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November 2006 A Chinese Advantage As a Singaporean I would like to express my support for your publication in its defense of the lawsuit brought by the Lees. My reaction was to come to your Web site to sign up for a subscription. Although I fully support your cause and am aggrieved at the lack of free speech in my country, I also feel that the exercise of free speech is a responsibility that cannot be compromised by inaccurate reporting. Granted your pending dispute with the Singapore government, fairness in criticism is necessary for your magazine to retain its credibility and integrity against the accusations that have been made. Thus, I would like to clarify the facts presented by Michael D. Barr in his analysis, and question if his criticism of bias in Singapore is not colored by a plank in the eye. Mr. Barr claims that in the early 1980s, the Ministry of Education favored sap schools when allocating graduate English teachers and granted two O-level bonus points exclusively to sap school students when they applied to enter junior college. “By contrast,” he writes, “neither Indians nor Malays received any special help, let alone schools of their own to address their special needs.” This is blatantly untrue and reeks of polemical exaggeration. The bonus points are not granted exclusively to sap school students, but are awarded to students from any institution who have excelled in Higher Chinese, Higher Malay or Higher Tamil. In addition, contrary to what Mr. Barr implies, the sap schools do not represent the highest echelons of academic stratification: The Raffles schools, commonly regarded as the most prestigious schools, are not sap schools, and Malay and Indian students receive instruction in their respective mother tongues. Another way in which Mr. Barr unfairly plays up the failures of the Singaporean system is by attributing to it “tremendous biases against women, the poor and non-Chinese.” Such “tremendous biases” against women do not exist, if taken in relation to many other countries. I am female and never in my life have I felt the need to work harder than my male counterparts for the same achievement. If there exists a gender bias, it is certainly not reinforced by the “system” so much as a traditional mindset that happens to be even more pronounced in other Asian countries such as China, Malaysia and India. Lastly, Mr. Barr writes that “if Singapore’s meritocracy is truly a level playing field, as the Lees assert, then the Chinese must be much smarter and harder working than the minority Indians and Malays.” In other words, the assumption that Chinese are not smarter and harder working than the minority races proves that Singapore’s meritocracy is not a level playing field. What a simplistic assumption! Look at the Chinese after communism, as compared to the Russians. What race is successful in economic spheres despite being on the disadvantaged end of affirmative action policies in Malaysia and marginalized in the U.S.? I believe that Chinese values just happen to be more materially oriented than other traditions in general; there exists a cultural basis for the disproportionate success of Chinese entrepreneurship. On the other hand, the vast majority of Malays are Muslim; the naturally larger size of Muslim families means that parents have less time and resources to devote to each child’s education. I would think that the reasons for the relative success of the Chinese people are social, not political, and cannot be so lightly dismissed. Mr. Barr comes from a country with a no more distinguished track record on racism, and therefore should be fair to Singapore.
Esther Fang The Suffocated Country Thank you so much for all the insightful and truthful reports about Singapore. You do not know how much those articles mean to the islanders as we try to survive in an oppressive and suffocating country, and live with the injustices and betrayals the old despot and his precious spawn have committed against us. They are selling out whatever trust the locals have placed in them. And the media, who should be the guardians of the Lees’ land, have let us down and are now a mere mouthpiece of the you-know-who.
Henry Chai Better Reception Wanted I’ve been a reader of the REVIEW (on and off) for the past 20 years here in Singapore. I congratulate the REVIEW for taking a stand and making the articles on Singapore freely accessible. The PAP government has done a great job in putting Singapore on the world map in the socioeconomic sphere. But it should be more receptive to alternative and critical views. The review is such an avenue. I deeply appreciate the articles, now, in the past and in the future as well.
Steven Yeong
Nuanced Views of the King One would hardly know from Grant Evans’ September review of my book, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, that it highlights the political philosophy behind the Thai monarchy’s support for military coups against elected governments over the past six decades. Nor did Mr. Evans reveal that another main theme is how King Bhumibol mastered and adapted traditional ritual to restore power to the throne and build an overwhelming popularity among the Thai people. Both themes, of course, are germane to the September coup against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The palace’s implicit support for the coup would make any assessment of King Bhumibol’s political life and thought useful, whether one agrees with the conclusions or not. Mr. Evans, though, ignores my book’s core theses to instead condemn me as simply a hater of monarchy, traditional Asian culture and King Bhumibol himself. To reach such malicious conclusions, Mr. Evans distorts and even fabricates the book’s content. For instance, he brands my coverage of the shooting death of the previous king, Ananda Mahidol, Bhumibol’s elder brother, as “jaundiced,” even though I have said little new from what has been in print for years. And he strongly suggests I assert that Bhumibol himself killed Ananda because he “coveted the throne.” There is nothing in the book to support this borderline libelous statement. I have no idea whether Ananda shot himself or was killed by Bhumibol, the two possibilities most accepted among historians. If the latter, I clearly term it an accident that occurred in play. Mr. Evans says Ananda’s death was used by former Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram to tar “leftists,” like former Prime Minister Pridi Banomyong. Yet my book makes meticulously clear that it was the royalists, the palace’s highest princes and their backers, who campaigned to smear Pridi with Ananda’s death. This point is crucial to understanding King Bhumibol’s restoration of royal power, but again Mr. Evans misrepresents the book. While he offers other such distortions, more astounding is Mr. Evans’s attempt to suggest I dismiss the ritual, visual symbols and other traditions which shore up Bhumibol’s image as a saintly Buddhist king. Mr. Evans calls me galled and puzzled by such rituals: “That these rituals strike a deep chord across Thai society is clearly beyond Mr. Handley’s imagination.” That’s funny, because so much of my book, including most of the first chapter, details the centrality of traditional rituals and symbols in Bhumibol’s restoration. Indeed, I titled the book The King Never Smiles to emphasize this, explaining very early on that the king’s conscious avoidance of smiling, and the lack of him doing so in almost all official portraiture, is to project himself as an impeccable bodhisattva. But Mr. Evans, who as an anthropologist should get the importance of ritual imagery in modern politics, calls the title “supercilious,” saying I really want King Bhumibol to “go around glad-handing people with smiles plastered on [his] face in the manner of U.S. politicians.” If I sum up Mr. Evans’ assessment of my book, it is the mindless work of a Western-fixated, unqualified and insensitive mere reporter who scorns Thai culture and people, hates monarchies, and depends mostly on unsourced gossip to fashion an ugly picture of a monarch that he doesn’t realize is genuinely loved by the Thai people. This is strikingly similar to the Thai palace and government’s official view of my book, designed to convince people to dismiss it without reading it.
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