Chan Chun Sing is right, and we won’t last to SG100

by Daniel Yap

“ASK not what your country can do for you”. Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Chan Chun Sing echoed the sentiment of then-US President John F. Kennedy, and asked Singaporeans to shed a “transactional” national identity, thinking instead of what they would do for Singapore. Did the question hit home?

I think we Singaporeans are a calculative bunch because Singapore has always taught us to be that way. Seldom is there room for sentiment as we count every dollar and ask what’s in it for us. We only “follow the rainbow” as the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew implored us to, because we expect a pot of gold at the end of it.

We have an identity problem.

Our national identity is a challenge that PM Lee Hsien Loong already identified in his speech at the Ho Rih Hwa Leadership in Asia Public Lecture Series on 30 June 2015, and which he repeated to Time magazine the following month.

Staying or quitting?

It was ESM Goh Chok Tong who made much of “stayers” and “quitters” in his 2002 National Day Rally speech, and Mr Chan brought to mind some of that when he asked whether Singaporeans would stay when times got tough. Today, more than in 2002, I fear that Singaporeans have become more transactional: that is to say that we don’t do anything out of sentiment for this nation – only for what we can get out of it. It is how we have been trained to think and it is the stimulus that we are constantly fed.

This problem took root long before Mr Chan entered the political scene, so he can hardly be blamed for its existence. The G has been carrot-and-stick-ing Singaporeans as its preferred method of achieving outcomes since 1965. I prefer to think instead that Mr Chan mentions it because he wants us to see the problem that he sees and be part of some big changes to the way Singapore works. We rely on people in his position to lead the way in changing our transactional relationship with this country by changing this country’s transactional relationship with us.

How do we wean ourselves off this broken mindset so that we can last another 50 years?

Our transactional nationhood

We live in the cold halls of Singapore Incorporated, where the air-con is turned down to 16 degrees and the walls and floors are clad with shiny stainless steel. Where Singlish is often frowned upon (officially) and everybody tells you that art and culture are pointless. Where universities, parents, and teachers extol the income benefits of a degree above the value of learning and which offers us money for babies and wonders why we our Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is still low (answer: children are fundamentally sentimental choices, not transactional ones).

But the frontline of transactional Singapore is our citizenship policy: how we welcome new citizens and especially how we treat our ex-citizens.

Ex-Singaporeans face institutionalised prejudices that border on paranoia. Why this is so is not clear, and nobody seems to want to ask. Many Singaporean sons and daughters have left, never to return, so that they could pursue an overseas education (I know one young man who served his NS, but whose place in an overseas university depended on his holding citizenship there – Singapore revoked the citizenship that was his by birth), or because of family reasons (international marriages, extended families needing care abroad), or to further business opportunities (we are asked to venture out, but Singapore draws the line at us gaining advantages through other citizenships, even if it ultimately benefits the country of our birth).

Are there good reasons for those who are Singaporeans at heart to give up their citizenship here? Of course. Are there good reasons for us to be sentimental and welcome any returning ex-Singaporean with open arms? I don’t see why not. That is how a loving mother would treat her wandering children; that is how a motherland should treat her erstwhile citizens.

Mr Chan is spot-on when he raises this point about being “transactional” about the benefits of citizenship. He is clearly saying that Singaporeans’ attitudes should change. I assume he is also trying to say, politely, that the G’s policies should change too.

Even while remaining frustratingly opaque (because Singapore considers the door to citizenship some sort of weakness that will be exploited), Singapore’s criteria for citizenship is utterly transactional – good education, good income, good assets, good ethnic profile. Our immigration authorities seem to give scant credit to those who can trace their roots to this nation, or who have spent the bulk of their lives building it, or who have given birth to a generation of Singaporeans. When we deal transactionally with our new citizens, we tend to attract the transactional-minded. But if we give room for sentiment in citizenship, our people will learn that loving Singapore will not go unrequited.

Then, perhaps, we stand a chance of meeting Mr Chan’s challenge – of getting to SG100.

But for now Singapore remains mostly cold to the children who really love her, who find only small pockets of warmth in each other’s company, or in the small changes (but not enough) that are now happening with regards to how we care for our underprivileged – changes that Mr Chan himself oversaw during his years as Minister for Social and Family Development. But whenever we ask our leaders to push for more compassion and more sentimentality in policymaking, the consequential bogeyman of moral hazard is waved at us and the transactional status quo is retained.

I think that it is time to dismantle our transactional nationhood and suffer the short-term consequences so that we will survive in the long term. We should be ready to face hardship (while the going is still pretty good) so that we can weed out the risks associated with transactional thinking in Singaporeans as well as in our national policies.

Until that happens, all those who love Singapore are fools because she does not love us back, but seeks to transact with us instead. And unless Mr Chan’s hope for a heartfelt national identity can be realised, unless we change the transactional heart of Singapore Incorporated, it will be only fools left here when tough times finally roll around.

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Featured Image by Natassya Diana.

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The post Chan Chun Sing is right, and we won’t last to SG100 appeared first on The Middle Ground.

- Daniel Yap