Introduction

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2019 has affected the quality of life of individuals all over the world. The direct effects include being infected by the virus, whether asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or being severely ill and even loss their life. Family suffering, financial loss, and the inability of health facilities to accommodate the rapidly rising cases have aggravated the misery of those being exposed to the virus.

The indirect effects are experienced through various health protocols, including restrictions on population mobility and universal face masking to limit the spread of the virus. These indirect effects may influence people's livelihood, day-to-day behaviour, and mental health. The vulnerable groups (such as the poor, older persons, pregnant women, and persons with disabilities) may suffer much more, facing difficult choices between being exposed to the virus by continuing their usual daily activities or going hungry by staying at home and losing their income.

Among these vulnerable groups, older persons with a hearing disability may suffer more. Policies to curb the spread of infection bring difficulties in face-to-face communication for persons with hearing disabilities (Sher et al. 2020). The mask muddles sound and hides the movement of the lip (Trecca et al. 2020; Huzlen and Fabry 2020). Physical distancing also prevents people with hearing disabilities from communicating well with others as distance reduces the clarity of voice (Huzlen and Fabry 2020). Furthermore, restriction on meeting other persons physically results in having fewer opportunities to obtain assistance in daily conversation.

Therefore, older persons with hearing disabilities are much more precarious, vulnerable and marginalized than others during the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenges are accentuated in the absence of affordable effective hearing aids and limited or even non-existence of sign language.

Nevertheless, hearing disability during the pandemic is one of the most often neglected topics in research and policymaking, although the disability has far-reaching consequences on the quality of life (Nuesse et al. 2021), prosperity of the community, and government policies (WHO 2021; McDaida et al. 2021). This study examines the magnitude and prevalence of hearing disability among older persons, their demographic diversity and hearing disability impacts on the quality of life.

Breaking Racial Divides

The durability of class privileges in Singapore and the Federation was not totally divorced from the imprints of race. Upon Yusof's appointment as the Yang di-Pertuan Negara, the PAP government trumpeted the idea that he was to be a symbol of unity for all of Singapore, not a parochial figure for any racial community. During the installation ceremony, Lee emphatically broadcasted to the residents and citizens of Singapore that Yusof as Yang di-Pertuan Negara “symbolises all of us”. The Yang di-Pertuan Negara, as a national symbol, was therefore meant to transcend race. It is important to note that in the historical context, the difference between race or the physical colour of one's skin, and ethnicity, which connotes the cultural practices beyond the biological referent, was not a relevant distinction. As a legacy of colonial knowledge, the historical actors in late colonial Singapore viewed race as a marker which carried social meaning and was a signifier of cultural attributes. It was also an opaque cloak which obscured deeper structural issues stemming from class contentions, or the social relations of economic production.

This message of transcending racial divisions subdued the status quo of colonial society in two ways. The first could be characterized

by a “horizontal” movement. Under colonial rule, the British governed racial communities of Malaya separately, resulting in racialized division of labour and disparate socio-economic outcomes between different racial communities. British officials hardly gave any consideration to the formation of a post-racial sense of fraternity to bond their colonial subjects, at least before the Second World War. The Malayan-born Yang di-Pertuan Negara was thus a corporeal symbol of transition into a more cohesive society. In his speech during Yusof's installation ceremony, the Singaporean prime minister was mindful of how class issues had become potently racialized:

The PAP government aimed to eradicate communalism in Singapore. It recognized that the gulf between the socio-economic realities of Singapore’s racial communities turned the already visible racial divides material.

The study of Malay political culture has always fascinated me. This is somewhat an awkward situation: the rajas, along with their attendant pomp and pageantry, kindle and tickle the imagination of this individual of middle-class background who has spent almost his entire life in a republic. As I have come to comprehend, the notion of hierarchy, subordination and deference occurs everywhere and subjects everyone, from the family institution to the grandest platforms of international politics. Such is the condition of human society.

When I was a student in the Departments of History and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS), I had the opportunity to critically explore this human condition. I delved into research on the political culture in Singapore and Malaysia, unpacking the creative efforts to resurrect precolonial kerajaan elements to serve the interests of imperial and post-imperial regimes. This led to an earlier iteration of this book in the form of my Master of Arts thesis in 2019. That year also coincided with two milestone anniversaries in Singapore: the bicentennial commemoration of the island's “founding” by Sir Stamford Raffles and the 60-year mark of the PAP's rise to power. Officials urged Singaporeans to treat 2019 as an opportune moment to assess the nation's journey and contemplate on its future. The thesis was a response to those calls.

Since then, the thesis has been augmented, enhanced and refined into this monograph, having benefitted from further research undertaken during my time as a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge. Recent historiographical debates on decolonization and the Commonwealth have also enriched this project. With these additions, this book has become more than just an account of Singapore's national history—it is a critical analysis of international hierarchies, class divisions and racial inequalities during the global age of decolonization. These issues continue to haunt contemporary life today, and thus this book contains the reflections of one historian about his own present.

The origins of this edited volume stem from a two-day online webinar series on Managing Demographic Change in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Issues amidst the ‘New Normal’, which was held from 19–20 November 2020 and hosted by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute.

At that time, the COVID-19 coronavirus had already spread throughout many parts of the world, and the situation declared a pandemic. It was something that many people had not experienced before, especially its wide-reaching global nature. Few communities, if any, were spared the impact of the pandemic. Within the span of a year, the pandemic not only claimed thousands of lives, but also closed international borders, disrupted air travel between countries and devastated the livelihood of countless others in societies all around the world.

The abovementioned workshop, therefore, not only provided a timely and important platform for a dialogue on the complex and multifaceted demographic issues emerging across Southeast Asia, but also connected them to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic on various communities and the lived experiences of many persons living in the region.

By 2022, however, it seems that the pandemic has been gradually receding. With increasing numbers of persons having been vaccinated against the COVID-19 coronavirus, many countries are gradually reopening with the resumption of international travel. Although there is more progress to be made in the fight against the pandemic, there has been a growing but cautious sense of hope that perhaps the worst is over. Many countries in Southeast Asia have reopened their borders with the recognition that the virus is considered “endemic” as part of a broader narrative of the “new normal” in a post-COVID-19 world.

This edited volume is, then, an important scholarly response to discussing the outcomes and potential futures that will result from such a “new normal”. Combining selected papers from the abovementioned webinar series, along with invited authors, a key theme that has emerged is the concept of precarity and its relationship with various populations throughout Southeast Asia. With the ongoing realities of social inequality and cultural diversity that many societies face, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the uncertainties that many encounter in all aspects of everyday life.

On 3 December 1959, the recently elected government of Singapore successfully installed Yusof bin Ishak as the first Malayan-born Yang di-Pertuan Negara. After over a century of British colonialism and a brief interlude of Japanese rule, the island state entered a new era of self-government, even as it waited for an uncertain reunion with the Federation of Malaya. The gaudy rhetoric, visuals and styles that accompanied the representative of the British Crown produced an atmosphere of a nationalist revolution, a rupture from the colonial order. Singapore was on the precipice of the new and unknown, a threshold of change and transformation. The talismanic vigour of the Yang di-Pertuan Negara represented a “Malayan” nation emerging from the obsolete era of imperial domination.

But underneath the grand parading of national sovereignty, Singapore was still in limbo. The island remained trapped in a colonial purgatory, in a liminal zone where states were denied sovereign equality and kept in an imperial system under the enduring dominion of Britain. In this “new” Singapore, the Yang di-Pertuan Negara was also exalted as a symbol of social equality, and yet, the office generated a series of secret plots, surreptitious plans and public performances which revitalized the stratifying practices of class distinctions in colonial society—a few continued to be more equal than others. With the coming of the

Malayan-born Yang di-Pertuan Negara, there was also a concurrent push towards the breaking down of the racial divisions entrenched during colonial rule. The office not only signified the erosion of the “Whites only” colour bar, but also served as a catalyst for a transcendental sense of “Malayan” identity between Singapore's different racial groups. The lumpiness of interracial relations, however, continued to taunt symbolic meanings of the Yang di-Pertuan Negara. Underneath the bold gesture of appointing a person of colour to the highest office in the land, uneasy contradictions persisted. Material disparities between different racial groups continued to threaten the promise of a post-racial and more equal social order.

An idealist among the PAP leaders, Minister S. Rajaratnam devolved the meaning of being “Malayan” to “the artists, the dramatists and the painters”. The same could be said for the multiple meanings of the Yang di-Pertuan Negara, the embodied representation of the “Malayan” nation in Singapore: the “artists”

INTRODUCTION

Over the last decade, Brunei Darussalam has been experiencing a huge increase in Internet penetration and social media usage. As of January 2023, these stand at 98.1 per cent and 94.4 per cent, respectively. Instagram remains the platform with the potential to reach citizens by advertisements (60 per cent), followed by Facebook (57.6 per cent) and Twitter (21.9 per cent) (Kemp 2023). While indicating society's high reliance on social media platforms for daily interactions and engagements, these statistics also point to these platforms being alternative sites for social engagements. With the proliferation of affordable mobile technology, mobile and fixed broadband availability, and high digital literacy, social media such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok have become sites where young people share their everyday life experiences and their socio-cultural and religious practices, and create new discourses that effectively shape the nation's socio-cultural, religious and political landscapes.

Certain digital trends can already be identified. In the past, Bruneian youths’ digital social transactions were in the form of knowledge exchanges and social interactions that were enabled by social media platforms’ key features and affordance, by the rise of individualism and self-expression, and by the transnational flow of popular culture produced and consumed. They included entertainment, daily life, satires and memes, to name a few.

Today, social media's user-generated functions allow users to co-create and share content. Users can become editors and producers, or what is commonly known as “produsers” or “produsage” (Bruns 2008, 2009, 2011). These platforms encourage active engagement, and intensification of participatory culture and further contribute to the profusion of digital content. As a result, we see social media users sharing content of different genres, be this on their everyday life at work/school/home, on lifestyle and fashion, religious knowledge and practices, including food and restaurant reviews, and humour and satire. They even allow them to act as amateur journalists reporting on local and global happenings.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • In the past five years, Brunei Darussalam’s socio-cultural landscape has witnessed a significant transformation, creating social and economic opportunities for Bruneians. Social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok have become spaces and sites for racial, political and religious engagements in Bruneian society.

• • Digitally connected young people and their engagements on various social media platforms are major catalysts in this transformation. They actively share their social and religious practices and, in the process, create new discourses that are effectively reshaping the nation’s socio-cultural, religious and political landscape.

• • This article examines three trends in Bruneian youths’ social media engagements: digital civic engagement and social justice; self-expression and influencing culture; and new religious expressions and lived religiosities.

• • Based on these trends, we can expect further evolution of youth culture carrying significance for the nation’s development.

• • The social consciousness and mobility of these young people are effectively measured through a study of the fluidity of their identity, ideas and practices.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

INTRODUCTION

Paddy rice is the most widely grown crop in the Philippines, the thirteenth most populous country in the world, and a world top-ten producer of the commodity. Milled rice is likewise the nation's main staple, accounting for 35 per cent of the average calorie intake of the population. Historically, rice has played a significant role in the culture of most Filipinos; the word “rice” is the same as the word “eat” in some of the country's major languages. It was perhaps inevitable that the commodity would become heavily politicized: maintaining its affordability for the consumer while safeguarding the livelihoods of the paddy rice farmer are seen by the populace as key benchmarks of a competent government.

The Philippines has also been historically a rice importer. A net rice exporter engaging in a few thousand tons of external trade in the 1850s and 1860s, the nation became a chronic rice importer since the 1870s. Net annual imports were typically in the 50,000 to 100,000-ton range in the 1880s and 1890s (with an interregnum due to the Philippine Revolution and Philippine-American War from 1896 to the early 1900s). In the 1900snet annual imports ranged from 100,000 to 300,000 tons. One reason for the rice deficit in the country is inconsistent rainfall in Luzon, the northern island group that hosts the country's “rice bowl”, in contrast to the “great river deltas of the Southeast Asian mainland” (Doeppers 2016, p. 64). By the late twentieth century average annual imports were 380,000 tons, and by the twenty-first century the average was 1.4 million tons (FAO 2022). Such a persistent trade tendency can only be explained not by vagaries of policy, governance, land use, and so on, but rather by the fundamental features of geography (Dawe 2006).

Rather than accepting economic reality, successive governments since the 1930s have instead acted to reserve the local market for domestically produced rice, placing imports under strict government control, while supporting paddy rice production with public funds (Briones 2018). The regime of import control intensified in the 1970s and successfully withstood all efforts at reform; it was only in 2019 that the government finally liberalized the rice industry, including the decision to import rice, albeit still subject to high tariffs.

Singapore imports more than 90 per cent of its daily food consumption. Imports are one of the four key “taps” on the supply side for meeting demand. The other three include domestic production, reserves and growing food overseas and re-importing it into the country. Within the island citystate, rice plays a crucial role, since it is a staple in the Singaporean diet. According to the country's 2010 National Nutrition Survey, rice and rice alternatives (e.g., wheat) composed the largest share of consumption requirements (44 per cent), followed by meat and meat alternatives (30 per cent), fruits (12 per cent), vegetables (12 per cent) and wholegrains (2 per cent) (HPB 2010). Despite rice's importance, Singapore relies purely on international sources to meet rice consumption requirements. This is because rice is a land-extensive commodity, requiring vast expanses of land that the city-state lacks.

The COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, and it has been a significant disruptor to global health, with more than 450 million cases recorded as of March 2022. It has also disrupted the global economy, causing economic contractions that have not been seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This chapter presents policy insights for Singapore's food security in the face of COVID-19, learning from its experience in its rice sector. It is divided into three sections. The first section describes the policy context for food security in Singapore prior to COVID-19, describing the evolution of Singapore's approaches, including the investments in domestic production after the Global Food Price Crisis of 2007–8; the development of its Food Security Roadmap in 2013; the restructuring of its food authority, the Agri-Veterinary Authority and its transformation into the Singapore Food Authority announced in 2018; and the launching in 2019 of the “30-by-30” target of 30 per cent food self-sufficiency by 2030. This section highlights that across these transitions, Singapore has forgone attempts to boost domestic production and stayed the course of import reliance for rice, by focusing on diversifying foreign sources for rice, as well as other commodities.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines how the Thai state formulates its rice policy, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that if the Thai state sees rice farmers as political threats, it is likely to impose extractive policies such as taxes on rice farmers. Conversely, if the state considers rice farmers as political partners, it is likely to implement subsidy programmes. But if the state views farmers as neither, it is likely to abandon them altogether, as has happened under General Prayuth's administration during the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, the Thai state has shifted from interfering to abandoning the country's rice producers.

Depending on the regime in power, Thai rice policies can seem paradoxical. While the state imposes policies to control rice prices and tax farmers, it also guarantees farmgate prices to appeal to farmers. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has not rectified this paradox, the magnitude of assistance programmes and the significance of state policy has been reduced. For extractive reasons, the state seeks to control the rice sector to allocate resources from it to industrial and other agricultural sectors. For electoral reasons, political leaders want to mobilize rice farmers via subsidy programmes because they are a huge voting bloc. Thai governments, especially those democratically elected from 2002 to 2014, implemented pledging schemes that procured paddy from farmers at high prices. From 2019 to the present, the government has implemented a price guarantee programme that set a floor price for paddy. Elected governments procure paddy and guarantee prices to solve the problem of falling prices. However, there has been considerable variation in the size of procurement programmes, which depends on the relationship between farmers and political leaders. Since the administrations led by Thai Rak Thai and its successor parties depended upon rice farmers’ votes, procurement programmes were larger in scale than those of other governments. After the 2014 military coup led by General Prayuth Chano- Cha, the government abolished the pledging scheme and replaced it with a production assistance scheme which allocated less money to rice farmers. Rice farmers’ problems such as falling prices, water shortages or indebtedness have not been solved. These

INTRODUCTION

Caustic policy debates have raged over the direction of the rice sector in Southeast Asia. The clashing views of governments, opposition parties, donors, international financial institutions, academics, consumer groups, private traders, rural activists and paddy cultivators have contributed to the rancour, although these actors are of uneven clout. One principal fault line pits the policy prescription of liberalization against protectionism. This is especially acute in countries in the region that are significant rice producers but import regularly due to cultivation totals that fall short of national requirements. Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines compose this special group of importers. Annual production figures vary, but even with the occasional bumper harvest that can lift cultivation totals to nearly meet consumer demand, total national requirements typically encompass additional supplies for filling public stockpiles. Governments draw from these reserves amid price surges or in cases of emergency such as drought, pest infestation, storms and floods that occur with regularity in the region. Although these net importers grow the vast majority of their rice requirements domestically—customarily, the closest to reaching selfsufficiency in rice is Indonesia (93–99 per cent), followed by the Philippines (85–95 per cent), and then Malaysia (59–75 per cent) (Otsuka 2021, Figure 4, p. 326)—the combined population of these countries is large. It amounts to about 425 million people. As such, together these governments acquire roughly 4.2 million metric tonnes of foreign rice each year, at a very approximate cost of US$1.68 billion on average.

Pro-market advocates would prefer to see higher volumes of rice imports in these countries (and private traders, not governments, in the main do the purchasing). Why? Chiefly because more imports are thought to be capable of bringing down the high price of rice in these rice-deficit countries. Rather persistently their prices exceed those of their rice export counterparts in mainland Southeast Asia, sometimes as much as a factor of two to three times. The reasons behind high costs for net importers can be summed by two factors. First are policy choices, which include heavy government intervention in the sector exemplified by the political and financial support of food parastatals that monopolize the import business (Rashid, Gulati, and Cummings 2008).

INTRODUCTION

Rice holds a special place in the socio-economic and political lives of Malaysians. It is a staple for almost the whole population and the first item in their food pyramid. Hence, rice is considered the major item in the “basket of food” for the country's food security. The paddy community is an important pool for political votes but more than 90 per cent of paddy farmers are in the bottom 40 per cent income bracket (Davidson 2018; MoA 2019b).

The sector only accounted for about 0.7 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1980, and was slashed in half by 2017 (Serin 2017). Its share of the agricultural GDP declined even faster, from 4.7 per cent in 1980 to 0.16 per cent in 2010. Paddy area accounted for about 20.5 per cent of agricultural land in 1970 but just 9.9 per cent in 2017 (MPIC 2018). The number of paddy farmers has declined from 208,000 in 1985 (MoA 2011) to 192,663 in 2019. Paddy farms are mainly smallholders with an average size recorded at 1.2 hectares (ha) in 1970 and 2.0 ha in 2016 (Selvadurai 1978; MoA 2016a). After the Green Revolution and purposive development support, absolute poverty among paddy farmers declined sharply from 88.1 per cent in 1970 to 48.3 per cent in 1990 and by 2015 the figure was significantly low. However, the incidence of relative poverty among paddy farmers is still the highest in the agricultural sectors.

While abject poverty has been greatly reduced, the sector shows slow growth in terms of its ability to meet local consumption and limited value-added development (Mohamed Arshad et al. 2019a, 2019b). The self-sufficiency levels (SSL) which are proxies for food availability have remained in the range of 65 per cent to 75 per cent in the last four decades. The SSL dropped from 70 per cent in 2016 to 63 per cent in 2019 despite a quadruple increase in subsidy allocation and government expenditure on the sector accounting for about half of the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-based Industry (MoA) for the period of 2015–17 (Ismail 2017).