Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore, ...

1911, the subsequent effective collapse of the republican government in China, and the emergence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a polemic opposite to the Guomindang (GMD) all served to politicise Chinese ethnicity as a whole in the eyes of the British. The “threat” from the migrant Chinese was now ideological rather than simply criminal as more Chinese began to take an active interest in China’s political struggles through the politicisation of the Chinese schools on the island. ⁴⁰

Largely ignored by colonial officials as far as concerns for the provision of education facilities and assets were concerned, the Chinese migrants had been left to their own devices in matters of education. The richer of the émigré population in particular held an intense amount of pride in traditional Chinese methods of schooling, and this was reflected in the establishment of the earliest Chinese schools on the island. Reverend G. H. Thomson recorded that in 1829, there were Cantonese schools in Kampong Glam and Pekin Street, with a Hokkien school also established in the latter location at around the same time. ⁴¹ The fact that these schools taught classical education, letter writing, and the use of the abacus rather than any subjects such as local languages, which would have contained more relevance to the cultural background of the Straits Settlements and its colonial masters, underscores the insular nature of the Chinese migrants at the time.

As anti-Manchu fervour began to gain momentum among the overseas Chinese, teachers in the Chinese-medium schools spun yarns of Han Chinese patriotism, transforming the context of the educational curriculum from literature and language skills to that of political thought reflecting the dogma of the democratic ideals stipulated by Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat Sen), one of the primary instigators of the revolution. The selection of Mandarin as the national language of the Republic of China in 1917 saw a gradual shift in the medium of instruction in Chinese schools from various dialects to Mandarin. ⁴² In 1919, colloquial Chinese textbooks replaced the traditional Chinese classics, and this change eventually made its way into the Chinese schools on the island. ⁴³ This reflected the fact that most of the teachers for the Chinese-medium schools were drawn from an idealist, prorevolutionary pool