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

of intelligentsia from mainland China, who brought with them contemporary social and political attitudes in the wake of the May Fourth Movement. Even more so than the Chinese classics, the new textbooks were not just a medium of instruction but a tool of nationalist ideas.

The flow of prorevolutionaries from China continued to ensure the presence of strong feelings of loyalty between their students in Singapore with the new Chinese republic. These loyalties were exceedingly powerful and zealous in their nature. The Chinese language communities retained strong ties with the mainland, as evidenced by the establishment of a branch of the Tongmen Hui (the United League) on the island in 1906. ⁴⁴ Sun himself visited Singapore in 1900 and had noted “the potential of Singapore as the centre of revolutionary ideas in South-East Asia”. ⁴⁵ Chinese merchants such as Tan Kah Kee (a Chinese migrant) and Lim Boon Keng (distinguished within the peranakan community) were among the first to join the Singaporean Tongmen Hui, raising substantial sums of money for the revolutionary cause. ⁴⁶

Sun’s idealism manifested itself through the enthusiasm of theChinese-language teachers who had carried the ideologies of the GMD to the Nanyang region. The British administration saw the increasingly vocal nationalist support in the Chinese-language schools as a confirmation of their worries of the “political untrustworthiness” of the Chinese-speaking community. To counter this, the administration drew up the Registration of Schools Ordinances in 1920, which “saw the beginning of a more coherent policy on the part of the British to control Chinese nationalism generally and to check the GMD forces in Chinese schools in particular”. ⁴⁷ The growing appeal of Mao Zedong’s CCP and the deep class divisions in Chinese society exposed by the civil war would further complicate matters. By the 1970s, the highly charged political nature of the Chinese schools was represented so vocally that the government of an independent Singaporean state would react harshly toward this ostensibly “chauvinistic and puritanical” idealisation of Chineseness.