Singapore’s government sought shared values to counter Western individualism

Evidence

A relevant effort to identify such commonalities in a very small place occurred in Singapore in the early 1990s. The people of Singapore are roughly 76 percent Chinese, 15 percent Malay and Muslim, and 6 percent Indian Hindu and Sikh. In the past the government has attempted to promote “Confucian values” among its people but it has also insisted on everyone being educated in and becoming fluent in English. In January 1989 President Wee Kim Wee in his address opening Parliament pointed to the extensive exposure of the 2.7 million Singaporeans to outside cultural influences from the West which had “put them in close touch with new ideas and technologies from abroad” but had “also exposed” them “to alien lifestyles and values.” “Traditional Asian ideas of morality, duty and society which have sustained us in the past,” he warned, “are giving way to a more Westernized, individualistic, and self-centered outlook on life.” It is necessary, he argued, to identify the core values which Singapore’s different ethnic and religious communities had in common and “which capture the essence of being a Singaporean.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 892

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: how multiethnic city-states institutionalize common values as a deliberate state project versus organic emergence.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘Grafting & Growth’ in its treatment of how shared commitments are deliberately engineered, though here about values rather than infrastructure.