Analytical Essay on Singaporean Culture and Heritage

Singapore Studies

The National Integration Council (NIC) was set up in April 2009, aiming to guide national efforts in integrating new immigrants to Singapore, and created a platform, the Community Integration Fund (CIF) which is a way of providing funding to organizations that implement ground-up integration efforts. Four featured initiatives for integration, supported by the CIF, help to accomplish the aims of the NIC. The first initiative is the ‘Walks to Remember’ initiative which allows Singaporeans and immigrants alike to learn about our Singaporean culture and heritage through the various trails here. The second initiative is the ‘Where I Know I’m Home’ initiative, a video series capturing the warmth between locals and foreigners here. The third initiative is the ‘SingaPlorers’ initiative, in which a board game was created to teach people the challenges of nation-building. The fourth initiative is the ‘What’s Your Story’ initiative, providing a platform through the Micro Film Competitions for locals and immigrants, young and old, to express their connections to Singapore through their lenses.

The ‘SingaPlorers’ initiative, which through the SingaPlorers - the Nation Builders board game, allows players to learn about the different challenges Singapore had faced while building the nation, from its independence in 1965 to its 50th year as an independent nation in 2015. Some of the obstacles that players have to face in the game include Singapore’s limited resources and an aging population. They also learn through play about the importance of social cohesion and keeping Singapore safe and secure. The co-producer of the game, Woo Li Fong sees lessons for both young and old from all backgrounds. “During the game, you must display resilience, resourcefulness, adaptability, and cooperation - the same treasured values of our pioneers. We hope that everyone who lives in Singapore, will come to understand and appreciate the values and policies ensuring that peace, prosperity, and harmony prevail in our multicultural society,” she said.

This initiative helps to develop the different attributes of citizenship which are legal status, sense of identity and belonging as well as participation in public affairs.

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Legal status makes official a person’s membership in a country. This shapes citizenship because it defines through law people who are included and also people who are excluded from being considered members of a country, providing a clear official position. This position is made concrete through the protection of rights and provision of privileges afforded by the nation’s constitution. This further defines citizenship because it differentiates the have’s from the have-nots. One challenge faced when building our nation was the difficulties when trying to develop a harmonious society in which different races are able to peacefully live in. Being a multiracial society, cultural and religious differences and discrimination caused disputes, which eventually led to multiple cases of racial riots in Singapore, and this discrimination is still causing some problems to our more or less harmonious society. Learning about some of the challenges we faced through this initiative reminds us that there are certain benefits such as the racial harmony in our diverse society, which many countries do not have, cannot be taken for granted. The Constitution made a contribution to the harmony in our society, with some laws protecting rights for us as citizens of Singapore. Article 12 of the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore guarantees to all person equality before the law and equal protection of the law. The Article also identifies four forbidden classifications – religion, race, descent, and place of birth – upon which Singapore citizens may not be discriminated against for specific reasons. For example, discrimination on those classifications is prohibited in the appointment to any office or employment under a public authority or in the administration of any law relating to the establishing or carrying on of any trade, business, profession, vocation or employment. In Article 15, it states that every person has the right to profess and practice his religion and to propagate it. No person shall be compelled to pay any tax the proceeds of which are specially allocated in whole or in part for the purposes of a religion other than his own. Every religious group has the right to manage its own religious affairs, establish and maintain institutions for religious or charitable purposes and acquire and own property and hold and administer it in accordance with law. Such laws are written to give us equal rights as citizens of Singapore. This allows us to integrate immigrants better as immigrants would then have equal rights as well in our society after becoming citizens, and to allow immigrants to learn to accept other people of different races and religions so that our society can continue as a harmonious one, painstakingly built by our forefathers. This is just one of the many ways that this initiative helps to develop legal status, by reminding us that benefits of citizenship as a Singaporean cannot be taken for granted and that our legal status is important in helping us to protect our rights.

Participation in public affairs refers to a way we exercise our responsibilities and obligations as citizens of a country. It gives us a stake in the country and helps to reaffirm our connection to the state. This initiative reminds us not only of the benefits of our legal status but also that as citizens of Singapore, with legal status comes our responsibilities as a citizen. If the older generations had not participated in public affairs as citizens of Singapore, we might not have even overcome the challenges when building the country. When we just started out, newly independent, realization that as a small country, we were very vulnerable to international and national threats and that we could not rely on other countries to defend our country for us when faced with such threats. With such realization, compulsory National Service was introduced on 14 March 1967, requiring male citizens of Singapore, upon reaching the age of 18, to enlist to serve National Service. Participating in public affairs by exercising the obligations as a male citizen to serve National service was necessary in ensuring the national security of Singapore. Such a responsibility was made much more necessary after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as Singapore now faced more threats, and National Service ensured that Singapore was ready to face terrorism an imminent threat. Had the older generation decided participation in public affairs, to enlist to serve National Service, was unnecessary, we would not have the national security that we have now that protects our country from threats and is preventing any terrorism in Singapore, despite it already making an impact in our neighboring country, Malaysia. Thus, this initiative reminds us that as citizens of Singapore, our obligations and responsibilities that come with the benefits of our legal status is absolutely necessary and that participation in public affairs allows us to build a better society, protect the rights we have now as citizens, and maintain the quality of life in our society, thus developing this attribute of citizenship of participating in public affairs.

A sense of identity and belonging comes from a shared belief that we belong to the same country. Citizens may share aspects of common way of life and feel strongly about similar things as other Singaporeans. This initiative allows Singaporeans to understand that certain things which shape our national identity came from challenges of building this nation. It gives us the ability to identify with each other as citizens due to the challenges we faced in the past when building this nation due to our common history. Newly independent Singapore faced many urban challenges, with our urban environment in the 1950s and 1960s was in a sorry state. The Housing and Development Board (HDB)’s inaugural annual report in 1960 described “huts made of attap, old wooden boxes, rusty corrugated iron sheets and other salvage material… congested squatter settlements with no sanitation, water or any of the elementary health facilities.” Almost a quarter of a million people lived in dilapidated slum conditions, crammed six to a room, with many more residing in squatter colonies along the city fringes. With the population growing rapidly, overcrowding was worsening. Dwellings in the city centre were often too small to accommodate large families, leading to cramped living conditions, poor ventilation, and inadequate sanitation. Thus, public housing flats were built to solve this problem. The newly built Housing Development Board (HDB) flats fostered a greater mix of ethnic groups. This helped to build a sense of community and social cohesion – critical to the harmony and stability of a diverse society that had seen ethnically-charged violence in the 1960s. In the late 1980s, as HDB’s building program slowed down and the resale market grew, there were warning signs that ethnic enclaves were starting to re-form in certain housing estates. As a pre-emptive step, the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) was introduced in 1989 to ensure a mix of ethnic groups in each town and even apartment block. Sales of new HDB flats and resale HDB flats were regulated based on predetermined ethnic quotas. This principle of encouraging social mixing and preventing enclaves from forming in our public housing estates has remained an important tenet in Singapore. The HDB flats are now a common sight in Singapore, and give us a sense of national identity and belonging as it represents our country and is something any Singaporeans can relate to. The building of HDB flats also allowed more interaction between different ethnicities and races which allowed us to be able to understand our cultural differences, as well as to appreciate the different cultures, causing us to have commonalities with each other about what we love, such as hawker food that includes food from different races, further developing our sense of national identity. This unique love for hawker food stemming from our hawker culture also causes us to act in the same way, ‘chopping’ tables and queueing for hawker food which we love and do not mind queueing long for. This allows us to easily identify with each other. Thus, through this initiative, challenges in the past which were overcome to allow us to have certain commonalities with other citizens, remind us of how our sense of identity which makes us uniquely Singaporeans were due to the challenges faced in the past, and to be able to treasure this unique sense of identity that we have, allowing us to better integrate foreigners as we are able to share common experiences with them that they are able to understand and appreciate our Singaporean culture better and to allow us to accept them more easily as the differences between people in the past and even now also allowed us to have this unique sense of identity.

While this board game is able to develop all the attributes of citizenship, I think it can be changed and further improved in such a way that it states the challenges and problems we face nowadays and allow players to access a link online through a QR code online to give suggestions at the end of the game, which would then be sent to the Singaporean Government to help them understand how Singaporeans think and to use these suggestions to improve on certain laws for more equality and decisions, coming up of ways to allow Singaporeans to be able to identify with each other much better, allowing Singaporeans to feel the need of contributing to a society that they are part of. By doing so, it allows players to express their own thoughts and think from the point of view of the Singaporean Government, which players can then be able to empathize with the Singaporean Government, having to make so many decisions to solve the challenges and problems in the country, that they can be more appreciative, instead of complaining about slips in the governance. The game can also have an online version, that players get different challenges to overcome with different options of solutions, and upon completing the challenge they can find out how the problem was solved by the government. In this way, the game is still able to have the same purpose and at the same time able to reach out to more people, especially the younger generation, who spend most of their time online, allowing students and young adults to be able to help integrate and not discriminate immigrants who come here for a better education, more job opportunities and better quality of life more easily to get them used to the life here and to be able to identify and feel comfortable with people in our diverse society. As a nation, we would then all have a better sense of identity as Singaporeans and feel the need to participate in public affairs to continue to maintain the harmony and security of the country as well as our own rights as citizens, thus being able to better develop attributes of citizenship.