Contexts: Singapore’s Foreign Talent Programs and the Chinese Middle School as a Recruiting Ground

Abstract

This chapter comprises two parts. The first part looks at Singapore’s foreign talent policy in general terms, reviewing the city-state’s talent-friendly foreign workforce management system and immigration regime; it then details several prominent foreign talent scholarship schemes since the 1990s, particularly three schemes targeting China. The second part unfolds around a symbolically rich event observed during the China leg of my fieldwork, which illuminates the ways in which Chinese students are shaped as subjects of educational desires. It is argued that Chinese educational desire is shaped according to two logics simultaneously, one involving an ideologized normalization emphasizing virtues and values, the other being a pragmatic attitude stressing extrinsic utilities and instrumental outcomes. This has important implications for the Chinese scholars’ subsequent educational experiences in Singapore.