Everything Also Complain

From ‘Singapore now home to 1 million PRCs’, 28 July 2011, article in insing.com

Netizens are in an uproar after a netizen received a letter stating that there are now nearly 1 million Chinese nationals in Singapore. This comes as a shock to many netizens, who until now, were not aware of the actual numbers of Chinese nationals in Singapore.

The netizen had received a letter for his application to UnionPay, a Nets Value-added service.

In the letter, UnionPay terms itself as “the preferred mode of payment for the nearly 1 million Chinese nationals living and working/studying in Singapore”.

Many believe the stated numbers are accurate as UnionPay is a reputable multi-national company.

…Netizens largely react with shock and dismay to this news, calling it a “staggeringly huge number”, others worry that the number of Chinese national immigrants will continue to increase, leading to further overcrowding in public transport.

Unionpay is one of the largest issuers of debit/credit cards in China, and caters not only to the immigrant Chinese population here but tourists from the mainland as well. If one can assume that this data was mined from Chinese nationals who are clients of the bank, what’s worrying is that this is really an an underestimate of the actual number of PRCs here if you factor in low wage workers, prostitutes, mail order brides or illegal immigrants who are unlikely to sign up for such cards. According to a SDP report ‘S’pore and foreign workers’, 11 Feb 2011′, there are already some 200,000 migrant Chinese employed as labourers here. So it’s not hard to imagine, if this information were in fact true,  that we may have more than a million PRCs amongst us, further diluting the Singaporean identity but allowing us to ‘punch above our own weight’ as LKY put it (Singapore can’t punch above its own weight if it depends on local talent, 23 July 2011, Today)

For some time, the Singaporean has felt the competition from talented foreigners. But these are people who have come here to become our citizens and I am a firm believer that the more talent that you have in a society, the better the society will grow. “If Singapore depends on the talent it can produce out of 3 million people, it’s not going to punch above its weight.

…”So you’ve got to accept the discomfort which the local citizens feel, that they are competing unequally for jobs. (It) cannot be helped.

So it cannot be helped that these migrants have brought their Third World habits with them. It can’t be helped if they make terrible bus drivers because of their poor grasp of English. It can’t be helped if furious locals go around slashing Chinese nationals for no rhyme or reason. It can’t be helped if we’re crowded out of our wits on the trains. Like LKY said later in the article, we just have to ‘assuage’ it, a case of ‘Easy for you to say’, when he probably doesn’t have to deal with social issues with migrants on a personal level. ‘Assuage’ is defined as ‘to make an unpleasant feeling less intense’, which in the passive sense means ‘take it like a man and deal with it’, but you could also ‘assuage’ a situation by doing something about it. In the case of the PRC slasher, he took the active sense of the word to the extreme, and the best advice that a man of LKY’s stature could give in response to how we deal with the inadvertent side effects of a pro-foreigner policy is to ‘assuage it’ because it ‘can’t be helped’, in the name of ‘talent’ and ‘growth’. It was a different tune sung by the same, great man in 1960 though (We’ve to close our doors a little, 2 June 1960, ST). But he changed his mind about casinos too.

Still, it’s heartening to note that some Singaporeans are taking a stand to staunch this pro-China wave, with table tennis chief Lee Bee Wah’s refusal to field ex ‘sure-win’ PRCs for the SEA games, instead opting for local talent and risking a medal fallout. Perhaps our foreign stars should be given a reality check once in a while, that Singapore is not the dream diaspora destination that the government has so fervently promoted, that they have to slog and bear with disappointment like every one of us, and this move by the STTA is a true test of their staying power and how far their roots have sunk in.

Filed under: 1960s, 2011, Foreign workers, Politicians, PRCs, Sports Tagged: | Foreign workers, Lee Kuan Yew, MM Lee, PRCs, sports