A City-State as Migrant Nation: Singapore from the Colonial to the Asian Modern

Abstract

Singapore is the modern Asian city par excellence, which happens to be a state which is trying to grapple with nationhood. As recently as January 16, 2011, its dominant political leader of more than fifty years once again intoned: ‘Singapore is an 80-storey building on marshy land. We’ve learnt how to put in the stakes and floats so we can go up for another 20, maybe over a hundred storeys.’ The vulnerability that is posited can only be deflected by the modern—the rational, the open marketplace, not only for capital but for human resources—just as it was in the colonial period, where the population of the island was overwhelmingly immigrants. The early 1950s was another historical juncture where Singapore was celebrated as a modern city. On September 22, 1951, it received its city charter, which the professor of geography at the University of Malaya pronounced as a feat since the wisdom of the day was that equatorial places were unsuited for great cities. The celebrations were lavish (ironically causing one of the worst traffic jams the city has ever seen), no doubt to put behind the humiliation of the Japanese Occupation. Yet the occasion was also an opportunity for political bargaining, in particular on the part of the immigrant Chinese establishment leadership who had their own ways of tying together trade, colonialism, and nationalism, different from the British. Then there were the Chinese left, mostly in the middle schools too, who staked a claim in the modern as well, as opposed to the feudal and colonial. These challenges which faced British coloniality were absorbed by its successor state and remain the bedrock in the way in which it continues to conceptualize Singapore as a modern city-state.

Hong Lysa was formerly a member of the Department of History at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is now an independent scholar and founding member of s/pores: new directions in Singapore studies [www.s-pores.com] and co-author of The Scripting of A National History: Singapore and its Pasts (Hong Kong University Press, 2008).