Accounts of self-differentiation by academically elite students in Singapore

As part of its strategies of augmenting its low birth rates and shrinking labour pool, the Singapore government has been recruiting top-performing students from neighbouring countries (eg China and Vietnam) with... [ view full abstract ]

As part of its strategies of augmenting its low birth rates and shrinking labour pool, the Singapore government has been recruiting top-performing students from neighbouring countries (eg China and Vietnam) with scholarships. Due to racial politics in the nation, most of the recruited students are from China to fit the majority Chinese racial group in Singapore (Tan 2003). However, this criterion of supposed racial and cultural similarity is largely unexamined by both the state and local scholarship (Sanderson 2002). My study seeks to explore this issue of race in the transnational movement of students into Singapore. I draw on interview data and focus group discussions with 30 top-performing students. Informants all graduated from a particular top-ranked secondary school in Singapore, and include both recruited immigrants and locals born and raised in the country. The immigrants among them often have aspirations to use Singapore as a stepping-stone to top-ranked universities in the West (Yang 2016). These aspirations for transnational mobility are also held by locals, and conditioned by an elitist and globalist curriculum in the top-ranked secondary school they attended (Lu 2016).

I investigate how informants talked about self-differentiation in relation to their peers in Singapore. Findings suggest that informants do not invoke ethnicity in their accounts. Instead, they positioned themselves (and others) along a continuum of ‘Singaporean-ness’, using official classifications of nationality, time of entry into Singapore and linguistic practices (eg Singlish) as sources of cultural and structural differentiation. Crucially, immigrants from China were positioned as the least Singaporean in accounts. Despite their supposed racial similarity and academic attainments, immigrant informants from China enter the space of Singapore schools with low status unless they can acculturate. They manage this by disavowing associations with being from China, whilst emphasizing their sense of being local. I argue that this might be a reflection of widespread discourses that are anti-immigrant and anti-PRC in nature, including local ideologies where overt Chinese practices are linked with a lack of sophistication and education. The state’s apprehension of ethnicity does not consider how linguistic and cultural practices are re-valued when transported to a different space.