Chinese Migration to Singapore:
Discourses and Discontents in a
Globalizing Nation-State
Brenda S.A. Yeoh
National University of Singapore
Weiqiang Lin
Royal Holloway, University of London
Changing economic realities in the last decade have seen the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) emerging as a major source of ‘new’ migrants in the
world. In the context of Southeast Asia as ‘destination,’ inflows from the PRC
take on another level of significance given the historical antecedents. In this
article, we take Singapore, a Southeast Asian global city-state, as a case study
of how Chinese migration histories and circumstances have evolved through
time. While colonialism has left the city-state with a large ethnic Chinese
population that persists till today, Singapore’s present-day aspirations to
become a globally oriented, open economy have led to a new round of transnational migration, where PRC nationals feature prominently. Focusing on
the streams of people moving from China to Singapore in the past and
present, a comprehensive range of developments surrounding the said
mobilities will be examined. These include a short historical account of
Singapore’s, and more generally Southeast Asia’s, longstanding exchange
with China; regulatory regimes that govern Singapore’s immigration policies today; the typologies and varied characteristics of modern Chinese
migrants gracing the city-state’s doorsteps; and social tensions arising from
these contemporary PRC flows into Singapore sitting uncomfortably between being predominantly ‘Chinese’ and ‘anti-Chinese.’ A few reflections
follow as a means to conclude this paper.
Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Vol. 22, No.1, 2013
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Introduction
In the pre-dawn hours of 12 May 2012, an automobile accident in downtown
Singapore involving a speeding Ferrari and a hapless taxicab that it ploughed
into not only left three dead in its aftermath, but also re-opened the wounds
of a nation hurting from its own success. Widely seen to be at fault for
running a red light, the (deceased) driver of the $1.4 million limited edition
sports car was 31-year-old Ma Chi, a wealthy private investor and one of
hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals who have recently flocked to
the city-state in search of opportunities. To the Singapore government,
migrants like Ma contribute to the nation’s economic growth, helping it
“punch above its own weight” (Channel NewsAsia, 2011a), even as declining fertility rates threaten to derail the country’s long-term trajectory
(National Population and Talent Division, 2012). But to some citizens, the
Ferrari accident was symptomatic of an immigration policy gone wrong—
one which created a situation where migrants compete with Singaporeans
for jobs and amenities, while gradually altering the social ethos and fabric
of the nation. In social media forums, citizens tended to position themselves
as recipients of the short end of the stick in the city-state’s latest demographic recalibration. Paying the ultimate price was the Singaporean taxi
driver who lost his life that night, who fell victim to not just any ordinary
auto accident, but one that state policies had an indirect hand in precipitating.
The pertinence of this story goes beyond simply highlighting the
troubled spots in Singapore’s labor-importing initiatives. Closer scrutiny
reveals that there exist finer threads that run through, and further complicate, the migration scene in the city-state. To be sure, the Ferrari accident did
not straightforwardly throw up a clear divide between citizens and foreigners, but singled out a particular group of migrants—those from the People’s
Republic of China (PRC)—as a metonym of policy failure and a source of
national concern. While the third fatality in that accident involved a foreigner who, too, like Ma, lived and worked in Singapore, her Japanese
nationality was (more) readily embraced and even neutralized on the
grounds that she “treated Singapore as… home” (AsiaOne, 2012a). As a
further contrast, instead of evoking sympathies from the public, Wu Wei
Wei, the injured passenger in Ma’s car, and another PRC national, was
initially rumored, and assumed, to be a nightclub hostess and social escort
to the married Ma, when she was in fact a student from “a reputable and
financially stable family” (AsiaOne, 2012b). Latent within this tragedy is
thus a thinly-veiled subplot that intimates an uneasiness about Chinese
migration to Singapore. Indeed, at a time when PRC citizens are increasingly mobile, their growing presence in migration streams has not spelled
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
33
their automatic acceptance, but has instead incited fresh social tensions and
stereotypical associations.
This paper is interested in examining the morphologies and peculiarities of this ‘new’ Chinese migration through the lens of Singapore. It
recognizes the PRC’s (re)emergent role as an important source of migrants
in recent years, while stressing the agency that receiving states have in
welcoming, differentiating and regulating these itinerants. For Singapore,
in-flows from China take on another level of significance given their
historical antecedents. As a former British entrepôt port and a “polyglot
migrant world constituted by streams of immigrants from China, India, the
Malay archipelago, and other far-flung places,” the city is at its core a “child
of diaspora” (Yeoh and Willis, 1999:359), whose present-day predominantly Chinese population bears witness to this legacy. In the next section,
we delve deeper into this history to provide a literature-based account of
Singapore’s longstanding traffic with China, followed by a discussion on a
second episode of contemporary flows to the island. Speaking back to the
PRC’s current clout as a major labor-exporting country, the fourth section
then reviews some secondary sources and newspaper reports to delineate
the typologies and characteristics of ‘new’ PRC migrants now gracing the
city-state’s doorsteps. The penultimate section comes full circle and explores the problematics surrounding these mobilities in a Singapore sitting
uncomfortably between being predominantly ‘Chinese’ and ‘anti-Chinese,’
before a few final reflections are made.
Chinese Migrations to Singapore
Contemporary migrations from the PRC to Singapore—and other parts of
Southeast Asia—must be framed within a much longer history of people
exchanges pre-dating the founding of these two territories as modern
nation-states. Despite the foreignness of the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and
‘emigration’ to Chinese courts before the 19th century, the Chinese had in
fact long been an itinerant society, with deep external trade links running
beyond its domain both overland and across seas (Wang, 2000). One crucial
site of early maritime travel and exploration was the Nanhai region, or
present-day South China Sea, where Southeast Asia and Singapore sit. As
Wang Gungwu (2003) documents, the Nanhai, later known too as the
Nanyang, had seen vibrant Chinese trade in luxury goods and other limited
artifacts since as early as the second century B.C., setting in motion some of
the first Chinese encounters with Southeast Asia.
Eventually however, it was not the Chinese who would become the
main drivers of their own migrations to the region; instead, it was the advent
of European colonialism that accelerated that process. European rule, in
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particular, did not only fragment the region into realms controlled disparately by Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain, but had also
transformed its economic life into one more integrated with the world, and
that specialized in cash crops, plantations and mining activities, rather than
subsistence farming (Chia and Perry, 2003; McGregor, 2008). The ensuing
demand for large numbers of manual workers to ‘man’ these labor-intensive industries in turn prompted the development of a new ‘coolie’ trade in
the 19th century (Yen, 1985; Yan, 2008). This coincided with a period when
China itself was a changed society: it had become more urban, and its
population had greatly rebounded from a prior decline at the start of the
Manchu conquest, resulting in acute land shortages. In this context, the
‘coolie’ trade served not only the purpose of plugging a burgeoning labor
gap in Southeast Asia, but also offered a crucial outlet for relieving rural
population pressures in China (Wang, 1991).
One locality that had been particularly embroiled in these labor and
colonial movements was Singapore. Founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford
Raffles as a British trading port under the auspices of the East India
Company, the city shadowed the footsteps of its sister settlement, Penang,
in seeing its Chinese population quickly grow to become a majority race on
the island (Wang, 1992). As Meagher (2008:134) records, the Chinese
population in colonial Singapore increased from approximately 3,000 in
1820 to some 50,000 in 1860, representing over 60 percent of its total
population by the end of that period. This was largely due to the city’s role
as a major destination and coordination center for Chinese migrants bound
for British territories in western Nanyang. Following the removal of the
1855 Chinese Passengers’ Act, which restricted the number of passengers
that could be conveyed per voyage, the position that Singapore occupied in
Chinese migration circuits only grew further, with inbound streams from
Hong Kong — the gateway of South China — multiplying from only a few
thousands to over 35,000 per year by the 1880s (Sinn, 1995).
These historical developments not only rendered Singapore a very
different kind of city in Southeast Asia — one whose face was sculpted by
continuous streams of migrant laborers, in particular Chinese ones, flowing
to its shores — but also left a deep impact on its demographic/racial profile
in the decades following British colonization. Partly for this reason, Singapore
was caught in the bind of a “double minority” when it became independent
in 1965, whereby (migrant) Chinese were a majority in the city, but a
minority in the region; whereas ‘native’ Malays were a minority in Singapore
but a majority outside (Tan, 2004:170). The new nation had to consequently
adopt a neutral, if also essentialist, brand of multiculturalism based on four
“founding races”— Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others, or shorthanded the
CMIO model (Yeoh, 2004) to diffuse this tension. For a while, nationhood
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
35
had meant that Singapore would enter into an (aberrant) period of demographic stabilization based on this model, but an inveterate return to its
migratory ways, noticeably from the 1990s, added a further line of distinction between citizens and non-citizens. While the proportion of non-citizens
— a fair measure of Singapore’s (‘new’) migrant population — was around
14 percent at the beginning of that decade, it had swelled to over 25 percent
by the year 2000 (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2010). This trend
persisted well into the 2000s, and by the year 2010, the proportion of noncitizens to the total population had exceeded 36 percent (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2010).
The sharp increase in immigration to Singapore in the recent two
decades has to be understood as being propelled by the twin forces of state
ambitions to remake the city into a thriving global knowledge hub and,
contradictorily, plummeting fertility rates among the local population. A
trend that has persisted since 1976, the nation’s fertility rates had in fact
fallen to a record low of 1.15 children per female, and to an even lower rate
of 1.05 among the local Chinese, in 2010 (Channel NewsAsia, 2011b;
National Population and Talent Division, 2012). Confounding this problem,
the country also witnessed a rate of citizenship renunciation among its
skilled nationals averaging around 1,000 cases per year between 2000 and
2010 (Channel NewsAsia, 2012), heightening the concern among officials
that “the figure of 180,000 Singaporeans living abroad in 2010 may be
swelled further as Singapore becomes increasingly integrated within the
global economy” (Jones, 2012:329). Seen as such, liberalizing immigration
in Singapore is then to be understood as a policy founded on an urgent
economic need to solve the country’s labor shortage and population woes.
In a bid to forestall the onset of this demographic/economic decline,
turning to ‘non-traditional’ sources of migrants that have opened up as
major labor-exporting markets has come to be seen as a sensible (and quick)
fix. In particular, the PRC is today a popular source of labor supply in the
city-state, not just because of the availability of a large workforce to tap on,
but also because of the (presumed) fit of its people within a CMIO model
that is currently under threat of ‘imbalance’ due to varying fertility rates
among local groups. Not surprisingly, the population of PRC migrants in
the city has also grown significantly over the last two decades, from only
“several thousands” in the 1990s to “close to one million”1 (The Straits
1
The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority clarified shortly after the release of this
figure that “total number of persons from all Asian countries (excluding Southeast Asia) who
are in Singapore is 852,000" (Yong, 2008), hinting that the number of PRC migrants was lower
than that estimated in the press. It did not offer, however, any further details on what the true
figure might be.
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Times, 2008a), making them one of the largest and most visible communities in Singapore. While ‘new’ Chinese inflows are not a new phenomenon
— as exemplified by the migration of Hong Kong Chinese to Singapore in
the late 1990s, whose overseas property-buying spree (Ong, 1999), incidentally, was then a cause of public ire for its role in inflating property prices —
the current batch of PRC migrants has the potential to pose an unprecedented social challenge to the city-state owing to its sheer size, its ‘sudden’
appearance and seeming inassimilability.
That the city-state is extremely scrupulous about its selection of incoming labor has not mitigated the situation. Tending to “bifurcate” its imported workforce along a sharp ‘skills’ divide that keeps migrants in
“separate, structurally determined sectors of society and the economy”
(Yeoh, 2006:36), PRC nationals in Singapore are increasingly found on both
sides of the divide. Among the foreigners that the Singaporean economy
absorbs, elite managers, specialists and expatriate workers belonging to the
“business and professional class” (Yeoh and Chang, 2001), arguably sit at
the top of the hierarchy. As the supposed reason for which transnational
corporations establish their presence in the city-state, these ‘foreign talents’
hold less restrictive employment and ‘S’ passes, and are eligible for permanent residency under the Professionals/Technical Personnel and Skilled
Workers Scheme, as well as citizenship after a minimum of two years’ stay
(Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, 2012a). However, as Jones
(2012:328) notes, while “many of these PRs [permanent residents] (though
the government does not reveal how many) are from China might be
expected to lead to their wider acceptance by the majority ethnic Chinese
Singaporeans, …this does not appear to be the case. High levels of immigration… have instead [led] Singaporeans [to] complain of feeling like strangers in their own country, of crowded subways and buses, rising house
prices, heightened competition for school places, and dealing with shop
assistants who cannot communicate with them.”
For the majority of PRC migrants, their acceptance in Singapore is
further challenged by their status as ‘unskilled’ workers, who are not only
denied residency rights, but are also disciplined by a grid of rules and
regulations that ensure that their presence in Singapore is a transient one.
While it is uncertain how many of Singapore’s 870,000 temporary work
permit holders are from China, these low-skilled workers are subject to
regular medical examinations that include a general physical checkup, a
chest x-ray, and a test for HIV/AIDS during their stay in Singapore (Yeoh
and Lin, 2012). In a draconian restriction of their relational freedom, they
also may not marry Singaporeans (lest they become eligible for permanent
residency) (Yeoh, 2006). On top of these stipulations, their employment is
subject to a so-called dependency ceiling and foreign worker levy—levers
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
37
that the Ministry of Manpower (2012) uses to reflect labor market conditions, and/or to modulate companies’ demand for migrant workers.2 While
the purpose of the dependency ceiling is to prevent the number of foreign
workers recruited for a particular job from rising above a certain ratio in
proportion to citizens, the foreign worker levy imposes a daily or monthly
duty, corresponding to its specific sector, on employers for each foreign
worker hired, as a means to encourage local recruitment first. In contrast to
their ‘skilled’ counterparts, these workers are thus brought in only to fill
vacancies that citizens are unable (or unwilling) to take up.
The inferior status of these workers is further inscribed in the social
spaces that they occupy in Singapore. Of particular concern is perhaps (the
state of) the accommodation in which some of these workers are being put
up by their employers.3 For male construction workers, which include PRC
nationals, abject living conditions in make-shift structures, and even cargo
containers, next to their worksites are not uncommon (Chan, 2011). A 2008
episode involving a state initiative to re-accommodate some 600 manufacturing and services sectors foreign workers in a newly converted dormitory
reveals the difficulty that these low-skilled migrants face in improving their
lot. As the said dormitory was to be located in a major residential estate,
news regarding its construction was immediately met with fierce public
opprobrium about the prospects of having to live at close proximity to the
migrant workers (Channel NewsAsia, 2008).
The above plethora of state strategies aimed at keeping migrant streams
apart, as well as their accompanying social outcomes and attitudes, by no
means apply only to PRC nationals. Notwithstanding, given the numerical
size of the latter in Singapore, and their diversity, these sifting mechanisms
arguably have a more far-reaching effect on them than on other groups. The
city’s laborious efforts in dividing up its foreign workforce into its distinct
strata draw particular attention to the thick economic sensibilities that
suffuse through its labor-importing calculations, and their consequent
effects on migrants’ life chances. While knowledge-rich ‘foreign talents’ are
offered a panoply of institutional carrots that seek to graft them into
Singapore’s resident workforce and social milieu, low-skilled migrant
workers are enlisted on a ‘use and discard’ basis, and are placed on temporary contracts that render them easily disposable whenever they are
deemed socially ‘out-of-line,’ or redundant in times of economic recession.
2
These restrictions also apply to the recruitment of semi-skilled ‘S’ pass holders, although,
unlike the work permit holders, they are eligible for permanent residency.
3
Legislation mandates that employers of work permit holders are responsible for providing
“acceptable” accommodation for their workers.
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TABLE 1
PROFILE AND NUMBER OF ‘NEW’ PRC MIGRANTS
Migrant Type
‘Skilled’ Migrants
Students
‘Study Mothers’
Work Permit Holders
Estimated Number*
Year of Estimate
n.a.
36,000
5,000
200,000
2008
2007
2007
NOTE: *These are reported figures based on estimates from the Chinese Embassy or
Ministry of Commerce
To some extent, these practices echo the spirit of immigration administration in Singapore’s colonial history, only in ways that are more complicated,
multi-dimensional, and, above all, relevant to Singapore’s current function
in late capitalism. In the next section, a finer differentiation of Chinese
migrants into the city’s ‘new’ economic logics will be made. Rather than
viewing these as migrants whose subjectivities were fixed prior to their
journeys, the ways in which they interact with, upset, or are constrained by
the policy deliberations of the receiving state, while attempting to forge
their own migrancies, will be emphasized.
Differentiating Contemporary Chinese Migrants
While useful for providing a sketch of how different classes of migrants are
channeled to/through Singapore, the country’s two-fold regulatory framework for managing migrant flows obfuscates the true heterogeneity of
modern-day movements from the PRC to the city-state. This diversity can,
in part, be attributed to the larger geographical field from which ‘new’
Chinese immigrants are being sourced—not just in Guangdong and Fujian
(as was the colonial practice), but also in major cities, such as Beijing and
Shanghai, and rural regions like Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang. In
addition, Singapore’s ‘importation’ of ‘new’ PRC nationals has also been
driven by varied policy directions, waxing and waning with the demands
of its markets, as well as socio-economic developments in Mainland China
(see Pieke, 2007). Singapore’s major daily, The Straits Times (2008a), thus
breaks down the history of Chinese migration to the city in the last 30 years
into four phases. While the first refers to a period of “special talents”
recruitment in the sports and arts scenes in the 1990s, the last three (overlapping) waves are tied more closely to China’s recent opening up, coinciding with shifting labor gaps in Singapore’s mainstay economy and a more
mottled profile among PRC migrants in the city-state (see Table 1).
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
39
‘Skilled’ Migrants
These finer distinctions portend that normally clear-cut migrant categories
in Singapore have become comparatively more blurred in the case of PRC
migrants. ‘Skilled’ migration is a case in point. In particular, Chinese
‘talents’ do not necessarily consist of top-paying expatriates or transnational
elites — as is often associated with Westerners — but may also occupy a
broader, or more “middle-class” range (Hing et al., 2009). Yeoh and Khoo
(1998) corroborate this view when they note that it is not uncommon for
Chinese (and other Asian) expatriates to be of more modest financial means.
For this reason, they are also more likely to feature dual income household
arrangements that require women (as opposed to playing the typical ‘expat’
role as ‘trailing spouses’) to be involved in paid work.
Leong (2008) makes a similar point, but from an angle that emphasizes
more on the banality of some of these ‘skilled’ migrations. To wit, he points
to the potpourri of trades that recent PRC migrants in Singapore are
engaged in, and their concomitant departure from a ‘one-size-fits-all’
conception of the ‘foreign talent’ category. Focusing on more recent entrants
whom he dubs “young dragons,” he describes these individuals as “welleducated,” “enterprising” and conversant in “good English”: qualities that
have allowed them to venture into a variety of fields, including law,
banking, public relations, the arts and the food and retail industries. These
exposures constitute for them a coveted form of “overseas experience” that
is perceived to be valuable by many of China’s youths. Rather than migrating just to access higher incomes or better jobs therefore, younger generations of ‘skilled’ PRC migrants are also beginning to reevaluate the meaning
of migration in less practical terms, and, in that sense, exhibit a more
exploratory, globally oriented, and itinerant attitude (Lim, 2012).
Students
Alongside those who migrate to find work, there are also sizable numbers
of Chinese students—some 36,000 in 2008 (The Straits Times, 2008b)—who
have moved to Singapore to take advantage of its education system; these
students are themselves targeted by the city-state as another sector of
migrants it wishes to attract under its “Global Schoolhouse” tagline (Economic Development Board, 2011). Specifically, as a form of interim or
potential professional labor, foreign students not only enrich the host
institutions’ education scene, but also strengthen the city’s vision to fashion
itself as a global talent hub and repository for skilled workers. As such, the
Singapore government is reported to have invested some S$36 million
(US$28 million) in funds, to award 950 pre-tertiary and 1,070 undergradu-
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ate scholarships to foreign scholars annually, with the majority of these
going to non-ASEAN4 students (Ministry of Education, 2012a; 2012b). For
PRC students, these awards, which cover all tuition fees and accommodation expenses, provide them an opportunity to study abroad, and gain that
much-desired “overseas experience,” at little cost. While no official figures
have been released as to how many of the awards are given to PRC
nationals, preliminary research has shown that higher education, supported by these scholarships and grants, is a popular conduit through which
prospective PRC migrants enter the skilled labor market in Singapore (Hing
et al., 2009).5
In spite of this seemingly symbiotic relationship between a ‘talenthungry’ Singapore and a ready army of PRC youths eager to migrate, the
city-state’s international education scheme is not without its complications.
Not least, government-funded scholarships tenable at universities and
polytechnics, though typically ‘bond-free,’ are tied to a Ministry of Education Tuition Grant that comes with its own “service obligations” (Ministry
of Education, 2009), requiring the scholar to work at a Singapore-registered
company for a minimum of three years.6 This condition also applies to other
foreign students who are not award holders but receive the same tuition
subsidy,7 and is meant to reclaim some of the financial benefits that the
student has received from the Singapore state. While measures are put in
place to ensure that these service obligations are fulfilled, there is growing
public concern that some PRC students are using Singapore’s well-ranked,
English-medium education system to plot personal transnational journeys
to more popular destinations, particularly the United States (Temasek
Times, 2012a; Dimmock and Leong, 2010); without viable means to police
4
ASEAN refers to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
5
There are specific scholarship schemes targeted at students from the PRC. At the pretertiary level, the SM1 (Senior Middle 1) scheme offers bond-free funding to support PRC
students to study in Singapore’s schools and junior colleges from secondary three up to ‘A’
levels. At the university level, there are two scholarship schemes specifically for PRC students:
the SM2 scholarships awarded to second year high school students from top schools in China;
and the SM3 scholarships intended to recruit students from reputable Chinese universities.
6
The service obligation may be extended for some scholars, as well as students of medicine
and dentistry, to up to six years.
7
According to the National University of Singapore’s table of fees, this discount can be as
high as 88 percent for a music student and 80 percent for a computing student before 2007. The
tuition grant has, however, been progressively reduced for international students in recent
years, to maintain a clearer advantage for Singaporeans (National University of Singapore,
2012).
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
41
their mobility, there is also the question of whether some of these students
are returning to China without serving their three-year obligations (Temasek
Times, 2012b). The potential for such a problem has in fact been recently
addressed by Education Minister Heng Swee Keat, who assures that “more
than eight in 10 scholars from ASEAN, India and China fulfill their service
obligations” (Ministry of Education, 2012c). Nevertheless, this high rate of
compliance among scholars sheds little light on the much larger numbers of
‘ordinary’ Chinese students in receipt of the Ministry’s Tuition Grant, and
the status of these following their graduation.
‘Study Mothers’
The issue of skilled graduates taking flight prematurely is not the only
problem in Singapore’s migration management. Widening the focus to
include pre-tertiary education, PRC student flows are notable too for the
secondary streams that they engender. In particular, a Long Term Visit Pass
has been specially created for “female visitors whose child or grandchild is
studying in Singapore on a Student’s Pass” (Immigration and Checkpoints
Authority, 2012b), signifying that grandmothers or, more commonly, mothers of young foreign students may relocate with them to Singapore for the
purpose of being their carer. Colloquially known as ‘study mothers,’ it is
estimated that there were around 7,800 such pass holders in 2006, with
roughly two-thirds of them hailing from China (The Straits Times, 2006).
Huang and Yeoh (2005) partially explain the popularity of this visa with
PRC nationals by citing the culturally specific responsibilities that these
mothers are vested with, prompting them to migrate to Singapore with their
young children in search of a better future. Yet, not being able to find work
in their new home, and/or shut out “from working as bar and dance
hostesses, masseuses and at food stalls” (The Straits Times, 2008b), poorer
‘study mothers’ are often caught between that desire to see their children
succeed and the difficulties of making ends meet in Singapore. The
government’s stance, however, remains unsympathetic, arguing that migrants should assess their situation before embarking on such a project; it
also points out that some ‘study mothers’ may exploit an overly liberal
system, by using their children’s education as a cover to find work in the
city-state (The Straits Times, 2006).
Low- and Semi-Skilled Migrants
While the intention to seek employment — if for the purpose of subsistence
— is often on the minds of less affluent ‘study mothers,’ a much more
common (and direct) route by which unskilled workers from the PRC enter
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Singapore is through the work permit system. Since 2005 in particular, the
issuance of work permits to these migrants for jobs in the services sector has
not only destabilized former associations of the permit with ‘3D’ (dirty,
dangerous and demeaning) jobs, it has also led to a gradual ‘Sinocization’
of the public face of the city, not least in its food courts, restaurants and
coffee shops (The Straits Times, 2008c). Besides the food and beverage
industry, these workers can also be found working as sales attendants in
shopping malls, “pump attendants in petrol kiosks, cashiers at 24-hour
convenience stores like 7-Eleven, hotel chambermaids, cleaners, postal
workers and bus drivers,” essentially taking up (low-paying) shift work
that are “shunned” by the locals (The Straits Times, 2008a). According to
Ministry of Manpower (2012) regulations, migrants are currently allowed
to compose up to 50 percent of the sector’s workforce. This figure not only
partially explains the ubiquity of PRC migrants in Singapore’s service
industry today, but also connotes a ‘deeper’ shift in the labor structure of
certain (once-localized) segments of the Singapore economy — one activated by citizens’ higher job expectations and PRC migrants’ willingness to
fill the vacated positions.
If PRC service workers have only recently found purport in Singapore’s
unskilled labor force, Chinese migrant workers engaged in construction,
manufacturing and shipbuilding work perhaps assume a more consistent
presence in the city-state. First arriving in the 1980s, these migrant workers—like their service industry counterpart and the ‘study mothers’—often
pay recruitment agencies hefty sums of money of between 18,000 and 65,000
renminbi to move to Singapore, sometimes without being told the full
nature of the work that they will be enrolled in (Lin, 2010). They are usually
employed on a short-term, contracted basis, earn low and irregular salaries,
and may be made to work long and/or overtime hours (Lin, 2010). In a
targeted study on Chinese construction workers, Low et al. (2008) highlight
that a majority of these workers are “unhappy” and “lonely” in Singapore,
exacerbated by the fact that they are frequently ostracized by the host
society. While their intention is to earn enough money to improve the
livelihoods of their families back home, they are themselves put up in
extremely poor living conditions, or in accommodations that one activist
calls “cesspool[s]” (Chok, 2009). Clearly, these workers represent one of the
most vulnerable migrant groups, who are kept transient by the city-state’s
regulatory regime, and made susceptible to exploitation by recruitment
agencies and employers. Although the extent of such abuses is unknown,
recurrent stories that surround this “underbelly of globalization” (Yeoh and
Chang, 2001) suggest that contemporary PRC migration to Singapore
involves not just the glamorous, the enterprising, the strategic, but also the
dejected and the browbeaten.
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
43
Accommodating PRC Migrants in Singapore
The introduction of this wide array of ‘new’ Chinese immigrants into
Singapore signals that there has also been a diversification of the ‘Chinese’
population in the city-state. More than at any point in Singapore’s postIndependence history, it now no longer consists of only Chinese descendants of old colonial flows, but a motley crew of differently incorporated
citizens and non-citizens, residents and transients, who may or may not be
well-versed in the country’s nationalization process and its CMIO model.
Salient for their arrival in large numbers and at a brisk pace in recent years,
‘new’ Chinese immigrants have, in particular, been singled out as a source
of social tension and unease in contemporary Singapore. Ironically, the
most vocal of contentions have come not from the ‘non-Chinese’ quarters of
the city-state, but from Chinese Singaporeans, who have been especially
critical of their newfound compatriots. Not unlike how second- and thirdgeneration Southeast Asian Chinese in other countries resisted being identified with the Mainland in the post-War years (Suryadinata, 1997), 21st
century Singapore seems to be undergoing its own bout of identity struggles
(if a belated one) of what it means to be predominantly Chinese but yet
multicultural.
It should be noted that some research on Singaporean economic migrants in China (Yeoh and Willis, 2005) has indicated that the politics of
identity at work on encountering China tends to increase Singaporeans’
sense of their national selves as they distance themselves from what they
perceived as the leached culture and degenerate morality of China. While
there are parallels, the negative strands in Singaporean perception of PRC
nationals in Singapore that often emerge in public discourse do not just stem
from perceived cultural dissonance, but coalesce particularly around the
notion that the state is being “unfair” to its own citizens in their own land.
Many argue that citizenship has its privileges, which should not be diluted
by giving preferential treatment to foreign others, especially when these
turn out to be fair-weather friends who have little sense of commitment to
Singapore. In this vein, much of citizens’ displeasure towards the immigration of PRC nationals to Singapore stems from the perception that the
government is giving these foreigners an undeserved ‘red carpet’ treatment. Seeing that most institutional and financial perks apply to ‘skilled’
migrants, this critique is also, to a large extent, ‘classed’ and skewed towards
migrants who have been admitted as ‘talents.’ In 2009, an episode involving
a China-born Singaporean permanent resident, Zhang Yuanyuan, professing her love for her native country on television during China’s 60th
anniversary exactly exemplified such a tension (The Economist, 2009).
Previously a student in Singapore and speculated to have landed a lucrative
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job there upon graduation, Zhang was reported to have returned to China
to join a Chinese oil company, and later the women’s militia, where she
made the infamous statement claiming that her “greatest wish” was to
repay her motherland. While one Singaporean went so far as to send an
email to ten of the city-state’s ministers asking them to take punitive action,
including the revocation of Zhang’s permanent residency (Yahoo!, 2009),
others questioned the motives of people like Zhang in moving to Singapore.
In particular, not a few were concerned that ‘new’ Chinese immigrants were
only using the city-state as a stepping stone to achieve other ends, and did
not really intend to give back to its society or to its development. Yeoh and
Yap’s (2008) work based on interviews with 60 PRC Chinese professionals
and managers conducted in 2000 shows that, by and large, permanent
residency and citizenship status were acquired largely for utilitarian purposes such as greater freedom in travelling (on Singapore papers) rather
than settling down in any one place. Indeed, “accumulating such status may
actually confer a higher degree of potential mobility, as the new status
allows former PRC transmigrants to gain entry to other immigrant gateways around the world with greater ease” (Yeoh and Yap, 2008:201).
The generous scholarships and educational benefits awarded to PRC
nationals have also become an issue of contention. The Ministry of Education’s
hefty subsidy of foreigners’ education is not only criticized for its susceptibility to abuse by these migrants; it is also viewed as an investible sum that
could have been used to better serve the interests of local students, many of
whom still pay their own fees and living expenses (Temasek Times, 2012a).
Related to this, the issue of employment comes up as another point of
controversy. After having acquired diplomas and degrees from Singaporean
institutes of higher learning, PRC graduates often go on to compete with
Singaporeans for jobs at the skilled and semi-skilled levels, and are seen to
depress wages in the market by accepting lower pay packages. These
migrants can apply for permanent residency under the Professionals/
Technical Personnel and Skilled Workers Scheme upon landing a job in
Singapore, allowing them to access many of the privileges that Singaporeans
are entitled to, but without having to pay civic dues such as National Service
(Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, 2012a). It is the perception of
‘unfairness’ in policy orientations that contributes to making Zhang’s
patriotic profession for China so inflammatory in the city-state, notwithstanding the fact that she had all along been a Chinese national, not a
Singaporean citizen.
Unhappiness with PRC migrants moreover spills over to the community level, as Singaporeans tend to view these ‘new’ immigrants as belonging to a different culture, and adhering to a foreign set of social rules. Stories
on the Straits Times citizen journalism blog, STOMP, are indicative of this
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
45
sentiment, as they are often replete with (derogatory) narratives of shady
business practices, exotic appetites for certain foods, sexual decadence, and
breaches of intellectual property rights in China, reinforcing a certain
stereotypical understanding of Mainlanders. Such caricatures may also be
extrapolated to migrants in Singapore, who, besides being ridiculed for
their (mythical) custom of eating dog meat, are further described as “loudmouthed,” “rude,” unhygienic, smelly, and inept in English (STOMP, 2011).
These negative impressions have only been made worse by recent news
reports of PRC nationals getting caught engaging in ‘illegal’ activities in the
city-state, including the running of two backyard aesthetic clinics administering human placenta extracts to Botox patients (Liew et al., 2010), cases of
‘study mothers’ offering unlicensed sexual services to customers patronizing the massage parlors they were working in (Mulchand and Sua, 2006),
and an “illegal” labor strike — the first in 25 years — staged by as many as
171 Chinese bus drivers over remuneration (Wee et al., 2012).
The migrants, on the other hand, have not taken to this amicably either.
According to an informal poll conducted on a blog frequented by Chinese
nationals in Singapore, 48.15 percent of surveyed users voted Singaporeans
as the most “disgusting” and “irritating” group of people out of eight
choices, with Filipinos taking second spot at a distant 7.41 percent (Yahoo,
2011; STOMP, 2011). This unpleasant exercise was followed shortly after by
at least two high-profile incidents involving PRC students harshly criticizing Singaporeans in online forums. In the first, Wang Peng Fei, a 24-year-old
in his final year of study at the East Asia Institute of Management, uploaded
a YouTube video of himself denigrating Singaporean culture, local linguistic pronunciations and minority groups. His parodic performance not only
riled ‘netizens’ in the city-state, but also prompted a member of a political
party to file a police report against him for racism, and his school to expel
him and revoke his student visa (Ang, 2011). The second case involving Sun
Xu, an engineering undergraduate at the National University of Singapore,
was perhaps more symbolic as the student was a recipient of a Ministry of
Education scholarship. In a blog post in early 2012, the 25-year-old described his loathing for middle-aged Singaporean men whom he called
(gangster-like) “uncles,” and ranted that there were (therefore) “more dogs
than humans” in the city-state (Lim and Tham, 2012; Lin, 2012). His remarks
were taken seriously enough by the university that his final year’s scholarship benefits were withdrawn in March of the same year; in addition, a
S$3,000 (US$2,340) fine and three months’ worth of community service
were imposed on him, on top of his regular scholar’s service obligations
(Durai, 2012).
The tussle of wills, between PRC migrants who view themselves as
invited guests of a nation ancestrally linked to theirs, and (Chinese)
46
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Singaporeans who regard themselves as the rightful (co)owners of an
independent and multicultural Singapore, has clearly proved difficult to
reconcile. Partly, in response to this quandary, the government has set up a
National Integration Council to promote stronger bonds between Singaporeans and the newcomers and, with it, a Community Integration Fund to
sponsor projects of up to S$200,000 (US$156,250) each that can aid in that
process (National Integration Council, 2010). Bolstering these efforts,
grassroots organizations, such as the People’s Association and OnePeople.sg,
have also deployed volunteers known as ‘integration and naturalization
champions’ and ‘harmony diplomats’ to foster greater understanding and
tolerance between Singaporean-born citizens and ‘new’ immigrants in
general (People’s Association, 2011; Lim, 2012). In addition, social clubs
organized by PRC nationals have recently emerged too, to facilitate PRC
migrants’ integration in Singapore. While the Tian Fu Club, an association
for Sichuanese newcomers, has looked to engage more with the local
community (Chang, 2012), the Hua Yuan General Association of New
Immigrants from China has taken steps to recognize migrants and Singaporeans who have played a part in enhancing the country’s social cohesiveness (Hua Yuan Association, 2007). To some extent, these social clubs mirror
the Chinese associations in colonial Singapore, but with their functions
greatly diminished at the same time. Rather than offering a range of ‘cradleto-grave’ services such as social welfare for the poor, the provision of
Chinese education, the conduct of ancestral worship, legalization of marriage, and even burial services to newcomers (Chinese Heritage Editorial
Committee, 1990), they now serve more as activity centers and mediators
between like-minded PRC migrants and locals.
These various efforts at integration carry the hopes of striking a balance
between economics and the continued viability of Singapore’s nationhood.
Still, the fact that any amicable outcome would take time to fructify is starkly
clear. In the country’s last general elections in 2011, immigration became so
much of a hot-button issue that it partially led to the ruling party losing some
forty percent of the popular vote — the biggest share in its history. This
historic turn of affairs manifested itself again three months later in the citystate’s fourth presidential election, even as another bout of anti-foreigner
sentiments bubbled over — this time involving “a migrant Chinese family’s
complaint about the smell from curry cooked by their Singaporean ethnicIndian neighbors,” and citizens’ retaliatory response to cook curry en masse
on the weekend before the election (Adam, 2011). For the postcolonial
‘global city-state’ hoping to keep its economic edge amid declining fertility
rates, the paradox of simultaneously being a nation and a well-serviced
‘talent’ hub built on migrants appears to be a feat that cannot be easily
attained. Even the city’s founding as a “child of diaspora,” along with its
CHINESE MIGRATION TO SINGAPORE
47
predominantly ‘Chinese’ fabric, seems to have retreated to the background,
when the nation is faced with a fresh round of (self-programmed) Chinese
mobilities.
Some Reflections
The sinuous storyline of Singapore’s rise as an immigrant port in the
Nanyang, and later, as a global city-state of late capitalism that is equally
reliant on migratory flows, arguably lends new insights to the Ferrari
accident involving PRC national, Ma Chi, and the (Chinese) Singaporean
taxi driver mentioned at the beginning of this article. In the last few sections,
we have sought to trace the genealogy of events and migration histories,
that had brought the paths of the two men together, and sparked the
consternation that followed the tragedy. More than a simple accident
involving an irresponsible driver and an unfortunate victim (or two), the
case, in all its seriousness, was a culmination of an earlier string of unhappy
episodes that had plagued the city-state’s recent (re)encounters with Chinese migration. This was exactly what made Ma’s involvement in the
accident so controversial, and the death of the taxi driver such a compelling
piece of evidence to Singaporeans that they were being penalized on their
own turf, by foreigners encroaching on their space.
For all the drama that the Ferrari incident had evoked, Singaporeans’
aversion to recent Chinese mobilities to their city is really more than a
contest of rights between locals and ‘new’ immigrants. It implicates the
critical role that the receiving state plays, in not just shaping the terms of
migrants’ (non)incorporation, but also defining the discourse by which its
population augmentation programs are to be judged. As earlier discussed,
purposing to fashion itself as a premier ‘talent hub’ but hampered by its
demographic limitations, Singapore has resorted to a bifurcative immigration policy (Yeoh, 2006) that aims to set the “talented” apart from the
“disposable” in its foreign labor selection. This pledge to be a careful
steward of Singapore’s migrant intake, on the part of the government, also
constitutes a form of social agreement that the state shares with its citizens,
only that the same compact is deemed to have been breached, with the
introduction of large, ambiguous flows of PRC migrants, who seem to be
using Singapore as a ‘stepping stone,’ and to be engaging in trades not
normally defined as ‘talent.’ In the reckoning of ordinary Singaporeans, the
Singapore government is, as such, both the authority that sets the rules of
engagement, and also the party to be held culpable when migrants do not
fit into the prescribed categories. In the case of the PRC nationals, their sheer
numbers and diversity have only rendered them that much more difficult
48
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to police (perhaps with the exception of the most restricted of migrant
workers), and one of the most controversial additions to the city-state.
The current unsatisfactory state of affairs is perhaps not an outcome
that the Singapore government had anticipated. After all, it would seem that
current streams of Chinese migrants and those that coursed through the city
in the colonial period are essentially the same flows, but only located in
different times. Indeed, just like in the olden days, the island is today once
more embroiled within processes of economic globalization, which are,
again, precipitating a labor shortage, and a need to look externally to fortify
its workforce. China, on the other hand, is experiencing renewed population pressures, and is at the same time relaxing its emigration rules,
facilitating the mobility of millions of much-needed labor around the world.
Still, the difference between the ‘old’ and the ‘new,’ in Singapore’s context
at least, has only become all too clear. While the descendants of the first
waves of Chinese (and other) immigrants to the city-state have been molded
into a people under the ambit of a Singapore ‘nation,’ China has moved on
to become a rapidly growing economy, a proud nation and a “hard-driving
and hard-striving” society hungry for progress (Lee Kuan Yew cited in
Jacobson, 2010). Until this contradiction can be disentangled, it seems
unlikely that the two ‘factions’ of ‘Chinese’ would see eye to eye any time
soon. Though separated by time in their respective migrancies, time is
apparently all it takes to make the difference.
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