No one understands Chinese privilege in Singapore

Somewhere in Singapore, a fresh graduate named Nurul is applying for jobs she is more than qualified for. Customer service executive: “Must be effectively bilingual in English and Mandarin.” Receptionist at a dental clinic in Bedok: “Mandarin-speaking, to liaise with Mandarin-speaking patients.” Admin assistant, marketing coordinator, pharmacy cashier, preschool cook: Mandarin required, Mandarin preferred, to serve clients who in every one of these cases live not within walking distance of China. The Ministry of Manpower does periodically remind employers that language requirements must be justified, but the ads continue appearing. Still, Nurul does not think of herself as a casualty of colonial history. The clinic manager does not think of herself as racist. If the two of them ever met, they would get along; the manager would find Nurul lovely and hire someone called Wei Ling anyway. This sincerity has christened the most radioactive two-word phrase in the country: Chinese privilege, a term coined in 2015 by an Indian Singaporean and denounced as an American import.

It is slightly deflating to learn that this most explosive phrase in Singapore’s recent history was produced by find-and-replace. In 2015, an Indian Singaporean named Sangeetha Thanapal took a paragraph written by bell hooks on white supremacy, swapped every word “White” for “Chinese,” and found that the paragraph still worked; the sentence held its shape around the new word the way a glove holds the shape of a hand. Now the concept had a name: Chinese Privilege.

Syed Hussein Alatas spent the 1970s testing the exact same experiment as Thanapal, taking Western social-scientific prose and swapping the terms about, only he did it to prove that the sentences were empty and interchangeable; he called the condition the captive mind, the Asian who can only perceive his own society through imported concepts. But people who reach for the imported phrase describe something like relief. Minority races spend their whole lives being politely inconvenienced in ways too small to prosecute; then two foreign-made words arrive and the pattern snaps into focus.

It’s hard to date the moment Singapore became a Chinese city. In very early Singapore, the 1824 census was conducted with such heroic precision that it recorded 16 Armenians and 15 Arabs. By 1871 it could sort the population into 33 separate races. But the ledger filed a Baba merchant who spoke Malay at home, prayed to his ancestors in Hokkien and had never seen China under “Chinese,” alongside a Cantonese coolie whose kinsmen had spent 1854 killing Hokkiens in the streets, while a Bugis nobleman and a Javanese boatman were dissolved together into “Malay”, which would have surprised them both. Meanwhile the junks were disgorging indebted young men from Fujian and Guangdong by the thousands, until in 1836 the column marked Chinese overtook the column marked Malay and never looked back.

In 1937, a British planter’s handbook explained the Malay “will not work” on estates, this being the settled scientific consensus of men who had watched Malays farm, fish, build boats and pilot them through pirate waters for a century, and then simply filed all of that under laziness. Here is the general theory of the British colonial administrators: the Chinese were industrious, acquisitive, admirably suited to commerce and secret criminal brotherhoods; the docile Indian made an excellent policeman; the Malay was a charming lazy child of nature who wanted only to sit beneath coconut palm trees. The theory shaped hiring policy. Chinese into tin and trade, Indians into the public works and the constabulary, Malays into fishing villages and, later as drivers and chauffeurs. And the Chinese, barred from the actual state, went off and built a shadow one: clan associations; dialect networks that functioned as employment agencies, courts and burial societies; schools raised on merchant philanthropy; a Chamber of Commerce by 1906. Meanwhile, the colonial government financed itself by auctioning the right to sell opium to those same coolies, so that the fortunes of the most respectable men in Asia compounded out of the dissolved bodies of their own countrymen.

The associations themselves mostly withered, which is unexceptional in any given decade. The coolie who stepped off the junk in 1885 was met at the quayside by his clansmen, who gave him a bed, a loan and a job; the loans built a shophouse, the shophouse endowed a school, the school produced a clerk, the clerk’s son got the scholarship, the scholarship became the surgeon. Meanwhile a voice has been circling the national conversation ever since, squeaking at anyone points at the outcome. It was all hard work, it squeals. Shut up about history and admire the effort. The Chinese simply valued education. They saved. They sacrificed. Nobody handed them anything; they were coolies, for heaven's sake, they slept forty to a room. You can just call it culture. One tidy word to explain a majority share of everything. Why should you listen to me? I am Meritocracy and in the founding scripture of the republic of Singapore I am a colossal ideology for six million believers, and I can create a society where everyone earned exactly what they have, if you listen to me, but for the love of god YOU MUST STOP TALKING ABOUT CHINESE PRIVILEGE.

Of course, this was 1965, and 1965 has always been narrated in a national-genesis kitsch. Every August, the official telling pulls the same levers: a trembling voice at the press conference, the fishing village, swamps, a miracle, and then the doctrine of race-blind meritocracy for all, the fairest starting gun ever. When Lee Kuan Yew promised a nation that was “not a Malay nation, not a Chinese nation, not an Indian nation,” Kuala Lumpur found it intolerable, and that’s roughly how Singapore came to be. The trouble is the starting gun fired over a city 75% Chinese, holding a century and a half of Chinese commercial capital, Chinese school networks and Chinese social machinery. Malay became the national language, in which the anthem is sung and military commands are barked and nothing else whatsoever happens; the schools went English, which was supposedly neutral; every Chinese child was assigned Mandarin as a “mother tongue” that was nobody’s mother’s tongue while the state talked the actual grandmothers' Hokkien and Teochew off the television. And the young republic dropped the pretence entirely when it came to the army: for the first decade of the draft, fewer Malay men were called up, and Lee Hsien Loong later explained that the state preferred not to put a soldier where “his emotions for the nation may be in conflict with his religion.”

Singapore basically discovered that you can just sort people. The West might have a whole liberal tradition insisting that a state must never allocate its citizens by race, but that tradition is for other countries. Those rules govern states that pretend to be colour-blind, and Singapore has never once pretended. Look at what Singapore did with housing. Four in five citizens live in flats the government built, on land the government owns, bought with savings the government compounds, which means the state is so total in its control of where bodies sleep that it can assign every single apartment block a racial percentage. Why agonise? Why hold centuries of anguished commissions on segregation like the Americans? If you don't like the demographic composition of a housing estate, just recompose it. Quota the block, quota the neighbourhood, quota the electoral slate, quota the presidency, quota the charities, quota the mother tongues, they’re only percentages. What a genius discovery. Amazing nobody else ever tried it. They must all be chicken. And here is the annoying part for critics who are ready to sneer at Singapore: it worked! There is no Bradford or Skid Row in Singapore, no banlieue, no ghetto or wrong side of any tracks. And this is our meritocracy: a race declared fair at the starting gun of 1965 and run ever since in inherited lanes of tuition money and English at home and grandfather’s networks, whose winners have never had to notice the water they swim in. As the fish said in the parable: “What the hell is water?” What the hell is Chinese privilege?

But in one corner of the school system, the whole doctrine sits exposed. Every so often the national conversation arrives at a nightmare moment when someone asks in public why some of the state’s most storied Chinese schools, Hwa Chong Institution and Dunman High School and Nanyang Primary School, run a special track that a Malay or Indian child cannot in practice enter. The horror of the Special Assistance Plan is the nine schools selected in 1979 to preserve Chinese-language heritage, lavished with resources and prestige, feeding conspicuously into the scholarships and open on paper to anyone willing to study Chinese as a first language. That same itch returns when researchers like Michael Barr tally where the Administrative Service went to school, or when the state, having abolished every other ethnic institution as a threat to harmony, is asked why this one class of them thrives on public money. Immediately, the justifications start twitching in the restless tachycardia of a bad conscience. It’s painful for a race-blind state to look directly at these schools. Because when you do, you’re facing the full implausibility of the arrangement: a nation that dissolved the Malay-medium schools and starved the Tamil stream and closed Nantah itself in the name of one national system, keeping and garlanding a protected archipelago for the majority's heritage alone, for a reason it has never quite stated, or possibly cannot state.

Do you remember the brownface ad? Every Singaporean remembers the brownface ad. It was one of the most clarifying controlled experiments Singapore has ever run on itself. Before the summer of 2019, the phrase “Chinese privilege” existed only on academic blogs. There were a lot of reasons it hadn't broken into the mainstream. Firstly, Chinese privilege was engineered to be invisible; a majority privilege that consists of never being asked to notice anything leaves no fingerprints. Secondly, every example could be individually explained away. But then a payments company dressed one Chinese actor as all four races of Singapore, browning him up to play an Indian, which exposed the whole racial apparatus for about six weeks. It turns out all you need is one image stupid enough to require no academic theory. And we couldn’t tear our eyes away. Someone had to apologise; then the police investigated the two minority siblings who released a rude rap video in response, which is the punchline delivering itself. The government that had spent decades explaining that race was too dangerous to discuss candidly, suddenly discovered it was being discussed candidly anyway on Instagram. The Straits Times published the word “privilege” without inverted commas. Yes, it all eventually subsided. In the HDB estates, a Malay seller was waiting out another slow month for an eligible buyer, and Nurul still can’t find a job, but that was all very anticlimatic. Wasn’t it satisfying, now that the ad was pulled and everyone had apologised, to conclude that racial ignorance didn’t exist in Singapore? But for some mysterious reason, among the minority races the actor’s skin had been darkened up to portray, “Racial Harmony: We Already Have It!” was not the reassurance it appeared to be.