Someone sent me an Instagram post this week from a GP tuition account called Classicle Club, teasing an essay about “Chinese privilege” in Singapore. The caption asks if the concept is an American import, and if that makes it wrong. It asks if the Chinese of this island are the equivalent of white settlers with sun hats and rifles. It says every country keeps its racism differently, and that Singapore keeps its racism inside one enigmatic two-word phrase everyone deploys and nobody defines.
I know the phrase. Everyone who grew up here knows the phrase. Racial harmony. It’s printed on posters, recited at assembly, invoked the second anyone brings up race in a way that isn’t a Racial Harmony Day costume. I’ve watched it get used as a conversation-ending device more times than I can count. Someone raises something that happened to them because they’re not Chinese, and the phrase arrives like a hand over the mouth. Not now. Not like this. You’ll wreck the harmony.
Before I go further, I want to name something about the source, because it matters for how much weight to put on the essay itself. Classicle Club is run by a General Paper tutor who built a following on TikTok and now sells this “archive” of essays for 95 dollars, marketed as the answer key to modern Singapore. In 2023 she was caught having lifted over 70 percent of a personal essay, on eating disorders, from thirteen different authors without credit. She admitted it. I’m not bringing this up to be cruel about a young business owner’s mistake three years ago. I’m bringing it up because I went looking for the actual essay behind that Instagram post and couldn’t read it. It’s paywalled. What’s public is a marketing caption dressed as provocation, written to sell a product to eighteen-year-olds who need to sound clever in an exam. That doesn’t mean the underlying question is fake. It means I’m not going to build an argument on top of someone else’s locked PDF. I’m building it on the actual public record.
So here’s the actual public record, and here’s where I land, as someone who is Singaporean and not Chinese.
The term “Chinese privilege” wasn’t lifted from America and bolted onto Singapore. It was coined here, by Sangeetha Thanapal, an Indian Singaporean writer, around 2014. She borrowed the structure of Peggy McIntosh’s “invisible knapsack” essay on white privilege, the idea of unearned advantages so ambient that the people carrying them don’t notice the weight. Whether the framework works for Singapore is a real fight among people who study this for a living, not a settled import you can dismiss by pointing at its passport. Terence Chong and Daniel Goh, both serious scholars, wrote a rejoinder in 2020 arguing the term gets used as a shortcut for what is actually political privilege, the advantage of belonging to the party that has run the country since 1959, and that collapsing the two makes for bad analysis. Humairah Zainal and Walid Jumblatt Abdullah, who they were responding to, hold that ethnic and political privilege in Singapore are so entangled you can’t cleanly separate them. Sai Siew Min, a historian, has made a more careful point still: Chinese privilege here is not a clean copy of white privilege abroad, because of how state authoritarianism, mother-tongue policy, and the CMIO system itself do work that the American analogy doesn’t capture.
That’s the part I want to sit with, because it’s the part that gets flattened every time this argument happens on the internet. CMIO. Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other. Every Singaporean is sorted into one of these four boxes at birth, on the identity card, inherited through the father’s line. This isn’t ambient culture, the way race operates in a lot of the West. It’s administrative. It’s load-bearing. It decides your assigned mother tongue in school, whether you’re eligible to buy or sell a flat in a given HDB block under the Ethnic Integration Policy, whether you can stand in a Group Representation Constituency election as the minority candidate a slate is required to field, whether you were the reason the 2017 presidential election was reserved for Malay candidates only, after DPM Shanmugam framed a Malay president, Chinese PM, and Indian Chief Justice as the visible proof the system was working as designed.
Depending on who’s arguing, that same machinery gets read two completely different ways. One read: this is the state actively engineering against Chinese dominance, quotas and reserved elections built specifically to stop the 74 percent majority from swallowing everything, proof the government takes minority protection seriously enough to legislate it. The other read: the fact that this machinery has to exist at all, permanently, as a kind of life support system bolted onto every housing estate and every election, is itself the evidence. You don’t need scaffolding to protect a group from a threat that isn’t structurally real. Malay and Indian Singaporeans don’t get reserved elections and ethnic quotas because the numbers naturally sort themselves fairly. They get them because they don’t.
I don’t think the settler comparison in that Instagram caption holds up, and I’ll say so plainly instead of hedging around it. Chinese Singaporeans are overwhelmingly descended from nineteenth and twentieth century labour migrants, not a colonising metropole sending administrators to govern people already here. The racial hierarchy that put Chinese Singaporeans on top wasn’t authored by them. It was built by the British, who ran the Straits Settlements on a stratified colonial logic and left it standing when they exited. What happened after independence is that the hierarchy got inherited, and in a lot of ways, reinforced rather than dismantled, by a government that was itself Chinese-majority and that made explicit demographic choices, like liberalising immigration for East Asian arrivals in the 1980s specifically to keep the racial balance from shifting away from Chinese. That’s a different story than settler colonialism. It’s also not a story where anyone gets to say nothing happened.
What I actually want to say to Chinese Singaporeans reading this, and I mean this as someone who has sat through the sports-commentator version of racism in America and the mum version here, and thinks the mum version is the one that actually needs unpacking, is that “Chinese privilege” existing doesn’t mean any individual Chinese Singaporean’s life has been easy, or that PAP hegemony and ethnic privilege are the same thing, or that Thanapal’s framework survives contact with Singapore’s specifics without modification. All of that can be true and it still doesn’t get you out of the conversation. The instinct is always to reach for the two-word phrase the second the conversation gets uncomfortable. I’d ask you to notice that instinct the next time it fires, and sit in the discomfort for one more sentence before you reach for it.
The essay behind the Instagram teaser might make some of these points too. I can’t tell you, because it costs 95 dollars and I’m not paying a plagiarism-adjacent TikTok tutor to read her marketing copy in full. The argument doesn’t need her. It was already here, made by people with names you can look up, for over a decade.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Da6yzTHjf10/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
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