Impressions of the Goh Chok Tong Years in Singapore

36 To the Market: Cultural Policy Amidst Contestation

425 To the Market: Cultural Policy Amidst Contestation TAN TARN HOW Singapore’s cultural policy since the 1960s can be divided into two major strands. The first is cultural policy as a socio-political instrument for nation-building, beginning from self-government through independence, to the present day. This politicisation of culture began with Lee Kuan Yew, but Goh Chok Tong held the same view as his predecessor. Both believed that people’s identity and values can—and should be—moulded for the good of the nation state, through education, language, housing and other policies. Indeed, Goh was as aggressive as Lee in social engineering by introducing versions of what can be called “national culture” and“national identity”. The second strand of cultural policy in Singapore is economic in its objective. It emerged from the end of the 1980s,around the time of Goh’s transition to the premiership.Following a major review of cultural policy, Singapore decided to turn itself into a “global city for the arts” and a “Renaissance City”. Both goals led to government backing for the development and dissemination of culture and heralded a flowering of the arts. The new policies transformed not just the cityscape but also opened up new opportunities for Singaporeans who became artists and new experiences for those who became members of the audience. This is not to say that the government and artists co-existed peacefully. Censorship is a major area of contestation between the state and the art maker. More room existed at the end of Goh’s term than at the beginning, but artists continue to lock horns with a conservative state as they push the boundaries. It is clear that contestation over freedom of artistic (and other forms of ) expression will feature as prominently in the post-Goh era as during it. Ghosts of History Past In the first strand of cultural policy, which is directed towards socio-political ends, two aspects of Singapore’s past are of particular significance. First, Singapore society is a synthetic creation, born not of the natural evolution of human settlement but artificially 36 426 TAN TARN HOW by the exigencies of a colonial economy that needed migrant labour. British administrative policies kept the Chinese, Malays and Indians apart in separate enclaves where they led different and virtually disconnected lives. They held different worldviews, closer to their countries of origin than the territory of their domicile.1 At the time of its birth in 1959, self-governing Singapore had inherited this absence of a national, unified culture. The second aspect of Singapore’s history was the fraying of the peaceful multiracial accommodation. During the period when Singapore was part of Malaysia, communal politics resulted in two riots in 1964 that killed 36 people.The violence,and the constantlyinvoked spectre of violence, cast a long and deep shadow over cultural development in the Caesarean-born nation, and made a deep impression on the minds of some Singapore leaders, so much so that it still remains a preoccupation after what others would see as a dissipation of the imminent danger. These two historical legacies—the unformed nation and communal strife—created in the minds of the government a tension between the need to, firstly, develop a common culture for nation-building purposes2 and, secondly, the political imperative to assuage each community’s fears of cultural dilution. It saw two obstacles in the way of the nationbuilding project: that of growing a Singapore identity while nurturing social harmony and the necessary values for economic growth. It was argued that a Singapore identity would be undermined by the primordial pull of ethnic identities and, worse still, patriotism to what was non-Singaporean—the countries of origin or ethnic affinity. The contestation about which identity and affiliation ought to hold sway resulted in tensions that were framed by the ruling elite as a fight against chauvinism and treason. In the early 1970s, for instance, editors of Chinese-language papers were detained without trial on the charge of inciting chauvinism when they protested against perceived attacks against their language.3 The aim of cultural policy for nation building was to make Singaporeans think they were not too different or that differences were not important politically and socially even if they were deeply resonant personally. This policy also found translation into the language curriculum. The government decided that the“mother tongue” (Chinese, Malay and Tamil and other Indian languages, as the...