On the social memory of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and historical accounts of living through it — The Association Specialists
  1. Schedule
  2. SESSION 1: Language planning and policy B
  3. On the social memory of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and historical accounts of living through it

On the social memory of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and historical accounts of living through it (20056)

Luke Lu 1 , Chien Wen Kung 2
  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, SINGAPORE
  2. History, National University of Singapore, Singapore

How does a policy innovation eventually come to be an ordinary and even normative practice? How does a community’s disparate ways of negotiating a language policy evolve into a singular narrative of blame and resentment? In Singapore, most within the Chinese community have internalized the relationship between the state’s ideology of Mandarin, and their racial identity and cultural practices (Starr & Hiramoto 2018). A prevalent narrative characterizes Mandarinization through the demise of other Chinese languages, cultural decline, and loss, blaming the state and its key policy instrument – the Speak Mandarin Campaign launched in 1979 (The Economist 2020, Kuo 2017).

 

This paper suggests that the current narrative surrounding the Speak Mandarin campaign might be better conceptualized as a ‘social memory’ (Cubitt 2007), by attending to ‘the process(es) through which a knowledge or awareness of past events or conditions is developed and sustained within human societies, and through which, therefore, individuals within those societies are given a sense of a past that extends beyond what they themselves personally remember’. In line with Foucault’s (1971) genealogical approach, we draw on life history interviews with 12 individuals (aged 57 to 83). Findings suggest a complex history where Mandarinization can be traced to transnational ideologies of ethnic unity and modernization from the founding of China as a republic (Tam 2020). Informants recount an uneven engagement with the Speak Mandarin Campaign, ranging from nonchalance, alignment, to fear of resistance. Accounts also often invoked the figure of Lee Kuan Yew, representing the sociopolitical circumstances of Singapore in the 1970s and 80s.

 

We argue that the current social memory of the Speak Mandarin Campaign emerges from and is sustained by a conflation of resentment against the ruling government’s perceived suppression of the Chinese-educated class, with the chronotope of Lee Kuan Yew utilized as a key discursive resource.

  1. Starr, R., & Hiramoto, M. (2018). Inclusion, exclusion, and racial identity in Singapore’s language education system. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 29(3), 341–355
  2. Foucault, M. (1971). Orders of discourse. Social Science Information, 10(2), 7–30
  3. Kuo, E. (2017). “方言不是毒蛇猛兽”——郭振羽教授谈新加坡的语言和文化. 怡和世纪 第31期. https://xinguozhi.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%AF%E6%AF%92%E8%9B%87%E7%8C%9B%E5%85%BD-%E9%83%AD%E6%8C%AF%E7%BE%BD%E6%95%99%E6%8E%88%E8%B0%88%E6%96%B0%E5%8A%A0%E5%9D%A1%E7%9A%84/
  4. Tam, G.A. (2020). Dialect and Nationalism in China: 1860-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  5. The Economist (2020). Singapore has almost wiped out its mother tongues. 22 Feb.
  6. Cubitt, G. (2007). History and Memory. Manchester University Press.