THE BABAS OF SINGAPORE
What makes Singapore different? The majority of Singapore's
population is ethnically Chinese, but Singapore is largely free of
corruption, has sound institutions and the rule of law dominates.
It's nothing like China. The answer lies in a historical division
in Singapore's Chinese community between the babas and the sinkeh.
The sinkeh, comprising the majority of the city-state's population,
were the recent immigrants from China, or whose parents were born
in China. They spoke Chinese, lived like Chinese and considered
themselves overseas Chinese. In Indonesia, such Chinese were called
the totok.
The babas, on the other hand, also known as Straits Chinese, were
Chinese more in name than practice. They were the descendants of
the very early Chinese immigrants (Hokkiens from the Fujian
province) to the straits settlements of Malaya (Penang, Singapore
and Malacca). They assimilated with both the local Malays and the
colonising British, whom they especially admired. The babas
developed their own culture, cuisine and language - Malay liberally
sprinkled with Hokkien.
The sinkeh were the traders, the coolies and the shophouse owners.
The babas became the lawyers, the civil servants and the
politicians; they attended the local English-language schools run
in the tradition of the UK's public schools, and Oxford and
Cambridge. If the sinkeh received an overseas education at all, it
was in Nanking or another university in China. Although the sinkeh
dominated Singapore's population, it was the babas who dominated
public decision-making. In effect, a baba minority captured sinkeh
Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of
Victorian England than China.
It was the babas who were the framers of
Singapore's rules and institutions. Many of Singapore's most
prominent Chinese have had baba backgrounds. Lee Kuan Yew, who
became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is the most
obvious example. He claims a Hakka heritage, although his
upbringing was that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his
parents and baba Malay to his grandparents.
"Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected with my life,"
Lee said of his childhood.
For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and
later a political necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese
with a focus on China, but as a baba who looked to England. He
followed the conventional career path of a baba and went to London
to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore became Harry Lee of
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His father had given him and two of
his brothers English, as well as Chinese,
names.
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in
Chinese ways?
No. He ran it in a manner to which a British
colonial administrator would have
aspired.
That other great framer of Singapore's institutions, Goh Keng Swee,
who rose to become finance minister and deputy prime minister, is
the epitome of the baba elite. Goh was born in 1918 in Malacca, the
epicentre of baba culture, into a baba family. His parents were
English-oriented Chinese Methodists.
The baba influence is now more subtle, but still there. Singapore's
current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has the strongest baba
pedigree of any of the country's leaders.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
Endangered species?
For goodness sake, Lee Kuan Yew practically
filled the entire cabinet with inbred
Peranakans.
For the last few decades in Singapore, the top
positions in civil service, statutory boards, armed forces, GLCs
have all along been going disproportionately to the
Peranakans.
That is one reason why Singapore has been run to
the ground.
Lee
Kuan Yew worked with the Japanese Kempeitai and later the British
colonizers to suppress the non-Peranakan
Chinese.
That's
why he has always been wary of non-Peranakan Chinese and could only
entrust power to his own family members and his other Peranakan
cronies.
http://tomorrow.sg/archives/2009/02/17/peranakans__going_the_way_of_the.html
