sbst275：
我是第一批分流制度的受害者，也是最后一批华校生。我个人非常看不惯新加坡所谓的“精英”（私人领域或政府领域）的一些子女要放弃华文，而很多红毛老猴(英美加澳纽)要学华文！这样环境是谁营造的！?所以我很早就对这个国家没有认同感，更不要讲参与和投入。人在做，天在看。如果新加坡的那些所谓的“精英”不会现在醒目，在我的有生之年会从新山那边看新加坡最终如何衰败！
You know better than me the true reasons why Lee Kuan Yew
destroyed chinese education in this country and imposed english
education to anglicise the society.
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/
