Marginalization, ‘Lee Kuan Yew’, and a Chinese-educated class: Understanding the collective memory of Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign

Abstract The Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC) was launched in Singapore in 1979, promoting Mandarin among the Chinese population. An emerging prevalent narrative blames the SMC in terms of causing Chinese cultural erosion. This article seeks to understand how and why this monolithic discourse has emerged. We do this by tracing Mandarinization as a transnational ideology originating from China’s founding as a republic. We draw on life history interviews with eleven individuals born between 1940 and 1966. Informants recount engagements with the SMC, from alignment to nonchalance, and fear of resistance. Accounts often invoked ‘Lee Kuan Yew’ as a chronotope, representing the sociopolitical circumstances of Singapore in the 1970s–80s. We argue that the current discourse surrounding the SMC might be theorized as a form of collective memory. It emerges from and is sustained by conflating prominent language policies with a perceived sense of the state’s oppression and marginalization of a Chinese-educated class. (Collective memory, collective remembering, Mandarin policy, Speak Mandarin Campaign)