Negotiating Singaporean Chinese Identity Through The Alternative Blogs Temasek Review And The Online Citizen

This research seeks to illustrate how a sample of Singaporean citizens is using blogs to oppose and reformulate government notions of Singaporean identity. It first establishes how identity issues have long plagued the city-state since its independence. Much of Singapore's cultural identity today took shape in the early 1980s after concern that Western values were causing rampant materialism in society. The government sought out a basis for Singaporean identity by turning to the cultural roots of Singapore's majority population, the ethnic Chinese. Aspects linked to the notion of being Chinese (Chineseness) were emphasized, such as the adopting of Confucian values in public policy and the introduction of the "Speak Mandarin" Campaign, first launched in 1979. Further steps such as the state's Bilingual Education Policy, which required students to learn both their mother tongue (usually Mandarin) and English also helped to embed official discourses linking ethnicity to cultural identity into Singaporean society.While mainstream media propagates the state's notions of cultural identity, blogs have become important alternative media platforms for discontent. Through the relative freedom of blogs, a sample of Singaporeans studied have debunked government articulations of cultural identity and redefined notions of what it means to be Singaporean. Previous academic essays on identity formation in Singapore fail to address the media's important role in negotiating identities. To fill this void, this in-depth qualitative research uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine a selection of articles by a sample of Singaporeans posted on two alternative news blogs, Temasek Review and The Online Citizen. Careful analyses of the language used in these postings reveal that the Singaporeans studied are dissatisfied with the state's methods of indoctrinating Chinese characteristics into the social fabric, and that blogs have participatory potential as discursive spaces for some citizens to create Singaporean identities for that refuse to conform to state-constructed versions.