Almost everyone with a political view has critical opinions about the state of politics here, but they have very low expectations that they will be heard should they speak up. Nothing will change, many say, with a tone of either resignation or disgust. It's like shouting across a ravine to the government on the other side and getting no response. Not even an echo comes back.

Meanwhile, minister after minister does the round of schools, polytechnics and universities, trying to encourage young Singaporeans to speak up. Political apathy will be fatal for our future, they say. They then cock their ears for the feedback that they want to hear, but instead get none. Not even an echo comes back.

(It's not that students are silent at these forums, but what they say in response is seldom what the government wants to hear. Since the government's ear filters out what their brains don't want to hear, they end up hearing nothing at all.)

In August 2001, a forum was organised to discuss the NUS Political Association Survey which had polled a random sample of 2000 NUS students [1] on issues such as political participation, awareness, attitudes and expectations. Of the more than 600 respondents, 77% had noted that they were not interested in political participation now and 88% had felt there were barriers that prevented them from entering politics, including the fear of authorities. One had remarked that 'Politics in Singapore is a taboo topic', while 48% had felt that it was boring a topic to discuss. Forty-five percent had seen it as being for the elite only.

The discussion panel included the Acting Minister for the Environment Lim Swee Say and he faced a barrage of questions. One student asked, 'How can the Government encourage students to participate in politics when it comes down hard on the opposition?' (the Straits Times, 23 August 2001; Lianhe Zaobao, 23 Aug 2001; Today, 22 August 2001)

The above passage (I have not corrected the occasional typographical error) comes from a paper by Huang Jianli, published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, 2006. It is titled Positioning the student political activism of Singapore: articulation, contestation and omission.

Here's another passage from that absorbing article:

Acting Minister for Media, Information and the Arts David Lim was the keynote speaker at the 'Youth in Action' forum for 300 students from four polytechnics and he exhorted students to be more concerned with politics. A twenty-year-old Ngee Ann Polytechnic student then challenged him, saying that 'Singapore politics is like a book with restricted rating and confined to those above 21 years old. Moreover, everyone already knows the ending. Hence, how can the government blame the young for not being interested in politics?' (Lianhe Zaobao, 22 November 2001)

Despite the numerous ministerial rounds of schools and tertiary institutions, Huang observed that,

The invitation for a repolitization of the nation had clear limits. The encouragement of youth political activism was confined to a 'talk-shop' level at seminars and television shows. Ministerial encouragement remained focus on raising youth's political awareness through reading and discussion, in preparation for adult political activism. Subsequent political participation as adults was also to be channelled towards the ruling party. Student activities were essentially confined to non-political, socio-community development. Party politics on campus remained banned, rules and regulations on student organisations were never reviewed.... It was a highly qualified and circumscribed youth activism that was being allowed.

The article contrasted the currently desired outcome of the ministers' encouragement with real student activism in the 1950s, 1960s and even the 1970s. Singapore has a history of student activism, but it is striking how, in the current phase of encouraging students to speak up, no reference is made to this history.

Instead, there is an imposed amnesia, or where amnesia is not possible, a PAP-approved narrative.

That narrative is most neatly encapsulated in Part 1 of Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography, The Singapore Story. However, in Huang's critique,

... the ruling People's Action Party has scripted a national history which simplified the student community into the polarized binary of those who received education under the Chinese medium of instruction and those who learnt in English. The rigidity of this official articulation has led to the tendency of apportioning much greater attention to student activism associated with the former group, while sidelining parallel developments in the latter and largely ignoring the inter-connectivity between these two groups. It has also framed Chinese educated activists as being the natural agents of Communism.

Huang supports his critique by carefully recounting what happened at important points in the past. He detailed how the 12/13 May 1954 riot, in which nearly 900 students from numerous Chinese middle schools clashed with the police after coming out in support of striking bus transport workers, was nearly contemporaneous with the police raid on the (English-medium) University of Malaya [2] hostels on 28 May the same year. In this raid, 8 members of the University Socialist Club were arrested for sedition for articles published in the undergraduate magazine Fajar.

His point was that as much as there was activism among the Chinese-educated students, there was activism too among the English-educated.

He describes as well, the tumultuous events of the early 1960s when students from the University of Singapore, Nanyang University, Singapore Polytechnic and Ngee Ann College joined in protests over merger with Malaysia, education reform, expulsions of students and the dissolution of student unions and publications, among other issues.

The English-stream students were not apathetic at the time, Huang points out:

It is Lee Kuan Yew's account on the history of Singapore student movements that has greatly accentuated the differences, ascribed extraneous values, and introduced rigidity to the point of making the division between these two groups of students almost ahistorical.

The consequences of this artificial bifurcation are threefold:

1. The approved narrative focusses almost exclusively on the activism of the Chinese-speaking students, erasing the contributions of the English-speaking ones;

2. We now oversimplify the politics of those days as a contest between two cultural streams with the Chinese-school students painted as impressive for their "vitality, dynamism, discipline and social and political commitment", while the English-stream students were considered notable for their "apathy, self-centredness and lack of self-confidence."

3. It promotes the presupposition that the Chinese-educated students were highly susceptible to Communism.

Huang's paper tries to repaint the Chinese-educated as perhaps leftist, but not necessarily communist, but in my view, there isn't enough by way of historical facts to convince [3].

In any case, the point of this essay is about student activism and political awareness, and the connection I wish to make between the echoless mutual haranguing today and the enforced amnesia about events from the past is this: there is no more inspiring model for student activism today than knowing about the past, and yet the government wants to awaken students' socio-political awareness without ever referring to it.

On the contrary, what little we are told of the past serves to dampen political participation. We are told that the activists were mostly communists (read: traitors), they caused untold economic damage by holding sit-ins, boycotts and even rioting. In turn they were expelled from school, never to graduate. Some were exiled to China, others arrested and detained without trial for years.

In any case, they were all Chinese-educated, not like you students today, English-educated. You have nothing in common with them. You are apathetic because the official ideology -- ever suspicious of Western values -- treats selfishness and apathy as ineluctable results of the deculturisation that an English education brings.

So on the one hand, the official ideology says you English-educated students are no-hopers when it comes to political consciousness and determination, on the other hand, ministers make their rounds trying to light your fire.

The more recent past -– highlights of dissent being Tan Wah Piow, Francis Seow, the 1987 "Christian Marxist plot" that almost no one believed, J B Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan -- is just as demoralising. And it is no wonder that when ministers talk to students, questions that bounce back at them revolve around these experiences.

We need to confront our history. Our students today need to know what Singapore students from generations past were capable of and draw inspiration from them. But even more importantly, the government needs to confront history too and get off this business of trying to impose a victor's version of the linear narrative. They have been wrong in the past (most notably, in my view, the 1987 arrests [4]), and they have to own up to having been wrong.

Our students today need to see the protestors in our history not as traitors but as loyal Singaporeans; that dissent can be noble.

Until such time, our ministers will continue to face a mighty silence of double disbelief. The young Singaporeans don't believe them, but even more dishearteningly, they don't believe in themselves.

© Yawning Bread