Came across this piece on X, unfortunately through a groyper account run by an individual who would be deported from Singapore (funny they don’t realise that and think it’s a dark enlightenment Mecca). It’s an informative essay with novel observations that could’ve only come from an outsider, because Singaporeans are famously reluctant to publicly opine on matters of race and religion, but I would like to correct some inaccuracies below. I trust that my comment will see the light of the day in the spirit of the pro-truth and anti-censorship ideological bent of this publication.
1. The Little India riot in 2013 was not, as the author put it, a ‘race riot’. The author might be desensitised to the magnitude of the term in Singapore because of the ubiquity of communal disturbances in his homeland, but in modern Singapore, a race riot is the equivalent of a black swan event. The Maria Hertogh riots and the Chinese-Malay clashes of 1964 and 1969 were the last communal riots to have afflicted Singapore, and these occured amidst the backdrop of merger and separation from Malaysia. The foreign workers who rioted in Little India were inebriated boors frustrated by their lot in life, not pogrom participants seeking to lynch out-groups on sight.
2. The author made a critical error of judgement by using Indian immigration to the likes of Canada as an analogy for Singapore’s immigration dynamics. Perhaps the comparison was necessary to contextualise things for a Western audience, but there’s a better analogy. Old-stock ethnic Indians in Singapore are more akin to the Québécois by way of their nature as a foundational ethnic minority group. New-stock Indian immigrants are certainly not part of the core demos, but their presence is a second-order effect of the government’s insistence on keeping the prevailing C-M-I-O ethnic mix static. The fresh-off-the-boat Indians are a necessary counterweight to the mass importation of ethnic Chinese FOBs to the tune of millions. Without this foil, Singapore would become a Chinese settler-ethnostate within a decade, with their percentage of the population eclipsing 80%, and the “Israel of Southeast Asia” allegations from Sinophobic Malaysian and Indonesian Islamists would dominate the national psyches of Singapore’s neighbouring nations. This would spell trouble for the country.
3. To reiterate, this is in no way analogous to the situation in Canada or other Western countries. Claiming that Indian immigration to Singapore has resulted in ‘reputational damage’ to old-stock Singaporean Indians is as asinine as making the same claim for the PRCs vis-a-vis old-stock Singaporean Chinese, and there are a lot more of the latter around. I don’t begrudge the author, who is a racial outsider, for lacking familiarity with how Singaporeans self-identify, but Singaporeans are pretty good at spotting other Singaporeans of different racial backgrounds and treating them accordingly. There are certain visual and behavioural tells that the author simply isn’t privy to. The author may seem them as generic ‘Chinese’, ‘Malays’, and ‘Indians’, but these groups have had centuries of familiarity with each other and have collectively assimilated to a common civic identity. Not to mention the common accent.
4. For someone who admires Singapore and the system of governance that keeps it exceptional and an oasis of tranquility the author is surprisingly blasé about the importance of adopting stringent penalties against the communalisation of politics. The author’s insinuation that the allegations of racism against Singapore’s marginal opposition politicians (who are dyed in the wool Chinese chauvinists, the sort LKY sought to eliminate) were frivolous is not only without merit (because, as mentioned above, Indian immigration is a second-order effect of Chinese immigration) it leaves the door open to Western-style communal strife that would decimate the country from within. Should Singaporean MPs be allowed to discuss the Israel-Palestine affair at length, perhaps even issue condemnations of either entity? No, and for good reason, because it’s radicalising Malay Singaporean youth as we speak. Most Singaporeans accept the soft-authoritarian curbing of their FoE privileges. There is no room for majoritarianism AND minority grievance-mongering in Singapore. Anyone who seeks to excuse one or the other is no friend of the country or its people.
Harry Yew here. Let's clarify your position. You think that the ~30% increase in the Indian proportion of the population since 1970 (despite having low birth rates compared to Malays, and roughly similar to Chinese), most of which came 2010 onwards, 5 years after CECA was agreed, is a 'necessary counterbalance' to Chinese racial hegemony and part of the maintenance of Singapore’s demographic mix?
I think you should look at the facts (a table is provided in the article) before gracing us with your opinions. It's very concerning that LKY's highly pragmatic acceptance (but not support) of multiculturalism is being retconned to quash reasonable opposition against CECA among (non-chauvinistic) Singaporean people whose parents and grandparents helped to nation-build in such a way that the three races Singaporeans, as you say, are genuinely integrated. I have even met Singaporean Indians who are against CECA. This is a national issue, not a sectarian one on the level of Israel-Palestine (this was poor analogising on your part).
Look at LKY's term in office, correspond it with the table provided, and tell me what happened to the Chinese proportion of the population during his tenure. Bonus points for telling us what he said about what Singapore would be like if it was 100% Chinese. You may be an ‘insider’, but your fingers are not on the pulse. Your assumption that the name Harry Yew is a straight copy of LKY’s name, rather than a play on it (Yew is a rare but nice British surname), tells me you are here to be a smartarse rather than say anything constructive.
Thanks for responding Harry. Unfortunately this is a somewhat antagonistic riposte to my minor corrections of an otherwise directionally correct and even enjoyable exposition on Singapore’s demographic profile, but I have to remind myself that this publication is patronised by chronically online Western commentators who lack geniality because of the corrupting nature of anonymity, and who have stores of pent-up anger to expend over the sobering state of affairs in their home countries, so I’ll let the snark slide, because it’s not personal. I suppose I’d have the same neuroses if Singaporeans were being blown up in concert arenas and mowed down in Christmas markets and my politicians were too impotent to respond with proportionate force.
I wouldn’t know a thing about Yew being an English name because Britain is a diminished nation that does not feature prominently in my imagination. I’m indifferent to the country and its issues; I’m only engaging with this publication because of this particular piece. I assumed you were another one of those angmohs befuddled by the naming conventions of Chinese people, but my apologies if that’s not the case.
It is factually correct that Indian immigration must keep pace with the supermassive scale of Chinese immigration relative to the proportion of their respective racial silos, so I’m not sure why my use of ‘counterbalance’ is in contention. You’re right that some Singaporean Indians aren’t very comfortable with FOB immigration; I was once antagonistic myself before mellowing with age. I’m a fence-sitter myself because of the cultural dissimilarities between our respective Indic groups (we’re Anglophone and de-casteified, they’re Indophone and retain caste), but there’s a way to put a stop to it, and that is to turn off the Chinese FOB tap altogether so that a proportionate increase in the other letters of the alphabet soup won’t be warranted.
If you want to talk numbers, the actual resident population, that is Singaporean Indians + PRs, has hovered at around 5% since the 1970s. There hasn’t been an actual increase in that figure. The increase comes down to the non-resident population, that is expats + transient migrant labour, which has spiked from 2% to 4%. This is how the collective resident and non-resident population went from 7% to 9% of the whole. This spike coincides with the increase in transient migrant labour from the collective subcontinent post-2000s to support massive infrastructure works in Marina Bay, Tuas, and beyond. I say the ‘collective subcontinent’ because non-Singaporeans are largely unaware that Indian and Bangladeshi construction workers are collectively lumped under the ‘I’ of the CMIO categorisation system. It is the catch-all category under which the likes of the Ceylonese Tamils and the microminority of Sinhalese Buddhists and Nepali Gurkhas fall. It is synonymous with ‘South Asian’, a recent contrivance alien to Malayan parlance.
To paraphrase Vivian Balakrishnan, who infamously described angmohs as ‘ballast’ when a bunch of angmoh expats flouted Covid containment rules at Robertson Quay in 2020 and provoked considerable ire, the 4% of Indians within the 9% are ballast. By the way, I was resolutely opposed to his remark, because I’m not a xenophobic bigot. I even had to console an angmoh expat acquaintance who was so offended by Vivian’s act of pandering to the xenos that he wanted to quit the country and move himself and the kids back to his previous base of Japan.
LKY’s 100% Chinese remark is irrelevant. If Singapore were demographically 100% Chinese, it wouldn’t exist. A Sino-Israel in the heart of the Nusantara, one that expelled its indigenous population to become a full settler state, would’ve been too contentious a polity for Sukarno’s and Suharto’s Indonesia and Mahathir’s Malaysia to tolerate. Their electorate wouldn’t have allowed it; they literally pogromed Nanyang Chinese as recently as 1998. There’s an excessive emphasis on what LKY said rather than what he actually did. The old man may have called Islam a venomous religion, but Singapore retains a separate Shariah court and runs a network of highly competent state-administered madrasahs. Islam additionally has special status under Article 152 of the constitution.
Speaking of which: the Israel-Palestine affair is exceptionally relevant, and no, it isn’t a sectarian matter, but a racial one. Context is once again king. The modern Malay racial identity is inextricably married to Islam; one may even argue that the process of Malay ethnogenesis was kickstarted by Islam, which is why the Filipinos are a separate national group despite being racially identical. When the Japanese invaded Malaya the Malay regiments that fought back declared Jihad against them in defence of Tanah Melayu. There’s no line between the two identities. Any act perceived to be in opposition to Islam is injurious to ‘Malayness’, which is why Singapore’s pro-Israel slant has resurfaced unprecedented racial angst against the ethnic majority. Comparisons between Nanyang Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jewish Olim are rife on Malay-language social media circles around the region. Regardless of what one thinks about the plight of the Palestinians it’s an unsettling development and there’s a steady stream of people being summarily detained under the ISA if you’ve been paying attention to the news. Might wanna check out the recent debacle at one of Shanmugam’s meet the people sessions.
For what it’s worth, Little India may be shabby in parts (by Singapore standards), but it isn’t Tower Hamlets or worse, Rotherham. Little India houses the Land Transport Authority’s HQ and several HDB blocks. It’s as normal a district as any. The pretty shophouses on the fringe house bars and acclaimed bistros, and Mustafa (which is a sensory overload for even me, to be fair) is exceedingly popular with middle-class Singaporeans of all races. The Indian Heritage Centre is pretty exceptional with some avant-garde architecture. I’m not sure what you’re trying to insinuate by proclaiming that you’d never visit the place. I sympathise with your angst over Britain’s downfall, but Singapore isn’t the sort of place to vicariously bandwagon us-vs-them politics by insinuating that cherished districts are no-go zones filled with undesirables. That energy would be better expended in Britain.
and my fingers don’t necessarily have to be on the pulse. We’re notoriously apolitical, remember? ;)
I was short with you not because I am anonymous and chronically online, but because you pompously declared your comment to be the truth at the very beginning of your comment before inaccurately declaring factors other than CECA to be the cause of Singapore's changing demographics (I was quoting the resident figures, by the way). You then proceeded to pepper your comment with non sequiturs, which, while interesting, were largely irrelevant.
I am not bandwagoning us vs them politics, I am merely reporting the concerns of Singaporeans (to a British, not Singaporean, audience) I've met about the overpopulation of Singapore and one of its primary causes, CECA. I also fairly reported, I think, Singaporean citizen's concerns with PRC immigration too. There are indeed some there are issues with ang moh migration, too, but I wouldn’t say that flouting covid rules is among the most egregious, especially in retrospect.
What I said was not even close to comparing Little India to Rotherham, one of your many bizarre strawmen. I am dealing with Singapore on its own terms while making them at least somewhat understandable to an overwhelmingly British audience. This audience, for example, would consider the London riots of 2011 to be a largely racial phenomenon and thus a race riot, especially given the analogous context (the killing of a black man by a white man). If the bus driver was Indian, there would undoubtedly have been commotion, but do you really think there would have been a riot?
Your self-proclaimed nonchalance about Britain's current situation is strange given that you seemingly delighted in the greatest scandal in British political history by referring to it several times in your comment, seemingly as a way to get under my skin. I applaud the effort.
Oh Harry, sayang, you punch like a girl. Don’t spurn me like you would a jilted lover. I’m not your foe. I’m trying to make you see the folly of cosying up to Singaporean xenophobes like a succubus. Once they’re done flogging the keling dead horse, they’ll come for you next. They’ll devour you alive! If there’s one thing that makes them madder than a brownoid with the temerity to be unapologetically successful, it’s an angmoh who sleeps with SPGs. If we were friends in real life I could regale you with tales of the angmoh-cina fights over women I’ve had to defuse.
Your claim that you furnished the resident data does not line up with the actual resident data. Perhaps this was lost in translation, but expatriates and foreign workers are not considered residents by Singaporean officialdom even though they live here full-time. Confounding, I know.
< Resident (citizen and PR) population >
1965
Chinese: 76.0%
Malay: 14.0%
Indian: 7.5%
Other: 2.5%
2024
Chinese: 75.9%
Malay: 15.0%
Indian: 7.5%
Other: 1.6%
The Chinese and Indian share of the resident population has remained static for 6 decades. The uptick in the Malay resident share of the whole can be attributed to the higher TFR of Muslim populations, the absorption of Chinese and Indians into their in-group through marriage and conversion, and the outmigration of Eurasians to Australia (there’s hearsay that the latter was encouraged by LKY to break the spine of the white colonial ruling class).
The fact of the matter is that you misinterpreted the data by failing to account for the removable ballast, the bulk of which consists of transient grunt labour responsible for building your condominium and rescuing the lady from the recent sinkhole in Tanjong Katong. You then used this ballast to vibe-conjure a Canada-style “invasion” largely based off the misleading social media rumblings of a disgruntled minority of seditious Singaporean Chinese racialists barking themselves hoarse about a great replacement conspiracy like they aren’t the living, breathing product of the thorough demographic decimation of the indigenous Malay population from well over 90% in Raffles’ heyday to the smidgen it is today. Talk about glass houses.
Let’s cut to the chase: the CECA ‘crisis’ in Singapore can be summed up as a case of elite overproduction colliding with status anxiety in a society obsessed with upward mobility. Singapore is adept at churning out law/medicine/financebros, so it was smooth sailing from the 70s to the 90s when the world revolved around their ilk. They could engage in mindless busywork, rack up the Krisflyer miles on fully comped business class trips, and shit-talk the rest of their underdeveloped, war-ravaged, impoverished Southeast Asian brethren, but when the epicentre of status shifted to Silicon Valley and its newfangled toys, Singapore was outed as a price taker rather than a setter capable of churning out cracked programmers or unicorns. Singapore’s tech pivot failed with flying colours (where’s our TSMC?) but the locally-based MNCs needed the talent anyway, which is where talented expatriates like YOU come in, as well as savants like Piyush Gupta, whom you namedropped in your piece to lend an air of credence to the CECA ramblings, when you know damn well the kopitiam uncles rambling about him aren’t remotely capable of filling his shoes.
YOU are the Piyush Gupta here. You’re jeopardising your rice bowl by pandering to a deranged microminority who fancy themselves on the better tail of the talent distribution curve, yet lack the skillset to build LLMs and the worldliness, temperament, and erudition to manage multinational teams. Is there an immigration crisis or a crisis of personal overestimation among the disgruntled? Because the silent majority who fall in the middle of the talent curve are happily employed in fields perfectly suited to their aptitude. Who do you think votes for the PAP to the tune of 70%?
You’re terrible at separating the wheat from the chaff, Harry. Your finger isn’t that deeply pressed to the pulse. It’s pressed to the pulse of a silo of deplorables. I grew up with some of these people. I know them and their misplaced sense of entitlement better than you ever will.
Just enjoy your life, comrade. Find yourself a pliant SPG (or a twink if you swing the other way, I’m sure there’s no shortage of their male counterparts) and count your blessings that you live in a relative sanctuary. Wading into the politics of a country you’re a guest in isn’t worth the trouble. Trouble has a way of finding people in authoritarian polities. For what it’s worth, it is because of the anti-extremist vanguard (like me) that you get to live a fuss-free life in a country that would otherwise be overcome by the juvenile temper tantrums of the deplorable segment of the ethnic majority. Internecine riots between various Chinese clans were common in the colonial era and LKY knew what he was doing when he subdued the worst of their lot. Let’s not return to that era.
Rest assured, comrade, I’ve no intention of wading into Singaporean politics or lending the articles’s credibility to the conspiratorial ravings of kopitiam uncles. For instance, I don’t buy into claims of Indian ethnic nepotism in the corporate sphere, or at least they're probably overblown. Indians are famously competitive with one another, so why would they blindly support their co-ethnics like this? I also noted in the article how much more robust immigration policy and foreigners' access to HDBs became after 2011 which is a good example of the many reasons why the PAP have managed to obtain >65% of the vote consistently. They listen to the electorate, whose disquiet over immigration (CECA was agreed in 2005) was undoubtedly a primary reason behind the PAP's collapsing vote share in 2006, but more especially in 2011.
I appreciate that some of my phrasing (e.g. referring to a race riot, criticising Little India) may have given everything else a partisan slant where none existed (I have nothing against Piyush Gupta personally, for example). That said, I maintain that CECA’s migration stipulations are an unfair imposition resulting from the overwhelming leverage that a large country like India has over small ones like Singapore. It seems to be a consistent pattern with India’s bilateral relations with many countries, although I have no doubt that Singapore, despite its relatively small leverage compared to Britain and Canada, almost certainly negotiated better and harder than both Canada and Britain combined.
That said, your take on Singapore’s elite overproduction and status anxieties, or even the failed industrial policy that never produced a TSMC, would make for a very interesting standalone article. If you ever feel like submitting such a piece, I’d encourage it. Or, as you suggested, sharing your first-hand experiences with your many experiences with immigration frictions here would also be interesting. I would also like to know why you feel that Singapore continues to be an authoritarian country - I had the impression that it had softened up a great deal in recent years (I discuss this in Part 2). Perhaps the opposition have learned how to tread more carefully.
Well you’re certainly nicer now. I appreciate that. I do have a fair bit to say about the gaps in Singapore’s industrial policy from a hereditarian perspective, but I doubt I’ll submit an op-ed because I hate thinking about politics or engaging with it. In that vein I’m very Singaporean. Not necessarily apathetic, just disdainful. I look at my distant ethnic cousins across the Andaman Sea engaging in all sorts of electioneering and I balk at it. To me politics is a wretched, soul-sucking enterprise that detracts from the things that actually matter in one’s 20s, like spending time with your loved ones, furthering your hobbies, finding a good partner, etc. Even writing this comment is a chore, but I shall push through because I feel the need to cut through the wall of bullshit that’s out there on the Internet.
Back to topic. Endogamy is the medium that perpetuates Indian ethnic nepotism. India is not a nation in the strictest sense but a colossal empire splintered into thousands of endogamous caste groups who are in effect self-contained ethnic groups looking out for their own narrow interests over that of competing groups. (this btw inhibits collaboration between out-groups and efficient scaling, which makes India laggard relative to China). But yes, ethnic nepotism falters outside this caste superstructure, and if it exists at all, it’s reduced to a feebler and more general form ie. the familial sort.
India’s ancient Brahmin clergy enforced a prohibition on overseas voyages called kalapani (there’s a Wiki article about this) by insisting that crossing the seas was a ritually polluting act. The theological hokum aside, the real reason for this prohibition was the unacceptable risk of exogamy potentially being mainstreamed by men who left their homes for extended periods of time, leaving a litter of miscegnated progeny devoid of caste, which could destabilise the caste superstructure from which the Brahmin clergy derived their power. But ancient Indian men ventured abroad regardless, defying the clergy and spreading Hinduism, Buddhism, and Indic scripts to Indochina. As a consequence of this genetic outflow the vast majority of mainland Southeast Asians have subcontinental haplogroups from waves of admixture in the ancient and medieval eras.
Indians are generally denuded of their caste after a minimum of two generations abroad, owing to the inability of each splintered microrace to swell to a critical mass capable of self-perpetuating the system of stratification, or even within a single generation if they marry across caste or racial lines and produce mixed offspring. Crossing the so-called kalapani generally produces the inverse of the grasshopper to locust phenomenon. This creates odd phenomena like x-generation Singaporean Indian Hindus importing Brahmin priests from India to staff the temples because “Brahmin” has long ceased to exist as a tangible identifier in Singapore. You couldn’t create a clergy out of our racial stock even if you tried. The conditions no longer exist.
So yes, you’re partially correct about Indian nepotism being an overblown phenomenon. This is why it was comical when your article was paraded around Elmo’s Twitter by midwit groyper accounts and their non-Singaporean Chinese ethnonationalist concubines who are blithely oblivious to the ways in which the Nanyang Chinese elite function as an endogamous caste group par excellence, including Singapore’s virtually monoracial political and business elite. The so-called bamboo network is effectively a transnational mercantile caste group that is endogamous to a fault. I don’t begrudge the Nanyang Chinese for it because I’m not an envious communist with a raging hate boner for the entrepreneurial, plus their ethnic sequestration is anyway a product of the centuries-long persecution and pogroming of their people by native Nusantaran bigots, producing conditions similar to that which birthed the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnoreligious group. I’m just saying that if we have a Brahmin-adjacent nepo elite in this country, the fingers are being pointed at the wrong people by the midwit rabble both local and foreign.
As for the authoritarian part: every Singaporean has had the fear of the government and police beaten into them by their parents in their formative years. I was forewarned to explicitly refrain from commentary on race and especially religious matters and to perish the thought of criticising the government. What is this if not an authoritarian polity? To be fair, my elders formed these inhibitions when LKY ruled by diktat, and things have certainly softened since his passing of the baton. But much remains the same.
I’m not making a value judgement on our system of governance because I strongly believe our heterogenous population makes us ill-suited to further democratisation. I’m somewhat cynical of human nature and can’t ignore the alarm bells ringing in the back of my head. Malaysia is a harbinger of what Singapore could become if democracy empowered any one group to gain extreme concessions at the expense of another, and I’d sooner see this island burn than watch the Chinese gain a Bumiputera sense of entitlement and turn the rest of us into outcastes. We do have unusually strong bonds of fraternity between the races which is somewhat of a miracle considering the horrid state of race relations in the rest of the world, but this exists only because Singapore is a walled garden. Better the devil you know.
ps: 2011 was a reaction to PRC and Pinoy immigration. The heat has since shifted to foreign Indians as of the 2020s. Come the next decade the plebeian screechers will probably move on to Africans (assuming they end up establishing a presence here), then embodied AGI after that. Siphoning the region of economically productive bodies and adding them to our ranks is the price we must pay for being a entrepôt microstate divorced from its natural hinterland. Rejoining Malaysia would put an end to it, but then we’d have to impose a Hukou system to stop all of the country from moving to Woodlands. Back to square one.
"although East Asians have a higher average IQ than Europeans, the distribution tends to cluster around the mean".
There's no good evidence for this AFAIK and this seems to be a misconception. The standard deviation of East Asian countries on the PISA tests are just the same as in Western countries. So, the East Asian distribution is not narrower.
The American IQ standard deviation may be wider than that of e.g. Japan, but that would in the first place be because the US is a more diverse country with large racial minorities with different IQ distributions. Lynn and Hampson (1986) said so themselves: "Japan does not have the range of racial minorities that are present in the U.S. and increase the heterogeneity of the American population. The greater homogeneity in Japan is shown by the lower standard deviations on the McCarthy scales, where the Japanese standard deviations are approximately 85% of those in the U.S." (https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-2896(86)90026-7)
"Malay criminality centres around what might be called ‘market crime’ [...] This type of crime is not primarily violent"
Is there any stats that you could refer to? Groups that are overrepresented in crime tend generally to be overrepresented in all types of crime, and nonviolent crimes generally constitute a large proportion of crimes in all groups. I suspect that even if much of Malay criminality is nonviolent, there should still be a difference between Malays and Chinese when comparing violent crime rates.
Hi, these are very fair comments/questions. Noted regarding the IQ distribution - but I still think it's fair to say that there is greater variation in personality and behaviour among Europeans. Whether this is due to social tolerance for variation or relative genetic heterogeneity is another question entirely. Either way, I believe this has second-order effects regarding phenotypic presentation of eccentricities and divergent thinking, which leads to innovation. That said, this was only an analogy, and my point about Singapore, that it is *not* as you would typically imagine of a primarily East Asian country, still stands.
Regarding your second point, I could not find granular race-based statistics for things like this, but I disagree with the implicit assumption (correct me if I'm wrong) that Malay violent crime must be proportionate with nonviolent crime. Besides the fact that crime is generally low anyway, violent crime does not facilitate nonviolent crime in Singapore in the way that it does in many other countries. In both Malay and Chinese gangs (the famous 'triads') it is thought that violent crime is not worth the attention it brings from the very diligent police.
As a side note, most cases of serious violent crime seem to be non-premediated domestic disputes, or petty disputes between older uncles at coffee shops. It's amazing how petty, overblown disputes are more often reported on than actual murders are in London's newspapers, such is the difference in crime between the two cities.
Came across this piece on X, unfortunately through a groyper account run by an individual who would be deported from Singapore (funny they don’t realise that and think it’s a dark enlightenment Mecca). It’s an informative essay with novel observations that could’ve only come from an outsider, because Singaporeans are famously reluctant to publicly opine on matters of race and religion, but I would like to correct some inaccuracies below. I trust that my comment will see the light of the day in the spirit of the pro-truth and anti-censorship ideological bent of this publication.
1. The Little India riot in 2013 was not, as the author put it, a ‘race riot’. The author might be desensitised to the magnitude of the term in Singapore because of the ubiquity of communal disturbances in his homeland, but in modern Singapore, a race riot is the equivalent of a black swan event. The Maria Hertogh riots and the Chinese-Malay clashes of 1964 and 1969 were the last communal riots to have afflicted Singapore, and these occured amidst the backdrop of merger and separation from Malaysia. The foreign workers who rioted in Little India were inebriated boors frustrated by their lot in life, not pogrom participants seeking to lynch out-groups on sight.
2. The author made a critical error of judgement by using Indian immigration to the likes of Canada as an analogy for Singapore’s immigration dynamics. Perhaps the comparison was necessary to contextualise things for a Western audience, but there’s a better analogy. Old-stock ethnic Indians in Singapore are more akin to the Québécois by way of their nature as a foundational ethnic minority group. New-stock Indian immigrants are certainly not part of the core demos, but their presence is a second-order effect of the government’s insistence on keeping the prevailing C-M-I-O ethnic mix static. The fresh-off-the-boat Indians are a necessary counterweight to the mass importation of ethnic Chinese FOBs to the tune of millions. Without this foil, Singapore would become a Chinese settler-ethnostate within a decade, with their percentage of the population eclipsing 80%, and the “Israel of Southeast Asia” allegations from Sinophobic Malaysian and Indonesian Islamists would dominate the national psyches of Singapore’s neighbouring nations. This would spell trouble for the country.
3. To reiterate, this is in no way analogous to the situation in Canada or other Western countries. Claiming that Indian immigration to Singapore has resulted in ‘reputational damage’ to old-stock Singaporean Indians is as asinine as making the same claim for the PRCs vis-a-vis old-stock Singaporean Chinese, and there are a lot more of the latter around. I don’t begrudge the author, who is a racial outsider, for lacking familiarity with how Singaporeans self-identify, but Singaporeans are pretty good at spotting other Singaporeans of different racial backgrounds and treating them accordingly. There are certain visual and behavioural tells that the author simply isn’t privy to. The author may seem them as generic ‘Chinese’, ‘Malays’, and ‘Indians’, but these groups have had centuries of familiarity with each other and have collectively assimilated to a common civic identity. Not to mention the common accent.
4. For someone who admires Singapore and the system of governance that keeps it exceptional and an oasis of tranquility the author is surprisingly blasé about the importance of adopting stringent penalties against the communalisation of politics. The author’s insinuation that the allegations of racism against Singapore’s marginal opposition politicians (who are dyed in the wool Chinese chauvinists, the sort LKY sought to eliminate) were frivolous is not only without merit (because, as mentioned above, Indian immigration is a second-order effect of Chinese immigration) it leaves the door open to Western-style communal strife that would decimate the country from within. Should Singaporean MPs be allowed to discuss the Israel-Palestine affair at length, perhaps even issue condemnations of either entity? No, and for good reason, because it’s radicalising Malay Singaporean youth as we speak. Most Singaporeans accept the soft-authoritarian curbing of their FoE privileges. There is no room for majoritarianism AND minority grievance-mongering in Singapore. Anyone who seeks to excuse one or the other is no friend of the country or its people.
5. Lee is the surname, not Yew.
Harry Yew here. Let's clarify your position. You think that the ~30% increase in the Indian proportion of the population since 1970 (despite having low birth rates compared to Malays, and roughly similar to Chinese), most of which came 2010 onwards, 5 years after CECA was agreed, is a 'necessary counterbalance' to Chinese racial hegemony and part of the maintenance of Singapore’s demographic mix?
I think you should look at the facts (a table is provided in the article) before gracing us with your opinions. It's very concerning that LKY's highly pragmatic acceptance (but not support) of multiculturalism is being retconned to quash reasonable opposition against CECA among (non-chauvinistic) Singaporean people whose parents and grandparents helped to nation-build in such a way that the three races Singaporeans, as you say, are genuinely integrated. I have even met Singaporean Indians who are against CECA. This is a national issue, not a sectarian one on the level of Israel-Palestine (this was poor analogising on your part).
Look at LKY's term in office, correspond it with the table provided, and tell me what happened to the Chinese proportion of the population during his tenure. Bonus points for telling us what he said about what Singapore would be like if it was 100% Chinese. You may be an ‘insider’, but your fingers are not on the pulse. Your assumption that the name Harry Yew is a straight copy of LKY’s name, rather than a play on it (Yew is a rare but nice British surname), tells me you are here to be a smartarse rather than say anything constructive.
Thanks for responding Harry. Unfortunately this is a somewhat antagonistic riposte to my minor corrections of an otherwise directionally correct and even enjoyable exposition on Singapore’s demographic profile, but I have to remind myself that this publication is patronised by chronically online Western commentators who lack geniality because of the corrupting nature of anonymity, and who have stores of pent-up anger to expend over the sobering state of affairs in their home countries, so I’ll let the snark slide, because it’s not personal. I suppose I’d have the same neuroses if Singaporeans were being blown up in concert arenas and mowed down in Christmas markets and my politicians were too impotent to respond with proportionate force.
I wouldn’t know a thing about Yew being an English name because Britain is a diminished nation that does not feature prominently in my imagination. I’m indifferent to the country and its issues; I’m only engaging with this publication because of this particular piece. I assumed you were another one of those angmohs befuddled by the naming conventions of Chinese people, but my apologies if that’s not the case.
It is factually correct that Indian immigration must keep pace with the supermassive scale of Chinese immigration relative to the proportion of their respective racial silos, so I’m not sure why my use of ‘counterbalance’ is in contention. You’re right that some Singaporean Indians aren’t very comfortable with FOB immigration; I was once antagonistic myself before mellowing with age. I’m a fence-sitter myself because of the cultural dissimilarities between our respective Indic groups (we’re Anglophone and de-casteified, they’re Indophone and retain caste), but there’s a way to put a stop to it, and that is to turn off the Chinese FOB tap altogether so that a proportionate increase in the other letters of the alphabet soup won’t be warranted.
If you want to talk numbers, the actual resident population, that is Singaporean Indians + PRs, has hovered at around 5% since the 1970s. There hasn’t been an actual increase in that figure. The increase comes down to the non-resident population, that is expats + transient migrant labour, which has spiked from 2% to 4%. This is how the collective resident and non-resident population went from 7% to 9% of the whole. This spike coincides with the increase in transient migrant labour from the collective subcontinent post-2000s to support massive infrastructure works in Marina Bay, Tuas, and beyond. I say the ‘collective subcontinent’ because non-Singaporeans are largely unaware that Indian and Bangladeshi construction workers are collectively lumped under the ‘I’ of the CMIO categorisation system. It is the catch-all category under which the likes of the Ceylonese Tamils and the microminority of Sinhalese Buddhists and Nepali Gurkhas fall. It is synonymous with ‘South Asian’, a recent contrivance alien to Malayan parlance.
To paraphrase Vivian Balakrishnan, who infamously described angmohs as ‘ballast’ when a bunch of angmoh expats flouted Covid containment rules at Robertson Quay in 2020 and provoked considerable ire, the 4% of Indians within the 9% are ballast. By the way, I was resolutely opposed to his remark, because I’m not a xenophobic bigot. I even had to console an angmoh expat acquaintance who was so offended by Vivian’s act of pandering to the xenos that he wanted to quit the country and move himself and the kids back to his previous base of Japan.
LKY’s 100% Chinese remark is irrelevant. If Singapore were demographically 100% Chinese, it wouldn’t exist. A Sino-Israel in the heart of the Nusantara, one that expelled its indigenous population to become a full settler state, would’ve been too contentious a polity for Sukarno’s and Suharto’s Indonesia and Mahathir’s Malaysia to tolerate. Their electorate wouldn’t have allowed it; they literally pogromed Nanyang Chinese as recently as 1998. There’s an excessive emphasis on what LKY said rather than what he actually did. The old man may have called Islam a venomous religion, but Singapore retains a separate Shariah court and runs a network of highly competent state-administered madrasahs. Islam additionally has special status under Article 152 of the constitution.
Speaking of which: the Israel-Palestine affair is exceptionally relevant, and no, it isn’t a sectarian matter, but a racial one. Context is once again king. The modern Malay racial identity is inextricably married to Islam; one may even argue that the process of Malay ethnogenesis was kickstarted by Islam, which is why the Filipinos are a separate national group despite being racially identical. When the Japanese invaded Malaya the Malay regiments that fought back declared Jihad against them in defence of Tanah Melayu. There’s no line between the two identities. Any act perceived to be in opposition to Islam is injurious to ‘Malayness’, which is why Singapore’s pro-Israel slant has resurfaced unprecedented racial angst against the ethnic majority. Comparisons between Nanyang Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jewish Olim are rife on Malay-language social media circles around the region. Regardless of what one thinks about the plight of the Palestinians it’s an unsettling development and there’s a steady stream of people being summarily detained under the ISA if you’ve been paying attention to the news. Might wanna check out the recent debacle at one of Shanmugam’s meet the people sessions.
For what it’s worth, Little India may be shabby in parts (by Singapore standards), but it isn’t Tower Hamlets or worse, Rotherham. Little India houses the Land Transport Authority’s HQ and several HDB blocks. It’s as normal a district as any. The pretty shophouses on the fringe house bars and acclaimed bistros, and Mustafa (which is a sensory overload for even me, to be fair) is exceedingly popular with middle-class Singaporeans of all races. The Indian Heritage Centre is pretty exceptional with some avant-garde architecture. I’m not sure what you’re trying to insinuate by proclaiming that you’d never visit the place. I sympathise with your angst over Britain’s downfall, but Singapore isn’t the sort of place to vicariously bandwagon us-vs-them politics by insinuating that cherished districts are no-go zones filled with undesirables. That energy would be better expended in Britain.
and my fingers don’t necessarily have to be on the pulse. We’re notoriously apolitical, remember? ;)
I was short with you not because I am anonymous and chronically online, but because you pompously declared your comment to be the truth at the very beginning of your comment before inaccurately declaring factors other than CECA to be the cause of Singapore's changing demographics (I was quoting the resident figures, by the way). You then proceeded to pepper your comment with non sequiturs, which, while interesting, were largely irrelevant.
I am not bandwagoning us vs them politics, I am merely reporting the concerns of Singaporeans (to a British, not Singaporean, audience) I've met about the overpopulation of Singapore and one of its primary causes, CECA. I also fairly reported, I think, Singaporean citizen's concerns with PRC immigration too. There are indeed some there are issues with ang moh migration, too, but I wouldn’t say that flouting covid rules is among the most egregious, especially in retrospect.
What I said was not even close to comparing Little India to Rotherham, one of your many bizarre strawmen. I am dealing with Singapore on its own terms while making them at least somewhat understandable to an overwhelmingly British audience. This audience, for example, would consider the London riots of 2011 to be a largely racial phenomenon and thus a race riot, especially given the analogous context (the killing of a black man by a white man). If the bus driver was Indian, there would undoubtedly have been commotion, but do you really think there would have been a riot?
Your self-proclaimed nonchalance about Britain's current situation is strange given that you seemingly delighted in the greatest scandal in British political history by referring to it several times in your comment, seemingly as a way to get under my skin. I applaud the effort.
Oh Harry, sayang, you punch like a girl. Don’t spurn me like you would a jilted lover. I’m not your foe. I’m trying to make you see the folly of cosying up to Singaporean xenophobes like a succubus. Once they’re done flogging the keling dead horse, they’ll come for you next. They’ll devour you alive! If there’s one thing that makes them madder than a brownoid with the temerity to be unapologetically successful, it’s an angmoh who sleeps with SPGs. If we were friends in real life I could regale you with tales of the angmoh-cina fights over women I’ve had to defuse.
Your claim that you furnished the resident data does not line up with the actual resident data. Perhaps this was lost in translation, but expatriates and foreign workers are not considered residents by Singaporean officialdom even though they live here full-time. Confounding, I know.
< Resident (citizen and PR) population >
1965
Chinese: 76.0%
Malay: 14.0%
Indian: 7.5%
Other: 2.5%
2024
Chinese: 75.9%
Malay: 15.0%
Indian: 7.5%
Other: 1.6%
The Chinese and Indian share of the resident population has remained static for 6 decades. The uptick in the Malay resident share of the whole can be attributed to the higher TFR of Muslim populations, the absorption of Chinese and Indians into their in-group through marriage and conversion, and the outmigration of Eurasians to Australia (there’s hearsay that the latter was encouraged by LKY to break the spine of the white colonial ruling class).
The fact of the matter is that you misinterpreted the data by failing to account for the removable ballast, the bulk of which consists of transient grunt labour responsible for building your condominium and rescuing the lady from the recent sinkhole in Tanjong Katong. You then used this ballast to vibe-conjure a Canada-style “invasion” largely based off the misleading social media rumblings of a disgruntled minority of seditious Singaporean Chinese racialists barking themselves hoarse about a great replacement conspiracy like they aren’t the living, breathing product of the thorough demographic decimation of the indigenous Malay population from well over 90% in Raffles’ heyday to the smidgen it is today. Talk about glass houses.
Let’s cut to the chase: the CECA ‘crisis’ in Singapore can be summed up as a case of elite overproduction colliding with status anxiety in a society obsessed with upward mobility. Singapore is adept at churning out law/medicine/financebros, so it was smooth sailing from the 70s to the 90s when the world revolved around their ilk. They could engage in mindless busywork, rack up the Krisflyer miles on fully comped business class trips, and shit-talk the rest of their underdeveloped, war-ravaged, impoverished Southeast Asian brethren, but when the epicentre of status shifted to Silicon Valley and its newfangled toys, Singapore was outed as a price taker rather than a setter capable of churning out cracked programmers or unicorns. Singapore’s tech pivot failed with flying colours (where’s our TSMC?) but the locally-based MNCs needed the talent anyway, which is where talented expatriates like YOU come in, as well as savants like Piyush Gupta, whom you namedropped in your piece to lend an air of credence to the CECA ramblings, when you know damn well the kopitiam uncles rambling about him aren’t remotely capable of filling his shoes.
YOU are the Piyush Gupta here. You’re jeopardising your rice bowl by pandering to a deranged microminority who fancy themselves on the better tail of the talent distribution curve, yet lack the skillset to build LLMs and the worldliness, temperament, and erudition to manage multinational teams. Is there an immigration crisis or a crisis of personal overestimation among the disgruntled? Because the silent majority who fall in the middle of the talent curve are happily employed in fields perfectly suited to their aptitude. Who do you think votes for the PAP to the tune of 70%?
You’re terrible at separating the wheat from the chaff, Harry. Your finger isn’t that deeply pressed to the pulse. It’s pressed to the pulse of a silo of deplorables. I grew up with some of these people. I know them and their misplaced sense of entitlement better than you ever will.
Just enjoy your life, comrade. Find yourself a pliant SPG (or a twink if you swing the other way, I’m sure there’s no shortage of their male counterparts) and count your blessings that you live in a relative sanctuary. Wading into the politics of a country you’re a guest in isn’t worth the trouble. Trouble has a way of finding people in authoritarian polities. For what it’s worth, it is because of the anti-extremist vanguard (like me) that you get to live a fuss-free life in a country that would otherwise be overcome by the juvenile temper tantrums of the deplorable segment of the ethnic majority. Internecine riots between various Chinese clans were common in the colonial era and LKY knew what he was doing when he subdued the worst of their lot. Let’s not return to that era.
Rest assured, comrade, I’ve no intention of wading into Singaporean politics or lending the articles’s credibility to the conspiratorial ravings of kopitiam uncles. For instance, I don’t buy into claims of Indian ethnic nepotism in the corporate sphere, or at least they're probably overblown. Indians are famously competitive with one another, so why would they blindly support their co-ethnics like this? I also noted in the article how much more robust immigration policy and foreigners' access to HDBs became after 2011 which is a good example of the many reasons why the PAP have managed to obtain >65% of the vote consistently. They listen to the electorate, whose disquiet over immigration (CECA was agreed in 2005) was undoubtedly a primary reason behind the PAP's collapsing vote share in 2006, but more especially in 2011.
I appreciate that some of my phrasing (e.g. referring to a race riot, criticising Little India) may have given everything else a partisan slant where none existed (I have nothing against Piyush Gupta personally, for example). That said, I maintain that CECA’s migration stipulations are an unfair imposition resulting from the overwhelming leverage that a large country like India has over small ones like Singapore. It seems to be a consistent pattern with India’s bilateral relations with many countries, although I have no doubt that Singapore, despite its relatively small leverage compared to Britain and Canada, almost certainly negotiated better and harder than both Canada and Britain combined.
That said, your take on Singapore’s elite overproduction and status anxieties, or even the failed industrial policy that never produced a TSMC, would make for a very interesting standalone article. If you ever feel like submitting such a piece, I’d encourage it. Or, as you suggested, sharing your first-hand experiences with your many experiences with immigration frictions here would also be interesting. I would also like to know why you feel that Singapore continues to be an authoritarian country - I had the impression that it had softened up a great deal in recent years (I discuss this in Part 2). Perhaps the opposition have learned how to tread more carefully.
Well you’re certainly nicer now. I appreciate that. I do have a fair bit to say about the gaps in Singapore’s industrial policy from a hereditarian perspective, but I doubt I’ll submit an op-ed because I hate thinking about politics or engaging with it. In that vein I’m very Singaporean. Not necessarily apathetic, just disdainful. I look at my distant ethnic cousins across the Andaman Sea engaging in all sorts of electioneering and I balk at it. To me politics is a wretched, soul-sucking enterprise that detracts from the things that actually matter in one’s 20s, like spending time with your loved ones, furthering your hobbies, finding a good partner, etc. Even writing this comment is a chore, but I shall push through because I feel the need to cut through the wall of bullshit that’s out there on the Internet.
Back to topic. Endogamy is the medium that perpetuates Indian ethnic nepotism. India is not a nation in the strictest sense but a colossal empire splintered into thousands of endogamous caste groups who are in effect self-contained ethnic groups looking out for their own narrow interests over that of competing groups. (this btw inhibits collaboration between out-groups and efficient scaling, which makes India laggard relative to China). But yes, ethnic nepotism falters outside this caste superstructure, and if it exists at all, it’s reduced to a feebler and more general form ie. the familial sort.
India’s ancient Brahmin clergy enforced a prohibition on overseas voyages called kalapani (there’s a Wiki article about this) by insisting that crossing the seas was a ritually polluting act. The theological hokum aside, the real reason for this prohibition was the unacceptable risk of exogamy potentially being mainstreamed by men who left their homes for extended periods of time, leaving a litter of miscegnated progeny devoid of caste, which could destabilise the caste superstructure from which the Brahmin clergy derived their power. But ancient Indian men ventured abroad regardless, defying the clergy and spreading Hinduism, Buddhism, and Indic scripts to Indochina. As a consequence of this genetic outflow the vast majority of mainland Southeast Asians have subcontinental haplogroups from waves of admixture in the ancient and medieval eras.
Indians are generally denuded of their caste after a minimum of two generations abroad, owing to the inability of each splintered microrace to swell to a critical mass capable of self-perpetuating the system of stratification, or even within a single generation if they marry across caste or racial lines and produce mixed offspring. Crossing the so-called kalapani generally produces the inverse of the grasshopper to locust phenomenon. This creates odd phenomena like x-generation Singaporean Indian Hindus importing Brahmin priests from India to staff the temples because “Brahmin” has long ceased to exist as a tangible identifier in Singapore. You couldn’t create a clergy out of our racial stock even if you tried. The conditions no longer exist.
So yes, you’re partially correct about Indian nepotism being an overblown phenomenon. This is why it was comical when your article was paraded around Elmo’s Twitter by midwit groyper accounts and their non-Singaporean Chinese ethnonationalist concubines who are blithely oblivious to the ways in which the Nanyang Chinese elite function as an endogamous caste group par excellence, including Singapore’s virtually monoracial political and business elite. The so-called bamboo network is effectively a transnational mercantile caste group that is endogamous to a fault. I don’t begrudge the Nanyang Chinese for it because I’m not an envious communist with a raging hate boner for the entrepreneurial, plus their ethnic sequestration is anyway a product of the centuries-long persecution and pogroming of their people by native Nusantaran bigots, producing conditions similar to that which birthed the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnoreligious group. I’m just saying that if we have a Brahmin-adjacent nepo elite in this country, the fingers are being pointed at the wrong people by the midwit rabble both local and foreign.
As for the authoritarian part: every Singaporean has had the fear of the government and police beaten into them by their parents in their formative years. I was forewarned to explicitly refrain from commentary on race and especially religious matters and to perish the thought of criticising the government. What is this if not an authoritarian polity? To be fair, my elders formed these inhibitions when LKY ruled by diktat, and things have certainly softened since his passing of the baton. But much remains the same.
I’m not making a value judgement on our system of governance because I strongly believe our heterogenous population makes us ill-suited to further democratisation. I’m somewhat cynical of human nature and can’t ignore the alarm bells ringing in the back of my head. Malaysia is a harbinger of what Singapore could become if democracy empowered any one group to gain extreme concessions at the expense of another, and I’d sooner see this island burn than watch the Chinese gain a Bumiputera sense of entitlement and turn the rest of us into outcastes. We do have unusually strong bonds of fraternity between the races which is somewhat of a miracle considering the horrid state of race relations in the rest of the world, but this exists only because Singapore is a walled garden. Better the devil you know.
ps: 2011 was a reaction to PRC and Pinoy immigration. The heat has since shifted to foreign Indians as of the 2020s. Come the next decade the plebeian screechers will probably move on to Africans (assuming they end up establishing a presence here), then embodied AGI after that. Siphoning the region of economically productive bodies and adding them to our ranks is the price we must pay for being a entrepôt microstate divorced from its natural hinterland. Rejoining Malaysia would put an end to it, but then we’d have to impose a Hukou system to stop all of the country from moving to Woodlands. Back to square one.
"although East Asians have a higher average IQ than Europeans, the distribution tends to cluster around the mean".
There's no good evidence for this AFAIK and this seems to be a misconception. The standard deviation of East Asian countries on the PISA tests are just the same as in Western countries. So, the East Asian distribution is not narrower.
The American IQ standard deviation may be wider than that of e.g. Japan, but that would in the first place be because the US is a more diverse country with large racial minorities with different IQ distributions. Lynn and Hampson (1986) said so themselves: "Japan does not have the range of racial minorities that are present in the U.S. and increase the heterogeneity of the American population. The greater homogeneity in Japan is shown by the lower standard deviations on the McCarthy scales, where the Japanese standard deviations are approximately 85% of those in the U.S." (https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-2896(86)90026-7)
"Malay criminality centres around what might be called ‘market crime’ [...] This type of crime is not primarily violent"
Is there any stats that you could refer to? Groups that are overrepresented in crime tend generally to be overrepresented in all types of crime, and nonviolent crimes generally constitute a large proportion of crimes in all groups. I suspect that even if much of Malay criminality is nonviolent, there should still be a difference between Malays and Chinese when comparing violent crime rates.
Hi, these are very fair comments/questions. Noted regarding the IQ distribution - but I still think it's fair to say that there is greater variation in personality and behaviour among Europeans. Whether this is due to social tolerance for variation or relative genetic heterogeneity is another question entirely. Either way, I believe this has second-order effects regarding phenotypic presentation of eccentricities and divergent thinking, which leads to innovation. That said, this was only an analogy, and my point about Singapore, that it is *not* as you would typically imagine of a primarily East Asian country, still stands.
Regarding your second point, I could not find granular race-based statistics for things like this, but I disagree with the implicit assumption (correct me if I'm wrong) that Malay violent crime must be proportionate with nonviolent crime. Besides the fact that crime is generally low anyway, violent crime does not facilitate nonviolent crime in Singapore in the way that it does in many other countries. In both Malay and Chinese gangs (the famous 'triads') it is thought that violent crime is not worth the attention it brings from the very diligent police.
As a side note, most cases of serious violent crime seem to be non-premediated domestic disputes, or petty disputes between older uncles at coffee shops. It's amazing how petty, overblown disputes are more often reported on than actual murders are in London's newspapers, such is the difference in crime between the two cities.