Postwar Singapore Research Articles

Education and State Formation Reconsidered: Chinese School Identity in Postwar Singapore

Abstract After WWII, Singapore launched decolonization and the state elites were under strong compulsion to blend the Chinese and other racial communities into a national whole. Chinese schools, equipping students with worldview and cultural‐linguistic abilities very different from those at other schools, hindered the completion of this task. The state elites sought to resolve this problem by replacing Chinese schools, but this policy antagonized the Chinese and undermined the legitimacy of the ruling regime. To pacify the Chinese, they switched to uphold Chinese schools as an integral and distinct category in the education system. This strategy, nevertheless, kept Chinese schools culturally compartmentalized and sacrificed the objective of promoting interracial integration. To rectify this situation, the ruling authorities sought to blunt the cultural distinctiveness of Chinese schools by strengthening Chinese teaching in English schools. However, this policy was not very successful, because the Malays – the adversary of the Chinese – resented it. This study demonstrates that state formation is a complicated project containing conflicting tasks, it reminds us state hegemonic strategies always bring about contradictory results and the connection between education and state formation is always dialectical.

Ting-Hong Wong. Hegemonies Compared: State Formation and Chinese School Politics in Postwar Singapore and Hong Kong. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002. 290pp. Cloth $85.00.

Ting-Hong Wong. Hegemonies Compared: State Formation and Chinese School Politics in Postwar Singapore and Hong Kong. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002. 290pp. Cloth $85.00.

The politics of space: changing discourses on Chinese burial grounds in post-war Singapore

In order to elaborate on the view that space is a heavily contested domain of social life, we examine two closely juxtaposed discourses on Chinese burial grounds in postwar Singapore. State-constructed discourse not only highlighted the insanitary nature of burial grounds, but adopted a utilitarian view of burial space. In the context of the need to reconstruct a war-torn country in the 1950s and later the pressing demands of nation-building in the 1960s, the “problem” of Chinese burial grounds was constructed as the need to release “sterilized” land for “development” within planning discourse. In contrast, the Chinese community under colonial rule advanced the view that their burial grounds were “sacred” spaces situated within the discourse of geomancy and ancestor worship and as such “immune” from state intervention. With independence, the status of the Chinese as a citizen in a nation-state with accompanying obligations made it more difficult for the community to maintain a separate distinctly Chinese discourse on burial space. Consequently, new discourses which stressed the rights of the Chinese as citizens emerged as instruments of negotiation. Our aim is to show that both discourses were embedded in a field of power relations: both are strategic, set up in opposition to each other, and drew on the existing power relations between the state and the people. Discourses also changed with the broader context, in tandem with shifting power relations engendered by the transition from colony to nation-state.

Chinese Culture in the Hong Kong Curriculum: Heritage and Colonialism

In their introduction to Education and the Colonial Experience, Gail P. Kelly and Philip Altbach point out that, while "what those who ran [colonial] schools wish to have them accomplish ... was to assist in the consolidation of foreign rule,"' there were yet many different faces, strategies, and consequences to colonial education. The relationship between the culture of the colonizer and that of the colonized has not been everywhere a simple one of imposition and submission. If, in many societies, the indigenous culture withered under colonial rule, in others, native tradition or certain strands of it might thrive or revive under colonial sponsorship or stimulation. This article shows how British administrators and Chinese educators in Hong Kong have selectively used Chinese cultural heritage in the curriculum. While it honors the cultural heritage and transmits the sense of Chinese identity, the curriculum also fosters the sense of being at the periphery of both the Chinese and the Western worlds-which, no doubt, assists the consolidation of outside rule.