The Charade Of Meritocracy

October 2006

By Michael D. Barr

The legitimacy of the Singaporean government is predicated on the idea of a meritocratic

technocracy. A tiny number of career civil servants play a leading role in setting policy
within their ministries and other government-linked bureaucracies, leading both an elite
corps of senior bureaucrats, and a much larger group of ordinary civil servants. Virtually
all of the elite members of this hierarchy are “scholars,” which in Singapore parlance
means they won competitive, bonded government scholarships—the established route
into the country’s elite.

Scholars not only lead the Administrative Service, but also the military’s officer corps, as
well as the executive ranks of statutory boards and government-linked companies
(GLCs). Movement between these four groups is fluid, with even the military officers
routinely doing stints in the civilian civil service. Together with their political masters,
most of whom are also scholars, they make up the software for the entity commonly
known as “Singapore Inc.”—a labyrinth of GLCs, statutory boards and ministries that
own or manage around 60% of Singapore’s economy.

The basis of the scholars’ mandate to govern is not merely their performance on the job,
but also the integrity of the process that selected them. The educational system is
designed to cultivate competition, requiring top students to prove themselves every step
of the way. Singapore’s schools first stream students into elite classes after Primary 3 and
4. They then compete for entry into special secondary schools and junior colleges, before
vying for government and government-linked scholarships to attend the most prestigious
universities around the world.

These scholarships typically require several years of government service after graduation,
and the scholars are drafted into the Administrative Service, the officer corps of the
Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), or the career track of a statutory board or GLC. The
government insists that all Singaporeans have equal opportunities to excel in the system,
and that everyone who has made it to the top did so purely by academic talent and hard
work. Other factors such as gender, socioeconomic background and race supposedly play
no more than a marginal role, if they are acknowledged as factors at all.

On the point of race, the Singapore government has long prided itself on having instituted
a system of multiracialism that fosters cultural diversity under an umbrella of national
unity. This is explicitly supposed to protect the 23% of the population who belong to
minority races (mainly ethnic Malays and Indians) from discrimination by the Chinese
majority.

But this system conceals several unacknowledged agendas. In our forthcoming book,
Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project, Zlatko
Skrbiš and I present evidence that the playing field is hardly level. In fact, Singapore’s
system of promotion disguises and even facilitates tremendous biases against women, the
poor and non-Chinese. Singapore’s administrative and its political elites—especially the
younger ones who have come through school in the last 20 or so years—are not the cream
of Singapore’s talent as they claim, but are merely a dominant social class, resting on
systemic biases to perpetuate regime regeneration based on gender, class and race.

At the peak of the system is the network of prestigious government scholarships. Since
independence in 1965, the technique of using government scholarships to recruit cohorts
of scholars into the administrative and ruling elite has moved from the periphery of
Singaporean society to center stage. Even before independence, a makeshift system of
government and Colombo Plan scholarships sent a few outstanding scholars overseas
before putting them into government service, including most notably former Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong. Yet as late as 1975 this system had contributed only two out of
14 members of Singapore’s cabinet. Even by 1985, only four out of 12 cabinet ministers
were former government scholars.

By 1994, however, the situation had changed beyond recognition, with eight out of 14
cabinet ministers being ex-scholars, including Prime Minister Goh. By 2005 there were
12 ex-scholars in a Cabinet of 19. Of these, five had been SAF scholars, including Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong. A perusal of the upper echelons of the ruling elite taken more
broadly tells a similar story. In 1994, 12 of the 17 permanent secretaries were scholars, as
were 137 of the 210 in the administrative-officer class of the Administrative Service.

The government scholarship system claims to act as a meritocratic sieve—the just reward
for young adults with talent and academic dedication. If there is a racial or other bias in
the outcomes, then this can only be the result of the uneven distribution of talent and
academic application in the community. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it when
he spoke on national television in May 2005, “We are a multiracial society. We must
have tolerance, harmony. … And you must have meritocracy … so everybody feels it is
fair….” His father, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, was making the same point
when, in 1989, he told Singapore’s Malay community that they “must learn to compete
with everyone else” in the education system.

Yet if Singapore’s meritocracy is truly a level playing field, as the Lees assert, then the
Chinese must be much smarter and harder working than the minority Indians and Malays.
Consider the distribution of the top jobs in various arms of the Singapore government
service in the 1990s (based on research conducted by Ross Worthington in the early
2000s):
 • Of the top 30 GLCs only two (6.7%) were chaired by non-Chinese in 1991 (and
neither of the non-Chinese was a Malay).

• Of the 38 people who were represented on the most GLC boards in 1998, only two
(5.3%) were non-Chinese (and neither of the non-Chinese was a Malay).

• Of the 78 “core people” on statutory boards and GLCs in 1998, seven (9%) were
non-Chinese (and one of the non-Chinese was a Malay).

A similar outcome is revealed in the pattern of government scholarships awarded after

matriculation from school. Of the 200 winners of Singapore’s most prestigious scholarship,
the President’s Scholarship, from 1966-2005 only 14 (6.4%) were not Chinese. But this
was not a consistent proportion throughout the period. If we take 1980 as the divider, we
find that there were 10 non-Chinese President’s Scholars out of 114 from 1966-80, or 8%,
but in the period from 1981-2005 this figure had dropped to four out of 106, or 3.8%. Since
independence, the President’s Scholarship has been awarded to only one Malay, in 1968.
There has been only one non-Chinese President’s Scholar in the 18 years from 1987 to
2005 (a boy called Mikail Kalimuddin) and he is actually half Chinese, studied in Chinese
schools (Chinese High School and Hwa Chong Junior College), and took the Higher
Chinese course as his mother tongue. If we broaden our focus to encompass broader
constructions of ethnicity, we find that since independence, the President’s Scholarship has
been won by only two Muslims (1968 and 2005).

If we consider Singapore’s second-ranked scholarship—the Ministry of Defence’s

Singapore Armed Forces Overseas Scholarship (SAFOS)—we find a comparable pattern.
The Ministry of Defence did not respond to my request for a list of recipients of SAF
scholarships, but using newspaper accounts and information provided by the Ministry of
Defence Scholarship Centre and Public Service Commission Scholarship Centre Web
sites, I was able to identify 140 (56%) of the 250 SAFOS winners up to 2005.

Although only indicative, this table clearly suggests the Chinese dominance in SAFOS
stakes: 98% of SAFOS winners in this sample were Chinese, and about 2% were non-
Chinese (counting Mikail Kalimuddin in 2005 as non-Chinese). Furthermore I found not
a single Malay recipient and only one Muslim winner (Mikail Kalimuddin). A similar
picture emerges in the lower status Singapore Armed Forces Merit Scholarship winners:
71 (25.6%) of 277 (as of late 2005) scholars identified, with 69 (97%) Chinese winners to
only two non-Chinese—though there was a Malay recipient in 2004, and one reliable
scholar maintains that there have been others.

The position of the non-Chinese in the educational stakes has clearly deteriorated since
the beginning of the 1980s. According to the logic of meritocracy, that means the Chinese
have been getting smarter, at least compared to the non-Chinese.

Yet the selection of scholars does not depend purely on objective results like exam
scores. In the internal processes of awarding scholarships after matriculation results are
released, there are plenty of opportunities to exercise subtle forms of discrimination.
Extracurricular activities (as recorded in one’s school record), “character” and
performance in an interview are also considered. This makes the selection process much
more subjective than one would expect in a system that claims to be a meritocracy, and it
creates ample opportunity for racial and other prejudices to operate with relative freedom.

Is there evidence that such biases operate at this level? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this
question is “yes.” Take for instance a 2004 promotional supplement in the country’s main
newspaper used to recruit applicants for scholarships. The advertorial articles
accompanying the paid advertisements featured only one non-Chinese scholar (a Malay on
a lowly “local” scholarship) amongst 28 Chinese on prestigious overseas scholarships.
Even more disturbing for what they reveal about the prejudices of those offering the
scholarships were the paid advertisements placed by government ministries, statutory
boards and GLCs. Of the 30 scholars who were both prominent and can be racially
identified by their photographs or their names without any doubt as to accuracy, every one
of them was Chinese. This leaves not a shadow of a doubt that those people granting
government and government-linked scholarships presume that the vast majority of high-
level winners will be Chinese.

The absence of Malays from the SAFOS scholarships and their near-absence from the SAF
Merit Scholarships deserves special mention because this is an extension of discrimination
against the admission of Malays into senior and sensitive positions in the SAF that is
officially sanctioned. The discrimination against Malays has been discussed in parliament
and the media, and is justified by the assertion that the loyalty of Malays cannot be
assumed, both because they are Muslim and because they have a racial and ethnic affinity
with the Malays in Malaysia and Indonesia. Current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has
historically been a vocal defender of this policy.

This discrimination hits Malay men hard, first because it deprives many of promising
careers in the army, and second—and more pertinent for our study of the elite—it all but
completely excludes potentially high-flying Malays of a chance of entering the scholar
class through the SAF. A Chinese woman has a much better chance of winning an SAF
scholarship than a Malay man.

Yet even before the scholarship stage, the education system has stacked the deck in favor of
Chinese, starting in preschool. Here is the heart of Singapore’s systemic discrimination
against non-Chinese. Since the end of the 1970s, the principles of “meritocracy” and
“multiracialism” have been subverted by a form of government-driven Chinese chauvinism
that has marginalized the minorities. It was not known to the public at the time, but as early
as 1978, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had begun referring to Singapore as a
“Confucian society” in his dealings with foreign dignitaries. This proved to be the
beginning of a shift from his record as a defender of a communally neutral form of
multiracialism toward a policy of actively promoting a Chinese-dominated Singapore.

The early outward signs of the Sinicization program were the privileging of Chinese
education, Chinese language and selectively chosen “Chinese values” in an overt and
successful effort to create a Mandarin- and English-speaking elite who would dominate
public life. Two of the most important planks of this campaign were decided in 1979: the
annual “Speak Mandarin Campaign” and the decision to preserve and foster a collection
of elite Chinese-medium schools, known as Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools.

The SAP schools are explicitly designed to have a Chinese ambience, right down to
Chinese gardens, windows shaped like plum blossoms, Chinese orchestra and drama, and
exchange programs with mainland China and Taiwan. Over the years the children in SAP
schools have been given multiple advantages over those in ordinary schools, including
exclusive preschool programs and special consideration for preuniversity scholarships.

For instance, in the early 1980s, when there was a serious shortage of graduate English
teachers in schools, the Ministry of Education ensured there were enough allocated to
SAP schools “to help improve standards of English among the Chinese-medium students,
in the hope that they will be able to make it to university”—a target brought closer by the
granting of two O-level bonus points exclusively to SAP school students when they
applied to enter junior college. By contrast, neither Indians nor Malays received any
special help, let alone schools of their own to address their special needs. They were not
only left to fend for themselves, but were sometimes subjected to wanton neglect:
inadequately trained teachers, substandard facilities and resources and the “knowledge”
that they are not as good as the Chinese.

This account of discrimination against non-Chinese might lead the reader to assume that
the quarter of Singaporeans who are not Chinese must form a festering and perhaps even
revolutionary mass of resentment. Such an assumption would, however, be a long way
from the mark. Non-Chinese might be largely excluded from the highest levels of the
administrative elite, but just below these rarefied heights there plenty of positions open to
intelligent and hardworking non-Chinese—certainly enough to ensure that non-Chinese
communities have much to gain by enthusiastically buying into the system, even after the
glass ceilings and racial barriers are taken into account. There are many grievances and
resentments in these levels of society but the grievances are muted and balanced by an
appreciation of the relative comforts and prosperity they enjoy. For most, any tendency to
complain is subdued also by knowledge that it could be worse, and the widespread
assumption among members of minority communities that it will be if they seriously
pursue their grievances. As long as the Singapore system continues to deal such people a
satisfactory hand, if not a fair one, it should be able to cope with some quiet rumblings in
the ranks.

While this discrimination is not sparking a reaction that threatens the regime in the short
term, the resulting injustices are certainly undermining the myth that the regime operates
on meritocratic principles. This is worrying in the longer term because this myth, along
with the capacity to deliver peace and prosperity, is one of the primary rationales by
which Singaporeans reluctantly accept the many unpopular aspects of the regime, such as
the lack of freedom and democracy, the intrusion of government into most aspects of
private life, the pressure-cooker lifestyle and the high cost of living.

The rhetoric of meritocracy has given Singaporeans the consolation of believing that their
ruling elite are the best of the best and can therefore be trusted almost blindly on
important matters, even if they are highhanded and lack the common touch. As this
illusion gradually falls away—and today it is already heavily undermined—the trust that
Singaporeans have for their government is becoming increasingly qualified. It remains to
be seen how long the regime can avert the logical consequences of the contradictions
between the myth and the reality.

Mr. Barr is a lecturer at the University of Queensland and author of Lee Kuan Yew: The
Beliefs Behind the Man (Routledge, 2000) and Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The
Tepid War (Routledge, 2002).