
An illustrious Hakka from Meizhou was Marshal Ye Jianying, who helped arrest the Gang of Four in Oct 1976. The Gang of Four’s downfall paved the way for another Hakka, Deng Xiaoping, when he was China’s leader, to liberalize the Chinese economy, which resulted in China being the world’s second-largest economy today.
In the current and former Singapore governments, Hakkas include Lee Kuan Yew and his son, the current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, two former Finance Ministers – Hon Sui Sen and Richard Hu, former Chief Justice Yong Pung How, former Supreme Court Judge Lai Kew Chai and Minister of Communications and Information Josephine Teo. But there is no Hakka privilege in Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew did not recruit ministers exclusively among Hakkas.
Other Hakkas in Chinese history include Yuan Chonghuan (a general who defeated the Manchu invaders several times during the early 17th century before he was unjustly executed by the Chinese emperor in 1630) and Xue Yue (a Nationalist general who repelled the Japanese invaders three times in the Chinese city of Changsha from 1939 to 1942).
Another Hakka who shared the same ancestral city of Meizhou with me was Eugene Chen, a foreign policy advisor during the 1920s to Sun Yat Sen, a Hakka who founded Republican China.
In 1931, Chiang Kai-shek appointed Chen as China’s foreign minister for about one year. Chen was born in Trinidad, so he and Lee Kuan Yew were both Hakkas who were born in hot tropical islands, Trinidad and Singapore respectively, and became senior government officials.
Eugene Chen married a Trinidad woman of mixed European and African blood, Agatha Alphosin Ganteaume. After she died, he married Zhang Li Ying, also known as Georgette Chen, a painter who was born in China and settled in Singapore. One of his sons by his Trinidad wife was Percy Chen, a lawyer, journalist and supporter of the Chinese Communist Party.
Loving the motherland
Percy Chen studied law and qualified as a barrister in London. Like Lee Kuan Yew, he acquired the tastes of an English gentleman and learnt Mandarin only in adult life. Percy Chen moved to Hong Kong in 1947 and founded the Hong Kong Bar Association in 1948.
In Hong Kong, he acted as a middleman between the Chinese Communist government and Western businessmen, journalists and diplomats. He was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body under the Chinese Communist government, and was invited by the Chinese government to witness in Dec 1984 the signing of Sino-British Joint Declaration on Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China.
In 1979, he published his autobiography, “China called me: My Life Inside the Chinese Revolution”.
With Caucasian, African and Chinese Hakka blood, this racially mixed man felt a strong affinity for China. Percy Chen was not pure Chinese, yet proud of his Chinese roots. Like Chiang Kai-shek, Percy Chen had racial pride but was not racist. These two men are counter-examples to the abovementioned case of a Chinese man’s racist rant against interracial relationships.
It is the notable Hakkas of China, Singapore and other countries who contributed to my pride in my Hakka ancestry. But that does not make me a Hakka supremacist, any more than pride in Chinese civilization rendered Chiang Kai-shek and Percy Chen racist.
It is possible for a Singaporean to glory in being Hakka, or Teochew, Hokkien, Arab, Tamil, Sikh or Malay, yet respect other ethnic groups.
Toh Han Shih is chief analyst of Headland Intelligence, a Hong Kong risk consultancy. He is a Singaporean who lives in Hong Kong. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.