Luke Lu 

Luke Lu is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before academia, Luke was a secondary school teacher for five years. He is primarily interested in approaches to interactional sociolinguistics and ethnography, pertaining to issues such as transnational mobility, education, language rights, language planning and policy, and ethnicity. Such research have been published in Language Policy, TESOL Quarterly, and Language in Society. His most recent funded projects involved examining the pedagogical value of Singlish in ELT classrooms, and recovering a grassroots and transnational history of Chinese language reforms in Singapore. 

On the social memory of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and historical accounts of living through it

How does a community’s disparate ways of negotiating a language policy evolve into a singular narrative of blame and resentment? In Singapore, most within the Chinese community have internalized the relationship between the state’s ideology of Mandarin, and their racial identity and cultural practices. A prevalent narrative characterizes Mandarinization through the demise of other Chinese languages, cultural decline, and loss, blaming the state and its key policy instrument – the Speak Mandarin Campaign – launched in 1979. 

This paper suggests that the current narrative surrounding the Speak Mandarin Campaign might be better conceptualized as a ‘social memory’, by attending to the processes through which a knowledge or awareness of past events or conditions is developed and sustained within human societies, and through which, therefore, individuals within those societies are given a sense of the past that extends beyond what they themselves personally remember’. In line with Foucault’s genealogical approach, we draw on life history interviews with 12 individuals (aged 57 to 84). Findings suggest a complex history where Mandarinisation can be traced to transnational ideologies of ethnic unity and modernization from the founding of China as a republic. Informants recount an uneven engagement with the Speak Mandarin Campaign, ranging from nonchalance, alignment, to fear of resistance. Accounts also often invoked the figure of Lee Kuan Yew, representing the sociopolitical circumstances of Singapore in the 1970s and 80s. 

We argue that the current social memory of the Speak Mandarin Campaign emerges from and is sustained by a conflation of resentment against the ruling government’s perceived suppression of the Chinese-educated class, with the chronotope of Lee Kuan Yew utilized as a key discursive resource.