International Mobility and Educational Desire

Chinese Foreign Talent Students in Singapore

Peidong Yang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137591425
• eBook ISBN: 9781137591432
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book examines the Singapore government's controversial practice of recruiting students from China and granting them full scholarships on the condition of a service "bond". It offers detailed ethnographic accounts of the Chinese "foreign talent" students' educational and cross-cultural experiences in Singapore to illustrate the complex intersections between international mobility and educational desire. In doing so, the book presents contemporary Singapore society's concerns over immigration and cross-cultural encounters from a unique perspective.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Peidong YangInternational Mobility and Educational DesireAnthropological Studies of Education10.1057/978-1-137-59143-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Peidong Yang¹

(1)

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

Abstract

Opening with two ethnographic snapshots to illustrate the recent social tensions and controversies revolving around foreign students receiving Singaporean government scholarships, this introductory chapter locates the protagonists of this book, that is, “PRC scholars” in Singapore, in two contexts respectively: (1) the Singapore state’s “foreign talent” policy in response to economic and demographic challenges and (2) international educational mobility as an emerging phenomenon of interest to social scientific inquiry. This location-ing helps provide the essential backgrounds to the project and elucidates the contributions this book seeks to make to the studies of contemporary Singapore and to the studies of internationally mobile students. The chapter also provides an account of the ethnographic fieldwork underpinning the book, as well as an overview of the chapters to follow.

Keywords

SingaporeChinaForeign talentImmigrationInternational student mobilityEducational desire

End Abstract

One day in February 2012, Sun Xu, a Chinese national and final-year undergraduate student at the National University of Singapore (NUS), posted a status update on the Chinese social networking website, RenRen, that would get him into trouble. Apparently venting his frustration after having had some unpleasant encounters with Singaporeans over some trivial matters, the second half of Sun Xu’s unfortunate status update read: “There are more dogs than humans in Singapore (zai xinjiapo gou bi ren duo)!” ¹

After this status post was spotted and widely shared by netizens in Singapore, Sun Xu, who was revealed to be a recipient of a Singapore government-funded full scholarship, came under fire in just about every local media channel. For some days, this so-called “Sun Xu Incident” became a trending topic that many living in Singapore who read newspapers or used social media had something to say about. “How could someone who is obviously benefiting from Singapore be so ungrateful?”—so went the rhetorical question. Voices condemning this badmouthing ingrate were many and strong, and some explicitly called for him to be disciplined. The following month, NUS authorities formally investigated the case and, as a result, revoked the final year portion of Sun Xu’s scholarship, fined him 3000 Singapore Dollars (S$), and in addition, ordered him to perform three months of community service. When these disciplinary measures were announced, some in the public still felt that they were too lenient and demanded no less than the scholar’s expulsion from the university (Au Yong, 2012).

Over the past two decades, the government of Singapore has had a policy of welcoming “foreign talent” immigrants as a response to dismal local birth rates as well as perceived human resource shortages. Part of this foreign talent policy involves proactively recruiting academically capable students from Asian developing countries and giving them generous scholarships that typically carry a “bond,” that is, a legal requirement that the “scholar” works in Singapore for a number of years after graduation. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been the largest of these foreign talent recruiting grounds, and Sun Xu was among the thousands of “PRC scholars” over the years who had made their way to Singapore.

PRC scholars in Singapore like Sun Xu constitute a type of “appropriated people” (Long, 2011). The rationale underlying Singapore’s foreign talent scholarship schemes is simple. The foreign students’ talent or potential is recognized and nurtured, but it is in the end to be appropriated, to some extent, by the benefactor state. Yet, recruiting foreign talent scholars is not merely a pragmatic strategy for Singapore. Arguably, there is also a public and symbolic dimension to such an act of appropriation. Two core values underpinning Singapore society’s remarkable success, openness and meritocracy, are evidently encapsulated in such foreign talent scholar recruitment. The foreign scholar figure functions as a public symbol. As social anthropologist Long (ibid., p. 45) writes in relation to the Indonesian state’s construction and appropriation of national “human resources,”

[p]eople recruited to act as public symbols are constructed and disciplined in such a way as to ensure that the state feels it has made them its own; it feels comfortable with them, has a monopoly over their meaning, and can use them to do something or advance its own position.

What the 2012 “Sun Xu Incident” most conspicuously highlighted was how this logic of public symbolism could go awry and backfire. It showed how a foreign “scholar,” who is expected to exemplify excellence in conduct as well to embody a gratitude commensurate with the privileges bestowed on him, defied these public expectations in a dramatic way. As a consequence, the state of Singapore as well as many Singaporeans struggled to feel comfortable with these appropriated subjects. The desired foreign talent subject, who seems to author his own script, subverts the monopoly of meaning imposed by the appropriating state.

The “Sun Xu Incident” was a dramatic but largely isolated occurrence. At one level, its cause may have been personal idiosyncrasy or, at most, an issue of cross-cultural communication. International students’ lack of cross-cultural competence and the breakdown in communication between international students and the host society result in anti-social speech or behavior, of which there have been a number of cases. ² Yet, the tension this episode dramatized is not unique. Scholarship students from China are not always perceived by Singaporeans to be sufficiently appreciative of what they have been given. “Appropriated people” apparently have their own desires and plans that may go beyond what the Singaporean scheme offers, thus making the Singaporean state’s appropriation seem an act of restriction or limitation. In other words, appropriated people also wish to appropriate. From the Singaporean perspective, foreign talent scholars’ such counter-appropriation can be unsettling or even offensive. The following excerpt, taken from a letter written by a member of the public to Singapore’s English broadsheet The Straits Times describing her encounter with another PRC scholar, illustrates these tensions nicely:

At a seminar last year, I met a Chinese scholarship holder with a prestigious statutory board. In our short conversation, he lamented how he dreads having to serve his six-year bond, for after studying at a prestigious university in Britain, he found there were many other attractive job opportunities, and he felt his talent was under-used in Singapore.

Given that the statutory board focused on Singapore’s external enterprise growth, he was assured an exciting opportunity to work in its overseas offices as part of his training programme.

Not that it mattered, for he was thinking of how to break his bond, for he wanted success, not after serving his bond but immediately. He felt staying in Singapore would impede his ability to let his talent shine, for it was too small for him.

In fact, he shied away from being associated with Singaporeans. When I commented that his English was tinged with a British accent despite his years of study in Singapore, he beamed and said he was happy to get rid of his Singapore English accent: “Do I sound British? Oh great.”

I left the seminar with a heavy heart. Have we made the right choice in grooming foreign talent, only to have them snub us? Indeed, we have allowed them to realise how fortunate they are to study in top universities abroad—so much so, they feel they are too good for Singapore. (He, 2008)

As such, frictions revolving around the foreign scholar in Singapore illustrate the complexity of international educational mobility, which often interlaces the instrumental desires and designs of the nation-state, of institutions of higher learning, with the autonomous desires and life-projects of individual social agents (such as mobile students and their families or communities). Potentially problematic psychosocial dynamics emerge from the frontiers of cross-cultural contact (as illustrated in the various “scholar scandals” in Singapore). Indeed, projects of international educational mobility are the crossroads of multiple desires, promises, aspirations originating from different parties that may converge as well as diverge and collude as well as collide.

Furthermore, troubles pertaining to the PRC scholars illustrate a broader and more consequential set of tensions that have developed around the foreign talent issue in Singapore in recent years. Since entering the twenty-first century, Singapore has witnessed a rapid influx of foreigners, which present numerous challenges to this small island-nation society. Not only are physical spaces “crowded out” and urban infrastructure put under increasing strain as a result, foreign talent also intensifies competition for education and employment. As a young and ethno-linguistically diverse nation, Singaporeans may be nervous that their fragile sense of national identity and belonging will be diluted, as large numbers of foreign interlopers come to live among them without seeming to bother to assimilate or to even interact meaningfully. ³ Well-rehearsed in patriotic discourse, Singaporeans further question the loyalty of the foreign talent, many of whom eventually become citizens; they sometimes resent foreign talent for sharing the fruits of the city-state’s remarkable success without making equal measures of sacrifice and commitment (such as the compulsory military service all male Singaporean citizens render).

This book is an ethnographic account of the Chinese foreign talent scholarship students in Singapore, primarily as a case study in international educational mobility, situated against an increasingly controversial backdrop of foreign talent immigration in Singapore. My purpose, in a nutshell, is to present a focused examination of educational desire and social identity to explore broader concerns about immigration and cross-cultural encounter in the context of contemporary Singapore society.

Singapore and the Desire for Foreign Talent

Talent is desired. Everywhere. The advent of the “human capital” theory (e.g. Becker, 1964; Keeley, 2007) in the 1960s has had profound and widespread impacts on nation-states, corporations, and individuals across the globe. This human capital theory arose in conjunction with sociological analyses suggesting that the world had entered a post-industrial phase (Bell, 1973), an “information age” (Castells, 2000), and an era of the “knowledge economy” (Drucker, 1969), whereby, it is argued, “knowledge, training, and skills possessed by humans might be as important as, if not more important than, physical capital in the determination of [economic] output” (Chow, 2007, p. 208). As a result, many scholars and policymakers have come to place great emphasis on the importance of developing, attracting and retaining talented, knowledgeable, creative human subjects for the socioeconomic development of cities, regions, and nation-states (Castells, 1989; Florida, 2002; Reich, 1992).

In Asia, one of the most dynamic regions of world economic growth in the past four decades, many nation-states have embraced the discourse of human capital development and have implemented policies to that end (Chowdhury & Islam, 1993; Hoffman, 2010; Siu & Lau, 1998; Xiao & Tsang, 1999; Yusuf & Nabeshima, 2006). However, few Asian countries can measure up ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Contexts: Singapore’s Foreign Talent Programs and the Chinese Middle School as a Recruiting Ground
• 3. Selecting Scholars for Singapore: The SM2 Program
• 4. Singlish and the Singaporean: Cross-Cultural Encounter and Othering
• 5. Being “Very China:” Self-Consciousness and Identity Transformation
• 6. Desiring an Education: Scholarly Idealism and Anti-scholarly Entrepreneurialism
• Backmatter