April 16, 2022

On 16^th April 2010, in an interview with Emmy award-winning journalist Charlie Rose, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said: “The whole of our system is founded on a basic concept of meritocracy. You are where you are because you are the best man for the job, and not because of your connections or your parents or your relatives”.

In ‘Emerging class circles amid fading racial lines’, a chapter from Social Capital in Singapore (Routledge, 2020), Associate Professor Vincent Chua (NUS Department of Sociology), Dr Gillian Koh (NUS Institute of Policy Studies), Associate Professor Tan Ern Ser (NUS Department of Sociology) and Mr Drew Shih (formerly NUS Institute of Policy Studies) explain how while meritocracy has levelled the playing field and blurred ethnic lines for earlier cohorts of Singaporeans, new inequalities have emerged.

In Singapore, social cohesion is often cast as a racial problem rather than as a class problem. While class is often viewed as a natural outcome of meritocratic competition, race and religion are viewed as perpetually fragile and in need of constant management, given Singapore’s history of racial turmoil. In its present state, multiculturalism in Singapore has attained a generalised social harmony and tolerance between racial groups. However, inter-mixing happens more in the public domain such as in neighbourhoods and at workplaces, than in the more privatised domains of friendship and marriage.

The researchers found that about 40 to 60 per cent of ties with neighbours and co-workers are inter-ethnic. There is also a rising trend in inter-ethnic friendship and marriage ties among younger cohorts. However, inter-class contact is much less prevalent. The average network leans towards class exclusivity, where one’s contacts either hail mostly from elite or non-elite schooling backgrounds, public or private housing backgrounds, but seldom both. Therefore, while inter-ethnic ties have flourished under multiculturalism, inter-class ties seem to have declined from one cohort to the next.

Early meritocracy was able to bring people of different socio-economic backgrounds together in common settings such as in elite schools, producing a considerable amount of inter-class social mixing, particularly in early cohorts. However, as this meritocracy matured, the positions of the earlier winners and their offspring became more entrenched, and segregation by class grew in prominence.

In meritocratic societies, higher status individuals tend to hold negative views of their lower status counterparts. Meritocracy – the idea that rewards are based on intelligence and hard work – has resulted in promoting an unforgiving view that lower status individuals and groups are somehow deserving of their place. Elite circles are also marked by substantial barriers to entry, with people from less privileged backgrounds finding it difficult to understand cultural characteristics of the elite like taste and practices.

Marriage ties are often unions between equal status partners, reducing inter-class mixing. Streaming in schools may also stratify friendships according to academic ability. Overall, the findings point to an emergent social segregation pattern in Singapore based on the class factors of schooling and housing background.

Read the chapter here.