Cultural performances organised and conducted by Chinese-educated middle school students were important constituents of the student activism of Singapore in the 1950s and the 1960s. However, they have been under-explored in the literature on this period. Probing the genealogy of students’ cultural activism, I argue that regime change in the motherland China throughout the 1920s to 1950s were significant variables in preparing the stage for the students’ anti-colonial performances. Additionally, international and regional cultural trends during the Cold War greatly influenced the students’ articulation of a Malayan culture and a Malayan nation, inclusive of Singapore. Consulting rarely used sources, including Chinese student publications, especially school-concert pamphlets, programmes and brochures, this article gives a more nuanced understanding on the motivations, agency and creativity of school-based cultural activities amidst the turbulent politics of Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s to the 1960s. ‘Unofficial’ materials including oral history interviews and personal recollections give voice to the leftwing Chinese youth who have been silenced in the national history of Singapore for a long time.
Post-Second World War Singapore and Malaya experienced a surge of social movements, usually with a strong nationalistic call for self-rule. A decolonisation plan was introduced and carefully managed by the British, covering social welfare, an experiment in democratic politics and constitutional reviews.Footnote 1 Tim Harper uses ‘a new conception of empire’ to refer to such decolonising efforts as a means to reform and rationalise the colonial presence so that the British rule would be placed on a more secure footing.Footnote 2 A defining feature of this postwar period was greater political openness and freedom as enabled by the British experiment in liberal democracy, which in turn encouraged local political advancement. Notably, the immediate postwar 1945–48 period was known as the first phase of a ‘Malayan Spring’ that saw the rise of leftwing politics, which found a ready audience among the youth, workers and trade unions across the causeway. However, the Malayan Spring was soon curtailed as the British declared the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) in Singapore and the Federation of Malaya. The ascendant Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was driven underground and embarked on a decade-long jungle struggle with the British army. On the Singapore side, a second phase of the Malayan Spring was under way in 1954 as the British accepted the Rendel Constitution, which enlarged the scope of public life and political participation. A leftwing socialist party, the People's Action Party (PAP), was formed. With the mass support that PAP garnered from workers, peasants, Chinese middle school students and trade unions, the party won the 1959 general election and formed a government led by Lee Kuan Yew. In sum, the sociopolitical milieu of the postwar period fostered a unique sense of optimism, characterised by leftwing, socialist and modernist visions about the nation-to-be, and invigorated by international decolonising movements across the world.Footnote 3
In terms of culture, both the British and the PAP aimed to forge a nation-state by inculcating patriotism among the ethnically diverse population of Malaya and Singapore, a large proportion of whom were first- and second-generation migrants from China and the Indian subcontinent. At the heart of this nationalist vision was the British language policy that promoted English as the common language due to its purported non-communal and race-neutral quality. The British launched a new education system to establish the primacy of English. However, the new system did not incorporate existing vernacular schools (those whose medium of instruction was in Chinese, Tamil or Malay) because the British were suspicious of overt ‘alien influences’.Footnote 4 The Emergency further added great urgency to create a new education system that would finally replace all the vernacular schools to cultivate a Malayan consciousness because the British believed it was only by forging a Malayan identity through language and education that the influence of communism could be contained. However, as the language of the colonisers, associated with colonial power and control, English was never neutral, least so in the eyes of left-leaning Chinese youth. In order to forge a Malayan-centred identity, the British administration and its successors (the PAP) tried hard to reform Chinese-medium schools by transforming its curriculum. For instance, the Ten-Year Plan for Education aimed to control Chinese schools through administrative and financial schemes. However, as Ting-Hong Wong and Michael Apple show, these efforts mostly failed because fundamentally there was no suitable local pedagogic model. Lacking a local educational tradition, the pedagogy and curricula used in schools was externally and variously oriented towards not only China, but also India, the Federation of Malaya and England, and the state was not able to unify them all into a standard system.Footnote 5
There was another important, and related reason for the British to adopt this language policy during the Malayan Emergency. Chinese-medium schools were perceived as hotbeds of communism because of their manifest association with the newly founded People's Republic of China (PRC). Chinese-educated students, being China-minded and easily mobilised as a collective, were seen as a threat and in need of urgent control. Fearing that Chinese-educated students were likely to succumb to communist manipulation, harsher measures including the internal security laws under Emergency rule were used to suppress and police Chinese education; some middle schools were closed, and students and teachers were arrested for possession of communist literature from the early 1950s. On 13 May 1954, a major clash between Chinese students and the police broke out in defiance of a British order to conscript youth into military service in the war against the Malayan Communists. Known as the May Thirteenth Incident, it was a key event that marked the outbreak of the first major Chinese student action against the British. Many students involved in the Incident were arrested and charged with rioting, and participating Chinese middle schools were closed down.Footnote 6 Mutual hostility between the Chinese middle school students and colonial authorities escalated from the middle of the 1950s.
In independent Singapore's historiography, this period of Chinese student activism has long been framed in a communist subversion template. However, this view, which originated with the British and was reinforced by the successor PAP-led nation-state, as articulated in Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story, has been recently challenged.Footnote 7 Historians such as Hong Lysa, Huang Jianli, and Loh Kah Seng have reinterpreted the roles of leftwing student groups in Singapore's independence movement and nation-building. Writing against the earlier distortion, and in some case erasure of, Chinese-educated students in the official history of Singapore, Tan Jing Quee, Tan Kok Chiang and Hong Lysa's edited book is dedicated to uncovering the unwritten history of Chinese-stream student activism. It probes every aspect of the May Thirteenth Incident, ranging from students’ involvement in mass politics to personal recollections, and to cultural productions in literature, theatre, cartoons and dance.Footnote 8 Huang Jianli interrogates the binary view that cast Chinese-educated students as leftwing idealists who were pawns of the MCP, whereas the English-educated Chinese (and other) students were politically apathetic.Footnote 9 He argues that there was great porosity and interconnectedness between the Chinese and English-stream worlds,Footnote 10 pointing out in particular, the formation by the English-educated student activists of the Socialist Club at the University of Malaya in Singapore. This group, comprising a multiracial cohort of university students, not only advocated its own interests, but also on behalf other alienated groups including workers, peasants, and notably, Chinese-educated students, on issues such as the defence of Chinese-stream education and student autonomy.Footnote 11 Arguing against the ‘communist subversion’ narrative, Loh Kah Seng asserts that these movements should be understood as ‘local and largely autonomous responses to socioeconomic issues and colonial policy in Singapore and Malaya within the frames of anti-colonialism and socialism’.Footnote 12 It was in such entangled ideological contestations and political struggles that student activism of various spectrums burgeoned to articulate a non-Western modernist agenda—fundamentally a leftwing and socialist one—in determining the shape of an imagined nation.Footnote 13
Within the field of student activism, there is an increased interest in international and regional trends that significantly influenced local political developments. Meredith Weiss and Edward Aspinall identify that the cross-national flows of students and texts, transnational student organisations and international leftist movements happening faraway (for example, in Europe) influenced student activism in Southeast Asia to a great extent from the late 1950s to the 1970s.Footnote 14 In addition, Loh Kah Seng shifts the focus on student activism from elite university students to the polytechnic students in the tightly-controlled developmentalist state of Singapore of the 1970s. He emphasises that international contacts and pan-Asian student networks helped polytechnic students to gain a critical understanding about the state's industrialisation programmes.Footnote 15 In this article, my treatment of student activism is in congruence with such revisionist scholarship that aims to go beyond the ‘communist subversion’ narrative by highlighting the experiences of Chinese middle school students in the midst of protests, arrests and suppression. The focus here is on the student-organised school concerts that provided a relatively fluid and vibrant cultural space. It allows us to see the oppressed Chinese-educated students as creative, active cultural learners and producers connected to the transnational Sinophone world and influenced by the pan-Asian anticolonial movement.
This study is also inspired by the burgeoning field examining the ‘cultural Cold War’ in Southeast Asia.Footnote 16 Recent histories of postwar Malayan society emphasise the usefulness of the ‘cultural Cold War’ paradigm in generating new understanding about how cultural productions were influenced by regional and global imperatives. In particular, exciting knowledge has been produced on the cinema, literature, and theatre of the period.Footnote 17 These new studies all demonstrate the transnational character and international reach of various cultural practices that gained salience under the Cold War framework. In other respects, scholars are cautious about the applicability of Cold War concepts, pointing out, for example, that socialism/communism needs to be defined in a nuanced way when applied to Southeast Asia. In doing so, scholars try to understand how the Cold War was differently experienced in Southeast Asia, where decolonisation, independence movements and anti-communism often entangled with each other.Footnote 18 Furthermore, navigating Cold War studies towards the varied cultural expressions in Southeast Asia, Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem argue the need to break away from bipolar representations of the Left and the Right. They hold that Cold War culture was dialogical, and often crossed ideological boundaries through infusions of creative energy and cultural originality.Footnote 19
Framing the inquiry within ‘cultural Cold War’ studies, this article examines the performances at student-organised school concerts by foregrounding their linkages with the transnational Sinophone communities. First, I argue that the cultural performances at the school concerts reified the regional circulation of socialist cultural materials in China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia through networks of film companies and international socialist festivals. The Malayan culture that was performed at the school concerts was as much locally oriented as it was influenced by pan-Asian developments, particularly the cross-ethnic solidarity conjured up by the Bandung Conference in 1955. Second, the school concerts are examined as a contact zone in which cultural materials of socialist China encountered the diasporic youth who were dissatisfied with the colonial treatment of Chinese education. Local articulations of socialism were translated into dances and songs that addressed the exigent needs of anti-colonialism, preservation of Chinese education, and the call to construct a Malayan culture through the Anti-Yellow Culture Movement. Above all, this study resonates with what Jeremy Taylor calls for, that is, to study the receptions, consumptions and interpretations of non-Malayan cultural materials in the imagination of a Malayan nation.Footnote 20
Another aim of this study is a reassessment of the Sinophone scholarship that rejects China factors and gave full agency to local, Malaya-oriented anti-colonial interpretations.Footnote 21 In recent debates about the Chinese diaspora, scholars have tended to reject the notion of Chineseness, which they believe would impose a Sinocentric view upon the hybridised/localised overseas communities.Footnote 22 Here, I argue for historically situated, shifting relationships between homeland China and the Chinese diaspora. The ways in which the school concerts were organised in the 1950s and 1960s had a much longer genealogy in China's early twentieth century May Fourth Movement, which shaped modern Chinese education in the first place. The performance programmes, instead of being communist, were actually inherited from China's wartime culture, that is, a mixture of patriotism, nationalism and revolutionary socialism. Furthermore, this article also demonstrates that China was a major source of inspiration not because it was the imagined motherland—while it was indeed perceived so for some who finally made their way back to the PRC—but for those who stayed and chose to fight for Malayan independence, China was looked upon as an emerging cultural leader in the decolonising Third World. It displayed a model of cultural development alternative to that of the West.
Setting the stage, encountering colonial suppression
Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s experienced a vibrant development of the performing arts. Dances, choirs, musicals and dramas all appeared at the Chinese middle school concerts. The genealogy of these school concerts can be traced to early-twentieth-century Republican education reforms by Chinese nationalists since the May Fourth era. Moreover, the programmes these diasporic Chinese students inherited and adopted in their school concerts were a mixture of ideologies that fused Chinese nationalism, wartime patriotism and revolutionary socialism. These cultural materials were made available through travelling Chinese theatre troupes sent by both the Nationalist-KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), each with their distinct claims about Chineseness before, during and after the Second World War. Colonial authority enacted strict surveillance of these cultural materials due to their suspicions that they were a means of pro-China propaganda. This section argues for a more nuanced understanding of these performances by tracing the students’ creativity and agency in negotiating with colonial suppression and in localising performances that originated from China.
A mixed genealogy in China, 1920s–1949
Most of the Chinese schools in Singapore and Malaya were very small and set up privately by individuals, or clan-based and other nongovernmental organisations. During the early colonial era under the East India Company, the British were only interested in trade and hence took a laissez-faire attitude to local administration, and Chinese schools had hardly been operating within the framework of colonial governance. From the early twentieth century onward, however, the sociopolitical changes that swept across China also lapped at the shores of the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Malaya, along with larger waves of immigration.Footnote 23 In order to foster a strong China-focused patriotism among the overseas Chinese, the Nationalist government transplanted modernist Republican schools into the Chinese diaspora with a strong emphasis on cultivating a sense of homeland nationalism and citizenship.Footnote 24 Like their counterparts in Republican China, Chinese-school students in Singapore and Malaya developed various practical social skills by engaging in diverse extra-curricular activities. Civics classes were introduced to the curriculum with a new focus on encouraging the students to participate in public life, including in interest groups and self-government organisations.Footnote 25 Republican educators argued that only through civic morality, whereby the welfare of the community was placed above individual freedom to forge communal patriotism, could Republican China lead to progressive social development.Footnote 26 From the 1920s through much of the Second World War, there emerged a group of May Fourth era intellectuals—also known as ‘southbound writers’—those who sojourned and/or settled down in Southeast Asia while working as writers and journalists in Chinese-language newspapers.Footnote 27 Importantly, many of them also taught at diasporic Chinese schools. Believing in the power of culture and education in remolding diasporic youth into modern, enlightened and patriotic Chinese, these individuals further nurtured the progressive seeds in Chinese-medium schools. Therefore, the collective spirit and political sensibility of the Republican Chinese educational reforms not only grew stronger among the Chinese diaspora, but also took root locally by continually drawing upon the May Fourth-era thinkers and literature.
The Anti-Japanese Resistance (1937–45) against the war and occupation that ravaged China also caused an upsurge of patriotic mobilisations in the diaspora. The National Salvation Movement, which was endorsed by the Nationalist-KMT government but also saw the participation of the CCP's cultural front, aimed to mobilise overseas Chinese to contribute to China's war effort.Footnote 28 Importantly, they were able to propagate a high-pitched nationalism and patriotism by sending theatre troupes to travel and perform across Singapore and Malaya.Footnote 29 These travelling entities, due to their itinerant and flexible operations, were able to disseminate leftwing theatre and music across the Malayan world. Many of the patriotic songs written for the war mobilisation became so popular that they could be heard in theatres and schools across the island. They became an important part of the cultural legacy inherited by the Chinese students in their postwar anticolonial struggles. As Yao Souchou comments: ‘the war efforts energized a new Chinese patriotism, and more importantly, a political sensibility built on the experience of mass mobilisation and modern, nationalist feelings’.Footnote 30
In 1938, the Nationalist government sent the Wuhan Choir Troupe (Wuhan Hechangtuan) to spearhead the National Salvation Movement in the Chinese diaspora.Footnote 31 The Wuhan Choir Troupe introduced 46 ‘salvation songs’ to the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya. Songs such as the March of the Volunteers (Yiyongjun Jinxingqu) by Nie Er and Tian Han, Song of the Guerrilla Troupe (Youjidui Ge) by He Luting, were favourites performed by progressive leftist organisations, for example, the Singapore Brass Gong Musical Society.Footnote 32 Intriguingly, the wartime song, March of the Volunteers, had such complicated routings and re-routings that both the diasporic Chinese and the colonial government displayed ambivalence towards it. Due to its powerful and heroic melody, this song had been most frequently sung and performed by the Wuhan Choir Troupe and widely circulated in diasporic Chinese schools. When the CCP defeated the KMT and established a communist regime in 1949, this song became the PRC's national anthem. Consequently, the same song that used to be favoured by the Nationalists was banned by the KMT in Taiwan. The British colonial government also reacted to its change of identity. On 8 May 1952, Watson Hyatt, senior inspector of Chinese schools in Singapore, declared that the song was forbidden in Singapore because it was the song of New China. He also clarified that singing songs of the Nationalist-KMT government was still allowed.Footnote 33 However, the Chinese students who inherited the whole batch of cultural materials left by wartime theatre troupes could hardly draw a clear distinction between songs of the two ideological camps. So, while the colonial government categorised the March of the Volunteers in clear-cut ideological terms, the students’ experiences complicate presumptions about the ‘China factor’ in their song choices and performances.
After the Wuhan Choir Troupe had departed Singapore, the China Music, Arts and Dance Troupe (Zhonghua gewu juyi she, also known as Zhong Yi) performed in Bangkok, Singapore and Malaya after the war, from 1946 to 1949.Footnote 34 It promoted new forms of Chinese performing arts born in the Communist wartime base in Yan'an. Whereas the Nationalist-endorsed Wuhan Choir Troupe perpetuated a sentimental patriotism, the communist-affiliated Zhong Yi was more focused on wartime socialist culture—folk and vernacular art forms—developed from the CCP's wartime experience of living with the peasants and ethnic minority peoples of Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan.Footnote 35 It had a different focus, which was to propagate the new national cultural focus defined by Mao Zedong's groundbreaking ‘Talk at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art’ in 1942. In this talk, Mao had laid out the blueprint for creating proper forms of Chinese national culture that would reflect the life of common Chinese folk. By ‘common Chinese folk’, Mao stressed that it was the peasants and ethnic minorities who should be the audiences and subjects of artistic creations, as opposed to the urban-dwelling working-class and bourgeoisie. So, a new national culture inspired by and situated within rural, local and vernacular cultural forms was invoked to represent the new socialist China.
The most representative of these art forms was the ‘yangge theatre’, which was based on the existing yangge that was originally performed at a traditional communal festival by peasants in northern China. Zhong Yi introduced the newly invented national form of ‘yangge theatre’ to the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya through a musical play Brother and Sister open the Wasteland (Xiongmei kaihuang), to praise the joyful spirit of the peasants.Footnote 36 The same play was performed by Zhonghua (Chung Hwa) Girls’ School in 1954.Footnote 37 Zhong Yi not only introduced yangge theatre, but also diverse folk dances of ethnic minorities in China. For example, the Dance Song of Youth (Qingchun Wuqu) featured an Uyghur-style group dance, while the Dance of the Baiyi (Baiyi Wu) was based on the dance of the Baiyi in Yunnan. Liang Lun and Chen Yunyi, two of the most prominent dancers in Zhong Yi who later became the founding members of the PRC's socialist dance troupe, played key roles in promoting diverse dancing styles in the Chinese diaspora through overseas tours. For instance, Liang Lun created a piece called Axi Moon Dance (Axi Tiaoyue), based on his experience of dancing with the Yi people in Kunming, Yunnan, in 1946,Footnote 38 and Huaqiao Zhongxue (Hwa Chong, the Chinese High School) performed the Axi Tiaoyue to celebrate its nineteenth anniversary at its farewell concert in 1960.Footnote 39
From the 1920s through to the 1950s, China and the meaning of Chineseness were dramatically changing, along with competing regimes and ideologies. Diverse, and competing ideologies defined the essence of national culture in various but sometimes overlapping ways during the war. Thus the Nationalists’ anti-Japanese patriotic calls often went hand in hand with the Communists’ revolutionary socialism. Nor were there any identifiable boundaries between the cultural forms produced by the Left or the Right, by the CCP or the KMT. As Mai Liufang puts it, when songs spread to the diasporic Chinese, the overseas Chinese inherited them all without making any distinctions about their political origins and ideologies.Footnote 40 In sum, this wartime cultural legacy formed an important part of the cultural reservoir of the student activism in the 1950s and 1960s. The students continually drew inspiration from this wartime cultural patrimony, which was a mixture of patriotism, nationalism and revolutionary socialism.
Students’ agency, creativity and adaptations
Although the school concerts shared an identical structure with their Republican antecedents, the students in Singapore and Malaya encountered stricter surveillance both by the school authorities and the colonial government. After the May Thirteenth Incident in 1954, the Ministry of Education required school authorities to gather and submit every detail of a performance for prior approval, from the programme, costumes and choreography to the names of students in charge.Footnote 41 In 1955, when the SCMSSU (Singapore Chinese Middle School Students’ Union)Footnote 42 Arts Association organised a concert to raise funds for Nantah (Nanyang University), the police banned one song and one dance performance. Later, a group of participating students were summoned for interrogation by the Special Branch, the internal security police. Labelling the performances communist, the authority deleted seven items from the programme and granted permission for the concert with specific conditions.Footnote 43 At a time when much of the old material was strictly banned and new local creations were yet to emerge, a ‘shortage of local resources’ was often expressed as the major reason for students resorting to foreign performance material, mostly from China.Footnote 44
The students were forced to develop creative ways of preserving and carrying on the tradition of annual school concerts under colonial censorship and suppression. First, the students installed internal cross-departmental surveillance to practice collective discipline at various school concerts. At the 1954 Zhongzheng Zhongxue (Chung Cheng Middle School) Graduating Farewell Concert, a propaganda department was set up to encourage all the students to participate in the concert through various publicity strategies.Footnote 45 The biggest problem facing them was the lack of strong leadership, which lay at the heart of enacting order and discipline so that students would be bound together as a collective. There were increasing complaints about students’ poor behaviour, such as absence without a reason during rehearsals.Footnote 46 To address the problem, the propaganda department launched a ‘competition game’ (jiemu jingsai) in which an evaluation system was set up to oversee students’ performances. The department would assign student investigators to oversee rehearsals of each performing unit. The best one would be awarded a prize and become the exemplar for others to follow. Having first been introduced at Zhongzheng's concert in 1954, the strategy turned out so successful that other schools soon followed suit. At the fundraising concert for Nantah by SCMSSU's Art Association in 1955, the propaganda department added new items to reinforce a more comprehensive collective discipline system. For example, student investigators came to the rehearsals, recorded the number of attendees, took notes of the students’ spirits, attitudes and emotions, and drew up weekly reports.Footnote 47 Concerts in these turbulent years carried on regardless of hardships and obstacles by means of a strict collective discipline which forged a comradeship in the face of the students’ prevailing anxieties.
To circumvent colonial surveillance of school concerts, the students also had to become more careful in their programme choices. They avoided singing songs with overtly China-oriented nationalistic themes and chose softer and sentimental wartime songs for the concerts. For instance, in 1939, Xia Zhiqiu, a leading member of the Wuhan Choir Troupe, composed Song of a Flower Girl (Maihua Ci) for the Salvation performances in Malaya. In 1953, this song was performed by students at Perak Girls’ School to raise funds for Nantah. The students adapted the lyrics to make the song speak to their exigent demands of preserving Chinese language and education, that is, to support the founding of Nantah, the only tertiary institute for Chinese-medium students in Southeast Asia. ‘This is the flower of education; this is the flower of success. Please buy the flowers to contribute to our Nantah.’Footnote 48 The Huaqiao Zhongxue (Chinese High School) performed a solo Song of Nostalgia (Sixiang Qu) that expressed a sentimental longing for the lost hometown.Footnote 49 At a farewell concert organised by Zhongzheng (Chung Cheng) Middle School in 1954, the students presented a song Flowers come after leaves (Xianyou Lüye Houyou Hua), which was written during wartime by a leftist composer, Wang Qiuyi. Drawing analogies between leaves and country, flowers and family, ‘Flowers come after leaves’ conveys the idea that love for one's country should be placed before love for one's family, hence arousing sentimental patriotism towards the motherland.Footnote 50 Without identifying which motherland it was, these songs allowed for porosity and openness to different interpretations.
Another factor that influenced Chinese student activism in significant ways was the Anti-Yellow Culture Movement (AYCM). This was a locally developed cultural movement that aimed to replace the capitalist-inflected colonial culture with a progressive socialist one. It started with a crime case in which a 16-year-old Chinese schoolgirl was raped and murdered on 12 October 1953. As the case was never solved by the police, the left-leaning Chinese youth were outraged, resulting in a moral panic about the ‘yellow culture’ that was disseminated in the form of pornography and erotica through the ‘mosquito press’ and tabloid newspapers. Students argued that the Emergency Law that was enforced in Chinese cultural and literary circles had led to the banning of many progressive Chinese art forms, including plays, songs and other performances. The cultural void left by colonial restrictions let ‘yellow culture’ sneak in, spreading its poison everywhere. Therefore, the moral discourse on yellow culture become politicised as the students criticised British colonialism for breeding such social ills. Soon, the Anti-Yellow Culture Movement gained mass support across the whole society, joining forces with anticolonialists including workers, peasants and intellectuals. It developed into a cross-ethnic cultural movement to include Indian and Malay associations. In 1956, a multiethnic, pan-communal association, the Anti-Yellow Culture Council (AYCC) was set up with more than 800 attendees from 400 organisations. The AYCC alarmed the colonial authorities who saw it as the expansion and infiltration of communism beyond the Chinese communities. The British quickly arrested one of the AYCC's leaders, Linda Chen, and disbanded two other organisations: the Singapore Women's Federation and the Chinese Brass Music Gong society.Footnote 51
Whereas the AYCC was banned, the call to promote the AYCM to build a true Malayan culture and identity gained support among students and workers across racial lines. The colonial government often found itself in a difficult position when seeking to ban performances that were staged for the mass-based AYCM. For instance, when the colonial government proscribed certain leftist publications, the police had explained that these materials were banned because they contained pro-communist propaganda, not because they attacked ‘yellow culture’.Footnote 52 In a report by the Singapore Police Intelligence Journal, the investigator pointed out that Ai Tong Old Boys’ Association performed an item called ‘The Happy Farmers’ Village’ to support the AYCM, which turned out to be adapted from the music of a communist yangge dance. The report stressed that the programme had been passed by the Special Branch and escaped notice.Footnote 53
The boundaries between ‘anti-yellow’, ‘communist’, and ‘patriotic Malayan’ performances were hardly identifiable. Chinese students constantly deployed the rhetoric of the AYCM to vindicate the righteousness of their school concerts. They argued that such performances were only a way to advance the idea of independence and the building of a Malayan national culture.Footnote 54 This was how Chinese-stream students deployed the AYCM's moral discourse to gain support from other ethnic groups and deal with colonial surveillance. The AYCM and the promotion of a wholesome Malayan culture hence served as a potent medium for the students to negotiate with the government for more freedom in staging cultural performances. Suffice to suggest here that the AYCM also opened a valve for the staging of socialist performances at school concerts. It left a fluid sociocultural space that the students could articulate and manipulate with their own agency. Still, the school concerts remained under strict surveillance by several interlocking intelligence departments, who monitored the lyrics of songs, content of the dances and scripts of dramas.
Dancing the Cold War yangge in the name of anticolonialism
Chinese school students were manifestly China-minded due to their long-standing association with Republican-era nationalist education. However, the founding of the PRC and the triumph of the CCP added new meaning to student activism. There was a sense of pride in terms of rejuvenating Chineseness, but more profoundly, these changes boosted the spirits of the leftwing youth who were ardent anticolonial fighters and only saw the future of Malaya in socialism. Indeed, one major source of information and ideas the students drew upon for their concerts was material published in the PRC. For instance, their dance pamphlets were identical in style to the PRC's dance magazines. And, the socialist-style folk dances were the most popular items performed during school concerts. Goh Book Kok, a Singaporean dancer, had fond memories of watching Chinese students performing the dance Picking Tea and Chasing Butterflies (Caicha Pudie) at the fundraising concert for Nantah at the Happy World amusement park in 1954. He later attributed the utmost importance of this experience in shaping his dance world.Footnote 55 Another piece, the Lotus Dance (Hehua Wu) was performed by Nanyang Nüzhong (Nanyang Girls’ School) on 10 December 1955 and was highlighted as a most memorable performance.Footnote 56 At a school concert held collectively by five Chinese schools (Chong Fu, Ai Tong, Dao Nan, Guang Hua and Nanqiao Girls’ School), both choreographies were highly praised for their outstanding qualities.Footnote 57
Notably, these two dances—Picking Tea and Chasing Butterflies and Lotus Dance—emerged as extraordinary representations of the PRC's socialist art. Drawing inspiration from vernacular Kun opera and Fujian folk culture, respectively, the dances were born in a new context whereby the CCP shifted its focus away from class struggles and began to emphasise local and folk cultural expressions of all China's ethnic groups and regions. Also, both dances were China's award-wining performances at the World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) in Bucharest in 1953. They were also performed in tours of India in 1954 and Italy in 1955.Footnote 58 The Lotus Dance was one of the most memorable items performed by China's cultural delegations during the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which the NUSU (Nanyang University Students’ Union) and SCMSSU also sent their student representatives to observe.Footnote 59 The exposure to China's socialist art internationally made the Chinese-educated students realise the emerging soft power embodied by the New China. They saw an alternative model of cultural development to that of British.
These performances belonged to what Emily Wilcox calls the ‘Cold War yangge’ that emerged in the early years of the PRC. Going beyond the conventional definition of yangge as a dance characterised by a distinctive hip-swivelling walk (niu yangge) during wartime, these new dances were refined aesthetically to represent the PRC's new national culture abroad.Footnote 60 It was a period that saw China's increasing global visibility at international festivals, such as the WFYS and tours to countries in the socialist bloc or formerly colonised countries. For instance, the Geneva Conference of 1954 and the Bandung Conference of 1955 saw China's attempts to showcase itself as a cultural leader of the nonaligned world.Footnote 61
So, the Chinese-educated students continued to have access to cultural materials from outside Malaya. Other than international festivals and tours, PRC publications and materials found their way through an important node, Hong Kong.Footnote 62 This corresponds to the recollections of former students in Singapore who, later in life, revealed that they had obtained progressive and leftist literature through various clandestine channels from Hong Kong.Footnote 63 Chua Soo Pong, a pioneering Singaporean performing artist, recalled his exposure to socialist dance magazines brought by his father from business trips in Hong Kong. Chua said, ‘These magazines had six issues and the latest issue was in 1959. Many of the choreographies were also taught at the Huaqiao Zhongxue (Chinese High) in the 1960s.’Footnote 64 Singaporean sailors also brought Chinese books from Hong Kong into Singapore clandestinely and sold them to small bookshops, which were identified by the former students as ‘unofficial channels’.Footnote 65 In addition, there were the Shanghai Bookstore and the World Bookstore that imported books mostly from the Hong Kong Joint Publishing Company, also known as Sanlian Press.Footnote 66 Before the ‘blanket ban’ under the Control of Imported Publications Ordinance in 1958, books on pre-1949 modern Chinese literature and philosophy, complemented by new materials that showed off the achievements of socialist China but were not overt political propaganda, were avidly sought after by Chinese school students.
The cultural nexus between China, Hong Kong and Singapore played a significant role in the regional circulation and consumption of socialist material, and has been researched extensively in recent scholarship.Footnote 67 At the time, Hong Kong was seen as strategically important by the contesting forces of the British colonial government, the US-supported KMT government and the CCP. Even at the zenith of Cold War anticommunist hysteria, socialist China continued to reach out to the diasporic Chinese through Hong Kong. For instance, Chinese theatre troupes continued to reach out to the overseas Chinese to promote socialist China's achievements. On 18 June 1956, headed by eminent socialist artists in China, the Folk-Art Troupe (Zhongguo minjian yishutuan, Min Yi) arrived in Hong Kong for a month-long programme of performances at the Empire Theatre. The performances portrayed a kind of soft socialism, including newly created ethnic dances, folk songs and traditional jingju (Peking opera). Parallel to the stage performances, Hong Kong's leftwing film company, Great Wall (Changcheng), turned the live show into documentary footage. Just one month after the tour in Hong Kong, Min Yin's socialist performances were repackaged as a Hong Kong movie, exported to Singapore and shown in the Capitol Theatre.Footnote 68 Min Yi's socialist performances such as Picking Tea and Chasing Butterflies and Lotus Dance were so popular that the diasporic Chinese students staged local renditions at various festivals.Footnote 69
In this China-Hong Kong-Singapore nexus, the leftwing film alliance Chang-Feng-Xin (Changcheng-Fenghuang-Xinlian) was a key mediator that repackaged the socialist performing arts to left-leaning Chinese youth in Singapore. The alliance established collaborations with film magnates in Singapore, such as the Shaw Brothers and Kong Ngee, who were supposedly rightwing.Footnote 70 These were unusual cross-ideological connections between the rightwing film tycoons of Singapore and the leftwing cultural workers of Hong Kong. As these cultural productions portrayed pan-Chineseness rooted in folk and popular culture that both KMT and CCP laid claim to, the colonial authority could hardly ban them all without being accused of being anti-Chinese, as opposed to anticommunist. Chinese cultural materials circulating to Singapore through such varied channels fed colonial anxiety over curbing influences from socialist China.
The penchant for folk culture depicted through various yangge dances also drew criticisms from students who deemed it irrelevant to the social reality of Singapore. They held that such portrayals were too radical and could draw unwanted attention from the colonial authorities. They argued that art should address the needs of people living in Malaya, not China. They advocated performances about the lives of factory workers, rubber tappers, tin miners and fishermen, whose sufferings were more pertinent to the current struggles of Malayan people. A good example here would be the Construction Dance (Xiudi Wu) performed at the 1954 Zhongzheng (Chung Cheng) Middle School farewell concert. As an original creation of the students, this dance was revealing about the ways in which students translated socialism into localised concerns. In order to create a choreography depicting the labour of construction workers, students conducted extensive research to understand construction materials including planks, silt, cement and atap. Furthermore, in order to comprehend the process of construction, students carried their learning and study to the construction site to live and work alongside the labourers.Footnote 71 By doing so, the Construction Dance reflected workers’ real lives and labour conditions, and embodied their emotions and spirits in its choreographed movements.
The way students developed this original choreography resonated with the ‘remolding’ principle expounded in Mao Zedong's ‘Talk at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art’. According to Mao, the fundamental principle of socialist revolutionary art was the body, which was a marker of class identity. Artists and intellectuals, in order to be close to the working-class masses, needed to live with the workers, and take part in their physical labour for psychological and physical self-reform.Footnote 72 The Construction Dance was such an iconic piece because it demonstrated how socialism was mediated through the students’ self-motivated practice and interpretation, rendered through new artistic forms taken from Malayan society. Therefore, China as a major source of inspiration afforded multiple imaginings of a socialist culture for the Chinese youth of Singapore, distinct yet connected to decolonising countries with similar fates.
Embodying a Malayan nation through multicultural performances
The year 1959 was a turning point in the ways that Chinese-stream students staged their school concerts. In that year, Singapore obtained full self-government under the leadership of the socialist PAP. The anticolonial theme that used to be a priority in school concerts was replaced by calls for nation-building through the construction of a Malayan culture. At that time, Singapore was dedicated to seeking a merger with the Federation of Malaya and forming a Malayan culture and identity undergirded by comradeship and solidarity among the three main ethnic groups: the Malays, Chinese, and Indians. There was a fundamental shift in official attitudes towards school concerts and student-organised extra-curricular activities. Authorities began to justify the need for extra-curricular activities by adopting the language of nation-building. They emphasised that school concerts should be valued as an important part of cultural construction, a lively and effective way to foster intercultural communication. Therefore, school concert programmes from 1959 envisaged a multicultural Malayan nation that drew from the cultures of the three main ethnic groups.
It was in this environment calling for a Malayan nation and culture that the Chinese school students eagerly learnt and performed Indian and Malay dances and songs at their school concerts. The aforementioned artist Chua Soo Pong was one of the Chinese students of the renowned Indian dancer K.P. Bhaskar. According to Chua, Bhaskar himself was a pioneer of Singapore's multicultural dance. He had experimented with a new choreography, infusing traditional Chinese opera with Indian classical dance.Footnote 73 He recalled how deeply Bhaskar had inspired his love for Indian dance. ‘I remember I saw Mr Bhaskar performing in a Chinese opera Butterfly Lovers. I was so fascinated by this strange combination, having this dancer doing Indian Bharatanatyam movements but in a Chinese story with a Chinese costume.’Footnote 74 Chua was not alone in studying Indian dance as he remembered many of his seniors were learning Indian dance too. For instance, at the 1960 Nanqiao Nüzi Zhongxue (Nan Chiao Girls School) farewell concert, the Chinese girls learnt the Indian Holi dance—a dance performed at an ancient Hindu festival—to express joy and hope for the future of Singapore.Footnote 75 At other occasions, for example, the Yishu Juchang (Singapore Arts Theatre) presented two Chinese girls in Indian costumes who performed the dance to worship the Hindu deity Indra.Footnote 76 Therefore, this period saw a growth of youth vanguardism under the banner of Malayan culture.
Alongside Indian dance, Malay dance and music occupied an equally important part in these school concerts. For instance, students at Nanqiao Nüzi Zhongxue performed an ‘invitation dance’ named Tandjung Ria, which originally came from Indonesia and was favoured among the Malays in Singapore.Footnote 77 At a Nanyang University Students’ Union concert, students presented a famous Indonesian folksong, Bengawan Solo.Footnote 78 The song was originally written in 1940 in an Indonesian kroncong style. In 1952, the Malayan Chinese singer Poon Sow Keng (Pan Xiuqiong) recorded the song in Mandarin with the Hong Kong-based gramophone company Pathé, popularising it among Malayan Chinese.Footnote 79 Throughout the 1950s, Poon's Mandarin version of Bengawan Solo was played on Malaya Rediffussion.Footnote 80 These programmes aimed not only to present and increase appreciation of other cultures, but also to prove that the Chinese and the Malays had many aesthetic and historical commonalities. Cross-pollination and integration of two or more cultures were a feasible future for a Malayan culture.
It must be emphasised that changes in culture and identity formation are often slow, unfolding gradually while dramatic historical events are taking place, for example, Singapore's self-governance in 1959. To understand this change of identity, I contextualise students’ practice of multicultural performances in the epistemological shift towards cross-ethnic solidarity at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, which encouraged many local undertakings that influenced the Chinese youth in important ways. The Bandung Conference of 1955 unleashed new energies in the postcolonial struggles sweeping across the former European colonies in Africa and Asia.Footnote 81 It bound the newly independent states together for a common task, which was to build a new global order based on self-determination, Afro-Asian solidarity, internationalism and peace. In the cultural field, the conference encouraged a renewal of old cultural contacts and interactions between regions and states that had been disrupted by colonialism.Footnote 82 It was a beacon of light for the Singapore anticolonial leftists; the Chinese middle school students, for example, invoked the Bandung spirit in their defence of Chinese education in line with calls for ‘a democratic education policy’.Footnote 83
Soon after the Bandung Conference, from 20–22 December 1955, the Singapore Pan-Malayan Students Federation (PMSF) organised a cultural festival in Kuala Lumpur. Initially, the PMSF was founded in 1953 to advance the unity of students across Malaya.Footnote 84 Stimulated by the spirit of Bandung and cross-ethnic solidarity, the PMSF rearticulated their mission as building an independent Malayan state by encouraging the youth to learn and appreciate each other's cultures so that cross-ethnic cooperation, exchange and interaction could be fostered.Footnote 85 At the Festival, Chinese, Indian and Malay students all staged diverse cultural performances. Accompanying the multicultural concerts, students also held art and handicraft exhibitions to showcase their distinct cultures.Footnote 86
The discourses and ideas about the Bandung spirit prevailed from the mid-1950s, gaining potency in various local sociocultural rejuvenation projects, such as the multicultural concert ‘Malam Seni’ (Art Night) held by the Nanyang University Students’ Union in 1959, and the ‘Malam Tarian’ (Dance Night) by the Industrial and Commercial Old Boys Association in 1960.Footnote 87 The PAP also promoted a multiethnic Malayan culture, for instance, by sponsoring multicultural shows such as the Aneka Ragam Ra'ayat (People's Concert).Footnote 88 In celebration of Loyalty Week in 1959, the Aneka Ragam Ra'ayat featured more than 200 shows, which included multicultural performances.Footnote 89 The Malayan culture embodied through these school and public concerts also drew substance from China, India and Indonesia. All three countries offered cultural fodder for the imagination of multiethnic roots in Chinese, Indian and Malay civilisations. Therefore, the construction of a Malayan culture was a manifestation of both local and cosmopolitan influences.
Conclusion
In 1963, the PAP stepped up to tame the leftists and finally crushed the opposition Barisan Sosialis party in Operation Cold Store in which top leftist leaders were detained. Such firm anti-communist measures further cleared the way for Singapore to become part of Malaysia on 31 August 1963. Nonetheless, after only two years, Singapore was separated from Malaysia.Footnote 90 After the painful separation, Singapore gained independence in 1965. As part of the efforts to consolidate its power and control, the PAP continued to suppress both student activism and leftist elements. In 1965, the government urged Nanyang University to reform and restructure in accordance with the PAP's call for ‘education for national development’.Footnote 91
In parallel with the efforts to curb the pro-communist elements in Chinese schools, however, the PAP continued to support the Anti-Yellow Culture Movement. Unlike its earlier focus, the AYCM was used to indoctrinate a certain set of ethics such as discipline, hard work and diligence to reorient youthful energy towards nation-building.Footnote 92 Under the PAP, the AYCM became a propaganda tool to consolidate the power base of the ruling elite among the Chinese-educated masses. The students understood the undercurrents, and hence they began to emphasise that their school concerts helped to organise Chinese youth into a disciplined and hard-working collective, capable of producing a wholesome culture that was constructive for Singapore's nation building.Footnote 93 By doing so, the school concerts negotiated a marginal survival with the government. Therefore, despite their lingering socialist themes and cultural elements, the school concerts avoided being tagged as ‘communist’ and gained legitimacy as part of the AYCM, which was officially supported by the PAP under its nation-building initiatives.
There was also a decline in multicultural performances compared to 1959–60, although most of the school concert programmes continued to use the language of an integrated Malayan culture to frame their activities. At a time of ethnic and racial turbulence, student concert organisers paid careful attention to the ways in which Chineseness was performed, especially with regard to potential risks in arousing ethnic tensions. This change also mirrored the racial tensions brought about by a race riot between the Chinese and the Malays in Singapore in 1964. The incongruity in the racial politics adopted by the multiracial PAP and the Malay-dominated UMNO (United Malays National Organisation) led to the expulsion of Singapore from the Malaysia in 1965.
During Singapore's transition from a colony to an independent nation-state, Chinese school concerts went through different stages, shifting strategies at each stage to speak to the ongoing sociopolitical transformations. There are several important observations to make here. First, the fact that China was a major source of inspiration for the diasporic students’ cultural activism needs to be interpreted together with China's emerging role as a cultural leader in the global socialist bloc. The free, equal and independent vision demonstrated by China's socialist revolution spoke powerfully to the concurrent local nationalist movement in Singapore and Malaya. Second, by privileging the position of Hong Kong in Cold War Asia, I explore the connections that enabled leftwing culture to be produced, circulated, consumed and interpreted in the Sinophone world. Third, the article re-examines the ‘China factor’ and Chineseness by unpacking its layered ideological underpinnings in the diasporic Chinese communities since the 1920s. The ways in which Chinese education and student activism functioned need to be placed in the larger context of China's Republican reforms, the Second World War alliance and postwar rivalry between the KMT and the CCP regimes. Ideas of nationalism, patriotism and revolutionary socialism formed an important culture reservoir that diasporic youth adopted and expressed in their school concerts. Whereas the British colonial government attempted to impose clear-cut ideological labels on the cultural material, the Chinese students usually inherited them all without making distinctions about their origins. Lastly, examining the multicultural performances and adaptations created by the students themselves from the 1950s to the early 1960s, I show how efforts of interethnic bonding were first inspired by the Bandung Conference and readapted locally to contribute to the short-lived flourishing of a Malayan culture in Singapore.
Above all, by framing Chinese student activism within a combination of varied trajectories and events, this article calls into question the ways in which diasporic Chineseness has been entrapped in the Cold War dichotomy between the free world and the communist bloc. This echoes well with Taylor's recent call to use the ‘Chinese cultural Cold War’Footnote 94 to examine the multi-polar competition—not just the bipolar story of the PRC and ROC influences—for the control of Chineseness through various cultural means.Footnote 95 Specifically, the ‘Chinese cultural Cold War’ takes into consideration the ambivalence of Chineseness as overlapping with the rise of ethno-nationalism in Southeast Asia.Footnote 96 In line with such scholarly interest in the ‘Chinese cultural Cold War’, this article demonstrates the ways in which Chinese-educated students organised cultural performances drawing on the KMT's patriotic nationalism, PRC-derived socialism, local Malayan consciousness and Cold War cultural contestations.
