It is more accurate to label Harry Lee Kuan Yew as hakka
peranakan.
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/
Endangered species?
For goodness sake, Lee Kuan Yew practically
filled the entire cabinet with inbred
Peranakans.
For the last few decades in Singapore, the top
positions in civil service, statutory boards, armed forces, GLCs
have all along been going disproportionately to the
Peranakans.
That is one reason why Singapore has been run to
the ground.
Lee
Kuan Yew worked with the Japanese Kempeitai and later the British
colonizers to suppress the non-Peranakan
Chinese.
That's
why he has always been wary of non-Peranakan Chinese and could only
entrust power to his own family members and his other Peranakan
cronies.
http://tomorrow.sg/archives/2009/02/17/peranakans__going_the_way_of_the.html
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.
The diffusion of material elements from one
society to another has a complex effect on the importing
society.
In the short run it is usually benefitted by the importation, but
in the long run it is frequently disorganized and
weakened.
When white men first came to North America, material elements from
Western Civilization spread rapidly among the different Indian
tribes. The Plains Indians, for example, were weak and impoverished
before 1543, but in that year the horse began to diffuse northward
from the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century the Plains Indians
were raised to a much higher standard of living (because of ability
to hunt buffalo from horseback) and were immensely strengthened in
their ability to resist Americans coming westward across the
continent. In the meantime, the trans-Appalachian Indians who had
been very powerful in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
began to receive firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually
whiskey from the French and later the English by way of the St.
Lawrence.
These greatly weakened the woods Indians of the trans-Appalachian
area and ultimately weakened the Plains Indians of the
trans-Mississippi area, because measles and whiskey were
devastating and demoralizing and because the use of traps and guns
by certain tribes made them dependent on whites for supplies at the
same time that they allowed them to put great physical pressure on
the more remote tribes which had not yet received guns or
traps.
Any united front of reds against whites was impossible, and the
Indians were disrupted, demoralized, and destroyed. In general,
importation of an element of material culture from one society to
another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if
it is (a) productive, (b) can be made within the
society itself, and (c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial
culture of the importing society without demoralizing
it.
The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon
so many other societies rests on
its ability to demoralize their ideological and
spiritual culture as much as its ability to
destroy them in a material sense with firearms.
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/01.html
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.
In the short run it is usually benefitted by the importation,
but in the
long run it is frequently disorganized and
weakened.
The destructive impact of Western Civilization
upon so many other societies rests
on its
ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual
culture as much as its ability to
destroy them in a material sense with firearms.
That is one reason why Singapore has been run to
the ground.
Lee
Kuan Yew worked with the Japanese Kempeitai and later the British
colonizers to suppress the non-Peranakan
Chinese.