Speak Mandarin Campaign - Evolution

Evolution

The focus of SMC first started with encouraging more people, especially the young to speak Mandarin in place of dialects, hence allowing people from different dialectal groups to communicate better with a common language and at the same time, reducing barriers between the different groups resulting from the use of different dialects. This is important in the unification of all Chinese in Singapore especially after independence. To meet the demands of globalisation and other economic challenge as a young nation, the government began to place greater emphasis on English. As a result, many English-educated Chinese Singaporeans began to lose their Mandarin or Chinese language skills. During the Singaporean general election, 1991, the People's Action Party (PAP) won a lower majority than usual, in part because of opposition parties' exploitation of the linguistic anxieties of working-class, dialect-speaking Chinese Singaporeans. Those Singaporeans clung onto their dialect as part of an identity, refusing to register their children in schools with Mandarin names.

As a result, the PAP government switched its focus away from dialects towards encouraging English-speaking and educated Chinese to speak more Mandarin. In 1994, the SMC specifically targeted English-educated business professionals and working adults. It promoted the use of Mandarin to keep their links to cultural roots so as to better appreciate the heritage and value and most importantly complement the economical aspects as China began to rise in the business sector. However, recently, through The Chinese Challenge, we can see that the SMC has moved towards a cultural aspect, whereby its main focus is to promote Singaporeans to hold on to their "roots", knowing their own culture well.

However, in recent years, critics have point that the sole purpose of the campaign was to eliminate old regional cultural linguistic rivalry that have existed since the time of the Southern Song vs. Jin and Yuan Kubalai Khantate. The government wanted to socially-engineer the Min/Cantonese/Southern Han Diaspora and force them to use the Standard dialect to create a more comfortable environment for the future waves (in the early 2000s) of Mongol, Manchu ad-mixed Han Chinese from provinces North of the Yangtze River. By pronouncing Chinese Characters in the PutongHua PinYin, the Northerners would feel more at ease, instead of the classical pronunciation in Cantonese and Min Nan Languages. In short, the local Singaporean Chinese were made to believe that Mandarin, or court speech, not their maternal dialects, was their "Mother Tongue". This is currently the biggest source of grievance for the local Singaporean Chinese 3rd/4th+ Generation Diaspora of the Republic of China and the Qing Dynasty towards the newcomers from the PRC mainland.,