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Singapore The Chinese
Singapore's Chinese residents were the descendants of
immigrants from coastal southeastern China, an area of
much
linguistic and subcultural variation. The migrants spoke
at least
five mutually unintelligible Chinese languages, each of
which
contained numerous regional dialects. Singaporean usage,
however,
following the common Chinese tendency to assert cultural
unity,
referred to mutually unintelligible speech systems as
"dialects."
All the Chinese languages and dialects shared common
origins and
grammatical structures and could be written with the same
Chinese
idiograms, which represent meaning rather than sound. The
primary
divisions in the immigrant Chinese population therefore
followed
linguistic lines, dividing the populace into segments that
were
called dialect communities, speech groups, or even
"tribes" (see
table 4, Appendix). In the nineteenth century, each speech
group
had its own set of associations, ranging from secret
societies to
commercial bodies to schools and temples. The groups
communicated
through leaders conversant with other Chinese languages or
through
a third language such as Malay or English.
The nomenclature for Chinese speech groups common in
Singapore
and Southeast Asia is confusing, partly because each group
can be
referred to by several alternate names. Most of the names
refer to
places in China with characteristic regional speech or
dialects,
and include the names of provinces, counties, and major
cities.
The distribution of Singapore's Chinese speech groups
has
remained fairly stable since 1900. The largest group were
the
Hokkien, who came from the area around the trading port of
Xiamen
(Amoy) in southern Fujian Province. Hokkien traders and
merchants
had been active in Southeast Asia for centuries before the
foundation of Singapore. In 1980 they made up 43 percent
of
Singapore's Chinese population. The second largest group
were the
Teochiu (sometimes written Teochew), comprising 22 percent
of the
Chinese population. Their home area is Chaozhou, in
Chao'an County
in northeastern Guangdong Province, which has as its major
port the
city of Shantou (Swatow). Chaozhou is immediately south of
the
Hokkien-speaking area of Fujian, and both Teochiu and
Hokkien are
closely related languages of the Minnan group, mutually
intelligible to native speakers after sufficient practice.
Hainanese, from the island of Hainan south of Guangdong,
made up 8
percent of the population. Hainan was settled by people
from
southern Fujian who arrived by sea, and Hainanese is a
Minnan
language whose native speakers can understand Hokkien or
Teochiu
with relatively little difficulty after practice. Speakers
of
Minnan languages thus made up 72 percent of the Chinese
population,
for whom Hokkien served as a lingua franca, the language
of the
marketplace.
The third most numerous group were Cantonese, from the
lowlands
of central Guangdong Province around the port city of
Guangzhou
(Canton). They made up 16 percent of the Chinese
population. Hakka,
a group scattered through the interior hills of southern
China and
generally considered migrants from northern China, were 7
percent.
Other Chinese call them "guest people", and the term Hakka
(Kejia
in pihyih romanization) is Cantonese for "guest families."
There
also were small numbers of people from the coastal
counties of
northern Fujian, called Hokchia, Hokchiu, and Henghua,
whose
northern Fujian (Minbei) languages are quite distinct from
those of
southern Fujian and seldom spoken outside of Fujian. A
final,
residual category of Chinese were the "Three Rivers
People," who
came from the provinces north of Guangdong and Fujian.
This group
included people from northern and central China, and more
specifically those provinces sharing the word "river"
(jiang) in their names--Jiangxi, Jiangsu, and
Zhejiang. They
would have spoken southern Mandarin dialects or the Wu
languages of
Shanghai, Ningbo, and Hangzhou. In 1980 they were 1.7
percent of
the Chinese population.
A significant category of Chinese, although one not
listed in
the census reports, were the
Baba Chinese (see Glossary)
or
Straits Chinese (see Glossary). They were Chinese who after long
residence
in Southeast Asia spoke Malay or English as their first
language,
and whose culture contained elements from China, Southeast
Asia,
and sometimes Europe as well. An indication of the size of
the Baba
Chinese community was provided by the 1980 census report
that 9
percent of Chinese families spoke English at home.
Stereotypically
the Baba were the offspring of Chinese migrants and local
women. In
the nineteenth century, they tended to be wealthier and
better
educated than the mass of immigrants and to identify more
with
Singapore and Southeast Asia than with China. In spite of
their
language, the Baba considered themselves Chinese, retained
Chinese
kinship patterns and religion, and even when speaking
Malay used a
distinct Baba dialect of Malay with many loan words from
Hokkien.
Never a large proportion of Singapore's Chinese
population, in the
late nineteenth century they took advantage of
opportunities for
education in English and promoted themselves as loyal to
Britain.
In Singapore, many Baba families spoke English as a first
language
and produced many of the leaders of Singapore's
independent
political movements, including Lee Kuan Yew. Although the
Baba, in
a sense, provided the model for the current Singaporean
who is
fluent in English and considers Singapore as home, the
community
fragmented in the early twentieth century as Chinese
nationalism
spread. After the 1920s its members gained no advantage,
economic
or political, from distinguishing themselves from the rest
of the
Chinese population and tended increasingly to become
Chinese again,
often learning to speak Chinese as adults. In the 1980s,
Baba
culture survived largely in the form of a well-known
cuisine that
mixed Chinese and Malay ingredients and in some families
who
continued to use English as the language of the home.
As the majority of the population and the ethnic group
that
dominated the political system and state administrative
structure,
Singapore's Chinese exhibited the widest range of
occupational,
educational, and class status. Those with little or no
formal
education occupied the bottom rungs of the occupational
hierarchy
and led social lives restricted to fellow members of the
same
dialect group. The level of formal education and language
of
education--Chinese or English--divided the Chinese into
broad
categories. Status for those working in the
internationally
oriented private sector or in government service depended
on
command of English and educational qualifications. In the
still
substantial Chinese private sector, status and security
rested on
a position in a bounded dialect community and a network of
personal
relations established over a lifetime. Although the latter
exclusively Chinese category was shrinking, by the late
1980s it
still contained some quite wealthy men who helped set the
international price of rubber, controlled businesses with
branches
in Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and other countries of
the
region, and supported Singapore's array of Chinese
charities,
hospitals, and education trusts. Singapore's Chinese
society was
one with a high degree of social mobility and one in which
status
increasingly was determined by educational qualifications
and
command of English and Mandarin.
Data as of December 1989
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