Jeffrey Sachs gives the strongest take-down I’ve seen for a while - speaking about how the system has always been here - we need a different one.
Of course, one can point out that this “strong take-down” is the case because: he speaks English, sounds (and is) American, is saying this at a pre-summit hosted by the UN, is well-known, is an older male person, and has a reputation as an outspoken economist.
It is often farmers, peasants, (like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, not to mention the Zapatistas and Landless Workers’ Movement, MST) who have led the way. Sachs does the important work of translating their point into terms economists and others at a UN forum can understand.
Not only is colonisation’s effects not talked about when countries say to a poor country “what’s wrong with your economy?”, there is still a crazy economic inequality in how rich and poor nations are given access to finances. As Sachs reminds his listeners, rich countries have 0% interest rates; poor countries have interest rates. So the rich get richer as they borrow from the future.
it’s a good moment to ask how new colonial dynamics receive an eternal-pause from taking shape in Southeast Asia. I find the recent discussion around race and anti-racism in Singapore bringing a lot of potential.
One of these is a series published on Academia.sg. I really appreciate how Academia.sg’s work, in a fast-moving context, is discussed here by the editors, Teo You Yenn, Chong Ja Ian, Cherian George and Linda Lim, how they see scholarship’s work as one of vocabulary-building.
As a good time to reflect on histories and narratives that shape our world, I’ll focus this extended writing on a reading of Sai Siew Min’s piece, on Academia.sg. I will draw a bit from my own experience as a daughter of two Chinese Singaporeans who married across class divides (seemingly without realising its implications), extending it a little (not completely) to think about right relationships in agriculture and resource use, agribusiness in Southeast Asia—what decolonising narratives would also consider.
The old left of Singapore politics, before merger with Malaysia and its subsequent decimation, has been astutely covered by the historian Lysa Hong on the 50th year of Singapore’s independence after separation from Malaya. Her narration of the damaged Malayan Dream reflects a larger anti-colonial dream of the region, that Tim Harper has more recently put together into a massive (but fun adventure read) volume (Underground Asia, Harvard University Press)—on anti-colonialist revolutionary groups that worked in secrecy, across Asia. Anti-colonialism in Singapore in the 1950s-1960s was strongest amongst the Chinese left (this is something I need to read more about), and Hong quotes historian Sai Siew Min, who deciphered Harper and Tan Jing Quee’s works, and traces the ISA to its source in British colonial administration.
According to the “what if” logic of Singapore’s historical commonsense, Singapore would not have transformed into the perfect showcase of capitalistic development had those suspected of Communist sympathies […] not been detained in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. (Sai 2009).
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For the ISA, detention without trial was “an important tool in the protective umbrella the British threw over their political pet project, allowing the British to weed out ‘the Communists’ and ‘pro-Communists’ and pick the ‘right’ people whom they could work with.”
— Lysa Hong, 2015, Revisiting Malaya: Malayan dream or Singapore nightmare in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Sai Siew Min has written a more recent piece on Academia.sg arguing for more work to uncover the history of waves of Chinese migration within an organic regional Malay world, and colonialism, which I will quote extensively from in this piece. I think it’s a good piece that later incorporates Laavanya Kathiravelu’s critique, and I really appreciate the world of thoughtful, perceptive and reflective thinking that it gives insight into: one that doesn’t reduce the opportunity for critical reflection.
To start off, Sai says:
Singapore’s political authoritarianism has benefited heteronormative Chinese men and their outlook disproportionately, in a way which extends into many domains. As this is moreover defended as a quality of “Asian-ness” while leaving many Singaporeans feeling helpless, there is a qualitative force to privilege in Singapore which differs from unconscious White privilege.
And she ends:
Singapore’s national history has embraced a muscular narrative of continuous Chinese pioneering-colonisation-settlement-migration in the region, traced anachronistically to “an ancestral nation”, which masks fragmented and truncated formations of race and identity for all Singaporeans, as a result of radical reconstitution of indigenous polities, borders, and spaces caused by European imperial formation and subsequent nation-building in the Malay world. Partial Sinocentric interpretations of Singapore’s past displace dense webs of trans-ethnic interactions as well as overlapping and connected histories that once made up an organic regional Malay world. Surfacing this Malay world and its discrepant histories of Chinese-ness, I suggest, is a necessary step towards grounded critiques of racism and privilege as part of our anti-racist practice in this part of the world.
I’ve spent a good part of the last month sleepless about what it means to decolonise, about what it means to be a Chinese Singaporean studying Thailand, about my own experience of life in Singapore. What are the material privileges I have experienced as a product of my generation (1990s babies), how are these at odds with the familial histories of my own family (with two parents from very different class backgrounds and upbringings) and that of friends?
More people are becoming conscious of privilege, and part of this awareness is an invitation (though sometimes more harshly dealt, as a demand) to unpack the privilege one holds. Yet many privileges are closely knotted with insecurities or points of pain, in the “privilege system” that Sai discusses, quoting the original paper by Peggy McIntosh in 1988, which conceptualised the term “white privilege”.
A concept of privilege that not everyone sees themselves in it, can become another mental cage—a very toxic, self-conscious, self-centred one.
Sai goes on, putting into words something I’ve felt very strongly as a daughter of my father who can only stand with bowed shoulders when he speaks to someone else in English, and who has always flitted in/out of place in his in-law’s family, mostly speaking with the older dialect-speaking person—my grandma. In how his camaraderie with most other people is attributed to his genial personality, not only his ability to code-switch across multiple languages and backgrounds:
To approach privilege in Singapore holistically, it behooves us to ask questions that begin with the fundamentals, such as what characterises Singapore’s privilege system; what “taxonomies of privilege” and its effects can we observe and document; how does Singapore’s privilege system recruit, interpellate, educate, reward and punish individuals whether Chinese or non-Chinese, male or female, elite and non-elite; what historical processes, events, and contingencies underpinned the development of privilege in Singapore; what is the dominant worldview of Singapore’s privilege system; what ideologies and narratives are in play to construct, perpetuate and enforce it. This list is by no means exhaustive, but the point is that Chinese privilege does not make sense in relation to White privilege; Chinese privilege makes sense in relation to Singapore’s privilege system.
It is also there in the way my spoken Chinese begins to sound more “Chinese”, after having been 10 months away from Singapore; how I never felt able to speak Chinese without stumbling in Singapore, because I was caught between the native language(s) of my home and the standards of Mandarin pinyin pronunciation that I was taught to speak, in one of the Chinese SAP schools:
MTLs [Mother Tongue Languages] in Singapore are artificially prescribed to us and artificially simplified, re-engineered, and enforced. Not only were Sinophone regional languages from South China the “living languages” for most Chinese Singaporeans before they were edited out of their lives, they had historically mediated communication between Chinese and non-Chinese in their hybrid and romanised forms. Sino-Malay and Baba Malay, for instance, feature predominantly linguistic influences from Fujian province, but the very concept of “a mother tongue” leaves little room for the region’s multilingualism and translingualism. Beholden to standards of authentic Chinese-ness located “elsewhere”, Singapore’s understanding of the Chinese MTL will always judge Chinese Singaporeans as “deficient” because we are “inauthentic Chinese” by definition. An effective decolonial critique of English language hegemony here should not berate Chinese Singaporeans for our deficient Chinese-ness by toeing the dogmatic line of a bureaucratic definition of the Chinese MTL; it should acknowledge the hybridised and inter-ethnic pasts of languages and cultures in Singapore and the region.
As with non-Chinese non-elite home experiences in Singapore, these home experiences are invisible to an English-speaking elite. And they share far more commonality and civic sentiment than they do with the English-speaking groups they may be racially grouped with, within CMIO categories.
Rather, the invisibility of Chinese privilege occurs as an aspect of Singapore’s dramatic re-making of language and education policies using the CMIO model from the late 1970s onwards. The un-even effects of this transformation surface in the multiple language-inflected contradictions we experience today.
How about the image of the hard-working Chinese migrant labourer, whose work ethic and values my father so closely upholds? The coolie. How does that square with a privilege system? Sai reflects on Sunil Amrith’s work, which shows how British records employed colonial terms familiar to them to understand migrant “colonists”, including Chinese and Indian shipping families, where semi-permanent migration, or “sojourning”, was the norm, not permanent settlement:
Historian Sunil Amrith’s work on intra-Asian migration and the Bay of Bengal puts the history of Chinese migration into regional perspective. He writes that one key difference between intra-Asian migrants and their trans-Atlantic counterpart lies in “the numbers of those settled rather than returned”.[7] By 1930, about 85 million people of British origin lived outside the British Isles, whereas about 6 to 7 million people of Indian origin, as well as a similar number of Chinese, had settled overseas by the end of 1930.[8]
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Scholars of Chinese migration explain that the Chinese word qiao/僑 refers precisely to this pattern of circular migration and temporary settlement, but as Amrith reminds us, “sojourning” was not unique to Chinese migratory patterns, but was a notable feature of Indian and intra-Asian migration in this region.
Studying what a more ecologically-and-culturally relevant form of agriculture in Southeast Asia could be, and in Thailand, I come back continually to what a displaced position means for observation, critique, and critical action. Understanding how multiple economies and empires have co-existed in relational balance through history, forms a good part of works like those of Sunil Amrith.
The elite West has rarely stopped misrecognising other cultures in its own terms of extreme extractivist relation. As a user of the English language, knowing when to halt my actions to recognise internalised norms of extractivist, colonialist dynamics that I perpetuate onto another person, seems to be the only priority, compared to finding the “right” or best solution.
One might start by questioning how a narrative tells us how to use another (human and non-human) being—which comes from a primarily European, extractivist logic of commodifying labour and peoples so that they can be productive units for a centre-oriented imperial economy:
…It is tempting to understand these non-indigenous Sinitic-speaking labouring communities occupying and developing land in the region as “settler colonisers” in the mould of White settler-colonists. And this was precisely how the Anglophone literature wrote about them. Knowledge produced by these Eurocentric perspectives consolidated the movement and settlement of different Sinitic-speaking migratory groups as a single phenomenon of migration and settlement by a uniform and homogeneous “Chinese” collectivity, but Sinitic-speaking migratory communities did not operate as a homogeneous and independent unit; rather, they blended into the Malay port polity’s existing socio-political-economic interests and structure.
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Both positive and negative racialised stereotyping of the Chinese was widely practised during the colonial period. Both were ideological products of Eurocentric interests and structures of knowledge production, and both were implicated in imperatives of European imperial expansion and ideological domination of the Malay world.
Some of the most vehement expressions of anti-Chinese sentiment came from White people. Narratives overwrought with “white guilt” about colonial exploitation of “native” populations were disseminated with Sinophobic narratives highlighting “native” victimhood at the hands of “alien” Chinese, as well as fears of “Chinese imperialism over-running the region”.[10]
“China’s rise” and all the speculation from Europe and North America about China, is just the continuation of this fear a few centuries on, used to shape another group into an other, to justify one’s purposes. It’s Orientalism, as Said would say. It doesn’t help us understand and see more clearly the changing dynamics of relationship, that probe potential futures of exchange and equity.
If you would like to read the Lysa Hong paper I’ve referenced above and can’t access it, you can reach out to me and I’ll be happy to forward you a copy!
What (English-speaking cultural hybrids) could do:
begin to pay attention to how a global North-educated elite is overrepresented in making decisions that will affect the region
understand how to discuss a privilege system in a way that does not jumpstart toxic narcissism, but in a way that opens opportunities to re-connect with the cultures that were suppressed by colonial and post-colonial authoritarian governments—cultures that were diverse, civic, and that lived life free of the social and ecological blindfolds that capitalist tabula rasa has made an aspiration for most Singaporeans.
ask how one’s work within a system helps to address and expand knowledge of the implications/dangers of the UPOV law, to support the ones who are concerned, but who do not (yet) work within the circles of business or policy
ask how we might coherently raise the urgency of examining and averting “unintended consequences” from intentionally-created situations
Enter recent heatwaves.
At the UN food systems summit, a new science-policy interface is being discussed—supported by private interests. These efforts are boiling up to a Green Revolution, paddling easily on the learnt habits and institutional structures already in place for knowledge colonisation, of which history teaches us a few lessons:
The creation of a Quinine export market in the 1900s fueled anti-malarial drug Dutch business, which the Dutch sold to the Americans, Spanish, British.
The opening of this frontier enabled the expansion of plantations for key export crops (all cultivated for export, contributing a fraction of the value they extracted back into the local ecologies, cultures and economies)
This is happening again: with the biomedical expansion overlaid on land and “food systems”, which can be also seen as extractive agri-commodities for the depopulation of spiritual ecological landscapes and degradation of lands, at the profit of patent recipients (which are entities, shareholders, and a very select group of private individuals)
[For small teams] Examine and articulate unintended consequences with this resource from Thought for Food; explore the concept of unintended consequences with a case study on the Green Revolution, and use their Futures Wheel not to “design solutions for systemic impact” but to expand the range of visible futures (desired and undesired): https://lnkd.in/gUEyXuT
Find ways to shift more private properties into a common resource property system, one that consumers can vote for with their feet and money, in the long run. We cannot confront a seed company (Unfold, for instance) if there are no concrete steps that give other English-speaking cultural hybrid consumers alternatives.
We are at a quite dire point - scientists are getting surprised by signals more often. The latest is about a potential Gulf Stream collapse happening sooner than science expected.
When I see news like this, and all the news about COVID in Southeast Asia right now, I think of the people for whom questions about inequality and climate just creates feelings of helplessness: people who don’t work from a position of feeling powerful.
There is no technical fix that will deliver effective results for all people, because that presumes the designer of a fix can know enough to predict all the outcomes of causal relationships just right. But perhaps right relationships can transform those whose bodies, talents, and neurodiversities have been systemically undervalued, so more people move from a position of helplessness to something less isolated, and stronger.
I’ve really valued recent sharings on Instagram by @gardenofleah, for reminders of how to embody slowdown, breakdown, and the experiencing and releasing of trauma.
How to hold bodies, let them go, be vulnerable and open, and to care for oneself.
I have written about “transitions of possibility” when we talk about food walks as an embodied method - about how visiting gardens and speaking to people about food matters for society and ecologies, beyond its cultural heritage value in Singapore.
These academic papers are useful to a small degree - for the deeper, longer-cycle reflective work of academic knowledge production. Where identities are also fought and created. And reading them has helped me refine my actions and choices, in what I consider activist work.
But practical actions still spread power more immediately, equitably.
We are just beginning to see a resurgence of popular discussions around seed, soil, earth, water sovereignty movements, but this time broader, more intersectional, across borders and identities. There is so much that can be done :)
#strugglesforsovereignty
#SiegetheSummit