The real world advantage it brings is as practical as it
can get. :)
If ang moh dominant, it will bring disadvantage, not advantage
to those ang moh bo ho.
My kek
piah drive limo. He said, sau beh jia lor is not limo job. Limo job
is to sau hotel,sau tour agency, sau airport.
All wear
long steve white shirt and black trousir and shiny
shoes.
One
month 3k to 5k.
Limpeh want to drive limo, they said
limpeh eng boon bo ho so bey
sai.
http://sgforums.com/forums/3426/topics/448366
Lee did
not agree with your decision to pick
Goh.
No, he did not
disagree. He said he would leave it to us. His own first choice was
Tony Tan. Goh Chok Tong was his second choice. I was his third
choice because he said
my English was not good
enough.
http://www.singapore-window.org/sw00/000310a4.htm
But the problem doesn't lie with ang moh ho or bo ho.
The real problem lies in why Singapore is not ang moh country but
you need ang moh ho in order to "progress".
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.
And the truth is finally revealed, no matter how ugly
it is.
It is a question of class, ethnic and power
conflict.
It is not a question of whether this language is
beneficial or not beneficial at all. That is a lie.
That English is a `neutral' language
is, of course, an ideological illusion.
Since
Singapore was a British colony for 150
years, English was already a common
language
among the privileged local population who
worked for the colonial
administration
and whose children had access to the
limited opportunities of learning the
language.
This included the first generation of
political leaders who, as English speakers,
had
access to British university
education immediately after the second world war.
The
ideological promotion of English as a
`neutral' language to all ethnic Asian
children
has suppressed this class
dimension. The political utility of this illusory
`neutrality' is
that it enables the state to articulate, in
English, its own interests distinctly, apart
from
the interests of all racial groups.
It also effects a
separation of state/national
interests
from those of the racial majority,
and prevents state/national interests from
being
captured by the racial majority. The
position of monolingual Chinese
speakers
illustrates this.
http://lukdomen.narod.ru/questia-geopol.pdf
During the 1970s and 1980s, economic
development and industrial growth reduced poverty and income
inequity and accelerated upward social mobility.
Those with educational qualifications,
command of
English, and high-level technical or professional skills profited
the most from the process.
The upper levels of the society were
occupied by a tripartite elite of high-level civil servants, local
managers and professionals employed by foreign-owned multinational
corporations, and wealthy Chinese businessmen who served as leaders
in the associational world of the Chinese-speaking
communities.
The first two categories were marked
by fluency in English, university-level education, often in Britain
or the United States, and a cosmopolitan outlook reinforced by
foreign residence and travel...
http://countrystudies.us/singapore/22.htm
It means what?
It means to reduce english to a secondary language and
to use mandarin as dominant would touch the economic and political
interests of a small ruling elite headed by the peranakan Harry Lee
Kuan Yew.
That is why they say take more interest in mandarin but
there won't be chinese schools.
Because ultimately, at the core, the question is a
political one. Not economic, not educational question.
It is completely political.