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Wednesday, June 24, 2026 - 20:00 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Indo Sino Fiasco


Unexpected collaboration of the year
(Source: theonlinecitizen.com)


About a week ago, Workers' Party secretary-general and recent leader of the opposition Pritam Singh addressed the India-Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (popularly known as CECA) in a Facebook post, denouncing the racism arising from its supposed (effectively) one-sided granting of (Bharat) Indian professionals access to local jobs*. This is clearly an entirely relevant topic for consideration, with race-based prejudice and xenophobia certainly unacceptable in Singapore's somewhat-fragile multicultural society.

The far more interesting part was the concurrent mention of a recent sleeper hit movie from China, 《给阿嬷的情书》 (thereafter Dear You), which tells the story of a Teochew grandmother discovering the truth behind her long-running correspondence with her husband in Thailand. The original controversy over Dear You was due to the IMDA mandating that it be screened with a Mandarin dub, instead of its original Teochew, in line with Singapore's longstanding Speak Mandarin (and not dialect) campaign. This had some locals forced to cross the border to Johor to watch it undubbed, following which the authorities relented and allowed ten Teochew screenings, later extended to eighteen (and perhaps more) after overwhelming demand.

There are several pertinent observations that might be made here. To begin with, Singh's referencing a suggestion that the "emotive Teochew blockbuster" is (PRC) propaganda may be somewhat of a head scratcher, given that his Workers' Party had basically survived mostly due to former leader Low Thia Khiang hanging on to the Hougang constituency as his base, after Indian political legend and previous head J. B. Jeyaretnam had basically been bankrupted by LKY** and other PAP members*** (but that one is totally not racist, ah!). It is somewhat difficult to understand how a Workers' Party chief can suddenly be against "emotive Teochew propaganda" given that he frankly owes his position to it to some extent - just sayin'.


Didn't hear no complaints about dialects and ethnic loyalty then!


Secondly, it has also been noted that there has generally been no issue with movies being screened in whatever tongue here, whether French, Spanish, Korean or Japanese etc.; indeed, various languages from India/Bharat have been freely represented in local cinemas, where one can take their pick of Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu or Punjabi films (some of which, I gather, have to be touching cross-national family dramas too, such as Amitabh Bachchan's classic Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham), with entirely zero comment from anybody.

Thirdly, it is also entirely unclear as to why a Teochew film would be accused of being China propaganda, given that their promotion of (Standard) Mandarin over the literally hundreds of spoken dialects has generally been recognized (by the CCP's detractors, at least) to be a political device towards unification. From this reasoning, would not allowing the movie to be played - but only in Mandarin instead - be considered as being biased towards the CCP instead? Moreover, if two elderly women exchanging letters qualifies as "propaganda", what can one describe Captain America smashing up ethnically-ambiguous mobs while being literally wrapped in their flag, as?

While I had stated that China may have a lot to learn about effective propaganda ops some days back, let me just add that I still believe in fair play: it's just bad manners to directly call one's competitors out when they have put in the work to improve, and honestly this doesn't help one's own development!


Green appears their official shirt colour for some reason...
(Source: nikkei.com)


In any event, this grandma pen-pal flick has somehow been described by Lianhe Zaobao as possibly China's perfect propaganda film alongside a flurry of other denigratory articles, which might be a sign of arms getting seriously twisted on the media backend (refer discussions on the prior language-based divison in local media, from 2022 to 2023). This has extended to the deputy editor-in-chief of the SPH Chinese Media Group describing the movie as "cognitive warfare" attacking local multiracial identity, and Zaobao going as far as to suggest that it was part of United Front (统战) tactics. Wait, is this the bad old days of the 1950s Malayan Emergency revisited?

This by the way comes as our Senior Minister emphasized in Shanghai that Singapore's relationship with China is purely transactional and based on mutual self-interest, which suggests that the tussle over control is spreading right to the very top. The mainland Chinese media has certainly picked up on the issue, with Global Times claiming a twisting of narratives, and accusing critics of "inner demons" by drawing a contrast to Coco; why, it is asked, is Coco celebrated globally as a touching and uplifting story representing "universal feelings" for seeking ancestral roots, while Dear You is panned for "hidden intent"?

Then again, Great America is probably correct to be wary of the power balance in the region, from how the GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP has just requested an advance on South Korea's warship deliveries, with his Commerce Secretary raising concerns on whether China has acquired an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine from the Netherlands, both issues that had very coincidentally been raised here recently - but the U.S. angle will have to wait for once, even if this saga does smell like a classic Western-flavoured identity politics campaign.


Dialect was never a problem for this series either
[N.B. The Mandarin title (英雄无名) translates as "Heroes Nameless", which is clearly not the same as the English title of Ah Boys To Firemen - and doesn't even have a specific relation to firemen in particular. It may however reference a famous Gu Long wuxia novel (英雄无泪), the comic adaptation of which has been referenced multiple times here.]
(Source: r/singapore)


As a final remark before ending off, it could be noted that India and China have historically been the two largest civilizations through much of recorded history, and have accounted for more than half of the global population as recently as 1850, and still comprise over a third of the world today. Quite incredibly, across all those centuries, there has been next to no conflict**** between the two peoples, save for a couple of border skirmishes in the 1960s that ended with a few thousand dead - which should honestly qualify them as super best friends considering what has been going on elsewhere. The Chinese Foreign Minister's call for continued dialogue has by the way just come after America's admission that they will not let India develop into a rival like China, but one supposes that it will be entirely up to India as to how they want to play The Greatest Game...


[*On the Micron job ad discussed a while back, a follow-up probe has had the company deny authorizing it... which however does not appear to address whether actual recruitment had occurred through the posting.]

[**Who was no stranger to using dialect for votes.]

[***Quite ironically, the final straw was JBJ getting sued because he implied in the party newsletter that local Tamil MPs had not been sincere enough in their efforts to promote the Tamil language, so it appears unclear as to whether mother tongues (re: Teochew) should indeed be supported or not.]

[****Some part likely due to geography, on which more next time.]


[To be continued...]



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