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Singapore academic Donald Low writes about the thing I've been worried about: Singapore's 'born again Chinese', or ethnic Chinese people in the diaspora who have been targeted by CCP propaganda in social media and chat groups
I was starting to see people say things like 'oh, I will only use the Chinese vaccine, it was created for Chinese people' and I just could not believe what I was hearing. Not isolated cases too: lots and lots of people. Especially Boomers.
A lot of this is just step one towards challenges to national sovereignty (Singapore is also a Chinese state so you belong to us), and worsens racial issues in the country by emphasizing more 'Chineseness' (already the majority group there with oppressive features)
Low says in the article that the term 'born again Chinese' comes from scholar Liew Kai Khiun: "to describe people of Chinese descent living outside of China (especially Singapore and Malaysia) who identify strongly with, and hold blindly optimistic views about, China."
"The term draws parallels with the “born-again” Christian phenomenon. Just as born-again Christians aren’t usually born Christian, born-again Chinese (BACs) may not be born Chinese or raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. Being educated in English, BACs usually have a poor command of the Chinese language and have little understanding of Chinese history and literature."
"Yet, like born-again Christians who are often more “public” about their faith than born Christians, BACs can be shriller and more strident than people who are born Chinese in defending their “motherland”.
All of this is very precise.
"A second practical suggestion is for all of us to interact more with mainlanders in Singapore. Such interactions will naturally help us avoid essentialising or stereotyping the Chinese people. Since my arrival in Hong Kong more than six years ago, I have had the privilege of teaching, engaging with, and learning from hundreds of bright Chinese youths. Their views of China’s future are diverse and multi-faceted; they find the blindly optimistic views of the BACs in Singapore quite laughable. Some of them even asked me why well-educated Singaporeans who do not live inside the Chinese propaganda bubble would parrot the views of CCP propagandists."
We don't have to look very far to see how far the propaganda is damaging. In the Philippines: pro-China propaganda, bots, etc have shifted a lot of defense conversations towards the aggressor (China).
In other countries in SE Asia where the local Chinese population has fought hard won political battles to be accepted as full citizens, perhaps even pogrom-ed (yes), giving in to this blood and soil ethnic pride at a critical time in geopolitics will destabilize and worsen things.
They call us 'pendatang' (immigrant, foreigner) but now so many of us are voluntarily choosing to side with a blood and soil regional power that honestly doesn't give a shit about us, that has always exploited overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia when it needed help (Chinese republican overthrow of monarchy, WWII, etc) but mostly just forget we are there.
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io BAC is a perfect description
@skinnylatte minta link...
@skinnylatte I think that's a common diaspora phenomenon. Where the first generation diaspora is more fervent, and more stuck in time, than the people they left. I read an article about the Irangeles diaspora that was similar. They still supported the old government, listened to the old music, and were fervent adherents of the old culture, while people still in Iran had moved on and changed.
@skinnylatte I went to China as a geography student with an interest in the Dai (傣), Bai (白) and Yi (彝) ethnicities and once my time there had ended a year later I’d concluded that much like Christianity, a lot of Han culture is expropriated from its minorities.
@skinnylatte
Traditionally the Singapore government is really not a fan of this kind of stuff, though?
@faassen nope, we’ve arrested a couple of spies etc
@skinnylatte i recall a number of years ago a friend who travels internationally to review mining projects mentioning something about Belt & Road projects just dumping huge quantities of Chinese nationals in countries during construction, and then not taking them back afterwards. His speculation was that it was a longer term plan to build influence through altering the demographic makeup of countries.