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The changing political and moral order has brought about a renewed search for individual identity, be it ethnic or cultural. As migrant communities throughout the world settle into their countries of adoption and as younger generations become identified with these countries, diaspora experiences are replaced by a sense of affiliation within the boundaries of nation-states. Yet the question remains whether migrant groups can become fully integrated into their adopted nation-states. Violence and tension have become hallmarks of contemporary ethnic politics, and separatism is on the increase— phenomena which sometimes involve migrants. Amidst these developments, the maintenance of a Chinese cultural identity in Singapore, ‘Within the four seas, we are brothers’ (sihaizhinei jiexiongdiye, 四海之內皆兄弟也). This old Chinese saying continues to hold relevance for the Chinese overseas today. The urgency of the search for cultural roots and identity on the part of Chinese in various parts of the world has never been more intense than at the present time. Throughout the world, Chinese community members are becoming more confident of their own communities, irrespective of their minority statuses, as well as more vocal and assertive in their quest for an identity of their own within the nation-states of which they are citizens. They have also participated in mainstream politics, thereby further elevating the statuses of their communities within their nation-states. In Singapore, the search for cultural identity has pushed the Chinese to re-evaluate their cultural and religious practices to maintain their sense of cultural continuity. Despite the fact that the Chinese constitute the dominant ethnic group in Singapore, comprising 77 per cent of the total population, their pursuit of cultural identity is guarded. Three factors account for this: (1) the heterogeneous character of the Chinese community, (2) the strength 2 Constructing a Singapore Chinese Cultural Identity Kuah_02_ch02.indd 29 11/11/2010 11:36 AM 30 Rebuilding the Ancestral Village of the Singapore state in its role of social engineer, and (3) the issue of multiethnic identity. The Singapore state is particularly notable for engineering the development of a Singapore identity that encompasses multiple ethnicities within an acceptable socio-political framework. Calls for lower-level cultural identity during the early years were closely linked to elements of cultural chauvinism and were actively discouraged by the Singapore state. Today, there is a gradual acceptance of the need to develop respective cultural identities by the major ethnic communities. Creating a Chinese Community in Colonial Singapore The history of the Chinese who immigrated from the two southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian to Southeast Asia from the nineteenth through the second half of the twentieth century has been well documented. A later wave of migration, short and intense, occurred in the 1950s and 1960s following the Communist rise to power in Mainland China. Until the 1960s, many Mainland Chinese continued to move out to Southeast Asia, but since then the new nation-states have imposed entry restrictions, which have made it difficult for would-be migrants to enter. There have also been ethnic tensions and racial riots in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore that have made these places less attractive. In addition, effective control on emigration imposed by the Communist regime in China after the Cultural Revolution made it even more difficult for Mainland Chinese to emigrate out of China. In Singapore, as elsewhere, the migrants were mostly from Fujian and Guangdong. Today, the Fujianese-speaking Chinese form the majority within the Chinese community. There have been three categories of migrants to Singapore. The first, who constituted the majority, arrived under the ticket-credit system where the migrants worked as a contract labour for a period of time until the passage loan was paid off; the second were sponsored by previously-arrived kinsmen; and the third were independent migrants who arrived with little money and few direct kinship connections, but with some knowledge of Nanyang (roughly, Southeast Asia) and with the knowledge that they could draw upon the existing social networks that previous migrants had established. The early migrants were predominantly able-bodied men, who ranged in age from 20 to 50. They were largely from the peasantry and were armed with few skills, but they had a determination to survive, as well as intelligence and a willingness to perform hard labour. It was only in the early twentieth century that women began to arrive. Their arrival helped to create permanent Chinese settlements. Kuah_02_ch02.indd 30 11/11/2010 11:36 AM [18.117.107.90] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 01...

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