The individualistic Singaporean youth: Are you one?

This article appeared in the Straits Times today:

A glimpse of China through young eyes

By Asad Latif, For The Straits Times

A CHANCE meeting with a group of students in a hotel lift gave me a glimpse of the generation that will inherit a rising China. I was in Beijing recently for an event organised by the Singapore-based Asia-Europe Foundation (Asef) on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Meeting's seventh summit.

I had come to the Asef meeting straight from the annual conference of the Fulbright Association. It had chosen Beijing as the venue both to honour the city that had hosted the Olympics this year, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the normalisation of relations between the United States and China.

At the Fulbright conference, I had led a roundtable on China's rise. It had been a productive session at which the Chinese participants had responded frankly and amicably to concerns over how a powerful China might behave.

But the discussion had been one among adults. What did young Chinese want the future to be? It was here that the meeting with the students proved fortuitous.

The young people, first-year students of history at Beijing Normal University, were on their way to another Asef event when they ran into me in the lift.

I asked whether I could meet them before I left Beijing. They agreed. Three days later, 10 of them turned up at my hotel to take me to the Temple of Heaven.

As we posed for a group photograph, they unfurled the flag of the Chinese Communist Youth League. That China's young communists should choose the Temple of Heaven as the venue was an interesting comment on the place of history, if not of religiosity, in post-Maoist China.

Emperors had once prayed at the temple for good harvests. Caught up in the mood of the moment, I thought that I should seek blessings for the students, the vanguard of China's future. I asked them what they wanted as a boon.

They were as surprised by my question as I had been by the appearance of their flag. A brief discussion ensued among them. 'Peace' was their spontaneous, and unanimous, first choice of blessing. 'Cooperation' and 'friendship' followed swiftly. As I was about to make my way to an altar nearby, one of the students added, almost as an afterthought: 'Could you pray for a bright future for us?'

That afterthought made me think. The students, four men and six women drawn from across China, had entered the 106-year-old university after having scored well in competitive examinations. Competitiveness came naturally to these 17- and 18-year-olds, whose entry to the prestigious university gave them access to a bright future. They were a part of China's elite, and they knew it.

However, for all of them, the public goods represented by peace, cooperation and friendship came to mind first, before their personal success did. Theirs was a social consciousness in which individual ambitions were expressed through collective values and goals.

Indeed, in the six hours that I spent with the students, the word 'I' was sounded no more than two dozen times and then, too, in answer to a specific enquiry, such as where a student was from. Most answers were phrased around 'we'.

Certainly, it was a contested 'we'. For example, if one student said something like 'the Chinese people think that...' and another disagreed with her, he would argue that 'while this is true, we must also remember that...'

However, 'we' prevailed over 'I'. The students' individualism was defined, not by its distance from a feared collectivity, but by a jostling for space within a trusted collectivity.

Their social consciousness appeared to have grown from a strong sense of cultural comfort. That comfort, in turn, seemed to have grown organically from China's success in emerging repeatedly from epochs of internal strife, foreign invasion and 'peaceful evolution', or alleged attempts by foreigners to subvert its polity from within.

China was so large and populous, and the weight of its history so great that, among the students, at least, a secure identity came with the fact of birth as a Chinese. These young people had no need to define themselves in opposition to other nationalities. If others chose to define themselves in opposition to the Chinese, that was their problem.

As for China's place in the world, the rather long walk to the subway station gave me an opportunity to ask the students: Had they had the choice of being born in an earlier era of Chinese history, which would it be?

The Tang Dynasty won easily, for that was when a peaceful and prosperous China had been the world's most powerful civilisation. However, a shy woman from Jilin province turned stern when she mentioned the Qin dynasty that had unified China.

Her body language suggested that, if it ever came to the issue of China's unity, even a cruel and autocratic emperor like Qin Shihuang would be preferable over those who would want to take the country back to the Warring States Period.

It was 1.30pm when we returned to my hotel. The students, who had travelled for more than an hour to meet me at 9am, were famished. I invited them to join me for a meal in the hotel.
As we were ushered into a restaurant, a student asked me anxiously: 'This place looks very expensive. Are you certain that we should eat here?'

Seated around the table, we received five copies of the menu. No one touched it except the group leader. I glanced at it and asked him to order. It was only when I received the bill that I realised that he had picked the cheapest items on the menu.

Secure in their Chineseness, courteous to a foreigner, and deferential to an older person, my new Chinese friends embody for me a China that is confident enough to seek its place at the table of the great powers - not by ejecting those already seated, but by asking for a larger table.

The writer, a former Straits Times journalist, is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.


It sparked off a chain of thoughts, which I shall document here:

I guess when I kept comparing Singapore with China using "小国思维"and"大国思维", the "we" and "I" issue is one of the contentious points. For China, they have gone from collectivism in Mao's era, to the quest of individualism after Cultural Revolution, and then for a "trusted collectivity" where individual dreams stem from a background of collective interests. I would say a degree of that exists in almost all Chinese youths. What about us? It's hard to say, but isn't it for many that the situation is opposite: the quest for individuality and personal success overshadowing collective benefits. We comfort ourselves in the notion that personal success is the premise for national unity and success. Perhaps it is that our machinery is a small one, and every gear wants to make itself heard - to the extent we obscure the collective, and even develop a mindset that we can leave the machine and operate elsewhere. There is really no right or wrong, it's just the fact of society, reality and life. In this light, it is understandably why foreign immigrants are never easily accepted or even tolerated in our society. We hate more gears coming into our machine, because every new gear added threatens the need of existence of one that was already there. Repulsion stems from lack of confidence of the individual. Acceptance comes from those who see that they themselves have the "capital" to seek greener pastures. Notions that new immigrants threaten the stability of our country's inner dynamics is often a secondary thought, and even worse, it is a facade that we use in the public domain to veil over our deepest primary worry of personal interest. Even the Lehman protests at Hong Lim, how did it garner so much collective support and presence? It's simply because every single individual wants to recoup his or her losses. It's "collective strength" for "personal interests". The latter outweighs the former - or should I say, the former is the best means of drawing the media's and govt's attention to achieve the latter. Agreeable? It all boils down to this fundamental question: how do we view and where do we place the collective in our hearts? Are we overburdened by the imposition of the collective on our lives? Perhaps, in the first place, this is an invalid question, since the collective could be a non-existent or meaningless notion in the personal philosophy of some.

My main point is about the issue of where the individual stands in relative to the collective, and how this notion of collective is formed, what impacts it has on the individual and whether at the end of the day Singaporeans have become too individualistic for whatever reasons, and if this shift in individualism will eventually make us "selfish" people. Worse, have we been trying to impose a kind of rational explanation like, "ai ya.. 人不为己，天诛地灭", or "what has everything on the newspapers, esp global affairs got to do with me if it doesn't affect the economy and make me lose my job", or "I'm not a civil servant. I'm just an office worker. Why should I care" to make ourselves believe that our individualistic infatuations that pays no heed to the collective is reasonable. It is scary when people totally see the collective (eg national identity) as a passive result. People lose ideals, they lose common ground when they absolve all responsibilities they have towards the collective, and only want to take. It's a very intangible and subtle shift, and many people are not even aware of the impacts their mindset change will have on the future. (See, some youths don't even think of the future. They say they want to earn a lot of money, but they never even realize that isn't enough for a good life, and their children will have to be raised not just in an isolated world but in a collective setting.) I may be being overly aggressive or demanding in my views. However, I am intrigued when my Chinese friends who face difficulties with their own personal issues, such as inability to find work, not living their dreams, failing all expectations etc, still know something about the world, still care about the Chinese people and society as a whole, and will not ever have NO views on anything that lies beyond their job-sourcing. Singaporean youths of the same age? They always think they are suffering the most. They see themselves as being the only people who have personal problems. They feel that the whole society's a "division of labour", so they just have to do their own jobs, live their own lives and stay quiet and unthinking about everything else. For those who read the newspapers, many are simply trying to "know" so that it becomes "economic capital" to boost their employability. The society is something that simply has to be run by a team of bureaucrats and politicians whom "I can trust", and anything that's work is supposed to be done by them. People lose interest in public causes. They don't even care about human rights. All in all, it's got to do with the size of the nation, and how much influence it has on the global stage. China's collectivity is shaped by its up and coming global image, and everyone has a role in that. Singapore already has a good image in many aspects (not all), and thus people relegate to their own pragmatic concerns, and only that. They are, in my opinion, even incomparable to some of the peasants in rural China, who would sacrifice their own interests for their little community. Seriously, at times, I get scared at the thought that these will be the Singaporeans I have to serve in future. I know this is a generalization, and as with all generalizations, there are exceptions. However, the issue is the extent to which this problem is prevalent. Nonetheless, I draw optimism too from the belief there are people in Singapore who have a vision akin to the Chinese youths mentioned in the article. I just hope that Singaporean youths can begin formulating informed views on issues that pertain to a general good, and not get overly immersed in living behind blind walls. At the same time, like the last statement of the article, we shouldn't be diffident to the extent we forget to seek security in our collective identity, "courteous to a foreigner, and deferential to an older person". The respect for authority still has to be present, otherwise we will become equally blind and individualistic but on another extreme.

I know there are bound to be many who will find disagreements with my views. However, before you start finding flaws in my argument - that, in any case, has not been constructed with the purpose of writing an academic paper in mind and is thus not properly structured, do reflect on yourself and see if you are truly free from the "assertions" I have pointed out. I don't believe there is no one who can say he or she is totally guiltless. So what does this lead us to? The problem lies with the way our politicians have run this country. They have tried to send many messages that are paradoxical and conflicting in nature. The only thing is, all these messages in discourse are so subtle we just internalize them without even knowing it. History will prove my point, provided in future there will be people interested in sorting out our nation's past.

Oh speaking of this, I guess we all know now why many Singaporean youths are ever SO disinterested in history and philosophy. All these deal with the human race, and narrow-minded people are often too juvenile to comprehend things so noble.

找一天，我要写一篇文章，名为《论小国人民的个体生存与集体意识》。