A cacophony of Mandarin and English echoes through the streets of Singapore’s Chinatown as crowds of shoppers buy joss sticks and fruit as offerings to the spirits during the Ghost Festival.
English has long united the ethnically diverse island-state but Singapore’s leaders now foresee a time when Mandarin will be the country’s dominant language and they are aggressively encouraging their people to become fluent in Chinese.
“Both English and Mandarin are important because in different situations you use either language. But Mandarin has become more important,” Chinatown shopkeeper Eng Yee Lay said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Hit hard by the global slowdown, strengthening ties with China has taken on a strategic imperative in Singapore, which seeks to leverage the bilingual skills of its ethnic Chinese majority to get a larger slice of China’s fast expanding economic pie.
“With the growing importance of China on the world stage, Chinese Singaporeans who are competent in the language and familiar with the culture would have a distinct advantage when working and interacting with Chinese nationals,” said Lim Sau Hoong, chairwoman of the Promote Mandarin Council.
The government’s campaign to promote Mandarin began in 1979 to linguistically unite Singapore’s disparate Chinese communities that spoke a multitude of dialects passed on by their ancestors who came from China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Unifying the Chinese majority in a country with sizeable Malay and Indian minorities was a priority and in the early days the Speak Mandarin Campaign discouraged ethnic Chinese from speaking the dialects that prevailed, such as Hokkien.
Now, with government figures showing a majority of Singaporeans speaking Mandarin in their homes, the focus is on improving fluency in spoken and written Mandarin.
“In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue,” former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀) said at the launch of the 2009 Speak Mandarin Campaign earlier this year.
His vision is for Singapore to become China’s Southeast Asia hub as it expands its commercial interests in the region, while Singapore firms would entrench their positions in China, giving them a first-mover advantage over foreign firms.
Already, despite its small demographic size, Singapore was China’s third-largest foreign investor with total foreign direct investment of S$6.5 billion (US$4.6 billion) last year, a 40 percent rise from 2007, the Chinese government said.
Trade between the countries has risen 17-fold since 1991 to S$91.4 billion last year.
Singapore has come a long way since the 1970s, when Cambridge-educated Lee was suspicious of Maoist China’s designs on the region and focused on keeping the country predominantly English-speaking and aligned with the US and the UK. As Singapore prepares to mark two decades of ties with China next year, 20,000 Singaporeans are working in China and scores of joint ventures are under way.
Among them is the construction of an “eco-city” in Tianjin, which is being designed to use renewable energy, recycled water and has an extensive public transport system.
Singapore’s senior Cabinet minister and head of its Monetary Authority, Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), discussed the project with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) during a visit to China last week.
Developer CapitaLand, which aims to build 58 malls across 40 Chinese cities, said this month it planned to nearly double the value of its assets in China to US$8 billion, or 45 percent of its overall assets.
Singapore is fertile recruiting ground for Mandarin-speaking middle and senior managers to run multinational operations in China, where a lack of qualified managers has held back expansion plans by many foreign firms.
The financial crisis took a toll on Singapore’s export-dependent economy, reducing annual economic growth to just 1.1 percent last year, compared with around 8.2 percent between 2004 and 2007, and creating the highest unemployment rate in five years. Strengthening ties with China is seen as mitigating Singapore’s risk.
China is expected to become Singapore’s largest single market for non-oil exports this year, overtaking the US, says economist Irvin Seah at Singapore’s top bank DBS Group.
“We use the term ‘China-ready,’ meaning we will just have to grow with them,” said IE Singapore chief executive officer Chong Lit Cheong, whose state agency promotes Singapore firms’ investment abroad.
Singaporeans were among the first foreign investors in China after Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) adopted a market economy in 1978. Lee has visited China almost every year.
Business China, an agency under Lee’s patronage, is tasked to “groom 20,000 to 30,000 bilingual and bicultural Singaporeans with the ability to communicate effectively in the China market.”
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