Chua Beng Huat - Early Works

Early Works

Chua’s emphasis on the theoretical over the substantive is evident in his PhD dissertation. Written at a time when an understanding of how reality is socially constructed was just beginning to emerge, he used the Preliminary Report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to analyze how government reports are written such that they are demonstrably democratic. It was a phenomenological, ethnomethodological and interpretive piece that exposed mechanisms by which democracy is made visible in texts.

“I could have written on reports on crime or whatever because the substance was not important. The really important issue is the production of democracy textually in government reports because government reports, in whatever field, urban planning or deviance or policing, must not be seen as biased in any particular way. It was the processes, procedures and practices – how to manage information that was coming into the report – that was important to me. Specifically, I was not interested in anything substantive. I was only interested in the practices of how one actually uses the structure of the text so that it would appear to be unquestionably democratic,” Commenting on his dissertation: “One of the interesting things I think most people don’t realize is that those kinds of ethnomethodological work can actually be used for social change. Knowing how reality is put together is to know, at the same time, how it can be deconstructed. If you know how reality is constructed, then you know how it can be changed.”

Shortly after his graduate studies, Chua taught at Trent University, Ontario for about seven or eight years. In 1984, the Housing and Development Board (HDB) has offered him the Director of Research post. He returned to Singapore and took up the position. He began to stray away from wholly theoretical work and focused on writing critically about Singapore as well, including writing a weekly column in the national newspaper, The Straits Times, for one year. As he explained, “Once I came back to Singapore, to a certain extent, what happens locally politically gets personalized. I feel not just the responsibility but also the right to be critically analytical of a society to which my own life is embedded. In that sense, I kind of changed from being an academic to a more public intellectual; in Canada, I was basically an academic whose concerns are of conceptual and theoretical questions of how to do Sociology.”

His knack for scrutinizing the workings of the Singapore society and his insistence on doing so publicly did not go unnoticed. Within a year, he was fired from his job at HDB for his critical writings of Singapore politics. He joined NUS afterward, and has been there since 1985. The turn of events did not make Chua ease up on his public assessments of social reality in Singapore and beyond. In fact, it freed him of the constraint of being a civil servant and his research and writings expanded into more areas.