Factionalism within the Chinese community in Calcutta had discernible impact on Chinese schools in the city. During the 1950s, the divisions were drawn based on support for either the Guomindang or the Communists, an outcome of the civil war within China that led to the establishment of Communist rule in Mainland China and the formation of the Guomindang government in Taiwan. Some in the Chinese community in Calcutta supported the Guomindang government, and others the People's Republic of China.

One episode mentioned in the Yindu Huaqiao shihua (1958: 35–6) that highlights not only the conflict between these two factions, but also the Indian government's delicate position in maintaining order among the Chinese population in Calcutta involved Li Weibin. A leading figure within the Calcutta Chinese community, Li Weibin had been involved in the founding of the local Chineselanguage newspaper called Yindu ribao, and also played an important role in the establishment of the Overseas Chinese School and the Zhongzheng School. For over twenty years, starting from 1936, he served as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Meiguang School. His involvement with the celebrations commemorating the ‘victory’ of Taiwan over the People's Republic of China in the conflict on Jinmen Island in the Taiwan Straits in September 1954 led to his detention by the Indian government.

The celebration took place at the Jiaying Huiguan on 10 October, a day also known as the ‘Double Ten Day’, which marked the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and is recognised as the national day of Taiwan. A lavish dinner was held to celebrate the two events. Li Weibin was one of the main organisers and delivered a ‘rousing’ speech at the celebration. Within one week there were rumours that he and two other key people involved in the celebrations would be arrested. At first, most people thought this was meant to intimidate the proGuomindang faction in the city. But, on the night of 30 October, the Calcutta police took Li Weibin into custody.

On 14 June 2010, the local Calcutta daily The Telegraph reported that the Peimei School had ‘stopped functioning following infighting in the city's Chinese community’. The newspaper noted that the school had not reopened since the Christmas vacation in 2009. A few weeks before the publication of this report, a video showing intense bickering among the members of community at the Peimei Schools was posted on YouTube. With the demise of this iconic institution of the Calcutta Chinese, it seems that factionalism within the community has sadly brought to an end the ninety-year history of Chinese-medium education in Calcutta.

Scholars working on India–China interactions have rarely focused on the history and experiences of the Chinese who began immigrating to India over two centuries ago. These immigrants from China also seldom feature in works that deal with the Chinese overseas. In fact, there are only two book-length studies on this topic, the first by the American scholar Ellen Oxfeld entitled Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong (1993), and the second called Chinois à Calcutta: Les Tigres du Bengale (1999) by a French researcher named Julien Berjeaut. In an introduction to a special issue of China Report entitled ‘Kolkata and China’ published in 2007, I lamented that very few Indian or Chinese researchers had undertaken in-depth studies of the Chinese community in India. Zhang Xing's examination of the Chinese- medium schools established by the Chinese community in Calcutta presented in this inaugural volume of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre's Research Series is a step toward addressing this lacuna.

After coming to India in several stages from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Chinese immigrants settled in Calcutta, Bombay, Darjeeling, Assam, Madras, and other cities and states of India. Engaging in carpentry, shoemaking, tannery, dentistry, laundry and, more recently, restaurant businesses, these Chinese quickly carved out their niches within Indian society. Their numbers reached about 27,000 in the mid-1950s (this figure does not include immigrants from the Tibet and Xinjiang regions of China), becoming one of the largest foreign migrant communities in India. Yet they are perhaps also, as Ellen Oxfeld pointed out in her study, the most marginalised minority groups in that country.

This marginalisation is evident in Calcutta, where the Chinese have mostly lived segregated from other ethnic groups. While this isolation, both self-imposed and induced by local cultural and social norms, has helped preserve their traditional Chinese cultural practices and languages, it has also limited their access to the Indian political, economic, and educational systems. The India–China conflict of 1962 was a watershed moment for the Chinese in India. Not only was their allegiance to India questioned by the Indian government, but several thousands were also interned and deported from India.

The early Chinese migrant community in Calcutta mostly consisted of workers who had received little or no education in China. Additionally, many did not understand the local Indian culture or even the languages. Under these circumstances, the role and impact of education for the Chinese in Calcutta was regarded as very important. The Chinese schools and their curricula served to preserve Chinese traditions and culture. At the same time, various events sponsored by the schools, such as operas, musical shows, films, and sports, contributed to interactions among different groups of Chinese and brought about cultural unity, despite the issues of political factionalism outlined above. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Chinese schools in Calcutta served hundreds of students, some of whom departed to China, while others remained in India. The goal of education was to facilitate the return of the Chinese living in Calcutta to China for further education and contributions to the ancestral homeland.

At the celebrations in 1942 marking the tenth anniversary of the re-establishment of the Meiguang School, Tan Xichang noted that it was not easy to establish schools for the Chinese overseas, especially where the immigrant population was not very large. Establishing a good school for the Chinese immigrant community, he explained, required adequate funds, qualified teachers, equipment, etc., which were difficult to procure from a small community. Despite these shortcomings, Tan Xichang emphasised that the community had to think about the future generations not only for the prospects of the community in Calcutta, but also for the expected contributions to their ancestral homeland (Yindu Jiacheng Meiguang xuexiao fuban shi zhounian jinian tekan 1942: 84–5). Similarly, Jiang Jianbai, an educationist and a representative of the Chinese government in India, pointed out that education was important for the construction of a nation. He hoped that the Chinese schools in Calcutta would remove illiteracy among the community by providing basic education to the children.

Goh's retirement from politics was announced on 19 August 1984, four months before general elections, and seven weeks short of his sixty-sixth birthday. A year later, he was decorated with the Order of Temasek (First Class), the country's highest award. He remained deputy chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore until 1992 and of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation until 1994. He was also chairman of the Singapore Totalisator Board from 1988 to 1995.

China's strongman Deng Xiaoping had visited Singapore in 1978, and according to his host Lee Kuan Yew, he went home convinced that the island state was worth studying in light of the reforms that were about to be unleashed in China (Lee 2000: 668). Goh was made Economic Advisor to the State Council of the People's Republic of China on the Development of the Special Economic Zones and Advisor on Tourism in1985. His role in the latter position was to give advice, more on how tourism could earn foreign exchange for China, than on developing tourist sites (Phua 2008). His conviction that foreign exchange was central to the economy was already evident in his first book, The Economic Front, and was behind much of his thinking when Singapore's financial system was constructed. Also evident early in his life was his concern with China's needs, as mentioned in his short essay “My Ambitions” written when he was barely a teenager.

He also brushed up on his Mandarin in later years.

In June 1946, soon after the Labour Party in Great Britain came to power, a Social Welfare Department was established in Singapore. This body, where Goh worked after returning with his family from Malacca following the fall of Japan, was initially concerned with distributing money to the post-war poor, and providing food for the destitute.

A committee was later formed at the department for the express purpose of conducting a first-ever social survey to determine the conditions under which Singaporeans were living. Goh was made supervisor for the project. Monie Sundram, an old schoolmate from the Anglo-Chinese School and Supervisor of Public Assistance at the department, who later became a lawyer; and Goh's old teacher, Silcock, were also involved in it (ACS Magazine Vol. XVII 1948: 48).

As reported in The Straits Times, the initial survey involving 500 households carried out in July/August that year revealed “the terrible state of overcrowding in Singapore homes, and the amazing diversity of family structure — ranging from a single man to a family of over 25 making up a household” (ST 23/11/ 47). The response in the survey was good, with only 16 refusals among the 500. This was partly due to the chosen tactic of avoiding questions on household incomes. The fear was that public suspicion that such information would be used for tax assessment would affect the participation rate (Department of Social Welfare 1947: 20).

Goh, with Sundram as secretary, took charge of the project's detailed planning and the training of staff, which included directing the Social Survey Group at Raffles College during the 1947–48 academic year (Annual Report 1947–48; Singapore Department of Social Welfare 1947: 21–22). About 100 students helped out in the survey. Half of these were from Raffles College's Economics Department, while the rest came from King Edward VII's College of Medicine, and Saint Andrew's School. (ST23/11/ 47). In recalling these matters years later, Silcock thought the project a major event for the school, and certainly for Goh.

As 1918 drew to a close, old and once-powerful empires in Europe and Asia Minor were drawing their last breath. Unbeknownst to victors such as the British, their empires too would not survive the Great War for long. New states were replacing them, and over the recently begun century more would emerge in all parts of the world. In East Asia, most significantly, China was still mired in the confusion caused by the fresh collapse of its millennia-old dynastic system. Japan, on the other hand, was moving from victory to victory, modernizing impressively and filling the power vacuum left by Europe's misfortunes.

On 6 October of that eventful and chaotic year, Goh Keng Swee was born to Goh Leng Inn and Tan Swee Eng in the historic town of Malacca on the Malay Peninsula.

Leng Inn was “an upright, frugal and hardworking” Methodist who in his bachelor days worked as a teacher at Singapore's Anglo-Chinese School. Swee Eng was a Peranakan like Leng Inn, and belonged to the affluent Tan family of Malacca. The couple were to have five children — two boys and three girls.

Goh Keng Swee was only two years old when his family moved to Singapore, where he attended the Anglo-Chinese Primary School in 1927–1932, and the Anglo-Chinese Secondary School in 1933–1936.* He showed a talent for music, playing the piano and learning the accordion on his own.

Since the Goh family lived far from town on the Pasir Panjang Rubber Estate, the children relied on a chartered bus for transport to school. This they shared with the children of Leng Inn's closest friend, Kwa Siew Tee, who lived down the road from them. Siew Tee's daughter, Geok Choo, would later become Mrs Lee Kuan Yew.

One month before Dr Ooi Kee Beng delivered his manuscript to the publisher, Dr Goh Keng Swee breathed his last.

Dr Goh's death triggered an interesting phenomenon in Singapore. On the one hand, a profusion of tributes to the great man, from high and low, arose from many who had worked with him or, as contemporaries, were familiar with his achievements. Yet, at the other end of the age-spectrum, say, among the under- 40s, there was bemused surprise at that outpouring of acclaim.

A sign of collective amnesia among the younger half of the citizenry? Not really. They just may not have learned of Dr Goh, for reasons that are suggested below; or their ears did not prick up when his name or accomplishments earlier came up.

One reason is that Dr Goh was out of the public eye for some 15 years or more before his death. He did his job, retired, and had a clean break with politics. During his years of active service, Dr Goh's mission, as the book demonstrates in unmistakable terms, was to throw himself wholeheartedly into the tasks at hand. Not for him the development of a personality cult. He did not obsess over what the history books might want to say about him. He knew that his actions and their results spoke for themselves. And he understood the ancient Roman maxim: Sic transit gloria mundi.

The second reason that the younger generation may not have come up to speed on Dr Goh is the palpable state of the teaching of history in schools. Maybe, steps are now being taken to improve the situation. Time will tell. Perhaps the timeliness of publication of this book, so soon after Dr Goh left this earthly world, will stimulate interest among Singaporeans not only in its subject matter, but our nation's history.