Without bilingual policy, SG might be only English-speaking
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Without bilingual policy, Singapore might be only English-speaking today: PM Lee
Published on Jul 10, 2014
SINGAPORE - Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has addressed concerns that Mandarin standards are slipping, saying that it is not appropriate to compare today's social and linguistic environment with that in the 1950s.
Speaking in Mandarin at a dinner to mark the 75th anniversary of Chung Cheng High School, Mr Lee defended the Government's bilingual policy and presented a different perspective on the issue.
"If we did not introduce the bilingual policy, promote Mandarin and start Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools, Singapore today might be a completely English-speaking society," he said.
Given an environment where English is the lingua franca and working language, it has already not been easy to maintain Singaporeans' Mandarin standards at the level it is today...
http://www.straitstimes.com/news/singapore/more-singapore-stories/story/without-bilingual-policy-singapore-might-be-only-english
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Wow, this is really shameless of Lee Hsien Loong. His father Harry Lee Kuan Yew promoted english as official language of Singapore to consolidate control of english speaking elite from the colonial era and continued the british colonial policy of suppressing chinese language and chinese schools to destroy power of chinese so they don't pose threat to PAP, now he is twisting facts to fool naive and gullible people.
Read also want to vomit. Pui. Shameless bastard like his father.
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that is so fei hua
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Banana - Skin outside is yellow, meat inside is white.
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apple - skin is green or red
inside is white or yellowish
watermelon - skin is green
inside is red with black seeds
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THE BABAS OF SINGAPORE
What makes Singapore different? The majority of Singapore's population is ethnically Chinese, but Singapore is largely free of corruption, has sound institutions and the rule of law dominates. It's nothing like China. 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.
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/
From another paradigm, Singapore could be seen as the domination of one group over another.
Most of the leadership has been drawn from the Baba Chinese community, a group cultured in Malay and “Colonial British.”
Babas hold strong family values, community cohesiveness, and tend to respect authority.
This is in contrast to the southern mainland Chinese migrants to Singapore who fled oppression and tended to oppose authority.
Singapore has thus been run more in the manner to which a British colonial administrator would have aspired.
Thus patriarchal leadership with neo-Victorian values is not something the migrating Chinese accepted openly.
Singapore has seen many campaigns, incentives, and deterrents to achieve the values of the Baba class.
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/one-view-over-a-thousand-singapores-cadre-system-4852/
http://www.asiawind.com/pub/forum/fhakka/mhonarc/msg01319.html
http://www.singapore-window.org/sw06/0609FEER.HTM
http://www.scribd.com/doc/117973252/Carl-Trocki-Singapore-Wealth-Power-and-the-Cul-BookFi-orghttp://www.amazon.com/Ruling-Elite-Singapore-Networks-Influence/dp/1780762348/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405057460&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+barr+singapore
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Originally posted by Ee Hoe Hean Club:
Banana - Skin outside is yellow, meat inside is white.
some bananas the inside is yellow. -
什么��?
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Colonial or not, ENGLISH is an international language. Sg national language is malay.
If don't make English the official language , what language do you suggest to be sg official language?
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Lau qua loong as usual empty vessel making the most noise. He is an extremist attention seeker. Must appear every week to talk rubbish or act as parrot to seek attention. Useless, super greedy and evil scumbag.
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Originally posted by FireIce:
that is so fei hua
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without that f'ing policy, i think some singporean will have a variety of launguages to speak. somewhat like those malaysians. scrapping other medium schools makes a english-only population to grow.
the "solution"? import lor, we import food, oil and now we also import people. ...
hello, Problems after Problems, Policies after Policies. and we have cycle. a problem in the system, create a policy, the problem in the policy, create a new one. endless ...
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without culture, man is just another animal
language is just a communication medium n nothing more
emotional connections play a far more important role in life
the world runs on who u know n not what u know
if music is not played well , its just noise to the ears
please stop the noise as too much damages have already been done
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Diverting attention fron CPF
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this good for nothing million$ minister$ better find better ways to explain, otherwise when issues blow up like balloons and explode violently, explain thousands of times also no use.
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