Beng Huat Chua

This book is a series of essays by Singaporean sociologist Chua Beng Huat, one of Asia's leading commentators on the sociology of shopping and consumption. They are explorations of the consumption experience in Singapore, whether that be hanging out at the town center McDonalds, riding the escalator at Ngee Ann City, or learning how to look at price tags at Prada. Why do powerful women wear cheongsam? What is the symbolic significance of Peranakan food in Singapore? What do locally-made films say about class in Singapore? This collection of essays combines keen sociological analysis and sharp observation. Chua looks beyond the billboards and the TV commercials to examine how Singaporeans constitute their social reality in an environment steeped in global consumer imagery.

Consumption Culture in Singapore

Life is Not Complete Without Shopping

Taiwan's Present Singapore's Past Mediated by Hokkien Language

While the economic miracle of Singapore is widely known, the ideas that have underpinned it remain to be documented and critically examined. The single political party that has governed Singapore over the past three decades of nationhood has successfully developed different ideas at different times to organize the multiracial population into a relatively unified people who strive collectively to transform their own material conditions. This is the first book critically to analyse the evolution and succession of the above ideas within changing circumstances. In particular, the author charts the rise of "Asian communitarianism", a set of ideas consecrated explicitly as a national ideology. In contrast to foreign critics who readily see developments in Singapore as evolving phases of an unchanging authoritarian regime, the writer, a Singaporean himself, sees them as an attempt to develop a particular form of anti-liberal democratic polity by a highly ideologically conscious political elite.

Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore

Reading Foucault as a Conservative

Ananda Rajah

Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore

Examines the ways Singapore's impressive public housing program is central to the political legitimacy of the city-state's single party regime, and the growing contradictions of its success. The achievement of Singapore's national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the People's Action Party began to deliver on its promises. By the 1980s, 85% of the population had been rehoused in modern flats. Now, decades later, the provision of public housing shapes Singapore's environment. The standard accounts of this remarkable transformation leave many questions unanswered, from the historical to urgent matters of current policy. Why was housing such a priority in the 1960s? How did the provision of social welfare via public housing shape Singapore's industrialization and development over the last 50 years? Looking forward, can the HDB continue to be both a source of affordable housing for young families and a mechanism for retirement savings? What will happen when 99-year leases expire? Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation is a culmination of Chua Beng Huat's study of Singapore's public housing system, its dynamics, and the ways it functions in Singapore's politics. The book will be of interest to citizens and to scholars of the political economy of Asian development, social welfare provision, and Singapore.

The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing

The Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation

JooEan Tan

New Configuration of a Socially Stratified Culture

Singapore

Building Singapore's Financial District

The Golden Shoe

In Liberalism Disavowed, Beng Huat Chua examines the rejection of Western-style liberalism in Singapore since the nation’s expulsion from Malaysia and formal independence as a republic in 1965. The People’s Action Party, which has ruled Singapore since 1959, has forged an independent non-Western ideology that is evident in various government policies that Chua analyzes, among them multiracialism, public housing, and widespread social distributions to the citizenry. Singapore is prosperous and peaceful, it’s highly advanced on various metrics of economic development, it has a great deal of regional influence, it is home to sophisticated industries and a large financial service sector, and it features what are by Western standards unusually low levels of social inequality. Paradoxically, however, it is no beacon of political liberalism. Chua sets forth ample evidence that the dominance of the People’s Action Party is based on a combination of economic success and media control, limits on public protests, libel suits against political opponents, and severely curtailed civil liberties.

Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore

Liberalism Disavowed

Nostalgia for the Kampung in Singapore

That Imagined Space

This book examines instances in Southeast and East Asian countries where communitarianism is both articulated as national ideology and embedded as the ethos of social life.

Communitarian Politics in Asia

Culture, Multiracialism, and National Identity in Singapore

Conventional political science depicts legitimate elections as rational affairs in which informed voters select candidates for office according to how their coherently presented aims, ideologies and policies appeal to the self-interest of the electorate. In reality elections, whether in first world democracies, or in the various governmental systems present in Asia, can more realistically be seen as cultural events in which candidates’ campaigns are shaped, consciously or unconsciously, to appeal to the cultural understanding and practices of the electorate. The election campaign period is one in which the masses are mobilized to participate in a range of cultural activities, from flying the party colours in noisy motorcycle parades to attending political rallies for or against, or simply to be entertained by the performances on the political stage, and to gambling on the outcome of the contest. The essays in this book analyse electioneering activities in nine Asian countries in terms of popular cultural practices in each location, ranging from updated traditional cultures to mimicry and caricatures of present day television dramas. In presenting political election as an expression of popular culture this book portrays electoral behaviour as a meaningful cultural practice. As such this book will appeal to student and scholars of political science and cultural studies alike, as well as those with a more general interest in Asian studies.

Elections as Popular Culture in Asia

With the collapse of European socialism in the late 1980s, ascendancy of the liberal capitalist democracy and individual self-interest became prevalent in the West. In contrast, many polities in Asia, both by tradition and choice, have explicitly adopted communitarianism as a national ideology, for example Confucianism in Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, Islam in Malaysia and the Panca Sila in Indonesia. Here, communitarianism arguably informs public policies and political practices and the concept of the 'social' in terms of responsibilities and collective welfare is preserved. Communitarian Politics in Asia examines instances in southeast and east Asian countries where communitarianism is both articulated as national ideology and embedded as the ethos of social life and assesses the relative merits of a set of practices in their respective local political context. The book not only augments existing international debate on liberalism and communitarianism but also provides empirical examples of communitarian political practices that will substantiate and/or refute conceptual points, such as redistributive justice and costs to individuals, in this ongoing debate.

Kōichi Iwabuchi

This volume provides, collectively, a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian media culture, using the Korean TV drama as its analytic vehicle.

Analysing the Korean Wave

East Asian Pop Culture

Kuan-Hsing Chen

Asian Cultural Studies or Cultural Studies in Asia is a new and burgeoning field, and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal is at its cutting edge. Committed to bringing Asian Cultural Studies scholarship to the international English speaking world and constantly challenging existing conceptions of cultural studies, the journal has emerged as the leading publication in Cultural Studies in Asia. The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader brings together the best of the ground breaking papers published in the journal and includes a new introduction by the editors, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Chua Beng Huat. Essays are grouped in thematic sections, including issues which are important across the region, such as State violence and social movements and work produced by IACS sub-groups, such as feminism, queer studies, cinema studies and popular culture studies. The Reader provides useful alternative case studies and challenging perspectives, which will be invaluable for both students and scholars in media and cultural studies.

The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader

Koichi Iwabuchi

The contributors analyse the subject of Asian pop culture arranged under three headings: 'Television Industry in East Asia', 'Transnational-Crosscultural Receptions of TV Dramas' and 'Nationalistic reactions'.

East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

Beng Huat Chua

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