Chua Beng Huat

Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss‐crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub‐processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a ‘cultural’ boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia’; a potential ‘East Asian identity’, emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable.

Being Chinese under official multiculturalism in Singapore

At the time of independence, there were three visible racial groups among its newly constituted citizenry: an overwhelming majority of ethnic Chinese; regionally indigenous Malays and a small percentage of South Asians. The Cold War conditions precluded the island-state from being a Chinese majority state; constitutionally the new state was declared a multiracial nation. The three groups were reconstituted as Huaren, Malays and Indians. Multiracialism as official policy has become a means of governance of the Peoples Action Party single-party dominant government. Racial harmony as the public good provides the political and administrative space for the policing of racial boundaries, suppressing open discussion of racial issues. Meanwhile, Huaren culture has been progressively reduced to emphasis on filial piety as Confucianism writ small and an emergent Singaporean identity distances the local born Huaren from the ‘foreign workers’ that arrive daily from the Peoples Republic of China.

Maintaining Housing Values under the Condition of Universal Home Ownership

Singapore provides analysts with the opportunity to examine possible systemic consequences of universal home ownership, which it has achieved through the sale of public housing. One important systemic problem is the need to preserve and/or enhance prices of older existing flats. This article examines the various strategies used by the Singapore government to solve the problem, especially when resale used flats are more expensive than the new, subsidized flats purchased directly from the state provider. It further examines the limits of each of the strategies in view of changing social and economic circumstances as Singapore enters the state of a mature capitalist economy and society burdened with structural unemployment and declining birth rates. The effectiveness of managing these issues will affect the legitimacy of the ruling government.

Disrupting Hegemonic Liberalism in East Asia

Industrial capitalism and urbanization that fragment extended households and loosen social constraints on individuals are relatively recent phenomena and experiences for many in East Asia. The liberating, individualizing effects of the phenomena may be celebrated as new freedoms. The same freedoms have had, by now, at least two centuries of historical evolution in the “West,” where the freedoms have progressively crystallized into the ideological form of individualism that frames everyday life, despite laments against the demise of the “community,” of the “social,” and warnings of the rise of “alienation” and “loneliness” by a succession of social theorists, from Emile Durkheim in the nineteenth century to the “liberal communitarians” in the contemporary United States. This ideological individualism has been finessed by, as it fit neatly into the discursive spaces of, liberalism, the preferred ideology of the Anglo- American public and polities. The long 1960s, an enchanted decade of liberation rhetoric and social changes that bequeathed to the present various social movements, such as feminism, gay liberation, and civil rights, further entrenched the “rights”

Welfare Developmentalism in Singapore and Malaysia

Singapore and the then Malaya shared a similar history as British colonies from the nineteenth century until after the Second World War. Malaya gaining political independence in 1957 and Singapore in 1965. Independence of Singapore was enabled through a brief period of membership in Malaysia (1963-5). The extractive colonial economy of British Malaya and the entrepot economy of Singapore left the two territories at the point of political independence without any significant industrialization. Malaya was dependent on declining fortunes of rubber and tin exports, while Singapore remained a ‘trading post’ increasingly unable to utilize adequately the rapidly increasing local-born population. Industrialization, which was synonymous with social and economic development and both with nation-building, was thus the overwhelming preoccupation of the two independent governments. To the extent that then Malaya and subsequently Malaysia had a resource extraction economy and a sizable population which provided a domestic consumption sector, pressure for industrialization was less immediate than in Singapore. Furthermore, Malaya could follow the popular economic wis-dom of the 1960s of an ‘import substitution’ industrialization development strategy. Indeed, as a member of Malaysia, Singapore looked toward the larger domestic market as the immediate destination of the products of its nascent industries. It was only after political separation that Singapore changed course to export-oriented industrialization, following the by then well-trodden path taken by South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and before then by Japan.

Inter-Referencing Southeast Asia: Absence, Resonance and Provocation

Even today, in some quarters of Southeast Asian academia, laments about intellectual domination of the West are still being heard. Intellectual domination is often seen to manifest itself in a hierarchical division of academic labor in which Asian scholars are read as anthropological local informants, generating substantive local knowledge as empirical inputs to concepts and theories formulated by Western academics, constituting a form of “epistemological” imperialism that lingers on even after the end of colonial domination. Intellectual domination by the West can also be self-inflicted. Local scholars who are trained in Euro-American institutions perpetuate the same hierarchy by appropriating ready-to-hand concepts, from which the original Euro-American context has been erased, abstracted and “universalized,” and apply them to Southeast Asian contexts. Local complexities often have to be severely trimmed and skimmed to fit “neatly” into the selected concepts. As local researchers provide evidence that what was found in the West is also to be found in an Asian context, the universalizing claim of Western concepts is (re-)affirmed. Both processes are unhappy ones, even if there were good reasons for such bad practices; providing rich empirical substantive knowledge and/or reaffirming existing concepts stands a better chance of publication in prestigious, internationally refereed journals edited in the West.

East Asian Pop Culture

The American labour historian Gary Cross argues that ‘consumerism is not an inevitable stage in industrial development. Rather it has been a choice made within complex cultural, political and social contexts’ (1993: vii). Furthermore, ‘increased consumer need would lash workers ever more firmly to their jobs’ (Cross 1993: 39). The consequent ‘work-and-spend’ culture has become an essential part of contemporary everyday life of all wage earners, for whom the constant expansion of consumption remains the primary reason to labour. Historically, American capitalists had invested earlier than anyone else in consumer culture, including mass entertainment, which explains the American domination in the world of mass consumption, from fast food to Hollywood. Since the 1960s, East Asian countries have experienced very rapid and compressed capitalist industrialization leading to the unprecedented expansion of all modes of consumption, from small objects to luxurious automobiles to mass entertainment (Chua 2009). Against the background of the global dominance of the American mass-entertainment pop culture industry, a regional pop culture industry has been developing and consolidating in East Asia, so much so that we can discursively designate this transnational regional cultural industry as the ‘East Asian Pop Culture’ industry.2

The cultural logic of a capitalist single-party state, Singapore

Singapore is a settler nation in which the majority population is descended not from White colonizers but from Chinese migrants. Being without proprietary claim to the land, the new postcolonial island-nation declared itself a constitutional ‘multiracial’ nation of Huaren, Malays and Indians, without the isomorphism of race, culture and nation. Lacking a pre-colonial political structure, the new nation was constituted on the template of a modern nation-state, with all the liberal rights and freedoms that this implies, and where the government is to be established by popular mandate through periodic general elections. Operating within the political space framed by these two conditions, the Peoples Action Party—which has governed without effective opposition since 1959—has been able to manoeuvre between the logic of individual competition in the capitalist economy and the logic of equality between racial groups in social and cultural administration, pragmatically privileging one set of rationales over the other as the situation requires. Thus, the ideology of meritocracy is emphasized in the kinds of individual competition that determine and allocate educational and economic opportunities, thus individualizing economic success or failure. On the other hand, equality of race is emphasized in the management of cultural policies and in the administering and policing of race relations, including the suppression of conventional claims for redress made by racial groups which consider themselves discriminated against or marginalized. Racial harmony as a public moral good is evoked as an instrument for the management of race rather than as an arena for deepening the understanding and mixing of cultures. These strictures of the single-party state disrupt the universalizing desire of contemporary liberalism propagated by the West, providing other East Asian nations with the possibility of an alternative mode of capitalist development without a multi-party polity.

Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies: an introduction

Southeast Asia, one of the most colonized regions in the world, is conspicuously absent in the expanding archive of Postcolonial Studies. This is partly due to the negligence of the many practicing Postcolonial Studies practitioners, including editors of anthologies. It is, however, more significantly a consequence of the preoccupation of Southeast Asian scholars who were otherwise occupied with the more imminent issues that face the Southeast Asian nations that have been caught up with the Cold War and the post independence economic developments. This introduction provides a summary of the seven essays that raise substantive and conceptual issues that bear comparison with postcolonial analyses with the rest of the postcolonial world.Southeast Asia, one of the most colonized regions in the world, is conspicuously absent in the expanding archive of Postcolonial Studies. This is partly due to the negligence of the many practicing Postcolonial Studies practitioners, including editors of anthologies. It is, however, more significantly a consequence of the preoccupation of Southeast Asian scholars who were otherwise occupied with the more imminent issues that face the Southeast Asian nations that have been caught up with the Cold War and the post independence economic developments. This introduction provides a summary of the seven essays that raise substantive and conceptual issues that bear comparison with postcolonial analyses with the rest of the postcolonial world.

Asian values: Restraining the logic of capitalism?

This paper argues that the emphasis placed on the ‘collective’ as part of the rhetoric of ‘Asian values ‘, particularly in Singapore, has a potentially positive effect of limiting the excesses of rapacious capitalism. It argues that the insistence on privileging ‘collective’ or ‘social’ well‐being is both a moral critique and a moral alternative to the entrenchment of self‐interests in capitalist society. It is this moral conception of the ‘social’ that has enabled the Peoples Action Party government of Singapore to, at least rhetorically, reinscribe social democracy as its abiding commitment and its principle of government.