Originally posted by Rooney_07:
yes. they were a barbarians
Harry Lee Kuan Yew loves them. He is an anglophile.
The babas, on the other hand, also known as Straits Chinese, were Chinese more in name than practice.
They assimilated with both the local Malays and the colonising British, whom they especially admired.
The babas became the lawyers, the civil servants and the politicians; they attended the local English-language schools run in the tradition of the UK's public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge.
Although the sinkeh dominated Singapore's population, it was the babas who dominated public decision-making.
In effect, a baba minority captured sinkeh Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of Victorian England than China.
It was the babas who were the framers of Singapore's rules and institutions. Many of Singapore's most prominent Chinese have had baba backgrounds. Lee Kuan Yew, who became prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is the most obvious example. He claims a Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his parents and baba Malay to his grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected with my life," Lee said of his childhood.
For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and later a political necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a focus on China, but as a baba who looked to England. He followed the conventional career path of a baba and went to London to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore became Harry Lee of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His father had given him and two of his brothers English, as well as Chinese, names.
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese ways?
No. He ran it in a manner to which a British colonial administrator would have aspired.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
After World War II, the previously respectable designations such as "Baba"
and "Peranakan" became almost terms of abuse if used by the "non-Baba
Chinese".
The non-Baba Chinese gave the Babas condescending names, which implied that
they were not "complete Chinese" because of their (supposed) inability to
speak "Chinese", their alleged adoption of "foreign" (i.e. non-Chinese)
cultures and their British orientation.
The Japanese Occupation turned the Peranakan world upside-down by
triggering important changes in the political role of the Babas as well as
in their cultural identity.
Many Babas fell victim because they were among the groups targeted during
the Japanese sook ching operation. Hastily arranged "intermarriages"
between Nyonyas and non-Baba Chinese were to lead to radical changes in the
Baba way of life and to "sinicisation".
The British patronage of the Babas
was interrupted in 1942 and was never again fully restored.
AS "sons of the soil", the Straits Chinese British Association's Straits
Chinese defended their citizenship (or subjecthood) rights against the
China-born Chinese and those first-generation Singapore-born Chinese who
had a dual loyalty.
The chasm between the Babas and the sinkehs (literally "guests", or recent
immigrants from China) may also be illustrated by the typical occupations
of the China-born Chinese which self-conscious Babas would have shunned.
With the increased ambiguity of the status of the Babas, many of them
neither dared to admit they were Babas nor spoke Baba Malay in public.
The
days of Baba Malay as an inter-group language of commercial value were also
gone, and Baba Malay stagnated and became confined to the domestic domain.
The once flourishing literary activities in Baba Malay came to a grinding
halt and wayang peranakan and dondang sayang were in crisis.
Thus, the most
important "Malay" aspect of the previous Baba identity was indeed in
decline.
HOWEVER, there were early warning signs of the Babas' loss of influence.
Eventually, with the waning British influence, the failure of the
secessionists, the death of conservative "Baba politics" and the rapid rise
of the People's Action Party which led to self-rule in 1959, the Babas
reached the second crucial turning-point in their social history.
This
usually ignored turning-point was marked by self-rule and the takeover by
the PAP.
Although leading members of the PAP, such as Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Toh
Chin Chye and Dr Goh Keng Swee, were publicly described as English-educated
Babas, the Babas as a group were openly belittled as "deculturalised".
http://www.asiawind.com/pub/forum/fhakka/mhonarc/msg01319.html
This mother fucking anglophile bastard Harry Lee Kuan Yew and his destruction of chinese education, chinese culture and anglicisation of Singapore.
