4 Pick and mix for a global city

Race and cosmopolitanism in

Singapore
Angelia Poon

Global cities, in prevailing conceptualizations and popular fantasies of a highly

interconnected world, are typically characterized by strong infrastructure, sophis-
ticated technological networks, ethnic and cultural diversity, an open political
climate, and a cosmopolitan outlook. These characteristics are at once the reason
for and the consequence of global cities as strategic and specialized centers of
highly mobile finance capital. Enacting, in Saskia Sassen’s (2001) term, a distinct
‘spatiotemporal order’, the global city is embedded in a worldwide grid along
with other similar cities causing it frequently to appear at odds with some of the
demands of territorial nationalism where sovereignty is dependent on geographical
borders and a certain non-contiguity of space. This opposition accounts in part for
the impression that the global city operates according to a law and logic different
from those governing the rest of the nation in which it is situated and bound; indeed
that it is, like the past, perhaps another country altogether. Sassen (2004) refers
to this disjunction between global city and nation as part of a material as well as
conceptual ‘unbundling’ of the nation-state and its authority over people’s lives. In
the case of Singapore – the ‘little red dot’ on the world map that is island, nation,
state and city all at once because of its size – the tension between its aspiration to
become a global city securely plugged into neoliberal market capitalism (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2000) and the demands of social (including racial) control related to
its nation-statehood appears in many ways rather more acutely intensified.
Such a tension is, predictably enough, largely absent from the realm of public
discourse here as terms like ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘global city’ circulate without
self-reflexive irony or contradiction as part of the Singapore state’s latest national-
ist project. The state’s blueprint for the next chapter of the constantly unfolding
Singapore Story – that officially scripted narrative of national progress – has been
clearly articulated. Singapore, as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (Lee 2005)
declared in a National Day Rally speech to the nation, must be ‘re-made’ into a ‘vi-
brant global city’, cosmopolitan in feel and outlook, a home for foreign talent and
Singaporeans alike. More than ever, Singapore’s geophysical features – its size,
lack of a hinterland, small population – mandate its inextricable integration with
the global knowledge economy. This sense of urgency and impending crisis in the
government’s public rhetoric is hardly new. The call to be a global city interpellates
the citizen-subject of Singapore in the twentieth-first century as a divided one, at
 Pick and mix for a global city 71
once professing rootedness in Singapore yet also possessing a transnational ability
to negotiate and navigate between different cultures and communities. Employing
the terms of a neoliberal rhetoric of globalization, the Singapore citizen now has to
be fashioned into an enterprising, creative, and more sharply individuated subject.
To the state, this desire to be a global city must be managed alongside more ‘local’
concerns such as the aim for Singapore to be the ‘best home’ for its citizens (Yeoh
and Chang 2001: 1039). Significantly, in this vision of global city and nation, the
policy and founding national ideology of multiracialism is commonly represented
as a boon and natural inheritance, the foundation stone upon which the state can
decidedly build for the future.
Interrogating the state’s investment in effecting a seamless move from post-
colonial multiracialism to cosmopolitanism in the name of the nation, I want in
this chapter to force a critical wedge between the two terms by first examining
the fretwork of assumptions that underpins both the notion of what it means to be
‘multiracial’ and what it means to be ‘cosmopolitan’ in Singapore. How, in other
words, given the possible historical and political meanings of the term as well as
the way it has been appropriated by the Singapore state, might cosmopolitanism
put pressure on the selective pluralism of the state’s traditional multiracialism and
its current neoliberal version? What are the silences and anxieties surrounding
the usage of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in public discourse, and what might these reveal
about state power as well as about the possibilities for reconfiguring the character
of citizenship? I will address these questions more broadly and theoretically in the
first part of the chapter before framing the discussion in relation to two specific and
distinct areas of policy in Singapore: the shift in emphasis from bilingualism to bi-
culturalism and the state’s ongoing regulatory controls and discursive construction
of foreign labour within the national space. What will emerge from this discussion
is a picture of the contingent and partial nature of state power in Singapore as the
government seeks to manage both a selective and a strategic cultural diversity, and
the understanding of what cosmopolitanism and race can mean as well.

Business as usual? Multiracialism, cosmopolitanism, and

neoliberalism
In the National Day Rally speech I referred to at the start of this chapter in which
he articulates his hopes for Singapore as a global city, Prime Minister Lee (2005)
also highlights as a source of concern the social problem of what he calls ‘dys-
functional’, ‘low-income’ families. He notes that ‘[a]ll races are represented. But
among the groups, the Malay community is over-represented.’ Lee’s observation
is telling: for in comparing the different races in this manner as if each had a score
card, and singling out the Malay community, Lee discloses the continued tenacity
of a racialized way of dividing and organizing Singaporean society that informs
the state’s approach to social problems. This hegemonic mode of thinking which
has acquired the automaticity and the compelling force of habit is the product of
one of the founding ideologies of the Singapore nation – multiracialism in terms
of the official racial categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others (CMIO).
72 A. Poon
Multiracialism was the defining gesture of a newly sovereign state when Singapore
was ‘nationalized’ in 1965 following separation from Malasia (Hill and Lian 1995;
Brown 1994). It enabled a safeguarding of allegedly Chinese interests through its
construction of a favoured ‘Chinese’ subject shorn of the political radicalism of
the Nanyang Chinese, all the while without seeming to privilege any one particular
racial group. Certainly it made and still continues to make available to the govern-
ment a high-minded rhetoric of equality, fairness, and meritocracy. In terms of
social management and control, it allows the state to advertize its impartiality
while depoliticizing ethnicity and undermining the political potential of the racial
groups particularly as this pertains to anti-state behaviour and action (Chua 1995).
Presented as a self-evident and rational policy based on existing ‘fact’, multira-
cialism hides its constitutive role in race-building so that race is always already
an assumed ontological category in Singapore. The fact of race so constructed
provides a continued source of legitimation for state power by mystifying state
policy as being nothing more than faithful adherence to the contours of a ‘natural’
order of things.
If the struggle in the last few decades over the meaning of the nation in many
countries – like Britain, for example – has had to do with redressing the problem
of certain races being excluded from the national space, Singapore’s struggle
has been of quite a different complexion altogether. In Britain, as the case of the
development of black British cultural studies shows, redefining the nation has
meant trying to achieve recognition for blackness in an alternative narrative of
modernity by relating ‘counterhistories’ from vantage points in the past that have
hitherto been ignored (Baker, et al. 1996: 6). In contrast to what is essentially a
rewriting of monochromatic history, the Singapore state’s embrace of multiracial-
ism means that anti-racism (but not anti-racialism) is ostensibly an immanent
component of nation-building from the moment of full independence. From the
start then, this postcolonial multiracialism enshrines a selective pluralism with the
assignation and ascription of racial identity which all citizens must have and which
they inherit from their fathers. The patrilineal inheritance of race foregrounds the
extent to which claiming a racial identity in official terms is not largely a matter of
personal choice in Singapore, a point seen most clearly in the case of children from
mixed-race marriages who cannot automatically, for example, use a hyphenated or
hybrid racial category to describe themselves within the bureaucratic machinery of
the state. As a prescriptive means of social organization, multiracialism tends to
elide differences within each racial group as the individual subject from any one
group almost always assumes by default a symbolic role, representing and standing
for the larger community. At the same time as such intra-racial homogenization
occurs, multiracialism in Singapore also solidifies racial boundaries in the course
of administratively and politically recognizing and celebrating the differences
between races. Thus rejecting the ‘melting-pot’ model of integration for society,
Singapore’s model of multiracialism approximates instead what David Theo
Goldberg (1994b: 7) in writing about the genealogy of multiculturalism from an
assimilative monoculturalism in the United States calls ‘managed multicultural-
isms’. The incommensurability between racial groups and the rigidity of their
 Pick and mix for a global city 73
separation as seen in Singaporean multiracialism stands in contrast, for example,
to Charles Taylor’s (1994) notion of liberal multiculturalism, which, as elaborated
in the book’s Introduction, allows for the potential transformation of individual
constituent cultures.
The fact that in Singapore multiracialism and multiculturalism are terms which
tend to be viewed synonymously, conflated, and used interchangeably is not
accidental. It reflects an essentialist mode of thinking linked inextricably to a
hypostasizing of race, and means that even when speaking of an Indian or Malay
‘culture’, for example, more often than not one is still dealing with a racial core
from which ‘culture’ is conceived as a natural extension. The racialized nature of
public discourse and thinking in Singapore is closely captured in the French scholar
Colette Guillaumin’s (1995: 30) apprehension of racism’s symbolic power, its abil-
ity to confer ‘irreversibility’ on a society’s ‘reading of reality’ by essentializing its
people and their actions. In Singapore, this crystallization of people and practices
into racial essences, also presumes, particularly for the Indians and Chinese, a high
degree of racial identification with the so-called original homeland spaces of India
and China respectively. The principle of equivalence, selectively encoding race,
culture, history and specific spaces like a series of close-fitting Chinese boxes,
underlines multiracialism’s high level of ideological congruence.
In so far as Singaporean postcolonial multiracialism is about guaranteeing equal
rights and treatment for the different racial groups on the basis of equal worth, it
is also, however, about maintaining the relative population strength of each racial
segment of CMIO. The state sticks scrupulously to this ‘racial arithmetic’ (Yeoh
and Chang 2001: 1041) as is apparent, for example, from its distribution of public
housing according to specific racial proportions and the pedantic use of multiracial
images in school textbooks. The planned precision of multiracialism as a policy
thus seems ideologically in sync with what Cherian George (2005a) has termed
‘calibrated coercion’, the generally judicious way in which the Singapore state
exercises power, its preference for a restrained and intelligent use of force as op-
posed to brute violence and bloody repression. Postcolonial multiracialism ensures
at the end of the day that a Chinese majority is maintained. It also ensures that
Singaporeans take part in the political process and civil society as raced citizens
while constituting a sense of incommensurability among the racial and cultural
groups. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the formation of official community
self-help groups for the provision of welfare services along ethnic and racial lines.
Thus all Singaporean Chinese (or those so designated) are automatically made to
contribute a small amount of their monthly income to the Chinese Development
Assistance fund. Drawing attention away from the structural causes of poverty
and the need for greater state intervention, while suggesting that inter-racial help
is somehow less natural, the schemes of self-help groups promote the idea that
like must help like. Given the entrenched and dominant place of postcolonial
multiracialism in Singapore society then, what happens when cosmopolitanism is
added to the mix?
Translated from its component Greek words, to be a ‘cosmopolitan’ means
to be a citizen of the world. As a philosophical stance, cosmopolitanism covers
74 A. Poon
extensive ethical ground and may range from a politically disengaged international
aesthetics to a universal identification and fellowship with all peoples regardless of
nation. Although the two concepts of nationalism and cosmopolitanism were not
conceived as mutually exclusive terms (cosmopolitanism being the older word), in
the nineteenth century, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ was often apprehended in dia-
lectical opposition to nationalism and patriotism (Cheah and Robbins 1998: 233).
The cosmopolitan subject as a global citizen has traditionally connoted privilege,
leisure, aesthetic distance, and worldliness. In this regard, the nineteenth-century
British gentleman for whom the Grand Tour of continental Europe and beyond was
a requisite part of a proper education and the process of accruing cultural capital
comes readily to mind.
At the other end of the spectrum, cosmopolitanism can also invoke a universal
and totalizing humanism that cuts across the artificial and seemingly debilitating
provincial boundaries of nation, race, ethnicity, tribe, and local cultures. In this
way, as both traditionally dominant meanings show, cosmopolitanism has always
embodied a tension between ‘elitism and egalitarianism’ (ibid.: 268). More recent
critical attempts to resuscitate the term and recuperate it to more radical ends have
resulted in the coining of the term ‘cosmopolitics’ in an attempt to foreground the
idea of multiple and historically situated cosmopolitanisms and render evident the
various political investments in the term. Repudiating a monolithic sense of the term
by calling for an awareness of how the cosmopolitan experience may be different
for disparate groups of people, James Clifford has insisted on the presence of what
he calls ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’ (ibid.: 365). Thus it is not only the white
colonial traveller who is cosmopolitan but the non-white servants and porters who
made the journey as well; not only the Western anthropologist but the Third World
native informant; and not only the voluntary migrant but the refugee displaced by war
and natural disaster. Attention to such subaltern cosmopolitanisms is also closely
tethered to what Walter Mignolo (2000) has characterized as border thinking, a
mode of thinking conducive to a critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism from the
perspective of coloniality/modernity that is polycentric rather than Eurocentric.
The attempts by scholars to rehabilitate cosmopolitanism disclose various pos-
sibilities for political and critical action, which, broadly speaking, constitute a
general thrust towards an intensified understanding of the complexities of different
cultures and a belief in scale-expanding agency. Thus, directly tackling the web of
meanings that forms traditional cosmopolitanism, Bruce Robbins writes, ‘The most
generous and useful way to begin rethinking cosmopolitanism, it seems to me, is
neither as ideal unplaceableness nor as sordid elitism, but as a way of relativizing
and problematizing the scale and the units of democracy’ (Cheah and Robbins
1998: 261). The Singapore state’s appropriation of the term in its quest for global
city status, however, leaves many of the more political and radical possibilities of
cosmopolitanism untouched. The state’s silence on human rights, civil liberties,
and the practices of citizenship when discussing cosmopolitanism may be seen to
serve as a kind of determinist absence, an identity-constituting lack, wherein these
deliberate exclusions are as constructive of national space and being as the state’s
more overt market-driven prescriptions for cosmopolitan living.
 Pick and mix for a global city 75
The Singapore state’s embrace of cosmopolitanism as the social and cultural
answer to the market rationalities and economic dictates of the new millennium has
been identified by anthropologist Aihwa Ong as part of neoliberal governmentality.
Ong (2006: 3) defines ‘neoliberalism’ as a ‘technology of government’ where ‘gov-
erning activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need
technical solutions.’ State intervention is reduced to a form of problem-solving
and tied to an enhancement of biopower with the aim of optimizing resources and
the utility and self-management capacity of the citizenry. In the case of Singapore,
the state’s grafting of a particular notion of cosmopolitanism onto postcolonial
multiracialism may be said to yield a neoliberal multiculturalism that for all its
advertised openness is nevertheless premised on a strategically selective and
circumscribed cultural diversity. Indeed, part of the hegemonic force of neoliberal
multiculturalism lies precisely in the elision of its class bias in the types of mo-
bile, flexible subjects it privileges. The point about neoliberal multiculturalism’s
limited pluralism is significant and is intended to temper Ong’s specific reading of
Singapore’s attempt to be a technopreneurial and biomedical hub within an alleged
‘baroque ecology’ that finds an analogue in the image of the diverse and dynamic
tropical canopy (ibid.: 180). Ong’s analysis appears at times too exuberantly caught
up with the ostensible object of her commentary – the state’s vision for global
Singapore. She concludes that ‘[t]he “Asian values” discourse is dead, replaced
by enunciations of the effervescent ecosystem’ (ibid.: 194). I would argue, how-
ever, that there is a greater degree of (forced) continuity between past and present
state action in Singapore than Ong would appear to allow. Although neoliberal
multiculturalism is presented as a rational response to global forces, it is also less
coherent than it appears. When viewed alongside other policy announcements by
the state – those on bicultural education, for example – what emerges is the state’s
anxious continued investment in essentialist thinking about citizen subjects while
grappling with the multifarious demands of a cosmopolitan episteme and sociality
it initiated but cannot fully control.
For my purposes here, central to any effective critique of state-directed cosmo-
politanism in Singapore must first be the recognition that in mapping out its plans
for a global city, the state is also actively constructing and normalizing a vision
of the world within which to embed the island nation. The point is worth mak-
ing because the act of such ‘worlding’ goes to the heart of the project to remake
Singapore into a cosmopolitan global city, a move represented in public discourse
as inevitable, desirable, and above all, pragmatic. Nothing short of the continuing
legitimation of state power is at stake since traditionally the state’s successful
performance of rational government is predicated on its ability to respond to ‘real-
ity’. The language of pragmatic, rational government now meshes with neoliberal
rhetoric about the allegedly neutral and objective demands of the global market
and technology. In public discourse and state pronouncements, globalization – and
specifically the view of globalization as the radical transformation of time and
space as a result primarily of the movement and ‘flow’ of capital, technology and
knowledge – is enshrined as the undeniable feature of an unalterable present and
predetermined future. The options open to Singaporean citizens are presented in
76 A. Poon
stark, dichotomous terms: either buy in and play the game or lose out. Agency is
clearly circumscribed and few, if any, alternative pathways are presented in this fa-
talistic view of history and historical processes which demands that the only rational
response is the adoption of a (state-determined) consensus in the face of a common
challenge.
The Singapore state’s act of ‘worlding’ proffers a view of a fast-paced, intercon-
nected and competitive globalized world that is hardly unfamiliar. What accounts
for the power of such an essentially corporatist conceptualization of globalization
is a compelling language and imagery of flow and interconnection. Commenting on
the rhetorically seductive nature of this language, Anna Tsing (2001) has reiterated
the need for scholarly critical detachment that interrogates the way such language
constitutes not truth description but localized cultural claims about scale by par-
ticular parties with specific vested interests in notions of globality, the local, and
the regional. A language of flow focused on money obscures the institutional and
structural conditions under which claims about scale in relation to globalization
may be asserted: ‘We describe the landscape imagined within these claims rather
than the culture and politics of scale making’ (Tsing 2001: 108). The imagery of
circulation and movement often overlooks the ways in which permutations of race,
class, gender and nationality work to create different types of flow, exploitative
relationships, varied access to travel, and multiple possibilities for culture-making.
Neil Lazarus (2004: 27), countering the rhetoric of inevitability and depoliticiza-
tion that dogs discussions of globalization and anti-globalization, has also argued
that the logic of inevitability and ‘technological determinism’ that such language
enshrines glosses over notions of structural inequality and the material links
between the small segment of the world’s population profiting from the current
capitalist order and the vast majority living in poverty. In Singapore, at the same
time as the state works systematically through education and immigration policies
to facilitate the movement and settlement opportunities for suitably cosmopolitan
subjects, it also routinely bars a specific group of people, namely foreign labour
(like construction workers and domestic helpers), from the possibility of staking a
claim to cosmopolitanism. As we shall see in greater detail later, the state adopts
a bifocal view of which bodies within the territorial borders of the nation may be
construed as mobile, permanent, or transient. This directly affects the creation of
new political spaces and the formation of transnational political links, alliances,
and coalitions, relationships which tend in public discourse to be embedded either
in the financial circuits of high-end global capital or in the destructive form of the
terrorist network.
In the Singaporean context, the state’s embrace of corporatist globalization
means not only that cosmopolitanism is seen as an inevitable goal but that it
is championed and represented primarily in terms of a change in consumerist
culture. In the state’s plans for Singapore to become a global city like New York
and London (Singapore Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts
1999), being seen as cosmopolitan is deemed critical for attracting foreign talent.
A cosmopolitan global city in the consumerist sense is a space for one to enjoy the
cuisine, customs and festivals of various ethnicities and races who serve to provide
 Pick and mix for a global city 77
‘colour’ by their presence. From this angle, becoming cosmopolitan involves noth-
ing more than acquiring a taste for the ‘foreign’ or exotic products and services.
This is what Ulf Hannerz calls ‘cosmopolitanism with a happy face’ (quoted in
Nugent and Vincent 2004: 71). Attending such cosmopolitan consumption, with
its suggestion of already-formed cultures, is usually a language about tolerance
of diversity and the celebration of difference, a language shorn of any political
radicalism with an attendant anti-racism and privilege-attacking agenda.
Shrinking cosmopolitanism to consumerism brings explicitly to the fore the
nettlesome issue of class privilege and egalitarianism. Inflected locally, this pits
the cosmopolitan subject against a figure like the ‘heartlander’, that symbolically
resonant figure in Singaporean public discourse who usually hails from the lower or
middle class, is possibly more comfortable in his ‘mother tongue’ than English, but
who invariably lives in public housing. In contrast to cosmopolitan detachment, the
heartlander is characterized by rootedness and national attachment. The heartlander
is a key component of the PAP government’s electoral power base and is commonly
viewed as having more parochial concerns about so-called ‘bread-and-butter’ issues.
In this respect, he is a cause for concern, vulnerable to being alienated if unable to
gain the necessary social and cultural capital needed to appreciate cosmopolitanism,
let alone be cosmopolitan. The state’s awareness of the potential social divisions
and conflict in the transformation of Singapore into a global city is reflected in the
attempts by key political figures to harness, with arguable success, an emotionally
loaded language of nationalist primitivism. This is seen, for example, when former
Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong (1999) refers to Singapore as a ‘multiracial tribe’ in
a move to describe national attachment in primal, pre- or even anti-modern terms, to
express it as a raw gut feeling rather than consciously chosen affiliation. The rhetoric
of sentiment and national feeling is also clearly evident in the so-called ‘Singapore
21’ report, an ideal vision of and proposed roadmap for Singapore in the twenty-first
century commissioned by Goh to build the ‘heartware’ of Singapore (Singapore
Government 2002). The members of the committee, drawn from different sectors
of public life in Singapore, affirm the need to develop a ‘common passion’ for the
nation and a strong ‘Singapore heartbeat.’
The state’s approach to foreseeable tensions has been to present cosmopolitan-
ism as the natural outcome of postcolonial multiracialism, which in turn is set up
as the nation’s ‘heritage’. Continuities are thus always drawn between a (Chinese)
immigrant past and the present arrival of ‘foreign talent’ to Singapore for work.
The result is a timeless and universal story of money and labour that glosses over
the historical and materialist circumstances for each period of labour movement.
Despite the state’s best efforts, however, fault lines remain. For all its manifesta-
tions and meanings, cosmopolitanism invariably implies a certain cultural openness
and transgression of boundaries which is fundamentally at odds with the relatively
closed nature of postcolonial multiracialism and its neoliberal avatar in Singapore.
The forms of racial and cultural hybridity that are the expected features of a
cosmopolitan society might herald the diminished salience of racial categories.
Cosmopolitanism may also bring with it the prospect of multiple affiliations,
fissuring the citizenry’s identity, producing what Homi Bhabha (in Bhabha and
78 A. Poon
Comaroff 2002: 38) has called ‘political citizens’ on one level – those forming
the synchronous community generally compliant with state demands – who may
also be ‘cultural citizens’ with affiliations which revolve around sexual orienta-
tion, or religious beliefs, for example, that may conflict with the state’s agenda
for modernization. In Singapore, the cosmopolitan subject is primarily conceived
of in apolitical terms and there is a sense of quietism about state-sponsored cos-
mopolitanism and neoliberal multiculturalism. Singaporeans are required to be
cosmopolitan without embracing the activism and the state of being implicated in
moral action that being a full citizen of the world might warrant. While the state
might issue more calls for alternative views and discussion, certain areas, especially
racial issues, continue to remain ‘non-negotiable’ (Teo 2005) and consensus must
ultimately prevail.
As the Singaporean writer Catherine Lim (2005) has noted, despite all the talk
about change, there has been little concession to the idea that political openness
should form an inalienable part of the new global Singapore. This has been borne
out by recent events such as Singapore’s refusal to allow public demonstra-
tions by activists and various non-governmental groups during its hosting of
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in September 2006.
Former Prime Minister Goh’s explanation that the state could not afford to allow
demonstrations by foreigners when their own citizens were prohibited from staging
such public protests serves as a glaring example of the state’s depoliticized cos-
mopolitanism: his response sidesteps the fundamental question of citizens’ rights
and freedoms in a ‘reasonable’ bid for consistency at the level of policy (Straits
Times, 10 September 2006). The point here is not so much to illustrate the discrep-
ancy between state pronouncements and everyday life, between the cosmopolitan
ideal and the state’s neoliberal multiculturalism, as to suggest the co-presence of
different realities, possibilities, discourses, and even silences in order to cast into
sharper relief the tensions and contradictions which result from the intersection of
contingent state power and uneven global processes as the state seeks continually
to define ideas about nationality and globality. These tensions are further apparent
in such areas of Singapore life as the educational focus on biculturalism and the
state’s strenuous efforts to control non-elite foreign workers.

From bilingualism to biculturalism

Underpinning multiracialism from the moment of Singapore’s independence in
1965 was a bilingual policy that whatever its mutations since has had the effect
of alloying language with race. Thus it was and is still very much the case that
Singaporean children study English as a first language and their ‘mother’ tongue
(still largely identified according to their official race) as a second language. Yet,
since 1999, an acknowledgement of partial failure in the bilingual policy especially
with regard to the dominant racial group – the Chinese – has led to changes in the
Chinese language curriculum to allow for alternative syllabi to meet the needs of
students at different levels of language competency and potential. A less demand-
ing syllabus is now available as an option for students from English-speaking
 Pick and mix for a global city 79
homes weak in Mandarin. At the same time as the teaching of Mandarin has been
rendered more flexible to accommodate different learning paths, however, the
policy of bilingualism has also been adjusted by the state to emphasize the need to
groom a bicultural Chinese elite from the ranks of a general bilingual population.
Underlining the push towards biculturalism is the recognition of two ‘facts’: first,
that not all can be effectively bilingual; and second, that speaking the language is
not enough for effective engagement with another culture. ‘Bilingualism,’ accord-
ing to former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, ‘gets us through the front door, but it
is only through biculturalism that we can reach deep inside China and work with
them’ (quoted in Chua 2004). The aim now is to produce ‘a few hundred students’
each year capable of mastering a higher level of Mandarin and developing a deeper
understanding of Chinese history and culture in order to forge stronger business
ties with China. Here, it is evident that market realities have once again demanded
policy change in alignment with neoliberal logic. Similarly but to a less voluble
and visible extent, the other two racial groups (the Malays and the Indians) have
also been encouraged to engage the Islamic world and India respectively. That the
equations are not exactly homologous is telling – ‘Indian’ corresponds to ‘India’
like ‘Chinese’ to ‘China’ while ‘Malay’ corresponds to ‘Islam’ – and discloses
the way the problematic place of the Malay minority disrupts the neatness of the
postcolonial multiracial model.
The new policy adjustments and announcements on second languages may
be seen to represent a tacit acknowledgement that the environment, rather than
one’s ‘natural’ race alone, has a large determining role to play in the learning of
languages. And yet, a fundamentally biological understanding of race – a particular
kind of racial episteme – continues to inform these policy changes linked to post-
colonial multiracialism. Thus, while there is recognition of the role of culture and
environment in the shaping of individuals and their learning of ‘mother tongue’
languages, there remains nevertheless the sense that each individual subject pos-
sesses an essentially ‘true’ racial identity. It follows, then, that while biculturalism
does not preclude a non-Chinese student from studying Mandarin, for example, the
‘rightness’ of a Chinese knowing about Chinese culture and being able to speak
Mandarin is undisputed. It is little wonder then that in the public discourse on
biculturalism, a prominent Straits Chinese historical figure, Dr Lim Boon Keng
(1869–1957) – community leader, member of the Straits Settlement Legislative
Council, and philanthropist – is held up as a role model of desirable Chineseness.
Following a speech by Lee Kuan Yew at the Nanyang Technological University’s
Centre for Chinese Language and Culture in which he hailed Lim Boon Keng as ‘an
outstanding example of a bilingual and bicultural Singaporean Chinese’, the Straits
Times promptly published a full-page biographical account of Lim (Cheong 2004).
Lim was a British-trained doctor actively involved in the Confucian revival of the
early twentieth century in Singapore. Having grown up speaking English and Baba
Malay, the language of the Straits-born Chinese, Lim has been valorised for strenu-
ously seeking in his adult life to ‘return’ to his Chinese roots through dedicated
study of Mandarin and Chinese culture. He was for one the first to start Mandarin
classes in Singapore for Straits-born Chinese like himself. He was also derided by
80 A. Poon
Lu Xun, the famous Chinese writer and leading figure of the revolutionary May
Fourth Movement, when he was president of Amoy (Xiamen) University, as ‘a
Chinese of British nationality who cannot avoid speaking of Confucius whenever
he opens his mouth’ (quoted in Wang 1991: 156). The irony of Lim having to work
hard at being Chinese, far from suggesting the contingent and performative nature
of race, is hardly ever foregrounded in public accounts of his life. Instead, Lim’s
story is used paradoxically to naturalize the relationship between Chineseness as
a racial category and such unquestionable acts and practices of Chineseness as the
speaking of Mandarin. His ‘sinicization’ is seen as a laudable attempt to recover an
essentially Chinese and original self that birthplace and upbringing, those accidents
of history, had somehow obscured.
A more contemporary role model of sinicization and the one responsible for
publicly hailing Lim as an exemplary bicultural subject is Lee Kuan Yew himself.
From the start of his tenure as Prime Minister to his position now as Minister
Mentor, Lee has played a key role in the struggle over the appropriate signs of
Chineseness for Singapore and has been closely identified with the establishment
of Mandarin as the natural language of Chinese Singaporeans (Shepherd 2005; see
Goh, this volume). Responsible for spearheading the ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign
in 1979 which sought to promote the use of ‘high-culture’ Mandarin over the
use of other Chinese ‘dialects’, Lee has spoken publicly about his difficulties in
learning Mandarin throughout his political career. Lee’s (2004) relating of his own
experiences – teaching himself Mandarin, learning from a series of teachers, and
struggling to make political speeches in the language – is part of his self-fashioned
transformation from political leader to elder statesman and ‘mentor’ figure in
the public imagination. It is a transformation that reveals the evolution of state
paternalism in Singapore as he discloses, ‘I have recounted my personal experi-
ence in learning languages and at critical moments of my life to show that I know
its difficulties’ (Lee 2004). His doggedness has been celebrated in a book meant
quite clearly to serve as an inspiration to Chinese Singaporeans (Chua 2005). Even
as Lee openly acknowledges how the learning of Mandarin was for him a matter
of political expedience, it is at the same time very much normalized as a natural
move, an act of recovery in an elaboration of the ‘biology is destiny’ idea. As in
the case of Lim Boon Keng, Lee’s story illustrates how racial and cultural identity
is presented unalterably as a question of being rather than, as Stuart Hall suggests,
a relational process of ‘positioning’ and an ‘unstable [point] of identification or
suture’ (Hall 1989: 213).
In Lee’s view, English is essential for making a living but it is the mother tongue
language that provides identity and cultural ballast. Affirming the need for mother
tongue languages, he notes that this is what will give people their ‘identity and
[make] our society vigorous and distinctive’ (Lee 2004). Lee has also reiterated
that Singapore must have ‘a core of the Chinese-educated who can regenerate and
sustain the Chinese-speaking and Chinese-reading habits of our population’:

Our homegrown core will be reinforced by a continuing flow of the completely

Chinese-educated from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong who will come to work
 Pick and mix for a global city 81
here as work permit, employment pass holders, as permanent residents, and
some as citizens. And the number of Chinese tourists will be increasing.
(Ibid.)

The need for a ‘core’ again emphasizes the difficulty of escaping the clutches of a
cultural logic premised on unspoken notions of authenticity and purity. The fine-
tuned differentiation of Chineseness within the Singaporean Chinese population
suggested by the notion of a ‘core’ reveals the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism
even as a cosmopolitan society is envisaged. Lee’s comments efface the possible
differences among foreign native Chinese speakers while suggesting that a more
cosmopolitan society would ideally merely reinforce the divisions of the postco-
lonial multiracial model. Defending the changes to the teaching and learning of
Mandarin, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has also affirmed that the bilingual
policy is ‘as valid as ever’ and ‘at the heart of our identity’. He has asserted
Singapore’s status as a fundamentally ‘Asian’ society, adding, ‘we need to work
harder to ensure that the next generation retains [sic] a sense of self and cultural
identity’ (quoted in Teo 2004). These pronouncements, concurrent with calls for
global city status, belie the continued adherence to racialized ways of thinking
which underlie the CMIO model of postcolonial multiracialism and which have
historically proven useful to state power. They hint at the selectiveness of the cul-
tural diversity the state is willing to contemplate and point to elided anxieties about
the possibilities of re-affiliation and disaffiliation that come with cosmopolitanism,
possibilities which may challenge state hegemony and official notions of national
identity. The emphasis on biculturalism, in other words, reflects the state’s attempt
to come to grips with a changing cultural and racial landscape that it has hitherto
managed to manicure in certain ways, but which now demands ever more refined
and striated forms of state power.

Discrepant cosmopolitanisms: foreign workers in Singapore

The focus on biculturalism represents one of the main tensions in the state’s
neoliberal multiculturalism: its fear of possible cosmopolitan rootlessness and
deracination on the one hand and its aspiration for Singapore to be a global city on
the other. A similar paradoxical tension attends the state’s classification and cat-
egorization of foreign labour within the nation’s territorial boundaries. Negotiating
between varying permutations of race, class, nationality, and social capital such as
educational qualifications, the state places limits on cosmopolitanism to maintain
a selective racial and cultural pluralism. In the first place, like many advanced
first-world economies, Singapore is reliant on a host of foreigners with different
skills, educational levels, and expertise to run its economy. In fact, approximately
one million of its 4.5-million-strong population are non-citizens or permanent
residents. Foreign labour in Singapore is commonly recognized as being divided
into essentially two categories: foreign workers and foreign ‘talent’. The latter
group refers to the ‘employment pass’ holders or highly educated and mobile
professionals, entrepreneurs, and corporate elites while in the former group are
82 A. Poon
‘work permit’ holders, or those who work in low- and semi-skilled jobs mostly in
the domestic and construction industries. These two groups may be seen to exhibit
James Clifford’s ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’. They bring different cultures
and perspectives to Singapore but the state has put in place various measures on
immigration and employment which effectively bar work permit holders from
claiming cosmopolitanism and the cultural capital associated with it (Yeoh 2004).
In contrast, the government often calls upon the citizenry to accept foreign talent
as inevitable and vital to the nation’s continued survival and economic well-being
(Peh 2006). As Wong Kan Seng, the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, observed
in an interview, ‘Singaporeans today, really, should see it as being in their interests
to welcome them [foreign talent]. Make them feel at home. Integrate them, help
them integrate. If we don’t attract them, other countries are attracting them in
large numbers’ (quoted in Teo 2005). In Singapore, the global talent referred
to usually comes from ‘Malaysia, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan,
Britain, Europe, South Africa, Canada and the US’ (Brooks 2002). It is to this
group of people that the state advertises and brands Singapore as ‘a global city of
opportunities’, ‘an attractive place to live, work and play’ (Singapore Ministry of
Information, Communications and the Arts 2006).
Collectively, the state’s many public pronouncements, the Immigration Act,
and the regulatory measures for work permit holders regarding marriage and re-
production amount to a bifurcated governmentality that results in the constitution
and embodiment of foreign workers and foreign talent in specific racialized and
classed ways. Repeatedly in public discourse, absorbing foreign talent is likened
to a salutary injection, an infusion into the current population mix, not least gene
pool, that would help create a creative and vibrant living environment while for-
eign workers undertaking low-status, low-wage jobs are allied with the potential
for disease and social disruption. As early as 1997, during his National Day Rally
Speech, then Prime Minister Goh (1997) declared, ‘We must therefore welcome the
infusion of knowledge which foreign talent will bring. Singapore must become a
cosmopolitan, global city, an open society where people from many lands can feel
at home.’ In this and other similar exhortations, it is implicitly assumed that foreign
talent reinforces the racial categories of postcolonial multiracialism which merely
expand rather than undergo radical transformation to accommodate the newcomers.
In this regard, the biologically -inflected vocabulary the state uses to naturalize the
changes it must convince its citizenry to accept is hardly incidental.
Despite official exhortations to welcome foreign talent, it has become, predict-
ably enough, all too apparent that the arrival of such talent fuels competition
at the workplace and creates added pressure on jobs. Already, resentment by
Singaporean citizens has forced some discussion of what citizenship entails espe-
cially since foreign talent is actively courted and given the prospect of citizenship
without apparently needing to discharge some of their duties to the nation-state
(like doing national military service, for example). Especially when foreign tal-
ent refers to Chinese and Indian professionals, the stress on the presumption of
racial identification that underlies postcolonial multiracialism is intensified. The
racial intermixing and hybrid cultural productions that must invariably come with
 Pick and mix for a global city 83
encouraging the presence of foreign talent would foreseeably also cause strain to
the rigidity of the postcolonial multiracial model with its overly-neat distinctions
between the races.
In contrast to the welcome and flexible freedoms extended to foreign talent in
Singapore, the state subjects low-wage foreign workers to stringent regulation
and disciplinary control. Such control ensures that this group of migrant workers
remains unintegrated into Singaporean society, and manifests itself most clearly
in bio-policing measures which restrict reproduction and produce specific forms
of embodiment. Take the case of foreign domestic workers, who number around
150,000 in Singapore with most hailing from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri
Lanka. These women are subject to half-yearly medical check-ups which include
tests for pregnancy as well as for HIV infection. Those who do get pregnant almost
invariably face immediate repatriation. The prohibition on pregnancy is listed in the
‘Conditions of Work Permits’ issued by the Ministry of Manpower alongside other
injunctions against foreign domestic workers engaging in illegal or ‘immoral’ ac-
tivities like the ‘breaking up’ of families (Singapore Ministry of Manpower 2006).
Thus, what these conditions and regulations do is to construct the foreign domestic
worker or maid as a promiscuous figure, always a potential threat to the family and
the larger social fabric of the nation (Poon 2003). In the state’s eyes, the maid is
incapable of regulating her own sexuality; that role and the more general work of
surveillance must be undertaken by the employer since the latter is also required
to put up a security bond of S$5,000 for her. The prohibition on getting pregnant
and the risk of losing the security bond lead many employers to restrict their maids’
movements, or even confine them to the house or flat (Arshad 2005).
Under the Marriage Restriction policy, work permit holders are also not allowed
to marry Singaporeans or permanent residents without obtaining prior permission
from the Ministry of Manpower. In a move that continues to stigmatize the foreign
worker and advertise the state’s aversion to the worker’s presence, this regulation
applies to former work permit holders even after they have left the country. The
Manpower Minister’s explanation for this extreme measure is that it needs to prevent
illegal immigration and a potential underclass from taking root in Singapore. By
relaxing the law, the potential increase in the population given the number of work
permit holders could ‘churn and change’ society (Au Yong 2005). In addition to
the conditions against marriage and pregnancy, other requirements by the state for
work permit holders constitute a specific disciplinary apparatus for everyday living.
A work permit holder, as the very term suggests, must carry his pass, a physical
card, with him at all times as he is subject to random searches by any public official.
On the other hand, the employment pass holder has the permission to be in the
country endorsed directly on his passport. Only at the airport or the causeway with
Malaysia, the nation’s territorial borders, is the employment pass holder checked.
He is otherwise a relatively free agent and mobile subject within the national ter-
ritorial space. In addition, his family members may also obtain long-term social
visit passes, a move calculated to facilitate ease of settlement in Singapore.
In contrast, the work permit holder is constructed as a transient subject who must
be reminded that his presence has been ‘permitted’ by the state. Illegal workers
84 A. Poon
risk punishment by caning if caught. Corporal punishment in this way serves as a
way of branding the body and is part and parcel of an overriding logic of selective
embodiment and hypervisibility for low-wage and allegedly less skilled foreign
workers. The state’s recognition and constitution of foreign talent allows these
selectively appointed subjects to escape the processes of substantivization at work
in the case of foreign workers. Using a panoply of methods to ensure the temporary
presence of foreign workers in Singapore, the state also denies any claim that
they might have on cosmopolitanism, and seeks to prevent their participation in
civic life and their possible involvement in forming local as well as transnational
political relationships. Yet, the mere fact of these workers’ presence means that
the potential for counternarratives to the official programme and policies always
exists; their historical agency might well provoke greater political consciousness
among Singaporeans through intensified discussion about rights, citizenship, and
race as well as increased participation in non-governmental organizations and
civil society.

Conclusion
In these two different aspects of social life in Singapore – the promotion of bicul-
turalism and the treatment of foreign workers – we may discern the contradictions
underpinning the state’s particular model of neoliberal multiculturalism: the
opposing desires for both cosmopolitanism and the social control inherent in its
traditional paradigm of postcolonial multiracialism. In its ostensible celebration of
cultural difference, diversity, and variety, neoliberal multiculturalism in Singapore
gives the impression of being an open and inclusive system. Yet it appears thus
by eliding the class bias and inequality that is intrinsic to its constitution. As a
disciplinary apparatus, it helps define the global cosmopolitan subject by setting
the racial, cultural and class parameters for its embodiment. Through such strate-
gies as a selective immigration policy, uneven entitlement to rights, and an elitist
education programme, neoliberal multiculturalism in Singapore differentiates
between citizens by valorizing them according to their economic contribution to
the capitalist order. In its disciplinary function, Singapore’s model of neoliberal
multiculturalism may be compared to its conceptual counterpart in South America,
the geo-political space to which the term is perhaps more familiarly attached. In the
1990s, various South American indigenous groups managed to win greater state
recognition for their cultural identity and gain certain cultural rights at the same
time as the region witnessed an increase in the adoption of neoliberal capitalist poli-
cies (Webber 2007). While these developments in cultural status were important
advances for indigenous peoples, they nevertheless tended to be of the kind that did
not threaten neoliberal capitalist development (Hale 2002). In this manner, neolib-
eral multiculturalism has played a critical role in determining indigenous identity
by affirming and giving official recognition only to certain aspects of indigenous
culture. What might be said to distinguish neoliberal multiculturalism in Singapore
from its analogues in South America is the politics of cultural recognition. Whereas
in Latin American states, institutionalized recognition of indigenous cultures
 Pick and mix for a global city 85
under neoliberal multiculturalism has replaced previous assimilation policies, in
Singapore, state recognition of the validity of race and cultural differences has
never been lacking. The act of recognition enshrined in the racial governmentality
of Singaporean postcolonial multiracialism was part of independence nationalism;
indeed, it has gone hand-in-hand with the country’s economic development and
climb up the global capitalist value chain from export-driven industrialization to a
knowledge and service economy. In this way, the Singapore state or the party that
has dominated the government since independence, the PAP, has always intuited
if not fully understood, through its pragmatic, instrumentalist governing logic, the
link between multiculturalism and economic development.
Is resistance to the present system or a more genuinely inclusive and equitable
multiculturalism possible in Singapore? An answer to this may perhaps be found
by contemplating the state’s fear with regard to the brave new world of Singapore
as global city that it envisages. The state’s continued reliance on essentialist
thinking and the carefully circumscribed nature of its policies suggest its fear of
the potentially destabilizing, centrifugal power of the cosmopolitanism it has been
encouraging. It is a fear that is likely to demand more challenging responses as
globalization proceeds to alter the salience of notions like ‘nation’, ‘community’,
and ‘the local’, and the unleashed ideological force and practices of cosmopolitan-
ism produce different notions of liveable sociality as well as paradoxical, unstable
and ever-shifting meanings of race, class, cultural identification, and citizenship.
New solidarities and networks as well as new political spaces look set as well to
arise from the different mobilities, circuits, and social actors brought into play
by cosmopolitanism. Within this potent mix, the need for critical scholarship to
analyse the continuities and breaks in state power as it is transformed so as to bet-
ter apprehend the pressures faced and resist the repressive foreclosure of political
choices (including possible alternatives to capitalism) is crucial. Only then can we
offer other discursive possibilities and alternative imaginings of greater justice and
political action. Only then can we reconstellate the norms for engaged citizenship
while striving to realize the notion that ‘[c]osmopolitanism is infinite ways of be-
ing’ (Pollock, et al. 2000: 588).