yes. they were a barbarians
Harry Lee Kuan Yew loves them. He is an anglophile.
The babas, on the other hand, also known as Straits
Chinese, were Chinese more in name than practice.
They assimilated with both the local Malays and the
colonising British, whom they especially admired.
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.
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/
After World War II, the previously respectable designations such
as "Baba" and "Peranakan" became almost terms of abuse if used by
the "non-Baba Chinese".
The non-Baba Chinese gave the Babas condescending names, which
implied that they were not "complete Chinese" because of their
(supposed) inability to speak "Chinese", their alleged adoption of "foreign"
(i.e. non-Chinese) cultures and their British
orientation.
The Japanese Occupation turned the Peranakan world upside-down
by triggering important changes in the political role of the Babas
as well as in their cultural identity.
Many Babas fell victim because they were among the groups
targeted during the Japanese sook ching operation. Hastily arranged
"intermarriages" between Nyonyas and non-Baba Chinese were to lead
to radical changes in the Baba way of life and to
"sinicisation".
The British
patronage of the Babas was interrupted in 1942 and was never again
fully restored.
AS "sons of the soil", the Straits Chinese British Association's
Straits Chinese defended their citizenship (or subjecthood) rights
against the China-born Chinese and those first-generation
Singapore-born Chinese who had a dual loyalty.
The chasm between the Babas and the sinkehs (literally "guests",
or recent immigrants from China) may also be illustrated by the
typical occupations of the China-born Chinese which self-conscious
Babas would have shunned.
With the
increased ambiguity of the status of the Babas, many of them
neither dared to admit they were Babas nor spoke Baba Malay in
public.
The days of Baba Malay as an inter-group language of commercial
value were also gone, and Baba Malay stagnated and became confined
to the domestic domain. The once flourishing literary activities in
Baba Malay came to a grinding halt and wayang peranakan and dondang
sayang were in crisis.
Thus, the most important "Malay" aspect of the previous Baba
identity was indeed in decline.
HOWEVER, there were early warning signs of the Babas' loss of
influence.
Eventually, with the waning British influence, the failure of
the secessionists, the death of conservative "Baba politics" and
the rapid rise of the People's Action Party which led to self-rule
in 1959, the Babas reached the second crucial turning-point in
their social history.
This usually ignored turning-point was marked by self-rule and
the takeover by the PAP.
Although leading members of the PAP, such as Lee Kuan Yew, Dr
Toh Chin Chye and Dr Goh Keng Swee, were publicly described as
English-educated Babas, the Babas as a group were openly belittled
as "deculturalised".
http://www.asiawind.com/pub/forum/fhakka/mhonarc/msg01319.html
This mother fucking anglophile bastard Harry Lee Kuan Yew and
his destruction of chinese education, chinese culture and
anglicisation of Singapore.
