January 21, 2010
The recent ugly fiasco of a PRC family who “hijacked” a SBS bus
for 6 hours just because the bus does not have wheelchair
accessibility and the bus driver refused to drive due to safety
reasons may be appalling for most Singaporeans, but such incidents
are common occurrences in mainland China.
Though China’s economy has grown by leaps and bounds since the
1980s, much of the country is still stuck in medieval times where
power comes from the barrel of a gun together with money and
connections instead of rules, regulations and laws which
Singaporeans are so used to.
There are four “Chinas” within China itself today:
1. The political elites who governed China from the capital
Beijing as the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties have done so
for the last 700 years, but in reality, they are not in full
control of China. There is a Chinese saying which goes – “The
mountains are high and the Emperor is far away”. The central
government in Beijing has very little say on many matters happening
at the provincial and county levels.
2. The provincial barons who run Chinese provinces, cities and
counties like their personal fiefdoms. These are the local thugs
who ruled the people under their purview according to their whims
and fancies – their words alone is the law.
3. The business class who needs the patronage of the local
Communist cadres in order to survive and vice versa. The
“collusion” of the political and business classes at the local
government level with some of them be involved in organized crime
like a former senior judge of Chongqing who committed suicide in
the detention center last year is a ticking time bomb waiting to be
exploded right in the face of the Chinese Communist Party.
4. The common folks with no power, connections or money, be it
city dwellers or rural peasants who form the majority of China’s
diverse population.
While many Singaporeans have an unfavorable impression of
mainland Chinese, the fact remains that they do have some highly
educated, sophisticated and qualified talents who will contribute
to our nation – the problem is: they are not coming to
Singapore.
According to a Gallup poll done in July 2009, the number one
emigration destination for college students in China is the United
States of America, followed by France and South Korea. Singapore is
not even featured among the top five destinations in spite of its
open door policies to mainland Chinese.
You can do a simple experiment by asking any ten Chinese new
citizen in the streets where their hometowns in China are and
chances are, they are more likely to come from places like
Changsha, Zhanghua and Shenyang instead of Beijing, Shanghai and
Guangzhou.
In reality, Singapore is getting many mainland Chinese from the
poorer inland provinces who does not have any understanding of what
the rule of law means.
To them, “law” means having the right money and connections to
get things done and sometimes taking it into one’s own hands when
all else fails.
This is not to say that lawlessness prevails in China. There is
a general set of written laws and some resemblance of a judiciary
system in place, but whether the law is enforced strictly is a
different matter altogether.
For example, prostitution is illegal in China, but there are
countless of KTVs, massage parlors and saunas where women provide
sexual services legally under the law so long the operators pay a
monthly “protection fee” to the local police who are often their
clients.
There were 58,000 “mass incidents”, the Chinese state’s
euphemism for strikes, street protests, roadblocks and other forms
of mass protests, in China in the first three months of 2009 alone
compared to 120,000 in 2008 and 90,000 in 2006.
Such antics by the PRC family is quite mild compared to the
countless cases of civil unrest which gripped China yearly at the
provincial and county levels.
Unlike Singaporeans, the mainland Chinese are generally more
“hard-driving” and “hard-striving” as rightly pointed out by MM Lee
and they seldom back off quietly when their interests are
threatened.
Parents are known to have protested outside university school
campuses for days to pressurize the authorities to accept their
children who cannot make the grade.
When property prices took a dive last year, disgruntled buyers
who suffered a paper loss from earlier purchases stormed the
offices of the property developer demanding a refund.
Angry villagers had no qualms burning down the office of a City
Council in Henan province whose officials tried to evict a
household from occupying land belonging to the government.
Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said in a recent speech that “an
army of sheep led by a lion is stronger than an army of lions led
by a sheep”.
The mainland Chinese are definitely not sheep – they are hungry
wolves which will even devour the lions if they are not careful
enough.
Even under the repressive rule of Communist China, they are
not afraid of breaking the laws to gather and protest against the
government and more than often not, the local officials dare not
take action against them out of fear of making matters worst.
If Singapore is considered a man-made artificial garden,
then China is a jungle. We are now “transplanting” the inhabitants
of a jungle to this lush serene tropical island of ours, how can we
ever expect them to integrate into our society?
It is quite obvious that the policy planners who allow such a
huge influx of mainland Chinese have no idea what kind of people
they are bringing into Singapore.
The mainland Chinese are highly united, organized,
nationalistic and protective of their own kind. They prefer to
mingle around themselves in their own clique rather than to reach
out to others.
With so many of them already present in Singapore, they have
even fewer incentives to socialize with other Singaporeans which is
already made difficult by the language barrier, thereby leading to
a widening rift between the two communities and the emergence of
ethnic enclaves in the HDB heartlands.
During China’s long 5,000 year history, it is always the Chinese
who assimilated other races into its own fold and not the other way
round.
The ethnic Manchus who ruled China from 1644 to 1912 A.D. were
absorbed into the Han Chinese in less than 100 years now that there
are hardly any of them left saved for a few autonomous counties in
the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang.
We are now seeing the sinicization of Xinjiang where Han Chinese
now make up more than 50 per cent of the province’s population due
to mass migration, reducing its original Uighur inhabitants to a
minority. Do we see the Han Chinese integrating into Xinjiang or
the other way round?
Though the forefathers of Singapore’s ethnic Chinese hail from
China, most of them now consider themselves as Singaporeans rather
than Han Chinese.
A Singapore Chinese has more in common with a Singapore Malay or
Indian than an ethnic Chinese from China. We are from two different
planets altogether.
As China is so vast a country with so many different races,
cultures and languages, the racial term “Chinese” has little
meaning.
A southern “Chinese” in Shenzhen will feel more at home in
Singapore than with a fellow “Chinese” living in the border town of
Dandong along the Yalu river where many are of mixed Han/Korean
stock.
A Hui Muslim Chinese from the inner Gansu province looks
essentially “Chinese”, but has more in common with Tibetans than
let’s say a Muslim or Chinese in Singapore.
So when MM Lee said in a recent interview with the National
Geographic magazine that “it is a good thing that the island has
welcomed many Chinese”, which “Chinese” is he referring to? The
“Chinese” from Shenzhen, Dandong or Gansu?
Based on demographics alone, we should be focusing on getting
the Chinese from the two southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong
since the majority of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore are Hokkiens
(Fujian), Teochew (Guangdong), Cantonese (Guangdong) and Hakka
(Guangdong) who should encounter fewer obstacles integrating
into our society due to similarities in language and culture.
Then again, Guangdong is the richest province in China with a
GDP comparable to Spain and its city dwellers have few
incentives relocating to Singapore.
With the Pearl Delta region catching up with Singapore in terms
of standard of living, the flow of immigrants may reverse in the
next few years. There are already a sizable number of Singaporeans
working and living in the cities of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Dongguan, and
Guangzhou.
The myopic and flawed immigration policies of the ruling party
pertaining to immigrants from mainland China will have
disastrous consequences for Singapore in the long run.
Now that they have allowed so many mainland Chinese into the
country, we will have no choice but to live with them and knowing
the near impossible task of integrating them, tensions between the
two communities will inevitably rise and threaten the social fabric
of the nation eventually.
http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/01/21/can-singapore-ever-integrate-mainland-chinese-with-no-sense-of-the-rule-of-law/