It’s been one of the best weeks that I’ve had in the insolvency business. The reason for this is simple, I am currently supervising the clearance of stock from various outlets of a retailer that we’re in the process of liquidating. This has kept me out of the office (I see offices as places where the impotent reside in order to get rid of what passes as sexual tension) and more importantly the experience of this job has introduced me to the world of the Chinese Karang Guni man.
Like the rest of Southeast Asia, Singapore’s economy is
dominated by ethnic Chinese businessmen. Like the Jews in Europe, the Chinese
in Southeast Asia learnt to operate across borders and the great fortunes in
this part of the world are from ethnic Chinese. The only difference that Singapore’s
ethnic Chinese business community and their regional counterparts is
that Singapore is only Chinese-Majority nation in the region and the only place
in this region where the Chinese are not persecuted.
These businessmen are primarily in what I’d call basic
businesses like supplying food, cloths and machinery bits. My former
father-in-law, Yong Koon is the prime example of this. Yong Koon built a small
business distributing eggs. He’d wake up in the morning, have breakfast, visit
his wholesaler and then go round the island distributing eggs. While his was
not one of the big fortunes, he managed to put two kids through to university
and the family car was a Mercedes. I remember telling Gina that the real hero
of her family was not her brother who worked as a government researcher but her
dad.
While the economy in this part of the world (including
Singapore) is run by small time Chinese businessmen, they are in fact despised
by the famously “pro-business” government. Our “patron founder,” Lee Kuan Yew,
who was an English-educated Peranakan (Straits Born Chinese) regarded the small
time Chinese businessman as a crude, backward lout who disrupted his view of
how the world should be. His contempt was clearly stated in his book where he
says, “We do not have entrepreneurs – we have traders.”
Mr. Lee spent the rest of his life trying to scrub out the
small Chinese businessman. The most obvious place to start was his war against
Chinese dialects, which was the language of the small Chinese businessman. I’m
old enough to remember campaigns telling kids to “Speak More Mandarin and Less
Dialect.” His personal vendetta against dialects reared its silly head in an
interview in 2006 when we were trying to break into the Arab market. Suddenly
someone said something about learning dialects and he went into a rant about
how the human brain was not able to absorb too many things. I’m old enough to
remember my army instructors telling us that we could be punished for speaking
dialect and that was perfectly acceptable.
Leaving aside issues of personal culture and identity, this
move cut Singapore’s business community from the rest of the region, where the
people did business with the people who spoke their dialects.
The official war against small time traders is also clear in
our official version of history. We are constantly reminded that we were a
backwater swamp before Lee Kuan Yew and his team came along. We were far from a
destitute place. We were a thriving “hub” (long before it became a fashionable
adjective) of regional commerce. Lee Kuan Yew did ensure that we could continue
to be one and improved on what was there but build it from zero – isn’t
accurate. There actually was an economy worth talking about, thanks to small
time Chinese “traders” (I think of the term as complimentary rather than
derogatory.)
When you look at Singapore today, it’s hard to argue against
Lee Kuan Yew and his policies. Our prosperity and standard of living is the
envy of many around the world, I include places like Europe and the US.
However, institutionalizing contempt for the small Chinese
businessman is clearly a mistake that we are now paying for. This is seen most
clearly in the current job market where retrenchments and pay cuts have become
a fact of life. Our people who have been brough up in the culture of the
“bureaucrat” have been trained to think that the only source of income and
survival is the steady job (preferably the office variety). This was all very
well when there were steady jobs. However, in an environment where steady jobs
are a rare commodity, our people are stuck because they’ve never had to look
for other sources of income beyond the steady job from an established
organization.
Had someone like Lee Kuan Yew been supportive of the culture
of the trader instead of the bureaucrat, we’d be in a better position. If we
people who thought like traders instead of bureaucrats, our people would have
been psychologically prepared for the bad times and found alternative sources
of income beyond the job from established organisations.
The “Ah Pehs in Bermudas,” who have bought the liquidated
company’s stock of sporting goods are traditional small traders who can survive
despite a rocky economic climate. They have a miraculously simple business
structure – a group of individuals who come together for a project and then go
their own way when the project is done. They keep overheads low and each
individual has their own market. So, not only are they selling the sporting
goods, they’ve also volunteered to take away the “rubbish” like used furniture
because someone from the network has a market for it?
These guys are good for society on a few levels. They make
their money without looking to the government or multinationals; hence they
don’t compete with others for precious jobs. They find ways of making their
money from recycling what many of us deem rubbish, which saves space at
landfills, thus being good for the environment. You’d imagine any government
with an iota of common sense would try to encourage these guys. Yet, our famously
“business friendly,” “smartest in the world,” government has decided that guys
who try and solve their own problems at a ground level are a nuisance. For
example if you get caught taking drinks cans from the trash bin to sell off,
guess what, the government will happily bust you for theft for having the
audacity to steal from the government and its big corporation partners.
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