Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

KEN YOUNG 67
of the Malay and Indian communities, but the ethnic Chinese (including the
peranakan Chinese who spoke Malay) are now taught in Mandarin (Shotam
1989). While the English-speaking Chinese group predominate in the middle class,
the sustained emphasis on Mandarin for the Chinese puts pressure on them too to
conform to the government’s social engineering of racially based communities.
After breaking down the older communities of culture and language,
and eschewing cultural chauvinism, the People’s Action Party (PAP) forged a
more individualised meritocratic society. However, from the late 1970s and early
1980s it became concerned about the trend towards Westernisation and loss of the
cultural ties of community. The stages of these various initiatives in favour of Asian
Values, Confucianism and the ‘promotion of Mandarin as the symbolic language of
all Chinese, whether or not they spoke it, set up a communal equation of ethnicity
and language which had not previously existed’ (Tremewan 1994:140). The entire
story is too involved to trace here, but the Chinese population of Singapore has
been moulded by a sustained process of social engineering in which their language,
values and identity have been minutely prescribed through the major institutions of
society. Taught first to separate from their communities of origin, they are now
exhorted to celebrate a Chinese identity drawn from the high culture of the
mainland (Clammer 1993). Cultural identity here is manifestly linked to the state’s
strategics of governance, development and social control. It fosters ‘Chineseness’
but not a sense of Chinese identity that is ‘rooted in community experience or
based on deep historical memory’ (Kwok 1994:31). How much this state-sponsored
Chinese identity has in common with the diverse Chinese populations of the
Southeast Asian diaspora is unclear. However, the need within Singapore itself for
such a sustained effort to forge ethnic cultural unity in a compact city-state ought to
inspire caution about the existence of region-wide cultural homogeneity among the
Chinese.
It is noteworthy too that the PAP turned back to communitarianism in the face
of concerns about values, excessive Westernisation, individualism and mindless
materialism. With due caution about the adequacy of these labels, they are
attributes that Singaporeans tend to acquire in the arenas of globalised
consumption–open recognition that the ‘mindless’ activities of consumption and
the lifestyle associated with these practices do have potent effects on values and
identity. That is arguably the case in Hong Kong as well, where neither the old
colonial power nor the People’s Republic of China favoured the growth of a strong
local identity–yet, perversely, and pointlessly, that is what grew there (Lee 1996:
264—71; Chow 1992; Turner 1996). 11
The issues engaged here are too complex to settle conclusively, though I hope
enough has been said to support my disinclination to regard the connection
between Chineseness and wealth as the key cultural characteristic of the new rich
in the region. While ethnicity, religion, language and other cultural differences remain
important, the most obvious means by which the new rich distinguish themselves
in society is found in the way they live. They assert their material advantages, and
their claims to superior competence in the new internationalised urban-industrial