Do all white people think that Singapore is in China?

Hi there everyone, I am sure you have seen the clip that has gone viral when TikTok CEO Chew Shou-Zi was asked repeatedly by US Senator Tom Cotton if he was a citizen of China and if Chew had any links to the Chinese Communist Party. That clip went viral because Cotton was seemingly oblivious to the huge mistake he was making - he thought that by simply asking the same question again and again in a very aggressive manner, he would get the answer he wanted but Chew performed super well under pressure and kept his cool. Cotton didn't seem to realize that Singapore wasn't a part of China and that if Chew was a Singaporean, then he could not partake in Chinese politics as you had to be a citizen of China to join the CCP. One needs to note that a lot of the criticisms of Cotton came from within the US, as many Americans accused him of being blatantly racist and ignorant - that he simply didn't know or care that Singapore was not a part of China, that Cotton simply didn't know enough about the different countries of Asia. Hence as I am a British-Chinese person naturally I have some thoughts about the matter as an Asian person living in a European country. 

Cotton wasn't well prepared for the senate hearing.

If I knew that I had an important meeting coming up, I'd make sure I prepare well for it - it's the same way I would have studied hard for an exam or a test if I knew it was very important. This was evidently not the case with Cotton because he had arrived there with one theory and he was going to bludgeon it through whether or not it proved to be right. He arrived at that hearing with one sole purpose - which was to accuse Chew of working for the CPP and he didn't have a plan B, he was simply going to repeat himself and get more and more aggressive until he got the answer he wanted. That's not a very intelligent way to try to get what you want - it strikes me as being unsophisticated, blunt and woefully unintelligent. Even a police officer interrogating a suspect after an arrest would try a more sophisticated tactic than simply saying, "admit you did it, you committed the crime, tell me you did it, I know you did it." Such a simple line of questioning allows the suspect to offer a simple response, "no, I told you already, I did not do it." However, the police officer could then use a different tactic to test if the suspect is telling the truth, "could you tell me where you were between 8 pm and 9 pm last Monday evening? Do you have an alibi?" Now if I worked for Cotton and I had to help him prepare for this important  hearing, I would probably go into the structure of TikTok and Bytedance so he would turn up well informed, he would then at least be taken seriously as someone who has clearly done his homework rather than a racist clown who can't be asked to do any research for that hearing. I would then draw links between the parent company in China and how working for TikTok has made Chew immensely wealthy; so rather than directly accusing him of working for the CCP, I would demonstrate how Chew's loyalty to a company that is closely linked to the CCP in China has made him very rich in the process - thus regardless of whether or not Chew is a citizen of China, Singapore or the USA, it is his relationship with the parent company that puts Chew in a position that would make him far more likely to do what the CCP wants as he has such a strong financial incentive to the CCP. Now that's something Chew would never admit to and the onus was then on Cotton to make a strong argument that this was the case, but no, Cotton was way too lazy to even try to do that. Cotton went into battle woefully unprepared or even worse, he is so naïve about the task at hand that he didn't realize just how much preparation he had to do for it. Either way, this reflects very poorly on him as a man who is bad at his job.  

Surely Chew could have explained the difference between Singapore and China to Cotton? 

Even if he had tried, I doubt Cotton was in the mood to listen to anything Chew had to say. Cotton rarely allowed Chew to finish his sentences and kept interrupting him. The fact is Cotton was only prepared to listen to what he wanted to hear and anything else was a lie to be swept aside, therefore trying to explain anything to him at that stage would have been futile - Chew chose to next best option which was to allow everyone else to work out two pieces of information that was evident from that exchange: firstly, that Cotton was an ignorant idiot who didn't know what he was talking about and secondly, that as a Singaporean, Chew couldn't participate in politics in China. The latter is evident to most people who have some knowledge and understanding of how things work in China, you don't need to be some kind of expert in Chinese politics in order to understand that. You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink - hence it would have been so futile trying to explain anything to Cotton given that he was totally unaware of just how he had messed up. 

Are white people really that dumb about geography? 

Let's not get racist about this - generally, the majority of people are quite stupid regardless of their skin colour. I'm off to Kazakhstan next week and you'd be amazed the number of people who have never ever heard of this country before or would only make some lame Borat reference to it as that's all they have ever heard about Kazakhstan. I'm from Singapore and can tell you that Singaporeans are equally stupid and ignorant when it comes comes to countries far away from Singapore. So by that token, whilst an American may think that Singapore is in China, a Singaporean may not be able to locate Memphis or Baltimore on  a map of the United States. It often boils down to whether or not that information is important or relevant to their everyday lives: So for example, a very working class person working as a primary school teaching assistant would never need to know facts about Kazakhstan because they're unlikely to ever need to travel there for work and they would not be able to to travel long haul for an exotic holiday like that. However, a businessman who has clients from all over the world would make it his business to learn about all the countries where he can potentially make a lot of money and thus he would take the time and effort to learn about Kazakhstan. So some people clearly have an incentive to learn about the countries around the world if there is some form of reward for them to acquire that knowledge whilst for the others, if it is just not that relevant or useful to them then they will simply not bother at all. We tend to spend more time and effort to acquire knowledge that will be very useful to us and for most people, that means there are no consequences for being really terrible at geography as they simply don't need that information for their everyday lives. You may judge them for being ignorant but the fact is, they are going to get away with it regardless. The irony is that for Cotton, his job definitely required him to learn about China, Singapore, TikTok and Bytedance for that hearing, he really needed a lot of knowledge that day but he simply didn't bother to even try to do any research prior to that hearing and he really could have just asked one of his aides to prepare a brief for him to read, so he would have been able to head into that hearing a lot more well-informed, but alas, he failed to do that. Most people don't need to know all that information, but Cotton desperately needed it. So this is not just a case of being stupid or ignorant, it is a man who can't be asked to do his job properly and anyone of any skin colour, nationality or ethnicity can be guilty of that. 

But Singapore is one of the world's most important, famous cities, there's no excuse for ignorance. 

I am going to be objective about this and turn this around: in the US, people who are generally well educated and good with geography will know about Singapore. But these people are in the minority and that should come as no surprise as the same rule applies in every country. However in Singapore, every single person down to the most uneducated idiot knows about Singapore as they live there, they were born there, that's just their country: hence it is not a fair comparison. The same division also exists in Singapore between the well educated, well informed individuals who are in the minority and the great unwashed working class masses who are woefully ignorant. That's the same situation in every single country in the world - it is just shocking that one would expect an American senator to belong to the "well educated, knowledgeable" category but clearly in this case, he came across as woefully ignorant and stupid. I need to point out though that this is a sample size of one and whilst we can talk about Cotton, we should not make any generalizations about Americans in general based on this one person. When I meet people, I generally try to test them to see which category I should place them in: are they intelligent and well informed or stupid and ignorant? But here's the thing, I don't expect most people I meet here to know anything about Singapore unless they have had reason to go there or have some kind of connection to Singapore - as long as they say, "I don't know anything about Singapore", that's fine by me because that's an honest admission. But what pisses me off is when people try to use some kind of knowledge of Singapore to try to impress me, that usually has the total opposite effect. For example, I once encountered this woman who told me, "I met someone at university who was from Singapore, her name was Christine Lim". And my reaction was, there are well over five million people in Singapore, what are the chances of me actually knowing this woman you met at university? What was the point of sharing that piece of information with me? If you wanna talk to me about Singapore, then by all means ask me questions about Singapore if you know little or nothing about Singapore. But allow me to make it clear: I'm never irked by people who know nothing about Singapore because I don't expect them to know anything about Singapore. But the irritation occurs often as a result of poor social skills, rather than any malice or racism. So the woman who met this Christine Lim at university; no she wasn't a racist, she was just an idiot and there's a big difference. 

Have I ever encountered this kind of racism before? 

Well, it is very rare to encounter the kind of blatant racism which is "like f*ck off back to China you f*cking dirty slit eyed chink", I am not saying it doesn't exist but it is very rare. For a private citizen like myself, I can choose whom I work with, whom I socialize with, whom I talk to and spend time with and so I can quite easily exclude people whom I think are ignorant, bigoted or stupid. But someone working in a customer service role, for example, a shop assistant in the mall, now that person has no idea who is going to walk into the store next and whom they're going to have to deal with next and that hugely increases the chances of them encountering an evil racist. They might have a peaceful day at work or a really difficult day, they can only hope for the best whilst expecting the worst. Thus I know I am in a position of privilege and I don't take that for granted. What I encounter a lot more are assumptions that people make, not out of malice or bigotry but out of sheer ignorance and poor social skills. The key difference here is the absence of malice - I know they said something stupid because they're idiots, not because they hate me and really wanted to offend or upset me. An example of this is when I tell someone I am from Singapore and their reflex action is to sing praises of how wonderful Singapore is, based on the assumption that this would please me and I would respond favourably to that. Now don't get me wrong, I always judge Singapore very fairly - there are both good and bad things about Singapore, however, I don't like it when anyone would assume that I must be 100% loyal to Singapore and would always like to hear others sing praises of the country where I was born. Instead of making that assumption, why not just ask me an open ended question like, "as someone who grew up in Singapore, what do you think about the government of Singapore?" That would allow me to then share my knowledge, experiences and opinions on the topic; that would in turn lead to a rather interesting conversations about my feelings about Singapore as someone who knows the country very well - contrast that to someone saying, "Singapore has the best government in the world!" to me with the expectation that this statement would really please me. Thus this example is more a case of someone with poor social skills making a wrongful assumption that irked me but is it racism? No there was no malice involved, it was a poor attempt at establishing rapport.

Have you heard people say ridiculous things about Singapore that were plain wrong? 

Oh yeah, it's not just from white people. I have a friend from the North-East of China who was very surprised that I spoke Mandarin, because he had assumed initially that Singaporeans would speak English but not know how to speak Mandarin even if some of us have ancestors from China. When I told him that he could speak to me in Mandarin, he said, "I thought that Singaporeans might speak something like Cantonese instead but not Mandarin." Another assumption a French friend made was that Singapore was an hideously expensive place to live and that was from a person who has never visited, he didn't realize that the majority of Singaporeans are ordinary working class folks living in modest HDB flats who shop locally at their local NTUC supermarkets where everything is very reasonably priced whilst the kind of crazy rich Asians who live in outrageously luxurious penthouses and spend a small fortune each time they go shopping are in fact in the minority. Another British person I met at an event assumed that all Singaporeans are very highly educated and I had to tell him that this wasn't the case at all, instead you get the full range of the very best scholars to the most uneducated idiots and everything in between, just like any other country - he admitted that his opinion was perhaps somewhat biased as he had met some very bright Singaporeans students when he was studying at Oxford but he had never actually visited Singapore before, so he was working with a very small sample size, consisting of the top Singaporean students who had made it to Oxford. Oh and there's this Filipino guy who irritates me so much because he thinks that he is being funny by adding the word 'lah' at the end of every sentence he says to me as if it would somehow make me laugh when really, that's not how Singlish works. Then there's Canadian who assumed that I would like the hot weather and hate the cold weather because Singapore is a tropical country, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Singapore may have a very hot climate but the locals spend so much money on air-conditioning to cool down their buildings to avoid sweating rather than embrace that tropical heat. I also met this Malaysian woman once who assumed that all Singaporeans loved the PAP, especially Lee Kuan Yew. Now I can see that as a Malaysian-Chinese, she probably wished she had a more efficient government when she was growing up and things got so bad for her in her home state that she left Malaysia to work in the UK. She was extremely shocked when she learnt that I wasn't a fan at all of the PAP and had mixed feelings about LKY - she thought I would've practically worshipped him, like some kind of Chinese deity. 

I noticed you included a lot of nationalities in that list of anecdotes above. 

Yes, I did that quite deliberately - I wanted to show that people from China, France, the UK, the Philippines, Canada, even Malaysia all have misconceptions of Singapore which were either based on them generalizing from a small sample size (as in the case of the man who met Singaporean students whilst studying at Oxford), something they saw in the media (such as the case of the French friend who watched the movie Crazy Rich Asians) or even just assuming that Singaporeans would agree with their view of the world (such as the Malaysian woman who was a massive fan of LKY). It is clear to me when I share these case studies where they have gone wrong but the common theme is that none of them have any malice to try to mock Singapore or insult Singaporeans, even if they didn't know what they were talking about. My point is that a lot of people out there don't know anything about Singapore but by the same token, that doesn't mean that they have any malicious intent to mock Singapore - they simply have massive gaps in their knowledge due to their lack of education.. There are a lot of Singaporeans who would assume that white people are inherently racist towards Asians and would seize upon the Cotton vs Chew case as evidence of this racism when really, I want to be the voice of reason here. Yes there are a lot of uneducated, stupid and ignorant people as well as those with terrible social skills out there I am afraid, but there are actually very few racists - I understand the key differences between these two categories. 

Why do so many Singaporeans/Asians assume the worst of white people being racist then? 

Allow me to explain it like this: a lot of people will go into panic mode and assume everything is very dangerous when they lack the knowledge of what they are doing. A simple example of this is when I tried to teach my parents how to use a microwave oven back in the 1990s, remember they didn't grow up with this technology so it was all completely new to them and very confusing. My mother was afraid that if she pressed the wrong button, the microwave would detonate like a nuclear bomb and cause a massive explosion that would instantly kill everyone in the neighbourhood - yeah right. This was of course impossible but because my mother didn't understand how microwave oven worked, she assumed the very worst. I had to assure her that the worst case scenario was some overcooked food, the microwave oven wasn't a dangerous bomb waiting to be detonated. Yet my mother felt that there was a risk of this massive explosion because she didn't know what she was doing, rather than because there was any real danger of that happening. Likewise, when I took my nephew skiing a few years ago, my mother imagined the very worst case scenario of my nephew getting killed in various ways like freezing to death after getting lost in the mountains, skiing off a cliff or being buried in an avalanche. This is all because my mother knows nothing about skiing and how tightly regulated it is as an activity - in a ski resort, there are rules and I enrolled my nephew in a class with a highly qualified instructor, so he was able to learn skiing in a very safe environment with absolutely no risk of any serious accidents. I even met his ski instructor and after chatting for a while with that ski instructor, I knew my nephew was in very good hands. So I just told my nephew to be a good student, pay attention and do as he was told - of course, my mother didn't have any knowledge of any of this. So her perception of the risk my nephew was exposed to when skiing was based on her ignorance, whilst my confidence of how little risk my nephew was taking was based on my knowledge: that's why we have such complete opposite reactions. I could go on but my point is that people always assume the very worst when they simply don't have the knowledge of a topic - so when I told people that I was off to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on holidays, those who have no idea where on earth those countries are would come up with dumb questions like, oh is it dangerous there? Now that question isn't based on any real information of those countries, in fact all they could think of was, "sounds like Afghanistan, it ends with a 'stan' - that sounds dangerous." It is once again an assumption made on the basis of ignorance rather than knowledge. 

I have lived in Europe since 1997, I have worked in a number of European countries and speak a few European languages to a very high standard. In terms of doing business with white European people, I have a wealth of knowledge and experience that enables me to do what I do really well and that's something that the vast majority of Singaporeans will never have, given that they have never had the opportunities to live and work in Europe the way I have, nor have they learnt as many European language as I have. Thus there is a similarity with that situation with my mother worrying that the microwave oven would blow up like a nuclear bomb, they have no idea what they are dealing with so they are simply going to assume the very worst. The reasons why they assume the very worst is probably down to their pessimism as well as a lack of faith in their own ability. So let's look at a hypothetical situation: imagine it is Monday morning and your boss calls you the moment you wake up and says, "it is an emergency. I need your help." Your colleague Tom was supposed to pick up the important French client at the airport this morning but Tom has just called in sick, so the boss needs you to pick up the French client from Paris instead. Tom will email you all the information about this account shortly, but until then, you know absolutely nothing about this French client. So how you feel about this situation may depend a lot more on your abilities rather than the French client per se in the complete absence of any information: if like me, you speak French fluently at native standard and have lived in Paris, then you would feel very confident about the task that you have been given. But if you don't speak French, know nothing about France, never been to France and have never ever met a French person in your life before, then you would feel very nervous about being asked to step in for Tom. This nervous pessimism is mostly due to your lack of ability and confidence to do a task like that, rather than because of anything to do with this mysterious French client that we know nothing about. By the same token, my mother was nervous about using the microwave oven because she was uneducated and knew absolutely nothing about how it worked - it had nothing to do with the microwave oven posing any kind of real danger in the kitchen. Hence a lot of Singaporeans are in this situation: they assume the worst about white people being racist due to a complete lack of knowledge and experience when it comes to interacting with white people. Note that it has nothing to do with white people actually being racist but we are still left with the same perception of white people being racist because most Asian people will not blame themselves for being inadequate, when it comes to dealing with white people. 

So unfortunately, whilst Senator Cotton is clearly a very lazy idiot who can't be asked to put more effort into his job, I am worried that this unpleasant incident is only going to fuel more racism in Singapore as some Singaporeans are going to use this as justification that white people are inherently racist and hate Asian people. The truth is a lot more complex and even if Cotton was racist (he has a track record of saying very offensive things and has been accused of racism in the past), this is only a small part of a more complex picture in this discourse about racism in our modern society. I'm also acutely aware of just how racist Singaporeans can be towards white people as well - after all, it's not just white people who are capable of being so racist. But what do you think? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.