1 See len Ang and John Stratton, 'The Singapore way of multiculturalism: western concepts/Asian cultures', Sojourn (No. 10, 1995), pp. 65-89.
2.
2 As of 2001, there are 55 million Malays in Malaysia and Sumatra; furthermore, it is claimed that most of the 300 ethnic groups in Indonesia (population 21 1 million) are of Malay origin (Straits Times, 26 May 2001).
3.
3 See Nirmala Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race. disciplining difference in Singapore (Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1997).
4.
4 There is by now an extensive literature on multiracialism in Singapore by local academics, including Geoffrey Benjamin, 'The cultural logic of Singapore's "multiracialism"' in Riaz Hasan (ed.), Singapore: society in transition (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1976); Sharon Siddique, 'The phenomenology of ethnicity: a Singapore case study', Sojourn (No. 5, 1990), pp. 35-62; Nirmala Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race: disciplining difference in Singapore (Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1997); Chua Beng Huat, 'Racial Singaporeans: absence after the hyphen' in J. S. Kahn (ed.), Southeast Asian Identities: cultures and the politics of representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), pp. 28-50 and 'Culture, multiracialism and national identity in Singapore' in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories. inter-Asia cultural studies (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 186-205.
5.
5 See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, OUP, 1995), p. 29-29.
6.
6 The palace grounds of Sultan Hussein were ceded, by treaty, to his descendants in perpetuity at the time the island was sold to Raffles. In 1999, the current government appropriated the land and palace and designated it all a Malay Heritage Centre. In compensation, Sultan Hussein's descendants (who were still living in the palace in the 1980s) will be paid an annual sum of $100,000 for a specified number of years. The acquisition was discussed in the Malaysian press as the erasure of the last evidence of Malay land rights in Singapore.
7.
7 The 'Malay' identity 'shared' by some peoples of Southeast Asian origin Malaysia, Singapore and Sumatra has also been fragmented by theological differences within Islam. And, regionally, potential ethnic and religious solidarity is further fragmented by differences in material wellbeing among the different national Malay communities. Singaporean Malays are materially better off compared to those in Malaysia and Indonesia.
8.
8 This was done after the Malaysian press had argued, following the Singaporean-Australian academic Lily Ibrahim, that Malays in Singapore had been 'marginalised' by the meritocratic policies of the Singapore government.
9.
9 Straits Times (8 February 2001).
10.
10 For an 'official' conceptualisation of the economic 'backwardness' of Malays in Singapore, see Tania Li, Malays in Singapore. culture, economy and ideology (Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1989).
11.
11 There is an extensive literature on the 'Asian Values' debate by international and local writers, including Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? (Singapore, Times Books International, 1998)); C. J. Wan-ling Wee, "'Asian values", Singapore and the Third Way', Sojourn (No. 14, 1999), pp. 332-48); and Chua Beng Huat, 'Describing a national crisis: an exploration in textual analysis', Human Studies (Vol. 2, 1979), pp. 47-61).
12.
12 The ideological and policy features have coalesced nicely in an advertisement which features life in an extended three-generation ethnic Chinese family, with a Caucasian as the son-in-law.
13.
13 I owe this point to Daniel A. Bell.
14.
14 Until the late 1970s, prior to the widespread use of English as the 'street' language, the common interracial language was Malay; Indians and Chinese would converse using Malay.
15.
15 The idea that a language belongs to a particular race or ethnic group is, of course, problematic as it denies that language acquisition is a learned process rather than an intrinsic biological inheritance. English has, contrary to the Singaporean leadership's mistaken belief, been adopted by many middle-class individuals in ex-British colonies as their own language.
16.
16 Nanyang University was closed down and its student and staff merged with the then University of Singapore to form the National University of Singapore in 1981. The Nanyang Technological University has no academic affiliation at all with the latter.
17.
17 In the 1997 general election, one of the candidates from the Workers' Party was publicly labelled as a 'Chinese chauvinist' by the ruling party on account of his expressed sentiments regarding the social and economic disadvantages suffered by monolingual Mandarin speakers in the face of the ascendancy of English as the lingua franca. He is now a fugitive from the law for his failure to pay indemnity, which results from a series of libel suites brought against him by several members of the ruling party, including cabinet ministers.
