onefixedstar | The life of a grad student

It's 9:00 on a Friday night and I'm sitting in my office, revising a paper and prepping for next week's study groups.

I also got to hear a very engaging talk this afternoon about the way the Internet is being used in Singapore to challenge, in very small ways, what the lecturer referred to as an illiberal democracy with a surplus of oppression. The ups and downs of my life.

The most interesting part was the extreme rationality of the government of Singapore. It's a state where the state seems to own virtually everything: nearly all housing is government-owned (and government subsidized), all taxis are government-owned, all forms of mass media are government-owned, and all food is subsized (you can buy a meal for less than $2CDN). Naturally, this gives the state enormous power, and they wield this power in an extremely blunt way, with almost excessive amounts of bureaucratization. Thus, a generation ago they decided that each ethnic group in Singapore ought to have one language and one national holiday (the easier to classify them?). The problem was that the Chinese minority had four or five languages going. The government decided that Mandarin made the most economic sense, and began taking steps to ensure that the next generation would be fluent in Mandarin (and English) and nothing else: they altered the school curriculum, they imported a bunch of entertainers from Taiwan, and they made sure that the media used no Chinese language except for Mandarin. They succeeded; these days, nearly all young Chinese in Singapore speak Mandarin and no other Chinese language. Similarly, when the government more recently decided that the declining birth rate was a problem they took steps: they introduced mixed dorms in universities, moved several (female-dominated) departments from the University of Singapore to the (male-dominated) Technical University, introduced a rule saying that you could only get housing if you were married and were otherwise required to live with your parents, and began planning various social mixers. All of this was a complete turn around from their previous stance that men and women should not be allowed to mix too freely because Singapore was an Asian country.

I should do a more sociological analysis of this situation, and maybe eventually I will, but for now I'm just going to say that I found it all utterly fascinating and oddly compelling (kind of like a real life game of the Sims!), although I don't think I'd want to live there.