LKY launches fund to solidify chinese dominance

Well, the actual heading on ‘Leewatch.info’ goes,

“Mr Lee Kuan Yew launches fund to boost bilingualism

Former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew on Monday launched what he described as the ‘most important book’ he has ever written and kicked off a fund to help children become bilingual early.
Hoping that the fund would top $100 million, he pledged a personal donation of $10 million plus all proceeds from the sale of 200 signed copies of his book which will go for at least $10,000 each. …
The Lee Kuan Yew Fund for Bilingualism will be used for initiatives to help children with their mother tongue and English, especially before they reach primary school.”
This was followed by a comment by a bloke going by the name of LY Lim,

This push for bilingualism is yet another chinese supremacist nonsense by this fellow. 

To keep singapore largely chinese, and then to come up with this mother tongue nonsense, and then to launch a fund for it, is simply an attempt to not only keep singapore, sorry, Qingapore, Qinese, but to ensure that the Chinese remain Qinese so that all 'others' would have no choice but to follow suit in character, if not in colour.  Lee likes to wave the 'how bad it was in the past without monolingual/cultural unity amongst the chinese' card to push for chinese unity.  But to pair this with the 'mother tongue' policy, and to keep the 'racial balance' in favour of the chinese simply translates this whole thing into a chinese supremacist formula.  It is illogical to say that if the chinese were allowed to be different amongst themselves, that would cause social tension and problems.  If that is his view, than one can expect that he would certainly want to keep down the numbers of those of other cultures/races to a minimum as well.  Looking at the way things have transpired for the past few decades, that's exactly what happened.  And hence, today, the chinese, socialised within this Orwellian state of affairs, aren't, unfortunately, as open to difference either.

2000 years of being 'same same' has now become a regional disease, with singapore heading the charge.  The Chinese shouldn't let this happen - though i wouldn't hold my breath about them bothering about that which doesn't disadvantage them...as singapore history has clearly shown.

But the main point here is not that LKY is 'solidifying chinese dominance' per se.  What he's doing, as he's been doing for quite a few decades now - with the helpful silent acquiescence of the chinese population....can't really blame them that much since they hail from a culture of unthinking subservience and traditionalism - is to reinforce what it means to 'be Chinese' along Legalist-Confucian lines.  And it is only when this is done, that 'chinese' dominance will mean a fascist one.  He has to solidify chinese grounding in China's culture, and after which, he can sit back and rely on their thus-created self-absorption, political/cultural/intellectual/creative short-sightedness, to enable the government and the elite to come across as intelligent, and all difference of any significance as undesirable.  So, in order to solidify chinese dominance, he has to reduce them to the same level as their 'brethren' in China, before elevating that persona over all else, and through such dominance, assimilate all difference.

The same thing happened in the Qin (221 b.c.) dynasty and thereafter as the elite struggled to eradicate the  more intellectually individualistic/democratic Chou era spirit to redefine what it meant to 'be chinese'.  They succeeded, and it came to 'cultural', 'economic', and 'creative' fruition in the Han dynasty.  So, one can say that the chinese perceiving themselves as 'children of the Han' is actually quite the insult because it means that they were oppressed enough to the point of personality/intellectual degeneration, that they began to value themselves along lesser lines.  I'm sure their Chou-era cousins wouldn't recognise them as they are today.  They were meant to be much more if the Chou spirit wasn't interrupted.

"Being made less, the mountains loomed large enough to block out the sun in their sights"

Commented, a Tom Zheng, on the above,

Singapore’s real strategy for success is multilingualism, and not exclusively Chinese Mother-tongue bilingualism, which over the past four decades have eroded the richness of local ethnic Chinese cultural forms....I think Asianising Singapore does not have to mean making Chinese bilingualism so exclusive. The death of enthic diversity among Chinese Singaporeans with the wiping out of Chinese dialects has already resulted in great cultural loss.

It is most unfortunate that when most Chinese speak against bilingualism in singapore, it is not because they are for multiculturalism in respect of non-Chinese cultures, but they are for ‘multiculturalism’ in the context of preserving different chinese ‘dialect’ cultures.  That’s alright i suppose, if one was in China.  But in an originally Malay state, and then a multicultural one, that just reeks of cultural/racial self-absorption, and the degree to which they consciously or subconsciously have taken Singapore as nothing less than Qingapore.  Such people aren’t, in essence, ‘singaporeans’ - whom are the fusion of the best elements of all cultures - but qingaporeans whom have discounted all difference and seek to reproduce china in all its ‘multicultural’ glory in a historically non-chinese state.  That is why i always find it laughable when they demand that they are given more opportunities then 'foreigner's because they are 'native-born'.  You may be 'native-born' mate, but you're acclimatised in a clime that is anything but local.

And then we have an LY Lim going, after Zheng,

“Bravo Mr. Lee,
Thank you very much for making this donation of which I am certain will inspire others to do likewise. This brings to mind a wise Chinese saying: let those who have money to offer money, and those who have strength to put in the effort. 有钱出钱, 有力出力.
谢谢您的关怀.
“

This LY Lim, should bugger off back to China - since people there wouldn't generally think anything amiss with that statement.  That isn't a 'wise' chinese saying.  It's a saying borne of the chinese people accepting the hierarchically exploitative status quo and thus producing such 'philosophies' to numb and dumb the following generations.  It could easily be paraphrased with, 'let those whom have money to subjugate others do so, and let those who don't slave for them.'  Silly fellow.

ed would rather have variation arising from difference than variations of the same thing.This is not an ‘anti-chinese’ statement as defensive and self-absorbed persons might be inclined to think.  Rather, it is an ‘anti-cultural/racial exclusivity’ statement.  All history has shown that the most vibrant, creative, logical, and inventive minds, come from multicultural communities that has been afforded the luxury of cultural miscegenation.  I recall one British girl saying in a comment beneath a BBC article that went along the lines of, ‘Keep England English?  That’s cultural suicide!’  Very wise.  Very wise indeed.  

People have often said that singapore has no natural resources.  They were dead wrong of course.  They had a great cultural resource - the significant presence of Malay, Indian, Eurasian, and Chinese cultures.  In themselves, they are like separate twigs.  Easy to bend.  Easy to break.  Together and through fusion, through each infusing the culture and language of another, it would allow unique results to be produced.  Think along the lines of spring onions on curries, or sambal belachan in Hor Fan.  When it comes to ideas, its going to be far more lip-smacking.

So all this ‘fund’ is going to produce is a reinforcement of the cultural status quo as opposed to its rejuvenation via cultural fusion.  It’s going to dilute ‘others’ enough to ensure that when there is ‘fusion’, the ‘others’ are going to be just another dialect group of the chinese.  I’d rather variation coming from difference than variation of the same thing.  Amen to that.

ed