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.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
