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"Loh, Kah Seng"
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Semi-archives and Interim Archives: A History of the National Wages Council in Singapore
The National Wages Council (NWC) was the orchestra of Singapore’s wage policy in the 1970s and 1980s. Our paper explores two key episodes in its history: its formation in February 1972 and its adoption of a high wage policy between 1979 and 1981 as part of Singapore’s economic restructuring. We were able to draw upon partially declassified government records held at the National Archives of Singapore. Yet these records are incomplete and lacking in certain aspects as archival sources. We complemented them with other archival and published sources, including the oral history and writings of the NWC’s longtime chairman, Lim Chong Yah. Our research urged us to conceptualize a pair of ideas, “semi-archives” and “interim archives,” acknowledging the partiality of both archival and published sources in Singapore. The history of the NWC suggests a rethinking of the centrality of the documentary archive in the Western academic tradition. In Asian contexts like Singapore, a multi-archival approach is necessary for the writing of recent history. Singapore historians can work both modestly and imaginatively with a wider range of available historical sources, including archival, oral, and published sources.
Journal Article
Polytechnicians and Technocrats: Sources, Limits, and Possibilities of Student Activism in 1970s Singapore
Making a case for studying student activism outside of elite university students, this paper investigates the sources of polytechnic student activism in a tightly controlled society: 1970s Singapore. It seeks to find less obvious histories: the limits of state control, the relative openness of the city-state, and the identity and lived experiences of the polytechnicians. Through the writings and cartoons of the Singapore Polytechnic Students’ Union, augmented by oral histories, the paper traces the contours of student activism as defined by everyday events as well as momentous experiences formed at the intersection between campus, national, and transnational—particularly pan-Asian—developments.At the national level, the polytechnicians’ identity responded to the state’s instrumentalist view of students, which was to define the polytechnic student in a more expansive way, attacking student apathy toward social and political issues. Some student matters, such as protests against bus hikes, escalated into national issues, bringing the polytechnicians into encounters with state officials and politicians. Political surveillance caused fear and anxiety but also fostered a sense of injustice. Conversely, international contact, such as reading critical literature and participating in pan-Asian seminars, helped the polytechnicians place Singapore in an Asian context and plot themselves on a mental political spectrum. Reading was an experience: universal ideas in books enabled the students to contextualize local issues, just as everyday experiences in Singapore helped them locate the abstract. The international contact thus enabled the polytechnicians to give meaning to concepts such as “students,” “education,” and “Asia.”
Journal Article
The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya
Post-war Malaya. Liberal, communal, Fabianist, and left-wing socialist groups rise. Alliances are brokered and broken. Slogans are shouted but their meanings are contested. British decolonisation allows the political flux, then proscribes it. The university nurtures future statesmen before changing to train experts in development. The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity explores the role of a group of university student activists in the contest for a modern nation-state.
eBook
The University Socialist Club and the contest for Malaya
The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya The book, using a small group of left-wing student activists as a prism, explores the complex politics that underpinned the making of nation-states in Singapore and Malaysia after World War Two. While most works have viewed the period in terms of political contestation groups, the book demonstrates how it is better understood as involving a shared modernist project framed by British-planned decolonization. This pursuit of nationalist modernity was characterized by an optimism to replace the colonial system with a new state and mobilize the people into a new relationship with the state, according them new responsibilities as well as new rights. This book, based on student writings, official documents and oral history interviews, brings to life various modernist strands – liberal-democratic, ethnic-communal, and Fabian and Marxist socialist – seeking to determine the form of postcolonial Malaya. It uncovers a hitherto little-seen world where the meanings of loud slogans were fluid, vague and deeply contested. This world also comprised as much convergence between the groups as conflict, including collaboration between the Socialist Club and other political and student groups which were once its rivals, while its main ally eventually became its nemesis.
eBook
Emergencities: Experts, Squatters and Crisis in Post-war Southeast Asia
Western planning experts, beginning with the United Nations Mission of Experts on Tropical Housing in 1950–1951, undertook major interventions in what they described as a zone of urban crisis across Southeast Asia after the Second World War. In various 'emergencities', allegedly threatened by expanding squatter settlements, the experts proposed robust and immediate state action to organise a comprehensive regime of planning to replace the unauthorised areas with regulated housing. Yet, despite its scientific appearance, the planning expertise constituted a political project that sought to transfer Western ideas of the \"Garden City\" to unruly Southeast Asian cities. The project stressed the importance of nationhood, citizenship and democracy in urban reform and was fearful of the appeal of communism in post-colonial Southeast Asia. The expert interventions usually failed but still had significant and unpredictable outcomes. By reinforcing patronage politics, they politicised housing and extended state power into urban life. The interventions also created crisis situations of their own making and catalysed social resistance, both spontaneous and organised. Southeast Asian cities became, sites of a struggle between competing forms of urban modernity. In contrast to the experts framing modernity and tradition in opposition, however, squatters demonstrated their adaptive \"cultures of modernity\", utilising both old and new ways in their pursuit of a modern life.
Journal Article
Emergency Situations, Participation, and Community-based Disaster Responses in Southeast Asia Gray Areas and Causes for Optimism
Emergency and participation intersect to form the basis of Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (CBDRRM). This article has three aims. First, it explores the criticisms of participatory development in CBDRRM. Second, it highlights how disasters provide insights into participatory development when disasters are viewed not merely as terrible events but as catalysts for social change. Third, the article contends that despite its flaws, CBDRRM is neither hegemonic nor oppressive but can be adapted to the needs and cultures of communities. The article calls for an empathetic form of participation and room for diverse partners to work together.
Journal Article