Colonial Rule and “Category”

Abstract

This chapter examines how Chineseness itself came to be labeled as “problematic” and how “the Chinese” became “racialized” as a distinct group with inherent characteristics as their “secret societies,” and communist activities became the target of surveillance by the British colonial administration. It employs the concept of racialization as the process of differentiation and discrimination on the basis of people's belief in “inheritable” characteristics, whether phenotypically visible or invisible. The chapter focuses on a colonial, modern development of the category of “the Chinese” in Singapore as the target of law-and-order enforcement by paying attention to the process of visibilization of inherent characteristics of “the Chinese.” In colonial Singapore, around the turn of the twentieth century, the Straits Settlements government was concerned about several political movements: the Chinese nationalist movement, the Indian nationalist movement, and the communist movement.