May 19, 2023

The Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre was officially opened on 19 May 2017, with the express mission to nurture Singapore Chinese culture and enhance social harmony. On the academic front, however, Associate Professor Xu Lanjun (NUS Chinese Studies) argues that there is a lack of knowledge in Chinese Studies about non-elite cultures. Specifically, the study of Chinese-language cultures in Singapore and Malaya tends to focus on elite cultures, not popular culture. Her project ‘Chinese Popular Cultures in Post-War Singapore and Malaya (1945–1965)’ aims to remedy the lack of academic research undertaken in the realm of popular or non-elite Chinese culture in the post-war period.

In this project, Xu seeks to preserve Chinese language cultural heritage by cataloguing records of Chinese popular culture from the post-war years in Singapore and Malaya into an online database. She identifies storytelling, street opera, pop music, folk artists, performance troupes, pulp fiction, entertainment magazines, mosquito papers and tabloids as non-elite media forms which have not been well-documented or researched thus far. The proposed database would include scans of printed materials, video and audio recordings, and oral histories. The scope of the project goes beyond Mandarin Chinese to include Chinese dialect cultures as well.

Xu hopes that the collection and availability of Chinese language popular culture materials in post-war Singapore and Malaya will encourage researchers to generate new knowledge and insights into non-elite cultures.

In addition to creating an online database of primary sources for others to consult, the project thus contributes to global academic understandings of the media, meanings, and values through which post-war Chinese language popular culture in the region was disseminated and consumed.