Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics and Socio-Economic Change, 1945-1965 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics and Socio-Economic Change, 1945–1965 Adam McKeown Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics and Socio-Economic Change, 1945–1965. By Liu Hong and Wong Sin-Kiong . New York: Peter Lang, 2004. viii+209 pp. Predictions of the imminent assimilation or modernization of overseas Chinese, and the demise of their hometown, family and dialect associations have been common since at least the 1930s.Yet the associations have endured and adapted, and analysts have turned to ideas like Confucian capitalism and alternative modernities to understand the persistence of "traditional" culture alongside modernizing change. This book focuses on Singapore Chinese politics, business and institutions in the two decades after World War II to explain much of that continuity and adaptation. As the authors note, this is a pivotal period that is ripe for reinterpretation. The frameworks of assimilation, modernization and Cold War history that shaped earlier studies of this period were not good predictors of the cultural organization and transnational scale of overseas Chinese society that emerged in the late twentieth century. The authors' depiction of this period entwines political unrest, modernizing business and education along with the activities of traditional associations and entrepreneurial networking. Rather than framing a disjuncture between traditional past and modern present, the events of this period created an environment in which new movements and established institutions interacted with and accommodated to each other. The book includes chapters on the involvement of Chinese associations in local elections, educational policies of the Singapore government and Chinese huiguan, student protests, labor movements, entrepreneurial strategies, and attempts to expand regional business networks beyond Singapore. The variety of topics provides a broad social context that demonstrates the interlinked nature of the transformations. Unfortunately, stylistic limitations cause the book to often fall short of tying these themes together. Topics mentioned in early chapters are not properly introduced until later chapters (often a problem for a reader like me who is familiar with overseas Chinese history but not the political history of Singapore), and significant analytical approaches and conclusions are not carried over from chapter to chapter. To some extent, this is the unavoidable difficulty of a multi-author work (two chapters with material on prewar Singapore were originally written by Lim How Seng and revised by the authors). An additional revision would have polished the book significantly. But the importance of this book's analysis of the significance and complexity of the postwar period still shines through the structural problems. The first chapter on prewar Singapore describes Chinese society almost in terms of bang divisions. It is the least well realized of the chapters, overlooking [End Page 140] the many other kinds of political, business, trade, family and hometown associations that rose and fell in this period. It suggests a decline in the significance of bangs after the establishment of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1906, yet the bangs continue to reappear throughout the book as an important basis for social networking. These simplifications run against the grain of historical nuances that characterize the rest of the book, and muddle the nature of postwar changes. The authors also suggest that transnational connections before the War were primarily with China, as opposed to the Southeast Asian regional networking that appeared after the War. I have also made this assertion in my own work, but I now think that tax farming syndicates and trade guilds were strong early precedents for regional networking. In other words, the stimulating approaches developed in this book could be expanded beyond the postwar period to create a better understanding of the broad trends in overseas Chinese history since the nineteenth century. The chapters by Liu Hong analyze the decline of the political importance of Chinese huiguan and the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce after the War, and their proactive redefinition as centers for cultural identity and business networking. They show how these associations tried and failed to promote a successful candidate in the elections of the 1950s, and how they turned their attention much more successfully to developing regional economic networks and supporting Chinese schools. These changes also marked a shift away from China-centered orientations toward the...