In Singapore, Vitriol Against Chinese Newcomers
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Construction workers from
mainland China at Renewal Christian Church in Singapore, which offers
meals and English lessons to those far from home.
By ANDREW JACOBS
SINGAPORE — It was bad enough that Ma Chi was driving well above the
speed limit on a downtown boulevard when he blew through a red light and
struck a taxi, killing its two occupants and himself. It didn’t help,
either, that he was at the wheel of a $1.4 million Ferrari that early
morning in May, or that the woman in the passenger seat was not his
wife.
But what really set off a wave of outrage across this normally decorous
island-state is the fact that Mr. Ma, a 31-year-old financial investor,
carried a Chinese passport, having arrived in Singapore four years
earlier.
The accident, captured by the dashboard camera of another taxi, has
uncorked long-stewing fury against the surge of new arrivals from China, part of a government-engineered immigration
push that has almost doubled Singapore’s population to 5.2 million
since 1990. About a million of those newcomers arrived in the past
decade, drawn by financial incentives and a liberal visa policy aimed at
counteracting Singapore’s famously low birthrate.
Tensions over immigration bedevil many nations, but what makes the clash
here particularly striking is that most of Singapore’s population was
already ethnic Chinese, many of them the progeny of earlier generations
of Chinese immigrants. The paradox is not lost on Alvin Tan, the
artistic director of a community theater company that takes on thorny
social issues.
“Mainlanders may look like us, but they aren’t like us,” said Mr. Tan,
who is of mixed Malay-Chinese descent and does not speak Mandarin.
“Singaporeans look down on mainlanders as country bumpkins, and they
look down on us because we can’t speak proper Chinese.”
One thing mainland Chinese notice about
Singapore is that is it much more law-abiding and strict than China.
Crossing the street at traffic lights is the norm and jaywalking is an
offense. Mainland Chinese often ask Singaporeans, “Is there caning for
all criminal offenses?”
Credit: Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
These days, mainland Chinese get blamed for driving up real-estate
prices, stealing the best jobs and clogging the roads with flashy
European sports cars. Coffee shop patrons gripe that they need Mandarin
to order their beloved Kopi-C (coffee sweetened with evaporated milk).
True or not, tales of Chinese women stealing away married men have
become legion.
“Singaporeans woke up one day to find the trains more crowded with
people who speak Mandarin, and they aren’t handling it very well,” said
Jolovan Wham, executive of an organization that helps foreign laborers,
many of whom face exploitive work conditions. “The amount of xenophobia
we’re seeing is just appalling.”
In the days after the accident, social media here were awash in
commentary that blamed mainlanders like Mr. Ma for upending Singapore’s
gracious, well-mannered ways. Bloggers called him “spoiled and corrupt,”
wrongly identified him as the son of a powerful Beijing official and
suggested the police prosecute him posthumously. Detractors created a
mock Facebook page, since removed, that brimmed with ugly invective.
“Good riddance and enjoy hell you piece of mainland trash,” read one of the tamer postings.
Singapore’s government, which has long relied on strict media and
sedition laws to maintain ethnic and religious harmony in a
multicultural society, has become alarmed by the venom, much of it
coming from middle-class Singaporeans. In a recent speech to a
parliamentary committee, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean defended
the country’s immigration policies, saying foreign workers — both
educated and unskilled — were indispensable to counterbalance a rapidly
aging population and to maintain the momentum of Singapore’s roaring
economy.
“Quite naturally, we expect that our new immigrants should adapt to our
values and norms, and we get upset if they have not yet done so,” he
said, speaking in English, Singapore’s lingua franca. “However, I do
agree that we should not let recent reactions towards new immigrants and
foreigners undo the good job that we have done in building a strong and
cohesive society out of people from many lands.”
More than a third of Singapore’s residents are now foreign-born. While
the government has refused to release figures on immigrant origins,
officials are quick to stress that the majority of new citizens came
from countries other than China, with nearly half from Southeast Asia.
In private, they also note that many of the more outlandishly wealthy
arrivistes are just as likely to hail from London, Dubai or New Delhi as
from China. Among them is Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian-born
co-founder of Facebook whose decision to trade his American passport for
Singaporean residency provoked a tempest in Washington this year.
The issue nonetheless looms large on the political landscape, and many
analysts say anger over immigration contributed to the governing
People’s Action Party’s unexpected losses in last year’s parliamentary
elections.
The government has already started to adjust the spigot. The number of
new permanent residents has decreased by nearly two-thirds since 2008,
when 80,000 applications were accepted, while the number of people
granted citizenship has remained level at about 18,500 a year, according
to the National Population and Talent Division. Despite the growing
animus, Singapore remains the third most desirable immigration
destination for affluent Chinese after the United States and Canada,
according to a survey by the Bank of China and the Hurun Report, which
compiles an annual list of the richest Chinese.
Although the furor has largely been confined to the anonymity of the
Internet, Singaporeans staged a rare public protest against new
immigrants last summer after a family from China complained about the
curry-laden odors wafting from an ethnic Indian neighbor’s apartment. A
campaign organized via Facebook drew tens of thousands of supporters who
all vowed to cook a curry dinner on the same day.
There was another wave of schadenfreude in March, after a Chinese
student at the National University of Singapore was fined 3,000
Singapore dollars, or about $2,390, for referring to Singaporeans as
dogs in a posting on a Chinese microblog service. The student, who was
also forced to perform three months of community service and to return a
semester’s worth of financial aid, said he was upset by the glares from
elderly Singaporeans he accidentally jostled on the sidewalk.
The tenor of the debate has unnerved some Chinese immigrants, and
angered others. Wang Quancheng, the chairman of the Hua Yuan
Association, the largest organization representing mainlanders, said the
government was not doing enough to help integrate new arrivals, but he
also blamed Singaporeans for their intolerance and said many were simply
jealous that so many Chinese immigrate here with money in their
pockets.
“Of course, the new arrivals are rich or else the government would have
to feed them,” he said. “Some locals are very lazy and live off the
government. When new immigrants come, they think it is competition,
taking away their rice bowls.”
Actually, the typical Singaporean is far better off than the average
person in China. Thousands of Chinese students live here, too, some with
mothers who came along to support their children by illegally working
as maids, or worse. In Geylang, Singapore’s red-light district, Chinese
women can sometimes outnumber the stalwarts from Thailand and the
Philippines.
Many Chinese do successfully assimilate. According to official figures,
30 percent of all Singaporean marriages involve a citizen and a
foreigner, up from 23 percent a decade ago. But the passage of time does
not necessarily narrow the cultural gap.
Yang Mu, a Beijing-born economist who moved here in 1992 and became a
citizen three years later, acknowledges a host of superficial
differences, saying he finds locals somewhat aloof, more likely to work
late and less likely to spend the night commiserating over stiff drinks.
Unlike Singaporeans, people from China, he said, would never split a
dinner tab.
“I’ve voted in four elections now, and it is great to live in a country
where you can trust people and trust the government,” said Mr. Yang, 66,
who formed a local charity that teaches English to Chinese migrants. “I
still don’t feel Singaporean,” he added. “The truth is, when I retire,
I’ll probably move back to China.”
